Employing more teachers and finally delivering on the promise to reduce weekly class-contact time by 90 minutes will be essential in 2025, Scotland’s biggest teaching union has said.
The EIS union has contrasted the Scottish government’s aim to become “a leading ‘fair work’ nation by 2025” - including action on the gender pay gap, the disability employment gap and anti-racist employment - with realities in the education sector.
In schools, EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley said today, there remains “employment practice that is wholly incompatible with the Scottish government’s fair work ambitions”.
Many women face ‘real difficulty’ finding work
She added: “Far too many of our newly and recently qualified teachers, the vast majority of them women, continue to face real difficulty in securing jobs in Scotland’s schools.
“Even where these teachers do manage to obtain work, it is often precarious in nature, on short-term temporary contracts which offer little or no security or stability of employment.”
Ms Bradley also said that, even after recent pay deals for teachers in Scotland, salaries continue to “lag significantly behind comparable graduate professions, and behind that of teachers in other [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries, including Ireland”.
Meanwhile, workload remains “excessively high”: independent academic research for the EIS this year showed that, on average, Scotland’s teachers work more than 11 hours of additional, unpaid overtime on top of their weekly contracted 35 hours.
Ms Bradley said: “Hopefully the recent Scottish government Budget deal with [local authorities’ body] Cosla can start to address the workload issue by ensuring that commitments to employ more teachers, and to reduce teachers’ maximum class-contact time to 21 hours per week, are met in the interests of delivering a fair deal and fair work for Scotland’s hard-pressed teaching professionals, and a better learning environment for Scotland’s young people.”
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