You know that half an hour you spend with your registration class every morning before lessons begin?

The time when you register who’s at school and who’s not; check on Billy and Emma, who you know have had a few issues at home; and make sure Adam is wearing his school shoes, not his cool new trainers … again. The time you spend supporting the kids in your class, building a rapport with them and offering advice.

Well, if your school is within the area of Falkirk, that time could be taken away from you. In a bid to save some cash, Falkirk Council has proposed getting rid of the traditional registration class as a “relatively pain-free way of saving money”.

At a meeting of the council’s education executive this week, members explored a number of proposals for saving money in schools, including the scrapping of registration periods to save £693,000 over a year - which would remove the need for 16.7 full-time equivalent staff to cover them.

However, one teacher in attendance, Fiona Craig, warned against scrapping what she said was a crucial part of pastoral care.

“If we remove registration, what we will be doing is removing the first line of guidance… Pastoral staff will often meet with pupils at that particular point,” she said.

Craig also pointed out that having registration classes guaranteed a point of contact for every secondary pupil at the start of every school day, during which registration teachers could deal with absence notes and check on attendance. There would be an impact on teaching and learning over the rest of the day if the issues weren’t address during morning registration, the teacher explained.