Although it is over 30 years since the UK ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill only passed - albeit unanimously - in the Scottish Parliament in December 2023, becoming an act in January 2024.
Most of its provisions will come into force in July of this year.
Meanwhile, the ever-increasing numbers of pupils with additional support needs (ASN) will continue to be ably supported by Scottish government-funded organisations such as My Rights, My Say (which supports 12- to 15-year-olds with ASN) and Enquire (which advises parents of pupils with ASN).
Those bodies are greatly looking forward to legislative change that will have the effect of extending existing rights and making them more widely available.
A ‘game-changing’ children’s right
This development has been unanimously welcomed across the political and professional spectrum and the 2022 Muir report described it as a “game-changer”, devoting an appendix to it and referencing the UNCRC’s Article 29 in its first recommendation (“I have the right to an education which develops my personality, talents and abilities”).
However, in the Muir report’s other recommendations, there is no mention of any impact assessment to be carried out on the likely repercussions on schools’ pastoral capacity of this “game-changing” law.
Coming into force at a time when schools are assailed by post-pandemic challenges - raising attainment, closing the gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students, tackling rising pupil absence and deteriorating pupil behaviour - this is particularly disappointing. But it is not new.
A characteristic of school education in Scotland since at least the turn of the century has been the disconnect between policy making and policy implementation.
Teachers could be forgiven for feeling that, throughout this period, their professional experience of working in schools has been a kind of educational Pianosa - the island of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 - where insensitive and out-of-touch superiors keep putting up the number of missions.
What is particularly striking, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, is that we have continued to treat schools as if they are organisations exclusively concerned with curriculum, assessment, pedagogy and qualifications.
Yet a crucial aspect of schools is, and always has been, their pastoral role. Indeed, in tackling the most important challenges currently facing our school education system, it is the pastoral structure and capacity of schools that will be crucial.
That is of course where such a structure exists, because as Jonathan Cunningham - vice-president of primary school leaders’ body the AHDS and headteacher of a Glasgow primary school - recently explained in Tes, primary schools in Scotland, irrespective of size or socioeconomic characteristics, have no pastoral structure of promoted posts.
Review needed of guidance and pupil support system
Secondaries, at least since the guidance/pupil support system was introduced in Scotland in the late 1960s, have had such a structure.
But it has always been understaffed, underfunded and, despite the national review of guidance published to coincide with Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) some 20 years ago (then immediately ignored as the focus became exclusively CfE), it has never been thoroughly reviewed or evaluated.
Typically, there are at least twice as many curriculum principal teachers in Scottish schools as PTs of pupil support/guidance.
There is also a big pay discrepancy, thanks to a job sizing toolkit still used by local authorities, which discriminates against PTs of pupil support/guidance and has been unreformed since the McCrone reforms of more than 20 years ago.
Notwithstanding this, it is on schools’ pastoral role, rather than on their curricular or pedagogical capacity, that the burden of tackling the great inequities in school education now falls.
Although the thought of yet another report might horrify many teachers - before we have even implemented the Muir and Hayward reports - we urgently need a national review of the pastoral capacity of Scotland’s schools.
Frank Lennon is an educational consultant who previously worked as a secondary headteacher in Scotland for more than 20 years
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