Something reminded me last week of the famous paradox in the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in which the character Tancredi Falconeri says: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
But in talking about education reform at the School Leaders Scotland (SLS) conference in Aberdeen last week, education secretary Jenny Gilruth had it the other way around. “If you want things to change,” she seemed to be saying, “things will have to stay as they are.” At least for now. At least until we’ve had another consultation. Or two. Or maybe…who knows?
And meanwhile, let’s have a new national education institution in addition to all the ones we’ve been promising to change but that are increasingly looking as if they are staying pretty much the same.
Unheralded, undefined and uncalled for as it may be, the national Centre of Teaching Excellence will be great. Because everyone knows that excellent teaching is what we need (correct). And creating a new national institution is obviously the best way of achieving it (not so much). And putting “excellence” in the title of something always means that it becomes indisputably excellent (not so much, with bells on). Frankly, it seemed that rather than making a meaningful contribution to the conference, the cabinet secretary was throwing a dead leopard on the table.
The frustration palpable as SLS members later munched their lunch outside the conference hall was far greater than that evidenced by the muted questions to the cabinet secretary inside it. Who was it, we wondered, who thought the status quo was even sustainable any longer, let alone the best that young people could expect in the future?
Time for reform in Scottish education
Professor Louise Hayward’s report into the future of Scottish qualifications has not been universally lauded, but it has enjoyed an unusually high degree of support, not least from teachers and school leaders. And in the context of the call for a new culture in Scottish education in Professor Ken Muir’s report on institutional reform, and alongside the proposed changes in skills education in James Withers’ report, the Hayward report has opened the door - at least slightly - to the possibility of a better, more coherent, future for our curriculum and its assessment, and, most importantly, for the experience of young people and other learners. The need for real education reform was amply demonstrated by the fact that it took three separate reports to call for it.
Professor Lindsay Patterson has called the Hayward recommendations “vapid”, and he understandably drew attention to the lack of data to support them. However, his comments are more a criticism of the shameful lack of good quality data in Scottish education generally than a reason to dismiss the Hayward recommendations themselves.
In fact, the evidence for the effectiveness of many of the suggested innovations lies not too far away. For example, the International Baccalaureate values a whole range of creative, community and outdoor learning opportunities within its framework and can now seamlessly incorporate vocational learning alongside high-quality academic courses.
The Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) in England requires students to devise and complete their own programme of research. It enjoys high status and is valued by employers and highly selective universities alike, perhaps because the outcome of the research may as easily be the construction of an engineering model, the completion of a business plan for a social enterprise or the making of a work of art as the writing of a traditional academic essay.
The powerful work of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, the Outward Bound movement and youth organisations such as the Guides and Scouts also shows that achievements of all kinds can be evaluated with both flexibility and rigour.
Meanwhile, absolutely no one anywhere in the world is saying that three consecutive years of high-stakes handwritten academic tests at the end of high school education in Scotland is the way to go. Even the UK government seems to be gently removing its fingers from its ears and toning down its absurd claims about the matchless merits of GCSE and A level.
But to underpin the success of reform, Scottish education should adopt another key feature of the International Baccalaureate. At the heart of the IB is a philosophy of education, not simply the accumulation of decades of pragmatic (or cynical) political decisions. The philosophy not only encompasses what is done by students and how it is assessed, but also why it is important that certain things are studied and crucially “how do we know what we know?” And the answer to that question is never just “because we read it in the SQA-approved textbook”.
Without that grounding in a strong and well understood philosophy, there is, indeed, a risk that the post-Hayward world will be full of vapid lowest-common-denominator qualifications that even those who take them do not understand and no one truly values. In such a world, the risk will be great of reverting to a hardcore of “real” qualifications that provide privileged access to the opportunities of adulthood to a fortunate few. Not only will an opportunity be lost, but we will risk the current inadequacies and inequalities in our system becoming worse.
If we are going to make the names Hayward, Withers and Muir resonate through Scottish education rather than them being forgotten (or possibly mistaken for a defunct firm of Edinburgh solicitors), we have to get on with thinking these things through. Rather than launching new consultations on widely accepted principles, the cabinet secretary should be challenging the teaching profession and its leaders to turn those principles into genuinely excellent practice.
“This time”, she should be saying, “if we want things to change, things will actually have to change. Let’s do it!”
Melvyn Roffe is principal at George Watson’s College, an independent school in Edinburgh
