There is nothing new after all. A principal reform in the 10-14 report was none other than first-level guidance by class teachers, managed by promoted guidance staff.
Seventeen years on, Glasgow has agreed an identical post-McCrone system and has run into teacher opposition for introducing what turns out to be an educational relic.
The city’s “student tutors” are only marginally different from the “class tutors” who were designed to develop the pastoral dimension.
The 1986 report comments, spookily: “The promoted guidance staff will still be dealing with numbers that make it extremely difficult to know pupils well. Ideally, therefore, one teacher should be in a position to get to know a group of pupils - a tutor group, register class or whatever - very well.”
This teacher, “should, if at all possible, also teach that group so that the social and curricular aspects are joined”. Tutors would become “subject teacher, register teacher, first link with the school system, first point of contact for parents, initiator of, or participant in, social activities, outings, parties and helper in, or organiser of, social or community work undertaken by the school”.
They would carry on from primary where the single teacher looks after every aspect of education.
Uncanny or what?
