“No one seems to be taking the lead,” wrote a secondary teacher for Tes Scotland this week. Her concerns are particular to one subject but they reflect a wider sense of unease spreading through the profession.
This teacher and her colleagues like to be “thoroughly planned and organised”, and not feeling like that this year is “a major cause of anxiety, as we feel we are letting our students down”. Their frustration echoes frequent complaints in recent weeks about vague (or non-existent) guidelines for practical subjects with very specific needs in their teaching environments, such as art, dance, drama, home economics, music and PE.
The same teacher stresses that, with exam-level courses starting before the summer, senior students have already gone through two months of learning - in one of the most important years of their young lives - with teachers who felt they were operating in the dark. Many teachers, in all sectors and at all levels, share such concerns. The EIS union’s Headteachers’ and Depute Headteachers’ Network complained this week, for example, that senior management teams were contending with “ever-changing guidelines, increased and unrealistic demands and lack of support from local authorities”.
New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has been praised for her country’s response to the coronavirus. As Ardern said: “Decisive action - going hard and going early - helped to stamp out the worst of the virus.” That is what a crisis calls for: swift, decisive action. People can display extraordinary resilience and resourcefulness in a crisis, but they need clarity on their parameters.
And, over the past six months, swift, decisive action is what we have sometimes seen in Scottish education. The first case of Covid in Scotland was confirmed on 1 March, leading to a dramatic series of announcements: on 13 March, school inspections were suspended; on 16 March, student teachers’ school placements were ended; on 18 March, it was announced that schools were to close; and on 19 March, exams were cancelled. Recently, however, school staff have become frustrated by a sense of a system sleepwalking towards yet more crises.
As long ago as 28 April, the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association called for the cancellation of the 2021 exams, to give teachers a year to grapple with whatever might take their place. That may or may not have been the best approach, but it would have created a far clearer picture than the guddle schools and colleges are dealing with now.
Rather than cancelling exams, education secretary John Swinney indicated before the summer that the most significant change - assuming, of course, that Covid-19 doesn’t force the cancellation of exams again - would be the delay of exams by a few weeks.
Then came news on 14 August that there would be a 10-day Scottish Qualifications Authority consultation, after it proposed changes to exams and assessment designed to mitigate the pressures of Covid.
There was, to put it mildly, a mixed reaction to those proposals, but at least there was a clear indication of when the changes would be confirmed: the week beginning 31 August. Yet - with the SQA presumably overwhelmed by the 23,000 submissions to the consultation - that did not happen.
Similarly, after Tes Scotland asked Education Scotland last week about when several practical subjects would get clearer guidance, we received a reply saying that - for art, dance, drama, home economics and music - updated advice would appear “in September”.
That sort of vagueness has been hugely worrying for teachers already deep into one of the most important years of thousands of students’ young lives. Teachers need clarity - and they don’t have time to wait.
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 11 September 2020 issue under the headline “Teachers need swift, decisive action to get out of this guddle”
