Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, has elected a female leader for the first time. Here Andrea Bradley talks exclusively to the Sunday National about the challenges she faces and her hopes for Scottish education.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT BEING THE FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD THE EIS?
It is a pity that it has taken as long as it has for that to be the case given the predominance of women in the teaching profession. That is indicative of the barriers women face in education and in society more widely. The EIS as an organisation has not been immune to those kinds of inequalities, although I would say that over the past 10 years and within the tenure of the outgoing general secretary Larry Flannigan, real inroads were made to reset the balance in gender equality both within staffing structures and in the way our lay democracy is organised and operates. I am now in this position because of the work of Larry and colleagues, many of whom are women and strong women at that.
Throughout my whole time within the union, I have been inspired, supported and encouraged by strong women in the trade union movement so this is the outcome of lots of support and input. What I would hope now is that we can continue the progress the EIS has been making, so that opportunities are taken up by women at least in equal measure to men, given the demographics of the profession.
IS A TEACHERS STRIKE ON THE CARDS?
Teachers have seen an overall decline in the value of their pay. They are prepared now to fight for a fair pay settlement, particularly in the context of the sharp increases in the cost of living. We have had a meeting with the Scottish Government and Cosla where an offer of 3.5% was tabled. That was only a 1% advance on the 2% that had been offered and rejected out of hand in May, so we were quite clear that our members would find that insulting.
Our original claim was lodged in February for 10% to keep in line with inflation and do something towards the recovery of the salary value that had been lost over the past decade. Given our members’ efforts during the pandemic to keep education going and to prioritise the welfare of young people and their families through a very difficult time, we thought our members were more than deserving of it.
We also need significantly more teachers than we have and there is a manifesto commitment from the SNP to reduce class contact time for teachers to 21 from 22.5 hours per week, but that is not going to be possible unless we have significantly greater recruitment of teachers. We would like to see it reduced to 20 hours per week and class size reduced to 20 pupils at all stages of the curriculum. We think that is absolutely critical to delivering quality education and to education recovery.
The Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is rightly bold and ambitious in design but requires much more staffing and much more resourcing.
And in order to recruit more teachers, we have to make sure pay is attractive and workload is tolerable, and for a very long time workload has not been tolerable for teachers.
In Scotland, we have strong ambitions for the quality of our education and we often look to Finland, for example, as a model of how things could be done, but they have practically double the number of teachers per child because they have, over a long period of time, been prepared to invest in what is required to be able to deliver on those kinds of ambitions.
WHAT ABOUT THE IDEA OF RAISING THE SCHOOL ENTRY AGE?
The EIS are very much for a play-based learning experience for young people at early level but we would have concerns about an overly simplistic approach being taken to raising the school starting age. There are already serious issues in early years where, although it is promised in statute that young people have access to a teacher, very large numbers of them never see a teacher in the whole time they are in their early-years setting.
Some local authorities have retained teachers in their early years provision, knowing how important it is to do that, but many have not in order to make savings. That is a very short-sighted approach given what we understand about the importance of high-quality early years provision for all young people and particularly young people from the poorest socio-economic backgrounds. We would have anxieties that simply raising the school starting age would open more floodgates to that kind of practice.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT EXAMS?
We do not believe that in every circumstance exams are the best means to assess whether learners have acquired the skills we want them to acquire and understood the concepts we want them to understand.
Exams in the form that young people have tended to experience them over the last decades advantage certain cohorts of young people over others and disadvantage the poorest young people. If we are to have an education system that is fairer and a society that is fairer, then we have to make sure equity is more at the heart of the assessment system.
That does not necessarily mean doing away with Highers and Nationals but what we would like to see is a senior-phase experience that does not have young people simply drilled through exams, one year after another. That is not quality education as it involves young people being prepared for the next round of formal assessment continually, rather than there being time and space to engage in learning that is deep, creative and enjoyable.
We think the aspirations of CfE would be much better achieved for the senior phase if we were looking at a structure that is not annual presentation for formal exams. We think that inhibits the realisation of CfE and there should be alternatives to exam-based assessment that are more centred on teachers’ professional judgement, not only in terms of what the outcomes are but around what that assessment should look like, when it should be timed and how it should be shaped to the needs of individual young people.
Teacher voice and professional judgement should feature much more strongly around assessment as an alternative to exams. It would be better for the overall education experience but also fairer and more equitable. Given that is the stated aim of the Scottish Government and all stakeholders then it is something we have to consider seriously.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE CLAIM THAT SCOTTISH EDUCATION IS FAILING?
We don’t accept that narrative of failure. We represent members who are working so hard on behalf of young people and families and we see them do really wonderful things not just in terms of their learning, but also in terms of how they interact with one another socially and in terms of how they think about not only themselves but others.
That has been borne out by the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) research which shows that in terms of young people acquiring those skills embedded in CfE that are a bit more difficult to assess than simple literacy and numeracy, actually young people in Scotland are faring very well compared to their counterparts internationally.
It was really a shame that when that data was published more was not made of it by members of the press and politicians who seem to be very quick to seize on statistics and data that would allow them to paint a very negative picture. They were not quick at all to comment on what was a success story about CfE and the education of children and young people in Scotland.
When you become obsessed with narrow measures of educational success that is always going to be problematic. I think as a country we need to be very careful not to do that. I would suggest we are doing it too much already as there is lots of qualitative data there showing that in spite of a decade of austerity and the pandemic, Scottish education is actually doing quite well.
Yes, there is a lot more to be done and there is a lot more we want to achieve, but it is demoralising for young people to hear their work completely dismissed by politicians and the press as not being worth terribly much. That is very difficult for them to hear, for their parents to hear and for the wider school community to hear. It is really not how you encourage and support and stimulate progress in the direction we want to see it and you don’t achieve success by setting up competitions between different schools and different local authorities.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE HAPPENING?
While I would still like to see education being a political priority I would like that to be more of a consensus-led priority than it is at the moment. I would like to see less party political sparring over issues around education which actually paralyses progress rather than enabling it and sometimes results in decisions being taken that might be a quick political fix but are not in the interests of sound education.
I would like to see more of an agreed position around the purposes of education and the fact that if education is to be a top priority for our society then it has to be sufficiently resourced so that it can be all the things we want it to be.
We are absolutely on board with the principle of equity in education. I want to see stronger and more equitable outcomes for children and young people. I want all of them to have a quality experience and I want us to do something decisive about the young people coming from the poorest backgrounds.
That is not just down to education, that is about parental incomes, transport costs, housing costs, social security. It is fallacy to suggest the education system can deliver that objective on its own.
Alongside all of that is the role of teachers and the respect and trust there needs to be around the teacher professional voice. Teachers are highly trained, highly skilled professionals, working collaboratively with one another and their voice needs to be at the heart of the progress we are striving for in terms of our education provision.
We are in the midst of education reform at the moment and talking about the SQA, Education Scotland and the Inspectorate being replaced by new agencies.
We need to see teachers’ professional voice, in large part represented by trade unions, at the heart of all of the design work around them, deciding what the vision and even the staffing of those new organisations should be, in order to avoid making similar mistakes to those which have resulted in this lengthy and intensive education reform.
