Tell me what I need to know about you so I can be a good teacher.”

That was Anna Grant’s question to her new S1 class when she met them for the first time in June. It resulted in a girl telling her she was deaf in one ear after a series of infections and would benefit from sitting close to the front of the class. Two boys revealed that English was not their first language, and a third boy handed her a folded up Post-it note as he left the class. The piece of information he felt she needed to know to teach him well was this: both his parents were dead.

It was a powerful and insightful question for a teacher fresh out of university to ask - one that will doubtless result in avoiding painful and potentially destructive misunderstandings. Grant finished her teacher education course in May, just three weeks earlier, as one of 24 students to be the first to complete the University of Edinburgh’s new two-year MSc in transformative learning and teaching.

The course aims to create teachers with a strong sense of social justice, taking a leaf out of Teach First’s book, and selling teaching as a career in which you can make a difference. However, instead of hot-housing students and getting them in front of classes as quickly as possible - in the manner of Teach First - the Edinburgh students have two years to hone their teaching.

The other aim of the course is to develop teachers capable of working across sectors, given that the Curriculum for Excellence is a 3-18 curriculum. Generalists are trained to teach from nursery to S3 and specialists from P5 to S6.

By asking her class what she needed to know to teach them well, Grant was treating them as individuals, making an effort to find out about them and not making ill-informed judgements or assumptions, says programme director Aileen Kennedy.

It is known as “recognition” and is one of the key principles of transformative learning practices, she says, because if you know your pupils, you can get the best out of them.

“Relationships are completely fundamental to learning,” adds Kennedy.

Grant - who was the only graduate this year on the course’s subject-specialist track - says that her semester working in a primary school as part of the course made her acutely aware of the importance of having a rounded view of pupils. But she also saw how hard that was to achieve in secondary, when you have pupils only for a short time every day and are responsible for just one area of the curriculum.

She recalls one primary pupil who wasn’t particularly strong in her subject - English - but whom she got to “shine in other areas”. He loved outdoor learning and art and playing table tennis. That broader knowledge of his talents and interests meant she could teach her subject more effectively, she says.

“You don’t get to see that achievement across the curriculum in secondary because you are so focused on that child and their learning in quite a narrow part of the curriculum,” says Grant. “I’m really interested in exploring how we smash those barriers.”

Kennedy, who started her career as a primary teacher, says she is “jealous” of the students’ direct experience of both sectors.

“What it does to beginning teachers is really quite remarkable,” says Kennedy. “It gives them a context to question why things are the way they are. Some of them were teaching P7 in May, and then in August they were in secondary seeing children of the same age leading totally different lives, in a totally different structure.”

You hear teachers saying they are teachers of young people, not primary teachers, or teachers of maths or English or science, but this cohort of new teachers feels that deeply, says Kennedy.

“They see the one constant [across the sectors] is the children and young people.”

The programme, however, has come in for some criticism. Teaching unions have voiced concern about teachers without degrees delivering lessons in secondary. The general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, Seamus Searson, told Tes Scotland in 2017 that having generalists delivering subjects in secondary would amount to “weakening the standard” and that they would become “second-class people in the [secondary] school”.

Dramatic evolution

Meanwhile, Larry Flanagan, the EIS general secretary, said the move “raised questions” and could create a “two-tier system in the secondary sector” because some teachers would have degrees in the subjects they were delivering, while others would not.

Unsurprisingly perhaps - given the aim of this course is to create teachers who challenge and are prepared to speak up - the students did not take this lying down.

They wrote a response to that article, saying that society’s understanding of education and child development had “evolved dramatically over the past 20 years” and it would be “unnatural” if traditional expectations of initial teacher education and newly qualified teachers did not also evolve.

They questioned why some commentators were arguing that “professionals educated to master’s level” and dedicated to supporting children were “weakening the system”, and pointed out that staffing in secondary was at crisis point. Teachers were already covering subject classes in which they did not hold a degree, they said - but they also stressed that to plug gaps in secondary school staffing was not the aim of the MSc programme.

“The BGE [broad general education phase] has eight curriculum areas - not subject specialisms, but areas,” wrote Grant and fellow student Rachel Campbell in their response. “We feel it is time we put our money where our mouth is. If we’re truly dedicated to enriching, interdisciplinary learning, we need to support teachers who want to deliver this type of experience beyond primary, while recognising the power of subject-specialist teachers working in primary schools.”

Anna Hayes is one of the few generalists to graduate from the course who will be spending her probationary year in secondary. She studied on the course’s nursery-to-S3 track, and will this year be working as a probationer at Kirkcaldy High in Fife, in the maths department. But no one can accuse her of teaching a subject she is ill-qualified to deliver: her undergraduate degree is in maths.

Interestingly, though, she expects the four years she spent studying the subject at the University of Edinburgh to be of little use to her when she is teaching S1 to S3.

“Obviously, when it gets to the exams there’s a leap and it becomes more complex and specific to the subject, but all teachers should be able to teach the broad general education because that’s the foundation for all subjects,” says Hayes. “My degree does not have all that much to do with the broad general education phase - it’s later on, after that, that deeper knowledge becomes useful.”

Generally speaking

Kirkcaldy High headteacher Derek Allan already has a primary teacher working in his maths department. Rachel Cunningham has been teaching maths at the school for five years. Allan says he was interested in introducing primary pedagogy into the department in a bid to smooth the transition from primary to secondary.

“It used to be that coming to secondary was seen as a fresh start at the big school,” says Allan. “There was an element of snobbery involved - ‘that’s you moving up to the high school; you can forget that primary rubbish’. Clearly, that’s not helpful from the learner’s point of view.”

Pupils today are better supported when they come to secondary, he says: guidance teachers share information, and experiences are organised so that pupils get to know their new school. But “the curricular flow is still not right for Curriculum for Excellence”, he adds, with there still being too big a difference in their school experience in P7 and S1.

Being able to recruit a generalist to cover lower secondary classes also helps solve another headache with which the vast majority of secondary headteachers will be familiar: teacher shortages, which are particularly acute in Stem (science, technology, engineering and science) subjects. The last time Allan recruited for a maths teacher, he had five applications, but the school did not recruit because “frankly the quality did not appear to be there”.

And Allan dismisses any suggestion that the children who are taught by a generalist are being short-changed: “These teachers are equally skilled in different ways,” he says.

However, some of the teachers from the course say it is not their cross-sector training that has been controversial with teachers on the ground; rather, it is the idea that they are being trained to fight for social justice, as if this is a quality lacking in other teachers. But Kennedy says that is to misunderstand the programme.

“The pressures on teachers are such that sometimes it’s really difficult to take a step back and to have the space to think that through, and think about the assumptions you are making. It’s not that teachers are unable to recognise a racist incident [for example] and deal with it - it’s just that spending two years thinking about your assumptions and challenging them ingrains that [understanding] in you.

“Every teacher and every postgrad will tell you a year is just not long enough. And while the undergraduate [degree] is four years, the fact that our students have done their undergraduate and then spend two years doing this makes a difference.”

The average age of a student on the master’s course was 32, but there were students in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. Grant is 33 and a mother of three; Hayes is 24 and started the master’s straight after finishing her undergraduate degree.

In the first cohort there was also a deaf student fluent in British Sign Language, as well as students whose first language was French, German, Spanish and Greek.

The Charlie test

However, the programme has so far struggled to recruit onto its subject-specialist track, which focuses on areas with shortages. As mentioned previously, Grant was the only student out of the 24 who completed the course this year to train for teaching a subject from P5 to S6, and the number of subject specialists remains low for those projected to start the course this year, as well as those entering year two.

When the course first got under way, some students were worried about “not being transformative enough”, says Kennedy, but she stresses that small acts can make a big impact - it’s not about donning a figurative cloak and trying to be some kind of superhero. For Kennedy, it is more about the students having a strong “sense of right” and not being afraid to speak up - but doing that in a sensitive way.

“It’s about knowing if you have got freedom to support the freedom of others - but it’s also about knowing how to do that and when to do that.”

For one student, that was about challenging setting in maths in primary, because grouping pupils by ability had been shown to exacerbate social disadvantage. Another student spoke up when she thought the lessons she was being asked to deliver with a small group of English as an additional language (EAL) pupils would actually benefit the whole class.

However, Kennedy also appreciates that not all teachers should be trained in this way. What schools need is “an armoury” of staff who bring different skills, she says. And she is confident that this group of teachers will have a positive impact.

As well as assessing students against General Teaching Council for Scotland standards, Kennedy has also applied “the Charlie test”.

“The test is, ‘Would I let you teach my son?’” she explains. “I have to say, I would love them to - they are going to be phenomenal.”

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 13 September 2019 issue under the headline “Smashing the barriers”