Scottish teachers warn SNP Named Person role means less time in classroom
Teachers have warned the Named Person role means them spending less time in the classroom Credit: PA
Simon Johnson, Scottish Political Editor
10 September 2017 • 9:00pm
National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT)
Scotland's teachers face being forced to cut the amount of time they spend in the classroom after they take on the duties of filling the SNP's controversial Named Person scheme, the country's largest teaching union has warned a Holyrood inquiry.
The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) said a physics teacher in a deprived area could end up being the Named Person (NP) for more than 200 children and "is likely to have less time available for the teaching of physics than prior to the introduction of the NP service."
Additional staff will be required to fill in while teachers assess the "wellbeing" of each child, decide whether to share information about them with other agencies and the "wider legal landscape", the union warned.
Although a draft code of practice has been drawn to help guide Named Persons in their new role, a second teaching union told the inquiry it represented nothing more than "a blatant and cynical attempt at buck-passing, where the focus is on protecting Scottish Ministers from further legal action."
The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT)claimed the Scottish Government does not know how to make the role comply with a Supreme Court judgement declaring its original plan unlawful, so has made schools and teachers responsible.
But its submission to Holyrood's education committee warned that teachers could not solve the "puzzle" of compliance with the Data Protection Act "if the highest judicial minds in the UK could not resolve the tensions."
Among the other groups to express concerns about the scheme, in a series of last-minute submissions to the committee, were Scottish Women's Aid (SWA), which expressed concerns that "non-statutory" Named Persons are already inappropriately sharing information about children with the perpetrators of domestic abuse.
John Swinney, the Scottish Education Minister Credit: PA
SNP ministers originally introduced the scheme, which assigns a 'state guardian' for every child, to identify at-risk children earlier. Health visitors will assume the role for pre-school children and teachers for older youngsters.
But they were forced to put the scheme on hold and drastically water down its information-sharing powers after the UK Supreme Court ruled that it breached parents' human rights, confidentiality laws and data protection.
John Swinney, the Education Minister, unveiled a new Bill scrapping a statutory duty for state guardians to share information and replacing it with a responsibility to consider whether doing so would help a child's wellbeing.
However, a draft code of practice published alongside the legislation made clear that Named Persons "must be able to justify the interference" to the right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and Data Protection Act.
The warning from the EIS comes amid a major teacher recruitment crisis in some areas of the country, with more than 500 vacancies unfilled according to figures published last month.
The union warned that complying with the scheme would have "implications" for teachers' time, especially for those who work in schools with a large number of pupils with "needs". It cited the example of a physics teacher in a secondary school serving a deprived area.
This "will take Named Persons away from the classroom or from other duties such as in the case of Primary Headteachers. In the case of the secondary example, the gap would require to be filled with additional teaching staff whose specialism is physics."
The NASUWT said that attempting to comply with data protection by stating teachers should consider sharing information about a child "seems to be a very crude and ill-thought-out way of attempting to address the concerns raised by the Supreme Court regarding confusion."
"This approach will simply make schools and teachers responsible for resolving the Supreme Court's 'logical puzzle' in respect of the read-across between the Named Person requirements and the DPA, presumably because the Scottish Government does not know how the puzzle can be resolved in practice," it said.
The UK Supreme Court ruled the original Named Person plan was unlawful Credit: Nick Edwards
In a damning indictment of how the scheme deals with domestic abuse, the SWA submission said: "There have been extremely concerning cases where a Named Person has inappropriately shared information with a perpetrator about their child accessing Women's Aid services, thereby increasing the risk to the child and their mother and leading to children being prevented from accessing specialist Women's Aid services and support."
A Scottish Government spokesman said the new Bill "fully addresses the issues raised by the UK Supreme Court" and "will bring consistency, clarity and coherence to the sharing of information about children's and young people's wellbeing."
He added: "We will provide full support to all practitioners who are involved in implementing this legislation, which is intended to promote early intervention in order to prevent problems from escalating."