The Secret Teacher continues their look at the impact of Glasgow Council’s Plan to cut up to 450 teaching jobs, this week focusing on what it could mean for inclusion in schools.
It’s really depressing when you consider the impact these cuts are going to have on inclusion, which is a huge issue in schools. How would this be better with less staff?
The number of children with additional support needs is going up year-on-year, and if you’ve got less staff to help manage this, it’s difficult to imagine how that’s going to be catered for.
The system is by no means perfect just now. Every teacher in the country will have their own view on what they could do to improve inclusion. The only thing I think everyone would agree on is it’s not by having less staff. Some children are just going to be left behind, and their needs are not going to be met.
It’s my first experience of being in education where an initiative has come out with absolutely no positives to be found in it. You can’t magic stuff out of nowhere. Staff are already stretched.
One of the things we pride ourselves on in our primary school is the experiences that we offer. A lot of those experiences happen outside of the school. We try to take children out into the world, and give them real-life opportunities and context for learning.
I hope they don’t change the staffing, but it’s hard to think how a lot of these are still going to take place. It’s currently a ratio of one adult to 10 children, so if you’re talking about a class of 30 that requires three adults.
That doesn’t need to be all teachers. There are also Support for Learning workers, but I don’t see this cut in teachers being replaced by an increase in Support for Learning workers. I wish it was. I would love it if they were paid more. I think that’s a huge issue, and what they get paid is scandalous.
I think this will directly lead to worse learning experiences for children as well. If they have additional support needs, it’s hard to see how they will be supported effectively without a clear drop in quality.
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Nobody in a school is twiddling their thumbs and looking for something to do. If there are 450 posts going, that’s not far off one per school. I don’t think many people could nominate somebody that they think they would all be better off without in the school. I hope not anyway.
It’s a brilliant place to work, and I’m fortunate that I work in a school that I love to be in, but I would be nervous about inviting somebody to come into teacher training right now, knowing what they are potentially coming out with at the other end. If they are able to move countries that’s brilliant, but not everyone can.
It feels quite dark at the moment.
I think there will be teachers who will retire and teachers who will leave. It’s a cut in numbers rather than a cut in staff being hired, so you would imagine staff who are leaving won’t be replaced.
We always go ‘feast or famine’ when it comes to staffing. We have too many teachers or too few teachers. It feels inevitable that in five or 10 years time suddenly we’re trying to hire teachers left, right and centre because we’ve got a mass shortage.
That inevitably means you've lost huge amounts of experience within schools, and training that people have built up over the years. I don’t want to call it a lost generation, as that’s a bit dramatic, but it’s a lost section of teachers over many years who have tried to join the profession and left it because they couldn’t get a job.
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When they have come in, they haven’t enjoyed it because they’re so stretched, and there’s not support that they hoped they would have or that the schools would have liked to offer.
The cut in teachers is the headline, but the money being saved there isn’t going to be spent elsewhere in schools. It’s just a direct cut. If the money was going to be spent elsewhere I’m sure they would have made a right song and dance about it.
I imagine there will be a drop-off in terms of meeting the needs of certain learners.
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I’m not saying we meet the needs of all learners right now, and it’s not a perfect system, but the sad reality is it’s not getting better and any hope we might have of it getting better is pretty low.
I can’t see them introducing new facilities and new schools with trained staff. It’s quite a worrying time for a lot of schools.
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