Created on: 05 Jun 2025
Comrades,
There is a lovely film I watched with my family recently called The Half of It. In one scene, a teenager’s English teacher is trying to persuade her not to go on to the local State college, but instead to go somewhere Ivy League.
The girl teases her, “You better watch out; in a town like this, isn’t it a firing offence for a teacher to give students advice like that?”
And the teacher just smiles and says, “In this town, everyone fears God, but you know the only thing that God fears…? The teachers’ union!”
Setting aside the deep irony that that line now has, given what our American comrades are facing under Trump, I have to say that in the EIS we’re not out to make anyone fear us, but we do want people to respect us.
All too often that respect is not given until we are forced to fight for it. But when we are forced to fight, we win. And I want to start today by celebrating two key victories that the EIS has won this past year, FELA’s pay deal and ending of deeming, and Glasgow comrades’ reversal of catastrophic cuts to teacher numbers in the City.
Those two victories have taught us many important lessons for our campaigning work, but the one key take-away I want to highlight here is this: when it comes to Education, Fair Work is this government’s Achilles Heel. A theme I’ll return to later.
Both victories showed the collective power and solidarity of the EIS, but winning them was not easy and fighting for them was exhausting.
Our General Secretary, Andrea Bradley, Assistant Secretary David Belsey, all Officers, Organisers and staff within the Organisation and FE Departments, our FELA President Anne-Marie Harley and Glasgow Secretary Jane Gow, together with the hundreds of activists and thousands of members within FELA and Glasgow LA, all of them, working together, became the vanguard of our campaigns for Quality Education and for the Future of Further Education.
And all of them deserve our heartfelt thanks.
But, comrades, the forces that came for us in those battles will return. And the reason I know that is that austerity has not been ended. This AGM is the first held under a Labour government at Westminster since 2009, but you wouldn’t know it because this past year has felt no different to the previous fourteen.
Back in September at the TUC congress, I was able to challenge the Prime Minister directly about what he was going to do to end child poverty in the UK. He had no adequate answer.
Today, I say to him, however indirectly, “Prime Minister – the multiple ongoing crises our country faces were not caused by poor families with more than two children; or by disabled people on benefits; or by desperate people arriving on our shores in small boats; they were caused by a rapacious minority who arrive on their superyachts and on their private jets, and by you, the political class who serve their interests.
“Today the top 50 richest families in the UK hold more wealth than the poorest half of the whole population.
“In a country where a quarter of our children live in poverty, that level of super-wealth is a moral stain.
“Mr Starmer, we need wealth taxes now to wipe it clean! End austerity now because it’s the best recruiting-sergeant the far-right could ever have.”
I could say a lot more, colleagues, but let’s turn to our First Minister, because I have to tell you at the STUC this year he didn’t mention schools or teachers once, or the range of tax measures he could introduce, even though he was talking about tackling the far-right and ending child poverty.
He offered some words about the crisis within Higher Education but let me say to all our ULA comrades, you deserve better and our fight to stop redundancies, especially at Robert Gordon University, is about trying to end the disastrous experiment of turning learning into a business, an experiment which always sacrifices quality education.
So, we stand in solidarity with those striking at RGU, and with all comrades across the sector, and we say to the First Minister, we don’t need respect in the form of warm words at conferences, but we do need it in the form of a governing party actually keeping its manifesto promises.
In both 2007 and 2011 they broke their promise to reduce class sizes in early Primary, and then they never mentioned class sizes again. What they did instead was to end ring-fenced funding for education to Local Authorities, and stood back and watched as those Authorities across the country cut education budgets and undermined the vital ASN infrastructure that the Scottish education system had built up over decades.
Those cuts never let up and education funding has been a political swing-ball ever since, casually batted back and forth between COSLA and the Scottish Government like two bored kids in a back green.
In 2016 the manifesto promise was to close the poverty-related attainment gap. But Attainment Challenge and PEF funds were never going to be enough to repair the damage.
The built-in precarity of PEF must surely also be connected to the precarity of so many teacher posts which now plagues our system, especially in Primary. Precarity is a blight on Scottish education and ending it is central to our mission in the Stand Up campaign.
A key statistic from the 23/24 census is jaw-dropping. Last year, only 12.8 % of primary probationers obtained a permanent post. But of course, the problem isn’t just about the year after Probation. New teachers, years and years into their careers, are still trapped, with no hope of a permanent job in sight.
89% of Scotland’s Primary teachers are women. So, the vast majority of those members imprisoned in that precarity are young women. They can’t get mortgages, they can’t afford to start families, and they feel, as one sister put it to me, completely “devalued and disposable.”
And devalued and disposable is exactly how countless women are feeling at the opposite end of their careers, as they go through the menopause and struggle against a culture of eye-rolling and dismissiveness.
As one sister put it to me: “It’s never said outright, but it feels at work like I’m being told all the time, ‘This is the job, if you can’t handle it, you need to get out.’ And I do want to get out, as soon as I possibly can.”
She told me she felt like crying with relief when she read the updated EIS guidance on Menopause and Menstrual Health. “Because of the EIS, I know I’m not alone and I know I’m not mad,” she said.
She asked me to thank Nicola Fisher, our Equality Convener, and everyone who supports or serves on the Committee, for everything they do in advancing the equality agenda, but especially for producing that guidance this year.
Comrades, in response to the concerns of these two groups of sisters, and also the trans men and non-binary colleagues who may also suffer menopausal symptoms, let me say something personal for a moment, on behalf of Adam, Mark and myself.
This coming year, the Office Bearers of the EIS will all be men and all Secondary teachers. But I want to say to every EIS member, in all our sectors and in all our networks, that we will be the humblest listeners we can be, the warmest allies we can be, and the strongest advocates we can be.
And let me express some of that advocacy right now.
Just a few months ago one Deputy Chief Constable described violence against women and girls in the UK as having reached epidemic proportions and constituting a national emergency. I do believe the Scottish Government and COSLA have recognised that misogyny is a deeply troubling aspect of the violence and aggression against women working in our schools.
But they need to do more about it.
Those women are living a daily reality of being threatened and assaulted and they need to be able to keep themselves safe and to teach their pupils about consequences. And those consequences need to be properly funded in the form of different types of alternative, but supportive and inclusive, provision for violent and aggressive pupils, so that everyone in classrooms can feel safe.
Those women also need time, CPD and materials to help them inoculate their pupils against the virus of hatred poisoning children online.
But comrades, that’s not enough. The Scottish Government and COSLA need to acknowledge that misogyny isn’t just something ‘out there’ invading schools, peddled by the far-right or secreted into boys’ heads by creeps on social media. It’s also something that has baked in a structural violence at the heart of our workplaces.
When an industry or profession, whose workforce is overwhelmingly female, casualises and exploits the labour of women at one end of their career, and then drives them to want to quit early at the other, and when so many women in both situations do actually quit, in what have become record numbers, with severe impacts on their incomes and their pensions… then there’s a word to describe that industry or profession.
And that word is ‘misogynistic’.
Quite simply, if the Government and our employers want to be taken seriously in any way when they try to talk about Fair Work ambitions, then ending that institutional, systemic misogyny has to be their urgent priority.
Now, if only there was a way to show that respect with concrete actions and new investment…
If only there was a way…
Which brings me of course to the 2021 manifesto. Chisel it on an ‘Edstone’, comrades – “We will recruit at least three and a half thousand additional teachers and reduce teachers’ contact time by an hour and half a week.”
And then the swing-ball match began again in all its monotony. Four years on, and the scores are in:
In refusing to get on with cutting our contact hours, or to accept that the additional non-contact time must go only to preparation and correction, the Scottish Government and COSLA are effectively saying, ‘We don’t care about your stress.
Because if we do give you those extra hours, we want to use them to make you work even harder, because you aren’t doing enough to improve children’s outcomes. We know best what you need to do to make those improvements, and it’s by attending more meetings, generating and analysing more data, and doing as you’re told.’
Comrades, when we’re faced with that level of disrespect and intransigence, there is no alternative but to fight.
After years of patience and dogged negotiation from our Salaries Convener Des Morris, and Assistant Secretary Stuart Brown, and everyone supporting or serving on the Salaries Committee, after all those years, when Andrea presses Go tomorrow on the consultative ballot, we will vote Yes-Yes in our thousands, and we will demand respect until it’s shown to us in concrete actions and not in promises on paper that mean nothing.
Colleagues, the 2021 manifesto wasn’t just about the contact hours, because they were actually part of an overall promise to commit an additional £1bn to education for something called…. Covid recovery.
“Covid recovery?” What a joke…
It’s as if everything we went through and everything we delivered as a workforce throughout those years just vanished in a haze of ‘manifesto amnesia’.
Except it didn’t. Thanks to a comprehensive final written submission produced by Assistant Secretary Anne Keenan, and then the flawless in-person testimony by Andrea, the Scottish Covid Inquiry earlier this year received the full history of teachers’ experiences during the pandemic, and the key lessons are relevant not just for dealing with a future health emergency, they’re relevant right now for dealing with the current pandemic of violence and aggression and of workload stress and burnout.
And those lessons are very simple: in whatever ‘balance of harms’ matrix you apply, you have to stop downplaying or hiding away the harms done to teachers and school staff, and you actually have to prioritise staff wellbeing if you genuinely want to meet the needs of young people.
A report published in late 2020 did discover that the risk of becoming a Covid-19 case was higher among teachers than the general population, but that finding was hidden in the small-print, and was not mentioned at all by the then First Minister.
For the ongoing research into numbers of teachers and pupils suffering Long-Covid, I want to thank our Employment Relations Convener Susan Slater, everyone on the Committee, Stuart Brown and all of the staff involved, but also for all of the vital work they’ve been developing on Health and Safety which sits at the very core of our Stand Up campaign.
Other key planks of the 2021 manifesto were about education reform and Instrumental Music Services. On the question of reform, I will leave most of what there is to say to our Education Convener, Susan Quinn, when she reports later, because she can express what needs to be said much better and probably more calmly than I can, and I want to thank her, Anne Keenan and everyone supporting or serving on the Education committee for the EIS’s relentless efforts to highlight the Scottish Government’s failings when it comes to reform.
And those failings are legion. When a government ignores key recommendations of a swathe of reports into our education system, which it commissioned, then no one can blame you for starting to worry that you are not in safe, respectful, or competent hands.
On Instrumental Music, we’ve won battles this year in Midlothian, Perth and Kinross, and Stirling to halt planned cuts. To all of the IMTs involved, the Secretaries, activists and staff, we say thank you, and we say to our comrades in East Ayrshire where the Authority is pushing through an ill-advised proposal to move the instrumental music service to an arm’s length body, we stand with you in your fight to resist it.
Investing in arts education is essential because the arts bring human-centred self-expression, compassion, and empathy into young people’s learning and wider achievements, and those values form the foundation of the resistance to the forces of hatred that I mentioned earlier today.
On the streets those forces are already poisoning our democracy and attacking human rights, as we saw last summer in the appalling racist attacks and riots. In the polls they are set to make unprecedented gains at the ballot box in 2026.
At the start of my speech, I made reference to a heart-warming film. But I feel I now have to refer to a much bleaker work of art, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
The novel is set in a society in which fascists have just taken power. During the unfolding repression, an assistant general secretary in a trade union is disappeared by state forces.
The country Lynch has set his story is not Argentina or Chile in the 1970s, it is not even an imagined extension of what is happening today in the United States under Donald Trump, it is a fictional present-day Ireland, but the trade union official in the novel belongs to a very real teachers union, our sister union, the TUI.
When a man seeking high public office says that he and his ‘party’ will ‘wage war on teaching unions’, he may say – if he’s even questioned about it at all – that he intends those words to be metaphorical.
But let me say right now that all of us in the EIS stand shoulder to shoulder with our comrades in the NEU and with all other anti-racist educators who were the intended targets of that verbal attack in our shared revulsion and repudiation of it.
And we will work tirelessly with them and everyone across the Trade Union movement to prevent that man from getting his hands anywhere near the levers of power.
Words matter, and that metaphor for me conjures not just works of fiction but very sinister realities. Because the far-right will try to come for us, if they get the chance, and the first things they will go for are the values at the heart of the GTCS standards, the four values of CfE and the capacity of Citizenship.
As the voice of the EIS on the Political Literacy group within the Curriculum Improvement Cycle, I have been very clear that CfE is inherently anti-authoritarian, and must remain so, and that Scottish teachers must never be impartial when it comes to upholding social justice, integrity, sustainability, wisdom and compassion.
As Paulo Freire taught us, “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
But siding with the powerless is anathema to the far-right – because they rely on deliberately targeting the powerless, particularly three of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world today: refugees and migrants, the Trans community, and Palestinians.
Our policies and practices offer strong support and solidarity to each of these groups.
Our work to challenge myths about immigration, our educational welcome packs for asylum-seeking children and families, but also our wider anti-racist work within the system and within the trade union movement, are all vital in standing against the racism of the far-right.
Our support for Trans rights has been exemplary. We are clear that the recent Supreme Court judgement should not be used to negate the spirit and intent of the Equality Act which provides that the rights of all minoritised groups are equally protected – with no hierarchy of order.
As we strive to assess the impact of the legal judgement on the wording of our policies, we say to our Trans and non-binary siblings, we feel your fear but we will not abandon you, we will not stop countering the disinformation peddled about you, and we will not stop campaigning for your right to a safe, fulfilling life, lived as you want it to be lived.
A safe, fulfilling life is also what we want for the Palestinian people, living in their own state, alongside the state of Israel, with mutual security, with international laws and rulings upheld and with equal respect for all human rights.
That kind of peaceful co-existence is very far away indeed.
Earlier this year, Paula and I attended a conference on protecting the rights of Palestinian children held by the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, and I want to thank those comrades for hosting us and for organising such an important event.
Today, with all of you, I know I do not need to go into the horrifying details of the slaughter and starvation in Gaza, which UN experts have described as ‘scholasticide’, and a form of ‘un-childing’, and which Amnesty International has concluded is a genocide, so the only thing I want to highlight about that event is what was said about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.
A ray of hope during that harrowing day was the analysis by one speaker that BDS is working. It’s harming the Israeli economy and that will undermine the far-right Netanyahu regime which, according to a group of retired Israeli security chiefs, and I quote, “is […] propelling Israel to catastrophe—harming the security of the state, […]and leading Israel to a dictatorship.” End quote.
Netanyahu and his extremist government do not speak or act for the whole of Israeli society in the same way that the war-criminals of Hamas do not represent all of the Palestinian people.
One of the most effective things we can do to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and with those Israelis who try to speak out and resist the Netanyahu regime, is to stay resolutely committed to our policy of aligning with BDS actions.
And I want to thank our Chief Financial Officer, John McLeod, for regularly monitoring the updates on the BDS companies list, so that we can continue to do exactly that.
Israel, of course, is not the only country sliding quickly towards dictatorship.
Franklin D, Roosevelt famously defined fascism as the “ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
Last summer, I had the privilege of addressing the Education International conference in Argentina, where I was able to highlight the danger that billionaires pose to education and democracy in one of the motions.
Argentina’s new far-right leader is intent on attacking trade unions, in a country where trade unionists were tortured, murdered and disappeared in their thousands during the so-called Dirty War.
That Dirty War was a genocide against trade unionists and left-wing intellectuals, but it was also a genocide against Jewish people. Jews made up only 1% of the whole population in Argentina at the time, but a hugely disproportionate number of those murdered by the fascist regime, up to 12%, were Jews.
When the richest man on the planet is gifted a chainsaw by that Argentinian President, when the richest man openly backs a neo-fascist party in Germany, and when he gives Nazi salutes at rallies, we need to pay attention.
Fascism so openly embraced and financed by billionaires is something we need to help our young people to understand so that they can learn how to resist the abhorrent violence that sits at its core, whether that be antisemitism, Islamophobia, or anti-Palestinian hatred.
I end with a final recommendation and a plea. My recommendation is the book Doppelganger. In it, Naomi Klein brilliantly dissects how the far-right distort language, especially the language usually used by left-wing progressives, in order to make the powerful and the privileged appear as if they are victims who need to be liberated.
The section on Isael/Palestine has been made available for free online.
Comrades, my plea is that you urge your school leaders, senior education managers and Councillors to engage with the EIS’s Education for Peace policy and Israel/Palestine learning resource.
One was updated and launched earlier this year – and I thank again all those I thanked at the Education for Peace launch – and the other, and how it might be updated, will be discussed later at this AGM.
As we continue to think about how to help our young people explore the complex issues that our society faces, especially about how fascism rises and how it can be defeated, at a time when those young people have never been more deliberately targeted, distracted and lured into the far-right’s disinformation by big-tech and its AI algorithms, at a time when a new rearmament race is upon us, and at a time when The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has dozens and dozens of Red Flag Alerts, Active Alerts and SOS Alerts for Genocide for different groups across the world, we all have to understand that those kinds of resources and policies for peace and justice have never been more urgently needed by educators and for the society we want to nurture into existence.
But if there is one group of trade union activists and employees who can work quickly to play an even larger role in building the bulwark against the fascists that the world needs, it is all of you, it is all of us.
At the start of the STUC conference, I was sitting up at the back with Andrea, and suddenly out of the blue she gestured to the delegation and she said to me, “Look at this group of activists, look at the quality of the people we have! What a union! What a union!” The spontaneity, the admiration and the passion in her voice struck me dumb. But I’ve found my voice again.
And I say now in reply to her and to all of you, Yes indeed! What a group of activists, what a General Secretary and staff, what a union.
Respect is what we deserve, respect is all that we demand, and respect is everything we must win.
No Pasaran, comrades, No Pasaran! Solidarity, always!