Do our eyes deceive us, or is there some welcome news yonder for Scottish teachers? Indeed there is. Or rather, there potentially is …
Education secretary and deputy first minister John Swinney has confirmed that Gayle Gorman, the chief executive of Education Scotland, is looking into scrapping the ratings system in Scottish school inspections.
Currently - as both primary and secondary teachers will be all too aware - a school’s performance can fall into six categories: unsatisfactory, weak, satisfactory, good, very good or excellent.
But during a school leaders’ conference in Edinburgh, a Glasgow headteacher pointed out that ratings detract from content in inspection reports. Mr Swinney replied: “I think you’ve got a point”.
He acknowledged the anxiety and stress that inspection can bring with it, and said: “There are certain elements of fear within the system which we need to remove.”
Mr Swinney said he was determined to create a more confident profession of educator that wasn’t worrying about who might knock on the door the next time.
He said the current “richness” of school inspection reports - which had been absent in past eras - could become lost if people focused predominantly on ratings. He went on to add that he understood the “temptation” among educators to “gravitate to ‘What did you get?’ ” questions, rather than have in-depth discussions about a school’s performance.
However, Mr Swinney stressed that the matter was for Ms Gorman, the chief inspector, to decide.
Ms Gorman was speaking at the same conference and confirmed that the idea had been discussed. “It’s certainly something we’ve been talking about and looking at,” she said.
Concerns had been raised that “people cut to that [inspection report rating] and don’t necessarily see the rest of the detail”, she added.
However, Ms Gorman did say that the ratings could be useful in helping a school to identify areas in which it needed to improve, and that any alternative system would have to be clear about a school’s strengths and weaknesses.
