As an organisation with charitable status, we need to publish an audited annual report and financial accounts each year and submit them to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.
The annual report provides a link between our statutory functions, our strategic objectives (as outlined in our strategic plan 2023 to 2028, Trusted Teaching) and the activities that we have undertaken to achieve them.
Its main purpose is to hold GTC Scotland publicly accountable to our stakeholders for the income we receive and the activities we carry out.
Taking stock
A core part of my job is to plan, monitor and report on GTC Scotland’s financial performance. In recent years we were able to absorb the impact of turbulent economic conditions without having to increase the annual registration fee due to the level of reserves we built up and our efficiency savings.
It was, however, no longer financially sustainable for us to continue operating like this and in December 2024, our Council agreed a plan to increase the annual registration fee incrementally over 3 years.
In April 2025 we raised the registration fee to £75. Council reviewed and reaffirmed this plan at its meeting on 3 December 2025, and the fee will increase to £83 in April 2026. The next planned increase will be to £88 in 2027, with Council to review and approve this again in December 2026.
Raising the fee allows us to deliver our statutory functions in a more financially sustainable way and means we can use some reserves to pay for improvement work. This allows us to modernise our processes and systems to improve our services and better meet needs.
Making progress
We’re now roughly at the midway point of our strategic plan, working towards our vision of trusted teaching and focusing our improvement work on delivering our core functions of regulation well.
Our 2024 to 2025 annual report highlights some of this work, and speaking about its publication, GTC Scotland’s Chief Executive and Registrar, Pauline Stephen, commented that ‘we’ve built on strong foundations to drive forward improvements to how we deliver our core functions and advance our vision for Trusted Teaching.’
This financial year we have made tangible progress on reviewing our Fitness to Teach rules, most recently publishing an action plan. This sets out our priorities following detailed consideration of recommendations made in an independent report into our conduct process and following a call for views on the wider process.
Fitness to Teach is what people often think of when we speak about regulation, but we regulate the profession in a number of ways, including setting requirements for initial teacher education programmes and setting and promoting teaching standards. This financial year we have published a digital version of the Code of Professionalism and Conduct and a revised Memorandum on Entry Requirements to Programmes of Initial Teacher Education in Scotland.
We have made major progress in modernising our digital services too, with the launch of the new MyGTCS platform to provisionally registered teachers over the summer and all registrants set to gain access in early 2026.
I believe that clear communication is vital for building trust and ensuring accountability. The feedback we received about this year’s fee increase indicated that we needed to do more to explain our work.
Ahead of our next planned fee increase in 2026, I wanted to highlight how we use our resources and to encourage registrants to read our annual report. It’s an important source of information about the work we do in the public interest to set, uphold and promote high teaching standards.
