Sheila Laing, East Lothian’s virtual school headteacher, has been teaching for over 40 years and has led four primary schools. When she first became a head, there was a “three strikes and you’re out” approach to behaviour but she always believed that building relationships was the way to get the best out of pupils.
Laing will retire in August but, for the past two years, advocating on behalf of the authority’s looked-after young people has been her bread and butter.
She has concerns about the drive to close the “poverty-related attainment gap” because the “pressure that brings to bear gets in the way of delivering what children need”.
Qualifications are important, she says, but the focus should be on “the quality of the overall experience for the child”.
1. Who was your most memorable teacher?
I went to James Gillespie’s High in Edinburgh, which was quite an old-fashioned and formal education. The standards were high and so were the expectations, but it suited me, bizarrely. It was a council school by that time but it was still a selective all-girls school and you had to pay £12 a year. I’m not quite sure how I got in - my dad said it was “a social experiment” because he wasn’t a professional, he was an electrician. I still don’t know if he was joking.
Miss Warren was my English teacher - she was quite wacky and a bit offbeat, and different to the other teachers. She used to sit on the desk and swing her hair about, and go off at tangents. She was more of a person than the other teachers, who you tended to have a very formal teacher-pupil relationship with.
There was also my form teacher, Mrs Walker, who taught French. She was a tiny, very glamorous lady. I had a really boring primary school where I felt very anonymous, but I had done two years of French so, when I went to Gillespie’s, I was better than other people and I started to achieve, and realise I was not some nonentity - that I was really good at languages.
2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?
The worst thing was primary school, which is not the way you expect it to be. I felt very anonymous at primary. I was in a class of 36 and in the yellow reading group in P1 - which I worked out was the bottom reading group. Report cards would tell you your position in the class and I was always 31 or 32 out of 36, so that told me I was pretty thick, and not really clever and didn’t really count.
The best bit for me was going to secondary. Being able to go in and be good at French meant I began to find that I had talents and that I could achieve. That made me feel good about myself. I did French, Russian and Latin, and I did really well.
3. Why do you work in education?
I have always really connected with children and young people. What really matters to me is that education is about developing the whole child - not just seeing them as a learner but seeing them in the context of their life, family and community. Having that holistic view of the child and seeing them as an individual - that’s what really good teachers attend to.
But it was actually my mother who enrolled me in the teacher training course at Moray House [now part of the University of Edinburgh] because she saw an advert in the Edinburgh Evening News for people to fill the places. I was away having fun and she told me “you’ll need to get back by September because you’re going to college”.
4. What are you most proud of in your career and what’s your biggest regret?
I’m proudest of successfully merging two very different schools in West Pilton in Edinburgh - Inchview and Craigmuir - which merged to become Forthview Primary in 2003.
When the community was consulted about having a new school, everyone said “no” but the council did it anyway. It was really hard because there was so much opposition to it. I had been acting head of Inchview for 18 months before the merger and [when the schools came together], I was the only person who wanted to be there.
We had to figure out everything from scratch - how we were going to celebrate Christmas, how we were going to do school dinners, how we were going to organise the playground. But it was also an amazing opportunity and we worked hard together and built a really great, emotionally literate school.
Regrets? That’s a really hard one. There’s a part of me that really regrets leaving Forthview. There’s definitely a bit of my heart left there in that community. The fact that we came from a really hard place, and not only got along together and worked together but thrived, and were innovative and forward thinking and raised attainment. It was really great.
5. Who would be your colleagues in the perfect staffroom?
I would like to have all the teachers I have worked with who really care about nurture and learning. That would just be the dream - to start a new school with all these fabulous staff, who share the same philosophy and who really care about children: great teachers who are really willing to think differently about how to meet children’s needs.
6. What are the best aspects of our school system today?
The best aspect is undoubtedly that focus on relationships. When I became a headteacher, there used to be a very behaviourist approach taken - something called “assertive discipline”. It basically meant three strikes and you were out. I hated it with a vengeance because, to me, it was the opposite of being child-centred and understanding what was going on with that young person. Now, though, it’s widely accepted that the best education takes place where there is a relationship.
When I think back to primary, I did not have a relationship with any of the staff - that did not happen until I went to secondary and connected with my French teacher. Relationships are fundamental, especially for care-experienced young people. They have to believe somebody likes them to be able to learn. They are so attuned to that.
The worst aspect is performativity and the huge focus there is on proving that schools have raised attainment. The pressure that brings to bear really gets in the way of delivering what children need. You see that with care-experienced young people. There is pressure to get five qualifications but that does not necessarily meet the needs of the young person, it meets the needs of the school. They might be quite happy with the three they need to get to college.
Of course, you want children to gain qualifications but the focus is on the measurement, as opposed to the quality of the overall experience for the child.
The real job is about getting the best teaching so that children are learning really well. Closing the attainment gap needs to be done by the government - the issue is poverty and it can only be addressed by schools in small measure.
7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you most?
Grace Anderson was a nursery nurse in the incredible Craigroyston High School under-fives centre, which was a radical innovation. It was in Pilton and you could go and drop off your kids while you attended classes with the young people.
I lived there and I used to take my kids there while I went off to learn how to type. Local mums and dads could also just go there and play with their children.
Grace was a person who never judged anybody. The craziest people would walk in and she would always find something positive to say about them and their relationship with their child, [knowing that] everybody loves their child.
I learned so much from her and tried to take that into my practice. It’s about building relationships with people and it’s about respect.
Colin Finlayson, who was, at different times, head of Ainslie Park High and of James Gillespie’s High, was my go-to person for advice. He was a well-respected headteacher who himself left school with no qualifications. He understands ordinary people and the challenges, and has a great belief in the importance of education for enhancing people’s lives.
My third person is [Professor] Rowena Arshad [who recently stepped down as the head of the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport]. She is a good friend and she never ceases to challenge me and develop my thinking.
8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d do?
I would be asking questions about the huge focus on education to solve poverty when the issues are structural and political. Poverty is endemic, it has not really improved and it’s about to get worse because of Covid. Something different needs to happen outwith education.
The next thing I would do is make the Independent Care Review [published in 2020] a high priority for educators, so that care-experienced young people are given a voice and extra support at transition. They should all have a key member of staff they are involved in identifying - someone they trust - and they should not ever be excluded from education.
One of the most important things in this job is changing attitudes to care-experienced young people and developing an understanding. But getting access to teachers is hard - there are so many priorities schools have to train staff in, and this comes to the tail end [of their priorities], but it is so crucial and important.
9. What will our schools be like in 30 years?
I will probably be dead so I don’t expect to find out! It’s likely there will be more digital delivery - that might be the norm - but what I hope is that people come first and the IT surrounds that. The relationships need to be the focus and at the centre of learning.
10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools in the past 12 months?
That’s every class teacher. They had to slog so hard to adapt their learning for online and then to adapt it again for face to face. It’s been the most awful year and there’s no doubt that classroom teachers held things together and kept education going.
Interview by Tes Scotland reporter Emma Seith
This article originally appeared in the 2 July 2021 issue
