The President looked back over the past year, and warned of a growing Health & Safety crisis in Scottish education

It certainly doesn’t seem 12 months ago that Andrea stood up here with that super hi-tech ballot launcher that opened our consultative ballot on workload, to force the Scottish Government and COSLA to meet the promise to reduce class contact time and employ more teachers. What a twelve months it has been. If this year has shown us anything, it is that collective action works, professional voices matter, and hope is strongest when it is organised.

When the EIS campaigns, the public pays attention. When the EIS negotiates, it does so with the strength that comes from tens of thousands of education professionals standing together. Our influence this year has not appeared by accident.

It has come from members in schools, colleges and universities who have given their time, their voice and their conviction to the cause of quality education. And colleagues, that is power. This union is a fighting union, and when we fight, we win. We don’t win for the EIS we win for you, our members.
Back in March we finally won on workload. And whilst we won’t see the impact straight away, getting Scottish Government and COSLA to agree the 2021 manifesto commitment was a game changer.
A major challenge was getting the message across; yet over the course of a consultative ballot and two statutory ballots the message was adapted, refined and delivered via a variety of means to the point that not only did we breach the punitive 50% threshold, but we smashed it.

And it was all down to a huge collective effort by activists, officials, officers and members in staff rooms up and down the country encouraging their colleagues to Stand Up for Quality Education by voting to reduce their own workload. I am proud of that effort, and I am proud of our victory. We stood up for our members. We stood by your desire to reduce your workload.

As a secondary teacher myself, I recognise and understand the frustration of waiting longer to see the benefits of increased professional time (formerly known as personal preparation and correction time), but it is simply impossible to deliver any sooner on a national scale because the teachers just aren’t there in sufficient numbers and that is a fact.

The work has already started on putting into practice the agreement to reduce class contact time. Hopefully the handbook will see appropriate amendments before we finish for summer. There is a lot to do, but I know our Salaries Committee will be on task all the way.

Standing Up for Quality Education also means standing up for those in the system who are marginalised or discriminated against. This union is at the forefront of tackling misogyny, mis- and dis-information and the far right.

Our Many Good Men teaching and learning resource was launched back in January aimed at older teens, but we are already putting together resources for use with younger learners. We have been running a really successful anti mis-and dis-information campaign across social media in a bid to Change the Story and promote equality, diversity and inclusion through strategic communication that fosters critical thinking.

Our work in tackling the far right continues and will continue to be a major area of work, but in October of last year we produced an extensive briefing paper aimed at supporting members in having conversations about the far right. We also produced a briefing paper providing vital guidance for members in supporting transgender pupils in our schools.

As I said earlier the EIS is a campaigning union, and we campaign and win across the whole spectrum of education in Scotland. We have stopped compulsory redundancies in UWS and our members at ENU who have been out on the picket lines have just won a no-compulsory redundancy agreement. We have balloted our members in GCU and we will no doubt be on the pickets there soon.

It is an utter disgrace that these institutions which hold literally millions of pounds in reserves and in cash are deliberately trying to make employees redundant.

Whilst industrially things have been comparatively quiet for FELA colleagues, there is still the constant Fight for the Future of Further Education…the programme of GTCS registration for college lecturers is ongoing with almost 4000 lecturers now registered.

As I know, you are all too aware, Health and Safety is the ticking time bomb in Scottish education that is just waiting to go boom. The levels of violence, aggression, misogyny, bullying, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and racism that teachers and lecturers are having to deal with on a daily basis are completely and utterly intolerable.

Our employers and the government are not yet up to the task of protecting us. We have a legislative right to work in an environment that keeps us safe…what matters is that something is done and that we are protected and allowed to get on with the job that we maybe used to love but are finding it increasingly hard to do so right now.

Members in a school I recently visited told me that levels of violence and abuse that were considered unacceptable only 5 years ago are being routinely ignored in order to be able to simply carry on with the day.

Standing Up for Quality Education requires significant and properly ringfenced funding. Money that can be tracked into the coffers of our employers and followed right down to the schools where it is meant to be going.

We have a new Cabinet Secretary, and I have message for her… Mairi, for this electoral campaign we provided you with a costed manifesto for Quality Education for this new parliament.

This government needs to use its tax raising powers to inspire the extremely wealthy to stop avoiding and start contributing more…to be given the opportunity to create a fairer, more equal society and to contribute to a quality education system that really does enable those within it to become successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens…because colleagues, there is nothing wrong with those 4 ideals but things have gotten a wee bit lost along the way.
I can’t end my speech without mentioning the aspect of this year, and last, that has given me most joy and pride. It has been the utmost privilege to represent you, and this great union on the international stage.

I only hope that I have been able to demonstrate understanding, empathy and a true spirit of international solidarity wherever I have been. I have certainly loved meeting and more importantly learning from sisters and brothers the world over.

The Trade Union movement is the largest civil society organisation in the world. It is present in virtually every country, even though in some places it has to exist in the shadows. We are fortunate, both by being in Scotland and (mainly) in the public sector that union membership is a recognised and valued feature of employment. This is not the case in many parts of the world.

I worked for 2 years as a VSO Volunteer teaching English in Cameroon. At the time my colleagues in school would joke that civil war would never break out in Cameroon because there are too many languages (it is home to 275 living indigenous languages) and no one could agree with each other long enough to form an alliance, so peace was much easier.

This is no longer the case, and the anglophone western provinces are effectively at war with the majority francophone provinces. I would like to dedicate this speech to a kind and helpful man who I had the pleasure of working with for 2 years in the Far North of Cameroon. Mr Fon was a colleague in the Government Bilingual High School of Maroua.

Mr Fon took me under his wing when I arrived and helped me cope with the culture shock of teaching in state “funded” education in West Africa. Sadly, Mr Fon passed a few years ago, having moved back to his native North West Province, but I only found out fairly recently. Mr Fon passed from complications related to starvation, due in part at least to the anglophone crisis which led to the closure of 80% of the state schools and therefore non-payment of salaries by the Cameroonian government. He was a good man who didn’t deserve to go out that way.

In conclusion and to slightly paraphrase Lech Walesa’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (delivered by Danuta his wife as he was barred from attending):

“We must respect the dignity and the rights of everyone and every nation. The path to a brighter future of the world leads through honest reconciliation of the conflicting interests and not through hatred and bloodshed. To follow that path means to enhance the moral power of the all-embracing idea of human solidarity.”

None of us can truly be free to live our lives in peace and comfort until we are all free to live our lives in peace and comfort.

This is an edited extract of President Adam Sutcliffe’s AGM speech – see www.eis.org.uk/meetings-and-events/agm2026 for the full text.