Nicola Sturgeon’s ambitions to overhaul Scottish education have been threatened by the country’s largest teaching union, whose members are now threatening industrial action.
The Educational Institute of Scotland announced yesterday that it would ballot on action short of going on strike because of the SNP’s reforms to the country’s exams system.
Larry Flanagan, EIS general secretary, said the workload that the changes would give teachers would be “unacceptable”.
The aggressive stance of the union is a worrying sign for the way in which Ms Sturgeon’s wider reforms are likely to be received.
The SNP leader, if returned as first minister after Thursday’s Holyrood election, is to put in place changes to the way schools are governed, with local authorities being cut out of the loop for some funding, which will go straight to head teachers.
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Ms Sturgeon’s manifesto promised an extra £750 million of investment to close the attainment gap between the richest and poorest in Scotland.
There is a commitment to provide more information to parents, including on the national testing being brought in at primaries one, four, seven and third year of secondary school. There is also backing for school clusters and new education regions.
However, she is clearly struggling to get through her existing reforms, which she has inherited from the previous government. The Curriculum for Excellence — a new way of working which has been beset by teething problems and criticism — itself was the brainchild of the government before that.
The EIS said the final recommendations of an expert group set up by the Scottish government to address concerns with the new system did not go far enough.
The group was set up in January to look at ways to reduce secondary teacher workloads and stress in the wake of Curriculum for Excellence reforms.
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It followed an indicative ballot by EIS in which more than 93 per cent of members said they would be willing to take some kind of action over “excessive and unsustainable’’ workloads.
Mr Flanagan said: “The EIS executive has discussed the working group’s recommendations, and unanimously agreed that they fall far short of an acceptable solution to the issue of excessive workload.”
Any action would stop short of a strike but would see teachers working to contract by boycotting any additional work and assessment related to the new qualifications.