GTCS under pressure as misconduct cases soar

The number of complaints that Scotland’s teaching watchdog is dealing with has rocketed over the past few years, with an increasing number coming from members of the public, TESS can reveal.

In three years, conduct cases - which make up the bulk of the fitness-to-teach cases and can involve anything from teachers helping pupils to cheat in exams to teachers’ sexually inappropriate behaviour - have almost doubled from 64 to 122.

Complaints from members of the public about teachers have risen over the same period, from 30 to 52.

And the General Teaching Council for Scotland, which has the responsibility for regulating teachers’ professional conduct and competence, has projected that conduct cases will continue to rise by 10 per cent each year until 2019-20.

Ken Muir, the body’s chief executive, said that the increase in complaints was in line with other regulatory bodies and was not about more teachers behaving badly. Societal changes were to blame, he added.

We lived in a litigious society, Mr Muir said, and the rise of electronic communication has had made it easier to make complaints to regulatory bodies, like GTCS.

The rise in use of social media, meanwhile, had also led to a whole new kind of case coming before the council.

Mr Muir said: “We live in an increasingly litigious society. People are looking for some form of outcome or justice when they have a complaint, which makes them more likely to pursue a complaint with a body like ourselves than five or 10 years ago.”

Now, to cope with its increasing caseload and also to address concerns about the stress and anxiety caused by the time it takes to conclude complaints against teachers, the GTCS has published plans to cut its fitness-to-teach processes “from years to months”.

The long wait for justice

Currently, it can take anything up to two years for the GTCS to decide whether a teacher should face sanction, but the body hopes to introduce changes next year that will reduce this period to as little as three months.

These plans were welcomed by Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS. Assistant secretary Drew Morrice said: “It has been a significant frustration to the union that some cases have taken many years to be processed, so we are glad that they are looking at this. For some people the time it takes to get an outcome can be extremely stressful.”

The union has also called for the reforms to include changes to the way that teachers who had experienced “a degree of mental breakdown” were then removed from the register. Such teachers should not have to go through the usual fitness-to-teach process, Mr Morrice said.

‘The time it takes to get an outcome can be extremely stressful’

The GTCS is consulting until the end of November on the changes it is proposing, which it hopes to introduce in the middle of 2017.

The organisation currently deals with competence and conduct cases in the same way, but in the future it wants to process them differently. In cases of teacher competence, the GTCS wants fully fledged teachers to go through the same process that probationer teachers go through if their employers believe they are not up to the job.

This would mean a less adversarial process and a more coherent approach to evidence-gathering across councils, the GTCS said.

However, the GTCS only hears four to seven competence cases a year, with conduct cases making up the vast majority of its fitness-to-teach workload - and these are only going to increase.

Speeding up the process

When it comes to processing these cases more quickly, the GTCS believes that a number of small changes will add up to a big time reduction. It plans to:

* Make its investigation process more flexible and enable officials to throw a case out at any stage. At the moment, only the investigating panels convened roughly once a month can make that decision.

* Offer teachers the chance to agree to a range of outcomes without going to a full hearing, from a reprimand with consent to removal from the register with consent.

Jennifer Macdonald, GTCS senior legal adviser and head of adjudication services, said: “This is about little bits of time that tick on or cases that sit in the system that could be cleared out at an earlier stage.”

Jim Thewliss, general secretary of School Leaders Scotland, welcomed the planned changes to the procedure.

Being stuck in a process for 18 months to two years was in no one’s best interest, he said. However, it was also important that people knew their case was being taken seriously and not rushed through the system.

“Each case has to be seen on its own merits and this process does allow that to happen,” Mr Thewliss said.

The consultation on fitness-to-teach changes can be found on the GTCS website