Anger at delay to get rid of poor teachers

SCOTLAND’S teaching watchdog has been condemned for taking too long to drum out bad teachers.

The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) faces accusations of an ‘interminable’ wait to get rid of poor classroom performers.

The criticism has been levelled by School Leaders Scotland (SLS), which represents school heads, and the educational Institute of Scotland (eIS) union.

They claim children’s education can suffer as a result of the lengthy process.

Recent GTCS cases, published on its website, include incidents that occurred as far back as 2005. A French teacher who taught in a Glasgow school was banned from teaching in January for an offence he committed in 2011.

Jim Thewliss, SLS general secretary, said: ‘When it gets to the point where the local authority refers the case to the GTCS, it can take an interminable amount of time to be dealt with.

‘You can identify a member of staff whose performance needs to be supported, that can then enter into performance management, and by the time you have gone through the whole system, it can take anything from 18 months to two and a half years, sometimes longer.’

he added: ‘What that means is that you have a member of staff around whom you have concerns over competence, who is in there teaching kids and not improving.

‘What we would like to introduce is more rigour so that we get to a conclusion more quickly than we do just now.’

eIS general secretary Larry Flanagan said: ‘Quite often the key thing for us is that the earlier stages of the process have not been addressed adequately.’

A GTCS spokesman said it had recently revised its fitness to teach framework to streamline its regulatory processes and a professional competence case could now be processed within months.

The Scottish Government is proposing that the GTCS be replaced by an education Workforce Council, which would be responsible for the regulation of a wider range of education workers, including college lecturers, school librarians and community development workers.

The GTCS is strongly opposed to the change, saying it has ‘the potential to do irreparable harm to the status and identity of teachers’.