In our last week of 2021-22, we held our first school prizegiving ceremony for three years.
It was fantastic to look out over a hall full of students and their parents, and to call them up on stage to recognise a very wide range of achievement - certificates for effort and attainment, awards from the John Muir Trust, Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Growing2gether awards, national awards for social enterprise projects, and many many more.
At the end I unveiled the new school magazine: a superbly professional production entirely down to the work of one of our S1 classes (under the guidance of an excellent teacher), who wrote the articles, sourced sponsors to pay for the printing, interviewed teachers, sold advertising, designed a logo and layout, and completed all the other tasks needed to publish a high-quality magazine.
So, basking in this glory, it was depressing, to say the least, to get home and find on my WhatsApp groups the latest unofficial league tables for schools in Scotland, showing my school to be the 337th best in Scotland.
As usual, my anger led to despair about how this reflected on our hardworking staff and hardworking - and, yes, highly attaining - students (even if this attainment is not reflected in the narrow measures deemed important by the Scottish press). Needless to say, the article did not do justice to the school I know and love.
School league tables offer a narrow view of ‘success’
I have written about this before and am beginning to sound like a broken record, but I fail to see the value in clinging to a measure of attainment (five-plus Highers) that means absolutely nothing in the context of Curriculum for Excellence or what we are meant to be trying to achieve in Scottish education.
In my school - unless a student is aiming for a university course that specifically needs five Highers (and, nowadays, these are few) - we see little point in making them go down this route. Far better to have them take the four Highers they need to get into the course they want, and supplement them with a vocational course, such as travel and tourism or criminology at level five, which will maintain their interest and give them worthwhile skills for life and work.
Alternatively, like my own son, they could, in the senior phase, complete the four Highers they need, add a couple of Advanced Highers - possibly all at grade A - and take a Foundation Apprenticeship in engineering, which would make them a far more rounded individual on leaving school than, perhaps, those who take a purely academic route. Unfortunately, despite an impressive array of qualifications, they would still be deemed worthless by a system that judges success on measures that have no place in 21st-century education.
There is a complete lack of leadership in determining how we measure success in Scottish schools. At least in this year’s articles on league tables it was recognised that all the “top” schools were located in areas of affluence, yet these tables continue to perpetuate a view among parents about what makes a “good” school.
Every year there is outcry from those of us who measure success for our students through different means, but every year our voices are ignored. It is beyond time for a change.
All of us who care about Scottish education need to put pressure on those who have influence to ensure that we do justice to our students’ achievements - rather than falling back on outdated statistics that mean nothing in an education landscape focused on the future.
John Rutter is headteacher at Inverness High School
