ANYONE looking to count the challenges facing the Scottish education system wouldn’t have far to look for them and would need more than the fingers on two hands to count them all.

EIS members in every sector are struggling to deliver quality education on bargain basement budgets due to successive years of political decision-making since 2010 in Westminster and at Holyrood, that short-changes our students and exacts more labour from the education workforce than is actually paid for through salaries.

In early years, the teacher-to-child ratio is sitting at 1:131 despite the swathes of evidence showing that getting it right in the earliest stages of a child’s education is critical, not only to their future educational progress, but this has lifelong and society-wide implications. Qualified teachers are essential for getting pre-school quality education right, yet their numbers have been decimated over the past decade.

Looking to school education, teachers are on their knees. Scotland’s class sizes are among the very highest in the OECD, and teacher class contact time the same. Our schools are so seriously understaffed that teachers are working the equivalent of a day and a half per week extra, unpaid, every week, to keep learning and teaching going.

Around 40 per cent of children and young people in mainstream classes have a recognised additional support need — that amounts to more than 13 children per class of 33 — but in far too many instances, there is no other adult in the room to support all 33 children other than one teacher.

EIS members report that unmet additional support need is the single biggest factor fuelling the rise in violent and aggressive behaviours in our schools — behaviour that results in physical and psychological injury for too many teachers and support staff, this on top of the stress arising from unsustainable workloads.

Meanwhile, thousands of teachers in Scotland are on casual contracts, crying out for security of employment, with many struggling so hard to live so precariously, they’re leaving the profession very early after years of successful study and fulfilment of the rigorous requirements of entitlement to teacher registration in Scotland. We prepare our teachers to be among the very best in the world, and invest in doing so, but then are hugely wasteful of that precious investment post probation.

FE lecturers have had to battle over the last decade for their professionalism to be valued too, forced to take industrial action in nine out of 10 of those years for fair pay, and in protection of jobs and quality education. Funding for the FE sector has been slashed by 17 per cent since 2021-22, with resultant loss of jobs for lecturers and support staff, and cuts to course provision for students. This is despite further education being the pathway out of poverty for thousands of working-class students.

Universities are also loudly sounding the alarm in respect of funding crises, and trade unions in the sector who’ve been battling on pay and pensions on behalf of members year after year are now fighting hard against threats to hundreds of jobs and the quality of higher education on offer for students across the sector.

No sector of education is without significant challenges: neoliberal politics is leaving no part of the education system unharmed.

This is a matter of concern to all who understand the value of education for the common good, as well as for individuals. It’s a matter of even more urgent concern when we consider the axiomatic role of education for democracy and peace, particularly so in the current political and geopolitical context.

Far-right ideology has been winning at the ballot box in South America, the US, and in Europe, where we also have an ongoing war; the brutal conflict in the Middle East has reached new heights of barbarity; and war in several African countries continues to rage, albeit with far less media attention.

High-functioning democracies don’t go to war with one another. High-functioning democracies resolve conflict between themselves peacefully and in so doing, ensure that their citizens, some of who become their politicians, are well educated — with sound knowledge and understanding of themselves, their communities, the world and their place in it; and the ability to think and respond critically to the misinformation and disinformation that seeks to stoke fear, resentment and hostility between people as a way of deflecting attention from the billionaire power-holders and right-wing governments who should actually be in the frame for the attacks on social, political and economic rights, and people’s safety and security as citizens of the world.

In this respect, quality education is an existential imperative. Yet the funding of it across every sector in Scotland fails to measure up to this reality.

More alarming, still, is the recent decision by the British government to increase spending on military defence at the expense of the poorest in our society and our public services — holding back on scrapping the two-child benefit cap, cutting social security payments for disabled people and continuing to slowly starve all sectors of education and other public services of vital funds, all with resultant Barnett consequentials. The shaky justification for this — defence of the realm — is somewhat ironic, in that by prioritising military posturing ahead of public services and social security, the British government is running the very real risk of causing long-lasting damage to the very fabric of our society.

Against this backdrop, there’s a real opportunity to be grasped by any party that’s serious about social justice, serious about quality education for the common good, and serious about quality education for democracy and peace amidst the threats to both that intensify by the day.

After a decade and a half of austerity; eyewatering rates of poverty and deprivation for far too many, contrasted with unbridled wealth accumulation by a small few; with neoliberal ideologies rampant in the public sector, demanding that workers do more and more with less and less, including in education, to the detriment of teachers and students alike; and with far-right narratives stalking young people on social media, gathering traction in our communities and intruding into our classrooms, a clear and hopeful vision of an education system rooted in social justice, equality and democracy, is desperately needed from our politicians as we approach the next election in May 2026.

This, coupled with the political will and courage to properly resource the realisation of any such vision, including through increased taxation on wealth, is a must. So too is the insight to understand, and the humility to accept and acknowledge, that any such vision can only be created with the co-architecture of teachers and lecturers and their trade unions as valued professionals who have the necessary expertise and the moral conviction to co-design a coherent, principled vision for Scottish education and, critically, to turn it into reality — for all of our good.

Andrea Bradley general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland.