Transcriber: Denise Anagnostou Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
Good evening, everyone.
There's nothing like being put on the spot, I suppose.
I thought I'd begin by establishing the level of expertise in the audience.
How many of you have children?
Right.
How many of you have been a child?
(Laughter)
Right.
So we're going to assume
that the level of expertise for any talk of education
is fairly high in this audience.
What I want to talk about
is the current challenge facing Scottish school education.
The part of the difficulty with this challenge
is defining exactly what it is.
It used to be the case that we thought that was the issue.
[Equality, equity]
We now realise that this is the issue.
[Reality]
What we do about it, of course, is quite a different thing.
But if there's one thing that Scottish education needs
it's some way of dealing with the gap
between the least and the most advantaged in our society.
Now, I've been in education for over 40 years,
and that gap hasn't closed.
So, there's something incredibly important facing our society
that hardly a day goes by
where it's not at some level or another on the Scottish news.
But I do think part of the difficulty we have is framing the question:
'What is it that we're trying to do?'
And when we come to that, we have to decide, What are the solutions?
My suggestion is
that a large part of the problem is the culture of Scottish schools.
It's the culture of conformity
that stifles innovation, that in fact promotes orthodoxy,
and often that orthodoxy masquerades as a kind of recycled system
that claims that it is new.
But the culture of conformity is quite oppressive in Scottish education,
and if you think it's nothing to do with you,
then just consider for a minute the state of Scottish schools.
These two images, I think, sum up the state of Scottish schools.
I've been a head teacher for 20 years; I can get away with that picture.
Part of the difficulty, I think, we have is
that we have a system that's far too uniform
for the 21st century.
Of the 365 secondary schools in Scotland,
364 - all but one which is an exception for historical reasons -
are governed in exactly the same way.
In fact, they're governed by the way they were governed in 1918:
by local authorities when the current system was set up.
In 1918, there were, in fact, 36 local authorities.
We've got that down to 32 at the moment.
But part of the difficulty is that system, when it comes to introducing change,
does it in a lockstep fashion.
We don't have individual schools piloting things.
Everyone has to do it at the same time.
And that, I think, is understandable if you're looking for standardisation
and equality,
but what it does is it robs the system of learning experiences
because the system is so uniform that sharing good practice
is pretty much tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic
in the hope that you'll miss the iceberg of social injustice.
When it comes to school leadership,
it seems to me that school leaderships are obsessed with the norms.
What's happened recently in Curriculum for Excellence is
head teachers have been worried sick, some terrified,
that their school will be seen as different from the norm.
Because if you step outside the norm you run the risk of being poorly rated
in your next HMI inspection.
So, that culture of conformity, I think, has not served the least advantaged.
But it's worse than that because we accept statements like,
'The core business of schools is learning and teaching.'
Right, of course.
Learning and teaching, one would hope, goes on in schools.
But the core business of schools being learning and teaching
has led to a culture
where teachers think a lot of the things that impact on a child's education
are not their business.
So, if we take Alexander Scott, who was a Scottish poet in the 1960s,
we can trace this back as far as Alexander Scott,
who summed up Scottish education in a two-line poem
which I'd like to present to you in its entirety.
Alexander Scott said,
'That Scottish education.'
He titled that poem 'Scottish Education'.
The point about it is that it's teacher-centric,
and if you think that kind of thing has changed,
I'd ask you to consider this.
A first-year pupil, Heather, in a Scottish secondary school,
is given a task in English to write from personal experience:
'Write about the street where you live.'
Heather's answer is, 'My street is full of empty cans,
durty needels and sweaty rapers.'
Now, the pedagogical approach to that,
the idea that it's about learning and teaching
says the problem here is Heather's spelling.
The fact that she may live in an environment
frequented by alcoholics and drug addicts
is not the teacher's business,
because the expertise is about learning and teaching,
and therefore, that's the way it should be approached.
Tom Leonard, a Glasgow writer writing in the 1970s,
made a similar type of comment on the Scottish curriculum.
He said, and I quote, 'By the time I was eight,
I could tell the difference between an elephant and a giraffe,
between a lion and a tiger, between a rhinoceros and a zebra',
and then he ended his essay, published in Scottish International,
with this phrase:
'But as regards the animal life of Glasgow itself,
well, a cat was a cat,
a dug was a dug, a burd was a burd
and anything smaller was for stamping on.'
Now, the editor of Scottish International,
you will note, chose not to correct Tom Leonard's spelling.
But if you think that has all changed and the modern curriculum is different,
consider this task.
Back to Heather again, who in history is asked to write what she has learned
about William the Conqueror.
Now, Heather's a smart girl with a wide vocabulary,
and she decides to use it,
and correctly referring to William the Conqueror's illegitimacy,
she writes,
'William the Conqueror was a bastard.'
But to let the teacher know that she's not being precocious
and that she's using the word accurately,
she puts in brackets:
(Laughter)
[a real bastard]
Now, the pedagogical approach to that says,
What is appropriate for a first-year girl in a Scottish secondary school to use
as far as vocabulary is concerned in a formal school task?
Is her choice of vocabulary, however accurate, appropriate?
That's to miss the point.
The point, of course, is
how appropriate is it for someone like Heather
who may live in a street frequented by drug addicts
to learn about William the Conqueror at all,
never mind being tested on it.
So we've got a situation, it seems to me,
where if we were to look at where we currently are,
things have moved on.
We now know that there are 10 socioeconomic deciles,
and every school in Scotland now knows precisely
which socioeconomic decile every pupil is in.
The difficulty, of course, is that most schools have no clue
as to what to do with that information
other than to use it to analyse examination performance.
And guess what?
If you're in deciles one, two and three, the lowest 30 percent,
your chances of doing well in national examinations
are massively reduced.
So I've depicted these 10 deciles using Tom Leonard's 10 animals,
and I'm going to invite you to select an animal which best represents you.
Now, once you've done that, here's your test.
[To be fair and equal, everyone must take the same exam: climb that tree.]
Now, that's pretty much the rationale for standardised national testing.
There's something deeply iniquitous about the Scottish system
when we haven't solved even that problem.
It seems to me one of the solutions would be this:
to change the core business,
to shift the emphasis away from learning and teaching in schools
and onto pastoral care.
If you focus on pastoral care,
you're much more responsive to the nature of your intent,
and individual schools ought to have the autonomy
to diverse their responses
in relation to the immediate needs of their own pupils.
The difficulty with that, of course, is
it seems to fly in the face of common sense.
Let's, in fact, be blunt about it.
Scottish schools are dominated by a culture that's so similar
that if we don't do something to widen it,
it will cease to become a learning system.
'Synectic' is a word that William Goodman coins.
I know it's a bit of an ugly word, but it's the best I could come up with
to describe what I think the culture change needs to be.
And we need to have a culture in Scottish education
that accepts diversity and in fact, perhaps, promotes it,
and out of that, we will then develop what will hopefully be a learning system.
There's very little point, it seems to me, in sharing good practice
across the Scottish secondary education system
when most of the practice is so similar.
Scottish education has ceased to become, in many respects, a learning system,
somewhat ironically,
because teachers basically share similar approaches.
The culture, however, will only change if school governments change,
and I think if we could introduce a far higher level of school autonomy,
we would get a wider range of schools.
They would be more responsive, more innovative,
and that could be within a national framework.
The difficulty, it seems to me, is
that Scottish education has focused on strategies,
and the quotation there is from Peter Drucker,
the management guru,
who said, 'Culture eats strategy.'
And that, I have to say, is pretty much my experience with Scottish education.
In fact, I'm almost at the point
where I would say I'm against school improvement.
I'm only against school improvement
because it gets in the way of transformation.
The least advantaged in our schools don't need school improvement.
They need transformation,
and the only way we're going to get that will be if we tackle the culture.
In fact, culture in Scottish schools is barely spoken about,
never mind adopted as a possible route for solution.
We appoint improvement officers; we appoint attainment advisers.
But if you look at Scottish schools,
the pastoral care system that exists in secondary schools
is perfectly capable of being expanded.
And yet, in career terms,
if you're a principal teacher of pastoral care in a Scottish school,
on average, you'll earn 30% less
than a principal teacher of subjects or curricular PTs.
And there are far more of them.
And in fact, in the current situation,
principal teachers of pastoral care are being cut.
So, it does seem to me cultural change is the only way forward.
And I would say finally, just to end -
I might want to quote, or paraphrase, Alexander Scott:
'I've tellt ye.'
(Applause)