Teachers are being “morally blackmailed” into working excessively long hours for the sake of their pupils, the president of a teaching union has warned.
Stuart Hunter, of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA), will use the union’s annual conference on Friday to demand better support and resources to help teachers manage their growing responsibilities.
He said teachers are often expected to work a “toxic” amount of extra time outside of their contractual 35-hour week, leading to burnout and stress.
But instead of support, Mr Hunter said there is a “programme of systematic budget cuts” and he argued the threat of job cuts can often be used as a “political weapon”.
Cuts to mental health support for pupils, he said, has left teachers to “fill the void”, taking on the job of “social workers and educational psychologists” alongside their teaching responsibilities.
In his address to teachers in Glasgow, he said: “I am certain that many, if not all of you, recognise the sources of work that increase our workload from normal to excessive or toxic.
“We have created a culture whereby teachers cannot say ‘no’ because it will not look good for them, after all, ‘it’s for the sake of the kids’.
“We have been conditioned over the years by moral blackmail to take on more and more work.
“We have been very subtly controlled and coerced into believing that we are letting our students down if we do not take on the additional work for which we are not trained.”
He went on to state: “Why do we allow ourselves to be emotionally blackmailed to the point we damage our own mental health to do the job we love: to making a positive difference through education to the lives of every student we teach.”
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “The Scottish Government recognises and appreciates the hard work of our teachers, which is why we have invested to ensure they are the best paid in the UK.
“Scotland has the lowest pupil teacher ratio of any UK nation and we are offering local authorities £145.5 million in this year’s budget for protecting teacher numbers.
“The Scottish Government is working with the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT) on progressing the commitment to reducing class contact time and ministers are determined that planning for this is based on robust evidence.
“It is vital that school staff are able to access any wellbeing support they might need.
“Since October 2020, we have allocated over £2 million to specifically support the wellbeing of the education workforce.”