Scotland’s biggest teaching union has agreed to campaign for a four-day working week.
At the EIS annual general meeting this afternoon, delegates unanimously backed a motion calling for the union’s council to push for a four-day week, along with other trade unions and the Scottish Trades Union Congress.
Glasgow delegate Ella van Loock said a four-day week could make a “huge difference” to teachers’ health and wellbeing.
She said that she already worked a four-day week and that it had “changed my life”.
The five-day model, she added, reduced the pay, promotion prospects and pensions of women in the teaching profession, who were “disproportionately impacted by caring responsibilities” and therefore stood to benefit most from more flexibility at work.
The teacher wellbeing benefits of a four-day week
Ms van Loock also said that a four-day working week would make teaching more attractive to graduates.
Another Glasgow delegate, Shauna Richardson, said that the idea might sound radical but in reality Scotland was behind the times, given successful trials of four-day weeks in New Zealand, Sweden and Utah.
EIS council member Andrew Fullwood said it was “going to take time” to make a four-day week a reality, but that support for the idea had long been building and that the concept of a weekend had once seemed an outlandish idea.
This week has brought reports that the UK is launching the world’s largest four-day working week experiment.
Phil Alexander, a Midlothian EIS delegate, told the AGM that a four-day working week made sense at a time when more and more teachers are feeling the strain of workload pressures and are looking to go part-time.
