ONE thousand jobs axed, the primary school day cut and tourists charged for council services are proposals by Highland Council as it seeks to save £64 million over the next five years.
A list of controversial ideas is contained in a public consultation document being issued by the authority as it prepares its spending plans until 2019.
School closures, reducing secondary teachers and distance learning for pupils as well as cleaning council buildings less frequently and charging more for burials and cremations, are also included.
Currently, the council only charges for car parks in Aviemore, Fort William, Portree and Inverness. Charging is now likely to increase and be extended to any car park with more than 20 places.
In the consultation document, the local authority also says visitors staying in hotels, guest houses and B and Bs could be asked to contribute towards roads maintenance and waste services.
It explains why a shorter primary school day could help: "Primary pupils are in class for between 22.5 to 25 hours per week depending on their age. For any time over 22.5 hours, additional teachers are engaged - this is due to the rules around working conditions for teachers agreed at a national level. We believe that we can save up to £3.2 million per year by shortening the time pupils have in class by 30 minutes per day for pupils in primary four, five, six and seven."
Meanwhile the council's 29 secondary schools vary in size from 55 pupils to more than 1,000 and the authority says it is costly to ensure the same subject provision across all schools.
It continues: "We propose to partner schools so that subjects can be delivered remotely from one school to another, particularly for pupils in S5 and S6."
It is estimated that up to £600,000 savings would be achieved from this approach.
The council says it has already achieved more than £77.7m of cuts over the past five years. It says the grant it receives continues to reduce in real terms due to inflation and increasing costs and its cash is not expected to increase over the next four years, which leaves a budget gap of £64 million.
Budget leader Councillor Maxine Smith said: "The scale of the savings required means that we must now look at changing the way we provide some services and reducing others. This will mean a reduction in the number of staff we employ and the number of buildings we use, and will impact on the services we provide."
Michelle Morris, depute chief executive said: "The council maintains its commitment to no compulsory redundancies wherever possible."
Bob Colman, Highland regional Secretary of the EIS teaching union said he was meeting other unions and the council next week, adding: "We would resist any attempt to make teachers comp-ulsorily redundant but will scrut-inise these proposals carefully to assess the impact on our members and the quality of education."
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