Teachers in Dundee are to go on strike in protest over the “long-term damaging consequences” of plans to change to a system of school faculties.
The EIS teaching union, which will hold its first full in-person annual general meeting since before Covid in Dundee this week, is also threatening to stop holding the three-day event in the city.
The EIS has told Dundee City Council that its members in all secondary schools will strike on Wednesday 22 June, after the council issued a statement indicating that it was pressing ahead with its plans for school faculties.
EIS general secretary Larry Flanagan said the local authority’s proposals “would remove the vital experience offered by subject specialist principal teachers from our schools” and that it would cause “long-term damaging consequences for education in Dundee”.
He added: “Dundee’s teachers will not back down in their defence of the quality of education provision in the city’s secondary schools.”
Dundee’s lord provost, Bill Campbell, was due to speak at the EIS AGM in the Caird Hall tomorrow.
But Mr Flanagan said that the Dundee City Council press statement on the issue “seems to have been deliberately planned to coincide with our AGM arriving in the city this week [and] is a further act of provocation that will only add to teachers’ anger”.
He added: “In these circumstances, it is inappropriate for any official of Dundee Council to address the AGM, and the EIS has now withdrawn its invitation to the council. The EIS executive may also seek to reconsider its established practice of regularly holding AGMs in Dundee.”
The EIS AGM has for some time been held every two years in Dundee - and every other year in Perth - and, according to the union, is worth around £1 million to the local economy. However, the EIS says it “may now seek to review its association with the city in light of the ongoing dispute”.
Stewart Hunter, Dundee City Council’s children and families convener, said the move to faculty structures was “designed to improve the quality of learning and teaching that can better support pupils and improve outcomes”.
School faculty structures, while usually controversial when implemented, have been established across much of Scotland for some time. Opponents say they are driven by cost-cutting rather than the improvement of educational standards.
The approach sees discrete subjects brought together into a faculty, overseen by a faculty head. Concerns have often arisen where the faculty head in a school is responsible for subjects in which they have no background.
Dundee City Council, which agreed the changes three years ago but delayed their implementation because of the Covid pandemic, said secondary schools were moving to the new system on a phased basis from August and that new posts were being advertised now.
The authority announced the plans on Tuesday, a move that Mr Flanagan described as an “act of provocation that will only add to teachers’ anger”.
Mr Flanagan said: “Teachers do not take strike action lightly, but they will do so to defend the quality of education for Dundee’s young people.”
He added: “We call on SNP-led Dundee Council to recognise its own party’s endorsement of school empowerment, to suspend its provocative recruitment process and to engage in constructive negotiations with teacher representatives.”
Mr Hunter, however, said Dundee’s new senior leadership structure would not lead to a reduction in the number of teachers at any school, and said that “staffing levels would be enhanced”.
“It has never been the intention to impose a ‘one size fits all’ model,” he said.
“Headteachers have been clear with us that this is what they want for their schools. They believe that faculties, tailored to their own schools, will benefit their young people.”
Mr Hunter added that the council was “hoping and willing to continue talks with the trade unions”.
The city council said arrangements for the date of the strike were being finalised, and information would be sent to pupils as soon as possible.
A recent survey of Scottish teachers by two academics found that that just one in 10 of 1,300 teachers who responded said their school had retained traditional subject principal teachers. Some 60 per cent said their school had a faculty structure and around 30 per cent said they had a mixture of faculty and principal teachers.
The two academics, Professor Graeme Nixon and Dr William Barlow, of the University of Aberdeen, told Tes Scotland that the move to faculties seemed like an erosion of one of the great strengths of the Scottish education system - that teachers are degree-educated in the subjects they deliver - and that there had been a detrimental impact on attainment.
