Quick- do nothing!
The new Education (Scotland) Bill is designed to look like steps are being taken- but in reality it’s the status quo with a haircut.
I was asked to write a comment piece this week in the Daily Mail about the new Education Bill (Scotland) currently ploughing through the Scottish Parliament. You can find the piece that made it to press here. It was edited down from a slightly different piece I wrote which I thought was worth posting here.
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Unless you are the Education (Scotland) Bill, in which case the answer seems to be ‘perhaps if I dig deep enough I’ll find the answers in Australia,’ and ‘this spade seems a little small for my liking.’
It’s meant to be a solution to the problems in Scottish education, a system that has gone from being world class, to one that is a warning to other nations of what not to do. There is a crisis in school behaviour; teachers are striking because they feel they can’t cope with the rising tide of aggression and defiance. The attainment gap has become a canyon; Scotland’s performance in international league tables like PISA now tracks its performance in international football tournaments, especially for the least advantaged students. Literacy and numeracy has declined. We are not, it is safe to say, in a Golden Age. But education can be the engine of a child’s future, and therefore of society’s success. Get it right, and all else follows. The link between a student’s success at school and their later life opportunities, affluence, life span and outcomes, has been thoroughly demonstrated.
What Scotland needs is a revolution of how we train teachers, manage and run schools, and teach in the classroom. Instead, we have this bill, which feels like an attempt to make the metaphor of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic seem radical. We have the incredibly named Curriculum for Excellence, which is neither a curriculum nor excellent. Unlovely and unloved by teachers, mystifying to deliver, devoid of clear direction and content, leaning on the grooviest and most inane educational cliches, built in a laboratory, but unable to be implemented in a classroom. It needs to be weighted with chains and dropped into the deepest part of the Atlantic. You don’t improve a tinfoil sword, you replace it completely. The CfE has not worked and cannot work, but because everyone has invested so much in it, no one can bear to admit it. But sunk costs remain sunk costs, however much you pour into the pit.
We have the current Scottish Qualifications Authority to be replaced by…a new body called Qualifications Scotland. What bold new strategy will this reform focus on? It will introduce a ‘Learners Charter’ and. ‘Teachers’ and Practitioners’ Charter,’ to listen more to those voices. To be renewed every five years. Ah yes, that’ll do the trick. I’m glad I’ll be alive to see that, really something to tell the kids about when they’re older. Students’ voices matter, but the idea that if we ask enough of them, they’ll come up with the answers adults lack, is just a bizarre and heroically pointless strategy to drive improvement. And while I also hugely endorse the general principle of seeking Teacher Voice, I have little confidence that this will be anything more than a way to demonstrate that ‘we have listened to stakeholders and they absolutely love what we are doing.’
Worse, there appears to be an appetite for making this new body about reducing the number of assessments that students sit on the spurious grounds that they don’t meet all learner’s vague needs, or cause stress, despite the fact that anything else you replace them with is hugely less fair than exams, less reliable as a judgement on their ability, and vastly more discriminatory to less advantaged children. Plus, the stress children feel sitting them is directly proportional to a) how well we teach them and b) how much pressure we put on them to feel stressed. Reducing the number of exams is exactly the opposite direction in which we need to go.
One area that might have the potential to improve matters is in the creation of a yet another new body (the Office of His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Scotland) based on an old and existing body operating under the umbrella of Education Scotland. One important criticism of the latter is that it’s an obvious conflict of interest, to be inspecting and judging schools that you were also supporting. The new body will in theory have more independence and take more of a leadership role in setting priorities. This can have impact, as long as HMCI can be genuinely independent from the broader apparatus of Scottish educational bureaucracy, which is not guaranteed. We also have no detail about how these inspections will be carried out, what they will be based on etc. A lot rests on what its framework looks like. What schools are judged on has an enormous impact on what they do- see England for details- so if this body manages to be truly based on the science of learning and what we know about well-run schools then it could be a game changer. Or it could enforce the current mediocrity.
Education Scotland, soon to be liberated from the onerous burden of marking its own jotters will then be free to focus on curriculum design itself and professional development. If that meant that it would burn CfE to the ground and salt the ashes upon which it stood, that would be great, but I won’t. If it meant that teacher training would be rebuilt from the ground up to focus on the practical skills and knowledge teachers need to manage challenging behaviour, and evidence informed ways to help children learn and understand and grow then that would be wonderful. But unless it is forced to do so, we can expect a continuation of what has been going on for years, which the opposite of what is needed.
The attempt to pass this off as revolution, let alone the improvement of a system whose engine has completely seized up, is as unconvincing as the gendarme from ‘All ‘Allo and as superficial as Clark Kent throwing on a pair of spectacles. Gok Wan himself could not glow this up. Scottish schools are begging for substantial change, leadership and hope., This bill isn’t it.