In their report Improving Scotland’s Schools, published in 2015, the OECD wrote that “Scotland has a historic high regard for education”.
It praised many aspects of the Scottish system, and noted that “learners are enthusiastic and motivated, teachers are engaged and professional, and system leaders are highly committed”.
In response, our first minister Nicola Sturgeon acknowledged that there was much to celebrate in the report, but that this positive picture was not universal, and that for many young people, particularly those living in poverty, schools were not getting it right.
She asked that her government be judged on its ability to close the attainment gap that blights the life chances of far too many children, families and communities.
As a result, the Scottish government has published the National Improvement Framework, and has launched the Scottish Attainment Challenge, focused on supporting pupils in the local authorities with the highest concentrations of deprivation.
This political commitment has been welcomed by the education community, but the specific strategies to deliver it have met with strong opposition from many teachers, trade unions and local authorities.
For the last two years, SELMAS (Scottish Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society) has held seminars, roundtables and discussion groups to consider issues related to educational inequity, a condition that has bedeviled our schools for many years.
We have spoken to international experts, local authorities, university colleagues and many, many teachers. What follows is a personal reflection on what I have learned.
From its inception, Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) had a clear and unblinking focus on curriculum content. National agencies such as Education Scotland were generous in the production and dissemination of curricular guidelines, learning and teaching resources, implementation workshops, advice and guidance, etc.
Much less attention was given to the implications for teachers, who were required to build and develop new cultures of learning, new methodologies and new relationships with their pupils.
As we near the end of the implementation phase of CfE, there is an opportunity to enter a new phase. I would argue that this regeneration should have at its centre strategies to build the confidence and competence of teachers.
We have a workforce that presents as feeling harassed and overwhelmed. Our local authorities in Scotland are struggling with significant financial cuts, and school leaders report that this has had a negative effect on the budget available to support teacher professional learning.
This summer, the Scottish Qualifications Authority published findings based on visits to a number of schools in which they report that the current assessment regime is “unsustainable in its current form”.
Pupils said they “felt like drowning” in the face of over-assessment, and almost all teachers said they did not feel that unit assessments improved learning, but were a “never-ending” chore.
We know that the workplace is changing rapidly and there is some evidence that by the middle of this century, automation will overtake almost half of existing jobs.
To flourish in this new world, young people will need different capacities and skills. They will require the new basics of empathy, problem-solving, resilience and the ability to think critically and creatively as Professor Brian Boyd describes in his paper A Common Weal Education.
They will need to work and learn collaboratively, and to exercise the higher-order skills of creating, analysing and evaluating. There is evidence that many educators have not yet fully embraced the implications of these changes for classroom practices.
The time is right for a radical overhaul of the ways in which we develop and support our teachers.
Further improvement in pupil performance requires that we invest in help for our teachers to move the focus from curriculum content – what is taught – on to better and more creative understanding of pedagogy and methodology.
We need to learn from research which suggests that the most successful teacher development is local, contextualised and collaborative, and reject the pervasive model of central “experts” training school-based colleagues.
Many schools have made an impact on the underperformance of children from poorer backgrounds by celebrating and sharing the success of colleagues in their own school and community who have introduced successful interventions.
They acknowledge that the experts in how to achieve best results in their own area are those who have invested in that area as employers, educators, social workers or as local residents, and that the greatest success for young people might lie more in their progress with personal attributes and capabilities than with their success in national examinations alone.
In this context, furthering teachers’ academic credentials may not be the best way to improve their classroom skills, and the current drive towards more Master’s-level learning for teachers, for example, may not be the most productive way to achieve real change.
In 2013, Reform Scotland published By Diverse Means; Improving Scottish education. It noted that the lack of diversity in Scottish schools impeded change and growth, and described the culture of the system as being “hierarchical” and therefore disempowering.
It found that constructive criticism was neither sought nor valued, and the profession as a whole could be described as compliant and passive.
The Commission suggested that uniformity in the school system suited the majority of school pupils, but it was clear that it was not meeting the needs of all. In education, as in so many aspects of life, one size really does not fit all.
The reality is that a significant number, perhaps as many as a quarter of secondary pupils, are disengaging from traditional school models of learning, often in the early teenage years, and particularly if they are living in communities where ambitions are restricted and families feel disempowered in terms of employment and social engagement.
The cost of this disengagement is massive, not just in terms of the impact on the lives of these young people and their families, but also in terms of wider society as many of those who fail to engage with education might well end up requiring state support in terms of benefits, criminal justice interventions and health care.
Closing the gap for these youngsters requires that we move from complacency to creativity in meeting their needs.
International research tells us that the current focus on managing, monitoring and measuring teacher performance is unlikely to bring about the transformational change that is required.
Rather we need to build a system that trusts teachers and is based on local collaboration and shared resourcing.
For this to succeed we must redirect investment from content-based national guidance documents and events to those which are owned, developed and evaluated by local communities.
And as a priority we need to undertake an independent evaluation of the impact on pupil learning of CfE and of Education Scotland, to ensure we are travelling together in the right direction.
- Margaret Alcorn was a teacher for many years and was the first ever Scottish national CPD co-ordinator in 2004. She is now the Convener of SELMAS, the Scottish Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society. Visit https://welcometoselmas.wordpress.com