News Story

Teachers to be reballoted after turnout means EIS fails to win strike mandate

A majority of EIS members voting backed strike action over `excessive´ teacher workloads, but the turnout was not high enough.

Scotland’s largest teaching union is to reballot members as part of a dispute over “excessive” workloads with the union also hitting out at “restrictive” laws which meant it failed to win a mandate for strike action.

A total of 85.9% of EIS members who voted backed strike action, but with less than 47% of members taking part in the vote, it cannot go ahead with industrial action.

With current UK laws requiring at least half of all union members to take part in a ballot before action can take place, EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley said the result was “disappointing”.

She insisted that despite “very strong” numbers being in favour of industrial action “our ballot has fallen victim to a highly restrictive element of trade union legislation that is soon to be repealed”.

She added that while legislation passed by the Labour Westminster government would “remove many of the more restrictive elements of trade union law”, the current “excessively strict thresholds that are a lingering legacy of the previous UK government ” remain in place.

A special meeting of the EIS executive body on Thursday agreed that teachers will be balloted again on the issue, with Ms Bradley stressing the need to “reduce excessive teacher workload”.

The EIS general secretary said both the local government organisation Cosla and the Scottish Government had “made promises to Scotland’s teachers and pupils that action would be taken to employ additional teachers, reduce teachers’ class contact time, cut teacher workload and create a better working environment for teachers and pupils alike”.

She said: “We cannot let the politicians off the hook on their promises and we cannot take our collective foot off the gas in our workload campaign.”

She insisted it was “no coincidence” that the recent Scottish Budget saw Finance Secretary Shona Robison make “specific reference to additional money going to local authorities to enable the class contact time promise to be met”.

The EIS entered into a formal dispute with the Scottish Government and Cosla in February last year over the failure to deliver a commitment made in the 2021 SNP manifesto to cut teachers’ classroom time.

Ms Bradley declared: “We must keep the pressure on and we must ask our members to vote again on industrial action, and in even greater numbers, to ensure that we can hold the politicians to account and continue to demand that, at last, they deliver on their own promises to Scottish education, its pupils and its teachers.”