A COUNCIL has come under fire for axing teachers who support pupils who struggle with basic English.
The attack from teaching unions comes after Glasgow City Council revealed plans to cut 15 English as an Additional Language (EAL) posts in January.
The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) teaching union said the posts were being lost at a time when there was an increased need for such provision with greater numbers of pupils arriving in Glasgow who do not have English as a first language.
The cuts also come just weeks after the local authority announced the loss of 22 posts in a council service that supports pupils with learning difficulties such as autism in mainstream schools.
However, the council said the cuts were unavoidable at a time when budgets were being reduced and appealed to the Scottish Government to give more financial support to the city.
Hugh Donnelly, the EIS local association secretary, said: "We understand the budget pressures, but the need for accountability, as well as fairness and transparency, remain.
"We understand that this has been primarily a political and not an educational decision, given that there is increasing need for EAL and inclusion support teachers.
"The reality is that cuts in specialist provision impact on all pupils and students and there has been no assessment of the impact of introducing the changes mid-session on schools and headteachers."
Mr Donnelly called for the transfer of staff to be halted where it could be seen as detrimental to the service so that a "full and proper" assessment under the 2010 Equality Act and Glasgow's own equality impact assessment guidance could be carried out.
Stephen Curran, the council's executive member for education, said: "The council had flexibility to add a small number of temporary EAL staff over the past two years, but that's no longer possible with budget pressures and looming cuts in our funding settlement from Scottish ministers.
"Reflecting the city's growing diversity, including over 1,000 new pupils from all over the world who now enrol at our schools annually, the council is asking our new First Minister for her support in enabling more specialist EAL teachers to be employed in the city she represents."
"Equality impact assessment is a process which has been carried out from the outset of the review of the services. The documentation has also been completed in line with council policy."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article