Created on: 22 Nov 2024
The EIS has written to First Minister John Swinney and Finance Secretary Shona Robison, calling on the Scottish Government to deliver its promises to Scotland’s learners and teaching professionals in the Scottish Budget statement on 4 December.
In the letter, the EIS highlights manifesto commitments made by the Scottish Government on the recruitment of additional teachers and the reduction of teachers’ maximum class-contact time – both of which have yet to be delivered by the Scottish Government.
The EIS is also calling on its members, who comprise the vast majority of Scotland’s teachers and lecturers, to write to their own MSPs to encourage them to lobby for more funding for Education to enable the delivery of Scottish Government commitments to schools, students and teaching professionals.
In the letter, EIS General Secretary Andrea Bradley says, "I write on behalf of the EIS and its 65,000 members ahead of the Draft Budget to urge you to honour your 2021 Manifesto promises in respect of the employment of an additional 3500 teachers and the reduction of teacher class contact time to a maximum of 21 hours per week."
"These promises were made to the Scottish electorate, tens of thousands of whom are EIS members, and hundreds of thousands of whom are parents of the children and young people that our members teach, care for and nurture in our schools, amidst increasingly difficult conditions and significant resource constriction and constraint."
"Teacher numbers have fallen in Scotland over the past two years, this posing a real threat to the quality of education provision in Scotland, and in a growing number of instances, to the safeguarding of health and safety in our schools. Very concerningly, violence and aggression by young people is on the rise and the health and safety of our members, predominantly women, is increasingly being put at risk due to insufficient staffing levels."
"Teachers work, on average, more than 11 hours per week extra unpaid because their hours of class contact and the class sizes they teach are amongst the highest in the OECD, and there are simply not enough teachers employed within the system to do all of the work that requires to be done; at the same time, though, thousands of teachers in Scotland experience precarity of employment, unable to obtain job security, sometimes for years on end."
"The 2025-26 Draft Scottish Budget is realistically the last opportunity for the Scottish Government, via the Scottish Parliament, to allocate sufficient funds to facilitate the recruitment of the promised number of teachers this parliamentary term, also essential to deliver the promised tangible reduction in teacher workload through class contact reduction."
"The EIS and its members call upon you to use some of the £5billion of additional funding recently allocated to the Scottish Parliament by the UK Government, and/or to increase tax on wealth and property as necessary, in order to deliver on the important Manifesto promises made to the Scottish electorate - to invest in quality education for our young people and in the teaching profession, by increasing teacher numbers and reducing class contact time to a 21-hour maximum."