TEACHING unions have attacked proposals by Scotland's largest local authority to slash £15 million from its education budget – arguing the plans will damage learning.
The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) hit out after Glasgow City Council announced the measures as part of £70m budget cuts in the next two years.
The cuts include merging and relocating specialist schools for children with learning difficulties and reducing support for learning teachers to save £2.5m.
The councils also intends to replace teachers in nursery classes with child development officers, having one head across several nurseries and changing school timetables to save a further £5m. School maintenance will be scaled back to save £1.5m, after-hours clubs reduced for £100,000 and increasing the cost of a school let for £800,000.
Larry Flanagan, general secretary of the EIS, said: "The continuing removal of teachers from nursery establishments means that young children are being denied the access to a teacher that was a key pre-election commitment for the Scottish Government."
However, a council spokeswoman said: "The council's budgets are under intense pressure and the proposals are about protecting priority areas."
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