EVERY school inspector in Scotland is to be drafted into councils this August to ensure commitments on reducing the workload of teachers are being met.

John Swinney, the Education Secretary, said he had been "stunned" by the levels of bureaucracy facing school staff - with some local authorities failing to address the issue.

He told a meeting of the Scottish Parliament's education committee a key part of his new delivery plan for education was directed at the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and Education Scotland.

He said: "I have been stunned by the level of bureaucracy, assessment and transactional activity that is required by teachers right across the system.

"That is why the delivery plan is so heavy on the measures that I am requiring of the SQA, of Education Scotland and why I am putting school inspectors into education authorities in August for a two week period.

"Every inspector in the country is going into local authorities to identify which parts of the reducing workload.... conclusions have not been implemented and then I will pursue those to get them implemented because they were supposed to be implemented and they are clearly not."

Mr Swinney's comments came after secondary school teachers voted by an overwhelming majority to take industrial action over "excessive" workload.

The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) held the ballot after the introduction of new qualifications which an official report found had led to "unintended and unsustainable" workloads for pupils and teachers.

Mr Swinney also told the committee he did not expect the introduction of new standardised national tests for pupils at key stages of their primary and secondary career to add to workload.

The new tests have been introduced because the Scottish Government believes there is insufficient comparable data to assess how well schools in different local authority areas are tackling the attainment gap between pupils from different backgrounds.

He told MSPs: "We don't at this stage believe the data is available to enable us to define the gap conclusively. We do not have comparable data authority by authority. We have data within authorities.

"That is why we believe we have to move to the position of having standardised assessments to inform teacher judgement about the performance of young people.

"I don't want to create a further cottage industry of data. Where there is data being collected, but it is not comparable, I want to replace that data with comparable data that will be able to help us assess the scale of the gap and then measure the effectiveness of the interventions that are deployed to try to close that gap over time."

However, Tavish Scott, the Scottish Liberal Democrat's education spokesman, said the government's testing plans would lead to the publication of damaging league tables.

He said: "School league tables will be a fact of education life by next year. I am not convinced school league tables will make any difference to closing the attainment gap. They did not when a former Tory minister Michael Forsyth introduced such an approach. What is possibly different now?

"You would expect that if the focus of government becomes those standardised tests teachers quite understandably are going to be completely focused on teaching to those tests. That is the reality of it."

On Tuesday Mr Swinney announced Scottish schools are to be given unprecedented legal responsibilities for the education of pupils alongside councils.

The changes will also see millions of pounds of funding given directly to headteachers to allow for key decisions to be made at school level - with a new national formula established to provide a universal standard for staffing after concerns of inequalities across Scotland.

In addition, in September this year Mr Swinney will launch a review of the way schools are run which will examine how to "empower" schools and parents and "decentralise management".