Teachers' leader calls for major education investment

At it’s core is an attempt to transform the actual classroom experience for both teachers and their pupils, and the need for that sort of action is incredibly, and increasingly, pressing.

Despite apparently endless promises, teacher numbers in Scotland are still lower than they were when the SNP first took office in 2007. Classes can have as many as 33 pupils crammed into them. Teachers’ contact time is higher than almost any comparable country. Violent and aggressive behaviour have been increasing. The proportion of pupils with additional support needs has jumped from five percent to 43 percent in less than twenty years.

Is fair to say, therefore, that the proposals from the EIS are, in so small part, aimed at relieving the pressure in classrooms?

“Yes that would be fair,” Ms Bradley replies. “I mean, I think it's absolutely right to highlight that a lot of the difficulties and the stresses and the strains that young people are experiencing seem to be worse post Covid, but actually our members were reporting this before that. We know what happens in periods of austerity.

“We know that it disproportionately impacts those from the poorest backgrounds. We know that poverty leads to spikes in poor mental health. We know that there are issues with children's nutrition. We know that there are issues with children's physical health as a result of that.

“So if you're talking about a package like this taking the heat out of classrooms, then yes, absolutely it would.”

But she is also at pains to point out that the union is not just looking for immediate relief – that ultimately it wants to make the case for long-term, positive changes:

“This is about properly resourced, human centred education that takes account of the fact that education is a collective social endeavour, and in order to make it work best for children, young people and families it has to be properly and fully staffed.

“You can't do it on a shoestring. You can't do it with online teaching and learning. It has to be with in-person, face-to-face interactions between young people and their teachers, and one another, and with enough adults in the room to support that type of interaction, but also enough of the specialists who are able to support young people directly with the many additional support needs that they now have.”

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Those increases in the level of need are a particularly pressing issue for teachers, pupils and parents all over Scotland. The nation’s policy of presumed mainstream inclusion was always supposed to be built on the idea that, while teachers would be leading their classes and making appropriate adaptations, they would be supported by a range of specialist professionals.

The reality has been very different:

“So, we have seen over the last decade or so dwindling numbers of educational psychologists considering the number of young people who require them. It's the same with speech and language therapists, or behaviour support staff, who would have been in relatively plentiful supply in the late 90s and early 2000s. But these professionals with all their expertise have been spread more and more thinly.

“The paradigm at the moment is that every class teacher is a teacher of additional support needs. Now, that is true. Every teacher does have to be able to respond to the complexity and the array of needs in front of them. But that's not the same thing as saying that they are specialists and that they are as well-equipped as an educational psychologist, for example, to be able to respond to some of this.

“And with up to 32 other children in a class, it is just not reasonable to expect teachers to do all of this.”

One of the union’s most eye-catching proposals, and probably the one that would be most obviously transformative to the public, is the reduction of class sizes to no more than twenty pupils, a limit that at present only applies to some practical classes in secondary schools. Such a shift would require more teachers, more classrooms, and a significant level of investment, so why does the EIS think it would be a good use of resources at this time?

“We believe that that is a critical way in which we can improve so much the experience of Scottish education for all children and young people, and particularly children and young people with additional support needs and those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

“There's lots of international research that shows the benefits of that, and actually professional common sense too. Some of us have had the experience of doing it for a very, very short time in the early 2000s when we had a Labour - LibDem coalition government.

“We had class sizes in English and Maths in secondary schools in Scotland that were capped at 20. We were able to do so much that was fun, creative, and still rigorous in terms of how we were teaching those kids English, and you had the opportunity to build relational approaches.

“So the relationships between the kids and their classmates were better, and the relationships between the kids and the teachers, and the other adults who were there in greater numbers to support the learning, were so much better. So professional common sense and wisdom tells you that that is a that's a good route to go down.”

“Teachers are being inhibited from working with kids the way that they envisioned that they were going to be able to do when they came into the profession, and the conditions that they're working in, and the starving of education as a vital public service, is sucking the joy out of teaching and the joy out of learning.

“So we've got, on the one hand, the under-resourcing, the understaffing of the service, but we continue to have an obsession with high-stakes assessment, and neo-liberal measures of what is success and what is high performance in a public service.

“It's like a perfect storm.”

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From the EIS perspective, that storm is doing enormous damage to teachers, pupils, the education system, and the country as a whole, but any conversation about finding a way out of the maelstrom will, in the end, have to turn to money.

The proposals put forward by the EIS come with an estimated annual bill of around £860million. That is, on the one hand, a huge amount of cash, but Ms Bradley is keen to place it in the proper context:

“I think that the EIS manifesto and the work that we've done with the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that this is not pie in the sky.

“Think about the fact that the Scottish government has a budget of £68 billion to disperse, and here we're talking about moving to a scenario where, across the board, class sizes would be capped at 20, and we can do many other good things too, and we can do all of that for less than a billion.

“What we're trying to do is to argue the case for proper and increased investment in our education service so that things can be better for children and young people in the here and now.

“But we're also arguing that by doing so, by making that investment now, we are going to save ourselves an absolute fortune down the line because we don't have the health inequalities that comes from a poorer experience of education, young people will have less interaction with the criminal justice system because they are better educated, we will have stronger employability for all of our young people.

“We can afford it. It's about whether we have the political will to make it happen.”