SCOTTISH teachers only won their substantial pay rise by threatening to strike, Education Institute of Scotland (EIS) general secretary Larry Flanagan said today.

The union leader addressed the EIS annual general meeting after teachers voted to accept a salary increase of 3 per cent, 7 per cent and 3 per cent over three years.

“I said last year at AGM that it’s not enough to have the arguments, not enough to have the moral high ground, not enough to have sympathetic voices off stage,” Mr Flanagan told delegates. 

“We were clear from the beginning the Scottish government would only concede our claim if they believed that our threat of strike action was real and that was exactly the case.”

He said that when members had voted to reject “what was not a bad offer,” they showed their resolve.

It was not just that “a clear majority showed they were willing to take strike action,” Mr Flanagan said, but they did so “in numbers that made it clear that the Scottish government could not rely on the Tory strike thresholds” to quash the dispute.

“Strike action is always a last resort, but trade unions must be prepared to fight when it is required – and we demonstrated that the EIS was willing to do so,” he said.

Mr Flanagan also revealed that the union had increased its membership by 3,987 since starting its pay campaign in January last year.

This brings EIS membership to 58,851, which he said was “the highest membership figure we’ve had in quite some time,” with “as many members under the age of 40 as we have over that age.”