The notion of “work-life balance” can conjure up visions of mindfulness retreats and geometrically pleasing offices that would get Marie Kondo murmuring in approval.

Sometimes, though, you can get people closer to that equilibrium in far more prosaic fashion - by, say, making sure that your organisation’s website isn’t a nightmare to navigate.

Work-life balance is a huge priority for Gillian Hamilton, Education Scotland’s interim chief executive, who warns that if teachers - or anyone else for that matter - are exhausted then their job will “eat them up”.

People in Scottish education who know Hamilton well will tell you that her empathy for the teaching profession makes her a great fit for her job in a time of reform when there will be much anxiety and uncertainty.

Certainly, while she is happy talking about the lofty aspirations of education reform, Hamilton knows that teachers sometimes have more immediate priorities - like finding stuff quickly.

Hamilton, who has been in her role since the end of March, makes it clear that “disparate communications” from Education Scotland will not cut it for time-poor teachers.

“We need to make it as easy as possible for teachers across Scotland if they’re looking for a resource or information,” she says. “It needs to be easy to find, and our communication needs to be more streamlined and slicker.”

Education Scotland ‘listening to teachers’

As a former primary headteacher, she acknowledges that, since Education Scotland was formed in 2011, it has been perceived as a somewhat aloof and remote organisation, and you’re hardly remedying this if teachers can’t find what they need on the organisation’s website.

“This is really important,” Hamilton says. “We need to be an accessible organisation...and much closer to the profession, and the profession needs to feel that that support or advice - whatever it is they’re looking for - is more accessible.”

Hamilton has been keen to underline her open-mindedness and willingness to listen to teachers. She hosts a new Education Scotland podcast, Learning Conversations, which certainly has a more relaxed vibe than is often associated with the organisation.

And she is hitting the road: by the end of this school year, she wants to have visited every one of Scotland’s 32 local authorities, where she will meet classroom teachers and education directors alike.

“My job is to serve the profession,” says Hamilton, adding that it’s essential to “listen to the people that I’m working with closely”.

Hamilton was a primary head until 2004 and then head of educational services at the General Teaching Council for Scotland for three years, where she led the revision of Professional Standards and the pilot of Professional Update. Later she became the first chief executive of the Scottish College for Educational Leadership (better known as SCEL), before it was subsumed by Education Scotland, where she became a strategic director. In the first episode of the new Education Scotland podcast she recalls that that decision over SCEL was “a shock”, but that she ultimately came to realise that the important thing was that the work of SCEL would continue within its new home.

“You don’t bring about improvement by doing it to people”

“In all leadership roles I’ve had, you’re always learning,” she says. “I need to learn about the work that our teams do across the whole spectrum.” With that knowledge you should then “develop people and invest in people [and] that’s how you bring about change and improvement”.

In her time at SCEL she “realised really quickly that I couldn’t do the job on my own” and “learned about the importance of listening and building relationships”. SCEL’s innovative work on school leadership was successful, she believes, because it got buy-in from the profession.

Hamilton hopes to see the same buy-in with Education Scotland and - while recognising that its scale, reputation and imminent reform make that more difficult - she says her approach will be the same: “I don’t know how to do it another way.”

“You could do [this job] at your desk all day, and get caught up in the constant stream of communications, but I want to be able to talk confidently about what’s happening today in Scottish education, in our schools,” she says.

The benefits of going out on her travels were underlined earlier this month when she went to an “amazing” carers’ event in Fife, where young delegates got to quiz influential people like Hamilton, as well as politicians and local authority chief executives.

“They made me think differently,” she says. The day was a stark reminder that young carers are not one amorphous group, that each individual faces unique circumstances, with some coping well and others struggling to get by.

“Sometimes when you’re doing a job like this, with 400 staff and all these diverse functions, it would be easy just to delegate some of that - ‘I’m too busy - will someone else go to the young carers’ festival?’ That’s not the kind of chief exec that I want to be,” says Hamilton.

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School inspection was brought together with curriculum development when Education Scotland was formed in 2011. Since then, inspection has in theory become a considerably more collaborative process - but Hamilton acknowledges that she still hears from headteachers who “really feel the pressure” when it is their school’s turn.

She underlines that inspectors don’t want to be taken into “a room with 30 folders of evidence”; instead, “we want to see learning and teaching, we want to speak to staff and parents and young people”.

And she says she frequently hears about the upside of inspection from headteachers, who report that “some of the best professional learning they’ve ever taken part in [was] working with the inspectors during that inspection week, even though that pressure is there”.

Hamilton adds: “You don’t bring about improvement by doing it to people - you will not improve a school or a system. The best way to improve a system is doing it with people, with the staff.”

The changing role of headteachers

“My headteacher experience was really different to what it is now,” says Hamilton.

At the turn of the century, ”there were hardly any emails” to field, the landmark McCrone deal was fuelling halcyon thoughts of 35-hour working weeks, there had been a big increase in support staff - and there was simply more money. Making a big change like taking on a whole new maths scheme did not seem all that daunting, she recalls.

“For all of us now, we’re operating in a really, really tight fiscal context, and that’s really challenging for local and national government, and sometimes there are difficult decisions,” says Hamilton. She adds, though, that “sometimes really, really tight financial contexts result in really outstanding innovation”.

Behaviour and Covid

Before the summer Scottish education hit the mainstream headlines for the first time in a while. Education secretary Jenny Gilruth had announced a summit on violence in schools (although she later tweaked its working title to focus on behaviour and relationships instead).

Hamilton says: “I don’t like the black-white debate of good behaviour, bad behaviour. We’ve worked really hard in Scotland in the area of inclusion and supporting young people, and I think we need to keep our eyes wide open around that whole conversation.”

However, she does not take concerns about behaviour lightly and adds an important caveat: “If teachers are concerned about young people’s behaviour, then actually the cabinet secretary and Education Scotland need to listen to those concerns.”

Hamilton stresses that “we are not in the same place post-Covid”. School leaders have told her that proactive support of pupils has had to be stepped up, and that since the pandemic “mental health has been a really big challenge”.

She has concerns about the lingering impact of the Covid years on primary-secondary transition work, even though “schools have done an amazing job of doing that online”.

“We can’t pretend that we came to the end of a global pandemic and things flipped back,” says Hamilton. “We know that for lots of young people being away from the classroom [has] been really hard.”

Learning from the primary sector

With so much recent focus on issues such as assessment and behaviour in secondary schools, it sometimes feels like primary schools do not get the attention they deserve.

“I think we can learn an enormous amount from work that happens in our primary schools,” says Hamilton, citing emerging work on the benefits of play and experiential learning not only in the early years but also “further up the primary school”.

She highlights social media posts that Aberdeen’s Dyce Primary had posted recently.

“It busts the myth of being too big for play, when you saw some of those Primary 7s and the learning they were engaging in.”

Hamilton is also keen to talk up the potential of interdisciplinary learning in secondary schools, and how primary schools could share their expertise in this area.

“I do believe in the importance of subject knowledge in the development of curriculum in secondary schools, but I’m always in awe of a primary teacher in a busy class who’s teaching across that whole curriculum spread, and differentiating it across the whole class,” she says.

Taking teachers’ views into account

Hamilton fully backs Gilruth’s decision, just before the school summer holidays, to pause education reform to allow more time for teachers to feed in their views.

There has been a lot to digest in recent months, including the Hayward report on assessment and qualifications, the National Discussion and the Withers report on skills.

”[Gilruth] is rightly really keen to be making sure that she’s speaking to the profession, and really being sure that the profession is taken into account,” says Hamilton.

The extended reform period means changes at Education Scotland will be postponed and Hamilton’s interim role will go beyond the autumn 2024 period she had in mind. What she does after that, however long her role lasts, she has not yet decided.

There are just under 400 staff at Education Scotland and she stresses that uncertainty over the future has been “really hard” for them, as well as for teachers and others who work in the sector.

“The wellbeing of my staff has to be really important, too,” she says.

Pressing ahead with changes

Education Scotland’s combination of inspection and curriculum remits has been controversial since the body was formed 12 years ago. As the impetus for reform grew, Shirley-Anne Somerville, when she was education secretary, described Education Scotland’s “core problem” as “trying to be all things to all people”.

And the process of splitting up Education Scotland’s key functions will continue despite the pause in reform announced by Somerville’s successor.

Hamilton says “we’ll still be one organisation, but we’ll operate really as two functions within that organisation” over the coming period, a move she spoke about at an Education Scotland staff conference this week.

“So we’ll have a leadership team responsible for what will become the inspectorate”, while a separate function “encompasses not just curriculum but professional learning, learning and teaching, and our current improvement work”.

“My job will be to continue to lead those two functions as part of one organisation during this reform,” says Hamilton, adding: “It feels like a real opportunity...to start that shift now.”

An advert for a new interim chief inspector is due to be posted by the end of August, with whoever is appointed reporting to Hamilton.

“Inspection findings have to be a big part of how we know ourselves as a system”

The role will act as something of a stepping stone until the reform of Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) is fully played out, but Hamilton insists that it is right to press on with some level of change in the meantime.

“An organisation should never stand still,” she says. “It would be a mistake for us, as an organisation, to stand still and wait for that period of time.”

Nevertheless, she underlines that, whatever happens, school inspection will not become an island.

“Inspection can’t sit in isolation,” says Hamilton, adding that to have a new inspection body too far removed from other national education organisations would be “a really big mistake”.

“Inspection findings, intelligence from inspection, have to be a big part of how we know ourselves as a system,” says Hamilton, pointing out that inspection is already helping shape some crucial support provided to schools.

“I think there’s a risk that we lose some of that, and it’s really important that we hold what’s worked well, and whether there are one, two or three organisations [as a result of Education Scotland and SQA reform], the important bit is that, as a system, we are sharing knowledge and using it.”

‘Scottish education does a really good job’

Hamilton is keen that the reform process does not give the impression that Scottish education is in a bad way.

“Scottish education does a really good job,” she says. “Scottish education can improve and be better, but there is a commitment across local and national government to get it right for Scotland’s children.

“And we need to hold on to that - reform doesn’t mean we change all of that.”