If ever there was any doubt, it must be clear by now that Covid has not been the spark for revolution in Scottish education that some had hoped. In the aftermath of those frenetic few days way back in March 2020, when schools closed, inspections were suspended indefinitely and exams were cancelled, many people saw a potential silver lining: out of national crisis, history shows us, often comes radical change. And hopes for an education system without exams or school inspections - easily dismissed in the past as a pipe dream - suddenly felt tantalisingly attainable.
Yet, after a two-year hiatus, national exams are on their way back in 2022 and, just last week, Tes Scotland reported that school inspections are to resume in January. Plenty of dismay greeted those announcements and they were presented as evidence of stubborn conservatism in Scottish education. Even though the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and Education Scotland are due to be reformed, many are sceptical about whether whatever comes next will be all that different from what went before.
And yet change is in the air in Scottish education. The emergence of grassroots teachers’ events such as ScotEd - the second instalment of which took place online last weekend - and teacher-led podcasts, such as Changing Conversations, shows an increasingly self-confident profession. (The annual Scottish Learning Festival organised by Education Scotland also became more accessible this week, of course, when it returned as an online event after Covid forced its cancellation in 2020. It seems doubtful that in-person education conferences will ever get back to anything like pre-Covid numbers, even when the pandemic finally recedes into the past.)
Teachers challenging the status quo in Scottish education
Critical voices in Scottish education, meanwhile, seem emboldened - just look at the many readers openly professing their delight at the publication this month of Class Rules: the truth about Scottish schools by James McEnaney, which takes aim at numerous shibboleths of Scottish education.
In this week’s magazine, we interview Stuart Clyde, head at Bertha Park High School in Perth, which opened in 2019 as Scotland’s first brand-new state secondary since 2002. Clyde - whose staff have the unique experience in Scotland of introducing one year group at a time, since starting with S1-2 in 2019-20 - talks about the importance of making room for colleagues “who think a little bit differently, who have got a different slant on how things should be done, who just don’t fit in to the conformity of what everybody thinks that role should be, who push the boundaries a little bit”.
There are signs of people who fit that bill being given more space in Scottish education. The Muir review on reform of the SQA and Education Scotland, which has just started - and which, education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said last week, should report back in January - has, for example, included on its small expert team that arch contrarian Professor Walter Humes, critic of what he described in a November 2020 Tes Scotland article as Scottish education bodies’ “bureaucratic mindset” and “hierarchical culture” that leave “little scope for fresh ideas”. Another member of the Muir review expert group, Khadija Mohammed, is certainly keen to push boundaries and ask awkward questions - she began a piece for Tes Scotland in April with this blunt enquiry: “How much more time do we need to progress on racial equality in our schools?”
In our interview with Clyde, he talks about a key lesson from Covid being that “you don’t always have to do what you’ve always done to get the job done”. Covid may not have led to revolution in Scottish education, but it has opened teachers’ eyes to new ways of doing the job - and, as Clyde puts it, “it’d be a travesty if we just now collapsed all that and put it in a drawer”.
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 24 September 2021 issue under the headline “Covid has empowered teachers to push the boundaries in education”
