SNCT Teachers Side calls out lack of progress with commitment to reduce teacher contact time
The Teachers Panel of the SNCT released the following statement today. AHDS fully supports this call to make progress on the Government's commitment and reconfirmed within Teachers Panel discussions that the panel's position remained that implementation must be fully funded and staffed such that it would not further add to the workload of school leaders.
"The Teachers’ Panel of the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT) met yesterday, Monday 2nd December, to consider the lack of progress on the Scottish Government’s manifesto commitment to reduce the weekly class contact time maximum for teachers in Scotland to 21 hours.
Class contact time for Scottish teachers remains unacceptably high when compared to other countries’ education systems, and is a contributing factor in the intolerable levels of workload being experienced at all levels in the profession.
In what is now approaching four years since the manifesto commitment was made ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, and three and a half years since being re-elected, the Scottish Government has failed to implement its key manifesto promises to reduce class contact time to 21 hours and to recruit 3,500 extra teachers in order to deliver on this policy. The effects of this failure are being experienced daily by teachers across Scotland, with those in work finding workload pressures unsustainable and thousands of qualified teachers struggling to secure permanent employment.
Over the past three and a half years, the repeated attempts of the Teachers’ Panel to push for progress on the reduction in class contact time have been met with delay and obfuscation, a situation that cannot be tolerated any longer.
As such, the Teachers’ Panel has unanimously resolved that in the event of there being no indication of the plan for the swift implementation of the class contact time commitment within the terms of the Scottish Government’s budget setting process this week, a formal dispute will be declared through the SNCT."
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