This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Scottish councils have accused Nicola Sturgeon’s government of breaking the law after it threatened to cut council budgets unless they promised to freeze the number of school teachers.

The Scottish finance secretary, John Swinney, has warned he will withhold up to £51m in education funding unless all 32 Scottish councils sign an individual deal with his officials to employ exactly the same number of teachers next year.

Rory Mair, chief executive of the councils’ umbrella body, Cosla, said the government was trying to coerce councils by imposing unreasonable and arbitrary demands without consultation – a step that was ultra vires, or beyond its legal powers.

He said Cosla’s lawyers believed the government’s ultimatum was illegal on four separate grounds and demanded ministers agree to negotiate when they meet Cosla for talks this Wednesday – a demand rejected last night by the Scottish government.

The row has added to growing tensions over local government funding and council spending cuts in the runup to the general election, with teacher numbers emerging as an important political battleground.

Last week, the Scottish TUC called for the end to an eight-year freeze in council tax rates in place since 2008, a flagship Scottish National party policy blamed by its critics for seriously damaging the capacity of councils to improve services.

A government spokesman said it was firmly committed to keeping teacher numbers. “Having not only the highest quality but also the right number of teachers in our schools to support our pupils is a policy we would hope local authorities would support,” he said. “Ministers have made clear that the conditions of the offer will not change.”

Mair said the freeze on teacher numbers was based on the mistaken assumption that there was a direct link between a low teacher-pupil ratio in the classroom and improved performance by pupils.

The actual figure being used by ministers was arbitrary as it was based on a single day’s classroom census every September, when teachers could be off ill or absent for professional reasons, or supply teachers unavailable.

There are about 51,000 teachers in the public sector, costing about £3bn a year. Councils had identified up to 150 posts they wanted to cut, Mair said. “The idea teacher numbers are dwindling in Scotland is just nonsense,” he said.

He said forcing councils to protect the number of teachers at a fixed level would put much greater pressure on other parts of their budgets, but also restrict their flexibility to increase spending on other types of education, such as vocational training.

Cosla, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, published a new report by the sector’s advisory body, the Improvement Service, which said there was no evidence proving a link between teacher numbers and attainment.

Colin Mair, the Improvement Service chief executive, said the government’s own data proved that performance by secondary pupils, including those in Scotland’s eight most deprived councils, had improved year on year despite fluctuating teacher numbers.

“There is simply no correlation between pupil-teacher ratios and attainment,” Mair said. “In the 10 years we have examined, we can find absolutely no relationship between pupil-teacher ratios and the performance of pupils in the Scottish education system.”

The Scottish government said its ultimatum came after councils broke a previous agreement to protect teacher numbers, and that the £51m on offer includes an extra £10m (to be shared across 32 authorities) to help meet any extra costs.