Maureen McKenna OBE, a maths teacher and former school inspector, became director of education in Glasgow 14 years ago and has presided over significant increases in attainment and a huge drop in exclusions - down 94 per cent since she took up the post in 2007.
And the key to it all? According to McKenna - who will retire at the end of 2021 - it’s the nurturing approach that Glasgow schools take and the compassion and care they show every child.
But it hasn’t always been plain sailing: when she arrived in post, there was “constant flak” about how bad education in the city was, McKenna says.
Now that narrative has changed and, she argues, Scotland as a whole needs to get better at talking up the “amazing work” that goes on in schools, in order to combat the “hideously undeserved” negative coverage that education often receives in the media.
1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?
David Blair - he taught me maths at Bearsden Academy. He didn’t teach in a traditional way, so he taught me that you could teach differently. He taught in a creative way - it wasn’t just stand-at-the-board chalk and talk.
2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?
The best bit was I did art and design, and the maths was easy; the worst bit was having to go to school.
I didn’t like school. I thought it was very traditional, very boring and I might not have been the most well behaved. I was “lively”, shall we say.
The schoolwork was fine - it was quite straightforward - and I got good results and all the rest of it, but school overall was not particularly child-centred.
Nobody asked me what I wanted from school. I didn’t do any sciences, yet I think like a scientist.
Nobody ever looked at my subject choices or came back and gave me advice. I just chose whatever I fancied.
I left school in 1977 and went immediately to university after fifth year because I didn’t want to stay at school any longer than I absolutely had to.
3. Why do you work in education?
I love children and young people, and I want to make a difference to them.
4. What are you proudest of in your career and what’s your biggest regret?
I’m proudest of my 14 years at Glasgow - that our schools are at the centre of their communities and that they take nurturing approaches.
Our exclusions have dropped by 94 per cent and incidence of youth crime from the ages of 10-16 has halved in the past 10 years.
Exclusions have not dropped because our children are behaving so much better - it’s how we are responding to those incidents. That’s what’s making the difference.
It’s OK for things to go wrong - things go wrong in your family, things go wrong in my family, and disagreements arise - but it’s how we respond to them that makes the difference.
We do restorative work with young people so that they understand consequences, roles and responsibilities.
If you are getting that right in your school setting, then those young people are taking those skills out into the community and making better decisions about what to get involved in outside school.
It is time consuming but it pays massive dividends and our schools are just great at it now. We will always exclude - there will always be a time when young people need to be excluded for their safety or the safety of other children. Just as long as we are doing it for the right reasons.
5. Who would be your colleagues in the perfect staffroom?
I never spent much time in the staffroom as a teacher. But when I went to teach maths as principal teacher at Kilsyth Academy [in North Lanarkshire, at that time part of the old Strathclyde Regional Council], they had a male staffroom, a female staffroom and a mixed staffroom.
I’m sure I got the job because I said to the headteacher as I was leaving: “I saw your men’s staffroom. Oh, my god, what are you guys like? Something out of the time of the Ark?”
When I arrived, I put a mug in the men’s staffroom, a mug in the ladies’ staffroom and a mug in the PE staffroom and I rotated around [them]. The men did not know what to do.
I would just go in and make my cup of coffee and sit down, and you would see them all going: “What’s she doing here?”
It stayed like that well into the 1990s. It was so archaic, it was staggering.
6. What would you say are the best and worst aspects of our school system today?
The best is that we have a really strong education system. Our schools do amazing work every day that God sends and Scottish education has huge amounts to be really proud of.
The worst aspect is all the negative publicity and the pillorying our schools get. It’s hideously undeserved. Like The Times’ league table of P7 performance. Just absolute, unadulterated nonsense - and arithmetically poor. You can get into a philosophical argument [about league tables] but it was arithmetically poor.
It was based on Primary 7 so, in a primary school with 25 children in P7, each child is 4 per cent - based on such small sample sizes, it’s just nonsense because there will be big variations in performance from one year to the next.
7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you most?
All the HMI [Her Majesty’s Inspectors] I worked with. They were the most amazing set of people. I loved being an HMI.
I think inspection has a really valuable role to play - not in a punitive way but in supporting improvement.
You are really privileged as an HMI because you are in people’s classrooms and you get to see all kinds of practice, which is great, and I mixed with some of the cleverest people I have ever worked with. It really lifted my thinking.
Seven years there was the best professional development ever, and I could not have done this job without having been an HMI.
I am saddened by the poor reputation now. There needs to be more reflection on the role of HMI but it was a real force for good and influential (albeit often in the background).
The decision to bring HMI in beside Learning and Teaching Scotland [the two services were merged in 2011 to form Education Scotland] was not the right decision - [school inspection] needs to come out.
8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d do?
We need to create a more collective narrative in Scotland around how well we are doing, and not be apologetic about it.
When I first came to Glasgow, there was constant flak: we were constantly being told we were rubbish.
The opposition councillors would just say all the time how bad education was and what a terrible track record Labour had [Glasgow City Council was Labour-led at the time]. And, honestly, it would wear you down because you are constantly thinking “what do I have to do?” and you almost start to make excuses. But you need to change the narrative.
An optimistic system is an improving system. But if people are constantly feeling on the back foot, battered and bruised, that’s [the sort of defensive approach] you will get. It’s not about accepting poor standards - there’s a good story to tell and we need to get better at telling that story.
9. What will our schools be like in 30 years?
We have to take our learning from the pandemic. We have to think: what are the skills our young people need for the second half of the 21st century?
Education is really slow to change - but so it should be. These are other people’s children. You can’t keep faffing about with an education system, so change needs to be incremental, and compassion and care have to be at the heart of everything we do.
We have to move beyond a “points win prizes” society [which prioritises exams].
Young people need to be flexible, responsive, entrepreneurial. They need confidence and resilience, and we need a school system that provides that.
Assessment is going to change significantly - both how we assess and how we accredit.
10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools in the past 18 months of Covid?
The past 18 months have been really difficult for everybody around the world but, in particular, in our schools it has been really hard and it has been the collective strength of us all working together at the various layers that has made the most difference. We need to garner that strength to take us forward and out of this. It’s not about any one person.
Maureen McKenna was talking to Emma Seith, a reporter at Tes Scotland
