The GTC meeting last week was the last to be attended by Ivor Sutherland, who retires as registrar at the end of this month. So it was appropriate that the English language, in which he took a forensic interest, should have held centre stage.
Convener Norma Anne Watson was “a tad disappointed” that representatives from the Scottish Executive Education Department were not present to hear some complaints she was about to raise on its plans for teacher training reform. As for the plans themselves, she was “profoundly disappointed”.
Ohers confessed to being almost “apoplectically disappointed” with the training proposals, the funding ideas from the higher education funding council and the suspicions that a U-turn was about to take place on probationer posts (TESS, last week).
On all of these issues, registrar Sutherland was left to compose “robust” responses, presumably somewhere on the range between mildness and apoplexy.
We have little doubt that the outgoing registrar will make his views “pellucidly obvious”, as vice-convener Gordon Kirk put it.
