There are few sights more pitiful, more vexing or more predictable than the sight of teaching unions on the whinge. This time it is the EIS and the other unions representing teachers in Scotland. They are unhappy that the new Curriculum for Excellence – of which, for what little it may be worth I have, albeit anecdotally, heard some encouraging things – is being rushed into service too quickly. It has only been in development since 2004. Just as bad, apparently, the new National exams designed to replace the unfit Standard Grade are coming along too soon. Teachers are confused and unhappy and overworked and all the rest of it. The new exam, incidentally, won’t be sat until 2014.
Regardless of the merits of the teaching unions’ case, it is worth paying attention to the language they use in public. Here, for instance, is a report from yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday. It is entirely typical.
Larry Flanagan, an English teacher at Hillhead High School in Glasgow, and the incoming general secretary of the EIS, puts the difficulties in context. Teachers are having their pensions and working week reviewed. The cost cutting that has hit the entire public sector is now striking the classroom. Lack of cash means class sizes rising. They feel, he says, that the support is no longer there. And now this.
“Introducing the new curriculum for S1 and S2 has been a significant challenge,” says Flanagan. “To do it this year in S3 at the same time as trying to prepare for the new qualification is too much workload.”
Ochone! Ochone! The lambs. At no point in this or any other report I have seen has any union representative said anything like: You know, there have been difficulties. Introducing a new curriculum and exam has been just as tough as you might imagine. Many problems remain. Some schools are going to find this difficult. But you know what: we’re just going to get on with it and make it work. I think that’s what parents and pupils would expect from us and, damn it, they’d be right too. It’s our job to “deliver” and so we will. As I say, you never hear this from them, do you?[…] Anne Ballinger, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, adds: “There are reports of teachers lying awake at night with worry. They are working all day Sunday. They are talking about a lack of direction and a lack of any sort of collaboration with others. The response has been: ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ ” […]Russell and the EIS are now set for more talks this week, with the education secretary having pledged to offer more support to any school which feels it needs it. The EIS, however, says it will not be fobbed off with good intentions. Flanagan says: “We are looking for hard cash on the table. The key thing is how do you create time for teachers to do the development work on this. It comes down to staffing and giving schools some extra time.”
So I’m with Kate Higgins on this: the teaching unions’ may have some reasonable concerns but the way they talk about this or almost any other reform reduces whatever latent sympathy one might have for their troubles. Teachers, reasonably, want to enjoy a high social status. Fine. But with that comes responsibility and part of that, in their case, is spending more time teaching and less time whining.
One last thing: KH correctly criticises the press for swallowing teaching union propaganda. The EIS relased a “major poll” concluding (astonishingly!) that 70% of their members consider themselves too feeble (not their term) to make the new curriculum work for S3 and in time for the new National examinations in 2014. In fact this was a self-selecting survey f 27% of the EIS’s membership and thus necessarily biased towards union activists and perennial malcontents. Not a useless survey by any means but not as dispositive as it was reported.
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