TEACHERS are to vote on whether they should cut the time they spend in the classroom to 17.5 hours a week to free them up for marking and preparing lessons.
The EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union, will debate the calls during its three-day annual general meeting in Perth this week.
It comes after teachers won a 13 per cent pay increase, staggered over three years, following a lengthy campaign and threats of strike action.
A motion from EIS local associations in Glasgow and South Lanarkshire insists workload and helping children with
additional support needs (ASN) are “still major causes of stress for teachers”.
They are calling on trade unions to campaign to reduce class sizes to a maximum of 20 in all mainstream classes, while also pushing “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.
Practical subjects should have classes with no more than 20 pupils, it states.
It wants these changes to be “progressed on an incremental basis” so they are fully in place by August 2025. The motions will be put to a vote during the EIS
meeting in Perth, which gets under way on Thursday.
General secretary Larry Flanagan said this year’s event will focus on issues such as “tackling severe workload, reducing class sizes, and improving ASN provision” following the successful pay campaign.
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