The Scottish government’s promise to reduce the time teachers spend in front of classes by 90 minutes a week appears to have stalled - no date for delivery has been set and the policy was not referenced at all when, last month, the new government outlined its priorities for the next three years of the current Parliament.
Now - at the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA) annual congress in Crieff next week - a principal teacher is due to put forward an alternative: that the pledge should be delivered in primary where “it would be more straightforward to implement” and “secondary teachers are compensated by a 7 per cent uplift in salary”.
The motion is being proposed by Grant McAllister, who is arguing that “the lack of specialist teachers for some areas of the curriculum have prevented fulfilment” of the government pledge on reducing class-contact time.
The Scottish government has pledged to increase teacher numbers by 3,500 over the course of the 2021-26 Parliament - a policy it says will allow it to deliver the 90-minute reduction in class-contact time.
However, last year, teacher numbers fell in Scotland for the first time since 2016. And headteachers report that some secondary subjects - such as maths, technological education, computing and home economics - remain tough to recruit to. This calls into question when teacher numbers are going to be high enough - particularly in certain subject areas - to deliver the class-contact time pledge.
On 18 January, giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee, then education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said the government had suggested that the reduction would be “easier and quicker” to deliver in primary and could therefore be realised there first, while secondary could be left “until later...because of the numbers that we still have to recruit”.
However, she said that local government and teaching unions “did not want to follow that process” and “they wanted to see the reduction happen throughout all education at the same time”.
It should be made clear that Ms Somerville made no mention of compensating secondary staff with a salary boost.
Still, it will be interesting to see how secondary teachers at the SSTA annual congress next week vote on this novel approach to the reduced class-contact time policy, two years after it first emerged.
