In January 2017, a huge row blew up over a £15 increase to the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s (GTCS) annual registration fee. Within a few hours, several thousand teachers had signed a petition protesting against the hike from £50 to £65. This was serious: the raw anger was palpable in the online comments. There was plenty of outrage about the fee itself, but that issue also seemed to be a proxy for many other frustrations about how teachers in Scotland were being treated.

For Ken Muir, chief executive of the GTCS since 2013, it was the biggest media storm he had to deal with that year. Now, looking back from the era of Covid-19, it seems likea bygone age.

Muir has announced his retirement and plans to hand over the GTCS reins in March next year. His last few months in the job will be dominated by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s not the only huge international issue that will have ramifications for Scotland’s teaching council - there’s also the small matter of Brexit.

In an in-depth and wide-ranging conversation with Tes Scotland, Muir looks towards a turbulent few months ahead, but also reflects on the changes he has seen during a 42-year career in Scottish education. 

The 2017 fees controversy - where did that extra £15 go in the end?

The irate reaction to the GTCS fee increase of 2017, designed to raise about £1 million, led to a “tough few months”, says Muir. The extra money went towards the refurbishment of GTCS HQ in Clerwood House on the outskirts of Edinburgh - where the Victorian part of the building needed reroofing - and to improve IT to allow for more flexible working.

That was done in the knowledge that“the working patterns of people were changing quite significantly”, and has proved to be prescient given the explosion in home working during the Covid outbreak. But things have moved on so much that there is now a question mark over whether the GTCS should retain such a big base.

“Do we still need it? We certainly will need something, but whether it’s something of the size and scale of Clerwood House, I’m not sure,” he says.

The headache that the fee increase caused for the GTCS now looks very different from the vantage point of late 2020. “It was a pretty big storm at the time,” he reflects, “but in comparison with what we’re dealing with just now, it was nothing really.”

Student placements stopped in March - how did that go?

Before exams were cancelled, before schools were closed, one of the first big decisions made in Scottish education when Covid hit in March was to cut short teaching students’ school placements. “It was relatively smooth [in practice], although it created a bit of a furore at the time, not least from the students themselves, who wanted to complete their placements,” says Muir.

That means a lot of teachers now going into their probationary year having not completed placements. The GTCS has responded with a “huge” investment in various experts to help with health and wellbeing, including bespoke support where necessary for probationers. It has also been asking schools for earlier feedback on how probationers are doing, as well as finding out who is suffering from not having completed their initial teacher education, with just over 100 out of about 3,500 probationers identified.

Guidance to address other issues - such as enhanced support from universities for placement students and alternatives to assessing or observing students in a Covid world - are also being worked on with education directors’ body ADES and the Scottish Council of Deans of Education.

“We’re doing all we can,” says Muir.

He anticipates some concerns from headteachers about taking on three or four students this term amid rising Covid safety concerns, but says that “we’ve done everything we can to try to make it as safe as possible”. 

Muir adds that “the last thing we want to do is store up a problem of having insufficient teachers coming into the … profession at the beginning of the next academic year, which could be the case if [teaching] students do not continue with their placements”.

On the face of it, he says, the easiest option would be to cancel placements until December - but then there would be a “question mark over whether it would be feasible to grant the standard for full registration [for] even the very best students”.

What happens in the worst-case scenario over the coming months?

If there is “total lockdown and schools shutting en masse”, says Muir, the obvious danger is “students not being able to complete the university programme or any placements at all”.

He adds: “We’ve just got to accept the fact that last year and this year, who knows for how long to come, the teacher education experience could very different [from] a normal year.”

But that different kind of experience could have upsides, too: the resilience and “hugely flexible” approaches student teachers have had to demonstrate - such as balancing in-class and online learning - are like nothing their predecessors faced.

He says: “Teachers have really been thrown in at the deep end in relation to IT and technology, and I think it’s a very different set of skills that they will emerge with.”

Serious concerns over Brexit’s impact on teaching standards

“I am deeply worried about it,” Muir says of the Internal Market Bill. This is the UK government’s attempt to ensure that, post Brexit, professional qualifications issued in one part of the UK are recognised across the whole of the UK. But this causes problems for teachers, says Muir, as the UK has long had four “very different education systems”. 

That prompted the GTCS to submit a response to the consultation on the bill, warning that it risked diluting teaching standards in Scotland and calling for an exemption. Last week, the GTCS wrote to all 76,600 registered teachers in Scotland asking them to raise concerns about the bill with their MP.

“My biggest concern lies around the fact that we have in some parts of the UK - not Scotland - unqualified teachers,” says Muir.

He fears that “anyone who is teaching, let’s say in England, as an unqualified teacher can then expect to gain full registration with the GTCS - it can only dilute the quality of the teaching profession”.

Lots of teachers from England apply to work in Scotland. In the past five years, on average, 621 teachers from England have been registered in Scotland annually.

Muir says he is “not making a political issue - this for me is a standards issue”, and that he has raised the topic in meetings with a No 10 adviser, a Scotland Office adviser, and in two technical meetings with writers of the bill.

“I’ve come to the same conclusion in all four meetings … I don’t think they’ve got a clue about Scottish education and I don’t think they’re all that bothered about it,” says Muir. “It’s too much of a risk for Scottish education to open the doors to unqualified teachers - it’s as simple as that.”

The perception of teachers during the pandemic

“If Covid has shown anything at all, it’s shown a lot of folk who have been cynical about teaching just how difficult and complex teaching is,” says Muir.

Families’ experience of home learning will have underlined the complexity of teaching a class of 30-plus children to a consistently high standard, he believes. “That’s one of the reasons why we insist on a teaching qualification: you need to have that fundamental basis on the skills and practice of being a teacher, children’s developmental phases and all the rest of the theory and practice - you need to have that in your head before you set foot in a classroom.”

What happened to those 15,000 teachers?

Before the summer, there were reports that 15,000 teachers could be contacted by the GTCS to help fill staffing gaps during the coronavirus crisis. That figure was arrived at from GTCS figures showing that there were 76,643 registered teachers in Scotland with 61,349 employed in schools, leaving 15,000-plus teachers who were registered but not working in schools.

Within days, Tes Scotland had established that the number who realistically might come back to the classroom was closer to 600. In practice, the number has turned out to be far lower even than that.

The GTCS identified 2,961 teachers whose names had fallen off the teaching register in the past three years - 90 per cent of whom were aged over 60 - and sent out emails and letters to gauge interest. Many of the email addresses were out of date as they were associated with teachers’ old schools, so 1,000 letters had to be posted.

At the time of this interview, 50 had re-registered and 40 had expressed an interest. Among those, some have applied conditions to their return, such as being prepared to do only online or one-to-one teaching, or to take classes of a certain maximum size.

“The notion of 15,000 teachers sitting there eagerly waiting to join the teaching workforce in Scotland is just not right,” says Muir.

What’s happening with fitness-to-teach hearings during Covid?

Muir says that, in many ways, it has been “business as usual” for the GTCS apart from two things: annual celebrations, such as those for probationers and teachers who have completed the Standard for Headship, have not been possible as physical events; and a number of fitness-to-teach hearings have been postponed.

“We haven’t moved yet to all hearings being virtual but, like most regulators, I think that’s the way we’re going to end up going - the court system’s going down that road,” says Muir. “It makes it an awful lot easier getting witnesses virtually - you can take half an hour out to participate as opposed to having to travel for two days.”

Covid has accelerated the move to online hearings “by quite a few years”, although some of the teachers subject to hearings have insisted on traditional face-to-face sessions.

Online hearings have, says Muir, run smoothly and relatively quickly, and have been “much more structured”. Partly, he acknowledges, that is because - as anyone who has attended Zoom meetings will know - it is harder to interject in an online meeting.

Although some hearings have been delayed, Muir says all will go ahead eventually: “There is no chance of any of them falling into abeyance and nothing being done.”

His biggest regret

“I would have liked Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) to be more successfully embedded, although I think we’re getting there,” says Muir.

He adds: “How we measure and value education hasn’t changed in the way that the original philosophy [of CfE] suggested that it might.” Specifically, he thinks that the focus of Scottish education is still on the “exit point of attainment” at the end of secondary school, as has long been the case.

Yet Muir is irked by those who, often from beyond Scotland, “belittle” CfE. He says that the likes of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - which examined CfE in 2015 and is due to publish another review of Scotland’s curriculum next June - and the many foreign visitors who come to see the impact of Scotland’s reforms show “no dissent at all [and agree] that it’s absolutely the right direction of travel”.

So, while he recognises that CfE’s “four capacities” - “successful learners”, “confident individuals”, “responsible citizens” and “effective contributors” - have been “hugely criticised for all sorts of reasons, sometimes for political reasons”, there is also “a consensus that the kind of children and young people that an education system needs to produce in the third decade of the 21st century… exhibit those four capacities”.

That view was strengthened by an OECD report involving 27 countries, published after Tes Scotland spoke to Muir, which found that Scottish students were among the most likely to understand and appreciate the perspective of others, and also to demonstrate positive attitudes towards immigrants.

Muir admits that those stewarding CfE from its conception nearly two decades ago got some big things wrong.

“We didn’t get the planning right for such a fundamental change to Scottish education,” he admits, adding that it was the “first time ever that we’d tried to change everything at once - the whole curriculum”, after previous “nibbles at it” with Standard Grade, Higher Still and the old 5-14 curriculum.

“We didn’t share the philosophy of Curriculum for Excellence well enough,” he says - with teachers or parents - and “probably needed to think more carefully about the planning of it and involve the grassroots of the profession”.

As a result, he regrets that the accumulation of traditional qualifications is still being prized above other forms of achievement. That is frustrating for Muir, as “successful learners go far, far beyond quals - my mantra has always been that attainment is a subset of achievement”. He insists, however, that “we’re much further on than we were 10 years ago” in recognising wider achievement.

The need to do more on racism

In an interview with Tes Scotland in 2018, Muir said he was “sickened” by the “shocking” and “blatant” racism in schools, and that he feared little progress had been made on this over the previous three decades. Today, he remains concerned that “the teaching profession in Scotland is not representative of society as whole”. 

Muir believes that, with about 4 per cent of people in Scotland being black, Asian or minority-ethnic (BAME) but only about 1 per cent of teachers being BAME, Scottish education has to be more proactive in recruiting teachers from minority groups. He says that the profession needs to persuade some communities - who may see careers such as medicine and accountancy as preferable - about the merits of teaching.

An analysis of Scottish government figures published by Tes Scotland in August and obtained through a freedom of information request showed barely any progress on this issue in a decade. In 2019, 47,467 teachers (92.3 per cent) were recorded as being white and 826 (1.6 per cent) as being from
a minority-ethnic group. In 2009, 49,719 (95.9 per cent) were recorded as white and 781 (1.5 per cent) as minority-ethnic.

The change in Scottish education that has most pleased him

Muir - who qualified as a geography teacher in 1978 and was head of inspection at Education Scotland before taking on his current role in 2013 - wrote the prospectus for the much-heralded new community schools about 20 years ago, designed for a world where schools worked far more closely with other services.

More than any other change, he is heartened that services to support children and families are “better integrated than they ever were”. He adds: “There’s more of a realisation among teachers themselves that they can’t do everything to support these individual children who are presenting the most difficult circumstances for learning.”

There has been a “huge cultural shift, which is never easy”, seen in the small number of jobs with the title “director of education” - “director of children’s and family services” or similar is now more common.

Over the decades, he has also seen the quality of professional learning “improve greatly”. When he started teaching in the late 1970s, “you clambered to get on a course and that was basically it - there was no expectation, really, that most of the professional learning would be self-generated and collaborative. It was something that was done to you.”

Are teachers still leaving Scotland in worrying numbers?

In 2017, there were concerns about the number of teachers leaving Scotland for work abroad. Around that time, the latest GTCS figures showed that 861 teachers aged 21-35 had lapsed from the register.

“It’s less of an issue than it was,” says Muir, with the number of applicants for teaching increasing. “I think [the impact of] Covid [on the job market] will increase it even more because it’s seen by some to be a much safer career prospect.”

Henry Hepburn is news editor at Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 6 November 2020 issue under the headline “‘Teachers have really been thrown in at the deep end’”