Scottish school strikes end as union accepts pay offer

The threat of strike action in schools across Scotland has ended after support staff accepted a new pay deal.

COSLA said additional funding had been found to meet the “extra demands” of Unison at the beginning of the month.

On Monday, Unison members voted to accept the improved offer after they took strike action last month.

Across all of Scotland’s councils, support staff including pupil support assistants, catering and cleaning staff voted for the deal by a margin of 69.6%.

The accepted offer has various improvements on previous rejected offers including a timetable for all local government staff to be paid a minimum of £15 per hour by 2026 and the full deal being backdated to April 2023 rather than some uplifts only happening in January 2024.

Unison Scotland’s head of local government, Johanna Baxter said: “This deal is long overdue and was hard fought for by Unison members.

“COSLA urgently need to review the bargaining process to ensure that future pay negotiations progress quickly and with as little disruption as possible.”

Earlier this month, COSLA said that “intensive talks” with the Scottish Government had led to some “limited one-off funding” to improve the deal.

In a statement, a spokesperson said: “This is the final £17.2m to get a package worth more than half a billion over the line, which will increase the wages of our lowest paid employees by £2,000 a year, for the second year in succession, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.”

Unison had rejected a previous pay deal that was accepted by other unions, including Unite and GMB, in September.