Mark Priestley is a professor of education at the University of Stirling and led the independent review of the 2020 results fiasco. He was born in Australia but moved to the UK at the age of 6 with his parents, ultimately attending around half a dozen primary schools, and then a boys’ grammar in Stafford, which became a comprehensive midway through his time there.

Priestley - who has worked in Scotland for 20 years - believes the great weakness of the education system is “evaluationitis” because it stifles innovation. He also detests the tendency to dismiss older teachers as “blockers” and argues that Scotland’s dedicated, professional and committed teachers are its greatest asset.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

School was not really a happy time for me. Secondary, in many ways, was a miserable time. I didn’t enjoy it - I found it quite tedious. I was expected to excel and didn’t on the whole.

I had a history teacher, Mr Fisher, though, who did believe in me. I don’t know why - we were actually fairly horrible: I can remember filling his desk drawer with fishing maggots. But he taught European and modern history and, when I got into the sixth form, he taught me for part of the course - we had two history teachers - and he just inspired me.

He was a very quiet and scholarly man. He was an ordained priest - we knew him as The Bishop - and he had a dog collar he wore in school. He not only believed in me when I was a somewhat scruffy, lazy lout, he also taught me how to write.

He spent a lot of time working with us on how to communicate our ideas and that’s something that has stayed with me and been part of my work ever since. He also inspired me to go on and do history at university, in Manchester.

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

The best bit was undoubtedly the sixth form. There was a lot of disruption when the school became a comprehensive when I was going into Year 9 (S3). Part of that disruption was the arrival of girls but it also had an effect on discipline because the teachers struggled suddenly with a comprehensive cohort, having dealt previously with a largely academic curriculum.

But in sixth form, we were suddenly in a different space. We had a common room, we were trusted a bit more, we had freedom, we formed friendships when new people came in, and we also got out and about outside school.

We all had cars and motorbikes and so on. We discovered pubs and what I remember about the sixth form, really, apart from the fact that I came out with three fairly decent A levels, were the friendships and camaraderie.

So, contrast that with what I would say was the worst thing about schooling really, which was the culture of casual violence, by other pupils, in a boys’ grammar. Before we joined the girls’ school and became comprehensive, it was a time where, if you weren’t in the rugby team, and you weren’t big and strong, you were bullied.

Teachers turned a blind eye to it and some were actually bullies themselves - there was a lot of hitting. I was never caned but if you answered back, or gave a smart answer, or were just mucking about, you would get smacked around the head.

I have very poor memories of that period.

3. Why do you work in education?

As someone coming out of school, I really had no inclination to become a teacher but I came out of university in the mid-1980s, when there were no jobs at all for graduates, and ended up working in retail management for three years and then sales. I hated it - particularly sales.

I was on the road at 5am every morning, travelling around the country in a small car. So I suppose I reached a watershed where I thought: “I’ve got to do something different with my life - what can I do with my degree?” I reconsidered teaching at that point.

I went in with some trepidation, did a course at the University of Leeds in 1989, and thoroughly enjoyed my teaching practice. I had a couple of tough years in a school that was at the bottom of the Cheshire league table, where I really struggled, but then I moved to a school in Leeds where I suddenly realised teaching was a lot of fun.

I haven’t looked back since. I think, really, what I have found rewarding about teaching over the years is the fun of working with young people - there’s never a dull moment in school.

But education is much more than schooling - we often forget that. One key point in my career was doing a master’s in curriculum studies at the University of Leeds in the mid-1990s. It was like opening a door expecting to find a small cupboard and instead there’s this massive hallway, and a room that stretches to infinity.

That inspired me greatly and I suppose that was the start of the track to where I am now.

4. What are you proudest of in your career and what do you regret?

We emigrated to New Zealand at the end of 1996 and it was supposed to be permanent. I thoroughly enjoyed working in a different system but we had to come back for family reasons, and that was a major regret at the time. It did seem I was throwing away a very promising career because, over there, I had made the move into initial teacher education, and I just loved the job so much, and the area.

As it happens, I don’t think I would be where I am now had we stayed in New Zealand. I would probably still be working as a teacher educator. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity, for example, to work with some of the major academics I have and to do the scholarly work I’ve done.

In terms of my proudest achievements, I suppose, probably, these fall into two areas and they are both about making a difference. One is about the difference I have made to people, whether school students or student teachers. The other area, of course, is the academic work, particularly on teacher agency and, more recently, our work on curriculum making.

The teacher agency work I’m particularly proud of, because it’s had a profound effect on educational researchers around the world. When we started it 10 or 12 years ago, there was hardly anyone talking about teacher agency. Our contribution was to unpack what teacher agency is and how it works, and the effects that it has.

It’s all very well training teachers to be better teachers but if we are making them do the job with one hand tied behind their back, because of the environment they work in or the resources they have, then we are effectively disabling them.

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

We need diversity in any school staffroom - in terms of cultural diversity but also diversity of experience. We need to particularly value people who think outside the box and the sort of people who ask awkward questions. Too often, I think, we value conformity and groupthink, but research tells us that healthy organisations see diversity and conflict as sources of strength.

One thing I’ve really detested over the years is this tendency to dismiss older teachers as blockers. They are not: they bring a lot of experience. There is a place for young enthusiasm but there is also a place for wisdom, experience and caution.

6. What would you say are the best and worst aspects of our schools system today?

The best aspect has to be the teachers and the lecturers - any organisation, essentially, is the sum of its people. And if we don’t treat our people well, we get less effective organisations. Scottish teachers and headteachers are characterised by commitment, dedication and professionalism.

What is particularly exciting now is the number of funded master’s programmes for teachers because that has taken a professional teaching workforce and opened up their thinking about education. The challenge, of course, is how we make use of that resource in the system.

The weakness is that we have a major focus on evaluation and measurement. It’s not as bad as England, perhaps, but it’s bad enough that it stifles innovation and encourages a dull, play-it-safe conformity. We need to move beyond this “evaluationitis” and think in terms of development and support.

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

The head of the department in my second school, a guy called Dick Whitfield, was fabulous. I’d come from a fairly bruising educational experience - two years in a tough school where I struggled quite a lot - and this guy basically believed in me and gave me lots of positive support to become a better teacher.

Similarly, when I came into academia, this was a whole new world with a different set of rules, and two people in particular stand out: Richard Edwards, who arrived the same day as me, and who became the head of the University of Stirling school of education. He, again, always believed in me and encouraged me. And Gert Biesta, who now works at the University of Edinburgh, was a major inspiration because he helped me become much more theoretically rigorous.

The third person is my wife, Andrea, who was a physics teacher and now works at the University of Stirling as well. She has this capacity to always ask the awkward question you never thought of. Many ideas have been honed and sharpened thanks to her.

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

I would emphasise tackling the issues around “evaluationitis”. This overemphasis on evaluation activity undermines the aspirations we have around equity and the curriculum.

I would want to figure out how we develop the system to facilitate what we want - good curriculum development - and to minimise what we don’t want, which is accountability-driven practices.

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

If we look at the overall organisation of schools, that hasn’t changed much over the past 100 years so I’m not confident that schools will look very different. However, we’ve had a bit of a shock to the system with Covid. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development review [of Curriculum for Excellence and qualifications] has come at a good time in that respect, because it’s arriving on the back of the system thinking “well, actually we need to change”.

I’d like to see changes in accountability practices; better use of school spaces so it’s not just about classrooms; schools that are more democratic - based on children’s rights, for example, and less on discipline.

I’d also like to see an emphasis on powerful knowledge in school - that’s not talked about much in Scotland. It’s not just the skills we need to develop for the future workforce; people also need knowledge to become effective, critical citizens. At the moment, we cram people with knowledge to pass exams but we don’t ask: “What do young people need to know to be effective citizens?”

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools in the past 12 months?

Classroom teachers have done a heroic job. I would also like to mention student activists, particularly round the national qualifications issue last year, who were able to raise the profile of the problems. I would like to see far more student activism through education.

I am also going to name an individual: Professor Rowena Arshad, who is now retired and has done fabulous work around diversity in the workforce, and in education more generally. I think that’s a hugely important issue to take forward.

Interview by Tes Scotland reporter Emma Seith

This article originally appeared in the 18 June 2021 issue