Put teachers in charge
For parents like me, Scottish education has been a black box. It's time to give teachers control and open up schools to creativity and innovation.
By Eddie Barnes
THIS summer, my youngest son will finish his time at our local primary school. It is 12 years since his older brother first walked through its doors back in the summer of 2010. Now, in the blink of an eye, me and my wife are going through that disorientating rite of passage that comes to all parents. Without so much as a by your leave our erstwhile little darlings have turned into long-limbed lumps, leaving us to wonder what the heck happened.
I will spare you the details of our mid-life crisis, but our imminent farewell to primary school has left me asking a question. What did they gain from their time? All my three children went to a state school down the road from us on the other side of our local park in Glasgow. Did we give them a decent educational start in life? The disconcerting truth as I look back is that I have no idea what to think at all.
Certainly, all the teachers we’ve met down the years have been to a man and (mostly) woman engaging and enthused by their job. That seems to me to be 90% of the job of running a good school right there. Having contacted Education Scotland in advance of writing this column, I also managed to unearth an out-of-date inspection report from 9 years ago which found that most pupils were happy and that the school was officially “good” or indeed “very good” in some aspects. But this does little to remove my general feeling of numbness. It’s partly my fault: having failed to get involved beyond the odd coffee morning and garden dig, my experience as a parent has been largely as a bystander not a co-educator. Covid changed that a little, as we worked with teachers and got to see just how imaginative and dedicated they were. Since last August, however, it’s been back to normal. The school is a black box: he goes in, six hours later, he comes out. Just like the masks secondary pupils are still being forced to wear, it’s as if a veil has been draped back over the whole business. It all feels highly unsatisfactory.
I come from a family with its fair share of teachers so I know how irritating parents can be sometimes. Based on sample size of 2.5 children, we think we know best. Yet I do believe my own tiny first-hand experience of Scottish education tells a wider story. And that’s not just due to conversations with fellow mystified parents, it’s based on the experience of teachers too. We all seem to lack both knowledge and ownership of our education system.
Partly it’s due to a lack of information. While new primary assessments have now been introduced, the SNP has withdrawn from two out of three international surveys on pupil attainment and abolished the Scottish survey of Literacy and Numeracy. A few years ago, the OECD also noted the absence of any research or evaluation on what is working well in our schools. But it runs deeper than just a data gap. With central government and local authorities in charge, the message runs down to us at the business end that education is something that is handed down to us from on high. This is about control.
Consider testimony to the Scottish parliament last week from Mel Ainscow, a professor of education at Glasgow University. “Scotland is blessed with the most remarkable expertise among the teachers and headteachers” he said, but “frankly you are not getting the best out of it because everything is being dictated either from the centre or from local authority. We have got to give teaching back to the teachers,” he added. After speaking to teachers in Dundee, he told MSPs that headteachers are "frustrated, want more space and they want more control over the budget to create priorities in their own school….schools are so used to the idea that someone is going to tell them what to do, issue another document or guidelines that the priorities tend to be dictated from outside.” Last month, a report by the think-tank Reform Scotland noted how our education system is characterised by a “culture of compliance” in which school leaders are effectively ordered to “take forward the government and local authorities’ agenda rather than meeting teachers’ and schools’ needs as they, themselves, perceive them.” As was reported in yesterday’s Scottish Daily Mail, the grip of central government now extends to blocking the release of a recent OECD draft review into Scottish education under the ludicrous premise that publishing it may damage the UK’s international relations. I have to say I never realised that the SNP were so concerned about protecting the United Kingdom’s international reputation. Pupils may at this point note the irony of being told to sit standardised exams at the end of school by a government that appears to believe it should supress any external assessment on itself.
The result of this culture, I fear, is a kind of mute passivity on behalf of us all, teachers and parents together. As Professor Ainscow suggests, we just wait for somebody to tell us what to do. And this learned helplessness is just fine for the local authorities, central government, and the teaching unions which want to keep their hold on the reigns of power. I find it saddening that very few teachers in Scotland feel able or willing to speak out, just as its sadly typical that anyone who does is seen as a bad egg or, worse, a proponent of “down there” – England, The Land Where Bad Things Happen.
Scotland doesn’t need to adopt English style reforms – indeed, the mania for data and testing over the last decade has caused its own set of problems. What’s required is for our deeply conservative educational establishment to get a rocket, and for power and control to be handed down to schools. As Keir Bloomer, the head of Reform Scotland’s Commission on School Reform put it: “Schools, headteachers and teachers need to be given the freedom to improve the outcomes of their children in a way that local and national governments of all political backgrounds have proven themselves unable to do.” A few years ago, the SNP’s then Education Secretary John Swinney pledged to do so but backed off for fear of upsetting vested interests. I doubt very many people could pick out his successor, Shirley Anne-Sommerville from a line -up, which is exactly the way the SNP want it. Things must be managed, not reformed, you see, if the magic 50.1% support for independence is to be nurtured. So a political party dedicated to the cause of political freedom fails to deliver any meaningful autonomy to the thousands of brilliant teachers across Scotland who, with it, might be able to transform lives and restore this country’s reputation for educational excellence.
Make heads accountable for their schools, hand them budgets, back innovation, create a supportive inspectorate which seeks to encourage them to lead - oh, and insist that dozy parents like me get off their backsides to help as well. As I leave primary schools behind with a gnawing sense of regret, I hope the next generation will find something better.
ENDS