Stumbling through the school car park while wrestling with a massive pile of marking is surely the hallmark of the English teacher. It is, after all, a subject notorious for long hours spent correcting essays.

But Lorna Changleng, head of English at Kelso High in the Scottish Borders, and her staff have left behind the time-consuming process of deciphering impossible-to-read handwriting and squeezing hastily scribbled notes into margins. Instead, they have made the move to electronic marking and are annotating their pupils’ typed work with voice notes - recorded feedback that can be as long or as short as it needs to be. And, crucially, it is saving them time.

Communication now flows more easily in both directions - bad handwriting is not the sole preserve of students - and with greater immediacy. Students don’t have to wait until they’re physically present in class to get their teacher’s thoughts on their work, either.

“You just press a button and they have it,” says Changleng, who is also principal teacher of media, literacy and library, and religious, moral and philosophical studies (RMPS).

Since April 2019, Scottish Borders Council has been rolling out iPads to every teacher and every child from P6 to S6. All of the authority’s nine secondaries were due to join the scheme by Easter this year, with just Jedburgh Grammar still to come on board, when the coronavirus surged through the UK in March and threatened school closures.

Two days before lockdown, iPads were hastily distributed to Jedburgh’s students and in June - when the prospect of pupils attending school for just a couple of days per week loomed large - the rollout to primary pupils was brought forward, with thousands of devices distributed to children in their homes. These were delivered by a range of council staff, who found themselves temporary members of the Inspire Learning team, which is responsible for the rollout and has the lofty goal of transforming education in the local authority through technology.

Changleng has not always been enthusiastic about the scheme. “Technology is not something I am entirely comfortable with,” she admits, adding that she regarded the prospect of her classes being kitted out with iPads with “some trepidation”. But Changleng says that the Inspire Learning programme “sells itself because you can see the impact it’s having”.

As well as speeding up marking, she says, the devices are encouraging boys - who she finds dislike writing by hand more than girls - to write more than the bare minimum because they can type or dictate their work.

Better connected

Crucially, the new technology - which in Changleng’s case replaced two class sets of unreliable laptops that she shared with other teachers on her floor - has allowed courses to continue that would previously have been removed from the timetable.

Kelso High has 600 pupils and, when its RMPS teacher left and no replacement was found, it faced the prospect of having to withdraw the subject. Now, the school is using newly acquired Apple technology to beam RMPS lessons in from other schools, a process that has been made easier because all schools now have the same hardware and apps.

Changleng explains: “The lessons are delivered live via [Microsoft] Teams. I just set it up on my iPad and then mirror the display to a large screen, and my colleagues in Earlston and Hawick deliver the lessons remotely.

“They also send assignments via Teams and the pupils send them back. This has allowed us to retain our curricular offer - but it could also be used to expand it.”

Education secretary John Swinney was asked recently in the Scottish Parliament about consortia arrangements between schools, set up to allow pupils to access a wider range of qualifications by tapping into lessons delivered in neighbouring secondaries. He said moving pupils between schools was not appropriate, but that it could be done remotely.

In a rural area such as the Borders, however, moving between schools has never really been an option, points out Kelso High headteacher Jill Lothian - the distances involved are simply too great.

“The main barriers were timetable and rurality,” she says. “The distance from Peebles to Eyemouth is huge - you are talking about an hour and a half each way.”

But now, Lothian says that Higher politics - a subject at Kelso but not common in Scottish secondaries - could also be offered to other Borders schools.

The advantages the new technology is bringing are significant - but other councils have shown you do not need a one-on-one device-based scheme worth £16 million over 10 years to achieve them. The Western Isles’ e-Sgoil (e-School) has been beaming lessons into schools since 2016 and makes much of the fact that video-conferencing software and an internet connection is all that’s needed.

What’s more, one-on-one schemes have something of a chequered past, with perhaps the most famous failure being the $1 billion rollout of iPads to pupils in Los Angeles in 2013. One key criticism was that teachers had not been trained to use them.

However, in the Borders, crucially, support for teachers and pupils is at the heart of the programme. Catherine Thomson, a former music teacher and depute head who is now a member of the Inspire Learning team, says: “This is a significant investment in times when funding is hard to find in local authorities. So, from the choice of product to the training, it was about making sure those pillars - like the infrastructure, devices and professional learning - were high quality. We wanted to absolutely make sure every time you switched on that device, it worked.”

Digital first

The scheme is not just about giving out iPads, it is about “education transformation” and “the device is just the start”, says Andrew Jewell, a former primary teacher, who is also on the Inspire Learning team. “The change agent in education is the teacher, not the device.”

The goal is to create “a world-class digital and learning environment” in Scottish Borders schools, he adds, that gives equity to all - both in terms of the technology that pupils have access to, but also, as in Kelso, the curriculum.

For Kelso High’s Lothian there’s another aspect to the equity the technology brings. “In a classroom, you might have 30 young people,” she says. “You try your best to get around to them and give them equal time, but using the iPads - because you can see what they are all working on [through the Classroom app] - you can do a quick scan and see what they are doing and whether they are on track.”

In light of lockdown, the rollout of devices to Jedburgh High was rushed and completed in a day - usually that process would have taken two days, with the pupils asked to build their own devices with support from the Inspire Learning team.

In a Covid-free world, the school would have received a week of support from “floor walkers”, clearly visible in their purple branded T-shirts, and available to help teachers and pupils deal with issues as they arose. It pained the Inspire Learning team to accelerate their carefully planned induction process and offer support remotely, as opposed to in person. However, all teachers involved in the project were promised at least five hours’ training.

In Kelso High last year, teachers got far more than the standard five hours: every Tuesday after school they had professional development training on how to use the iPads in the classroom.

Thee Inspire Learning team has two full-time education trainers. When only secondary pupils had the iPads, schools got one day per week of support from them. Now that P6s and P7s have their iPads - with P4s and P5s also to benefit (see box, right) - that support will be spread more thinly. But the hope is that the level of expertise among staff has generally improved.

In every secondary there are now Inspire Learning leads - enthusiastic teachers who have signed up to support their colleagues. As primaries join the scheme, more leads are being appointed. There are also plans to train pupils to offer support to peers and teachers.

“Originally, we were thinking that the kids would be so much more advanced than us teachers because they are so used to technology,” says Lothian. “But we found that while they could work Snapchat, they still needed to be taught the basics, like how to create a file and upload work to Teams.”

The Inspire Learning Academy got up and running in August. It is to be the vehicle for delivering all kinds of continuing professional development for Borders teachers, including sessions on how to make the most of the new technology.

Core issues

Apple itself is also keen to emphasise the role it is trying to play in building teacher confidence with its products via courses such as Apple Teacher, a free online professional development course. Ask Apple what the next big thing in education technology is likely to be - as we did recently - and the response is: schools getting to grips with the technology that is already out there. It says that without a confident teacher, the technology will not be used to its utmost. Apple cautions against schools splashing out on devices without also having developed a clear long-term vision.

But not everyone is an Apple convert. Some Scottish teachers, when asked by Tes Scotland for their take on the pros and cons of the technology giant’s products, question the wisdom of placing a fragile device in the hands of a teenager. One says that teachers in one authority where iPads are widely used are “on first-name terms with the local screen-repair shop”. They also highlight the inconvenience of trying to type on an iPad.

Advocates, however, stress the device’s portability: unlike a laptop, it does not tie you to a desk and can be used in the playground or on a bus. They also argue that to see it as just a word-processing tool is to grossly underestimate its potential; besides, you can connect a keyboard.

Ultimately, the argument for one-on-one devices seems to have been won earlier than expected, largely because of the pandemic. When lockdown came and online learning was the only means by which schools could continue to educate their pupils, it seemed that authorities such as Borders had been blessed with the gift of foresight.

Scottish Borders and Glasgow councils - the latter also recently gave an iPad to every pupil from P6 to S6 - sought to remove one of the biggest barriers to education in lockdown: the “digital divide” of some pupils enjoying access to devices and reliable internet while others do not. These councils could be confident at least that every pupil had the technology they needed, if not the connectivity. More than one Borders teacher tells Tes Scotland this was “a godsend”.

Lockdown proved to be a crash course in online learning for teachers and pupils everywhere. One teacher who works in the Borders tells Tes Scotland she went from Luddite to YouTuber within just a couple of weeks. A big factor was the time and impetus lockdown allowed to develop these skills, she says.

After schools returned in August, primary pupils in the Borders got to use their lockdown iPads in the classroom for the first time. Supporting them and their teachers will be harder since Covid restrictions mean that having extra staff in schools is currently discouraged and much of the support will have to, therefore, be done remotely.

And, while there are nine secondaries in the Borders, the authority has 60 primary schools, and around a quarter have rolls of fewer than 50 pupils, which do not all have the skillsets of large pools of staff to draw on. Ironing out connectivity issues in nine secondaries seems achievable; dealing with six times the number of primaries will be more challenging.

The pandemic has, however, provided an incentive to surmount barriers that might previously have led to frustrated teachers leaving technology to gather dust on a shelf. Now, in a year in which face-to-face teaching could be suspended at a moment’s notice, the argument for embracing technology has, to a large extent, been made for the Inspire Learning team - and the work they did pre-Covid has left them ready to capitalise.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 9 October 2020 issue under the headline “The tablet to cure all ills”