The first in-person annual general meeting of Scotland’s biggest teaching union since 2019 got underway today, and, in many ways, it felt like nothing had changed since its last pre-Covid AGM three years ago.
Some issues never go away - class sizes, workload, poverty and pay are always likely to exercise EIS delegates, and they are present and correct in this year’s agenda.
But dig into the list of 52 motions up for debate here in Dundee and you can see how the landscape of Scottish education has fundamentally changed.
To a delegate in 2019 who’d somehow slipped into a time vortex that transported them to 2022, some motions just wouldn’t make any sense, like the one calling for long Covid to be classified as a disability or another seeking to continue treating Covid-19 as “a notifiable disease”. A demand for extra funding to support post-pandemic pupil counselling, meanwhile, would have put the fear into teachers from 2019, who were already seeing a surge in mental health difficulties long before the spectre of a global health crisis appeared.
Covid: the legacy for schools
The all-encompassing damage wrought by Covid is clear in a lengthy motion demanding “a fully funded, long-term recovery programme to address the social, emotional, behavioural and developmental impacts of Covid-19 lockdowns and family traumas on our children and young people which are impacting on their attainment and achievement”.
We still cannot fully grasp the long-term impact of the pandemic on essential pillars of society such as the economy, healthcare and transport - although the signs in recent weeks have been particularly worrying - and the same applies to education.
Covid has already been a catalyst for education reform, with the Muir report published in March and Professor Louise Hayward’s report on reforming assessment and qualifications due later this year.
As another EIS motion puts it, “the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated the challenges facing schools”. It wants these to be “resolved with a national programme of investment and considered improvements to the architecture of Scottish education”.
Critically, it demands that Covid ultimately leads to better times ahead - the programme must “not simply return Scottish education to the same position that was in place before the pandemic”.
This return to an in-person EIS AGM could be a fraught affair. Already this week, strike action has loomed in connection to both an issue that long pre-dates Covid (school faculty structures) and another (remote learning) that encapsulates some of the conundrums presented by pandemic-era education. Meanwhile, industrial action over pay may also be coming over the horizon.
There has been some more upbeat news of late, with Andrea Bradley soon to become the first female general secretary of the EIS in its 175-year history (albeit one motion seeks to survey members on whether they are happy with the current system for choosing who fills this role).
The venue hasn’t changed (not yet, anyway) and many of the characters and issues are the same that took centre stage in EIS AGMs pre-Covid.
But the atmosphere has changed. June 2022 feels like a strange interim period after the initial havoc of Covid: like the rest of us, EIS delegates are now trying to make sense of what comes next.
With Covid, change is inevitable in all sorts of ways that we still don’t fully comprehend. The EIS AGM will be one big push by teachers in Scotland to bring about the sort of change that teachers want to see.
Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn
