Giving teachers less classroom time, not more, is the true key

It feels like a very, very long time ago now, but back in 2021, the SNP published a manifesto for the Holyrood election.

Like any other manifesto, it contained all sorts of promises and pledges and commitments and rhetoric covering all sorts of policy areas, including the one that the party used to pretend was its top priority: education.

We were promised thousands more teachers (that hasn’t happened) and free school breakfasts and lunches for every primary school pupil (that hasn’t happened either).

Some especially gullible readers might even have believed that the SNP really would give every child in Scotland a free laptop or tablet and free internet.

But the part that caught the attention of teachers, a significant proportion of whom are long past trusting the party of Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and now John Swinney, was the promise to reduce their class contact time by ninety minutes per week.

This was the pledge that really mattered – the one that could have begun to genuinely transform Scottish schools for the better.

But I appreciate it feels a bit counter-intuitive to many.

If we want to improve Scottish education, then it seems to stand to reason that we need teachers to be spending as much time in the classroom as possible.

In reality, that assumption is entirely, unequivocally wrong, and it’s not actually all that difficult to understand why.

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Of course we need teachers to be teaching their students, and we certainly don’t want them having to spend hours and hours a week on pointless paperwork and meaningless admin tasks, but there is a balance to be struck between time spent directly educating young people and the time spent making sure that teaching is as effective as possible.

Put simply, the things that you want your child’s teacher to be doing, the activities that help ensure that the quality – not just the quantity – of teaching time is maximised, require less contact time with pupils.

Everyone wants to know that teachers are reading and reviewing their child’s work, developing their understanding of the progress being made, identifying strengths and weaknesses, considering those in the context of wider student cohort, and planning effective learning experiences that keep everyone moving in the right direction.

Think, for a moment, about what you want when you go to parents night. Are you there to be told about some test scores and grade predictions that you could get in a text message, or do you want to know that the teachers actually know your child?

The latter. Of course it’s the latter.

But that takes time, and time is the thing that successive governments have refused to give teachers. And then they wonder why the whole education system feels more and more like a pressure cooker with each passing year.

The SNP promised to at least move Scotland in the right direction on that front, and some people were so desperate for progress that they chose to believe it.

But many of us were much more sceptical. Implementing this sort of shift was always going to be extremely complicated, and would require challenging attitudes – such as those that are prevalent amongst spreadsheet-bothering council officials – that are as deep-rooted as they are destructive. It was also, always, going to cost money.

There was no evidence that the SNP had done the necessary legwork to understand the full scale of what was required. The manifesto commitment wasn’t just uncosted, it was untethered from any sense of material reality.

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It looked for all the world like a political promise (which is as empty as promises get) and the chances of it ever being realised were very close to, and perhaps even less than, absolute zero.

Which brings us to the present day, and the announcement that teachers are to be balloted for strike action over the SNP’s complete and abject failure to honour a clear promise not just to the profession, but to your children.

The government’s defence for all this is that they really do care, and really have tried, and that if everyone just hangs on they will finally do what they said they would do. You can even believe them if you really, really want to.

The kindest interpretation of the situation is that the SNP is incompetent. The harshest is that it lied. Either way, the result is the same: teachers facing a workload crisis, and children being let down.