CEC Budget 2025

Tourist Tax Consultation 2024

The CEC has started its public consultation on the proposed Visitor Levy (Tourist Tax) for Edinburgh. The consultation is available online here, and it will be open until 15th December. 

Edinburgh EIS has drafted an organisational response to the consultation - which you can find here - that highlights the need for spending on public services, and education in particular. Please feel free to review and use as guidance when completing the survey. 

Edinburgh Council’s Proposed Education Cuts Must Be Stopped And Teachers Must Be Valued Properly

There’s a narrative, coming from Edinburgh Council spokespersons and from within Council reports, that the City’s Education budget has up to now been “protected” from the need to find savings. This is completely false and the Council needs to stop repeating it. Schools have been taking their share of cuts for years. To take just two, of many, examples, savings brought about by measures such as management restructuring in Secondary Schools and annual embedded cuts to Devolved School Management (DSM) budgets are well over a decade old.

But of course, DSM budgets are notoriously opaque and no one has really been noticing the salami-slicing – that’s why we continue to demand greater transparency around DSM. It’s vital that every parent and teacher in Edinburgh is told clearly what the proposed cuts to DSM budgets will actually mean for their children and their school, not just this year but over the following two years also.

However, it doesn’t take much to guess what these cuts will come down to: fewer teachers in front of classes. One of the reports which came to Education Children and Families Committee this week framed the argument like this: “It is worth noting that the budget for teachers’ salaries alone accounts for 25% of the full council net expenditure at £261 million. Since 2016 we have had an increase of over 400 teaching posts. It is therefore difficult to see how the challenging level of savings can be addressed over the next 4 years without impact on staff numbers across the directorate and wider council.”

How loaded this all is. How indulgent an expense teachers’ salaries are made out to be when put in such terms, until you remember that Scottish teachers’ pay is barely the average of our OECD counterparts, and that for several years teachers had to accept pay rises of 0% or 1%, suffering real terms cuts to the extent that we are now over 20% below our 2008 salary levels.

How extravagant 400 extra posts sounds, until you remember that they were absolutely necessary during a period of rising school rolls.

And how unreasonable it makes us sound when we in the EIS say that education cuts should be taken off the table completely, until you remember that investment in education is the best preventative spending a society has. The more you spend on education, the more you save in terms of long-term health and social services costs, in terms of criminal justice costs and in terms of the very social fabric of our communities: quality education is the best antidote to the virus of the far-right and further cuts to our budgets will simply dilute that antidote in years to come.

And so, we do say these cuts must be stopped and we will continue to say it because here’s something else that is worth noting: Edinburgh’s teachers are currently subsidising the City to the tune of more than £57m a year in unpaid additional labour.

Independent research commissioned by the EIS and undertaken by academics from University of the West of Scotland, Birmingham City University and Cardiff Metropolitan University has revealed that Scotland’s teachers are working an average of 11 hours above their contracted 35 hours.

A classroom teacher at the top of the main-grade scale earns an hourly rate of £35.50, based on a 35-hour week, with 39 weeks spent in front of classes. Working 11 extra hours a week unpaid means that every teacher in Scotland is giving the equivalent of £15,229 every year into the education system. In Edinburgh, with an FTE of 3762 teachers, that amounts to over £57m, but of course that’s only assuming every single one of those 3762 is a classroom teacher: every Principal Teacher about half way up the promoted scale is donating over £19,000 a year in unpaid labour; every Educational Psychologist half way up their scale is subsidising the Council £20,000; every Depute or Head Teacher about half way up their scale is donating well over £25,000.

And why exactly are we giving so much of our own time and subsidising the Council to such an extraordinary extent? The answer is simple: it’s because of all the other cuts which have been imposed on Scottish Education since 2008 but that no one ever really talks about or remembers, cuts to specialist support staff and services, whose work did not vanish but simply got dumped onto classroom teachers.

Numbers of Additional Support Needs and Learning Support teachers, EAL teachers, Speech and Language Therapists, Child Psychologists were all slashed. To give one brief specific illustration, Scotland-wide, the number of teachers in the Primary sector with a general ASN role was cut 70% between 2008 and 2023, but in that time the number of pupils with an ASN rose by 491%. Edinburgh Council cannot pretend those kinds of cuts were not made in the City’s budget during those years, and they cannot pretend that the City’s teachers somehow avoided the fall-out.

Teachers care deeply about the children in their classes and they want to do everything they can to try to meet their needs. But when all those supports are stripped away from them, and when those needs keep rising and becoming more complex, caring deeply comes at a huge personal cost. Sacrificing 11 hours a week of their own time just to try to manage that additional workload, while also often suffering from the effects of violent and aggressive pupil behaviour, teachers in Edinburgh and across the country are now at breaking point.

We find it deeply and cruelly ironic that one of the Council’s plans to save money is by cutting down on absences among education staff. By inflicting more cuts, they guarantee doing the opposite because of the consequent stress they will place onto staff. Last year, a Freedom of Information request across all Local Authorities found that the numbers of days lost to school staff absence due to mental ill-health had risen by 57% in four years. Does the Council seriously think that a “wellness plan” is going to stem that rising tide of work-related stress among teachers and support staff, when that stress is caused in large part by all the cuts we’ve described here and when they promise more of the same medicine?

We will continue our campaign to stop Education cuts and will have more to say about the specific plans as they emerge in more detail, but until then, in general terms, we feel it is very important that the Council stops trying to claim that education has been “protected” up to this point and starts to value teachers’ labour properly.

Alison Murphy, Edinburgh EIS Local Association Secretary

Phill Pearce, Edinburgh EIS Local Association President

Tom Britton, Edinburgh EIS Local Association Assistant Secretary

Claire Robertson, Edinburgh EIS Local Association Vice President

Louise Bishop, Edinburgh EIS Local Association Treasurer

Allan Crosbie, Edinburgh EIS Local Association Executive member and EIS National President

Save Our Schools

Hi folks,

For your interest, and for campaigning purposes, I’ve calculated that the 11 hours each of us is working above our contracted hours equates to £391 per week per teacher, or £15,247 per year, that we are saving SG/Councils in their budgets. I’ve reached that figure by taking £48,516 and dividing it by 39 to get a weekly rate of pay (£1244) and then dividing that by 35 to get an hourly rate (£35.50); then I multiply that by 11 to get a weekly equivalent rate of unpaid overtime (£391) and then multiply again by 39 to get an annual rate - £15,247.

For Edinburgh’s 3762 teachers (that’s FTE; we know there are many more actual people), that equates to over £57m being saved every year by CEC because of teachers’ unpaid labour. And that’s only if you count each of those 3762 as being classroom teachers at the top of the maingrade scale – we know there are many Principal Teachers, Deputes, and Head teachers.

Each PT on point 5 of the PT scale is giving over £19K per year unpaid labour; each DHT or HT on point 11 of their scale is giving well over £26K per year.

I hope to use this next week in a deputation to CEC Education committee.

Hope this is helpful, though I suspect some of you may already have been making the same calculations!

Allan Crosbie

EIS President