A leading think tank has proposed merging school in-service days and reducing teachers’ holidays from 13 to 12 weeks.
The Centre for Scottish Public Policy (CSPP) has suggested in-service training days, which are held throughout the school year, should be lumped together reducing disruption for parents and giving teachers 12 weeks’ holiday instead of 13. David Farmer of the Fife branch of the Educational Institute of Scotland, has given a lukewarm reaction to the suggestion.
He said the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA) had approached the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT) with a “shopping list” of proposals for changes in working conditions, but the CSPP’s suggestion was not one of them.
Although he did not rule out the change to holidays, he said teachers would have to be given plenty of notice if it is brought in.Influence”People are going to come out with these statements in the run up to the review because they think it’s good publicity and it might get a hearing from someone who might be able to influence a change in the system,” he said.
“I think that proposal might not go down well with a lot of teachers. It would have to be negotiated on a national level and I wouldn’t like to speculate how that would go, although there would have to be quite a long timescale so they are not implementing something when people have already made arrangements.”
He added, “I wouldn’t like to say that’s not acceptable, but for it to happen there would have to be negotiations within the SNCT. As far as we’re aware this is not one of the things up for discussion by the SNCT.”
Meanwhile, Dundee City Council has confirmed it is not considering the CSPP’s idea, and that it has already agreed its schedule of in-service days up until the end of the 2012-13 term.
Photo used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user eriwst.