Andrea Bradley - who officially takes up the role of general secretary of the EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union, today - found herself at secondary school at the same time as her dad. Well, almost.  

Bradley’s father was a factory worker and shop steward at the Hoover factory in Cambuslang but then he decided he wanted to re-engage with education. She started secondary just as he started studying towards his Highers at college and then, the year before she went to university, her dad graduated with an honours degree in psychology and English.

Bradley’s dad went on to become a further education lecturer and a branch secretary for the EIS college lecturer’s association, the precursor to EIS-FELA (the Further Education Lecturers’ Association).

• Background: EIS union elects first female general secretary in 175 years
• News: Threat of strikes across the UK
• Related: School closures on cards over local government pay dispute
• 2019 deal: New three-year pay deal agreed for teachers in Scotland
• 2021 deal: What is the impact of Scottish teacher pay deal on salaries?

Education and union activism therefore loomed large in Bradley’s life long before she embarked on her own teaching career or joined a trade union. She remembers conversations over dinner dominated by talk about the essays and homework she and her sisters and her dad were engrossed in.

Now, Bradley is the first female general secretary in the EIS’ 175-year history. And she doesn’t beat about the bush: it has, she says, taken too long for a woman to be appointed to the role, given that teaching is a predominantly female profession.

So, with a woman finally in the top job, are there issues that impact on female teachers that she is keen to make progress on?

Bradley believes it is no coincidence that teachers are overworked and underpaid, and 80 per cent of the teaching workforce are women. There is “a gender aspect” to the pay erosion that has taken place over the past 20-plus years, she argues.

She says: “It’s a largely female workforce that is working more than a day a week, on a regular basis, unpaid - and it’s a largely female workforce that is struggling to meet the array of additional support needs within large class sizes, with little in the way of additional specialist support.

“You can’t ignore the fact that these are serious, serious challenges that a majority-female workforce continues to grapple with, with the result that in many, many cases their own health and wellbeing is suffering.

“What we also need to remember is those same women are also likely to be carrying, disproportionately, the burden of caring responsibilities within their own family settings as well, both in terms of looking after children but also looking after elderly parents or relatives, often at the same time.”

She adds: “We talk about teacher workload and teacher pay, and it’s right to do that, but I think we also have to be deeply conscious that we are talking about the experiences of women teachers in large part also. That’s not to ignore the experience of men - it’s not acceptable for anyone - but women also face additional burdens on top of what they are experiencing professionally.

“In looking for solutions, we need to have cognisance of the entirety of the problem and the complexity of the problem in order to be able to solve it.”

Undoubtedly, teacher pay - and achieving an acceptable settlement in the face of soaring inflation - is the biggest challenge Bradley faces as she takes over from Larry Flanagan, who steps down as general secretary after a decade in the job. The EIS has put in a claim for a 10 per cent rise this year but, to date, the best offer from local authority employers is 2 per cent.

At the EIS AGM in June, Flanagan reflected on the 2019 pay deal that led to a 13.51 per cent rise in pay over three years for teachers. He said it took “nearly two years to raise membership engagement to the point we knew we would win the strike ballot and, more to the point, John Swinney as DFM [deputy first minister] knew we would win the ballot”. 

If no acceptable offer is forthcoming from local authorities body Cosla and the government, Bradley says there will be a ballot on industrial action in October.

That means she must build a campaign - and ratchet up the pressure - in just a few months.

But she doesn’t see it as building the campaign from scratch. Instead, she believes the successful campaign that led to the 2019 deal is still fresh in the minds of members and activists, and that energy can still be called upon.

“There’s the muscle memory from the last campaign,” says Bradley. “Many of our members are activists who, had it not been for the pandemic, would have been poised to go after the remainder of what was required in terms of pay restoration, but that was disrupted by the pandemic.

“That impetus was put on ice but it has not dissipated - for many of our activists and members, that’s most definitely still there. They have, very strongly in their memories, all of the narrative around that last campaign and they were very buoyed by the success of that campaign.

“That spurred on so many people to become more active and to raise their ambitions in terms of what the union can achieve, and what we should rightly be asking for and seeking to achieve.

“These [pay demands] are not wild figures - this is about pay restoration, it’s about pay justice and given what we were talking about at the start of our discussion, it’s also about gender pay justice and, more and more, our members are being convinced of that.”

The cost-of-living crisis will act as a catalyst, says Bradley. “Ordinary working people” are having to choose between “eating, driving their cars and going on holiday because of circumstances caused by politicians”.

Before becoming an EIS official in 2014, when she was appointed as national officer (education and equality), Bradley spent most of her teaching career working in - and then leading - what she describes as an “utterly inspirational” English department at Cathkin High in South Lanarkshire.

She spent her final placement as a student teacher there in May 1995, and says there was a commitment to social justice that was simply not apparent in other schools at the time.

In the 1990s, the Scottish Attainment Challenge - and the focus on improving outcomes for disadvantaged young people - was decades away from being launched but, while other schools and departments were setting pupils by attainment, “carefully blended” mixed classes were the norm in Cathkin High’s English department.

That makes the teacher’s job harder, says Bradley, but class sizes were small to compensate and cooperative teaching, where two teachers would take a class, was common.

“There was a commitment to not consigning cohorts of young people to bottom sets and cementing the relative advantage and privilege that young people from more affluent backgrounds already were benefiting from.”

So when - after working for two years in Inverclyde - a job came up at Cathkin High, Bradley went for it and got it. Then, in 2010, she went on to become principal teacher of the department.

Over the years, though, the model was eroded. Budgets got tighter - first, class sizes started to grow and, then, staffing constraints meant cooperative teaching became less common.

It was clear then what was needed to close the gap and it’s equally clear now, says Bradley.  

“They know the answer - it’s about resourcing. That took resourcing.”

Today, the additional money that is meant to be targeted at closing the attainment gap flows into schools via the Scottish Attainment Challenge, but Bradley hits out at the government’s decision to change the way that funding is distributed.

Previously, the nine authorities deemed to have the worst levels of poverty were targeted but last year, it was announced that the same pot of £43 million would be shared among all 32 councils.

The decision means that while some councils will receive a share of this funding for the first time, the nine authorities deemed to be facing the greatest challenges will see millions of pounds removed from their budgets over the coming years.

Bradley describes the change as “unjustifiable” when poverty is not only growing but intensifying.

“We should not be making cuts to any of these budgets. What the government should be doing is finding money from elsewhere to provide to the authorities that originally were missed out of the scheme.”

Bradley says that some perceive there to be “a schism” between their professional role and trade union identity, but she does not.

You cannot offer pupils a wide range of opportunities and a varied curriculum without enough teachers, and you cannot attract staff - especially in certain subject areas - without paying them properly to do the job, she says.

Similarly, while the union’s 20:20 campaign - for class sizes that are capped at 20 and 20 hours of weekly class contact time by 2030 - would improve teachers working conditions, it would also “improve students learning conditions”.

Another key focus for Bradley - alongside the pay campaign - will be the changes to assessment and qualifications that are in the pipeline following the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review that found “misalignment” between the aspirations of the Scottish curriculum and the qualifications in the senior phase of secondary.

She sits on the independent review group, being led by Professor Louise Hayward, that is looking at how the system might change.

Bradley would like to see a move away from “annual high-stakes qualifications” and towards “exit qualifications”, but “the changes will have to be resourced”.

“A lot of that is about class sizes and not having multi-course teaching, so that’s about teacher numbers,” she says.

“You have to have the right amount of teachers to reduce class sizes and you have to have, in addition to that, the requisite number of teachers to be able to offer the variety of courses, and learning and teaching experiences, that we want for young people, so that they can pursue their particular interest, rather than square pegs being hammered into round holes.”

However, the first challenge, as the new school year gets underway later this month, will be hammering out a pay deal that keeps teachers in the classroom and prevents the first national teacher-led strikes in Scotland since the 1980s.

In education - as Bradley makes clear - a properly resourced system is the key to success. And that’s truer now than it has ever been because, without a serious cash injection, the system will be without the most basic ingredient it needs in order to function: staff.