By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 16 February 2016
A rift between ministers and councils over the Scottish Government’s pledge to maintain pupil-teacher ratios has widened, after the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities said it was considering a legal challenge to financial sanctions threatened against councils that fail to deliver.
Negotiations broke down between finance secretary John Swinney and Cosla earlier this month over the refusal of some councils to protect teacher numbers. Swinney came forward instead with a unilateral offer of £51m in hypothecated funding for individual councils that agreed to maintain ratios, which would be withheld from those that did not.
The issue has also aggravated divisions between councils. Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest authority, is already scheduled to quit the umbrella body and indicated its readiness to reach terms with ministers. Teachers’ leaders also reacted angrily to a Cosla report that questioned the causal relationship between teacher numbers and pupil attainment.
A legal challenge would focus on the right of ministers to impose budgetary terms without proper consultation or negotiation. Cosla has appealed to Swinney to resume national negotiation, and the convention’s chief executive Rory Mair said at the weekend that a court case was ‘way down the road’.
Teacher numbers have fallen steadily over the past decade in spite of a Scottish National Party pledge to maintain the ratio with pupil numbers, which have grown in many areas. Ministers blame some councils for failing to honour the pledge, despite receiving more money intended to fund it.
An additional backdrop to the argument is increasingly tight local authority budgeting, coupled with a council tax freeze now in its eighth year. Under the concordat that paved the way for the freeze, ministers agreed to give councils much greater freedom in setting their own spending priorities, and some see Swinney’s insistence on teacher recruitment as an unacceptable return to ring-fencing.
Cosla has also questioned the suitability of teacher-pupil ratios as a benchmark, producing a paper written by Mair’s brother Colin, who heads the Improvement Service, arguing that attainment levels have shown little correlation with teacher-pupil ratios. This was described by the Educational Institute of Scotland, the biggest teaching union, as a ‘spurious defence’ of teacher job cuts.
Meanwhile, hopes of a cross-party consensus over a replacement for the council tax also suffered a setback at the weekend, after the Scottish Conservatives said they would not join a broad-based commission set up by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Membership and terms of reference for the commission had been expected to be announced earlier this month, and other political parties have nominated delegates. The commission is also expected to include representatives of Cosla, the Scottish Government and outside expertise, and the hope is to have an agreed plan in place ahead of next year’s Holyrood elections.
But the Conservatives have decided to stick with their own ‘low tax commission’, set up before Sturgeon’s body was announced, arguing that voters should be presented with a choice between distinctive options.
