Scotland’s new education secretary has promised teachers extra in-service days to help implement curriculum reforms.

Màiri McAllan, who was appointed two weeks ago as Jenny Gilruth’s replacement, told Scotland’s biggest teaching union, the EIS, that she would meet its demands for more in-service days.

Addressing delegates at the EIS annual general meeting in Dundee on Thursday evening, Ms McAllan said she was “committing today to the in-service days”.

The aim is to help teachers respond to the ongoing Curriculum Improvement Cycle, or CIC, crucial details of which are due to be published this month.

Extra in-service days ‘will be structured’

In June 2025, Ollie Bray, the Education Scotland strategic director leading the CIC, argued for more in-service days so that teachers could engage with the “sharing, learning and adopting” of the changes, anticipated to begin during the second half of 2027-28 and continue for a number of years.

The education secretary could not yet tell the EIS how many extra in-service days there would be, only that the number and frequency would be confirmed at a later date.

Ms McAllan did, however, promise that the new in-service days “will be structured and they’ll be meaningful, and you’ll get to use them to the best effect in order for you to be prepared”. This commitment drew applause from the AGM floor.

Contact time ‘top of my agenda’

Ms McAllan said that another big priority for the EIS, reduced class-contact time, was “at the top of my agenda” and would “have to be the subject of intense conversation”.

The 2021 SNP manifesto commitment to reduce teachers’ class-contact time from 22.5 to 21 hours a week is finally due to be put into practice over the coming years, although the EIS is pushing to get the time down to 20 hours.

The education secretary addressed a number of other issues during her speech and while taking questions from several delegates, including the rising number of pupils with additional support needs.

She said that “commitment to mainstreaming remains absolutely unwavering”.

She was asked about eight years of EIS surveys and reports on the “sustained levels of violent and abusive behaviour towards teaching staff” in Aberdeen, and whether she would back a “national entitlement to instant support for any teacher assaulted or abused at work”.

While she was generally careful not to make any firm commitments on the issues raised by delegates, on violence in schools, Ms McAllan did say that “nobody should have to go to work feeling threatened” and that she had been reading up on the background to the Aberdeen situation.

Mobile phones and in-person teaching

The education secretary also said she was “really passionate” about dealing with the impact of mobile phones in schools. Earlier in the week - in her first major statement to Parliament as education secretary - Ms McAllan had confirmed that the government wanted to establish a statutory basis for “phone-free schools”.

She came out strongly for in-person teaching, too, after being asked about “a culture where councils are developing and promoting live online teaching and learning”.

She said that the “teacher-pupil relationship is the foundation of education” and questioned to what extent online teaching filled gaps in teaching provision or created and legitimised them.

The rise of online teaching in recent years has coincided with severe shortages of teachers in certain subjects.