Working for you Playing cheap politics with our children’s education

You will remember the scandal a couple of years ago when North Lanarkshire Council couldn’t do the basic arithmetic of being able to count the number of teachers it employed, resulting in the Scottish Government clawing back money which had been overpaid to the council.

Jim Logue, the thenconvener of the council’s education committee, presided over this fiasco.

But it wasn’t his head that rolled. The scapegoat was the director of education, Andrew Sutherland, even though the miscounting had been going on for many years before Andrew was appointed to head up the education department.

He was forced to resign by the council’s high heid yins and to sign a gagging order to stop him from spilling the beans about the local authority’s own incompetence – and to safeguard the position of those who were actually to blame for getting the teacher numbers wrong.

Now the council’s big bosses are trying to bully their head teachers into recycling £1.3million earmarked for pupils who need additional help into the council’s own coffers.

The council intend using this money to pay for their plans to sack much needed classroom assistants. It is an outrage.

Council leaders threatened to blackmail head teachers by laying the blame on them for the council’s own decision to sack classroom assistants if they didn’t agree to stump up 15 per cent of the Scottish Government money allocated to schools for less well-off pupils.

The council even ‘suggested’ that schools should use some of this extra money to pay for pupils’ swimming lessons and subsidised breakfast clubs, both of which are explicitly the financial responsibility of the council.

These heavy mob tactics against head teachers are in direct contravention of the government’s guidelines which explicitly state all this extra Scottish Government money for poorer pupils should go direct to schools with head teachers, not autocratic councillors like Mr Logue, deciding where best to spend it.

The council engineered a threatened cut in the number of classroom assistants deliberately as a ruse to get their hands on money which was not intended for them.

The fact that council leaders are prepared to play cheap politics with our poorest children’s education and the jobs of our classroom assistants speaks volumes about the lack of moral fibre amongst the leaders of North Lanarkshire Council.

The council intend using this money to pay for their plans to sack much needed classroom assistants

Cash for kids Education secretary John Swinney announced the extra funding for schools during a visit to Coatbridge High last October