The General Teaching Council for Scotland deprecated as a retrograde step a proposal by Mr Gordon Campbell, Secretary of State for Scotland, to accept for teachers’ salary purposes that the honours degrees of all other United Kingdom universities are equivalent in standard to a degree awarded with honours by a Scottish university.
Criticism was confined to BEd degrees awarded with honours in England and Wales. Mr Charles Blacklaw, GTC chairman, said that many of these degrees, some of them of very recent origin, did not match up to the Scottish degree with honours.
Mr George Gray, GTC registrar, said that all English academic degrees with honours were “OK”. What the GTC were worried about was the BEd, an amalgam of academic and educational subjects.
* Edinburgh education committee agreed by 16 votes to six that corporal punishment should not be permitted in primary and special schools, and that in secondary its use be restricted to headteachers and their deputes, who would administer it in private and keep a log.
The EIS responded to the decision almost immediately calling it rash and an affront to the professional dignity of teachers, and questioning its legality. “It is misplaced kindness to deprive (teachers) of the means of maintaining order before equally effective and one would hope, more constructive and lasting remedies are placed at their disposal.”
Mr James Docherty, general secretary of the SSTA, said that councillors tended to get above themselves. Because they were elected by the people, they thought that absolved them from being reasonable employers.
* ”. . . and that corporal punishment in secondary schools be restricted to headteachers and their deputies . . .” From Edinburgh education committee minutes.
TES SCOTLAND, MARCH 10, 1972
