Calls to cut teachers’ time in the classroom

Calls for teachers to cut the time they spend in the classroom to 20 hours a week or less are to be debated this week.

Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, will discuss demands from some local branches to reduce classroom time to as low as 17.5 hours a week.

Such a move would allow teaching staff to spend more time marking and preparing for lessons within the working day, reducing the amount of time they spend doing this at home in the evenings and at weekends.

Coupled with the reduction in classroom hours, teachers will also consider if class sizes should be cut to 20 across the board.

A motion from EIS local associations in Glasgow and South Lanarkshire states that workload and helping children with additional support needs (ASN) are “still major causes of stress for teachers”.

To tackle this they say the trade unions should campaign to reduce class sizes to a maximum of 20 in all mainstream classes, and also “campaign to secure a negotiated reduction of maximum class contact time for teachers to 20 hours per week and to increase preparation and correction time to 10 hours per week”.

A similar motion from the union’s Edinburgh association calls for “maximum class contact hours of 17.5 hours a week” coupled with maximum class sizes of 25 – apart from practical subjects where it says classes should have no more than 20 students.

It wants these changes to be “progressed on an incremental basis” so that they are fully in place by August 2025.

The motions will be put to the vote during the three-day-long EIS annual general meeting, which gets under way in Perth on Thursday.

Teachers will gather there after winning a 13% pay increase, staggered over three years, from the Scottish Government and councils.

Union general secretary Larry Flanagan said:

“The AGM will shape the priorities for the EIS, and for Scottish education, in the year ahead.”