Sheena Devlin loved school and always wanted to be a primary teacher. As a child, she tormented her cousins and siblings by insisting they play “schoolies” - she was the teacher and they her first pupils.
“That’s where I got my earliest teaching practice,” says the Perth and Kinross education and children’s services director.
But not everyone was enthusiastic about Devlin’s career choice. Her S4 guidance teacher at Dundee’s Harris Academy was “horrified” and tried to persuade her to go into secondary teaching instead.
“There was a real snobbery,” she says.
Primary schools disparaged in the past
Devlin was not put off - but it was not the last time she would hear the importance of primary schools disparaged.
In the early days of her career, she remembers an education director who used to say that “secondary is primary, and primary is secondary, and we need to remember that”.
Devlin - who was part of the first cohort to undertake a four-year primary teaching degree at the University of Dundee and qualified in 1988 - remembers being “incensed”.
She still marvels at the impact primary education has on a child’s life. Children start school often unable to read and write and then most leave secure in these skills - and much more.
“To me, that was just genuinely exciting to be part of helping young people change and grow and develop. I remember when I started I couldn’t believe I got paid to do it because I just loved being in school.”
All too often, though, what happens in primary slips under the radar because of the noise around the qualifications and the senior phase of secondary school.
If that narrow focus continues, mistakes made in implementing Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) will be repeated, fears Devlin.
“Leaving aside how people think CfE has gone - it was a real opportunity to get those learning pathways that were iterative and incremental and built on previous learning all the way through the broad general education.”
But that hasn’t really happened, she believes.
The notion persists that when pupils arrive in secondary it’s a “fresh start” - and primary teachers are also sometimes guilty of taking the same attitude when children come up from nursery.
“The starting point is ‘this is what I teach children in S1’ rather than ‘who are the children coming into my class?’, ‘where are they?’, ‘what is it we need to do?’.
“What happens is you can get into a bit of repeating and covering stuff that’s already been covered, when we need to be moving on with that learning.”
Impact of slow-moving education reforms
Devlin took over as president of the national education directors’ body ADES in November, at its annual conference, where she made it clear that the hiatus in implementation of education reform had left the system “in limbo”.
The message from ADES was the government needed to “get Hayward done” referring to the independent review of qualifications, led by Professor Louise Hayward that reported in June, but which the government has still to respond to.
In the meantime, Devlin says that education directors are not resting on their laurels.
In order to push ahead with improvement, ADES has established “a model of collaborative improvement”, which sees colleagues from other councils and Education Scotland challenging each other over aspects of their work they want to improve.
In Perth and Kinross, Devlin chose to put her authority’s plans for improving additional support for learning up for scrutiny and feedback.
Improving education from within
From October this year, all 32 Scottish councils will have had a “collaborative improvement” visit. A self-evaluation framework has also been worked on - schools already had the inspectorate’s How Good is Our School? and now councils have What Makes a Good Local Authority?, she says.
The goal is to improve “the system from within through a process of reflection and honest self-evaluation”, as well as “critical challenge from others”.
Ultimately, for Devlin, it all comes back to the “pedagogical core” - in other words, “learning and teaching is critical”.
“Our job is to make things different and better for the children and families we seek to serve, and that is primarily around the best quality learning and teaching,” she says.
‘I prefer the absence of surprises’
It is too early to say, she says, whether the proposed Centre of Teaching Excellence will have an impact.
That announcement, made by education secretary Jenny Gilruth at the SNP conference in October, was a surprise to Devlin, who adds: “I prefer the absence of surprises if I’m being honest.”
But if the mooted centre is an indication that “we are serious about ongoing development and support, then that’s a good thing”.
In a recent interview with Tes Scotland, Dr Zoe Robertson, the new chair of the Scottish Council of Deans of Education, said it took more than two years - the PGDE and probation - to build teaching expertise and that teacher education should be seen as a “continuum”.
Devlin echoes this but also believes that initial teacher education (ITE) could be better at instilling in new recruits how to teach “core skills” like reading, writing and numeracy.
“For me, there’s sometimes what I call an implementation gap between people’s understanding of theory and then the ability to enact that.”
However, like Robertson, she sees ongoing professional development beyond the ITE years as crucial to fostering “judicious and discerning professionals who know what works best in their particular situation”.
Teacher numbers tension
Yet, to avoid cutting teaching jobs, training and development budgets have “suffered over the years”, says Devlin.
“That’s something we need to look at to ensure there’s a sufficiency of resource for that ongoing training and development of professionals at all points throughout their career.”
She disagrees with the requirement for councils to maintain teacher numbers when councils are dealing with dwindling budgets, an ongoing source of tension between local and national government that took another twist this week as the education secretary wrote to councils saying she would not withhold funding over falling teacher numbers, despite previously threatening to do so.
Devlin talks about being clear about roles and responsibilities of the different players in the system - councils, government, schools, the inspectorate - and the need for them to be trusted “to exercise full authority” within their respective spheres.
It’s a common refrain: teachers in their classrooms want to be trusted to do their jobs with minimum interference from senior leadership teams, and headteachers want to be trusted by councils to run their schools.
But trust is hard when the stakes are high.
After all, as Devlin is keen to underline, to be given responsibility for someone else’s child is one of life’s greatest privileges.
Sheena Devlin was talking to Tes Scotland senior reporter Emma Seith
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