Edinburgh teachers set to escalate row after council rejects plea for home learning for last two days of term

Teachers argue home learning for the last two days of term would have helped combat the spread of Covid

The EIS teachers' union had argued the move for Monday and Tuesday next week would help cut the risk of spreading the virus and families having to cancel Christmas arrangements at the last minute, but the council said public health advice was pupils should remain in school.

EIS Edinburgh secretary Alison Murphy said the issue had "crystallised the fear and anger" many teachers had felt for months.

Now the union has launched a ballot of its over 3000 members in Edinburgh on whether to declare a trade dispute.

Alison Murphy says the refusal to move to remote learning crystallises the fear and anger teachers have felt for some time

Ms Murphy said: "Assuming we get approval, it means we are formalising with Edinburgh that things have become intolerable and members need concrete action."

She pointed to a rising number of Covid cases in schools; a lack of physical distancing in schools; an extra burden of supervision because of staggered breaks and lunches; and an increase in workload because of assessments replacing exams.

She said if issues were not addressed, the next step could be to move to industrial action. "We really, really don’t want to go down that route. What we want is to be able to do our jobs safely without sacrificing our health, mental or physical, and to be able to give the best to the kids because their experience at the moment is not good either and it's going to get worse as more and more staff get ill."

Rejecting a move to home learning, education convener Ian Perry said the council would be forever grateful to staff who had “worked tirelessly in these times for the sake of our pupils”, but the advice was schools should stay open because the controlled environment was preferable to social mixing.

He added: “We were also concerned that a change to school holidays at this late stage and at such short notice, would create significant difficulties and disruption for working families and single parents and carers to their childcare arrangements.”

But Ms Murphy wrote back saying staff would be “angry and upset” at the decision.

"The overwhelming feeling I have been getting from members is that we are, in public, the recipients of many fine words, but that privately the views of fringe groups such as [parent campaigners] UsForThem carry far more weight, and that decisions are not being driven by science, nor by care for vulnerable pupils, but by political expediency.”

And she claimed “constant discussion about vulnerable pupils and the desire to support those in poverty” was “rubbing further salt into the wounds”.

"After all, who is it but teachers who have, for years, being putting their own hands into their pockets to make up the deficiencies in the support available to those families; who have been doing thousands of hours of unpaid overtime to offer extra support to our pupils; who have been doing work that properly belongs to other support agencies who have themselves been devastated by cuts; who have been trying to keep a consistently underfunded school system going when the only thing that seems to increase is the level of expectation being placed on us."

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