Iain Gray is hacked off - really hacked off. Just look at his Twitter feed.
When first minister Nicola Sturgeon last month announced her intention to hold a second independence referendum, she insisted that education was still her “defining mission”. The former Scottish Labour leader soon tweeted in response - and you could feel his anger and frustration fizzing.
“Really, Nicola, give it up. NOBODY believes you. NOBODY,” read his tweet, which was prefaced by four “crying with laughter” emojis. He still hadn’t got it off his chest, though, and a few minutes later added: “The first minister just taking the p*** now.”
This raging against the SNP machine is a far cry from the caricature of feebleness that dogged his leadership of Scottish Labour from 2008 to 2011 - epitomised by the YouTube clip of him meekly retreating into a Subway sandwich shop when confronted by protesters in Glasgow Central Station, just before the 2011 SNP landslide at Holyrood.
Labour against the government
In conversation, Iain Gray is neither firebrand nor wallflower, but a thoughtful politician - and former physics teacher - with a sound grasp of the history of Scottish education. That latter quality is something he considers lacking in Sturgeon and her deputy, education secretary John Swinney.
Setting aside Labour’s usual charge sheet against the government - thousands of teachers and support staff lost, “dysfunctional” national bodies - Gray does not deny the genuineness of their desire to improve Scottish education. But a better appreciation of how Scottish education has developed over several decades, he believes, would have helped the government avoid several pitfalls.
The National qualifications, for example, might have retained the breadth of subjects and fluidity between different levels that the old Standard Grades ensured. Instead, there has been controversy about the lack of a “safety net” at National 5 (“Students have a new ‘ceiling’ to break through”, Tes Scotland, 31 March), which Gray feared would leave more pupils “coming out with far fewer or no qualifications”.
That only one in 18 schools was inspected last year is evidence, says Gray, that Education Scotland’s twin responsibilities for policy and inspection do not work
Constitutional matters, he believes, have also clouded judgement. That only one in 18 schools was inspected last year is evidence, says Gray, that Education Scotland’s twin “poacher and gamekeeper” responsibilities for policy and inspection do not work - and that it has been allowed to “go easy on itself [in the] knowledge that its political masters have their attention somewhere else altogether”.
Opposing ‘cynical’ policies
Gray hopes that Swinney’s response to the education governance review, due in June, will address concerns about Education Scotland’s roles. But he fears that, with anti-independence voters rallying to help the Conservatives become the main opposition in Scotland, previously moribund ideas, such as national testing and schools opting out of local authority control, are now firmly on the agenda. He sees Labour’s role now - after half a century of dominance of Scottish politics came to an end with near wipeout at the 2015 general election - as being a moderating influence on Tory agendas and “cynical and short-termist” government policies.
Gray believes, however, that schools generally serve pupils far better than when he left the profession three decades ago. “The atmosphere in schools nowadays is generally incredibly positive,” he says. Teachers are now “more professional” and are “asked to think more about how they teach”, while pupils’ experience has been transformed.
“An awful lot of pupils [thought] that there was no point in trying - it wasn’t so much the school had no place for them, it was that society had no place for them in the days of mass unemployment,” he says. “Many clearly felt that nobody really cared about them, which was reflected in the atmosphere in school. I don’t sense that at all now.”
He attributes that partly to Curriculum for Excellence, which, he says, for all its tribulations, enshrines that education should be for all, regardless of background or abilities.
“The fact that CfE was introduced has to be seen as a success...if you stand back and look at it, it’s quite astonishing that the teaching workforce did manage to make that shift,” he says, highlighting that this “modern and progressive approach”, first planned while Labour and the Liberal Democrats shared power, has won praise from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Schools still not flexible
Last month, however, Education Scotland’s analysis of inspections showed schools “have not fully taken on board the flexibility of CfE”.
Gray’s big idea for Scottish education, then, is one shared by the academic and former secondary headteacher Danny Murphy: the introduction of a “Scottish graduation certificate” that would list school leavers’ exam grades, but also give equal prominence to myriad achievements - whether they’re a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, voluntary work or vocational training. This would, he believes, encourage schools to offer a broader range of qualifications and activities.
But Gray fears teachers are still hamstrung by a failing in the Scottish education system that was evident 35 years ago, when he taught in Mozambique for two years.
“The headmistress [in Mozambique] apologised profusely to me because they were so short of teachers that they had to give me a double timetable,” Gray recalls.
“I looked at it and there was less contact time and more preparation time than in the one I’d left behind. Even there, there was a recognition that you had to provide teachers with enough time to do their job.”
Next week: Tes Scotland profiles education secretary John Swinney
