In your news pages last week, David Henderson reported on the problems that could be faced by young and inexperienced teachers due to management restructuring in secondary schools. I would suggest that the move to flatter management structures in secondary school would affect all teachers.
The McCrone agreement took out the assistant principal teacher and assistant head from the management structure in secondary schools. It is becoming obvious that the new curriculum leader post represents a bringing together of the old AHT and principal teacher posts.
The new curriculum leader will drive, challenge and monitor departments with a mountain of HMI approved paperwork in the way the AHT was supposed to do, but will not feel it is their job to actually run their departments.
The task of running the department is to be taken up by the classroom teacher. I am sure those teachers who have lost their PTAPT can bring evidence of this to your pages.
We are constantly being told that one of the main themes of the recent changes was based on the 1999 HMIAudit Scotland publication Time for Teaching. This is quickly becoming a hollow notion.
One last point, the two union representatives in your report noted this trend towards the “dumping” of management tasks on all classroom teachers but gave no suggestions as to how they are going to deal with this worrying trend.
James Waugh
Currie
