The education secretary has been urged by MSPs not to dismiss teachers who took part in highly critical online surveys about the effectiveness of Scotland’s school inspectorate and exam body as “the usual suspects” or “curmudgeons”.
The MSPs, who sit on the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee - which has a majority of SNP members - made the plea last week when education secretary John Swinney was giving evidence.
They were responding to a letter sent by Mr Swinney, ahead of his appearance before the committee, criticising a report that it recently published about the performance of education bodies, including the Scottish Qualifications Authority, Education Scotland, Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council.
The report argued that urgent work was needed to rebuild the relationship between teachers and the SQA.
This relationship has become increasingly strained since the introduction of the new qualifications, with secondary staff largely blaming the body for their workload woes.
Industrial action by Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, over “excessive SQA-related workload” was only called off in the autumn when the government agreed to scrap unit assessments.
However, in his letter to the education committee earlier this month, Mr Swinney described the committee’s report, which criticised the SQA, as “unbalanced”.
It placed too much emphasis on online surveys of people who “self-identify as teachers”, argued Mr Swinney, and had not taken enough account of the evaluations that the SQA and Education Scotland carried out themselves about their impact, which told a different story (see box, below).
Mr Swinney went on to argue that the 693 teachers who responded to the three surveys on the SQA, Education Scotland and SDS represented only “slightly more than 1 per cent of Scotland’s publicly employed teaching workforce of 50,970”.
The surveys were not a random sample and were not representative of the general population, he added.
‘Listen to school staff’
However, Labour MSP Johann Lamont urged Mr Swinney not to take “the rather arithmetical view that they do not really represent anybody because they are only 1 per cent” and to try to understand the responses the committee had received.
James Dornan, an SNP MSP who is convener of the committee, also mounted a robust defence of the committee’s report.
“If the comments had been raised only in the anonymous responses, we would have looked at the results differently, but the comments tied in almost exactly with the ones that we had heard. The comments were mainly to do with the SQA, so our criticism of it in our report was justified,” Mr Dornan said.
Ms Lamont asked Mr Swinney: “What do you think about the motivations of teachers who took the time to contact the committee to highlight their concerns?
“It cannot possibly be that they have all lost the argument and therefore feel, in a curmudgeonly way, obliged to pursue that argument through the committee.
“I urge you not to explain criticism away. Frankly, counting up the number of teachers who sent comments against the whole teaching profession does that.”
In response, Mr Swinney said that he listened to teachers “almost daily about issues” and took those points very seriously. However, he maintained that the report lacked balance.
Mr Swinney said: “The committee’s reliance on the survey is not indicative of a balanced view of all the available evidence, given that the education organisations themselves commission feedback from members of the public and the individuals with whom they interact, which provides different perspectives on the performance and impact of those organisations.
“For example, in the surveys that were carried out after Education Scotland inspections, the overwhelming majority of respondents - if my memory serves me right, the figure is possibly in excess of 85 per cent - thought that their school was enhanced as a consequence of the Education Scotland intervention through inspection.
“That, to me, is counterbalancing evidence that the committee should have weighed up in coming to its conclusions.”
