Every week for the past year or so, I’ve spent an hour at one of my local secondary schools as a volunteer for the brilliant Glasgow-based charity, MCR Pathways.
The idea behind the organisation is simple: you are twinned with a pupil who needs some support and are asked to act as their ‘mentor’.
I’ve found it a challenging but rewarding experience (though whether my mentee has found my ‘advice’ helpful is something I’ll leave for him to say).
Impressions from an hour a week spent fighting my way through the school’s packed corridors are fleeting, but I’ve seen enough to take away an obvious lesson around our tortured national debate on Scottish education.
What makes a great school? What delivers top quality education? Good teachers, duh.
Jenny Gilruth, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills
And a high-quality classroom experience for the pupils they teach.
It’s not rocket science.
It’s something that came back to mind last week after watching Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth set out the SNP’s progress on plans to reform Scottish education.
‘There is no greater a strength in our education system than excellent learning and teaching,’ she declared, rightly.
But the pace of reform her government is enacting to support this excellence is, as opposition parties put it, glacial.
A plan to scrap the Scottish Qualifications Authority has been put back. A separate move to reform the exam system has also been delayed.
There will be – you guessed it – a further consultation.
Scottish education is suffering from paralysis by analysis and a government that dreams up policy plans on the hoof, before dithering over whether to follow through on them or not.
It’s a stasis that needs to end.
The roots of this inertia and lack of direction go deep. It is more than 20 years since Scotland adopted the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), which sought to change the way education was delivered.
Numerous education secretaries have come and gone. None has ever quite managed to work out how to implement the plan properly.
On the front line, teachers have found themselves drowning in the ever-rising tide of bureaucracy and incompetence, most of it emanating from Edinburgh.
Famously, after asking for help with how to put the high-minded theories behind CfE into practice, teachers claimed to have received guidance amounting to more than 20,000 pages, most of it baffling.
Neil McLennan, one of Scotland’s foremost education experts, recalls being told by one headteacher how the big ‘green folder’ from the Education Scotland quango finally found a use either as a door-stop or – better still – as a punishment: pupils who had misbehaved were told to stay behind class and copy it out.
The bureaucracy reached lunatic levels. Another leading educational expert, Keir Bloomer, remembers telling a conference of teachers in Norway about what CfE involved.
Thanks to the bureaucratic changes it had introduced, teachers in Scotland, he said, were now required to understand ‘four capacities, 12 attributes, 24 capabilities, five levels, seven principles, six entitlements, ten aims, eight curriculum areas, three inter-disciplinary areas, four contexts for learning, and 1,820 experiences and outcomes’.
The Norwegian teachers all fell about laughing.
As one SNP education secretary has followed another, a tried and trusted method has become discernible.
Big plans to reform the new system are announced (remember John Swinney’s plan to give headteachers more autonomy?).
These then tend to be sandpapered down or dumped altogether.
Finally, to demonstrate that at least some action is going to take place, yet another report or review is ordered to update the reports from five years ago that said much the same thing.
Stick with me on this one, but here is the summary of what’s been produced in the past three years alone: a report by the OECD into the roll-out of CfE; a report into secondary assessments by Professor Gordon Stobart; a ‘National Discussion’ on education (which gathered in an impressive 28,000 responses); a review of educational infrastructure by Professor Kenneth Muir; and, finally, a report into qualifications and assessments by Professor Louise Hayward.
Come to think of it, I forgot to mention the reports of another body, the International Council of Education Advisers which has also been producing papers at an alarming rate.
Amusingly, its latest report concluded ‘the time for commissioning reviews is now over’. You don’t say.
Ms Gilruth’s defence is that with schools still reeling from the aftershocks of Covid, she needs to take the process of reform gradually.
There may be something to that, and as a former teacher, Ms Gilruth was initially seen as something of a breath of fresh air.
But, among some teachers and her former supporters, the frustration with the lack of change is boiling over.
Mr McLennan tells me: ‘She had a good start but is at risk of the returning issue of Scottish education – ideas rich, but implementation poor.’
It’s a perennial problem. But Humza Yousaf and Ms Gilruth now need to get a grip. Scotland has been consulted to death over education. What about some concrete action?
There is an urgent need to get on with a plan to tackle school discipline. Post-Covid, there is alarming evidence that behavioural standards in schools have fallen and that, even in primary schools, violence is commonplace/
Teachers want extra support to deal with unruly pupils who are wrecking lessons.
So far, ministers have organised the predictable summits to discuss the matter.
An action plan is promised; it’s time for government to act before teachers vote with their feet and quit for easier work.
There is the question of scrutiny. It’s welcome that the Government has taken Scotland back into international surveys which monitor progress, but the level of accountability is still lacking: according to figures obtained by the Scottish Tories more than 40 per cent of schools north of the Border haven’t been inspected for a decade.
More needs to be done. Schools and teachers should have more independence; in return, we should have a rigorous inspection regime to examine progress.
Finally, there needs to be a reset towards improving standards.
So if some National 5 exams are to be withdrawn, as proposed, let’s see those that remain give pupils the kind of challenge and test that sets them up for the far tougher challenges to come.
For years, we’ve had government that’s got in the way, hampering the ability of teachers to do their job.
It’s time for ministers to set the tone, show leadership, and give teachers the resources and the direction to get on with the job.