Chamber and committees

We took up that case directly with Orkney Islands Council, which was very clear that what Mr Mason suggests is not what happened. As I understand it from what my officials have said, the issue relates to the movement towards spending 0.1 of the school week on management time, so I am not sure that what Mr Mason said is accurate.

The wider point that Mr Mason raised is live. I did my teacher training in Glasgow many years ago, and I ticked the box that said I was willing to work anywhere in the country, as people will be fed up of hearing.

The preference waiver scheme that we operate, which offers £8,000 to secondary teachers and £6,000 to primary teachers as a golden handshake, is not being taken up in the way that it was before the pandemic. Part of the challenge is that, during the pandemic, we gave probationer teachers a job in their local authority, which I think has fed into the belief that there will be a job for them in their local authority at the end of their training. That has never been the case; it has always been a competitive marketplace. I remember what it was like for me many years ago. I had to apply to a multitude of local authorities across the country, and I had to move.

I accept Mr Mason’s point that moving is much easier for some people than it is for others. If you are single or do not have a family and—to be blunt—you have the money to do it, you can move.

There are other incentives that we need to build on. We need to work with local authorities to encourage people to move to different parts of the country.

We have challenges in Aberdeenshire Council and Highland Council. I have addressed those challenges directly with both local authorities. In the past, local authorities such as Aberdeenshire have worked with us on part funding programmes that encourage people to resettle. Additional funding is available for people who work in rural schools. In the round, in reviewing the probationer scheme, we will have to consider the preference waiver scheme, which we know is not as popular as it arguably should be, if we are to fill the gaps that we accept exist in some of the rural and remote locations that Mr Mason spoke about.

We have talked today in the round about some of the pressures that our teaching workforce face, not least with regard to behaviour, additional support needs and expectations. More broadly, I have engaged substantially with our professional associations on all those points, and they have been key to driving some of the change that we have seen.

The national action plan on behaviour was quite a departure and a shift in tone from the Government on the issue. I do not know to what extent members have reflected on that, but there has been a shift with regard to talking about behaviour in schools. We need to accept that and accept that there is a challenge. I have been up front about that for the past two-and-a-half years, because I know—from my friends who are not politicians and because of my engagement with trade unions and headteachers—how difficult the situation is in schools just now.

Something is happening in our schools in the post-pandemic period. We saw that in the behaviour in Scottish schools research, but we also see it across the world. I alluded to the work that has been done by the UN, changes in behaviour, dysregulation and changes in the type of learning and teaching that we have.

Mr FitzPatrick’s substantive question was about support for teachers, and I have a couple of points to make on that. First, in 2023, I announced the establishment of the new centre for teaching excellence, and we know now that the host institution is Glasgow. In the coming weeks, we will announce opportunities for staff to take part in that centre, which I think will be key. That is an offer to the profession. It is quite unique. It is about pedagogy and excellent learning and teaching. We know that that makes a difference. We have forgotten some of that in recent times, but we need to go back to the bread and butter of quality classroom teaching that makes a difference at the chalk face. The centre for teaching excellence is an offer for teachers to come out of school on secondment and have an opportunity to engage in academic practice, then to go back out into the system.

The second point is about reducing class contact. To me, that is fundamental. We have to free up teachers to engage in the processes of educational improvement and education reform that we want to drive. We will do that by reducing their workload and class contact. In order to deliver that, I have to work through that tripartite structure with our professional associations and, of course, with COSLA. That process has not been without its frustrations—I think that members know that.

The point that Joe FitzPatrick made about teacher numbers is in a similar space. I can talk about how I have protected funding at national level for teacher numbers, but it is challenging when local authorities then decide to take that extra money and make cuts regardless. The budget agreement that we have reached with COSLA was agreed in good faith, so I expect local authorities to go back to 2023 levels, because that is what the budget, with extra funding, provided for. In so doing, councils had to make substantive progress in relation to reducing class contact.

In February, we put a suggestion to the tripartite group about how that might work, but COSLA said it needed more time. I understand that COSLA will come forward with a paper in the coming weeks, before the end of this term, that will contain proposals about how that might work. We need to talk about the practicalities. The arrangement will look a bit different in primary schools, where it will arguably be more challenging to deliver than in secondary schools.

On the broader working relationship, the new education assurance board, which was a key part of the budget agreement, brings the Government and COSLA to the table. We must work together to respond to challenges, whether on teacher permanency, on how we support ASN pupils, or on reducing class contact. We must have a partnership with COSLA or we will not be able to deliver the change that we all want to see in our classrooms.

On the substantive point, I do not want there to be surplus primary school teachers. I would like them all to be in employment—

Mr Rennie is asking me to make a guess about something that will happen in the future. That is not my responsibility—

The overall PTR is 13.3, but I do not have the ASN figure in front of me. When it asked ministers to appear today, the committee did not provide us with a detailed breakdown of all the areas that it wished to cover. However, I am more than happy to write to the committee with any of that detail.

I will address Mr Greer’s point before I bring Graeme Logan in to talk about the changes that we have made to the SNSAs and reflect on the points that he has made.

Mr Greer talked about significant additional reporting being required. I am so old that I remember sitting around this exact table with Mr Greer in the previous session of Parliament and talking about these exact issues. The workload that we talked about then was associated with local authorities doing many different things in relation to how they measured attainment.

We must remember the rationale behind the SNSAs. I accept that there was a lot of debate about them at the time, but the rationale was to have a consistent approach across the country. We have heard today about what inconsistency does to children, young people, parents and teachers, so it was important to have a consistent approach to gathering that data.

However, regarding Mr Greer’s point, I am aware that some local authorities have kept their own reporting mechanisms in place in addition to using the SNSAs, which has resulted in an increase in workload. We have reflected on that through some of the changes that we have brought forward for the SNSAs. I will ask Graeme Logan to speak about that in a moment, but I do not accept the fundamental point that the broader workload is being driven by asks from the Government.

I am happy for Graeme to talk about some specific details of the SNSAs, but I will first reflect on a crude example from my experience in school some time ago. Classroom teachers are often asked to do administrative tasks, and my department used to have support once a week for data entry. For example, someone would deal with the administrative aspect of pupil reports, taking that task off my desk, which was really helpful in freeing me up and allowing me to do more planning, marking and other things during my free periods.

There are ways in which local authorities can drive workload, but they can also assist with it. The budget, which Mr Greer’s party voted for, provided extra funding to support ASN and extra teachers, which we know will make a difference, and some of that funding can be used by local authorities to alleviate teacher workload.

I will bring Graeme in speak about some of the substantive changes to the SNSAs.

I obviously do not have that detail in front of me; I would need to go on myjobscotland to collect it. It is important to recognise that many ASN staff are now employed using the PEF money that I mentioned in my answer to Ms Dunbar.

Mr Rennie raises a wider issue that he has written to me about as part of his constituency correspondence. The situation varies by local authority area. The issue of teacher recruitment practices was one of the first that I raised when I was elected back in 2016, because we have 32 different approaches and I do not think that that is a great way of supporting our teaching profession.

In a debate that we had a few weeks ago, there was a line in the Labour amendment about having a national list of supply staff. I am all for supporting that, and we agreed with the Labour amendment, but we now need COSLA to work with us on delivering that in practice. We see too much inconsistency in how local authorities use contracts and a huge overreliance on probation. We should not divorce the issues of permanency and short-term contracts from that of having a centrally funded probationer scheme. I have committed to reviewing that because, to my mind, we are seeing too much churn in the system, particularly in primary schools. That is not good for our early years teachers, it is not good for supporting them and it is not good for retention.

We need to work with local authorities to encourage them to provide permanent contracts. The budget settlement has been part of that process. The other part of it, which I alluded to in connection with pupil equity funding, concerns the four-year funding streams that the now First Minister committed to when he was cabinet secretary, to give local authorities clear sight of the funding that was coming, so that they could create permanent or longer-term posts, which Mr Rennie asked about.

There are significant challenges for our whole workforce just now, but that issue is not unique to Scotland. Last year, the United Nations published a really helpful report that talks about the precarity of employment that exists across the education landscape in many different countries, which we are seeing across the United Kingdom.

The situation has been partly driven by wages. It was right that we awarded the profession the good pay rises that we awarded it, but that means that local authorities are now having to look at other budget lines. We need to re-evaluate how we fund the totality of the teaching workforce, which was another point that came out of the debate that we held the other week.

You never know.

Yes. I broadly agree with the member’s point. I remember the work on reducing bureaucracy, which I think was led by one Michael Russell back in 2014, because I was a principal teacher at the time. I remember running a department meeting in which we were broadly re-evaluating general education, looking at all our units across the course and considering senior phase arrangements. At the end of it, I thought, “We have to reduce bureaucracy.”

We have to look in the round at what we are asking our classroom teachers, headteachers and principal teachers to deliver. I am really keen to talk to the professional associations about what we mean by unnecessary workload at the local authority level. I was discussing the issue with officials earlier, and there is very little that the Government asks for at national level that drives teacher workload. Much of it, certainly in my experience, is driven at local authority level through things that the professional associations might quite rightly argue are not about learning and teaching but more about administration. There is a body of work that we need to undertake.

I recently discussed revisiting the reducing bureaucracy agenda with the NASUWT. That speaks to the work on reducing class contact and teacher workload to create the time that is needed. Many of those tasks should not necessarily be for the working day of classroom teachers. They are driven at local authority level. They differ across the country in terms of reporting requirements, what systems are used, how information is inputted and how often it is required for each and every class that teachers teach. We do not have a national approach to that, which has been a key theme of today’s discussions.

I will bring Graeme Logan in to talk about the specifics that we ask for at national level. Anything else is being driven at local authority level. However, I accept the point that Mr Greer raises about reducing bureaucracy more broadly.

I am happy to engage with Mr Greer on the substantive points in the paper that he submitted some two years ago. More broadly, however, any engagement on teacher workload that has me at the table must also have COSLA there, because we are not going to change things if we do not get local government in the room. I am happy to be here and to give evidence for as many hours as the committee will have me, but if COSLA is not part of those discussions, we will not effect change in our classrooms.