'The SNP move on teachers' time is a cynical political ploy'

The opening line of the email said: “Proposals to deliver reduced class contact time for Scotland’s teachers have been announced by Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth.”

It went on to give two examples of alleged “practical options”, but straight away it all looked incredibly vague – especially given that this has now been a standing commitment for nearly five years.

Further down we got the usual blurb of a quote from a minister (in this case education secretary Jenny Gilruth) which claimed that the government is making a “statement of intent to empower Scotland’s teachers".

Finally, there was a ‘Background’ section stating that the apparent proposals were to be set out during a speech to the Association of Headteachers and Deputes in Scotland (AHDS) that would be taking place the following day. After this, the email asserted, the proposals would be considered by the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT), which includes trade unions, local councils, and of course the Scottish Government.

If you restrict yourself to looking at this in the simplest possible terms, then it probably all seems positive, and yet the government has faced an angry rebuke from the teaching profession.

Why? Well a large part of the issue is that all of this material was sent to journalists like me before the government informed the teaching unions they are supposed to be negotiating with.

In fact, unions have pointed out that when they met with government representatives on the same day as the email to journalists was sent, there was no mention of the proposals or the impending press release. The Herald has been advised that this meeting commenced less than two hours before the email was sent to journalists.

If the government were approaching this in good faith, they would have gone to the unions first – instead, they went to the press.

The teachers’ side of the SNCT has now responded to that move, accusing the education secretary – herself a former teacher – of undermining the collective bargaining process. It’s probably worth noting at this juncture that the SNP has form for this: in 2018 John Swinney tried to bypass the SNCT by sending a pay offer directly to teachers.

Now, and as unlikely as it may have seemed even a few days ago, it looks as though Gilruth has managed to make the current situation – which threatens to close schools in the new year – even more fractious.

It’s actually even worse than that. Once you get a look at the letter that has now been sent to the negotiating committee, it quickly becomes clear that the near-total lack of detail isn’t restricted to that initial press release.

What the government is actually proposing at this stage is to start developing a plan, one which might include various loosely outlined options that have clearly been given little more than the bare minimum of thought.

Read More:

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• EIS: It’s time for all promises made to education sector to be kept

Frankly, this is the sort of document that should have been available immediately after the last election. It is, at best, a request to start a conversation and get some ideas firmed up.

For example, one idea is to use morning assemblies “more strategically” to free up time in the school day. What does that actually mean?

The government is also trying to tie the workload issue to other vague promises that it wants to categorise as a “National Deal for Scotland’s Teachers.”

The reality is that the letter to the SNCT contains almost no concrete details or genuinely meaningful information.

What we have now is barely even a wish list, and dismissing it as vague probably still gives it even more credit than it deserves.

The more you read it, the more you wonder what the educational purpose could possibly be – but that’s just it. The purpose here isn’t anything to do with education.

The truth is that this whole sorry incident is a cynical political manoeuvre designed to undermine teachers.

SNP ministers and advisers know fine well that they made a commitment that is not going to be kept. They might sometimes try to pass some of the blame to councils (who certainly haven’t been beyond reproach) but it doesn’t work because councillors didn’t make, then break, this promise, so they’re never going to be the main focus of teachers’ anger.

The government also knows that teaching unions expect to secure a mandate for industrial action because the profession is – rightly – angry about the way in which it has been treated. That means that SNP MSPs are facing the prospect of teacher strikes and school closures in the run up to the next Holyrood election, all in response to a demonstrable failure on the Scottish Government’s part.

Current polling suggests this probably won’t cost them the election, but it could very well cost them seats and maybe even a majority.

And so, instead of making a serious offer to teachers, I think the government is now looking for a way to undermine them in the eyes of the public.

They are hoping that announcing these so-called proposals now means that, when the strikes are on the horizon, they’ll be able to start briefing some journalists and commentators and lobbyists, telling them that teachers are clearly being unreasonable.

We put forward proposals, they’ll say, and the fact that the strikes are going ahead anyway shows that these people just want to be disruptive. Parents, they will add, should blame teachers for their kids being at home instead of in class.

Some of them – particularly those already hostile to the teaching profession – will play ball and write what the government wants to see, and the hope is that this will influence public opinion to such an extent that teachers will be forced to back down.

But whoever is advising Jenny Gilruth and John Swinney on this stuff isn’t half as clever as they seem to think they are, and this feels a bit like watching someone try to set up a ten-move chess finish when the only game they know how to play is checkers.

The SNP is widely, and not at all unreasonably, regarded to have failed when it comes to education, and is still shivering in the shadow of Nicola Sturgeon’s ill-conceived ‘judge me on my record’ speech. The party said it would eliminate the attainment gap and to significantly increase teacher numbers, but has delivered on neither of these promises.

Across the country, more and more parents and watching their children struggle, especially in the face of a wholly inadequate approach to inclusion that has been sharply criticised by everyone including Audit Scotland.

Badly needed reforms have been kicked into grass so long that they might never be found.

The public aren’t idiots, and they’re not suddenly going to forget all of this when the people who broke their promises try pointing the finger at teachers.

The Scottish Government still has time to avoid teacher strikes in the new year – whether they’ll actually try to use it for that purpose remains entirely unclear.