How the Scottish Government avoided school strikes

How did we get here?

The simple answer to this question is that the SNP made a major, explicit promise to the teaching profession, and then failed to keep it.

In its 2021 manifesto, the party promised to reduce teachers’ class contact time by 90 minutes per week, presenting this as a key step towards ensuring that staff have the time and space they need to improve the experiences of pupils. Scotland’s teachers have higher class contact time than those in almost any other comparable nation, and addressing this problem was, unsurprisingly, popular with a teaching profession that continues to face significant issues with excessive workload.

However, actually implementing the change was always going to be more complicated than writing a few sentences in a manifesto, and so it proved.

Changes to teachers’ working arrangements are handled by the SNCT – the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers. This group brings together the main unions, the government, and COSLA, which represents the councils that actually employ staff and hold statutory responsibility for education in Scotland.

According to sources from the teacher side of those meetings, there was a clear – and for them deeply frustrating – lack of urgency around the Reduction Class Contact Time (RCCT), despite the obvious and multiple challenges in successfully delivering it. This is perhaps understandable for COSLA, which was being expected to keep a promise made by others, but is far less defensible for the Scottish Government.

Years went by with little or no progress. When serious action did begin, there were already concerns that the change could not be delivered before the end of the current parliament. During an appearance at the EIS conference in June 2025, Jenny Gilruth admitted that her government "should have delivered by now" when it came to RCCT.

In November 2025, the government announced new ‘proposals’ but gave them to the press before taking them to teachers or councils, which caused further problems. It also sought to conflate the clear and explicit commitment around contact time with other issues including pupil learning hours, the use of technology, variations in timetabling, pay settlements, and more.

Then, in December 2025, the publication of annual teacher statistics confirmed that the RCCT policy could not be delivered before the 2026 Holyrood election.

What did the data show?

Analysis carried out for the Scottish Government – published three years after the 2021 election – advised that teacher numbers would have to rise to 55,400 to enable a 90-minute-per-week reduction in contact time by 2026. If the policy were to be delayed until 2028, then falling pupil numbers meant it could possibly be achieved with 53,900 teachers.

Although the assumptions and analysis behind these figures were rather crude, they provided a benchmark against which the government's progress could be measured.

When census data was released in December 2025, it showed that the number of teachers in Scotland’s schools stood at 53,475 – nearly 2000 short of the level that the government had been told would be required.

According to COSLA, the failure to achieve the teacher numbers target was as a result of the Scottish Government failing to provide “full funding” for their policy. The Scottish Government has argued that it provided £186.5m to councils last year in an attempt to get teacher numbers back to 2023 levels. This target was also missed, but even if it had been met, it would only have taken teacher numbers to 54,033, meaning that RCCT would still have been undeliverable during the term of the current parliament.

Another problem lay in the fact that COSLA did not seem to accept that cutting class contact time by 90 minutes per week would benefit pupils, and resisted unions’ demands that the use of the additional time be left at the professional discretion of teachers. For the EIS in particular, this was a red line, and the union consistently stated that it would not accept a situation whereby council officials were able to direct the way in which teachers were to use their extra preparation and planning time.

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The threat of strike action becomes real

At the end of 2025 and into the beginning of 2026, the EIS decided that time had run out, and decided to ballot members over industrial action in response to the Scottish Government’s failure to deliver RCCT.

Although an overwhelming majority of members backed strikes, the union failed to meet the 50 percent turnout requirement that had been introduced by the previous Westminster government.

In response, education secretary Jenny Gilruth issued a statement which began: “It is reassuring that like us, EIS members see discussions rather than industrial action as the best way of reaching agreement on reducing class contact time.” The tone of this comment did not go down well with union members, and when they were reballoted, the turnout jumped to 60 percent, with 85 percent of those taking part indicating a willingness to go on strike.

The result seemed to rattle the Scottish Government, which issued two statements on the matter in less than 24 hours. The first stated that she was “deeply disappointed” in the union, insisted that “constructive discussions” had been ongoing, and urged teachers to “continue working with us”.

By lunchtime the next day, perhaps after broader consideration of the political problems that would be caused by school strikes in the weeks before an election, the tune had changed dramatically.

Suddenly, the government was “willing to take important steps” to avoid the threat of strikes, including the provision of “additional new investment”.

In the final sentence of a press release with a strikingly desperate tone, Ms Gilruth said: “My hope is that teachers will see these steps today as a demonstration of the Government’s genuine commitment to resolve the workload issues they face…”

She also advised that she was convening an “emergency meeting” of the SNCT.

The union agreed to take part, but kept its options open by providing notification of its intention to carry out targeted strike action in six local authorities: Glasgow, East Renfrewshire, Moray, Dundee, Fife, and Perth and Kinross. The latter two areas include the constituencies of Jenny Gilruth and John Swinney respectively.

But within days, a deal was struck between the union and the Scottish Government. Two days later, and having been put under enormous pressure, the plans were accepted by COSLA. As a result, industrial action has now been called off.

What has been agreed?

According to a Scottish Government press release, RCCT will now be delivered, but it will happen on a phased basis: teachers in primary and special schools will see a change from August 2027, while those in secondary schools will have to wait until 2029.

The Scottish Government has now stated that it will “meet the full cost” of its own policy commitment, and intends to provide a further £40m to councils – in addition to existing funding – in order to raise teacher numbers and carry out as-yet-undefined “preparatory activity”.

Going forward, annual government budgets will include a specific funding stream to cover the ongoing costs of RCCT, and there will be an additional £1m per year for rural and island schools, which will be used for incentive packages to attract teachers to these areas. The government has suggested that the funding could be used for things like housing support and relocation funding.

The Herald also understands that the dispute over the use of the additional 90 minutes per week has been resolved, and that this will indeed be at the discretion of teachers rather than council officials.

So it’s all sorted and we can move on?

Absolutely not.

One of the details confirmed by the Scottish Government’s press release is that new work will now be needed to figure out how the RCCT policy can be fully implemented. This “modelling” will be carried out jointly between the government and COSLA using a wider and more detailed range of data than had been made available for the original analysis in 2024, which will now be superseded, if not entirely abandoned.

This means that although the government has promised to “fully fund” the cut to contact time, it does not currently know how much funding will be required to achieve this. The Herald understands that the modelling work in question will not be completed before the coming Holyrood election, meaning voters are unlikely to be able to directly judge the SNP’s record on this matter.

Even after that work has been completed, and a funding level agreed, there remains an obvious challenge to be addressed: cutting class contact time for all across the country is only possible if more teachers are employed. In recent years, the Scottish Government has spent more than half a billion pounds trying, and failing, to significantly boost teacher numbers, which remain lower than the levels the SNP inherited when they first took office in 2007.

The government might also face some pushback over the decision to phase in the changes to contact time, with secondary school teachers spending a full two years with higher teaching time, and workload, than their colleagues in primary and special schools. Although the EIS union, which represents the majority of teachers, has accepted this, the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association (SSTA) is far less enthusiastic. In a social media post, it said that it has not even received a copy of the agreement yet, and has expressed “significant concerns” about the “inequity” of the proposed approach.

Delivering RCCT in secondary schools is more complicated because simply increasing overall teacher numbers is not sufficient – instead, councils will have to ensure that they have enough subject specialists across all areas, which could be especially challenging for single-teacher departments.

Between this issue, the need to guarantee higher teacher numbers, and the fact that the government doesn't actually know what this is ultimately going to cost, it is clear that there could be plenty of bumps on the road before RCCT becomes a reality.