The Covid pandemic has heaped “quite incredible” extra workload on to school management teams (SMTs), Scotland’s biggest teaching union has warned.

Headteachers and depute heads have raised concerns over potential “burnout” and asked how the education system will cope if many school leaders become ill.

The EIS union says SMTs are contending with “ever-changing guidelines, increased and unrealistic demands and lack of support from local authorities”.

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The following issues were raised at a meeting of the EIS Headteachers’ and Depute Headteachers’ Network on Friday:

• Excessive extra workload pressures on SMTs as a result of “constantly changing plans and guidance”, including many heads and deputes having to work throughout the holidays to prepare schools for reopening.
• SMTS still dealing with “excessive pressure once schools have reopened” and already finding themselves exhausted.
• Poor support from local authorities for new ways of working, such as poor IT infrastructure and connectivity making working online and holding virtual meetings “completely impossible”.
• Concerns that SMTs have increasingly become “managers’’, taking on more and more management, supervisory and HR functions during Covid, rather than leaders of learning.
• Risks to health: “stress-related illness as a result of ever-increasing workload, and increased risk of potential Covid infection as a result of working, often without physical distancing, with large groups of colleagues and/or pupils”.

Lorraine McBride, convener of the EIS Headteachers’ and Depute Headteachers’ Network, said: “Burnout is a very real risk for members of staff who have not had a real break since before the lockdown began. The challenge of having to plan entirely new methods of educational delivery, then replan again at short notice as a result of changes in government policy, has heaped huge amounts of pressure on school-management teams across the country.”

She added: “The levels of additional management and HR functions that SMTs have faced have been quite incredible. As one headteacher told the meeting [on Friday], he was required to carry out 30 individual risk assessments in the week before the school reopened, which he was committed to doing but had to do without any extra support being provided to him.”

Ms McBride said this showed “the unmanageable and unsustainable levels of workload pressure that SMTs are facing in schools across Scotland”.

She added: “In addition to the increased risk of contracting Covid as a result of working in busy school buildings, there is a growing danger of stress-related illness taking its toll on school-management teams. How will our education system cope if a large number of headteachers and depute headteachers become ill as a result of the current situation that they are facing at work?”