General Secretary Andrea Bradley’s AGM report focused on the power of collective action.

Solidarity is the superpower that trade unions and trade unionists rely on to get us through the darkest of days and out the other side with the wins on pay and conditions that shine on and that sustain us for years and decades to come.

Sustain the workers who win them and shine on for all trade union members. We encourage each other with our wins: we raise the expectations of our colleagues; we raise the standards that employers have to meet.

A victory for one is a victory for all.

Solidarity is the glue that binds us.

Two weeks ago, our Executive Committee showed unequivocally the strength of the EIS’s commitment to trade union solidarity, to supporting our members across this Union- specifically members in EIS-FELA at this time – and our collective commitment to helping them win this latest dispute with their employers.

Those employers seem to be getting away with applying some of the worst provisions of the anti-trade union laws…the Minister for FE practically greenlighting deeming in the Scottish Parliament last week.

Which is why the Executive Committee agreed to open up a £5 Million Hardship Fund to sustain striking FELA members right up until the end of the academic session.

Union busting instincts seem to be driving the decision-making in college board rooms the length and breadth of the country and in Holyrood backrooms. But no matter what the employers do, or the politicians don’t dae – the EIS is a union that fights hard for all of our members and we’re here to stay in the college sector.

That £5m fund that we opened is a fighting fund as much as it’s a hardship fund. And that money and the solidarity from across the Union will help sustain the strength and resolve of EIS-FELA members until this dispute is settled and an acceptable resolution is won. And it will be. Because hard though it is to do it, industrial action delivers better outcomes for workers.

Teachers wouldn’t have won our last pay rise without it.

STUC data published in April shows that striking trade union members in Scotland collectively won an additional £3 billion in pay and pensions on top of the original offers that were made to them by employers before they took industrial action.

Industrial action clearly is in the interests of workers, including teachers and lecturers.

Andrea Bradley

That’s the strength of our collective superpower. So we don’t buy the rhetoric that ‘Striking is in no one’s interests…’ Because industrial action clearly is in the interests of workers, including teachers and lecturers. That’s what employers and centre to right governments are afraid of.

This Union is solid.

In the past twelve months, together, we’ve been standing up for proper prevention of and protection from, violence and aggression in our schools – nearly 900 school branches completing the behaviour survey, the results and recommendations shared with the Scottish Government, COSLA and all MSPs, as well as relevant education stakeholders.

We’ve been standing up for proper prevention and protection from violence and aggression at the Cabinet Secretary’s series of behaviour summits. Pushing hard to influence the final behaviour action plan through SAGRABIS, being crystal clear that the EIS logo of endorsement will not be forthcoming if the plan fails to identify any additional resourcing to solve the problem of violence and aggression in our schools. No resources attached to the action plan, no EIS logo attached to the action plan. It’s as simple as that.

So, colleagues – a straightforward message from this AGM to the Scottish Government: wishful thinking and a glossy, shiny action plan will not lead to better behaviour-related health and safety in our classrooms; additional government money to recruit more staff will.

We’ve been standing up since the last AGM for proper additional support needs provision – at meetings, in the media, and earlier this week, we released a joint statement along with other teacher and support staff unions, and key parents’ groups, demanding more investment in ASN for the almost 40% of children and young people who now have a recognised additional support need.

So, we’ve been standing up for proper ASN provision and as a union we’ve been standing up for you – the teachers – whose workload continues to be totally unacceptable, as the workload research published yesterday has highlighted – 11 hours of unpaid work a week from the average teacher.

That’s even worse than it was at the last count. We’ve raised the issue at SNCT meeting after SNCT meeting, in bi-lateral after bi-lateral, stressing the importance of the promise that was made to the electorate to reduce teacher contact time to 21 hours per week– a promise to the electorate, including tens of thousands of teachers, hundreds of thousands of parents and carers.

We’ve been stressing the importance of full delivery of that manifesto promise in the interests of quality education and the imperative of the time being given to teachers for preparation and marking – because if it’s not, the workload crisis worsens and teacher wellbeing deteriorates further and we’re just not standing for that!

So, another message to the Scottish Government from this AGM – the additional 90 minutes must be delivered as promised and it must go to teachers for preparation and marking.

No ifs, no buts, no maybes – that’s an absolute red line.

And linked to workload, we’ve been standing up for teacher numbers because despite the other big Scottish Government manifesto promise to recruit 3500 more teachers by 2026, in December we saw teacher numbers fall for a second year in a row.

The Scottish Government says that it values education and wants to close the poverty-related achievement and attainment gap yet shortchanges councils in their funding year upon year and then freezes Council Tax and then councils themselves shamefully start squeezing the life out of schools.

Meanwhile it’s you, the young people and their families who suffer as local and national government play politics with our public service delivery.

We simply cannot run a quality education service on empty promises and the goodwill of teachers that’s already been well overspent.

Andrea Bradley

None of this is acceptable.

We simply cannot run a quality education service on empty promises and the goodwill of teachers that’s already been well overspent.

We can’t keep expecting teachers to give more and more at personal cost to them and their families.

We can’t keep allowing the thousands and thousands of hours of unpaid work to clock up.

Those thousands and thousands of hours equate to the permanent jobs that thousands of teachers – our members – can’t get.

This AGM is calling time on unpaid labour in the teaching profession! Teachers must be paid for all the work that they do and must be paid properly.

So turning to our pay claim. Teachers’ pay must be restored to the value that it held in 2008. That’s why we submitted a 6.5% pay claim. Less than the percentage uplift that MSPs have been awarded for this year. And that’s why our Salaries Committee unanimously rejected the pay offer that finally came from COSLA on Tuesday, after almost five months of waiting.

It’s undifferentiated which is good but more than misses the mark in its value. It amounts to an increase of £54 a month by the time you get to May 2025.

Since the onset of austerity and the suppression of public sector pay, teachers’ salaries have significantly declined in their real terms value, falling further and further behind the salary levels in many of the education systems amongst OECD countries.

As a result of the strike action that EIS members led in 2022-23, teachers at the top of the main-grade scale now earn £48,516. Despite the gain prompted by our strike action, the amount now earned is almost 25% less than it would have been if salaries had been annually paid at the rate of RPI inflation since 2008.

Had teachers’ salaries been paid in accordance with retail price rises, teachers at the top of the main grade would now be earning £61,234 – a much more attractive salary that more accurately reflects the value of teachers and that would help to strengthen recruitment and retention.

No matter what employers and the Scottish Government decide to do this time around when it comes to teacher pay, though, our collective trade union conscience will be clear. We do the right thing…always. On pay and everything else. We believe in proper funding of public services and decent pay for public sector workers.

We stand for education as a social good, a cornerstone of a society that’s built on principles of social justice. We continue to stand up for better.

That and much more are reflected in the Stand Up for Quality Education Manifesto that we’re officially launching ahead of the 4th July General Election.

We’ve been quick off the mark in publishing this just two weeks and two days after the election was called.

It’s a UK General Election and education is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, of course, but the EIS believes that Scottish MPs in Westminster have a responsibility to act in the interests of Scotland and its citizens in respect of all public services, including education.

Too often, though, our politicians appear to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. So, we need to go on trying to convince them to invest properly in education today because it’s the right and socially just thing to do. And because significant and sustained investment now will deliver huge long-term savings on health, on employability and on criminal justice for decades to come.

We urge all political parties and General Election candidates to stand up for quality education, for workers’ rights, for peace, for equality and for climate justice, alongside the EIS.