Teachers feel they must work longer due to emotional blackmail – union

TEACHERS are being ‘emotionally blackmailed’ into taking on excessive workloads, a union boss will claim today.

Stuart Hunter, president of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA), is to call for staff to refuse to work beyond their contracted 35-hour week.

He will also compare the treatment teachers receive to the experience of domestic abuse victims, claiming they have been ‘very subtly controlled and coerced’ into taking on extra tasks for which they had not been trained.

Mr Hunter will suggest the ‘most effective way... of ending controlling and coercive behaviour is to first acknowledge that it is happening’ but that the next step is to ‘unite and with one voice clearly state that magic word: No’.

Scottish Tory education spokesman Liam Kerr said: ‘Teacher shortages lie at the root of this requirement to work additional hours, and the blame for that lies squarely with the SNP government, which has underfunded councils and presided over a fall in numbers, rather than delivering the 3,500 extra teachers they promised.’

At the SSTA conference in Glasgow, Mr Hunter will say a culture has been created ‘whereby teachers cannot say “no” because it will not look good for them – after all, “It’s for the sake of the kids”. This is the conundrum – how do we reduce our workload back to our contractually agreed 35hour working week without having a detrimental impact on our students?

‘Why do we allow ourselves to be emotionally blackmailed to the point we damage our own mental health to do the job we love? Institutional controlling or coercive behaviour is similar in many ways to the more commonly known domestic form of abuse.’

Meanwhile, the NASUWT, whose conference is being held virtually today, said the SNP government is ‘failing to act with the urgency required to get a grip of the escalating crisis in violence and abuse from pupils’.

Last night a spokesman for the Scottish Government said: ‘The NASUWT is part of the national group tasked with producing a behaviour action plan – which shows clear partnership working between Scottish Government and the teaching professional associations.’

He added: ‘Scotland has the lowest pupil-teacher ratio of any UK nation.’

‘We must say that magic word: No’