Any move to cut learning hours in schools will be blocked, the Scottish government has said.
Ministers have underlined their opposition to the idea after Falkirk Council started a series of information events in its schools, outlining plans that would involve reduced learning hours.
Falkirk proposes changing to an “asymmetric week” from 2025-26 - with classes finishing each Friday lunchtime. The information events stress that this is already the norm in eight Scottish local authorities.
However, the plans would also see learning hours reduced in a council which, at secondary level, already has fewer learning hours than most other local authorities, where a minimum of 27 hours 30 minutes is the norm.
In Falkirk secondaries, the week would be reduced from 26 hours 40 minutes to 24 hours 45 minutes.
In primaries, the week would reduce from 25 hours (which is in line with most of Scotland) to 22 hours 30 minutes. An FAQs document explains that core class teachers’ 22.5 hours will be unaffected. Instead, the 2.5 hours assigned to a range of specialist areas, such as PE and music, “will no longer be required”.
Like local authorities across Scotland, Falkirk has been considering some drastic measures as it seeks to alleviate extreme pressure on its finances - in its case, a £62.5 million budget gap over the next five years, with children’s services expected to provide £40 million of savings.
Legal minimum for learning hours a possibility
In 2023, the Scottish government carried out a consultation on the idea of legal minimum school learning hours: 25 hours of teaching per week in primaries and 27.5 hours in secondaries. Currently, state schools must, by law, be open for 190 days a year, but the number of learning hours is not legally prescribed.
Today, when asked about the Falkirk plans, a government spokesperson said: “The Scottish government is concerned at any suggestion of cuts to learning hours and is clear that this would not be acceptable.
“Ministers are keen to come to a voluntary agreement with local government on protecting learning hours, but if no agreement is reached, will take steps to prescribe the number of hours made available in regulations.”
The government also said today that it would publish an analysis of responses to the national learning hours consultation - which closed 11 months ago, on 13 June - “in due course”.
The Falkirk plans have prompted a parent to start a petition this month calling for them to be stopped, which has so far attracted about 2,500 supporters. The mother behind the petition is concerned that, between P1 and S6, children would lose a year of education.
In mainstream secondary schools, Falkirk Council is proposing a 33-period week (rather than the current 32), including the reintroduction of form class (sometimes known as registration), which had been scrapped five years ago. Secondary students would have seven periods on Mondays to Thursdays and four periods on a Friday, with each period reduced to 45 minutes rather than the current 50 minutes.
The national picture for learning hours
A spreadsheet that accompanied last year’s government consultation on learning hours showed that 27.5 learning hours was the minimum for all secondary students in 24 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities. In another four local authorities, only some students got 27.5 learning hours or more.
Falkirk was one of only four councils where no students received at least 27.5 learning hours. The others were Edinburgh (minimum of 27 hours), Clackmannanshire (between 26 hours 15 minutes and 26 hours 40 minutes, depending on the school) and North Lanarkshire (26 hours 40 minutes, although the spreadsheet noted that the inclusion of registration and the “weekly achievement afternoon” would bring this to 29 hours 10 minutes).
In primary schools, by contrast, there was almost no variation across Scotland: 30 councils offered at least 25 learning hours, while two (Orkney and Argyll and Bute) provided slightly more or less in certain schools.
A Falkirk Council spokesperson said that the proposed changes to learning hours are “not final and have been brought forward to open a dialogue with stakeholders, including parents, carers and the pupils themselves”.
The information events this week are explaining to parents that reducing learning hours will help to avoid cuts to other aspects of education. Tes Scotland has asked Falkirk Council for confirmation of how much the learning hours plans will save and which other savings might still be necessary; updates will be included in this story.
‘Underhand way of administering cuts’
Andrea Bradley, general secretary of the EIS teaching union, said: “Teachers in Falkirk are very concerned about the intent behind this proposed reconfiguration of the pupil week. They think it is an underhand way of administering cuts to the quality of pupils’ education, but also cuts to teacher numbers, and neither of those things are acceptable to the EIS.
“These cuts would place young people in Falkirk at a significant disadvantage to their peers in other parts of the country.”
Ms Bradley said reduced hours were “not only inequitable and unfair” to Falkirk pupils, “but also wholly incompatible with the drive to tackle the poverty-related achievement and attainment gap, something which is supposed to be a priority for local authorities and the Scottish government”.
She added: “For the past two years, teacher numbers have dropped, so there really needs to be government intervention to prevent further cuts of the kind being proposed by Falkirk Council and any other local authority looking to wreak the same damage on young people’s education.”
Falkirk is far from the only council considering drastic options in an attempt to find savings. In February, Tes Scotland revealed plans in Glasgow to cut 450 teaching posts over three years.
Last week, new first minister John Swinney sidestepped successive attempts in the Scottish Parliament to establish whether he would stick to the commitment to increase teacher numbers by 3,500 in the course of the 2021-26 parliamentary term.
On Wednesday, Labour is expected to try to force a vote calling on the Scottish Parliament to intervene to stop cuts to teacher numbers across the country.
On the same day, a report by the Accounts Commission will underline the extent of the huge funding shortfall facing councils in the coming years (see Accounts Commission graph above).
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