Scotland’s largest teaching union is planning to open a consultative strike ballot over workload, and specifically in response to the government’s failure to reduce class contact time for teachers.
Here, The Herald’s education writer James McEnaney explains the issues behind a conflict that could lead to national school closures.
What is class contact time?
This refers to the time that teachers actually spend in class with students. Leaving aside the fact that almost all teachers work well beyond the hours they are paid for, the teaching working week is supposed to last for 35 hours – but that doesn’t mean that teachers are delivering lessons for the whole of that time. Instead, the expectation is that teachers are timetabled for 22.5 hours of class contact time per week.
Is contact time particularly high in Scotland?
Yes. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), contact time in Scottish schools is very high in comparison to comparable countries.
The ‘net teaching time’ for Scotland is given as 855 hours per year. The only OECD countries with higher figures for high school teachers are Chile, Costa Rica, and the United States. Mexico has a slightly higher contact time figure for teachers in lower-secondary, but a lower figure than Scotland for those in upper-secondary.
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The picture is a little more complex at primary level. In Scotland, contact time is the same across both sectors but that isn’t true for most countries. Countries including the Netherlands and Ireland have higher primary class contact levels than Scotland.
However, contact time in Scotland is far higher than in countries like Estonia (the current top-performing European nation in PISA international league tables), Austria, Finland, Germany, Korea, Norway, Poland, Portugal and more.
Why is high contact time a problem?
As the impending EIS strike ballot makes clear, Scotland’s very high level of class contact time is a workload issue for teachers, who have a weekly allocation of 12.5 hours in which to carry out all of the work that underpins good teaching and makes effective education possible. This includes, but is not limited to, marking, feedback, planning, professional development, safeguarding and more.
Where sufficient non-teaching time isn’t available, lots of that essential work ends up happening in the evening and weekends, and some of it doesn’t happen at all – and this has a negative, knock-on effect on young people.
Teachers in Scotland have just 12.5 hours per week in order to complete all of those planning, marking, and other non-teaching tasks.
Is contact time supposed to be coming down?
It is. In their most recent manifesto the SNP promised to reduce class contact time by ninety minutes per week for all teachers. This would not, as some thought at the time, mean that pupils received less teaching time, but it would free up more space for teachers to carry out their professional tasks.
The promise was seen as a major commitment by Scotland’s teaching profession, and a key pledge from a party that was, and remains, under huge pressure over its handling of Scottish education.
The lack of meaningful progress towards this goal led to teachers declaring a dispute several months ago, and has now prompted the EIS to ask members if they are willing to take industrial action in response.
The ballot will open today on a consultative basis. If members vote to support strike action, the union will then seek to move towards a formal, binding ballot that would deliver a mandate for strike action. In the end, this could result in disruption for primary and secondary schools across Scotland.
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