Headteachers in Scottish secondary schools have plenty on their plates just now. As well as growing day-to-day demands, they are navigating a period of flux and reform - and, as the Muir report noted last year, they already have to be experts in 40 different policy areas.

You would be forgiven for assuming, then, that secondary heads would be narrowly focused on the here and now, on the neverending to-do list within their own school gates.

Far from it, however, if the BOCSH group of experienced secondary heads across Scotland is anything to go by. It held its annual conference at the end of a school day in late May, with a title that sounded like a statement of intent: Looking Outwards, Learning Together.

After a session with Louise Hayward, author of the imminent report on qualifications and assessment reform, the 10 BOCSH heads each shared insight into something bold and new that their school was doing. They also invited attendees to visit their school to learn more.

Why take time out of a busy schedule to do this? BOCSH chair Peter Bain, head at Oban and Tiree schools, says that as well as the annual event, the group comes together once a month to share experiences and advice. Membership of BOCSH (which stands for “building on collaboration, supporting headteachers”) is capped at 20, as this “ensures a breadth of knowledge and experience while allowing effective sharing to take place”.

“It’s no secret that by working together we can achieve so much more than working alone,” says Bain, adding that this gathering of heads’ collective knowledge can make each school leader’s “own unique decisions and pathways so much easier and clearer”.

In that same spirit of openness and collaboration, a different selection of heads is put forward at the annual BOCSH conference each year to share something intriguing that their school is doing.

Here are the 10 schools that stepped up this time:

Grove Academy, Dundee: changing behaviour through the curriculum

Grove Academy had a group of a dozen S2 boys who were “boisterous, physically aggressive and immature in their attitudes” and “opposed to learning in the traditional fashion”, says depute head Matthew Robertson.

At the other end of the spectrum was a group of girls who were “disengaged”, “withdrawn” and “anxious”.

“Two of the girls were quite open: their ideal school day was a day where nobody spoke to them and they didn’t have to speak to anyone,” says Robertson.

The Every Dundee Learner Matters project led to the school using the curriculum to try to “hook” learners and improve engagement, as well as “social gelling”, creativity and employability.

The boys’ “keen interest” in football was exploited and charity Kindred Clothing - which uses fashion and design to engage learners - helped to re-engage the girls, which was an “unequivocal success”.

While there were some teething problems with the football project, it also ultimately increased buy-in among the students - although they continued to “totally reject anything that they saw as academic learning”.

So, when the boys entered S3, the school worked with Alexander Community Development on industry-level qualifications in the trades. That training has been “transformative”, says Robertson, because the boys see “the relevance”.

“It cost a lot but I think it was money well spent,” he adds. “Investing in the future of these young people was key.”

Royal High School, Edinburgh: proactive equality and diversity

“We belong here” has become the simple statement of values that headteacher Pauline Walker wants to inform everything the school does.

Her presentation at the BOCSH event, then, looked at how “we are meeting the needs of all”, with a focus on equality and diversity.

Students often take the lead - running equalities groups that cover race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and disability - while the school involves groups such as Intercultural Youth Scotland and LGBT Youth Scotland to help staff better understand structural racism and bias.

Staff, students and families have together explored how “coloniality and racism seep into the curriculum”, often because texts used in schools have “missing perspectives”. The school actively updates its collections of resources so that they “portray members of all [minority-]ethnic and cultural groups in positive and non-stereotypical ways”.

Walker explains that the school is not satisfied with a tick-box approach and wants to give students the confidence to speak out when they see something wrong. At a separate event in April, Walker said that, five years ago, there were issues with racial equality in the school.

Now, the school actively encourages students to report and challenge bullying, racism and religious intolerance, and has clearer protocols for dealing with racist incidents in school and providing guidance and support on policy and practice.

“Staff and partners have created an environment where learners feel listened to and are secure in their ability to discuss and explore diversity and multifaith issues,” says Walker.

Oban High School: a panoply of courses and qualifications

Oban students have had their pick of 96 courses by the end of S6, says Peter Bain, who believes that newcomers such as National Progression Awards (NPA) and Foundation Apprenticeships should be given equal billing to Highers.

Bain wants to see myriad routes to success for students - what he describes as a “breadth of progression” - and a culture where students don’t choose certain subjects to be with their friends and certain teachers, but “subjects that are going to fit in better with their career destinations”.

‘We are now better at adapting to students and we no longer expect students to adapt to us’

The school works with over 100 community partners. Bain says it is crucial that the partners “feel valued” and that college courses take place in the school - rather than students being sent out to college. He acknowledges that this means a school may have to set up specialist classrooms, such as a hairdressing salon, a garage and fields for agricultural students.

“I think that’s the key to success…get the tutors to come to school,” says Bain, adding: “If you can avoid the fragmentation of learning…you’ll reap the benefits.”

The school also runs 54 clubs and is a specialist school in four areas - traditional music, dance, rugby and shinty - and Bain sees the school’s role as showing students, through interdisciplinary learning, the links between all these and the wide array of courses and qualifications on offer.

And this approach’s time has come, he believes, with the idea of a Scottish Diploma of Achievement (SDA) - seeking to consign to history old hierarchies of qualifications - set out in the interim Hayward report in March. The broad Oban High approach to learning, says Bain, “leads back at what the [SDA] is all about”.

Mackie Academy, Stonehaven: experiential learning

Headteacher Louise Moir talks about her school’s “five-year programme of learning investment” from 2022 to 2027, during which she wants to see staff and students given more freedom to “take control of their learning and progression”.

The Aberdeenshire school is working with the Wood Foundation’s Excelerate programme, which places a big emphasis on oracy - the ability to speak eloquently - and project-based learning.

A big part of the school’s plans is “school leaver profiles”. Moir says that these should help leavers feel better able to talk and write about themselves and show how their skills have prepared them for whatever comes next.

Other priorities for the school are “deeper relationships” with employers and the wider community; and “more high-quality and diverse learning pathways”, which includes work with the Ford motor company’s Next Generation Learning programme, with its focus on “experiential learning” through, for example, an aeronautical academy.

The school has a full-time business and community support officer, who comes from a business background. Their brief is to “bring experiential learning into the classroom” and help students see the links between the subjects and skills they work on in school and “how those translate into the work environment”.

Belmont Academy, Ayr: tracking positive destinations more closely

Depute head Graeme McLean recalls the South Ayrshire school having its “knuckles rapped” over its leaver destinations data: in October 2019, out of 220 leavers, 94.6 per cent were in “positive destinations”, but by April 2020 that had fallen to 89.5 per cent.

This school year, however, data for 231 leavers in 2021-22 showed that 98.7 per cent were in “positive destinations” in October 2022, and 97.4 per cent in April 2023.

In large part, the change is down to the 1,250-student school’s new, tighter systems for tracking and monitoring destinations, including cross-referencing of different datasets. McLean - who has a specialist remit for leaver destinations and works closely with a Developing the Young Workforce lead in the school, Laura McMillan - says this cross-referencing will be one of his first jobs when he returns in August from the summer holidays.

This approach requires closer dialogue with partners such as training providers and colleges, and a Belmont Academy group focusing on positive destinations meets weekly at certain crucial points of the year. Also, if the school is struggling to establish what a former student is now doing, it will go to their family to try to find out.

Chess is fostering a level of ‘intrinsic motivation’ that has transferred into classroom learning

There has been a “cultural shift” on leaver destinations, says McLean, so that “not only is every member of staff in the school responsible for it, but [also] all the partner agencies”.

This includes building staff expertise in the use of leavers’ data. Headteacher Kevin Boyd says the school does “deep dives” into data to “quality-assure the appropriateness of leavers’ destinations”.

Recently, for example, it looked closely at the 13 leavers from 2021-22 who had gone into training. This process underlined that the route to a positive destination could be circuitous, that it sometimes confounded expectations of a student - for better and worse - and led to positive destinations in unexpected places. 

The school is now planning to compile leaver case studies, to “help improve our decision making on positive destinations”. 

Larbert High, Falkirk: squeezing more attainment out of the curriculum

Larbert High wanted to work “a little bit smarter” and “squeeze more attainment” out of the curriculum, says headteacher Jon Reid.

The school has:

• An “academies programme” that offers S1s personalisation and choice through specialisms in, for example, dance, football or rock and pop. By the end of S3, over a third of students will achieve a National 5 qualification in their specialism, and a quarter of S4s will undertake a one-year Higher.
• “Wider achievement opportunities” (WAOs) in S2, S3, S5 and S6 are “a good example of first-class interdisciplinary learning”, says Reid. One in literacy through sports journalism also encompasses curricular “experiences and outcomes” in technology as well as health and wellbeing. In 2021-22, WAOs resulted in students attaining 1,135 awards.

Now, the school has moved conversations with curriculum principal teachers away from focusing on the previous year’s results towards using that data to “plan forward” in what it calls “faculty future conversations”.

Faculties are challenged to think about how, for example, National 5 A passes can be converted into A passes at Higher, with targets then agreed. This process has led to new science, technology, engineering and maths pathways, as well as new courses in the senior phase, including a hugely popular NPA in criminology.

Creative timetabling allows students to “bolt on” extra qualifications by, for example, attaining an NPA at the same time as a Higher - so students studying Higher PE over two years also complete an NPA in exercise and fitness leadership. The new approach has led to students gaining an additional 495 qualifications.

Depute head Jo Wilson says the traditional pathway from N4 to Advanced Higher still exists in a lot of subjects but NCs and NPAs suit some students, given the focus on skills and continuous assessment. They also allow more students to “progress up that the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework ladder”, she says.

Preston Lodge High School, Prestonpans: chess for all

How’s this for an ambition? That every S1 and S2 in your school - all 410 of them - will learn to play chess.

That’s what has happened at Preston Lodge High in East Lothian, where enthusiasm for the game has reached such levels that a new type of toilet disruption has emerged: students delicately perching boards atop sinks in the hope of squeezing in a quick game before class.

The impact of chess in the past couple of years has been “universally positive”, says headteacher Gavin Clark. And some of the students who have embraced chess most are those who struggled most with other aspects of school - the game helping them attain levels of focus and concentration they had rarely managed in class.

However, there has been an “enormous” impact across “all abilities and backgrounds”, says Clark, with chess fostering a level of “intrinsic motivation” that has transferred into classroom learning.

Each S1-2 now gets six periods of chess a year. One teacher, who had expressed some concerns at first about losing teaching time in their subject, said that their “relationship with them has really improved as a result of the chess lessons, which has resulted in far fewer behavioural issues”.

Clark says the “unexpected benefit” was the “improvement in positive relationships between teachers and students”.

Lasswade High, Midlothian: how a primary teacher is improving maths attainment in secondary

In 2017-18, Lasswade High and its associated schools - seven primaries and a nursery - created a shared numeracy development post.

Headteacher Campbell Hornell says the role, which is filled by a primary teacher, has improved maths pedagogy at Lasswade: “concrete, pictorial and abstract” approaches to teaching maths, common in primary, are now a “strong feature” of secondary teaching.

The shared post - paid for jointly by all the schools in the cluster - has also led to a common understanding of standards among the schools and improvement among students who used to “hide or avoid maths”.

“We are now better at adapting to students that come into our school and into our classrooms and we no longer expect those students to adapt to us,” says Hornell.

The numeracy development officer has also helped identify P7 maths “high fliers”, who secondary teachers will work with once a week on developing “a mathematical mindset based on skills and problem solving”. Hornell says some work undertaken by the P7s is “first-year university level”.

Mearns Castle High, East Renfrewshire: a fully staffed wellbeing hub

The school’s largely affluent catchment area can lead to the perception that everything will be rosy and that students arrive at school ready to learn, says head Stuart Clark. However, while attainment is strong, the school identified a small group of learners who were not doing so well.

Their poor attendance was often the biggest concern - and the underlying reason was typically poor mental health.

‘Anyone who tells you we have recovered from Covid has not set foot in a school’

A key part of the school’s response was the establishment of its fully staffed “wellbeing hub”, run by principal teacher of student support, Roseann Cartledge, with three full-time wellbeing support assistants.

The hub is a calm space that looks and feels different from the rest of the school. Interventions vary in terms of intensity, but one go-to resource that staff use with students is a cognitive behavioural therapy programme, Living Life to the Full.

Between August and February, the hub received 95 referrals and 280 drop-ins. In February, Tes Scotland spoke to Ms Cartledge about the initiative.

Boclair Academy, Bearsden: recovering from Covid

“Anyone who tells you we have recovered from Covid has not set foot in a school in Scotland,” says Douglas Brown, head at the East Dunbartonshire school.

The cost-of-living crisis is also “impacting significantly on a huge number of young people”, so his school set about trying to understand “what was going on for young people” and how it could help.

Learning gaps were an issue, as was an increase in student trauma caused by bereavement and illness. Meanwhile, Covid absences meant students needed to be “refamiliarised with the life and work of the school” and were less able to cope with exams stress and pressure.

Responses included:

• Collecting data on students’ “stresses and anxieties” to inform the school’s responses.
• Getting the wider achievement programme back up and running “because the more you do with young people, and the more achievement they get, the better they feel about the world”.
• Training staff and students in mental health first aid, through the Be-inn Unity social enterprise.
• Retaining staggered lunches and intervals (where free buttered toast is served) to maintain a calm atmosphere.
• Setting up a “fairness room” with free toiletries, tights, uniforms and school resources.