I echo Judith Williams’s point. It is a problem to do with change, direction and perhaps leadership—I do not necessarily mean in the school; I am talking about beyond the school, I guess in SQA and with whoever is making decisions about curriculum for excellence.
It is not that teachers have a particular issue with change; they want change that makes sense. They are intelligent, rational, professional people, and they feel that the current changes are taking them away from all the things that the committee has heard about from this panel and the previous one. Teachers want to be in the classroom, but the changes are taking them away from the classroom.
By the way, even though there have been changes, there will be still more change, because the situation is still not right. Teachers see the prospect of further change and say, “I’m backing off from this.” Someone who is at the point at which their pension plan is sitting nicely is able to leave, which might explain why people at the top end of the age range are thinking of leaving.
Another issue is salary and opportunities for promotion. When the McCrone arrangements came in, principal and assistant principal teachers were taken away and there was a move towards having faculties and faculty heads. That was a major change, and my school was one of the first to make it. There are implications for workload. For example, I am in charge of a technology faculty. I look after computing, what we call techie, and business. I am in charge of 17 to 20 different courses. It is my business to manage requisition, deal with teachers, including probationers and student teachers, and do all the things that go with that—but then a change is put in place, and it is followed by another, and on and on it goes.
As someone pointed out, there is no way that all the work can fit into our contractual hours. If teachers pulled out of doing most of the things that they are trying hard to keep up with because they trust that everything will come right, the changes would just fall flat on their faces. There is fantastic goodwill from teachers in trying to deal with workload. There is also the possibility that teachers will not be promoted, because the people are not there to do it. It is about money and workload.