Created on: 15 Jun 2022
We think every young person deserves a quality education and a qualified and experienced teacher. Dundee is one of the most deprived areas in Scotland. And one in five young people leave school without any qualification at National 5 level.
The best way to improve the attainment gap and make sure every young person has what they need to succeed at school is to put more resources into schools, not less. The council has admitted that, after ten years, these changes will mean an annual cut of £135,263 from the school budget. That’s money that our schools desperately need to do the important work of improving the attainment gap.
Principal teachers currently play a vital role in delivering subject specialist support to other teachers in their departments. Without principal teachers there to provide support and leadership to the department, workload will significantly increase for teachers. That means less time to offer extra one-to-one support and guidance to young people who need it most.
After the hard work and constant changes to ways of working during the last two years of the pandemic, we know that teachers in Dundee are at breaking point.
In a recent EIS survey, nearly a quarter of teachers in Dundee said they have had to seek professional help to manage stress at work, and nearly three quarters of teachers said that inadequate staffing levels were a major cause of additional workload. This chaotic restructure will only make things worse for teachers.
We want every teacher to have the opportunity to develop their leadership skills and find great career opportunities in Dundee. But these changes will mean fewer development opportunities for classroom teachers and will only make the profession less attractive to newly qualified teachers.
Every teacher deserves a say in how their school is run. The council agreed to consult schools about this restructuring proposal but they didn’t like what we had to say. Now, they’re trying to impose a model that has been roundly rejected by our membership in three different ballots.
Secondary teachers are almost unanimously against these proposals.
It’s time to stand up and defend our schools from this chaotic restructure and mismanagement.
The best way to win this campaign and to #StopFaculties once and for all is for every member across Dundee secondary schools to take part in positive and successful collective action.
“The effects of faculties are ongoing and need to be continually challenged. With waves of cuts, faculties have become bigger and more common. The workload implications are huge but often undocumented, as colleagues feel they need to just get on with it. To manage this, standards have inevitably slipped in other areas such as learning and teaching and colleagues’ health and well-being.
“The concept of faculties devalues the teaching profession in an attempt to see teachers as managers instead of subject specialists and leaders in education. And we all know unpromoted staff end up doing the role of a principal teacher unpaid and without management time.”