It’s hard being a politician when it comes to education. If you’re in opposition, you have to master the dark art of making schools sound terrible while not blaming the people who work in them.
If you’re in power, you have to make schools look like peerless temples of learning and suggest it’s all down to your crack team of ministers - without saying that too explicitly and invoking the wrath of teachers. Or, in the case of reformist governments, you have to nick your opponents’ playbook: schools are failing, ergo we must change them - but don’t take it personally, all you teachers out there!
The self-interest that drives the political debate around education makes reality almost impossible to discern for casual observers. Especially if their media organ of choice disdains nuance and balance.
Meanwhile, teachers can feel like everyone is impugning their reputation. There has been a noticeable weariness emerging among teachers recently over how their profession is viewed. Many feel that the dominant public narrative around Scottish education is a misleading one of unmitigated failure.
For all the difficulties besetting the profession - workload, recruitment, problematic qualifications - teachers do not project unremitting gloom. That was clear after I tweeted the following message a couple of weeks ago: “Teachers of Scotland (and beyond): can you sum up in a tweet why teaching is such a great job?”
A stream of endorsements
Replies poured in through this small window of opportunity for a different narrative: a stream of endorsements for teaching that came from the heart (see bit.ly/BestJobScot).
A common word the teachers used was “privilege” - the privilege, as one reply put it, of “helping someone unlock what a worthwhile life looks like for them”. This sense of responsibility did not feel like a burden. Teaching could have a huge pay-off: “Nothing brings greater joy when it goes well,” said one depute head. Gillian Campbell-Thow, Glasgow’s lead officer for languages and Gaelic and Scotland’s Teacher of the Year in 2014, said that the Twitter thread was “the best advertising for teaching I have seen in a long time”, having given people “a chance to remind themselves why they love what they do”.
This opportunity was seized upon, reckoned teacher and Tes Scotland columnist Kenny Pieper, because topical issues such as standardised assessment and the prospect of a Scottish Teach First mean “we are all feeling a bit under the spotlight, and not necessarily in a positive way”.
This week we report on some of the problems blighting Scottish education. New qualifications are leaving more pupils at risk of reaching the end of a course without certification to reflect their efforts, analysis suggests (see pages 6-7), while some of the attempts to solve recruitment crises may be having limited impact (see page 10).
These are politically created problems. In addressing them, we should all take care not to imply failure among the teachers picking their way through policymakers’ mistakes.
There has been another uplifting trend on Twitter in recent weeks: newly-qualified teachers proudly posting photos of the bright and idea-packed classrooms that they have been meticulously preparing. They are clearly bursting with excitement at embarking on what they see as an inspirational career.
We do not want these bright-eyed optimists to become embattled cynics, but that is the danger if they are relentlessly told that their profession deals in failure. Just as the failings of the education system must be scrutinised, the successes of teachers must be celebrated.
@Henry_Hepburn
