Gail Preston is a secondary headteacher in Scotland, but her school does not yet exist. Since September she has been its sole member of staff - although that will change soon.
The Wallyford Learning Campus has at its heart a brand new secondary, as opposed to a replacement for an existing school, which is being built to serve the needs of the growing population in Wallyford, an East Lothian village near Musselburgh, close to the shores of the Firth of Forth.
Opening a new school is a chance to do things differently, says Preston, which is why she believes hers is “the dream job”.
“All these ideas that you have - all the times you think to yourself, ‘If only we could do this,’ or, ‘If only we could do that’ - suddenly you can,” she says.
So when the school - which is currently known as the Wallyford Learning Campus but will be officially named after the February break - opens in August, there will be no bells signalling the end of periods or the start of break. Also, when students transition from primary, it is Preston’s intention that they will not be overwhelmed by timetables chock full of different teachers with “multiple different expectations and perspectives”. Rather, they will be gradually exposed to the full gamut of subjects.
Preston also plans to give topics like sustainability and outdoor learning their own place on the timetable.
“It’s not about taking the space and making it like other secondary schools. It’s not version 2.0 of an existing high school. This is an opportunity to do all those things that we have been talking about and dreaming about,” she says.
“Obviously we are subject to all the same rules and regulations and restrictions and challenges, financial and otherwise, that everyone else has.
“But because you’re moving into a brand new space, there are no norms so there’s no idea of ‘it’s aye been’.”
A new school and a new vision
One thing that Preston is very keen to tackle is the sheer number of teachers and subjects that students are presented with when they arrive from primary.
“We hand an 11-year-old a timetable with 32 classes on it and in that timetable there are 13 or 14 subjects, and there are maybe 17 teachers, and they go to each of them for 50 minutes. And then we go, ‘Hmm, they’re not settling very well, are they?’
“That’s something that’s always got me, and I have the opportunity to do it differently here.”
Preston says there will be a presumption towards double periods, and that exposure to different subjects will be drip-fed into the timetable. So when a student first goes to the expressive arts faculty, for example, the focus might be on music and then it might change to drama - but the point is that when students arrive at the school they will not experience every subject in the first week.
“To support the young people in finding their person, having those secure positive relationships with adults, we can’t overwhelm them with multiple relationships and multiple different expectations and perspectives and then blame them when they have lost learning or find it hard to settle or self-regulate,” she says.
“There’s a lot of conversation in both sectors - primary and secondary - about getting the children ready for high school. But, actually, how do we, as secondary school leaders, get our schools ready to receive the children that we are getting? Not the fictional child in some textbook that doesn’t actually exist, but the reality of the children as they actually are, with the incredibly challenging experiences that they’ve had over the last few years.”
“I have the opportunity to do it differently here”
Preston also sees the creation of the new school - which is expected to have a future roll of more than 1,000 but will start out with around 300 students - as an opportunity to get rid of another pet hate: bells.
“It’s not a factory or a prison - we can all tell the time,” she explains.
She adds that her previous school, Dalkeith High in Midlothian, got rid of bells as a Covid mitigation.
Preston spent 21 years at the school: she started out as an English teacher there and latterly was depute headteacher.
Dalkeith High removed bells because it wanted to prevent the simultaneous surge of students into the school’s narrow corridors during the pandemic, but the change proved so successful it never brought them back.
“Everything was just much calmer” after the school bell was removed and, says Preston, ”if I go into a school now and they have the bell, it actually makes me quite anxious - you get a bit of a fright”.
Preston also sees the creation of the new school as an opportunity to put inclusion, wellbeing and equity at the heart of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, sustainability, outdoor learning and interdisciplinary learning will have their own dedicated space in the timetable.
“Each of these subjects will have a double period per week in S1 and S2 dedicated to it to allow for depth of experience built over time. Therefore, outdoor learning, for example, doesn’t become something that’s an occasional privilege, but something that is there as part of the core curriculum.”
Detailed development work on the curriculum will begin in earnest after the Easter break, at which point the senior leadership team and the school’s seven curriculum leads will be in place, leaving the summer term to plan ahead of the arrival of the first students in August.
“When else are they going to have 10 or 12 weeks to focus on developing a curriculum?” asks Preston. “So that’s going to be an amazing amount of time to have with staff to really understand what we’re all about and how we are going to make that work.”
Some students will be transitioning from primary into S1 in August but the school will also welcome attending Musselburgh Grammar students who live in the Wallyford catchment area into S2 and S3.
In all, more than 300 S1-3 students will join the school to begin with.
And “it’s not just a school” but a community campus. Ultimately, it is also expected that students from Edinburgh College will be on site making use of its dedicated science, technology, engineering, art and maths centre. There is also a specialist provision for secondary-age students with severe and complex needs.
Inevitably, Preston has a lot on her plate: she is liaising with architects, thinking about how the interiors of the new school should look and how the spaces should be used. Staff recruitment has also been a “massive” undertaking, especially because of the sheer number of applications. This is something that she says has earned her the nickname “the pied piper of East Lothian”.
Equally, however, Preston says: “For the first time since I started teaching in 2001, I’m actually able to step back and think deeply.”
And maybe that, as much as anything else, is what makes hers the dream job.
