In May, teacher Kaukab Stewart became the first woman of colour to be elected to the Scottish Parliament. The SNP MSP has since taken on the role of deputy convener of the Education, Children and Young People Committee.

Talking about her time in school as both a pupil and a member of staff, she tells us about the remarkable intervention of a teacher at a time when corporal punishment was rife, the discrimination she faced and why teachers should embrace having children in the classroom who “come right back at you”.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

I went to primary school in Northampton in the early 1970s, and halfway through that, I went to Pakistan for a year. I came back with no English whatsoever, aged 8 or 9. I didn’t have a good time at school: corporal punishment was used quite liberally, so I got belted and I got slapped quite a lot.

One time I wrote a word in a classmate’s jotter that she’d been struggling with, trying to be helpful. She’d been away from the table and came back, then made a big fuss about it to the teacher. The shouting from the teacher was extraordinary - I didn’t know what was going to happen at all. I went out in front of the class, turned around and she lifted up my top and slapped my bottom. I burst into tears because I was so shocked. I didn’t know what I had done. Some children were laughing and I was humiliated. I was absolutely howling, so the teacher said, “Stop your crying, that’s absolutely outrageous” - and I got the same again. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, even to the toilet. I had to sit there and it was absolutely awful.

There were a few incidents like that - I thought nobody should feel like that and my rebellion was to say, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a teacher and I’m going to do things differently.”

There was a Mrs Waller in the school, an older teacher who never stood out and no one sought out - she looked quite boring, with grey hair and grey tights and glasses. But after one of my many rows for not saying the right thing or mispronouncing words - in a sewing class where I called thread “string” because I couldn’t remember the right word - Mrs Waller was going past. She sat down and spoke to me about it all. We rehearsed the right word and went into the class. She spoke to the teacher and it was sorted. I just thought, “Oh my God, that’s an amazing woman.” From then on, she kept an eye out for me over the next six months.

And then she disappeared. I didn’t know where she’d gone. I asked around and it turned out she lived two streets along from me. I knocked on her door and a relative answered. I asked if Mrs Waller was all right and she said, “Well, she’s been feeling a wee bit poorly - would you like to see her?”

I was standing on the other side of the gate and she came out and the two of us had this lovely conversation. She had actually been ill for a while, but had still taken the time to keep an eye on me. Soon after, she died of cancer.

That experience was pivotal in my deciding to be a teacher - I wanted to be like Mrs Waller.

2. What was the best thing about your time at school?

I loved school, in spite of the early traumas. In middle school, I got put into the “remedial” English class, and there was no reason for it. I was absolutely miserable. I was bored and my French teacher, Mrs Brown, picked up on that. Soon I was no longer part of that group.

She encouraged me - I was about 12 by now - to join the drama group, and I went on to take part in shows. She also got me involved in sport and persuaded my parents, who were quite traditional, that I could go on an ice-skating trip to Birmingham, 30 miles away. She was lovely, with crazy red hair and fluffy curls, hippy flowing skirts and beads, while other teachers were all suited and booted.

I did think, “Why is she so interested in me? Why can she see that what’s happening to me [with the remedial class] isn’t right and other teachers can’t?” It turned out that her husband was permanently blind, which made me wonder if her husband helped her to see things in different ways.

The best thing was the extracurricular stuff. I loved the debating societies, drama clubs, sewing clubs, sports clubs - the social aspect of them all. Schooling in those days was quite formal: you sat in lines and weren’t allowed to talk. The clubs were where you got to have nice conversations and chat about what you’d watched on the telly - in our house, David Attenborough and sitcoms that are now totally inappropriate, like Mind Your Language - and it was the only time I spoke English.

3. And the worst?

The relentless discrimination, and how much underrepresented and marginalised groups have had to fight over the years. When it comes to black kids, we either don’t live up to expectations or people have expectations which are so unreasonable that we’ll never live up to them. Either way, we’re going to be failures.

When I came up to Glasgow in 1984 for fifth year, I got put in a class where people were repeating O grades - no one made any attempt to do an assessment of my level. It happened again in my probation as a teacher: I made a couple of mistakes with spellings, like putting the E in “Michael” in the wrong place, and my supervising teacher suggested that I take additional uplevelling English classes after that one mistake. There was a consistent prejudging based on my background, not my ability.

4. Why do you work in education?

To provide an alternative role model for all children: education was a way to change things. I always wanted to be a teacher, never anything else. Apparently, I was always playing at schools.

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

I’m most proud that I’ve kept going for 30 years - I think that that’s no mean feat. Believe me, there were times when I thought about leaving.

There was always a sense of hopelessness about the advancement of my career, which felt totally unfair. From my cohort all those years ago, anybody who wanted to be a headteacher or get on to the management scale is doing it now - I was the exception. As a human you do have a sense of failure, and I did see it as my fault: “I’m not good enough, I’m not trying hard enough.” You’re fighting in a system that sometimes feels totally stacked against you.

In terms of overt discrimination, staffroom food is always an issue. I often actually have the most boring lunchboxes, but one teacher came into the staffroom sniffing and saying, “What is that curry that I can smell?” Then she looked at me and went, “Hmm.”

She was right, it was my food that she smelled - but it was Heinz tomato soup.

Another time there was a child who hadn’t brought their reading book in a few times, so I was saying, “reading is very important” and “what does your dad have to say about this?”. He matter-of-factly quoted back his father: “Never mind what that Paki bitch says.”

Now imagine what it must feel like to hear words like that if you’re a child. There are some amazing things about the education system, but we do have to be mindful that it’s not always a positive experience for people.

I don’t know if “regret” is quite the word I’d use, but it’s this: although I was quite heavily involved in the teacher union movement, after all these years I’ve asked myself, “Could I have done better? Could I have worked harder? Could I have pushed doors further?”

Now, I’m probably in the right place at the right time - I’m hoping to grasp this opportunity [as an MSP] and use all the knowledge and experience that I have for the greater good.

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

You need to work with the colleagues you have in front of you, so I’d change the question’s focus to the physical staffroom itself. I do feel that staffrooms are not given the status they should have: there should be a place where you can sit properly, a table you can eat at, access to a sink, windows that open, regulated heating. How acceptable is it for a modern workforce not to have that? Covid, of course, has underlined the need for better communal spaces in schools, and some of the best lessons come from chance conversations in staffrooms.

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

The best aspect is that it’s free, right up to university level. The worst is that over the last 30 years it hasn’t come on as much as it should in terms of addressing inequalities across the board - I’m talking about things like additional needs and mental health, too. There is amazing stuff going on around Scotland, but it needs to be consistent.

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

The children: they keep you coming back to school when you’re struggling to keep going. Outside of children I’ve worked with, it would have to be Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg.

I like that [Thunberg] annoys so many adults. She has her own way of expressing things - and good for her. She is a prime example of somebody who has learned about something, analysed it and is coming right back at you, holding adults to account - I think that’s marvellous. I see her and Malala resonating with pupils by being slightly quirky, taking different pathways, having different views, being curious about the world.

I’d like to think that I’ve been one of those teachers that hasn’t suppressed those characters in the classroom - that I’ve tried to enable them, that I’ve embraced the sassiness and humour of children.

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

Assessment and the curriculum are two things I would like to take a look at, and actually we will be doing that. There will be reform of the SQA [Scottish Qualifications Authority] and I’d like to think this is an opportunity to look at how fit for purpose assessment is right from the early years through to further and higher education and beyond, how all those things can fit together in a coherent and consistent way, not in silos.

I would also like to pursue the decolonisation of the curriculum - looking at resources and teaching references we use, making sure they are more reflective of the societies in front of us, giving a more balanced view of other cultures and countries In teaching the world wars we could look more at the role of ethnic minority soldiers, for example, and we should recognise the role that slavery played here in Glasgow.

10. What one person do you think has made the biggest difference to schools and education more generally in the past 18 months of the Covid pandemic?

I don’t think it can be one person - we’ve all learned that, if it takes a village to raise children, it takes a community to keep us all going. You had teachers delivering food parcels to families, or distracting kids who were petrified because their parents had just dropped them off before going to work in Covid wards.

Authors really helped teachers when they took the copyright off their work during lockdown, when we were all looking for good-quality resources that we could use instantly - that was absolutely fantastic.

Interview by Tes Scotland news editor Henry Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 13 August 2021 issue