By Grant Smith, education reporter

SCOTTISH TEACHERS want to limit the number of foreign pupils in their classes because of the pressure of coping with large numbers who speak little or no English.

Delegates at the EIS teaching union conference in Perth at the weekend backed a call to seek a national agreement to set an unspecified maximum for mainstream classes and a separate motion to restrict the number in additional support needs units to ten.

Immigration has been boosted in recent years by the Executive’s Fresh Talent scheme and by the influx of migrant workers from eastern Europe, many of whom have brought their families with them.

According to the EIS, the strain is starting to show in the classroom and action is needed to stop teachers being overwhelmed by the demands of foreign children who need extra help.

Teacher Marjorie Bell said, “There is a crying need in mainstream schools for a limit on the number of children who don’t speak English.”

Another teacher told the conference of having Polish, Slovakian, Somali and Iraqi pupils in her P5 class, none of whom had been to a bilingual unit beforehand.

Without help to improve their English, pupils were finding it difficult to make progress in other subjects.

However, even specialist units were now having problems coping in the absence of a formal limit on numbers.

One delegate from Glasgow spoke of units “full to overflowing—there may be up to 20 children speaking as many languages.”

The union’s ruling council will now be seeking to negotiate with ministers and council chiefs to try to agree maximums for foreign pupils who are new to English.

Secondary school teachers have also called for a change in their working patterns to guarantee they have class-free time each day to carry out lesson preparation and correct pupils’ work.

Bruce Lowrie, from Edinburgh, said that having one class after another for the whole working day could see teachers having to cope with about 150 pupils.

“Having no non-contact time during the day can be incredibly stressful,” he said.

Edinburgh colleague Linda Richardson said, “We need a bit of reasonableness and common sense, so the timetable suits the teachers and not the system.”

Union leadership managed to convince members not to support a proposed “campaign of non-co-operation” over class sizes, which could have seen teachers refuse to take P1 classes with more than 25 pupils or S1 and S2 English and maths classes with more than 20 pupils from the start of the 2007/08 term.

A motion by Edinburgh teachers calling for the industrial action was described by former EIS president Jack Barnett as a “serious mistake” at a time when a record number of teachers would be going into classrooms after the summer.

Delegate Eric Baillie, a member of the union’s salaries committee, helped to head off a revolt over pay.

Motions were proposed calling for all future pay deals to cover one year only and for any increase to be equally divided so that all teachers— no matter what their salary and grade—would get exactly the same amount of money added to their pay packets.

Mr Baillie said that in 20 years as an official he had never heard any disquiet about increases being based on a fixed percentage of salary.

He added that the union should not be locked into a particular negotiating strategy because it was not possible to assume that a single-year pay deal would always be best.