Created on: 05 Jun 2026
The view from up here is great.
We can see unity.
We can see togetherness.
We can see common values, common purpose.
350 members from across all 32 of our local associations, and our two self-governing associations…all of you representing 80% of teachers and lecturers in Scotland…
Almost 65,000 members who’re bound together by belief in the value of quality education…bound by belief in the societal worth of our professionalism as teachers and lecturers…and bound together by trade union values and solidarity…within a union whose members are from all sectors of Scottish education at all career stages - a union who cares about teachers and lecturers and about pupils and students in equal measure.
Colleagues, our unity as trade union educators is our strength. We - every single one of us here- at this, the EIS’s 180th AGM, are guided by the same motto that signposted the way forward for our predecessors at the very first AGM in 1847 - ‘for the advancement of teachers and the promotion of sound learning’.
That motto has strongly stood the test of time. It’s lasted as a guiding principle to the EIS and its members for 179 years - withstood a raft of political and geopolitical crises - colonial wars, World Wars, financial crashes, periods of economic depression, the first rise of fascism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, a global pandemic, wars in Europe, ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and here at home- the human sacrifice of working class communities on the altar of capitalist greed, and the unending economic and human cost of neoliberal ideology being hammered into our public services, including our Education system- that is and must be treated and funded as the quintessential social good that it absolutely is.
‘For the advancement of teachers and the promotion of sound learning’- will be our collective creed as we navigate another age of monsters, to quote Gramsci... and a resurgence of the far right and the politics of hate and division, bank-rolled by billionaires whose avarice, hubris and complete lack of conscience are unfathomable, unconscionable to decent people.
Colleagues - the wolves are no longer at the door, they’re in the door as the recent Scottish Parliament election result attests.
Local elections are coming round next year.
Still more, our unity must be our strength. Still more, our motto penned in 1847 is and must continue to be our guiding and our binding maxim. We must continue to resist the profit before people economic paradigm that’s created a society riven with inequality, that sees our public services on their knees, including education, and our social security system in ruins, living standards in free-fall and levels of poverty and deprivation still rising...meaning that more and more of our young people are suffering serious educational disadvantage.
It’s no accident that 43% of our pupils have a recognised additional support need- a failure of government that the right to education is being frustrated by the gross insufficiency of funding for ASN provision…and we need to be very careful to give no ground to the voices on the right that are now harping even louder for the dismantling of inclusive education and the abandonment of the presumption to mainstream.
All of this is the architecture of the mega-wealth-holders who calculate that their interests can be best served by fanning the flames of racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, ablism.
All text-book tactics to try to divide – and conquer- working-class communities, ordinary people…We’ve seen this in history before and we know where it leads if it’s allowed to go unchallenged.
So the EIS does stand up and challenge the narratives of division and hate, and offers a hopeful alternative, at the same time as holding the UK and Scottish Governments to account on their failures to deliver for our citizens, their accountability for the sense of futility and fatalism that’s an absolute gift to the far-right.
Our Stand Up for Quality Education Campaign, our manifesto for the recent election, are key and that’s why we’ll continue to echo the demands that we made in that manifesto: more teachers, including in early years, smaller classes, better ASN provision and universal free school meals.
Scotland could have all of this for less than a billion pounds of additional spending on education each year. As IPPR said, it’s not an insignificant sum of money but the benefits outweigh the costs. Spend now for the common good, save multiple times over on corrective spending from the public purse.
Invest more now in Education across all sectors, for the benefit of our whole society longer-term. Because that’s exactly what education should be for… the common good. It should not be a competition between students for grades, or between schools for inspection scores, exclusion rates, Insight points…or a competition between local authorities on the raft of measures that feature in the National Improvement Framework league tables.
Education should be about collaboration, working together for the common good and ringfencing the resources to do it. The education provided in our nurseries, schools, colleges and universities, should benefit our pupils and students, their families and communities, now and in the future.
Less inequality, better health outcomes, greater prosperity, less interaction with the justice system for all of our citizens. Preventative spend - it's a no-brainer.
It’s why EIS FELA’s campaigning and the work we’re doing to press for better funding for HE, are in large part about creating that alternative vision and holding government to account on the under-funding of education.
And Education is a critical antidote to the poison of far-right politics.
We need a well-funded education system from Early Years to Higher education so that as teachers and lecturers, we can teach young people to read and write, to think and problem-solve and create...and so that we have what we need to educate the young people in our nurseries, schools, colleges and universities for equality, social justice, peace and democracy.
That’s what sound learning looks like. It’s how we build for a future of bread and roses and books- a future that rejects hate, a future that is hopeful.
Creating opportunities for political education - the Many Good Men, and the Tackling Misinformation and Disinformation resources, the Let’s Change the Story video series, Reps’ and member briefings, working with the TUC and the STUC, on how we organise a trade union response to the far-right… It’s why all of that matters.
It’s why it matters that we joined the Together Alliance as soon as it was formed- why I spoke on our behalf at the inaugural conference, why we answered the call to help fund and why we marched with half a million others who were prepared to be seen and heard on the streets of central London on the 28th March, seen and heard as the alternative to the politics of division and hate.
No pasaran!
When the EIS delegation got to the end of the march, gathering at Whitehall, and we heard the announcement that there were still thousands waiting to march off from Park Lane - it was another of those moments when the realisation of the collective strength and power of good people makes you shiver. Another unforgettable occasion that the EIS showed up for.
It’s why it matters that the EIS is credited as a donor to the making of Everybody to Kenmure Street, winner of an award at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Early last year we contributed substantial funds to the making of the film which tells the brilliant story of the collective power of the people of Glasgow standing up against the politics of inhumanity and hate.
The President and I were invited to attend the UK premier of the film at the GFT - another occasion where we were bursting with pride in the EIS and the strength of our solidarity with others who’re standing up for the common good. We’re preparing to get involved in screenings of the film and in the creation of an education resource- more important work to come.
It’s all essential - and it’s why we’ll continue to press the Scottish Government to work with us on the last of the three ISTP commitments that we jointly made in 2025. That agreement committed us to
This is code for challenging the influence of the far right. We have an in with government on this and will be working to score a hat-trick in getting all three of the 2025 ISTP commitments delivered.
We are determined. And we will organise across all spaces to challenge and offer hope in this new age of monsters…We hope that Motion 57 on building a political education strategy will pass with the solid support of AGM.
Because it’s important that we educate ourselves…Think about how we frame conversations on topics that the far-right are highjacking.
How we build trust and show empathy. How we win hearts and minds. How we work in solidarity with our comrades - not just saying solidarity, but doing it- with kindness, care, concern for our colleagues…and with self-care…so that we build our collective strength and courage to continue our industrial struggles, stand up for quality education, for equality and social justice, for peace and to step up the fight against the influence of the far right.
We’ve been doing all of this over the past year.
Everything, everywhere, all at once.
Standing up for teachers and lecturers, standing up for Scottish education, standing up for rights, peace and social justice…alongside the rest of the trade union movement in Scotland, the UK and internationally - it’s been our raison d’etre over the past 12 months.
At last year’s AGM, we demonstrated our willingness to up the ante on the SNCT workload dispute- we launched the first of three ballot with the press of that big red button- the visual display of your intent to really fight for what you were promised across a nine-month campaign that leveraged a tangible result - a contractual change that will significantly and permanently improve the working conditions of teachers and the learning conditions of pupils.
Our collective know-how and our collective strength as a union, from branch to local association to EIS headquarters…all parts of the EIS working together, putting in the hard yards, won that victory for Scotland’s teachers and kept us true to our mission.
Incredible.
Thank you to every single person in here for the part that you played in securing that victory by being ballot-strong and strike-ready.
Thank you to all EIS colleagues who aren’t here who did their bit too.
That second ballot result was a gamechanger.
The hour before it was announced, there was nothing on the table from the Scottish Government- not even a response to the draft agreement that the EIS had prepared and that the rest of the Teachers’ Panel had adopted weeks before.
A draft agreement that included phased implementation- a pragmatic acknowledgement of the significant shortfall in the numbers of Secondary teachers, that EIS members had pointed out was a significant issue and one that needed to be addressed.
No response to the Teachers’ Side proposed terms of agreement and no alternative on the table until after that ballot result came in…
A Scottish Government gamble that the anti-trade union thresholds would thwart us for a second time.
But they didn’t beat us a second time- because when we fell short by only a few hundred votes the first time around, we didn’t press the panic button- we kept cool heads, we analysed, we strategised even harder…and we tenaciously went after a mandate. And we got it.
The following day, with thresholds well-beaten and an overwhelming majority in favour of strike and ASOS... and we surmise after a meeting with the First Minister... the Cabinet Secretary urgently wanted to talk to us- talk to the EIS because our members- you- were the ones about to strike.
We met that afternoon and the Scottish Government began to show us- and COSLA- the money, and their late-in-the-day intent to get a settlement before EIS members began taking strike action in a matter of days.
We met with the Scottish Government every day for five days after that and although things were moving in the right direction, we kept up the national and local effort across those days, on preparing for the industrial action- taking nothing for granted. Counting no chickens. Nothing agreed till everything was agreed.
Anyone paying attention- and we know the Scottish Government- with an election just around the corner and having written the EIS’s name at the top of their risk register were paying very close attention- but anyone would have seen that our members were dead serious about taking strike action.
The pressure on the government that came from seeing that tens of thousands of EIS members were limbering up to take strike action that would shut schools, including in key constituency areas, during an election campaign...and that would see ASOS and associated publicity go on right up until the election, forced the Scottish Government to fold on the use of time- the full 90 minutes would go to preparation and correction, our red line met.
And the Scottish Government also agreed to go as far as it could as fast as it could on national implementation of class contact reduction.
We pushed back against piecemeal implementation across a handful of local authorities at a time, and we insisted on national implementation on a sectoral basis, including that pragmatic concession around phasing.
And the whole implementation would be fully funded by the Scottish Government. Full funding, no cuts to other parts of the Education service, no additional workload for Headteachers, Deputes and PTs.
In less than a week after the EIS secured a clear mandate with overwhelming support for strike action and ASOS, our terms were on the verge of being met- 90 minutes for teachers to use for preparation and correction, a credible timescale for implementation and fully funded.
That just left the small matter of gaining the agreement of COSLA.
In a dramatic tilt of the axis of negotiations, the EIS and the Scottish Government partnered up to lobby COSLA hard over the 24 hours or so before the Leaders meeting that was scheduled for the Friday before the Monday that our members were set to take action.
The Cabinet Secretary and I wrote jointly to Leaders the day before and lobbied individual councillors and MSPs with sway over COSLA leaders, hard. It worked. COSLA Leaders overwhelmingly voted to support the deal which meant it could then be proposed to the full Teachers’ Panel of the SNCT where it got majority support.
We did it. We got it over the line. A deal to cut workload and create jobs. An additional £40 million to start getting more teachers in our schools right now... right now starting to tackle the precarity that has plagued our profession for years, all of this in preparation for full implementation of the contractual change for Primary by August next year; and with agreement around a workforce planning focus at the SNCT to intelligently respond to the recruitment challenges to enable Secondary implementation by 2029.
Colleagues who are of certain years’ experience will remember that a similar phased approach was adopted 20 years ago when the last significant contractual changes to the working week were implemented- with Secondary going first that time and Primary colleagues following a few years later, the acceptance of phasing based on a grasp of the realpolitik of the situation and underpinned by the principle that a victory for one sector is a victory for all sectors.
And this latest win will be felt by all teachers in Nursery, Primary, Secondary and Special schools well within the lifetime of the current parliament.
There hasn’t been too much time to pause and reflect on the strength of what’s been achieved but I remember driving to Glasgow on the M8 from the SNP Conference the day after we got the deal over the line.
And there was something of a realisation that we’d achieved something big- something that will improve the professional and personal lives of teachers for decades to come- all through our collective strength and that brought shivers down the spine.
And this win on workload should inspire all of us to double down on workload otherwise, through working time agreements and workload audits at branch level.
Because there are no silver bullets, no panaceas, no effortless shortcuts to fair, healthy and sustainable workload and good work-life balance- it takes constant, relentless vigilance and collective surveillance and EIS members need to be up for that across all 39 35-hour working weeks of the year.
Not individually but collectively. And you will be.
Unity is our strength not just nationally but in our branches too.
Because 90 additional minutes a week is coming but it’s not here yet and even when it does arrive it won’t make excessive workload disappear.
And with a new Cabinet Secretary for Public Sector reform- aka public sector cuts - installed in the Scottish Government, we will need to stay on our mettle...And be prepared to resist attempts to cut corners on delivering on the full terms of the agreement that our ballot and the threat of our industrial action and the tenacity of our negotiating has just won - we expect the terms to be delivered in full with sufficient numbers of Primary, Secondary and Special school teachers to be able to deliver quality, human-centred, in-person teaching and learning to all of our pupils.
No back-sliding. No cheap workarounds. Digital as a default won’t do.
The EIS will continue to demand better.
Just as we did after last year’s AGM, when the Poverty Alliance called on the trade union movement to help build a campaign for government action against poverty and for better funded services ahead of the Scottish Parliament election.
We donated funds to build the campaign and made sure we had a strong presence at the demo in Edinburgh last October where thousands marched demanding better ahead of the election.
But judging by the party manifestos, and the new cabinet post created for Ivan McKee, the trade union movement and the rest of civil society has got more work to do to leverage a fairer distribution of wealth and stronger support for public services in Scotland.
And the EIS will continue to make our contribution to that effort, making our mark in standing up for quality education, as we have done over the past year…
On the industrial front- we've been defending jobs and course provision with strike action at the University of the West of Scotland and Edinburgh Napier - in both cases getting compulsory redundancies off the table, EIS-ULA unity and collective strength protecting the livelihoods of members and the quality of education at these institutions.
All power to members at GCU and Queen Margaret as they prepare to do the same!
Keeping up the fight against pension raiding by Independent school employers who continue to try to pay for freezes on pupil fees off the backs of our members.
As in Hutchie, EMS and Craigclowan- where EIS members are prepared to defend their rights as workers, the EIS will be with them.
Standing up for our members’ health and safety at Lenzie Academy and Linnvale Academy- getting the Dunbartonshires to agree to do better and make these schools safer for staff and pupils, by balloting our members.
Battling hard on health and safety at City of Glasgow College where our members and their students continue to be refused Respiratory Protective Equipment that would reduce the risk from carcinogenic welding fumes to as low as reasonably practicable. BAE welders are sent to the college to be taught welding wearing the right kit. Absurd and unacceptable that their lecturers aren’t provided it.
The EIS is pushing the College hard, the Principal has agreed to meet with me at my earliest convenience and I’ve suggested Monday morning…We have our arms around the striking welders and the Reps because we absolutely understand that especially when it comes to health and safety, an injury to one is an injury to all and we simply won’t have it.
On the Education front, a different type of safety issue and based on another ISTP agreement, we drove the work that led to the publication in March of a set of ethical guardrails and guidelines for AI use in Scottish education.
A good piece of work in response to the wild west approach to AI that was beginning to take hold in some local authorities.
All initiated by the EIS - There’s nothing artificial about the intelligence of EIS officers and officials…
They’ve won major concessions on the legislative front too- holding the Scottish Government and the Parliament to account, fielding swathes of amendments to bills to ensure that the policy you decide here and at Council is reflected in the legislation that affects our schools, our members and the learners in our settings.
This year, our amendments have strengthened teacher voice in the governance structures of Qualifications Scotland through the new Education Act; significantly narrowed the definition of restraint in the Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act; forced the government to rethink implementation timescales of the well -meaning but under-resourced Residential Outdoor Education Act; and secured legislative guarantees through the Tertiary Education Act that colleges and universities remain the primary fundable bodies - not private providers. A major win in standing up for quality education. And that’s just a snapshot...
And all of this has been ongoing while we continued to advocate for meaningful education reform. Many of you in this room have given your time and expertise to contribute to the review of Curriculum for Excellence, shaping the Curriculum Improvement Cycle in an effort to declutter, streamline and align the senior phase with the BGE. And we’ll continue to stand together, united, to ensure that the voices of all teachers – from all sectors – are heard as we move forward.
And as we move forward, we will press the new Cabinet Secretary on the implementation of the recommendations of the IRQA- that the Scottish Government might think they’ve kicked into the long grass – but the EIS hasn’t lost sight of the consensual vision of an alternative senior phase that if realised would transform the experiences of teachers, children and young people- genuinely sound learning that’s rooted in social justice.
And we’ll continue the solid work in local associations that’s undertaken by our cadre of reps and LA Secretaries upon whom the excellent work of the EIS depends, supported by our great team of Area Officers and Organisers.
Colleagues, there are no short-cuts to building union power in branches and nationally. It’s the hard graft of educating, agitating, organising. Rinse and repeat.
But when we do the hard work as a union, we reap the rewards for our members.
And in the current economic and fiscal climate, unfortunately, it looks like there’s no end in sight to that hard graft in the next number of years.
But as well as fighting one battle at a time, we keep our eyes on the bigger prize that the trade union movement is after - a fairer, more equal, more socially just society in which wealth is more equally distributed, a society that’s free of discrimination and where everyone can thrive.
We keep our eyes on the prize and we keep an eye on one another- we don’t forget to check that everybody’s doing okay. Things are getting even tougher and as a union we’ve been fighting hard for years now and people aren’t machines- the robots haven’t displaced us yet. So remember to look after yourselves and each other.
Unity is our strength as we continue to stand up for quality education and fight for the common good.
Colleagues, comrades - they think the General Secretary’s speech is all over- it is now…Solidarity!