Nae Pasaran! EIS President Allan Crosbie addressed delegates at AGM

There is a lovely film I watched with my family recently called The Half of It. In one scene, a teenager’s English teacher is trying to persuade her not to go on to the local State college, but instead to go somewhere Ivy League.

There is a lovely film I watched with my family recently called The Half of It. In one scene, a teenager’s English teacher is trying to persuade her not to go on to the local State college, but instead to go somewhere Ivy League. The girl teases her, “You better watch out; in a town like this, isn’t it a firing offence for a teacher to give students advice like that?”

And the teacher just smiles and says, “In this town, everyone fears God, but you know the only thing that God fears…? The teachers’ union!”

I want to start today by celebrating two key victories that the EIS has won this past year, FELA’s pay deal and ending of deeming, and Glasgow comrades’ reversal of catastrophic cuts to teacher numbers in the City.

Both victories showed the collective power and solidarity of the EIS, but winning them was not easy and fighting for them was exhausting.

But, the forces that came for us in those battles will return. And the reason I know that is that austerity has not been ended. This AGM is the first held under a Labour government at Westminster since 2009, but you wouldn’t know it because this past year has felt no different to the previous fourteen.

Back in September at the TUC congress, I was able to challenge the Prime Minister directly about what he was going to do to end child poverty in the UK. He had no adequate answer.

I could say a lot more, colleagues, but let’s turn to our First Minister, because I have to tell you at the STUC this year he didn’t mention schools or teachers once.

We don’t need respect in the form of warm words at conferences, but we do need it in the form of a governing party actually keeping its manifesto promises.

In both 2007 and 2011 they broke their promise to reduce class sizes in early Primary, and then they never mentioned class sizes again. What they did instead was to end ring-fenced funding for education to Local Authorities, and stood back and watched as those Authorities across the country cut education budgets and undermined the vital ASN infrastructure that the Scottish education system had built up over decades.

Those cuts never let up and education funding has been a political swing-ball ever since, casually batted back and forth between COSLA and the Scottish Government like two bored kids in a back green.

In 2016 the manifesto promise was to close the poverty-related attainment gap. But Attainment Challenge and PEF funds were never going to be enough to repair the damage.

The built-in precarity of PEF must surely also be connected to the precarity of so many teacher posts which now plagues our system, especially in Primary. Precarity is a blight on Scottish education and ending it is central to our mission in the Stand Up campaign.

89% of Scotland’s Primary teachers are women. So, the vast majority of those members imprisoned in that precarity are young women. They can’t get mortgages, they can’t afford to start families, and they feel, as one sister put it to me, completely “devalued and disposable.”

And devalued and disposable is exactly how countless women are feeling at the opposite end of their careers, as they go through the menopause and struggle against a culture of eye-rolling and dismissiveness.

Just a few months ago one Deputy Chief Constable described violence against women and girls in the UK as having reached epidemic proportions and constituting a national emergency. I do believe the Scottish Government and COSLA have recognised that misogyny is a deeply troubling aspect of the violence and aggression against women working in our schools.

But they need to do more about it.

Those women are living a daily reality of being threatened and assaulted and they need to be able to keep themselves safe and to teach their pupils about consequences. And those consequences need to be properly funded in the form of different types of alternative, but supportive and inclusive, provision for violent and aggressive pupils, so that everyone in classrooms can feel safe.

Manifesto commitments

Which brings me of course to the 2021 manifesto – “We will recruit at least three and a half thousand additional teachers and reduce teachers’ contact time by an hour and half a week.”

And then the swing-ball match began again in all its monotony. Four years on, and the scores are in:

• Teachers working over 11 hours of unpaid overtime a week.
• Three quarters of us feeling we rarely or never have enough resources to meet the needs of our ASN pupils.
• Two thirds of us stressed frequently or all of the time.

In refusing to get on with cutting our contact hours, or to accept that the additional non-contact time must go only to preparation and correction, the Scottish Government and COSLA are effectively saying, ‘We don’t care about your stress.’

Comrades, when we’re faced with that level of disrespect and intransigence, there is no alternative but to fight.

The 2021 manifesto wasn’t just about the contact hours, because they were actually part of an overall promise to commit an additional £1bn to education for something called…. Covid recovery.

“Covid recovery?” What a joke…

It’s as if everything we went through and everything we delivered as a workforce throughout those years just vanished in a haze of ‘manifesto amnesia’.

In whatever ‘balance of harms’ matrix you apply, you have to stop downplaying or hiding away the harms done to teachers and school staff, and you actually have to prioritise staff wellbeing if you genuinely want to meet the needs of young people.

Valuing the Arts

On Instrumental Music, we’ve won battles this year in Midlothian, Perth and Kinross, and Stirling to halt planned cuts. To all of the IMTs involved, the Secretaries, activists and staff, we say thank you, and we say to our comrades in East Ayrshire where the Authority is pushing through an ill-advised proposal to move the instrumental music service to an arm’s length body, we stand with you in your fight to resist it.

Investing in arts education is essential because the arts bring human-centred self-expression, compassion, and empathy into young people’s learning and wider achievements, and those values form the foundation of the resistance to the forces of hatred that I mentioned earlier today.

On the streets those forces are already poisoning our democracy and attacking human rights, as we saw last summer in the appalling racist attacks and riots. In the polls they are set to make unprecedented gains at the ballot box in 2026.

When a man seeking high public office says that he and his ‘party’ will ‘wage war on teaching unions’, he may say – if he’s even questioned about it at all – that he intends those words to be metaphorical.

But let me say right now that all of us in the EIS stand shoulder to shoulder with our comrades in the NEU and with all other anti-racist educators who were the intended targets of that verbal attack in our shared revulsion and repudiation of it.

Siding with the powerless is anathema to the far-right – because they rely on deliberately targeting the powerless, particularly three of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world today: refugees and migrants, the Trans community, and Palestinians.

Our policies and practices offer strong support and solidarity to each of these groups.

Our work to challenge myths about immigration, our educational welcome packs for asylum-seeking children and families, but also our wider anti-racist work within the system and within the trade union movement, are all vital in standing against the racism of the far-right.

Our support for Trans rights has been exemplary. We are clear that the recent Supreme Court judgement should not be used to negate the spirit and intent of the Equality Act which provides that the rights of all minoritised groups are equally protected – with no hierarchy of order. 

As we strive to assess the impact of the legal judgement on the wording of our policies, we say to our Trans and non-binary siblings, we feel your fear but we will not abandon you, we will not stop countering the disinformation peddled about you, and we will not stop campaigning for your right to a safe, fulfilling life, lived as you want it to be lived.

A safe, fulfilling life is also what we want for the Palestinian people, living in their own state, alongside the state of Israel, with mutual security, with international laws and rulings upheld and with equal respect for all human rights.

Franklin D, Roosevelt famously defined fascism as the “ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

When the richest man on the planet openly backs a neo-fascist party in Germany, and when he gives Nazi salutes at rallies, we need to pay attention. Fascism so openly embraced and financed by billionaires is something we need to help our young people to understand so that they can learn how to resist the abhorrent violence that sits at its core, whether that be antisemitism, Islamophobia, or anti-Palestinian hatred.

But if there is one group of trade union activists and employees who can work quickly to play an even larger role in building the bulwark against the fascists that the world needs, it is all of you, it is all of us.

This is an edited extract of the President’s speech. Full text is available at: www.eis.org.uk/meetings-and-events/agm2025