Carrie Lindsay, Fife council’s director of education and children’s services, left school at 16 to become a nursery nurse. She then went on to become a primary teacher, attending night classes at college to get her Highers and then Moray House College of Education (as it was then), followed by the University of Stirling.

She entered the classroom at the age of 24 and, by her early thirties, she was a headteacher.

She describes herself as “like a stick of rock with ‘Fife’ written all the way through”, having been raised in the authority, as well as spending her entire teaching career there.

Now, as well as being responsible for Fife’s schools, she is the president of the national education directors’ body ADES.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

My mum, Betty Lindsay, was my most memorable teacher. I started at Freuchie Primary in Fife in 1967 and she taught me for three years - it should have been two years but she retained me and kept me back for a year.

Freuchie was a small school with five teachers at that time and I was in a P2-3 composite class, but in P2 she decided I wasn’t progressing as much as she wanted and she made me repeat the year. It was partly because I started school when I was just four so she could go back to work, and I have a February birthday, so I was the youngest in the year.

I just accepted it, really; it was the right decision. I’m not sure it made any difference to my later schooling but, at that point, it probably gave me confidence because I wasn’t playing catch-up all the time. But I did always feel like I didn’t belong in my year group and I wanted to be in the year group above me, and that stayed with me all through my schooling.

My mum was ahead of her time. She had studied [Friedrich] Froebel - an early years pioneer - and had her classroom done up like a nursery, with the focus very much on play, when everyone else was still sitting in rows.

I got away with nothing because she knew everything that was going on - in the playground, in friendship groups - but she was a brilliant teacher and I benefited from that.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?

The best thing about school was the friendships. I’m quite a sociable person and the learning was not the thing I was most interested in.

I could fit in with lots of different groups. I could be part of the sporty crowd - I played basketball up and down Scotland - but I was also probably one of the kids that did not quite conform. I didn’t get into lots of trouble but I did not do everything I was supposed to do.

When I was in second year at Bell Baxter High in Cupar, girls were not allowed to wear trousers but I had to get the bus from Freuchie and it was blooming freezing on that bus. We asked to wear trousers but were told “no”, so I organised a sit-in in the girls’ cloakroom until the depute head came and spoke to us. Eventually they relented and let us wear trousers.

Probably the worst thing about school for me was I had a very clever older sister and teachers would compare me to her and say things like, “your sister would be able to do this”. So that was the worst aspect for me - being in my sister’s shadow.

3. Why do you work in education?

I finished my exams in S4 and I left school. I didn’t enjoy secondary apart from being around my friends, and I went to study nursery nursing. While I was there, the person running the course took me aside and told me I had the right qualities to be a teacher and said they thought I would be very capable of doing that.

Someone recognised something in me and people in my life ever since that point have encouraged me. I had to study for my Highers at college and night classes - it took a long time but I qualified at the age of 24.

4. What are you most proud of in your career and what is your biggest regret?

When I first became a headteacher in my early thirties, at Cowdenbeath Primary, we won an award for children’s rights in 1998. At that point, people thought children’s rights were something you shouldn’t really talk about - it was more about children’s responsibilities.

We built a boat in the hall, the SS Children’s Rights. It was massive and the children filled it with all the things they thought children in the future, sailing into the millennium, would need to make sure they were safe and their rights were being adhered to.

It was at the time of the Zero Tolerance campaign [a groundbreaking campaign that started in Edinburgh and changed attitudes to violence against women]. We wanted to do a piece of work that raised awareness of domestic abuse, so the children knew how to stay safe and what their rights were. It was a challenging school and a large number of the children were living in those circumstances.

We also wanted them to think about being aspirational - what were their rights in our world? And what could they aspire to? Because at that time, aspirations could be quite low.

My biggest regret was probably that I wanted to be a headteacher in a particular school but I didn’t get that job. I was gutted. It was one of the most difficult moments for me - but then I got the headteacher post at Cowdenbeath.

5. Who would be your colleagues in the perfect staffroom?

I would want somebody who was going to be a safe person and who was going to keep everybody calm, so I thought Norman Drummond [the founder of leadership social enterprise and charity Columba 1400] would be good. Then I would want somebody a bit sparky, just to keep people on their toes - I thought Marcus Rashford because of his focus on values and children who maybe haven’t had the best experiences. Then I was thinking Michelle Obama, because I would want someone with strong leadership qualities who can help take people forward in a positive way. If I had those three in the staffroom, I’m sure they would manage to take along with them any other staff who were maybe less ambitious for children.

6. What are the best and worst aspects of our schools system?

I still think Curriculum for Excellence is the best opportunity we have because it’s a curriculum that allows us to meet the needs of our learners.

For me, the bit I find challenging at the moment is the way that the media or the politicians - I’m not sure which - but the way that anything in education that is different is viewed as negative or fair game to have a go at.

It makes it really difficult to try different things. Sometimes, when you try something new, you will fail; but, sometimes, you also need to stick with things. We are not always able to stick with what we are trying out because of comparisons between one school and another. But our curriculum is about personalisation and choice, so what happens in all schools is not going to be identical.

It’s about the way society views education as something to have a go at rather than something to get behind.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you the most?

Before I started teaching, I would have said [Jean] Piaget or Froebel because I came from an early years background and I think that has stayed with me. But there was a book published in the Sixties by a teacher called Sybil Marshall, An Experiment in Education, in which she asked the children what they wanted to learn and created a curriculum to support them, whether it was outdoors or indoors.

It was a book by a teacher, not a highfalutin educationalist, and I read that as a young teacher and thought, “that’s what I want to do” - and that’s what Curriculum for Excellence is for me.

I started my career at Donibristle Primary in Dalgety Bay and the headteacher there, Alan Macdonald, was a brilliant man. He had a huge influence on me and taught me all about curriculum, learning and teaching, assessment and the power of the classroom setting.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what’s the first thing you would do?

I would probably do some kind of listening exercise to inform an ambitious vision for education coming out of the pandemic, so we can think longer-term and move away from the quick fixes that have been necessary recently.

I would probably also look at the allocation of resources to education and where we are targeting that.

9. What will our schools be like in 30 years?

Some difficulties that families have can be because they have become spread out. The support networks they might have had in the past are not there in their local communities because people moved away and [anyone who did move away] was seen as success.

If we could turn that around a bit and keep families together, and keep people local, that could be a good thing - keeping people local also feeds into the green agenda.

But just because people stay local doesn’t mean that their aspirations have to be local. Through our schools, we will have to help pupils see the opportunities both locally - because there will still be local jobs - but also what the more international or widespread opportunities are, by using digital means to connect on a wider scale.

10. What one person do you think made the biggest difference to schools and education more generally in 2020?

In 2020, we had an emergency response and one person has had to make a lot of decisions, and that’s the deputy first minister and education secretary, John Swinney. He had to decide if schools closed or opened, the mitigations that were put in place, the support available for e-learning.

But we shouldn’t be reliant on one person to make all these decisions. That happened because it was an emergency response - a command and control situation. In 2021, when we are no longer in an emergency situation, we should think collectively about what we want to focus on beyond the pandemic.

Interview by Emma Seith, senior reporter at Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 29 January 2021 issue