By Professor John Robertson
Thanks to Dottie for alerting me to this:
In the Guardian today:
Hundreds of thousands of pupils in England and Wales are being educated “on the cheap” by low-paid teaching assistants (TAs) covering lessons for teachers who are off sick or have quit, according to new research.
A desperate teacher recruitment crisis, compounded by inadequate funding, means schools across the country are struggling to put a qualified teacher at the front of every class, unions say.
Is this happening in Scotland too?
A quick search gets this:
Wow! It seems like its a thing here too. Wait, no, it’s the same Unison feed as the Guardian piece, in these two Scottish newspapers with no attempt to make their headlines accurate. They did the same thing yesterday with pupil safety, reporting an English story as if it applied here.
Why doesn’t it apply here?
Here’s one reason, thanks to the efforts of the Scottish Government:
The above from the Scottish Government today shows the pupil/teacher ratio in Scottish schools being maintained at 13.2 for the third year in a row despite around 6 000 more pupils in the system since 2019, with nearly 2 000 extra teachers.
Pupil to teacher ratios in maintained schools were lowest in Scotland (13.2) and similar in Northern Ireland (17.4), England (18.0) and Wales (18.4): https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/education-and-training-statistics-for-the-uk
These are big differences in the load faced by Scottish teachers compared with those elsewhere in the UK.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
They will find a reacher to give a ‘vox pop’ claiming things are ‘a total disaster’, with half the teachers on medication and looking for jobs stacking supermarket shelves. This will be published, unchallenged, padded out by quotes from teacher unions and unionist politicians.
Alasdair Macdonald
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Classroom assistants 15,000 + other staff. Administration and janitors. All need more training on additional needs. A module needs to be put into teacher training courses. Scottish Gov funding additional nurture/nature practitioners to help pupils on the spectrum. Things are improving from 10 years ago. Medical science improving.
Councils need to organise better to keep class sizes down.
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My daughter lives in one of the London Boroughs and, about 12 years ago I was asked to help advise a group of parents whose children attended local schools because the Tories had changed the funding formula to divert money from the less affluent areas to the more affluent ones.
Unfortunately, I was not able to help much because the education system in England has diverged so much from that in Scotland, that I was unable, in the time available to understand how the system operated within a different legal system. (Fortunately, other things happened elsewhere in England which forced a halt to the proposals.)
One of the things that shocked me was how impoverished the curriculum was in some secondary schools. Arts subjects, for example, were just excised in many schools. Such subjects are pretty expensive both in capital and current expenditures, but, as part of a broad and balanced curriculum are still a feature in Scottish schools. However, in many English schools such things are deemed by the accountants as too expensive. In one school in the borough, pupils were taught by qualified maths teachers for only half of the allocated periods For the other half of the time they did computer assisted maths supervised by teaching assistants.
Alasdair Macdonald
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Hardly surprising that the Tories are doing this in schools – they’re applying the same principle in hospitals, where non-medical staff have apparently been operating on skulls and brains, amputating limbs and toes, and removing patients’ tonsils – and untrained ‘physician associates’ have been learning brain surgery on the job…
I wouldn’t mind if said brain surgery was being carried out at Tory HQ where mistakes wouldn’t matter.
https://archive.is/lzvZu
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