Head teachers to get a £200,000 helping hand

HARD-PRESSED Highland head teachers who are struggling to juggle teaching pupils with running their schools are to get a helping hand.

An extra £200,000 is to be spent by Highland Council on supporting primary heads in carrying out the management side of their jobs, which has been welcomed by a teaching union.

The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) said its members had been complaining for some time about the pressures they faced in fulfilling all their duties and claimed it was because of cuts to the education budget.

The local authority’s budget leader Councillor David Alston said the cash money would be spent helping head teachers in carrying out their management duties.

Councillor Alston (Black Isle) admitted it was challenging for head teachers in medium-sized schools to teach and manage.

“There are some primary schools big enough to have a non-teaching head and in very small primary schools they can teach and run the school,” he said.

“It is the schools in-between, the main job is quite big and they have got a heavy commitment.”

Andrew Stewart, who is EIS’s Highland secretary, welcomed the cash injection and looked forward to seeing how it would work in action.

“It is a big issue for our members,” he said. “If this money does come then I hope it is meaningful. There are head teachers who do an awful lot of teaching but they are also responsible for their schools, the health and safety, the finances and curriculum.

“Is that money going to make a difference and not just give them an extra 10 minutes a day to manage the school?”

Mr Stewart said head teachers were generally not required to teach in schools with more than 150 pupils.

The Indepedent-Liberal Democrat-Labour administration proposal to make the one-off expenditure will be considered at the authority’s budget setting meeting in Inverness on Thursday.