The Christmas fair season is in full swing across Scotland. Last Saturday, I slalomed through the throngs at one school, evading the teetering bric-a-brac and technicolour home bakes as I kept my eyes fixed on the builders’ tea and bacon rolls that beckoned me from the other side of the dining hall.
A full complement of teachers was there in standard-issue festive jumpers, ushering in freezing parents, chivvying pupils to peddle snowmen decorations and generally stirring up the levels of bonhomie required to make such endeavours a success.
Sometimes, from the outside, being a teacher looks exhausting.
Aside from the daily demands of a job that has you on your feet for most of the time, and means you can’t always just dash to the toilet or take a day off when you need to, teachers go above and beyond the demands of the classroom. Festive fairs, sports days, trips, proms, ceilidhs, concerts, clubs and all the rest - however onerous their job is, teachers take pride in being there for pupils in all sorts of ways that don’t fit the traditional view of what “teaching” involves.
On Saturday, it didn’t look as though teachers would have much headspace left for what promised to the biggest education story in town: this week’s publication of country-by-country results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), three years after the last round.
I asked one secondary teacher - at the fair as a parent - if she would be looking out for the Pisa results. She wasn’t even aware they were imminent. In fact, she couldn’t recall discussing them with colleagues since they had come up in a lecture when she was a student teacher some years earlier.
That’s probably surprising to those with a passing interest in education, who may assume - given all the frenzied attention Pisa gets from pundits and politicians - that every three years, in the aftermath of the results, teachers are locked away en masse for inquests into what they must do next.
However, you’re more likely to find the average teacher rolling their eyes when you bring up Pisa, as if they had more important things to worry about than the intermittent testing of some 15-year-olds’ literacy and numeracy, the purpose of which was not immediately clear.
Indeed, I spoke to a senior-ranking local authority official who noted, with some satisfaction, they had heard of headteachers in that part of Scotland reassuring pupils sitting Pisa tests not to worry, as “they’re not that important”.
Yet, Pisa should absolutely not be dismissed out of hand: any set of rigorous data that could help to inform policymakers and practitioners about where education is going right or wrong must be scrutinised closely. And the Scottish government should take a look in the mirror if it feels Pisa gets undue attention - a series of decisions in recent years have left the country conspicuously lacking in national education data.
Notably, there was the scrapping in 2017 of the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy, which followed withdrawal from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. And that’s before we get on to the Scottish National Standardised Assessments - trumpeted as gauging national progress in literacy and numeracy but now just a tool to guide “teachers’ professional judgment”.
It’s curious that Pisa - deemed so influential that it has given the government a reason to press ahead with reform and opponents ammunition to savage its education record - resonates so weakly with teachers.
Some don’t see the point of Pisa, some question its validity, some have barely heard of it - and some are just too busy prepping for the Christmas concert.
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 6 December 2019 issue under the headline “Teachers are too busy to care which way Pisa is leaning”
