Last week saw the publication of the first national Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) exams since 2019. 

This week, thousands of staff and pupils are filing back into schools with face masks gathering dust at home and the 3D chess of applying social distancing in cramped classrooms a thing of the past.

In short, many of the outward signs suggest that Covid is over and school life is back to normal.

Except that’s not true: Covid still has the capacity to disrupt, and schools are having to contend with the myriad knock-on effects of the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis presents more challenges for schools to contend with, while the usual mix of concerns that always permeate school life will no doubt also remain ever present.

So, what needs to happen to make 2022-23 - and the years that follow - go as smoothly as possible for schools? 

We asked teachers and teaching representatives around the country exactly that question, and gathered their responses into six key areas: staffing and budgets; wellbeing and mental health; Covid requirements; exams and assessment; learning loss; and pay and conditions.

Here’s what they told us.

Staffing and budgets

The Scottish government has promised to increase teacher numbers by 3,500 - but it is not responsible for employing staff, so are there actually going to be jobs for these extra teachers? And are we getting teachers in the subjects we need them? 

Last December, official figures showed that teacher numbers have risen by over 2,000 since the pandemic began, from 52,247 in 2019 to 54,285 in 2021 - but that does not tell the full story. 

More than one in 10 places on secondary teacher education courses in Scotland went unfilled in 2021-22, for example, with maths, physics and chemistry recruiting far fewer student teachers than needed.

Meanwhile, budget pressures on schools and their staff are mounting. At the EIS teaching union’s annual meeting in June, outgoing president Heather Hughes highlighted the potential damage of “the worst cost-of-living crisis for 40 years”, including soaring energy costs. And many schools are still trying to work out how to handle the reallocation of Scottish Attainment Challenge money, announced last December, which is intended to spread funding more fairly around Scotland but is leaving some local education authorities and schools with big dents in their budgets.

Sean O’Hara, a deputy head at a Perth and Kinross secondary, says timetablers in schools in the north and east of Scotland will be having “sleepless nights” about unfilled vacancies this year.

Shortages are particularly acute in subjects such as physics and maths, which has a knock-on effect on the courses schools can deliver, he says. 

Maths teachers end up delivering only maths courses - and not application of mathematics, personal finance awards or mathematics of mechanics - because there simply aren’t enough of them.

There are some positives, however, he says. “A power of work” has been done by universities and policymakers, for example, to raise the profile of home economics and “that seems to be paying off at lightning speed” in terms of finding teachers of the subject.

Nonetheless, Nuzhat Uthmani, a Glasgow primary school principal teacher and co-founder of the popular Scottish Teachers for Positive Change and Wellbeing group on Facebook, says recruitment is “the biggest concern by far among many colleagues, some who have been teachers for years and still are awaiting a permanent contract”.

To make things go more smoothly this year, Uthmani calls on universities to be more upfront about the recruitment crisis and for local authorities to stop “using probationers as cheap labour to cover posts year on year, instead of giving permanent contracts to more experienced teachers”.

Meanwhile, Shiv Das, a secondary geography teacher, wants more representation from ethnic minorities in all areas of the teaching profession, as part of a drive in every school to “make a proactive effort to develop an antiracist school culture”.

Elsewhere, Katie Shearer, a principal primary school teacher in Glasgow, says headteachers should have more control over staffing as “they know what their school needs and the skill sets they require”. She and her colleagues would also like to see more permanent contracts, as it benefits everyone to have staff who are “invested in a school’s future”.

Shearer also calls for more support for probationers, whose early experience of the profession has been overshadowed by Covid and who - with senior staff dealing with the fallout of the pandemic - have not had as much help as they should have these past few years.

With school budgets stretched, teachers are also warning that rising costs must not have an impact on pupils’ education.

Caroline McFarlane, a design and technology faculty head in Aberdeenshire, says: “Practical subjects such as woodwork, metalwork and cooking have all been affected. The Scottish government made the welcome move to remove the cost of the school day, but the reimbursement calculations are now wildly out of date - some materials I bought last session are now four times more expensive and we have been hit with myriad supply issues.

“Thankfully, my headteacher made the excellent move away from departmental budgets - or my wood order for National 5 alone would have left me unable to run any other classes in the school.”

Wellbeing and mental health

“Health and wellbeing among staff and pupils are at an all-time low,” says Sammy McHugh, a secondary teacher of English.

She is far from alone in saying that school staff’s “workload and stress levels have gone through the roof” and adds that “this year, more than anything, there needs to be stability for pupils, especially those sitting exams”.

Dominic Tollan, a PE teacher who edits the journal of the Scottish Association of Teachers of Physical Education, says: “The effects of Covid will not go away overnight, for staff and for pupils.”

As such, he says the first priority after lockdown was to focus on the health and wellbeing of pupils - “given some of the personal traumas they may have experienced, on top of the lack of socialisation, the seclusion and the worry and anxiety” - and he believes that, in 2022-23, “it is important that this doesn’t change”.

Health and wellbeing should be treated as just as important as literacy and numeracy, says Tollan. 

The Scottish government policy of a counsellor in every secondary school could be helpful to that aim, although progress in delivering this pledge is unclear.

The looming cost-of-living crisis is also a big concern, says Katie Shearer, with many more pupils’ families likely to have to worry about the cost of heating, transport, uniform and other school costs.

“We as teachers will need support with how to deal with this as it could manifest itself as prolonged absence, kids not having eaten, not having completed homework, behaviour issues due to lack of sleep, hunger and reactions to a tense situation at home.”

In December 2021, the Scottish government announced that education staff would receive “a package of continued support to help manage additional pressures as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic”, including coaching, mentoring and peer-led learning.

Yet, it remains a common complaint that school staff have often felt isolated and unsupported during the Covid pandemic.

Covid requirements

The premise that the pandemic is not over was a common observation made by union leaders and teachers who spoke to us.

That was clear in England in the final weeks of the summer term. The school holidays do not get under way there until mid July, and while Scottish teachers and pupils were getting into holiday mode, their English colleagues and counterparts were seeing masks make a comeback as Covid cases and absence rates rose.

No doubt aware this situation could easily rear up in Scotland, new EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley says that, with no more national requirement for masks or for pupils to be grouped in bubbles, Scottish schools will be responsible for carrying out their own risk assessments as staff and pupils return.

If they decide - because of high Covid rates in communities - that mitigations such as masks need to make a comeback, then they must be supported in that.

“It could be perfectly reasonable for a school to say, ‘in some circumstances we need to have masks in use in corridors’, and what is important is that schools arriving at those conclusions from robust risk-assessment processes are supported by the local authority and ultimately the Scottish government,” says Bradley.

She adds that the EIS called for free Covid testing to remain for teachers and pupils and that the union “would still advocate for that”, instead of staff and students “guessing” whether or not they have Covid.

Bradley also says that because Covid absence is not recorded separately, teachers are under pressure to go to work - even if they suspect they have the virus - because they might not want to “fall foul of unsupportive absence-management procedures”.

“There are contradictory messages around taking personal responsibility with regards to Covid and then feeling within your employment you are going to fall foul of absence management procedures. This is particularly important given the scale of reinfection we are seeing and the fact that vaccine protection is waning.”

Caroline McFarlane says: “After two years of essentially being told ‘treat anyone with Covid like they have the plague and avoid them’, it is difficult to now shift the mindset to this ‘living with Covid’. I caught Covid for the first time in June 2022, two weeks before the end of term. The result: utter confusion. You are advised to stay home for five days following a positive test. But you don’t need to test. But if you have a fever, you should stay home. Unless you don’t want to. It’s utter chaos.

“As we start to move back into the colder weather and we spend more time indoors with new strains undoubtedly taking advantage of our immunity starting to wear off - what then? No one will adhere to any future lockdowns like they did in March 2020.”

Douglas Hutchison, director of education in Glasgow and president of education directors’ body ADES, says “ventilation is key” because Covid is an airborne virus. There have been calls for air filtration devices to be installed in schools, but Hutchison believes that is unlikely as the cost is “prohibitive”.

It seems likely, therefore, that doors and windows in schools will be thrown wide open again this winter. With ballooning energy costs, though, all those responsible for school budgets will feel highly conflicted about pumping out heat that is immediately lost out of the window.

Exams and assessment

The SQA should continue the modifications made to courses and assessment into 2023-24, says Seamus Searson, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA).

Modifications to courses - such as Higher English candidates being required to produce only one piece of writing for their portfolio, as opposed to two - were introduced in 2020-21 with the idea that this would compensate for the time lost in class to the pandemic.

Those modifications were continued last year (2021-22) and the SQA announced in April that they would be retained again this school year (2022-23), since “the effects of the disruption will not go away after the summer break”.

However, Searson says the SQA should make an early statement that what is in place this year (2022-23) will continue in 2023-24, to allow teachers to “organise and plan” - but also because after the 2024 exams, the entire system is set to change.

The government’s response to Professor Ken Muir’s March report on how to take forward the changes to national agencies Education Scotland and the SQA revealed that the new organisations should become operational in 2024, with the SQA still running exams up to and including those in 2024.

But Searson argues that there is little point in reverting back to the way courses were run before the pandemic for just one year.

“Teachers should not be asked to waste time and effort reintroducing something that is going to disappear the following year anyway. If the SQA just told schools and teachers the exam system will be the same for the next two years, that would be very helpful to everybody.”

Douglas Hutchison adds: “We need to keep communicating and engaging with people around the whole qualifications reform process.”

He believes it could result in positive changes for Scottish education, but that teachers need to feel involved or there is a risk “people become cynical” - and that “can become corrosive”.

Andrew Bailey, a physics teacher in Dundee, thinks an extra day or half day of in-service time should be created by the government specifically so teachers can engage with the independent review of assessment and qualifications. 

He cautions against assuming that all teachers follow what is coming out of the latest review or report - some do, he says, but many don’t - and their voices still need to be heard.

Craig Paterson, headteacher at Alness Academy, in Highland, wants the “SQA to give us a consistent exam model and plenty of notice about how things are going to look”.

But he adds: “We need to recognise, especially in the context of the past two years, that attainment is not everything.”

Sammy McHugh says that more needs to be done to ensure the education of any pupil affected by Covid is not unfairly affected.

“Last year, the government and SQA, hardly challenged by professional associations, insisted on carrying on as normal and it was anything but. They kept telling us that ‘considerable modifications’ were being made but it did not feel like that at all.

“In my subject for N5 and Higher, for example, students were given information that helped them with one aspect of a two-paper/three-element exam. On the surface this might look reasonable but because of the date this information was given, students had already done the hard work and learned all of the possible texts and commonalities anyway.”

So, says McHugh, the government and SQA must “give us all of the vital information upfront in August”.

Ultimately, however, what she really wants is a move away from an exams-based system in which “many more students from affluent backgrounds do better than their less-advantaged peers, year after year after year” - as last week’s exam results once again demonstrated.

Learning loss

“One of the key things that worries us is the Scottish government’s lack of a proper research base in terms of education recovery,” says Mike Corbett, Scotland official for the NASUWT teaching union.

“There are countries like the Netherlands and the USA that have taken a more research-informed approach to understanding where their pupils are at and what is needed to help them. Even the Westminster government has managed to institute a one-on-one tutoring programme - albeit that they initially messed it up.

“It just feels like there are too many people in Scottish government and councils and schools who think this is back to normal. There is no normal; things have changed irrevocably.”

However, Dominic Tollan says: “We need to get away from the ideas of ‘catching up’ and ‘lost learning’ and teach in the present.”

Instead, he wants to see teachers “re-evaluate what we had been doing before Covid and use it as a catalyst for positive reform of policy and practice”.

He fears that there will be a temptation to focus on literacy and numeracy to the detriment of others areas of the curriculum, such as PE.

He also warns against a temptation to “intense ways of learning just to try and accelerate learning targets, tick the box and move on”, which he believes could undermine approaches such as play pedagogy.

“We should be allowing pupils to learn at a pace that is appropriate and that doesn’t place undue pressure on them or teaching staff to match or better what has gone on before - it should not be ‘business as normal’ as we are at the tail end of a situation that was far from normal”.

Caroline McFarlane says: “The Covid catch-up is real - not in terms of academic success but in terms of maturity.” She adds that S5 students have “missed significant growth opportunities” and so “will not be ready for the ‘two-term dash’ to Higher as they are still trying to reorientate themselves to schooling”.

Katie Shearer and her colleagues feel there needs to be a fresh look at how inclusion of pupils with additional support needs (ASN) in mainstream schools, as “the status quo isn’t working”.

She says the situation could be improved by having more specialist staff based permanently in schools and more “highly specialised, well-funded units” that work closely with mainstream schools.

Pay and conditions

If no acceptable pay offer is forthcoming from local authorities’ body Cosla and the government, new EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley says there will be a ballot on industrial action in October.

In Scotland, unions are demanding a 10 per cent rise this year but to date have been offered only a “completely inadequate” 2 per cent rise.

Seamus Searson, general secretary of the SSTA, recently told Tes Scotland the “optimum time” for strike action would be November.

Greg Dempster, general secretary of primary school leaders’ body the AHDS, says the pay claim started out as restorative - a bid to build back teacher salaries - but now it’s just about “keeping pace with inflation”.

He identifies industrial action as the big issue facing the system this year - and so does Douglas Hutchison, who points out that support staff could also walk out.

However, many are concerned this will break the stability needed to get pupils back on an even keel with schooling - something Hutchison says was lost in the pandemic.

It used to be that you “got up and went to school” but the pandemic derailed that, he says, and it’s a habit that has yet to return for some young people, which is reflected in lower attendance rates.

“We need to get back into the routine of coming to school all the time but what worries me is the risk of industrial action. That will break that relationship again.”

Hutchison admits, though, that he understands why industrial action is being threatening given the huge rise in the cost of living - and notes too that public finances are “not in great shape” either.

Caroline McFarlane says that if pay isn’t addressed, rural schools could find it even harder to recruit. She predicts “a mass relocation of staff anxious to find workplaces closer to home” to cut down on the cost of commuting.

“Our rural school has staff travelling over 400 miles a week who now, understandably, are weighing their priorities over where they want to work and where they might have to work.”

Dempster says primary school leaders are craving a period of stability: “Our members would welcome - not just for the benefit of teachers but for the benefit of their schools - early progress on the pay award. 

“That’s going to be hugely disruptive if a settlement is not reached pretty quickly once people get back round the table.”

So, as ever, a new school year kicks off with plenty of debate and disagreement, although it feels heightened this year. Everyone is hoping for something akin to normality after many years of disruption; whether or not they get it remains altogether another matter.