The leader of Scotland’s largest teaching union is calling for councils and the Scottish government to “get moving” on the promise to cut class-contact time by 90 minutes a week.
Action is needed, says EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley, to stop the damage “chronic workload” is doing to teachers’ professional and personal lives.
Ms Bradley’s comments follow the government’s response to the Hayward review of qualifications and assessment, in which education secretary Jenny Gilruth reiterated that the government remains ”fully committed” to the contact-time pledge and acknowledged that teachers “require more time if they are to accept a greater responsibility for formal assessment”.
In a statement to the Scottish Parliament on 19 September, Ms Gilruth called for “all parties to bring the necessary focus to delivery as quickly and effectively as possible”.
She suggested that the barrier to moving forward with the reduction in class-contact time was getting agreement over how teachers would spend the additional time.
Responding to a question following her statement, Ms Gilruth said: “I could go ahead tomorrow if we could get an agreement around the purpose of that time, because there are enough teachers in certain parts of the country right now to enable us to get going.”
‘Glacial’ progress on class-contact time
However, Ms Bradley said - speaking exclusively to Tes Scotland - that it was the government and councils’ body Cosla that were dragging their feet.
Ms Bradley described the progress of negotiations to date as “slow” and “pretty glacial”.
“They have not been paced as urgently as we would have wished given the chronic levels of high workload for teachers,” she said. “We would have liked to have seen much swifter progress.”
Ms Bradley agreed that one barrier to implementation was how the additional time would be spent.
She said the other members of the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers - the forum for negotiating teachers’ terms and conditions, which includes representatives from the teaching unions, the government and Cosla - appeared “reluctant” to accept that the additional time should be used exclusively for preparation and correction, as the teaching unions would like. However, she added that they had so far failed to put forward any alternative proposal.
One other use for the additional time out of class could be more “collective activity” - such as staff meetings and parents’ meetings - but Ms Bradley argued that this would likely increase workload, not ease it.
“If teachers are caught up in even more of that activity that does nothing to alleviate the pressures they are already under in respect of preparation and marking,” she said. “There are also always workload implications arising from these meetings and these activities.”
‘Not enough teachers’
The other barrier to implementation is teacher numbers.
Ms Bradley said it was hard to understand how the government could move forward with the pledge while teacher numbers are falling, not increasing.
“It’s difficult to see how the Scottish government is ready to implement its manifesto commitment given that it also promised to employ an additional 3,500 teachers and what we have seen over the last two years is teacher numbers in decline,” she said.
“What we are also seeing across at least three local authorities now are plans to significantly cut the teacher workforce.”
Asked for her reaction to the education secretary’s plea to “move at pace” on cutting weekly contact time from 22.5 to 21 hours, Ms Bradley said: “My reaction is, ‘Yeah, let’s get moving.’ We have been waiting for three-and-a-half years already and meanwhile the professional and personal lives of teachers are being damaged by persistent overwork.”
A government report into delivering the reduction in class-contact time, published in May, says that aiming for implementation in 2026 across primary, secondary and special school sectors “would require a significant increase in the number of teachers in the short term”.
It recommends taking the more cautious approach of aiming instead for 2028.
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