Off with the heads

Some primary heads may lie uneasy this week. Under the bludgeoning of the inspectorate, as administered in the latest report on primary education, those heads who have not helped maintain and accelerate “progress towards the adoption of the principles and practices recommended in the primary memorandum” must be feeling bloody and somewhat bowed. Off with them, says the report, to appropriate in-service courses.

Criminals mentally below average

Crime is one of Scotland’s few growth industries, said Mr Gordon Neave, deputy governor of Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, to a meeting of the Dumfries branch of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency. His comment was reinforced by statistics of young people in penal establishments (682 young men in borstals, 746 in young offenders’ institutions, 174 in detention centres and 265 on remand; plus 70 girls in one establishment in Greenock).

Pay claims announced

The pay claim lodged by the Teachers’ Panel this week would give day- school teachers four basic scales: pound;1,650-pound;3,000 by 10 increments (honours graduates in secondary); pound;1,450-pound;2,600 by 10 increments (honours graduates in primary schools, ordinary graduates in primary or secondary and certain teachers of practical and aesthetic subjects in secondary). The lower increments are pound;1,300-pound;2,450 and pound;1,250-pound;2,200.

Horrifying “barbarism”

I discussed corporal punishment with foreign students recently. They liked Scotland immensely but were horrified by the “barbarism” of corporal punishment. I intended to let them see a tawse but such was their horror I decided not to, in case I killed the Scottish tourist trade off.

Letter - JB Gibson, Dunfermline

Challenge of Christianity

It was illuminating to read in The TESS the observation of a schoolmaster that he was the only principal teacher of religious and moral education with a separate department in the whole of Scotland. Illuminating but not surprising. The Queen of the Sciences has long been Cinderella. I doubt whether the Miller report (somewhat delayed) on religious and moral education will prove a Prince Charming.

Letter - Philip Rice, Dingwall.