Andrea Bradley

On the final day of AGM, General Secretary Designate spoke to the AGM on her vision for the EIS. This article includes edited extracts, view the full speech at: www.eis.org.uk/Meetings-And-Events/AGM2022

It’s a good reminder of how far we’ve come on the road to gender equality that all three of our office bearers, for the second year in a row, are women. But there’s a distance that we still have to travel together to achieve gender equality in the workplace and in wider society.

Several of the motions debated so far at AGM have underlined the fact that we still have a long way to go towards equality. Equality for the sisters in our movement and in our families, for our mothers and grandmothers, for our daughters and the girls and young women that we teach.

And for the boys in our classes, our own sons and the men that we know who too often are under pressure to conform to hyper-masculinised gender norms that are oppressive for them as well as for the women and girls around them.

Particularly after the setbacks of the pandemic globally there’s a lot of ground to be recovered. And given the EIS’s strong track record on the equality front, and heartened by the turnout and participation at the Equality fringe yesterday, I’m looking forward to continuing our onward journey alongside you, our activists, with equality even stronger at our core and at the heart of our collective bargaining.

It’s a real pleasure and an absolute honour to be addressing you this morning as a First time speaker as General Secretary Designate. The very first time I spoke at AGM was in this hall – at my first AGM as a member of the South Lanarkshire delegation – maybe about 15 years ago.

It was so moving yesterday, hearing so many voices continuing our commitment to speaking up for refugees and asylum seekers, that’s something that’s emblematic of our union and something that I’m incredibly proud of.

There can be no doubt that the last ten of our 175 years with Larry as General Secretary have made us stronger. In that ten years, Larry’s leadership has been as much about encouraging leadership amongst our members as it has been about his own individual skills and talents…and there are many, many of them and they’ll be missed.

From EIS Headquarters to our individual branches Larry’s legacy gives us firm foundations to build on and I want to record my gratitude to him for that, as the next General Secretary, as an EIS member, as a trade unionist and as a teacher.

Firm foundations to build what? Well – everything you’ve been talking so passionately and eloquently about over the past two days and for quite a few years before this.

The obvious and pressing priority is our Pay Attention campaign. We’ve staked our claim, nailed our colours to the mast and the incoming Vice President has even got her nails done in Pay Attention campaign colours. So now we need to win: for pay justice – for gender pay justice given our demographic – and for union power. And listening to our speakers on the issue of pay over the past couple of days, I know we’ve got what it takes to win this.

To win it because it’s simply unacceptable that teachers and other public sector workers would be expected to bear the burden of yet another crisis that’s been created by the economic vandalism of the Tory government and a Cabinet of millionaires, utterly morally bankrupt and more intent on callous racketeering and profiteering than they are on caring about people and supporting recovery.

We can’t let these people with their anti-human ideology do this to us. Not just for ourselves, because if they can do this to us as professionals and as organised trade unionists, what more will they try and get away with doing to the people who are least able to fight back, the parents and carers of the poorest young people that we teach?

More hunger and food insecurity, more health inequalities, more mental health anguish, more poverty and poverty-related stigma in our schools and colleges and poorer experiences and outcomes and fewer life chances for the poorest of our young citizens.

So this pay campaign is as much about the EIS playing its part in fighting back against the Tory assault on the lives and dignity of working people and those who can’t work, while they and their cronies are raking in billions off the back of Brexit, Covid and every other opportunity to accumulate wealth at the expense of the rest of us, as it is about winning a pay rise for teachers themselves.

And we can’t allow COSLA to peddle the myth of the one workforce agenda. Or the Scottish government to quietly sit there on the side-lines being let off the hook by a raft of egalitarian-sounding rhetoric that’s in truth about pay suppression for teachers and by dint of that the rest of the public sector.

We know one workforce is utter fallacy and I have a sense that the other public sector unions know it as well. We should be talking to them and other unions about how we dismantle this mythology.

Our Pay Attention campaign needs us to be fighting fit. If we’re to win a pay rise that protects teachers’ incomes from the worst of the cost of living increases, from every corner of the union, we need to keep building what will be a formidable display of our union strength.

We’ve started building this – the press statements, the campaign materials, the branch meetings, the petition, the social media activity, the well-judged response to the Cabinet Secretary yesterday, and the demo outside this building. All of this building from our strong foundations and using our well-toned muscle memory from the 2018-19 pay campaign to win this one too.

With full-blown organising, comms and political campaigning, synchronicity of actions with local associations, we’ll be ballot ready, strike ready by October, with a strong industrial action strategy mapped out so that we’re strike ready and strike able.

From the speeches and applause we’ve heard this AGM about pay and the other inter-related injustices it sounds like you’re well up for taking this on – and so am I!

You’ve already been busy engaging members in your schools over these past weeks and after a well-deserved summer break when EIS HQ will still be working behind the scenes, we’ll be asking you, our activists, to continue building the campaign. We’ll let COSLA and the Scottish Government see that we never stop. We’ll let our members see that we never stop, and we won’t stop until we have that 10%.

Some of you might have picked up a wee bit of Ange Postecoglou creeping in there. Dedicated followers of football or not, we want all of our members to get involved in the Pay Attention campaign. No bystanders, no wallflowers. Some gentle persuasion here, some cajoling there, some outright requests to take on a role over there too – no bystanders. This pay claim is for everyone. We need to make sure that all our members are included in the pay campaign activities and all other activity too.

We need to keep working to support and engage our members from typically under-represented groups – our disabled, Black Asian and Minority Ethnic and LGBT members. All of our members’ voices need to be included in the cacophony that will be demanding a cost of living pay increase for teachers and who by rights deserve more than 10%. 10% is restrained given what you’re still owed after a decade or more of relative overall pay decline!

And when we win that, it’ll be a win for all public sector workers. As you know colleagues, in the trade union movement, we’re about equalising up, not allowing ourselves to be bargained down.

As I said, I want us to be equality focused in the Pay Attention campaign and equality focused and inclusive in all aspects of our work. That’s a core element of our trade union identity – a commitment that makes us who we are.