Jim Thewliss remembers the early years of his career in the 1970s and 1980s being peppered with industrial action: there were constant battles for pay and conditions that matched the level of responsibility each teacher had. As a teacher who would go on to have a long career in school leadership, he was in the thick of it. 

Isabelle Boyd, another former school leader of many years, remembers the tail end of the last century as an era when resentful staff with challenging workloads had no option but to attend weekly meetings with school leaders, who sometimes appeared to be racking their brains trying to think of what on earth to do with them. 

Then, after so many years of arguments in Scottish education, everything changed. In 2001, the landmark McCrone deal or - to give its official title, “TP21” (A teaching profession for the 21st century) - was signed. This not only led to a period of stability in industrial relations in Scotland, but it also - at long last - put in place a mechanism for teachers to have a say in how time outside of classes was spent and built time into the working week for teachers to breathe. 

It was a deal unlike any other. A utopian ideal that teachers across the world would covet. All would, seemingly, be well at last. 

Yet while on the face of it, it is possible to paint a picture of pre-McCrone turmoil and post-McCrone relative harmony in the Scottish teaching profession, of a job that was changed fundamentally for the better, the truth is far more complex. McCrone, with its core aim of reflecting and driving a high level of skill and professionalism in teaching, made most of the right noises - but was also responsible for some long-lasting bum notes. McCrone changed the experience of being a teacher in Scotland, but it would be over-reaching to say it has been an unqualified success or that the promised domino effect on other countries ever took place.

Even at the time, the agreement did not command universal support. Thewliss - now general secretary of School Leaders Scotland (SLS) - is, from the vantage point of 2022, critical of some aspects, including the removal of the assistant headteacher post and the introduction of the “job-sizing toolkit” used to determine salaries attached to promoted posts, which he says was never fit for purpose.

So, more than 20 years later, how does the hugely significant agreement continue to shape the working lives of Scottish teachers, and what influence does it have over how heads run their schools? Ultimately, are teachers and school leaders better off now in Scotland than they were in the aftermath of McCrone?

The McCrone deal reportedly cost over £2 billion, led to a 23 per cent pay rise over three years for teachers, prompted the introduction of the 35-hour working week and resulted in class-contact time being set at 22.5 hours. It aimed to bring the pay of teachers in Scotland in line with that of other professionals. But the deal - agreed in 2001 - went further than that.

It led, for example, to the creation of the Teacher Induction Scheme, which guarantees teaching graduates a one-year post in a school so that they can quickly accrue the classroom experience they need to become fully fledged teachers. McCrone saw principal teacher posts introduced in primary schools and classroom support ramped up in secondaries, as well as the more general improvement of the support teachers could call upon.

The deal - the key aspects of which were introduced from 2001 to 2006 - promised around 3,500 additional staff to carry out “bursar, administrative and ICT support to schools” and its vaunted “Annex E” set out the tasks that should “not be routinely carried out by teachers”, including supervising pupils at lunchtimes and breaks, photocopying, inputting assessment data, and “the recording of educational broadcasts”.

Those in the profession may wonder what has happened between that deal being signed and the reality they now face in 2022.

On the face of it, the most eye-catching casualty since that time is Annex E. Teachers’ class-contact time is still, in theory, capped at 22.5 hours a week (although the government recently committed to reducing it by 90 minutes a week by August 2022) and the Teacher Induction Scheme is still considered by many - including Glasgow’s recently retired director of education, Maureen McKenna - as one of the crowning glories of the Scottish education system. 

Annex E, however, was scrapped. A decade after McCrone, it was the turn of Gerry McCormac - who at the time was the principal of the University of Stirling - to spearhead a review of teachers’ employment and, in 2011, the committee he led published its report (see box - McCormac).

Very few of the recommendations were implemented, as a result of strong opposition from the teaching unions, but Annex E was abolished, as McCormac argued that “we are trying to advance professionalism and, in doing so, to remove lists of dos and don’ts”. And by this time - a decade on from McCrone - some argued that the list of what teachers should not do had, to a large extent, already been put into practice in schools.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that is simply not the case. When Tes Scotland posted Annex E on social media late in 2021, it did spark a flurry of responses from teachers who still felt lumbered with many of the supposedly “outlawed” tasks.

However, to fully understand how the McCrone deal changed things for heads and teachers then, the impact now and lessons for all schools in the future, we need to look deeper than a desultory list of the sort of tasks teachers are expected (or are not expected) to do.

We first need to understand how the deal came about. Drew Morrice spent well over a decade, from 2003 to 2017, immersed in handling teachers’ conditions of service and salaries as the EIS teaching union’s assistant secretary, with responsibility for salaries. He says Jack McConnell - the former first minister of Scotland, who in 2001 was education secretary - deserves “enormous credit for facilitating [the McCrone deal] and getting it through”.

But while McConnell saw the McCrone deal over the line, it was triggered by the decisions taken by his predecessor, the late Sam Galbraith, who was the first cabinet secretary for education and children after devolution, from 1999 to 2000.

At the dawn of devolution, Galbraith and the new Scottish executive was faced with “the very real prospect of another highly damaging teachers strike”, according to Galbraith’s deputy, Peter Peacock, who was schools minister at the time.

While industrial action, or at least some sabre-rattling, had tended to precede any significant change to teacher pay and conditions, you had a Labour-Liberal Democrat executive determined to do things differently, and one that was all too aware of the damage that could be done to devolution “if we could not be seen to act clearly and positively”.

Peacock - who went on to become education secretary himself from 2003 - says he told Galbraith, based on his experience as a councillor, that “some sort of independent inquiry to end any strike might become necessary” and so Galbraith decided to “cut out the middle bit (ie, the strike) and move straight to an independent inquiry”.

And that was how the decision was taken to have what became the McCrone inquiry (see box - McCrone inquiry findings), says Peacock.

Gavin McCrone was an economist but his report on teacher employment is not necessarily his most famous piece of work. In 1974, McCrone, who was then chief economic adviser in the Scottish Office, wrote a paper for the incoming Labour government which came to the stark conclusion that - given the potential value of North Sea oil - “for the first time since the [1707] Act of Union was passed, it can now be credibly argued that Scotland’s economic advantage lies in its repeal”.

The memorandum only came to light in 2005 when new freedom of information legislation came into effect, leading to accusations from Scottish independence supporters that the UK government had buried it - although McCrone has said it was entirely appropriate that it wasn’t published because it was a briefing for ministers and was “confidential”.

Writing one landmark report is more than enough for most, but McCrone was then asked to chair the committee of inquiry into teachers’ pay and conditions, reportedly because he didn’t have any preconceived ideas about the matter - he had no skin in the teaching game.

According to Peacock, Galbraith was particularly keen to address what he saw as the big disparities between teaching and medicine in terms of how teachers as professionals were supported, educated and trained - Galbraith had been a prominent brain surgeon before entering politics. 

Was support for the deal universal among teachers?

As well as putting a ceiling on the amount of time teachers spent in front of classes, the deal gave them 7.5 hours a week for preparation and correction and 35 hours a year of CPD. It also ensured that in the early days of a teacher’s career they were mentored - thanks to the Teacher Induction Scheme - and had less time in front of classes than more experienced staff.

All of this - and the significant pay bump that the deal brought about - might lead to the assumption that support for the McCrone deal among teachers was universal.

However, Larry Flanagan, general secretary of the EIS teaching union, says he lost his position as the union’s Glasgow chair as a result of his support for the deal.

Flanagan - who was a principal teacher of English and drama at Glasgow’s Hillhead High when the McCrone deal was introduced and implemented - says he always viewed the 35 hours a year set aside for CPD as an entitlement, but that it was controversial: some teachers argued that they were effectively being asked to work an extra week for free.

Also, not everyone was a winner when it came to pay. Morrice was a principal teacher of guidance at the time the McCrone deal began to be implemented. Before McCrone, principal teachers were paid the same, irrespective of whether they were one-teacher departments or if they were responsible for managing a dozen staff. But with McCrone came job sizing. Different aspects of the job were given different weightings and salaries were determined on the back of those.

“Guidance teachers - and I was one at the time - took a considerable hit because they tended not to manage other teachers,” says Morrice. And posts such as assistant principal teacher and assistant headteacher ceased to exist, although salary “conservation” meant that, even though not all teachers benefited from the deal, no one was actually hit in the pocket immediately.

Morrice also remembers that some primary staff - who before McCrone had sole responsibility for their classes - were uncomfortable with the idea of handing over to other teachers to allow their contact time to be cut from 25 to 22.5 hours. Later, covering that time out of class proved a headache for primary school leaders who found it hard to secure supply staff and often ended up stepping in themselves - a situation that was later exacerbated when staff shortages and budget cuts became more common.

Some primary heads, reflecting on the deal now, even argue that it deskilled primary staff because a common solution was to cover non-class contact time - so-called McCrone time - using visiting specialists, such as art, music, ICT and PE teachers. But, after McCrone was implemented, classroom teachers were less likely to sit in on these lessons. One retired head recalls the ironic situation that arose in his own school, where some teachers started requesting to remain in the classroom during their McCrone time because they wanted to observe the specialist teachers’ lessons for their own professional development - something they would previously have done during their usual classroom time.

An Audit Scotland report reviewing the implementation of the agreement, published in 2006, stated: “Reductions in class contact time (time spent in class) are working well for classroom teachers but have contributed to an increased workload for headteachers.”

However, Susan Quinn - a former primary head who started teaching in 1989 - reminds us why that time away from classes is important: “Some people think it’s just about marking jotters, or cutting things out, or sticking things up on walls - but it’s about preparing quality learning and teaching experiences and researching what will be the best approach for that class.”

Quinn - who is now the EIS teaching union’s Glasgow secretary - adds: “The intent in lots of what was in TP21 was really good - it’s the implementation that has been more problematic, and not just in the short term. There has to be the resource there so that things are not done in a half-hearted way.”

The early days of implementing the deal were not all plain sailing in secondary schools either, recalls Isabelle Boyd. She took up her first headship in 2002, at Cardinal Newman High in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire.

‘It felt like detention’

Coming into the post just as TP21 was being implemented was, she says, a “baptism of fire”. Initial elation over the pay rise gave way to long, drawn-out meetings between school managers and teacher representatives about how the hours over and above the 22.5 with classes would be spent.

Boyd - who retired as assistant chief executive of North Lanarkshire Council in 2018 and now works as an education consultant - says: “Before [the McCrone deal] we had planned activity time, or PAT time. I can remember as a principal teacher having to stay behind every Monday and it felt like detention - as if the school management were scratching their heads, saying: ‘What shall we do with them this week?’”

The changed, post-McCrone reality was no panacea, however.

“After the agreement, there would be these long, protracted discussions between school managers and teacher representatives. I can remember trying to negotiate to have time to meet with principal teachers three or four times a year after 3.30pm for one hour and spending untold hours negotiating.

“Eventually we came to an agreement that we could meet with principal teachers twice a year.”

Things relaxed as the deal bedded in, says Boyd. However, in the early days of TP21 in particular, negotiations in schools across the country reached a deadlock and local authorities had to arbitrate.

And robust discussions at school level continue today, says Quinn. But she sees that as inevitable - given that school staff across a range of roles have different priorities and pressures - and, ultimately, beneficial.

“It’s just different people’s perception of workload and priorities, but having to come to an agreement means the focus is on collegiality and working together and problem-solving.” That, says Quinn, on the whole, “makes for better schools”, although the benefits on the ground may not always be clear.

Ultimately, Morrice says that McCrone brought “a degree of stability to schools that probably lasted up to 2010-11, when the financial crisis started to bite”. McCrone himself - reflecting on what he believed the committee’s greatest legacy to be in a 2011 interview with Tes Scotland - pointed to “peace and harmony for 10 years.”

At almost exactly that time, however, came some winds of change that shook the foundations of the post-McCrone consensus. The McCormac review’s recommendations to scrap the Chartered Teacher Scheme - a promotion route for teachers who wished to remain in the classroom - was viewed by many as an attack on a key pillar of McCrone. And around the same time, there was the hugely controversial 2011 pay deal, on the back of the 2008 global financial crash.

It was “effectively a pay freeze”, and the EIS teaching union came under fire for changes to supply teachers’ terms and conditions: the deal cut by almost half the rate of pay teachers received for doing supply cover for five days or less, reducing the incentive for teachers to work short stints in schools and, in theory, allowing the manipulation of the system if a longer period of supply was broken into far less expensive (for schools and local authorities) shorter chunks. These changes were later reversed, but the damage was done: many supply teachers had already drained away, and this was blamed for creating a staffing crisis in schools.

‘Significant’ pay increase 

Today - in early 2022 - Scottish teachers are once again locked in battle with the government and councils over pay, but in 2019 teachers did secure a three-year deal, which resulted in a rise of 13.51 per cent, with the final rise added to teachers pay packets in April 2020.

The 2019 deal pushed Scottish teachers’ pay at the top of the “main grade scale” (ie, that for unpromoted teachers) to over £40,000, which Flanagan describes as “significant”. Now, probationers earn just shy of £27,500 and, according to a recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report, they are well paid by European standards. Education at a Glance 2021 was published in September 2021 and uses “purchasing power parity” to compare teachers’ salaries in different countries. This means it does not just compare the raw wages for different sectors and career stages, but also how far that money will go and the bang teachers in different countries will get for their buck.

The report finds that Scottish primary and secondary teachers take home wages that are above average after 10, and even 15, years in the job. There is an important caveat, however: when Scottish teachers hit the top of the pay scale, their salaries start to stagnate and they tend to earn less than their European counterparts.

The report also shows that the amount of time Scottish teachers spend in front of classes remains among the highest in Europe and, even with the promise of a 90-minute weekly reduction in class-contact time from this August, Scottish teachers will still be teaching for more than the average among the 38 OECD countries.

The barrier that more experienced teachers hit in terms of their earning power is often viewed as an unintended consequence of McCrone, given the flatter staffing structure - with fewer routes for promotion - that it brought about in schools. It is also blamed for the move to faculties where more than one subject is grouped together. Although adopted in most local authorities now, faculties remain a live controversy to this day - just before Christmas a petition was launched in objection to plans in Dundee to move to faculty structures in the city’s secondary schools.

Professor Graeme Nixon and Dr William Barlow of the University of Aberdeen are researching the extent to which Scottish schools have moved to a faculty structure, as well as the impact it is having on multiple areas, from teacher workload to support for individual subjects. Their survey of Scottish teachers closed in November and one of the key findings is that just one in 10 teachers - of the 1,300 that responded - reports being in a school that has retained traditional subject PTs (principal teachers). The biggest proportion (60 per cent) reported that their school had a faculty structure and around 30 per cent said they had a mixture of faculty and principal teachers.

Nixon used to be a principal teacher of religious, moral and philosophical studies (RMPS). He is troubled by the move to faculties because the upshot has been an erosion of what many people cite as one of the great strengths of the Scottish education system: that teachers are degree-educated in the subjects they deliver.

Now, as a teacher educator, Nixon is a frequent visitor to schools and says it is common to have a humanities faculty that brings together history, geography, modern studies and RMPS. This leads to geography and modern studies teachers delivering lessons on world religions or moral philosophy, and to RMPS teachers grappling with thorny issues like remaining neutral when teaching politics.

“We want passionate experts delivering the curriculum,” he says. McCrone, he adds, did not advocate for faculties but did propose the devolution of management responsibilities to classroom teachers and a simpler four-tier model of school management. McCrone, then, gave councils licence to determine their own models, which has led to “arbitrary subject groupings and a great deal of variation across Scotland”.

“This is quite apart from the wider criticisms of faculties evident in literature and in education authority reviews relating to workload, lack of career progression, loss of subject support and specialism, diminishment of mentoring, marginalisation of subjects, and demoralisation of staff,” says Nixon.

Faculties are having a ‘negative impact’ on learning and teaching

Barlow’s last role in a school - before entering teacher education - was as head of expressive arts in a faculty that included art, music and drama. A logical sounding mix - despite sometimes being abbreviated to MAD - but one complaint about faculties is that they sometimes bring together subjects that seem unlikely bedfellows, such as modern languages and religious and moral education, or social subjects and business.

Barlow went from being a one-man department to managing 12 staff members, including music instructors. It was “a big jump” going from being a principal teacher to managing three departments but he says support was negligible.

Ultimately, Barlow believes, the move to faculties is having a negative impact on learning and teaching and, therefore, pupil attainment - at a time when schools are supposed to be strongly focused on raising attainment, in particular of the most disadvantaged pupils.

Teaching unions are opposed to faculties, and in more recent times have fought against their introduction. They were successful in staving off their introduction in West Dunbartonshire in 2016 and are now fighting the attempts to introduce them in Dundee. But in many ways - given how widespread Nixon and Barlow’s (as yet unpublished) research shows the model already is - this is like closing the door after the horse has disappeared over the horizon.

Morrice, however, defends McCrone on faculties and says they actually came about because of the financial crash and subsequent council budget cuts. Instead, his great regret on McCrone is that the Chartered Teacher Scheme was scrapped in 2012 before it had the chance to prove its worth.

The new post of “lead teacher” came into being in August 2021, but it is at a very early stage and, in any case, Morrice argues that it is a different beast because it is “a management-led process”. In contrast, experienced teachers had more freedom to decide to embark on the additional study required to become a chartered teacher.

So, looking at the big picture, is it better to be a teacher now - or was it better 20 years ago?

Is teaching a ‘more stressful job’ today?

Flanagan, who left the classroom in 2012 to become general secretary of the EIS teaching union, says teaching is probably a more stressful job today because society is more fragmented.

“Before the [2008] crash there was a degree of good times in the body politic of Scottish society, but when society is under pressure that is reflected in the intensity of the school experience and teaching. So I think teachers probably feel more stressed now than they did 20 years ago because education is under so much pressure and there are more cracks in society.

“But whether back then or today - when my own son and daughter are starting their careers as teachers - it is still a great profession. I think it is a brilliant career and hugely rewarding if you focus on the outcomes for young people and shut out the noise.”

What about hard cash and the extent to which teachers have managed to hang on to that significant pay bump they received in the early 2000s? University of Glasgow economist Professor Graeme Roy crunched the numbers for Tes Scotland in December and concluded that teachers are “slightly better off financially than they were in 2003” when adjusting for inflation for both entrants and more experienced staff such as headteachers - but that any real-term differences are relatively marginal.

“The big thing is what happens next,” says Roy. “The Bank of England expects inflation to rise further, possibly hitting over 5 per cent in the next few months. So if teachers get a 1 per cent rise, that’s at least a 4 per cent drop in their real-terms wages. That means the debate about the pay award is important as what is agreed will have significant implications for whether or not teachers are better or worse off in comparison to 2003.”

How important is pay when it comes to teacher job satisfaction? Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education and skills, told Tes Scotland back in 2017 - when Scotland was grappling with an acute teacher-recruitment crisis - that pay was unlikely to be turning people off teaching, and that it was more important for the job to be “intellectually attractive”. By that, he meant there needed to be opportunities for teachers to develop - “that’s what professionals are looking for”, he said.

“If we are talking seriously about the profession, then it means the profession has to own its professional practice in the same way as we take it for granted that medical doctors or lawyers do,” explained Schleicher. “That means we have to give people the room to advance their knowledge and their careers, to observe other teachers’ classes, to analyse and to figure out what good practice is.”

This, of course, is what Galbraith was trying to achieve back in 2000. And since then teachers have, indeed, been given more responsibility. The advent of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), says University of Stirling’s Professor Mark Priestley, shifted the onus for curriculum design onto schools and also increased bureaucracy. And now, with exam reform on the cards in Scotland after the upheaval of Covid, there is also talk of teachers playing more of a role in assessing senior secondary students. In these regards, the expectations put on teachers and school leaders appear greater than they have ever been.

Meanwhile, the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) recently argued that the professional learning needs of both experienced teachers and new teachers were not being met. In its submission to the ongoing Muir review on education reform - led by former GTCS chief executive Ken Muir, and due to report in the coming weeks - the GTCS said there needed to be “a fundamental rethink of teaching commitments to consider the time and space needed for...teacher learning”.

One area in which teachers are clear that they need more support is in dealing with a wide range of additional needs they now have in their classrooms: the proportion of pupils in Scotland with an identified additional support need now sits at 33 per cent, according to the latest figures, published in December. A change in legislation soon after the McCrone report, expanding the definition of additional needs, means that figure is far higher than it was two decades ago.

So, there have been big changes in the expectations on teachers - and likely more to come - but no commensurate change in teacher terms and conditions for the better, with the exception of some hard-won salary rises that do not, once inflation is factored in, amount to pay packets much different from those of 20 years ago.

Peacock believes that over the past 15 years - the time since his party was in power - “things have slipped”. He highlights the reduction in classroom support and the growing discontent over pay, as well as the return to annual pay bargaining.

“None of these regressions in policy can develop the high-functioning school system everyone needs,” he says.

For its part, the Scottish government says it will “continue to provide our education system, and especially our outstanding teachers, with support to help them deliver high-quality learning for our children and young people”. It highlights the last pay deal that “saw a minimum 13 per cent pay increase for teachers between January 2018 and April 2020” and the plans for more non-class contact time.

Of course, given his political party affiliation, Peacock is unlikely to declare the SNPs stewardship of education a resounding success, but his argument is backed up by the fact that teachers’ terms and conditions, in a number of ways, still fall short of the ambitions of a report published over 20 years ago.

Teachers are our schools’ most important asset - they account for the biggest slice of education budgets and, research repeatedly tells us, teacher quality is the most important in-school factor when it comes to attainment. 

By nurturing teachers, therefore, we nurture pupils - so why have we failed to build significantly on that seminal, teacher-centric deal struck at the turn of the century?