Tomorrow marks a year to the day since Tes Scotland found an intriguing line buried on page 62 of the SNP’s manifesto for last May’s Scottish Parliament elections.
Incredibly, it promised to reduce teachers’ class-contact time by an hour and a half a day.
This seemed too good to be true, and when we highlighted it on Twitter some teachers suggested it was surely a mistake. A few calls and emails later, and we had established that it was, indeed, an error: a sheepish SNP official told us that it was supposed to be a reduction of an hour and a half a week.
That - along with the lack of detail on how and when the commitment would be realised - gave the impression that it was a rather hurried addition to the manifesto. Still, it was welcome news for teachers.
After all, data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has shown that teachers in Scotland spend far more time teaching than those in most other countries for which data is available. A 2019 OECD analysis of 24 countries found that, at lower-secondary level, teachers spent, on average, 43 per cent of their working time on teaching. In several countries, it was 35 per cent or less. In Scotland, it was 63 per cent.
Despite its low-key introduction to the world, the Scottish government’s promise to shave a large chunk of contact time from the working week was a popular one among teachers in the run-up to last May’s parliamentary elections. The prospect of more time each week to plan, take stock and dive into meaningful professional learning was an enticing one.
The Scottish government has, however, been rather evasive and non-committal about when the policy would become a reality, and has faced political opposition. It seems like one of those policies designed to curry favour with an important block of voters - in this case, teachers - before much thought has been given to how it could actually be realised.
It was eight months after the policy emerged that we were able to report a target date for implementation. In December 2021, education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville told the Scottish Parliament - during a statement responding to data showing worrying trends for literacy and numeracy attainment during Covid - that she hoped to have the reduced contact-time policy in place by the start of the 2022-23 school year.
However, she also sounded a note of caution: the target date was not guaranteed to be met. Ms Somerville was clearly wary of the danger of constructing a rod for her own back.
But does this caution indicate the careful evolution of a policy - or the beginning of its slow strangulation?
Political history is, of course, littered with the remnants of eyecatching policy statements that never came to anything. On the SNP’s part, one of the most damning education policy sagas stretches back to before the party came to power in 2007, when it made ambitious proclamations about reducing class sizes. Those commitments faded from view in successive manifestos; the SNP’s manifesto for the 2016 parliamentary elections didn’t mention class sizes at all.
Will the same thing happen with the commitment to reducing class-contact time? The jury is still very much divided but it certainly seems that the government wants to buy itself some time, just as it has with the promise of free meals for all primary school pupils. Initially due to be realised by August 2022, free meals for P6-7s (P1-5s have already been given that entitlement) are now only to be introduced some time before the end of the current parliamentary term in 2026.
Last week, we got a flavour of what has been going on behind the scenes since the class-contact time policy made its muddled first appearance a year ago. In response to a freedom of information request, the government published some of its correspondence about the policy.
There was a note about Somerville appearing publicly to be “quite strong” about August 2022 being the potential start date for the policy. But government officials seemed to want to lower expectations, putting the onus for delivery on to local authorities, flagging up that the policy was dependent on having more teachers, and advising that public statements on the policy should underline that the “pace of [implementation] will be determined by need and capacity in the system”.
In short, it seems teachers shouldn’t expect that they will all be spending an hour and a half less in classes come the start of 2022-23. The contact-time policy has been given a punt down the road, although it hasn’t yet disappeared into the long grass.
In May 2017, to mark a decade since the SNP came to power, we went back to the party’s 2007 manifesto to see how key education policies had panned out over 10 years. One expert we spoke to was the University of Stirling’s Professor Walter Humes, who had this to say: “A pattern of ‘policy as spectacle’ developed - that is, high-profile initiatives launched with much boasting that were not sufficiently thought through or adequately evaluated.”
Some things change, some stay the same: perhaps burned by past experience, the government has certainly not boasted about the contact-time policy, which dribbled inauspiciously into existence in April 2021. But even if the hyperbole has gone, this is still another example of a policy that doesn’t seem to have been thoroughly thought through.
The government had better deliver on this policy, though, as a profession already under huge pressure pre-2020 has been battered by Covid. To dangle the prospect of easing that pressure, then not to do so, would feel like a betrayal.
Ministers need to make good on the promise of reducing class-contact time - you can be sure that teachers will have long memories if they don’t.
Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn
