In the summer of 1968, the students of Paris came out on to the streets, tore up cobblestones and hurled them at the riot police. Their grievances were many but the injustices of an out-of-date education system were high on the list. It served vested interests, they claimed, and not the interests of the young. While the president, Charles de Gaulle, contemplated using the army to restore order, the prime minister, Georges Pompidou - who would succeed him as president within the year - at least had a better rhetorical response. “Rien ne sera plus comme avant,” he said - “nothing will ever be the same again”.

In the summer of 2020, the teenagers demonstrating in Trafalgar Square in London, outside the Scottish Qualifications Authority HQ in Dalkeith and in George Square in Glasgow were, thankfully, more restrained in their protests. But their outrage at the way in which the political classes had treated them was raw, as was the despair of those who felt that their futures had been stolen by an algorithm. Within a few days, the policy change they brought about was total, swift and unconditional.

However, as the clock ticks towards the summer of 2021, there is not only a sense of déjà vu at what has often been a leaden-footed response of politicians and exam authorities across the UK but also a sense of despondency at the lack of engagement with the underlying issues, of which the exams crisis was but the most acute symptom. There’s a great deal of talk but also a real risk that things will end up pretty much the same after all.

So, let’s stop using glib words that evoke the promise of change but end up changing nothing. The more people talk about equity, excellence and inclusion, the more those words risk becoming edubabble, devoid of sincerity, meaning or power to make a difference.

For the sake of argument, let’s take it for granted that no one actually wants a more unequal, more rubbish and more alienating education system than the one we’ve got. If we were to replace warm words with decisive actions, what big things would we do?

First, we would turn the education system on its head - or more precisely, put headteachers at the head of the education system. Forget “empowerment” (another word that loses meaning in direct proportion to its overuse); let’s legislate to give headteachers responsibility for the quality of education provided for children and the authority to deliver it.

The rest of the education system would then exist primarily to enable headteachers to do their job. Heads are not functionaries; they are professionals whose responsibility is to act in the interest of pupils, their parents and communities. Decisions taken by headteachers and other school staff are much more likely to deliver positive outcomes than those taken by hierarchies too often susceptible to the whims of those at the top rather than responsive to the needs of those below. And it would quickly be apparent which bits of the hierarchy actually contribute to positive outcomes for children and young people, and which are a waste of space and resources. More power to headteachers should soon mean more resources in classrooms.

Gauging engagement

The second thing we would do is balance the authority of headteachers with the influence of parents and carers. Like empowerment, parental engagement in schools is too often lip-serviced rather than lived. Yet there is never a successful school without engaged parents. Hopefully, as a result of the pandemic, parents and carers will have developed a greater respect for the job of the teacher. Likewise, teachers will have gained a greater understanding of how parents and carers can, should - and usually do - support the learning and overall development of their children and the ethos of the school.

Strong, mutually respectful relationships already exist in very many schools but it requires determination and commitment from all sides to make them the powerful drivers of system improvement that they have the potential to be.

Third, we would really invest in teachers’ professionalism. I am regularly moved by the skill, commitment and idealism of the student teachers and probationers who work at my school. But I’m also often saddened by the lack of respect they feel the system has for them. I compare their stories with those of former pupils in their early careers in law, financial services, medicine or the military. It’s not about money (early career teachers’ salaries can now stand comparison with many other professions) but it is absolutely about valuing their contribution and showing a commitment to their development in the profession.

Suppose teachers’ careers were divided into seven-year-long segments, culminating in a fully paid sabbatical with a fully funded programme of opportunities for professional research, growth and refreshment, including international secondment. Suppose we had credible ways in which teachers who devote their careers to classroom practice could develop that practice, enrich the system and be recognised for doing so. Suppose we had clear leadership pathways for teachers and an actual physical staff college providing high-quality leadership education, leading to a range of PhD-level qualifications for headship and system leadership. And suppose all this was undertaken not during teachers’ weekends, holidays and in hours when they should be sleeping but by leave of absence from their substantive role.

And suppose, too, that this approach to teacher professional development meant a seamless interaction between the teaching profession, educrats and academics, not the better to reinforce orthodoxies but to ensure that research better enriches practice and practice constantly informs policy. Suppose that “co-creation” and constant improvement of the system were real and not just edubabble, and came about as a result of debate and (horror of horrors) respectful and well-informed disagreement, rather than from the calculations of the ambitious of how best to ingratiate themselves with the powerful.

And also, just suppose that this approach to teacher professionalism meant that we could more easily find opportunities for teachers to work for a time in business, sport, creative or manufacturing industry, or other professions and public services, and bring those experiences back with them into schools to the huge benefit of themselves, their pupils and the educational system as a whole. And suppose that meant that the prospect of later retirement and a 50-year teaching career didn’t seem quite so daunting after all.

The fourth thing we would do would be to use time and space in schools better. Much has been written about the agricultural origins of the school calendar but little has been done to modernise how we use time in schools generally - not to cram more of the same into the lives of pupils, or grind the joy out of the professional lives of teachers, but to enrich pupils, liberate staff and strengthen communities.

Schools are hugely expensive and chronically under-used pieces of infrastructure. But what if they were open longer hours and staffed throughout, not only by teachers but by a workforce comprising many specialists and delivering many services? What if schools were also designed as medical centres, mental health clinics, theatres, financial advice centres, enterprise hubs, recording studios, community media stations, artists’ ateliers and restaurants, as well as the sports centres and community centres that many already are?

Over the past year and more of Covid, we’ve also witnessed the breakdown of the assumption that learning and teaching can only happen in schools. So, what if it also routinely happened in shops, sports clubs, banks, theatres, restaurants, factories, community centres, as well as schools, colleges and universities?

This sort of innovation is currently stymied by a concept of school attendance, which is about control. Children must all turn up to the same place at the same time or else they (and perhaps their parents) will be punished. Compulsory education must always be non-negotiable but does it have to rely on this type of control?

More flexible timetables could incorporate more engaging forms of learning in different contexts and with different groupings of pupils, from lectures to individual tutorials. And some time at school would simply be downtime, especially during an extended day. Recovery from the pandemic will demand that we meet the needs of children and young people as individuals rather than timetabled batches of 30. To do that properly, we need to be flexible.

Not the only option

To achieve that, flexibility will also be needed for teachers and other school staff. Teachers in the UK spend more time with full classes of children than teachers in almost any other comparable country. This is often presented as a workload issue. But it is little noted that it also stultifies the curriculum, thwarts pedagogic innovation and feeds an industrial conception of schools that is at odds with the personalisation of learning and the development of the wider role of the school in its community, which must now be urgent priorities.

And what other big thing would we do? Well, we would scrap exams in anything like their current form. Without that, nothing else will really change. The impact of exams in driving everything that goes on in secondary schools, and a good deal of what happens elsewhere in the education system, is pernicious. It leads to a perverse prioritisation of one, relatively limited form of attainment and the devaluing of other richer forms. It makes learning short-term and transactional. It sells short both the young people who struggle to attain what is expected of them at a particular age and those who could do more and do it quicker. It fails to properly reward anyone who thinks differently, learns differently or who has life experiences that are different from the expected norm.

But post-pandemic, we would still need hard outcomes at points where the educational experience and attainment of the individual meets the needs of the world beyond. But at least schools would no longer be constrained by having to make the achievement of standardised national qualifications the main focus of their senior-phase curriculum. Instead, all students in the senior phase should have access to a whole range of qualifications - academic, technical, vocational and professional - from a wide range of providers, nationally and internationally. In a more agile, flexible, connected and professionally informed system, young people could combine such courses in ways that reflect their own aptitudes, aspirations and the pace of their own personal development.

In addition, national standards in core competences of literacy, numeracy and oral communication (ideally in at least two languages) could be recognised by attainment in standardised tests, taken in the style of the driving theory test, whenever it suited the individual - for example, when applying for a job. Along with schools and colleges, private, voluntary and public-sector organisations (such as the BBC) would help prepare people for those tests. Ideally, the standards would be recognised internationally or, at least, across the UK - and outstanding achievement in them could be celebrated in the community by awards ceremonies akin to as those currently staged so successfully for recipients of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. No one need ever miss out again.

The experience of Covid-19 is a one-way valve. We can’t go back now that we’ve seen the limitations and inadequacies of our current systems in a harsh, unforgiving light. But we have also seen that it is possible to change things quickly and that the state can apply huge resources of people, ingenuity and cash to solve a problem when there is an overwhelming imperative to act.

The pandemic has had a much more profound impact than “les évènements” in Paris in 1968. Across the world, the tectonic plates of technology, power and wealth are shifting and reforming; education systems are changing in response. Unless we do some big things in Scotland, however, we risk being the only country where even a pandemic can’t shift the balance of power between vested interests, and those of children and young people.

Melvyn Roffe is principal at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh

This article originally appeared in the 28 May 2021 issue under the headline “Vive la révolution”