This week the latest Tes Scotland long read looked at Scotland’s plan to reduce the contact hours of its teachers by 90 minutes a week.
Now, in a follow-up podcast, we talk to Oban High School headteacher Peter Bain - who is also the new chair of the BOCSH group of headteachers - about his hopes for the policy, what school leaders still need to know and when reduced class-contact time might actually become a reality.
Meanwhile, another primary head has given her views on the reduced contact-time policy.
Autumn Macaulay, headteacher at Raigmore Primary in Inverness, said that, as teachers already contend with “massive” workload, the promise of more time for planning and preparation was attractive.
Her school’s P1-3 class teachers do not get a big block of non-contact time just now: they have 15 minutes at the start of the day and another 15 minutes at the end, which is usually spent talking to parents and carers. Bigger chunks of non-contact time would put them on a level footing with P4-7 teachers, who get two blocks of 75 minutes a week.
“We need to allocate more time for the class teachers to have space in their relentless week for quality creative thinking,” said Ms Macaulay.
That could allow more time for curriculum design, create space for specialists in areas such as expressive arts (or teachers themselves use the time to become an expert in a specific area of the curriculum) and opportunities to work with secondary teachers on transition strategies for older primary pupils.
On the downside, said Ms Macaulay, some primary classes and pupils may not cope if non-contact time continues to be offered in short blocks and they end up having up to five different teachers a week. That “could be very unsettling” if there are “varying expectations, conflicting standards and not enough opportunity to build relationships”, and the onus could then be put on the class teacher to resolve these issues.
Timetabling is already complex - the school has to juggle nurture, outdoor learning and additional support needs (ASN) activities, as well as groups for children of armed forces families - and more non-contact time could make it even more difficult, and Ms Macaulay also fears that staffing problems could be exacerbated and school leaders called upon to cover more classes.
Finding the staff to allow reduced class-contact time is likely to be particularly difficult in certain parts of Scotland. Some secondary subjects are struggling in more rural areas, while some radical ideas are being proposed for primary school leadership in local authorities with chronic difficulties recruiting staff.
Laurence Findlay, Aberdeenshire Council’s education director, welcomes the 90 minutes policy in principle but has concerns about the practical implications.
“One of the biggest challenges for those of us in more rural and remote areas will be to ensure we have sufficient teacher staffing available to meet the demand,” he said.
“We have seen an increase in primary teacher numbers in recent years, which is positive, but in certain subject areas we continue to have significant recruitment challenges. To that end, the reduction in class contact may put additional recruitment pressures on certain curricular areas.”
At the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA) annual congress in Crieff this month, during a debate about the 90 minutes policy, Aberdeenshire teacher Gordon West said his school was “constantly struggling to recruit staff”: it was at least three English and two maths teachers short and often got zero applicants for jobs.
“Where are these extra teachers going to come from?” he asked, expressing particular concern that single-teacher subject departments could be forced to hand classes over to non-specialist teachers.
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