Laurence Findlay, Aberdeenshire Council’s director of education and children’s services, is an early riser. On his gym days, roughly five times a week, he gets up at 4am and is ready to go half an hour later. By 6am he has finished his workout, goes home for breakfast, and by 7.30am he is in the office.

Exercise hasn’t always played such a prominent role in Findlay’s life, but ramping it up from 2019 onwards has led to him shedding in excess of five stone.

“I turned 50 last year and I would say I feel fitter and healthier than I’ve ever felt in my life,” he says.

Findlay says his workouts are “a real stress relief” that has a positive impact on his demanding day job - which expanded in November when he took on the role of president of education directors’ body ADES.

“Going to the gym early in the morning prepares me for the day ahead,” he says. “Whilst I’m doing that workout I am thinking ahead to the challenges that I will face that day, the conversations I need to have and how I will respond to them. And I feel better for it when I come home as well.

“It’s just given me a greater balance in my life and work. It’s been quite powerful actually.”

Education directors under pressure

Having that release is perhaps more important than ever for Findlay because being an education director in the current climate is undoubtedly a tough shift.

The government has announced an extra £69 million so that local authorities can employ more teachers and more specialist staff to support pupils with special needs. Yet the education cuts being considered by councils - from five school swimming pools under threat in Dundee, to Stirling considering shrinking its instrumental music service - make it clear that local authorities remain under huge pressure.

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Jo Armstrong, who chairs the Accounts Commission, has warned that expected increases in local authority funding for 2025-26 would not cancel out the urgent need for councils to transform “at a pace and depth we’ve not yet seen”.

In this challenging climate, Findlay is proud of the work that ADES has done in trying to drive improvement and reduce variability between councils through collaboration.

Last year it launched How good is our education authority?, a framework to help councils take greater responsibility for improvement and iron out inconsistencies between education services.

Rethinking rural education

Findlay says there is a need to “fundamentally rethink” how education is delivered in rural areas.

The rules around school closures - set out in the Schools (Consultation) (Scotland) Act 2010 - were introduced to make it harder to shut rural schools.

However, Findlay argues that the law is not fit for purpose and needs to be “refreshed and modernised”.

“The 2010 act is there, I guess, to protect rural education. You can’t have people just going around closing schools willy-nilly - of course you can’t. But I don’t think it is protecting it at all,” he says.

“We are passionate about rural education: we want to have rural schools - just not as many as there are now. We want to make sure they are in the right places.”

‘We need to fundamentally rethink how we design our learning environments of the future’

He adds: “We have a couple of schools in Aberdeenshire that are so removed, even if the roll fell really, really low, we would keep a school there because otherwise small children would have to travel for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. We don’t think that’s acceptable.

“So we do have some areas where we would need a school but we have others where we could amalgamate some schools to form a larger learning community and more of a peer group.”

However, Findlay argues that the act - and the onerous consultation process that it demands - means that schools “wither on the vine” instead of there being proactive plans for the school estate.

“Many of these buildings were not designed to meet the level of need we have in our mainstream settings and increasingly, with some of the additional support needs that we have, these buildings cannot be retrofitted. So we need to fundamentally rethink how we shape and how we design our learning environments of the future.”

Inspiration to become a teacher

Findlay is himself the product of a small rural school. He was raised in Aberdeenshire and attended primary Rathen School near Fraserburgh, which at the time had a roll of around 50 pupils.

Today the roll has grown and his mum, who is in her seventies, works at the school as a dinner lady. In 2019, to mark her 25 years of serving local children their lunch, he presented her with a long service award.

Findlay went on to attend Fraserburgh Academy, where he later cut his teeth as a young teacher of modern languages.

“One of the reasons I became a teacher was because I’d had such a great experience at school, both at primary and at secondary, and I was taught by some amazing teachers, some of whom went on to be lifelong friends,” he explains.

“They really inspired me, motivated me and pushed me to be my very best in a number of different areas, but particularly in terms of languages. So to be able to go back there and work alongside them, and teach alongside them, that was a great privilege.”

Then followed over a decade in neighbouring Moray Council, where he rose to become headteacher of Forres Academy, then the council’s head of education and, finally, in 2014, director of education and children’s services.

In 2018 he returned to Aberdeenshire to take up his current post.

“Our strapline is ‘From mountain to sea - the very best of Scotland’, and it really is. It’s so diverse.

“We’ve got schools with nine children and schools with 1,400 young people. Our oldest school was built in the second year of Queen Victoria’s reign and we’ve got fantastic modern campuses that we have opened in the last five or six years, so it’s got a bit of everything and its takes a fair while to cover the patch.

“If I go out to visit a school in Braemar, that’s me tied up for the day. I think people often forget just how big Aberdeenshire is.”

Too much focus on urban Scotland

Findlay says the development of education policy in Scotland is often very much focused on “urban Scotland as opposed to rural Scotland”.

He welcomes the changes to the Scottish Attainment Challenge and the way that funding is distributed. The original model and its focus on the nine council areas with the highest levels of deprivation failed to recognise that rural areas have poverty, too, he says.

The Northern Alliance of local authorities - one of the “regional improvement collaboratives” that had varying degrees of success after their formation in Scotland in 2018 - aimed to give the councils in the north and the island authorities a collective voice and more influence. One of its early focuses was teacher recruitment.

‘The Teacher Induction Scheme has been great. But it is time for a refresh’

But while the recruitment of primary teachers has improved markedly, staffing secondary schools remains a challenge.

A “significant number” of Aberdeenshire secondaries now employ primary teachers to teach literacy and numeracy in S1-3. There are “real examples of success” from this cross-pollination between sectors, says Findlay, but such moves have been born of necessity: the council simply cannot get enough English and maths teachers. Other hard-to-recruit-to subjects include home economics, design and technology and the sciences.

Initial teacher education needs to be reviewed, says Findlay, as does the Teacher Induction Scheme, which guarantees teaching graduates a job for a year, during which time they can complete their probation.

This year Aberdeenshire requested 44 secondary probationers; it was allocated 20, but only eight started working in schools at the start of the school year.

“The Teacher Induction Scheme has been great, it really has been. But it’s over 20 years old now so it is time for a refresh,” Findlay says.

The “preference waiver scheme” involves probationer teachers being paid a lump sum (£8,000 before tax in secondaries, £6,000 in primaries) if they agree to be placed in any school in Scotland for their first year. In Findlay’s opinion, this, too, has become less effective. And the data supports his argument: for 2024-25 just 155 new teachers opted into the scheme, down from 310 in 2020-21.

The Covid pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have resulted in many new teachers choosing to stay at home with their parents, says Findlay.

Revamping initial teacher education

Ultimately, he would like to see places on university teacher education courses being allocated according to need.

This academic year the government said it would fund just over 4,000 places on teacher education courses, and around three-quarters were allocated to universities in the Central Belt.

Findlay makes the case for looking instead at where the need is “in terms of geography, in terms of subject” and allocating places accordingly.

“So if there’s greater need in the north for whatever it might be - mathematics, biology - then you give more places to [the University of] Aberdeen and you give fewer places elsewhere because people tend to stay close to where they’ve been trained.”

A solution is needed not just to ensure that schools are properly staffed now but also in the future, he says.

The government has promised a reduction in teachers’ class-contact time. Findlay says in primary that would be “doable”: his authority has calculated it will need an extra 50 teachers.

Secondary, however, “will be really hard because we can’t get these teachers anyway, so how are we going to get even more of them?”

Findlay is also clear that extra time out of class must be used for professional learning, development and curriculum improvement, whereas teaching unions argue that it should be for teachers’ preparation and planning. A compromise will have to be found.

Ultimately, as Findlay says, everything requires equilibrium: balancing a demanding job with keeping healthy; balancing budgets with the needs and wants of employers and employees.

It’s a tightrope that he has been walking as a director for over a decade. But the goal, he says, has always been the same: improving outcomes for children and young people.

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