EIS Day of Action: Remember to Wear Red for Temporary Teachers on the 5th of November

The EIS is encouraging its members in schools to wear red on the 5th of November to show their support for colleagues stuck on short-term or temporary contracts.

Precarity of contract is a significant problem for the teaching workforce in Scotland, particularly amongst recently qualified teachers.

The most recent EIS members' national survey found that only 66% of teachers who responded were on a full-time permanent contract. Teachers early in their careers, within the first 5 years, are most likely to be in short-term or temporary contracts, with little or no job security.

The Day of Action in support of teachers on temporary contracts is the latest component of the national EIS Stand Up for Quality Education campaign.

The EIS will open a statutory ballot on industrial action next week, on the 12th of November, as it continues to push the Scottish Government and local authorities to deliver on commitments to tackle excessive teacher workload, including by recruiting more teachers and offering permanent jobs to the thousands of qualified teachers struggling to find secure employment.

Commenting, EIS General Secretary Andrea Bradley said, "The EIS is encouraging its members to remember teachers in precarious work on the 5th of November, and to wear red to show their support for these colleagues. Many thousands of teachers across the country, most of them early in their teaching careers, find themselves stuck on short-term or temporary contracts.

"This means that these teachers have little job security, and can find themselves without employment at very short notice. Clearly, this has very serious implications for these teachers and their ability to earn a steady living, but also serious consequences for the young people in our schools when the staffing of their schools is not steady."

Ms Bradley added, "The increasing casualisation of the teaching profession is bad for teachers, bad for students, and bad for schools. It creates great anxiety amongst the teachers who are underemployed, and robs young people of a stable learning environment.

"For schools, it creates an operational and logistical nightmare, with frequent changes to teaching staff complements. The EIS Day of Action on the 5th of November is intended to highlight the plight of teachers on precarious contracts, and push the Scottish Government and local authorities to ensure that more teachers are employed on a permanent, secure basis.

"The Scottish Government and local authorities already have a binding commitment to tackle teacher workload and to recruit additional teaching staff – employing more teachers on permanent contracts must be an essential step in the delivery of these promises."