We have a very timely feature coming up in Tes Scotland on 6 August. Shortly before this year’s Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) results day, on 10 August, seven teachers will tell readers, at length, about their experience of going through the “alternative certification model”, devised after the cancellation of the 2021 national exams.

To allow them all to be as frank as possible, their contributions will be anonymised. The need for them to do so poses some questions in itself. On such an important issue, in such an exceptional year, all those teachers - from class teachers to heads - were keen to tell it exactly as they saw it, yet only anonymity allowed them to do that.

This is not unusual. In my 15 years at Tes Scotland, I have often seen a reluctance among teachers to make public comments, even on seemingly innocuous topics. It is understandable: most are employed by local authorities, which can be extremely jittery about teachers making even the blandest of statements without their express permission.

This does not seem a healthy state of affairs. In a liberal democracy, and in an education system that abounds with fine words about the need to trust teachers, surely experienced educators should feel free to debate ideas, even when they may contain some hard truths? We are not, after all, talking about Deep Throat organising a clandestine rendezvous in an underground car park amid epoch-defining governmental corruption. Our upcoming feature involves conscientious professionals simply trying to make sense of an exceptionally difficult year and looking ahead to what they hope will be a better future.

There is, of course, criticism of the SQA and the Scottish government, but the former’s days are numbered - harsh critiques of the SQA have not exactly been in short supply during Covid - and examination of the latter should be encouraged in a healthy society.

While they might disagree on the details, everyone in Scottish education surely has the same objective: the fullest and most rewarding experience possible for every learner who walks through the doors of a nursery, school, college or university. That being the case, it doesn’t feel right that teachers often feel so anxious about venturing an opinion, however carefully constructed their argument.

Earlier this month, Education Scotland tweeted to ask followers whom they would like to see as keynote speakers at the annual Scottish Learning Festival (SLF), which will be held online this year after Covid led to the cancellation of the 2020 event in Glasgow. Last Friday, we published an online piece by a teacher calling for presenters who “invite some criticism of the status quo of Scottish education” - one of whom, headteacher and author Bruce Robertson, writes for us this week. Another suggestion was Professor Walter Humes, a long-time critic of what he sees as an overly controlling tendency in the Scottish educational establishment.

However, Mark Priestley, who led the independent review of the 2020 SQA results fiasco, rather resignedly tweeted: “I’d love to see Walter Humes doing a keynote - he is just fantastic. But it won’t happen as the SLF is not a forum for critical voices.”

By keeping such voices at bay, by only nominally encouraging debate, ideas ossify and policy becomes a list of platitudes.

There must, of course, be some parameters - no one is suggesting that local authorities should embrace scattergun jibes from their employees - and all debate should be conducted respectfully and in good faith, no matter how severe the clash of ideas.

Nevertheless, for Scottish education to thrive, Scottish educators must feel they can venture a countervailing opinion without the need for a cloak of anonymity.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 23 July 2021 issue under the headline “Teachers shouldn’t need cloak of anonymity to speak their minds”