Commuters in Glasgow have been banging on for years about the need for an integrated travelcard, something that would make the hodgepodge network of trains, buses and underground easier to navigate.
Lo and behold, such a thing finally appeared as world leaders jetted in for the critical COP26 climate summit: for two weeks, delegates can flash a single card to hop on to their transportation of choice. After the world averts its gaze from Glasgow, however, it looks like that card will vanish, to the spluttering but ineffectual indignation of those who use the city’s transport outside of epochal climate conferences.
It’s a perfect example of how things that are supposed to be incredibly tricky or too expensive can actually be turned around quite easily if the political will is there. Remember Theresa May, when she was prime minister, chiding us that there was no “magic money tree”? Well, there is - it’s just locked away until the government decides that it really needs shaking.
In the past week, an online Tes Scotland article by secondary teacher Glen Fraser clearly struck a nerve. Teacher workload is such an ever-present issue that, even within the profession, it can feel like background noise - a grudgingly accepted fact of life. But Fraser’s piece drove home the impact of relentless workload, and how it seems impossible to do your job properly without working outside contracted hours.
“Unless I throw textbooks at my pupils each day and kid myself that it constitutes teaching … it feels nearly impossible to avoid some kind of unpaid overtime,” he wrote. He recalled his October 2020 “holiday” when, in a bid to get ahead, he decided to do some work during the autumn break - but, rather than helping him, that “reckless decision” led to a term that “nearly broke me”.
Unpaid overtime is a part of teaching culture in a way that is not true of all professions. And yet it doesn’t have to be that way: if the powers that be are serious about fixing it, they could.
They could start by properly addressing class-contact time, which is far higher in Scotland than in most comparable member nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The government commitment to cut weekly contact time by an hour and a half is a step in the right direction, but it still feels a long way from the day-to-day reality.
Teacher pay is another perennial issue. The clamour for it to improve briefly abated after the 2019 deal - a (partially backdated) 13.51 per cent increase over three years. Last week, however, the EIS teaching union described the current pay offer as “wholly unacceptable”, and said it was causing “growing anger in schools” as it would represent a real-terms pay cut.
As ever, teachers will have to pipe up if they want to improve their workload and pay - but how much energy do they have for this right now when they’re still coping with the all-encompassing shock of Covid?
Teachers are well used to juggling a multitude of competing demands, but, as primary head Susan Ward put it in a Tes Scotland article last weekend, there is “a very fine line” between the dogged resilience to cope with such demands and the “shocked exhaustion associated with burnout”.
Catherine Nicol, the new president of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, tells us this week that the cause of unmanageable workload is “too many people telling us what to do”, resulting in a mountain of paperwork that “all falls on the teacher on the ground”.
Nicol is, however, optimistic that the various education reform consultations will change that for the better. Certainly, if those in power really want to improve teachers’ working lives, there is nothing to stop them from making it happen.
This article originally appeared in the 5 November 2021 issue under the headline “If the politicians can magic up a travelcard, they can cut workload”
