Address by the General Secretary
Madam President, Guests, Colleagues,
It has been, to say the least, an interesting year since I gave my last report to our 2010 gathering in Dundee.
It is unusual insofar as I do not have to begin by welcoming a new Education Minister. Not only is Mike Russell still in post, but he remains there after submitting himself to the judgement of the people in the recent round of Parliamentary elections. Now he is about to enter a time when he will face the judgement of a different constituency – the people who make the education service work – its teachers.
And it is a profession that has demonstrated huge forbearance, that has faced up to the challenge of taking more than its share of the pain of public spending cuts – but which, as this AGM has already shown, is signalling the limits of its tolerance.
I have said many times before that this is the most difficult portfolio in the Cabinet and I believe the coming year will demonstrate the accuracy of that assessment.
Upon his original appointment, Mike Russell referred to his plan to "recalibrate” the Government’s relationship with local authorities. I advise him and his colleagues to do so again. I counsel them never to repeat the fundamental mistake they made last Autumn of stitching up a secret deal with COSLA that predetermined their approach to the SNCT negotiations. If we have tripartite machinery – let it be genuinely tripartite – a body of three partners of equal standing.
And I hope this government will have learned from the behaviour of local authorities last time round that the Concordat doesn’t work, that you can’t give Councils licence to spend the cash in the envelope however they please if, as a government, you have any serious intention to secure delivery on your national policy priorities.
Given the central role we expect the SNCT to play in negotiating on the recommendations that will emerge from the McCormac Review, it will never have been more important, not only to safeguard the machinery itself, but also to ensure proper behaviour by all the parties to it.
As President of the ETUCE I have been heavily involved in the launch and early work of European level social dialogue machinery for the Education Sector – one of the last sectors to develop this mechanism. But European level social dialogue can only stand of the shoulders of meaningful national social dialogue.
If Scotland – unlike our southern neighbours who lost the right to free collective bargaining years ago- is to position itself as a modern, forward looking nation within the European family, we need to see genuine partnership working and genuine dialogue operating at national level – and, indeed, at the level of the individual employer – be that a council, FE College or University.
But a commitment to social dialogue puts a huge burden of responsibility on the teacher unions too. Unions have to be prepared to engage meaningfully, not just to always say "no”. And, yes, it means making compromises, making concessions, taking really hard decisions that may well be unpopular. That is what real trade unionism is about.
It doesn’t mean that we are compelled always to reach an agreement. You can have dialogue and reach an impasse. That is a legitimate outcome. And it is legitimate to resort to alternative means to pursue your objectives – but only when dialogue has failed and only when there is a real and significant commitment by the membership at large to that action – action that depends critically on the support of thousands of individuals to do things themselves – not on their elected representatives doing something for them.
Last year, I warned delegates, and I quote, "we are about to enter a very long, dark tunnel which will test our members and our Institute to a degree that few will ever have experienced”. I wish my prediction had been less accurate.
I don’t want to rehearse all the debates around the past year’s SNCT negotiations. This AGM has done enough of that. But I cannot pass by on the other side of the road..
Of course this is a multi-faceted deal. And it is unusual insofar as normally we negotiate for improvements. But these negotiations took place in a context of a requirement to shrink paybill costs, not to grow costs.
That is a harsh reality to which some pay lip service, but fail to follow through where it matters. The EIS was not the only union in the negotiating room. Others had their chance to identify alternative ways of cutting paybill costs but were unusually taciturn.
In the end, the priority adopted by the EIS was to protect existing jobs and maximise employment opportunities. This year 2, 800 new teachers will leave the Induction Scheme and enter the jobs market – where there will be jobs for them and their immediate predecessors to apply for – thanks to the decision of the EIS. In the absence of an Agreement not only would these 2,800 jobs have disappeared, so too would other jobs as employers achieved their paybill cuts by slashing posts.
That would have created an army of unemployed teachers pursuing a diminished number of temporary and supply posts. And it would have ramped up the workload demands falling on the diminished number of teachers left in post.
This was an agreement for jobs and we will give the highest priority to ensuring that the jobs promises are delivered and I expect the other two pillars of the SNCT to act with equal vigour in securing the delivery of this central plank of the agreement.
I know as well as anyone the strength of feelings generated in some quarters by this Agreement. And I understand well the anger and disenchantment felt by those bearing the brunt of the negative aspects of the agreement. It would be unnatural not to feel that way.
At the end of the day, the elected representatives had to take decisions on behalf of the membership. That was their responsibility and that was what they were elected to do. I know that they took the decisions they did only after some of the deepest, most searing soul-searching and agonising I have seen in my 38 years of EIS involvement.
I know they took honest decisions, that they acted in good faith and that they acted only after the most thorough appraisal of all the options and the prospect of securing a better outcome by other means. And, unlike some other unions, they decided only after consulting the membership and fully respecting the outcome of that consultative process.
It is legitimate to disagree with their judgement – and this AGM has expressed its view of their actions – but it behoves everyone in the EIS to acknowledge and to respect the role, responsibility and the integrity of those elected by us to act on our behalf.
I say that because we are far from seeing the light at the end of the tunnel to which I have referred. We face many more and serious challenges ahead.
We do need to understand and grasp the implications of the environment in which we are now operating. It has changed and it has changed fundamentally. Almost all of us have lived our lives expecting that the future will invariably be better than our past. That we will enjoy continuous improvement and progress – better health, longer lives, better housing, better living standards, better education, better jobs. Though the speed of progress may vary we do expect the direction of travel will always be forwards.
That is being turned on its head.
We face being forced into longer working lives.
We face poorer pensions than we have come to expect
We will have to sacrifice more of our income to pay for pensions
Finding work will be harder, as unemployment rises and the public sector is squeezed
When jobs are found they will be less secure and there will be pressure to pay less.
Real wages in 2011 will be worth less in 2011 than they were in 2005
Now it is absolutely right that we – and other trade unions and wider civil society – continue to campaign to change the terms of the debate.
That is why we called for and supported so wholeheartedly the STUC march and rally in Edinburgh last October. That is why we participated in the huge TUC rally of 500k demonstrators in London at the end of March. And we will keep up the pressure for change.
We know that colleagues in some countries – notably Ireland where we heard from the INTO General Secretary yesterday- are in a worse plight since IMF officials are now effectively running their finances and they have lost economic sovereignty.
Our government has more room for manoeuvre. But it has freely chosen to accelerate the pace of repairing the public finances and to do so by drawing 80% from spending cuts and only 20% from tax rises.
And then they have chosen regressive taxes that hurt the poor the most – raising VAT to 20%. It speaks volumes of the attitude of the Westminster Government that it would tax at 20% the very shirt you wear on your back, but sets its face against a Financial Transactions Tax – of just 0.05%, that would generate an estimated £20bn for the Treasury.
The EIS is right to back the Robin Hood Tax and I call on all our members to become active in this campaign – engaging with MPs and indeed MEPs as we approach the European Day of Action on the FTT on 22 June.
But while that political action goes on, in parallel we have to engage in the daily work of our union – most immediately we face what may flow from the McCormac Review.
It is unfortunate that this Review is working in such a straitened economic climate and I welcome the assurances they have given us that they will not be a stalking horse for a cuts agenda. It is critically important that they do not fall into that trap if they are to have any credibility in the eyes of the teaching profession.
Last year in my address, I warned that the true worth of the McCrone Agreement would only come to be appreciated when it was threatened. Again, I feel more than vindicated.
It has been interesting to see even some of our own members who attacked TP21 at the time as the near end of the profession in Scotland as we knew it, at last rallying round that Agreement in the face of the recent SNCT changes.
This Agreement was founded on the premise of renewing teacher professionalism – a planned, coherent and demanding introduction to the profession, embedding CPD as an integral part of the life and work of all teachers throughout their careers, nudging towards a profession educated to Masters level through the Chartered Teacher Scheme, recognising the worth of the classroom practitioner.
It was based on the idea of building a high status, high trust profession, working flexibly and in collegiate ways.
Our very strong view is that the fundamentals of this Agreement are sound and the carefully interwoven strands, building on principles of collegiality and a strengthened place for teacher professionalism – leading to a much higher level of mutual trust in, and among, teachers – should not lightly be tampered with. The danger is that as bits of it are pulled away, the whole edifice will sooner or later collapse.
Sadly, there is an anti-TP21 Agenda out there and its epicentre is COSLA.
We have seen the attempts to unpick the Chartered Teacher Scheme simply because it has a price ticket attached. No assessment of any potential impact in education terms or the hole it knocks in the already shrinking career structure for teachers in Scotland.
We have seen the attack on salary conservation – no thought of what this will do to the motivation of those affected.
We have seen the attack on the Teacher Induction Scheme - one aspect of TP21 widely recognised as a world class innovation. Yet COSLA attempted to raise the teaching commitment to 0.9 without any thought for the impact on Probationer teachers already under pressure to meet the standard for full registration in a compressed period.
And COSLA has made clear that the only driver is crudely to save money. Educational considerations are cast aside. The education lights have gone out at COSLA.
Their miserable submission to the McCormac Review lays bare their true agenda. It is little more than an attempt to shred every meaningful aspect of the agreement that has brought stability and improvement to Scottish education over the past decade.
At its heart is a conscious attack on the professionalism and autonomy of teachers. Teachers are not even to been seen primarily as teachers of pupils – but as some kind of generic local authority worker, open to being called upon to work wherever and whenever their managers decide and carrying out such tasks as their managers demand.
Professional development is reduced to what fits the employer’s agenda and instead of having a coherent career structure, teachers will be offered the occasional titbit of a little envelope of money here in return for a little bit of extra work there.
All of this is presented as speaking on behalf of the children’s interest – based on the offensive assertion that teachers’ terms and conditions favour individual teachers over education. It is politically illiterate not to understand that the good teaching can only be built on a strong profession – with good working conditions, good remuneration arrangements and high quality, professional leadership at all levels.
Instead, we have weasel words such as "flexibility” being demanded. It is said that, "For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat – and WRONG” That was surely written in response to the "F” word that is today’s panacea.
It is simply astonishing that COSLA behaves as if it never had anything to do with TP21 and instead is trotting out substantially the same miserable agenda that drove the teaching profession to the brink of serious industrial unrest in the early 1990s.
It appears to be only the teacher unions that have any significant institutional memory, or any sense of ownership, of this Agreement.
I do not envy Gerry McCormac and his team the task they have undertaken. It is truly "high stakes "work but I hope they will resist the Siren voices, the Vandals who are pursuing an old, failed, anti-professional agenda.
I urge this Review to reflect very carefully on the climate and mood of the profession whose future they are addressing. One of the virtues of the McCrone Report – albeit we did not adopt all of its recommendations-was its recognition of what would be practicable in framing its recommendations.
And I advise the Scottish Government to take great care in this for it too will be a major player in what follows on from the report and its recommendations.
• Let it not be forgotten that Scottish teachers are facing real cuts in living standards as a consequence of a 2 year pay freeze with inflation running around 5% at present.
• Before long we will see interest rates rise, imposing a real burden on those paying mortgages.
• Coming down the tracks, the Westminster Government looks like legislating for a 50% rise in pension contributions to around 9.5%-10% of teachers’ frozen salaries.
• And pensions increases will be cut by the adoption of the CPI measure instead of RPI for uprating.
• And thoughts are turning to reducing the accrual rate to 1/90 or even 1/100, as well as replacing final salary pensions with career average pensions.
At a time of diminishing rewards and burgeoning workload demands, the way forward for teachers is not to turn to the Stakhanovite movement of the 1930s Soviet era- where heroic individuals were portrayed as model workers for their fanatical hard work in achieving outputs way above their quotas.
If there emerges from McCormac – or is pursued in subsequent SNCT negotiations – any significant further attack on the working conditions of teachers, the authors should beware the consequences. There is a limit to what teachers will put up with and I think this AGM is sending a very clear message how close to that limit we are.
Of course, these problems are by no means confined to our members working in school education.
Members in a number of Further Education colleges, most recently in Telford and Forth Valley, have faced – and are still facing – serious threats to jobs, including compulsory redundancies – as colleges wrestle with budget difficulties. And perversely so at the very time when the demand for college provision should be at an all-time high in the face of record levels of youth unemployment.
Members working in this sector continue to suffer the adverse effects of the break-up of national bargaining all those years ago – and day school members who talk carelessly about the lack of worth of the SNCT should reflect on what happened to their FE colleagues.
In the run-up to the Scottish Parliament elections last month the SNP made a clear manifesto commitment – "We strongly believe in collective bargaining in the sector, with a national set of terms and conditions for staff”. Now it is time for the Government to deliver on that commitment.
And it is also pressing that they deliver on another commitment which vitally affects not only our Further Education members but also bears equally upon our members working in Higher Education who have embarked on a programme of industrial action in the face of threats to job security.
That is a commitment to a policy of no compulsory redundancies which they have undertaken to work to extend across the public sector.
Given what is happening right now in the Tertiary sectors there is no time to lose on the part of Government in driving forward with these policy promises.
But there is a tendency when funding is tight, to try to shift the focus away from resources –, to focus on outcomes and to disregard inputs. As if the two were unconnected. So we shouldn’t mention money, or staffing or resources.
We shouldn’t mention class size – that’s just an input. All we should mention is exam results and where we stand in the PISA league tables. And we should be distraught that Shanghai pupils score higher than Scottish pupils.
Of course there are many other factors to which little attention is paid – not least the enormous range of functions and expectations placed on Scottish schools – way beyond literacy in Maths, Reading and Science. I suspect that high-scoring Shanghai doesn’t pay too much attention to developing "responsible citizens” or "effective contributors” as the empty seat at last December’s Nobel Peace prize ceremony reminded us.
And isn’t it interesting how a blind eye is turned to inconvenient observations from PISA – for example, that "high salaries are associated with better pupil performance”.
We need a more intelligent approach to interpreting the results of these international studies.
And there is also a tendency to transfer attention on to the individual teacher and the supposed deficiencies of many of them. We see a deficit model, with scapegoating of individuals and their schools, when what we need to address are systemic failures.
Raising professional skill and knowledge and enhancing teacher quality is a collective, not an individual activity.
Aside from the problems we face of shrinking resources – one of the most serious issues we will need to address is the very concept of teacher professionalism – what it means to be a teacher.
There is a danger that we see this question purely in terms of the individual and how he or she measures up against an emerging plethora of standards –
the Standard for Initial Teacher Education,
the Standard for Full Registration,
the Standard for Chartered Teacher,
the Donaldson proposal for a Standard for Active Registration
the Standard for Headship
Do we really need 5 different standards for teachers? And when we see suggestions to McCormac that somehow these standards can virtually substitute for teachers’ contractual terms and conditions, alongside demands from employers to strengthen control and direction over what passes for CPD, there is a real risk that the focus on a standards-based approach will amount to nothing more than a form of managerialist regulation and control, rather than professional empowerment..
Over the next few years, the role of the newly independent General Teaching Council will never have been more important. We have long endorsed the concept of a Teaching Council, but the profession has still to appreciate just how critical its work is going to be in the coming period.
It is no longer a body teachers consort with just until they attain full registration – and then forget about. How the new GTCS goes about its new role will have as big an influence on every teacher’s working life as will any SNCT or post-McCormac discussions.
We need a GTC that will fearlessly stand up as a bulwark in defending and promoting teacher professionalism at a time of shrinking resources.
So I urge members to consider putting themselves forward for endorsement by the EIS as candidates for election to the new Council this Autumn, or, indeed, to serve as Panel members. And I urge you to do all you can to ensure success in the elections for EIS- endorsed candidates.
It is vital that our profession reclaims control over the professional standards agenda – both its content and its application. It is vital that we are a genuinely self-regulating profession.
I know we are asking a lot from our members. To offer themselves up as activists – be it as a Branch representative, a local official or to serve on Council or its committees. And now we need people to get on board the GTCS as well. It is demanding and sometimes thankless work and I want to acknowledge that contribution by so many of our lay volunteers.
These are the people singled out by the President in his address to our 1948 AGM as the real strength of the Educational Institute, "thousands of teachers, most of whom have little hope of enjoying the gaiety and dissipation of an Annual General Meeting”!
I also want to acknowledge the contribution of those who have left us this year, in particular Assistant Secretary Simon Macaulay who retired last month after 27 years of service to the Institute and I welcome his replacement, Louise Wilson – who I believe may be only the second woman official in the 164 year history of the EIS..
I have referred before to the generational shift going on within the EIS and this trend continues apace. Last year 24 Council members departed and this year they are followed by another 23 – albeit I am sure a few will return once their electorates decide to be nicer to them.
It is, however, a significant corpus of knowledge and experience that is being lost – and at a very difficult time.
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”
But it is the mark of a resilient organisation that it undergoes refreshment and renewal. "Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis” Times change and we change with them. And change we must.
Colleagues, these are seriously challenging times and there is always a danger that we descend into a slough of despair. That we come to swallow the myth peddled by right wing scribblers and think tanks that nothing right or worthwhile is happening in the world of education. We know that is not the case.
We know that every day outstanding work is being undertaken across Scotland by thousands of teachers and lecturers to provide a sound education for our young people.
We owe it to the young people of Scotland to keep up the fight on behalf of education in Scotland, especially in these difficult times.
And I conclude by offering the observation of Raymond Williams,
"To be truly radical is make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
It is time for the EIS to be truly radical.
Ronnie Smith
10 June 2011
