£4.3M Budget investment to strengthen Education

A £4.3m investment for education was agreed in Highland Council’s 2025/26 budget.

This investment is a key indicator of change for Highland schools, its 31,000 pupils and their 2,000+ teachers and support staff that will further consolidate the Council’s on-going path to improvement.

Education Committee Chair, Cllr John Finlayson, said: “Highland Council’s financial budget responds to the challenges faced by education settings across the Highlands, both in urban and rural areas and creates important opportunities for investments.

“My Future Highland Programme is committed to improve outcomes for all children and young people across Highland with a particular focus on our most vulnerable, and this significant investment will go some way to support our dedicated teachers and PSA’s to deliver the best outcomes for all our young learners and to ensure that those with particular needs can experience greater levels of support and have increased opportunities to achieve.

“This £4.3m investment will enable Additional Support Need specialist teachers and the creation of a new Pupil Support Assistant Lead Practitioner model to provide enhanced support across all of our schools in Highland, underpinning our commitment to the principles of GIRFEC (Getting it Right for Every Child).  Furthermore, a significant sum has been set aside to create teacher capacity in line with national policy, allow more time for curricular planning and senior leadership building which will offer career progression pathways whilst supporting effective learning opportunities for pupils.”

‘Strengthen our Additional Support Needs provision’ is one of the Council’s budget investment priorities in its My Future Highland Programme and will see:

• £1.048m investment for Additional Support Needs (ASN) to strengthen the provision of support for pupils, enhance the practice of teachers and pupil support assistants by creating professional pathways for both groups and building our expertise across the Highland area.

A ‘Pupil Equity Fund’ supported by Scottish Government funding, will see additional Council funding to target support to pupils impacted by poverty:

• £0.320m investment top-up to the Pupil Equity Fund to enhance pathways and help close the attainment gap.

‘Developing and growing the workforce’ to enable the Council to provide resources to undertake a scoping exercise to plan for the delivery of reduced class contact time for teachers, in response to national policy:

• £2.000m investment to increase teacher capacity, to enable greater time to be set aside for teachers to plan and develop curricular arrangements for pupils.

‘Education Leadership Building’:

• £1.000m for future educational leadership and capacity building, to enable teachers to benefit from high quality support to enable them to provide more effective learning opportunities for pupils.

Education Committee Chair, Cllr John Finlayson, added:

“Improving Operating Models unlocks opportunity to deliver greater efficiencies and savings across the Education Service. Strengthening cluster school working, allocation of school management and integrating school roles will also deliver improvements in education at less cost.”

‘Savings, Efficiencies and Improving Operating Models’ – Falling school rolls will result in reductions in expenditure as we make efficiencies through reconfiguring how staff are deployed without adversely affecting pupils. There are specific proposals to develop more integrated ways of working whilst improving operating models.

• By strengthening how we align resources across all of the Council person-centred services we expect to derive efficiencies of £0.744m over 3 years.
• £0.600m by reviewing how management posts are allocated across the secondary estate in a number of ways (3-18 campuses being one such mechanism).
• £0.250m of efficiencies by creating a new integrated single status role to allow people who do multiple roles in a school to benefit from the security of a single contract.
• £50k derived from improving how short term absences are managed in schools.

“Focusing on making efficiencies wherever possible in the delivery of Council services ensures we deliver value for money and means that our resources are invested where they will have most impact.  This, combined with targeted investment aims to ensure the system as a whole is strengthened and that all pupils benefit, whilst ensuring that those with particular needs can experience greater levels of support and have increased opportunities to achieve.

The combined additional resources for ASN, PEF, and investment in teaching and leadership capacity will support the delivery of effective, high quality learning for children of all abilities whatever their background, challenges and talents.”

The budget report is available on the Council’s website.