Scotland’s 32 councils could cease to operate as individual education authorities under a new reform proposal published by the Scottish Government today, with responsibility for school education transferred to larger Local Schools Authorities and much of the money for schools sent directly to those bodies by national government.
The recommendations have been made by John Wilson, the former Broughton High School headteacher appointed as the Scottish Government’s Independent Professional Adviser on school reform. They have not been adopted by ministers. Education Secretary Màiri McAllan has instead opened a three-month dialogue with local authorities before the Government decides how it will respond.
The 135-page report, Shaping the Future: Strengthening Scotland’s Education System Through Empowered Schools, ranges across funding, school improvement, teacher recruitment, national education bodies and the powers exercised by headteachers. Its most substantial structural recommendation is that the statutory responsibility now exercised separately by 32 education authorities should be consolidated into a smaller system of Local Schools Authorities, requiring changes to legislation.
From 32 Council Education Authorities to Larger School Authorities
Scotland’s present system is rooted principally in the Education (Scotland) Act 1980. Local authorities are the education authorities and have the legal duty to secure adequate and efficient school education in their areas. Education Scotland describes the 32 authorities as responsible for statutory requirements, national education policies, education spending and continuous improvement, while councils also manage school estates and organise support around their own local structures.
Wilson proposes separating that education-authority structure from the existing one-council, one-education-authority arrangement. The new Local Schools Authorities would be formed from existing local-government structures and would absorb the school-education functions currently undertaken by individual councils. The report envisages each authority beginning with a baseline of between 80,000 and 100,000 primary and secondary school-age learners, although geography, population density and physical size would be allowed to alter that figure. No boundaries or final number of authorities are proposed.
The stated case for consolidation is that larger organisations could provide stronger specialist support, reduce repeated administrative functions, gain economies of scale and deal more consistently with national education bodies. The report points to existing cross-council collaboration as evidence that shared working can produce practical benefits. The Northern Alliance, covering eight local authorities, is cited for developing a common learning, teaching and assessment framework, while the Tayside partnership is credited with widening senior-phase choices through collaboration and a virtual campus.
Larger authorities would also change the proximity of education governance. Decisions currently made within one council area would increasingly be made across council boundaries. The report attempts to preserve elected involvement by assuming that Scotland’s 32 councils themselves would remain and creating Education Executive Boards for the new school authorities. Councillors from the participating councils would sit on those boards in proportion to the populations they represent, alongside interaction with senior education officials and education-sector representatives.
That model retains a place for local democratic representation, but the relationship would be different. A councillor sitting on an individual council education committee currently operates within the authority that carries the statutory education duty. Under Wilson’s proposal, the statutory duty would sit with the larger Local Schools Authority and councillors would exercise influence through a shared cross-boundary board.
During development of the report, members of the Scottish Government and local-government Education and Childcare Assurance Board raised this broader issue. Minutes from February record concerns about the review’s concentration on primary and secondary schools, the absence at that stage of specific consideration of early learning and childcare and additional support needs, and whether the work sufficiently reflected the wider local-government system in which education sits alongside other public services. Members nevertheless welcomed Wilson’s engagement and the value of examining the system from a school leader’s perspective.
School Funding Would Take a Different Route
The governance proposal is tied directly to a change in how education money moves from the Scottish Government to schools.
At present, most of the money councils use for education arrives within the wider local-government settlement rather than as a separately protected school budget. Councils determine how much of their resources will be allocated to education after meeting statutory obligations and considering local priorities. Specific programmes, including parts of the Scottish Attainment Challenge, are among the exceptions that are protected for particular purposes.
The scale of the expenditure involved is substantial. Wilson’s report records projected direct Scottish Government funding to local authorities of approximately £15.2 billion in 2025-26. Education Services accounted for planned spending of a little over £8 billion, after just under £8 billion in 2024-25, and represented approximately half of councils’ general-fund net revenue expenditure.
Wilson recommends defining what constitutes school-education spending nationally and ring-fencing that money. If Local Schools Authorities were created, General Revenue Grant and Specific Revenue Grant funding intended for school education would be paid directly by the Scottish Government to the new authorities. Their senior officers would then carry financial responsibility for those budgets, while schools would operate within strengthened Devolved School Management arrangements.
The argument in favour of the proposal is partly one of traceability. The report found substantial variation in how councils define, record and distribute education expenditure. Wilson records that it proved difficult during the review to establish precisely what was included within education spending from one authority to another, making comparisons between funding and outcomes difficult. The proposed system would retain existing pupil and geographical factors initially when calculating allocations, while national and local partners would subsequently refine the formula.
Ring-fencing would also protect money assigned for school education from being redirected to other council pressures. For headteachers who have been told nationally that additional education money is being provided while simultaneously facing reductions or restrictions locally, that could produce greater certainty over the resources available to their schools.
The opposing argument arises from the same local-government funding system. Councils are responsible for services whose effects overlap: social work, transport, libraries, community facilities, poverty programmes and other provision can all affect children before they enter a classroom. COSLA told Wilson’s review that ring-fencing can reduce the ability of elected councils to respond to their own local circumstances and can result in greater pressure on services whose funding is not protected.
Wilson accepts that concern within the report. The present system allows councillors and senior officials to redirect resources as needs change. A protected education budget would increase certainty for schools but reduce that freedom elsewhere in the council budget. The proposal therefore combines stronger protection for education expenditure with a narrower range of choices for councils managing several interdependent public services.
The Report Finds School Autonomy Varies Considerably
The proposed reorganisation is not intended simply to replace one group of administrators with another. Wilson links consolidation to greater authority for individual schools.
Scotland already has national Devolved School Management guidance under which a large proportion of school expenditure is intended to be delegated. The report says between 90 and 95 per cent of school funding should, in theory, pass through those arrangements. The principles include subsidiarity, transparency and giving headteachers substantial flexibility to respond to their own school communities.
Wilson found markedly different experiences between authorities. Some headteachers told the review that they had considerable freedom to move money between budget headings. Others said they could not determine their own staffing structures, were prevented from carrying money forward for longer-term plans or received usable budget information very late in the financial year.
The report therefore proposes national implementation of the Devolved School Management guidelines in full, with HM Inspectors assessing implementation from 2027-28. It also proposes that Local Schools Authorities provide schools with finance administration, legal services, health-and-safety support, HR and recruitment systems, core IT and school-estate services.
Giving headteachers more control over staffing and resources could allow schools to respond differently to deprivation, additional support needs or local curriculum demand. It also transfers more responsibility to school leaders. Headteachers consulted for the review themselves raised concern about additional administrative burdens accompanying greater budget control, while Wilson argues that expanded autonomy would have to be matched by dedicated professional support from the larger authority.
The report records another part of the relationship between schools and councils that is less visible in financial accounts. Wilson says some school leaders told him they were discouraged from discussing education policy directly with elected councillors. In one case reported to him, a school leader who involved parents in examining the implications of council policy was accused of “weaponising parents”. The report presents this as evidence supplied during the review, not as a finding about general practice across Scotland.
Schools Would Also Be Grouped More Formally
Below the Local Schools Authorities, Wilson proposes a second level of collaboration.
Schools would be organised into formal neighbourhood groups containing a notional minimum of 5,000 learners, adjusted where necessary for rural areas and densely populated cities. Existing clusters would be developed into more formal 3-to-18 learning communities, intended to coordinate curriculum, teaching and professional development between primary and secondary education. A school-group leader would rotate among participating schools and be accountable to the Local Schools Authority board.
The model draws upon collaboration already occurring between schools and councils rather than starting from a completely new concept. Regional Improvement Collaboratives were created during the previous school-empowerment programme, and some partnerships continued even as the original structures evolved. Wilson records both sides of that experience: some participants questioned whether the collaboratives amounted to an additional layer of administration, while others developed shared teaching approaches and expanded course provision.
Any new structure would therefore have to reconcile two objectives contained in the report itself: increasing collaborative capacity while reducing the complexity that educators say already surrounds them.
A Proposal That Follows an Earlier Attempt to Empower Schools
The direction has roots in reforms begun almost a decade ago.
The Scottish Government’s 2016 governance review began from the proposition that more decisions should be taken at school level. A proposed Education Bill was subsequently replaced by a 2018 Joint Agreement between national and local government, including the Headteachers’ Charter and revised Devolved School Management guidance. John Swinney told Parliament in 2019 that sufficient progress had been made through partnership to continue without legislation.
Wilson’s report takes the view that implementation of that settlement has been uneven. It says the degree of school-level subsidiarity envisaged in 2018 has not become consistent across the country and recommends putting elements of the system into a new statutory structure.
The evidence-gathering behind the new report extended beyond headteachers. The formal call for views went to 35 local-government organisations, including COSLA, the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland and SOLACE, with a reported 98 per cent response rate; all eight trade-union and professional-body organisations invited responded. Wilson also met teacher unions, school-leader organisations, local-government finance directors, council officials, national education bodies and existing regional partnerships.
Changing Structures Would Not by Itself Supply Missing Teachers
One of the practical constraints identified in the report sits outside the proposed authority boundaries.
Wilson describes teacher recruitment and workforce planning as an obstacle to improvement. For secondary postgraduate teacher training in 2024-25, only Drama, History and Physical Education filled the places available among 20 subjects cited by the report. Uptake of available places was recorded at 31 per cent for Computing, 31 per cent for Technology Education, 54 per cent for Biology, 34 per cent for Chemistry and 22 per cent for Physics.
Those figures do not mean every unfilled training place equates directly to an unfilled teaching post, but Wilson uses them to illustrate the difficulty of matching future teacher supply to what schools need. The report proposes nationally coordinated workforce planning based on pupil projections, subject demand, geographical shortages, staff turnover and flexible-working patterns, with consideration of incentives in subjects or areas where recruitment is persistently difficult.
Scotland had 53,475 teachers and 695,923 pupils in its publicly funded schools at the 2025 census. The overall pupil-teacher ratio was 13.2, although national totals do not reveal subject-specific or geographical vacancies.
The report therefore treats workforce reform as a condition required alongside governance change rather than something that would automatically follow from creating larger education authorities.
A New National Executive Director of Education
Wilson also proposes a new coordinating function above the school-authority level.
An Executive Director of Education would work alongside the heads of Scotland’s national education organisations and a panel of advisers. The person would be described as politically informed but not politically affiliated to the Government, with responsibility for coordinating national strategy, identifying overlap between national organisations and assessing whether schools and local authorities have the capacity to implement policy within the timetable being proposed.
The proposal comes while the national landscape itself is being reorganised. Qualifications Scotland has replaced the Scottish Qualifications Authority, HM Inspectorate of Education has been established separately, Education Scotland is being refocused and the Centre for Teaching Excellence has been created. Wilson says respondents described national responsibilities as cluttered and sometimes unclear.
A coordinating director could provide a single point through which those programmes are aligned. It would also create an additional senior position within a system already containing ministers, civil servants, agency chief executives, inspectors, national boards and, under these proposals, Local Schools Authorities. The report leaves the Cabinet Secretary politically accountable for the education system and describes the director principally as a coordinating rather than ministerial office.
The Government Now Has Three Months of Council Discussions
McAllan has described the report as a contribution to discussions with local government rather than a settled blueprint. The Scottish Government says the dialogue will last three months and that it will respond to Wilson’s recommendations after that process.
That process will have to move from the report’s proposed architecture to the practical design of any system ministers decide to pursue. Wilson establishes a suggested scale for Local Schools Authorities and the functions they would perform, but does not allocate Scotland’s councils to particular authorities or publish proposed boundaries. Implementation of the central governance recommendation would require legislation.
The discussions will also take place while schools are already adapting to a revised curriculum, new national education organisations, changes to inspection, additional-support reform and continuing teacher-workforce pressures. Earlier this month McAllan told Parliament that the revised curriculum is intended to be implemented in all schools from August 2028, while describing public-service reform and school empowerment as another strand of the Government’s education programme.
Sources
Shaping the Future: Strengthening Scotland’s Education System Through Empowered Schools — Scottish Government, 28 September 2026.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/shaping-future-strengthening-scotlands-education-system-through-empowered-schools/
Empowering schools — Scottish Government, 28 September 2026.
https://www.gov.scot/news/empowering-schools/
Education and Childcare Assurance Board minutes: February 2026 — Scottish Government, published 24 June 2026; meeting held 3 February 2026.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/education-and-childcare-assurance-board-minutes-february-2026/
Pupil and teacher characteristics 2025 — Scottish Government, first published 9 December 2025; updated 24 March 2026.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/pupil-and-teacher-characteristics-2025/
Local authority roles and duties — Education Scotland, last updated 31 October 2025.
https://education.gov.scot/about-education-scotland/local-authority-role-and-duties/
Education (Scotland) Act 1980 — UK Legislation.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/44
Empowering Schools: education reform progress update — Scottish Government, 25 June 2019.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/empowering-schools-education-reform-progress-update/
Scotland’s education reform: ministerial statement — Scottish Government, 25 June 2019.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/ministerial-statement-update-scotlands-education-reforms/
