ATL

Scotland

ATL national official for Scotland, Keith Robson, predicts pensions and the McCormac Review will dominate the year ahead

Pensions and the McCormac Review dominate the year ahead I hope you had an enjoyable summer holiday. Hopefully you've returned to school refreshed and ready for the year ahead. You'll need to be as there is a 'gathering storm' (to steal from one of Winston Churchill's book titles).

There are the two big ticket items looming over the horizon: teachers' pensions and the McCormac Review into teacher employment in Scotland. At the time of writing the former is currently in limbo in Scotland as we await the outcome of the negotiations on the Teachers' Pension Scheme in England and Wales between the UK government and the trade unions. ATL is at the heart of those negotiations, working hard to avoid further industrial action and to get the government to enter into meaningful dialogue over the proposed changes to the pension scheme as we did with the previous changes in 2006-07.

If recent media reports are to be believed, some of the 3,000-plus responses to the McCormac Review's call for evidence are quite incendiary. After a decade of peace in the classroom, in industrial relations terms, there is a storm gathering over teachers' pay and conditions. I fear that April's Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers' agreement was only a trial run for a calculated dismantling of the McCrone Agreement. If consensus is not found following the McCormac Review, Scottish education may find itself at the heart of an industrial relations battleground on more than one front.

So welcome back and hang on to your hats; it's going to be a bumpy ride this year.