Wednesday marked 10 years since my first day at TESS, which piqued my curiosity about what we were reporting back then. A quick scan of autumn 2006 issues revealed that the preoccupations of Scottish education were remarkably similar to those of today.
Many of those articles could, with the dated jargon changed and a few different names, just about pass off as fresh stories. There were reports of (deep breath): overburdened teachers; schools struggling to recruit heads; an FE college principal in hot water; rich men ruffling feathers with their radical ideas for education; a no-nonsense new education secretary (Hugh Henry); schools being shut for safety reasons; hand-wringing about healthy eating; and lofty claims that a “A Curriculum for Excellence” would help schools “rediscover the joy of learning”.
Aside from the indefinite article that has long since disappeared from the title CfE (I seem to recall claims about the far-reaching educational benefits of ditching that single letter), the one thing really dating the 2006 magazines is the coverage of technology. The wide-eyed reporting of claims that iPods might have educational benefits, for example, was pretty typical for the time - I’m of a generation of journalists behind laughably quaint articles with headlines like: “What is broadband?”
This, in our defence, was a time when googling “tweets” would have found you a novelty pop song quicker than a microblogging website, and when, to Scottish ears, “YouTube” sounded like an accusation of idiocy. How times have moved on.
While education contends with many of the same issues that it did in 2006, and reform continues at a seemingly glacial pace - it’s a decade and a half since the “national debate” that ushered in CfE - the digital world is changing rapidly.
Educators are trying to adapt, but it’s hard to keep up. I’ve lost count of the conferences where I’ve heard that schools are “preparing pupils for jobs that don’t yet exist”. But even that’s a hackneyed view, with experts now telling us most of today’s pupils won’t have jobs at all by the time the robots take over.
School has traditionally provided a linear experience, constantly building towards the make-or-break fifth year of secondary: learning reduced to a helter-skelter two terms, when you cram in enough information for a ticket to a lifetime of professional employment.
CfE was meant to change all that, by encouraging a more nimble type of learning and providing school-leavers who were adaptable, rather than pegs to fit holes in the jobs market. Lofty ambitions, but the jury will be out for a while yet.
Tensions between old, unyielding approaches to education and the fast-changing world are striking. Teenagers, of course, now carry in their pockets far more processing power than was used to get Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. Yet, worryingly, the research behind the Scottish government’s new digital strategy for schools reveals that a significant minority of pupils say they never use digital technology in school.
There’s a sense of urgency to the strategy. It calls for just about everyone in education to up their game, noting that many schools struggle even to get online or choose to hive off technology to a corner of the building, as if it’s a niche pursuit.
That sort of approach is no longer tenable. Regardless of how effortlessly they seem to handle technology, young people need help to navigate the unpredictable world that their little slabs of hardware are opening up. Teachers - you’re needed more than ever.
@Henry_Hepburn
