Extra teacher cash for north-east welcomed
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FUNDING of almost £20 million for north-east councils to recruit extra teachers has been welcomed.
A total of £19,173,000 has been allocated to Moray, Aberdeenshire and Aberdeen City to help them boost the number of teachers.
Moray is to receive £1.35 million in all, of which £424,000 will be directed towards primary schools and £507,000 for secondaries.
Aberdeenshire's share comes to £7,276,000, with £1.328 million and £1.496 million for secondary going to the primary and secondary sectors respectively.
A total of £4,815,000 has been set aside for Aberdeen City, with £812,000 for primaries and £961,000 for secondaries.
The rest of the cash is earmarked for Angus and Dundee City Councils.
The funding was made available through the Scottish budget. It is enough for all of the approximately fifteen hundred teachers recruited on temporary contracts across the country during the pandemic to be offered permanent positions and for an additional thousand permanent teaching posts to be created.
The extra £145 million allocated to teacher recruitment in the 2022/23 Scottish budget is the largest single increase since 2007.
News of the extra funding has been welcomed by North East Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman who said it marks the first step in delivering a key commitment in the co-operation agreement reached by the Scottish Greens and Scottish Government earlier this year. By the end of this parliamentary term Scotland’s schools should have 5000 more teachers than was the case before the Covid pandemic, as well as five hundred additional classroom assistants.
She continued: “I am delighted that with Greens in government we’ve been able to deliver this significant extra funding for north-east councils to recruit more teachers.
“Education has been massively disrupted throughout the Covid crisis. We can’t forget though that even before March 2020 Scotland’s teachers had some of the longest hours and heaviest workloads in the developed world.
“Getting extra teachers into classrooms is the best way to support children and young people who have been so badly affected by the pandemic and to help the existing school staff who have gone to such herculean efforts for the sake of their pupils. I am sure that we’ll see the benefit of this funding across the north-east in the months ahead.”
