The Scottish government’s reform of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and Education Scotland will create three new national agencies. However, while plans to replace the SQA and create a new independent inspectorate have been much discussed and debated, what of the “national agency for education”? In comparison, the debate around this reform has been far more muted.

The new agency will comprise what is left of Education Scotland, the joint inspection and curriculum development agency formed under a previous reform in 2011, when inspection is removed, both in terms of its staffing and budget; the Education Scotland name will be retained.

However, the body is also supposed to be undergoing transformation to address criticism that Scotland’s national education organisations have been - as education secretary Jenny Gilruth recently put it - ”too distant from those whom they serve”, even perceived by teachers as “an impediment to delivering excellent teaching”.

Putting teachers ‘at the centre’

Gilruth says that restoring trust hinges on putting teachers and pupils “at the centre of decision making” - but it remains unclear how that goal will be realised.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s biggest teaching union wants to see Education Scotland address “a significant erosion in the quality and quantity of professional support” around curriculum guidance and related pedagogy and teaching resources.

The reformed body, says EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley, must provide teachers with “access to high-quality teaching materials and associated advice that are reliable, trustworthy and provided in a timely fashion”.

There is optimism that under the leadership of interim Education Scotland chief executive Gillian Hamilton since March 2023, things are moving in the right direction. Education Scotland has made progress, senior figures in Scottish education have told us, when it comes to building bridges with teachers, heads and education directors.

One of Hamilton’s priorities in her first year was to visit all 32 local authorities, which she did not quite manage inside 12 months, but the commitment was well received.

Graham Hutton, general secretary of secondary heads’ body School Leaders Scotland (SLS), says Education Scotland “is already moving in the right direction” with a “very successful partnership working over the past year or so”.

SLS is “optimistic” that if the direction of travel is maintained, Education Scotland “will increase its relevance to teachers on the ground”.

However, cultural change alone will only get Education Scotland so far.

Lack of money causing concern

There are fears that scant resources will mean the support the revamped body provides falls short of teachers’ needs and expectations. A lack of money could put the brakes on true collaborative working, Bradley warns.

Education Scotland says the Scottish government has yet to announce a budget for the future of Education Scotland so it is “not in a position to comment at this stage”.

There also remains a lack of clarity about “how all the jigsaw pieces of Scottish education fit together”, says Hutton. He describes the education secretary’s plans for a Centre for Teaching Excellence - announced at the SNP conference in October 2023 - as “a costly innovation, which quite simply isn’t needed”.

According to Gilruth, the centre - to be housed in a university and have a budget of around £4 million a year - will make Scotland “a world leader in new approaches to learning and teaching” and ensure that all teachers are “supported and empowered” in the classroom.

But Hutton suggests the centre is “unnecessary” and that Education Scotland already has a proven track record in this role.

There is also increasing unease that the government rejected Professor Ken Muir’s recommendation - in his 2022 report setting out a vision for the reform of Scotland’s national bodies - that a national agency for education should take on SQA’s accrediting and regulating functions.

Muir says he made the recommendation because the awarding side of SQA needed to be “subject to greater scrutiny”; the 2021 review of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that “absence of alignment between curriculum and assessment” was “the single biggest barrier to the implementation of CfE”.

In September, Muir told the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee that he still believes “the principle of separating the awarding function and the accreditation and regulatory functions should be looked at”.

Uncertainty over leadership of new bodies

Arguably, however, the more immediate challenge for Education Scotland is this: who will lead it?

On Sunday 6 October, applications for the post of Education Scotland chief executive closed - as did applications for chief inspector of education. Both positions failed to attract enough candidates for a competitive recruitment process, marking one more delay among many on the road to reform.

For the time being, Hamilton remains in charge - and, some might argue, in limbo.

However, since taking up the post, she has said that “an organisation should never stand still”. Recent revelations about how the body plans to take forward the new Curriculum Improvement Cycle - and how teachers will be involved - suggest this is more than warm words.

Hamilton says Education Scotland needs to be “an accessible organisation...and much closer to the profession”; she acknowledges it has been guilty of trying to be “all things to all people”.

The new body, she told the parliamentary education committee on 25 September, would have a “clearer role”, which had now been set out by the government.

Gilruth’s description of the body’s future was published in June. She says Education Scotland’s “primary purpose” will be “to lead curriculum design, delivery and improvement, including the provision of resources to support high-quality learning and teaching”.

Gilruth expanded on this in evidence to the committee on 9 October: Education Scotland had become an organisation “involved in lots of different things in Scottish education”, but should focus on providing “curriculum support for the teaching profession”.

Dangers of ‘static employment’

Gilruth stressed the importance of changing the approach to staffing. Education Scotland had become an organisation of “static employment”, she said: previously practising teachers had been seconded into the body on a regular basis, perhaps never to return to the classroom.

Having teachers come out of school, work at a national level - but then go back - was “good for the system”, she added.

The education secretary conceded this was “a bit of a niche point”, but Muir had already stated in his 2022 report - Putting Learners at the Centre: Towards a Future Vision for Scottish Education - that the “fairly static staffing” in national bodies was often cited as a problem.

In the report, one secondary teacher describes it as “a deeply flawed model” involving a “central corps of ‘experts’ dispersing wisdom and scrutiny to grateful recipients at the frontline”.

Education Scotland has, therefore, introduced the new role of “Education Scotland associate” - teachers with over five years’ experience who will work for the body “on an ‘as required’ basis for up to 15 days” while keeping up their existing roles.

It says the role will help towards “a teacher-facing, profession-led agency as recommended in Professor Ken Muir’s report”; an advert for the posts, with a closing date of 10 November, seeks over 60 teachers. The aim is to recruit at least 100 associates over the next 12-24 months.

There is also the role of “national adviser”, which will entail up to 23 months out of school. Education Scotland says there will be at least one national advisor for each curriculum area as well as additional national advisers for modern languages and Gaelic.

The EIS’s Andrea Bradley says increased opportunities for practising teachers to be seconded to the national agency will “build significant additional leadership capacity into the system”, and could “lend the national body credibility and relevance in the eyes of the profession”.

However, she expresses concern at a dearth of resources “to facilitate release for teachers and ensure meaningful engagement”. She warns: “We cannot see a situation emerge in which teachers, who are already struggling with excessive workload and significantly subsiding the education system with free labour, are using annual leave to contribute to vital curriculum development.”

Confusion over mix of new national education bodies

Also, there remains confusion about how Education Scotland will interact with other national agencies. Hutton says “very little” is known about the Centre for Teaching Excellence and suggests this work should sit with Education Scotland.

The government has said that Education Scotland will “have an important role in supporting a thriving professional learning sector” and be expected to “build on the existing and well-regarded national leadership professional learning programmes”.

But Hutton says: “Education Scotland has proven over the years that they are able to provide high-quality professional learning and support for schools, teachers and leaders; therefore, adding another organisation into the mix seems unnecessary.”

Previously, it seemed the government was also against the idea of creating new organisations. Professor Muir recently revealed that, while preparing his March 2022 report, he had wanted to create a separate body for the SQA’s current accrediting and regulating functions - in the hope this would lead to “greater scrutiny” - like a “Scottish version of Ofqual” in England (Ofqual regulates qualifications, exams and assessments put together by other bodies).

However, he told the education committee on 18 September that he was informed “very late on…that creating a new public body was not on the cards”. His final recommendation, therefore, was instead that SQA’s “current accrediting and regulating functions should transfer to the proposed national agency for Scottish education”.

But even that idea was, ultimately, rejected by the Scottish government. Speaking recently about the decision - which predated her tenure as education secretary - Gilruth said: “I do not think that we are in the financial market for creating new bodies, at the current time.”

But if money can be found for a Centre for Teaching Excellence, why not for delivering Muir’s recommendations in full?

The danger with cherrypicking recommendations is, of course, that the reform of Scotland’s education infrastructure begins to lack coherence - one of the key problems it was supposed to solve.

In his report, Muir said: “Many with whom I spoke…sought a decluttered landscape where fewer agencies provided more joined-up working and removed the duplication of effort and roles.”

It is hard to see how this has been remedied by the current reforms, which mean two organisations will become three - with another brand-new one, the Centre for Teaching Excellence, joining the mix.

Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

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