Scottish cash boost for school discipline
Scottish Education Minister Peter Peacock has announced a cash boost to help discipline in Scotland’s schools.
£34.9 million over three years – from the existing education budget – will be used to hire support staff to help teachers in the classroom. This will include specialist discipline and behavioural staff as well as general classroom assistants.
The Scottish Executive believes that this will help to improve discipline by leaving teachers “free to teach”.
Speaking this morning, Mr Peacock said: “The extra staff I am funding will free teachers to teach the new curriculum, help all pupils to learn undisturbed and deal intensively with those pupils who need it most.
“I have spent a lot of time in recent months with headteachers, teachers and teacher unions evaluating our approaches to improving behaviour in schools. We have seen and heard of some very impressive practice and I have seen many examples where the support staff we already fund make a real difference. By increasing the funding, more teachers and pupils will be able to reap the rewards.”
But opposition parties said the announcement would do little to tackle the problems of discipline.
Conservative education spokesman, James Douglas-Hamilton, said: “Support staff do a wonderful job in helping teachers who are desperately overstretched by disruptive pupils and excessive bureaucracy, but the answer is not just to increase support staff, but to give powers to schools to remove disruptive pupils.
“What this Labour/Lib Dem Executive fails to acknowledge is that teachers and head teachers know best, and should be allowed to make their own decisions.”
SNP spokesperson Fiona Hyslop said the solution was to cut class sizes and increase teacher numbers.
Ms Hyslop said: “Increasing the number of teachers and cutting class sizes is the key to improving discipline in Scottish schools. Today’s proposal to increase the number of support staff is all about better management of a bad situation. What we need to do instead is attack school indiscipline at source, and that means reducing class sizes in all of Scotland’s schools.
“What is also a matter of concern is that the money to fund this headline grab is being plundered from other budgets in education, although the Minister hasn’t actually told us what budgets will be affected.”
