COUNCILS have come under fire for dragging their heels over the introduction of a new pay deal for teachers.

The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) teaching unions said a number of local authorities had failed to implement the nationally agreed increase in teachers’ pay for 2015/16.

Unions and local authorities agreed a national 1.5 per cent pay increase for 2015/16 in October following negotiations.

The pay settlement applies from the start of April, meaning teachers are entitled to backdated pay from that month.

Some councils have implemented the pay award and made the backdated payments while others have pledged to do so by the start of 2015.

Larry Flanagan, the general secretary of the EIS, said the issue of slow payment of the backdated element of the pay award was causing significant concern for teachers.

He said: "It is disappointing that a number of Scottish local authorities have been slow in arranging for the 2015 pay settlement to be applied to teachers’ salaries.

"Negotiations on the pay and conditions agreement were concluded in early September and the union's acceptance was announced in early October, but more than two months later, many teachers are still awaiting their local authority employers implementing the nationally agreed pay increase.

"Teachers’ pay settlements apply from the start of April, so Scotland’s teachers and associated professionals are now due some nine months of backdated pay increase, but the slow response means many staff will not have received this payment before Christmas.”

The EIS said that in one case a council had suggested it would not be making the payments until March 2016.

However, a spokesman for local authority umbrella group Cosla said the situation had been resolved in the vast majority of councils.

He said: "There is no suggestion that any teacher will lose out on pay owed and what we are talking about is one or two councils changing their payroll systems which have caused delays."

Cosla said the greatest concern was to councils was a £350 million cut as a result of the recent Scottish Budget.

A spokesman said: “Perhaps the EIS is less concerned about this as they feel they control the Scottish Government’s policy on protecting teacher numbers and therefore their members will be protected from the inevitable cuts to come.

"Cosla does not subscribe to this protectionist view point. The last thing we want to see is division between different parts of the local government workforce so we call on the EIS to lend their weight to calls for a reversal of the cuts to local government."

A Scottish Government spokesman said: "We expect the agreement on teachers’ pay in October to be paid as soon as possible."

The fall-out over the delay is the latest instalment in a long drawn out saga of ill-feeling between Cosla and the EIS over pay, resulting in the union taking movies for industrial action.

EIS members staged a walk-out in 2011 as part of a wider public sector protest over changes to pensions, but the last time the sector held a strike on pay was in 1986.

The EIS had demanded a pay increase of five per cent to redress a decline in salary levels over the past few years, but councils offered 2.5 per cent over two years instead.