Moray Council has drawn-up plans to get rid of classroom assistants who help look after children with disabilities.
The local authority is working on a new way of spreading auxiliary posts across the region’s schools and has said job losses are “inevitable”.
It is feared dozens of redundancies could be made, although education chiefs claim children with additional needs will still receive “appropriate” supervision after the reshuffle.
But hey have also admit some pupils will lose one-to-one support.
Yesterday, parents of children with disabilities said they were now worried about the future of their youngsters’ education.
The Press and Journal understands that several part-time members of staff at Greenwards Primary in Elgin have already been told they will not return after the summer holidays.
Gillian Groves’s disabled five-year-old son, Tom, is a P1 pupil at the school.
Mrs Groves said she was so alarmed by the prospect of the school losing support staff she was considering sending her son to a different primary next term.
She said: “Losing one-to-one support will severely impact Tom, he won’t be educated properly if he loses that individual contact.
“This feels like a paperwork exercise carried out by someone sitting behind a desk who doesn’t understand the effect this will have.”
Fellow Greenwards mum, Donna Ramsay, said she feared for the wellbeing of her six-year-old boy Connor, who has autism and attention deficit disorder.
She added: “Connor has someone looking after him one-to-one at the moment, and I worry about him having an accident if that position is split across two or more children.
“It could really be a dangerous situation.”
And Lorna Spink said her daughter, Brooklyn, suffered from epilepsy and required constant attention from her one-to-one auxiliary.
She said: “These kids need individual support, and if we don’t feel that they are safe after the holidays then we will have to look into home schooling.”
The local authority is conducting an expansive review of how it provides support for pupils with additional needs.
The chairwoman of Moray Council’s children and young people’s services committee, Anne Skene, described the initiative as a “big rejigging”.
She said: “Jobs will be lost at some schools, depending on the individual nature of the children who go to them.
“Some schools will get a reduction in hours, some will get an increase in hours.
“That inevitably means the schools getting a reduction in hours will employ less staff, and those with more hours will get more staff.
“It’s a very complicated formula that is based on the different needs of different schools.
“With reducing budgets, the level of support we currently have is difficult to preserve, it’s a very difficult situation.”
She added that some children who had previously received individual support may now be grouped together with one or more other youngsters.
A Moray Council spokesman confirmed the authority was looking at the best ways to maximise its £7.5million additional support budget over the next three years.
The move has been agreed by head teachers across the region’s primary and secondary schools.
The spokesman added: “Some schools will see an increase in hours and teachers, while others will see a reduction.”
A spokesman for the Educational Institute of Scotland teaching union described the loss of posts as “bad news for pupils and teachers”.
He added: “The loss of specialists from the classroom will remove vital support from young people who require it, and place additional workload pressures on class teachers.”
