State pupils ‘losing out’

Call for parents to be informed as think tank ‘surprised’ by findings

CHILDREN in some parts of Scotland receive two years less state education than in other parts due to a huge variation in the number of hours of teaching time offered by local authorities.

Research by the think tank Reform Scotland found the amount of time a primary school pupil can spend with a teacher can vary by almost 150 hours. For secondary school pupils it can be 245 hours.

When applied across a child’s school life this adds up to more than 24 months of classroom time, according to data accessed by a Freedom on Information request.

Aberdeenshire and West Dunbartonshire councils offer the most teaching time in Scotland, with 1,000 hours per year in primary school and 1,100 hours per year in secondary school.

By contrast, Moray offers the least primary school time, at 851 hours, while Dundee and Midlothian offer 855 hours of secondary school teaching.

Glasgow pupils receive 975 hours of schooling at primary level and 1072 at secondary, roughly similar to those in Edinburgh. Reform Scotland said it recognised the importance of local authorities setting the level of teaching hours, in line with budgets and pupils’ needs. But the think tank called for more transparency for parents over the variations in teaching hours.

Reform Scotland’s Research Director Alison Payne said: “We were surprised by the huge variation in hours exposed by our findings. We do not object to the variation in hours per se, because we believe that local authorities, and indeed individual schools, should have more control over their operation. However, we strongly object to the lack of transparency.

“We seriously doubt, for example, that many parents in Dundee will realise that their children will receive the equivalent of two years’ less teaching time than their peers up the road in Aberdeenshire.”

Scottish Conservative young people spokeswoman Liz Smith agreed with the need for parents to be given the full picture, saying that the research was likely to “disturb” them.

She added: “School contact time does not necessarily correlate with the quality of education on offer but two years is a very substantial difference. Reform Scotland is quite correct to say that there should be full transparency over this. Parents have a right to know about these differences, particularly if any evidence emerges to suggest that fewer hours are having a detrimental effect on pupil performance.”

But Councillor Stephanie Primrose, education spokeswoman for the local authority umbrella organisation Cosla, said there was no “magic number” of teaching hours per week, and councils needed autonomy in deciding educational policies.

She said: “We really have to get away from simplistic input measures and be mature enough to focus on outcomes. A host of other factors, including how children are taught in school, have a much bigger impact on learning.

“It would have been more helpful if the think tank presented a more thoughtful educational analysis of the issue rather than just presenting the raw data collected from FoI returns.”

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “There is no evidence in this research or elsewhere that children are not getting enough contact time with teachers during the school day, week or year.

“Local authorities have a statutory duty to be open for 190 days each year and it is for councils to determine the length and structure of the individual school day.”

‘‘There is no evidence in this research that children are not getting enough contact time