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Keep Standing Up
In this edition of the SEJ, we highlight the continuing EIS Stand Up for Quality Education campaign, which continues to put pressure on the Scottish Government and local authorities to deliver a better deal for Scottish education.
We look back at the EIS parliamentary event, Stand Up for ASN – from ambition to impact, which was held at the Scottish Parliament before the festive break. We also continue our look at the implications of the recent Scottish budget, and the subsequent funding deal which was struck between the Scottish Government and local authorities.
The EIS continues to push on all three key priorities of the SU4QE campaign – workload, ASN support, and pupil behaviour – and, while some progress has undoubtedly been made, there remains a long way to go to ensure that each of these campaign priorities have their needs met.
As the EIS has previously highlighted, the Scottish budget and the Scottish Government / COSLA deal do offer some hope of improvement. After year on year on year of squeezed budgets and cuts to staffing and other resources, there is the promise of more funding this year, with at least some of it to be allocated to key priorities such as enhancing ASN support, employing additional teachers, and delivering the promise to reduce teachers’ class contact time to a maximum of 21 hours per week.
That’s not to say that everything in the educational garden is now rosy. Despite the promise of additional funding, the prospect of more education cuts continues to loom over Scottish education.
In Glasgow, the local authority has been pushing ahead with its plans to remove 10% of the teacher workforce over a three-year period, with many posts already having been cut. This is having a massively damaging impact on already overstretched schools, with staff pushed way past breaking point by workload.
The impact on young people is equally devastating, with a real scarcity of additional support for the many pupils who require it. In these circumstances, it becomes increasingly likely that young people will either disengage from education entirely, or that their frustration will start to manifest itself in challenging behaviour in school.
On workload, delivering the Scottish Government’s manifesto promise on reducing teachers’ class contact time is one tangible step that can, and must, be taken to tackle the issue. So slow has progress been towards the delivery of this commitment, that the Teachers’ Panel of the SNCT took the unusual step of laying down an ultimatum to push the Scottish Government and local authorities to act.
At the time this SEJ went to print, there were just a few days left before the deadline expired. While, at the time of writing, the noises emanating from government and local authorities were encouraging, it currently remains to be seen just how concrete the plan for delivery of the promise will prove to be.
Also in this issue, we report on the latest developments in the long-running saga over the overtaxing of many teachers in Scotland following the 2022-2023 pay settlement, including the latest steps that the EIS has taken to attempt to deliver a resolution on behalf of members.
At the core of the issue is the question of fairness. It should not be the case that one teacher pays hundreds of pounds of additional tax, compared to a colleague, purely because of chance. This is a problem that local authorities should be looking to resolve with the HMRC rather than, as many councils have, burying their heads in the sand and hoping that it all goes away.
