We have to see teacher education as “a continuum”, says Dr Zoè Robertson, the new chair of the Scottish Council of Deans of Education.
But too often the focus falls on “individual, component parts of the system” - including initial teacher education (ITE).
The upshot is that if there is pressure to do something better in a certain area, such as supporting pupils with additional needs, or the teaching of maths, the solution is to try and cram more of it into university teacher education courses.
However, to make a real impact, Robertson argues, teacher education must be looked at as part of a bigger picture, with the focus on honing teachers’ skills and knowledge at every stage of their careers and evolving their expertise over time.
Career-long teacher development
“There needs to be an acknowledgement and a genuine recognition that once you achieve the Standard for Full Registration at the end of your probation, that is you at the start of your journey and your career,” says Robertson in an interview with Tes Scotland.
“There cannot be the expectation that you have everything that you need to know - that you are fully equipped with all the skills, and everything else that you do in your learning and development is just nice little top-ups or developing things you might be interested in.”
She adds: “If we truly believe, which I do, that teaching is highly complex and very demanding, to think you can achieve that in a two-year period - if you do a one-year postgraduate and a one-year induction - is a bit mindboggling.”
Robertson, who is also head of the Institute for Education, Teaching and Leadership at the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport, suggests that Scotland needs to establish a range of pathways for teachers to improve their skills. And it is not the first time this has been suggested.
In 2017 the Scottish government vowed “to establish new career pathways for teachers, allowing greater opportunities for development and progression”. It planned to learn from countries such as Singapore, which has three distinct career routes for teachers: teaching track, leadership track and specialist track.
However, that never came to fruition and, for now, there is only a “leadership track” for those interested in becoming school leaders. Robertson, who started her career in education as a primary teacher, says this pathway is “really good and really important” but “just one strand of the profession”.
She stresses that, when it comes to other teaching roles, such as unpromoted classroom posts, “we are just hoping that individuals know and are able to build and continually evolve that expertise”.
Robertson would like to see master’s-level professional development “spines” for teachers covering “what we recognise is critically important”. This might include areas such as enhancing pedagogical expertise, curriculum development and understanding assessment. She says there should also be the opportunity for teachers to specialise.
Ultimately, Robertson says, it is about “a properly interconnected framework of teacher learning and professional development that pulls the strands together” - including what is currently provided by local councils or Education Scotland.
What does she make of education secretary Jenny Gilruth’s plan for a Centre of Teaching Excellence?
Robertson welcomes investment “in the ongoing professional learning, development and capacity building of teachers”.
However, she warns against using the centre as a means of disseminating “more singular versions of ‘what works’ and ‘best practices’” - for example, rolling out approaches that claim to “fix reading”.
Investing in teacher expertise
This, she says, is unlikely to lead to sustained change because there are “no simple answers”- but investing in teaching expertise and ongoing development “could be transformative”.
Therefore, it is back to the idea that the profession needs “a coherent, structured, resourced framework of teacher learning and development - beginning with ITE and induction but crucially now focusing on the necessary post-induction teacher education”.
The other benefit of such a framework is it has the potential to make teaching more attractive. That is why the government became interested in developing career pathways in 2017: there was a teacher shortage and it wanted to generate more interest in teaching.
In the secondary sector, arguably, that need is still there.
Applications to secondary teacher education courses - with the exception of subjects such as history and PE - are down “across the board”, says Robertson, which is making it “very challenging to recruit” on to ITE courses.
In 2023-24 more than 50 per cent of places on secondary PGDE courses have been filled, but Robertson says early figures suggest that recruitment will be down on 2022-23, when just over 60 per cent of places were filled.
Approaches that could have an impact, she says, include marketing courses better; targeting undergraduate students in relevant subject areas; looking at ITE entry requirements; and exploring how to support students to undertake another year of study despite a cost-of-living crisis.
But Robertson also stresses that the teacher recruitment crisis is international and is influenced by changes in the undergraduate degrees students are taking.
The University of Aberdeen hit the headlines recently when it looked to scrap its single degrees in modern languages. Defending the move, the university cited “particularly low recruitment” to undergraduate modern languages programmes, going from 62 full-time equivalent students in 2021 to just 27 in September 2023.
As with the need for long-term fine tuning of teacher knowledge and expertise, Robertson suggests that focusing on one part of the system will not be enough to tackle the problem.
New teachers struggling to get jobs
While universities are struggling to recruit to many secondary subject specialisms, teachers entering the profession are not always managing to land jobs.
New secondary teachers are more likely to get temporary or permanent contracts after qualifying than new primary teachers. Nevertheless, last year around one in five failed to secure a contract in a state school by the September after their probation, according to figures published in December.
“We have to look at who is currently in the system and do these teachers exist somewhere but aren’t getting jobs?” says Robertson.
She adds that “bits of data” exist but not “a really clear, robust picture of the full landscape”.
Making probationers “supernumerary” - so not using them to fill teaching posts but having them in addition to a school’s staffing requirements - could free up posts for these new recruits, says Robertson. The induction year was not conceived as “a route to plug employment vacancies” but was supposed to be about developing and learning “the next stage of how to be a teacher”.
“That’s quite different from being a vacancy-filling strategy,” she says.
The sticking point for all of the above is, of course, that it would require investment.
But as the education secretary herself is keen to point out, if you invest in education you save in other areas - it is “about preventative spend”, as she put it when giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee earlier this month on the 2024-25 Budget.
And, of course, if you want well-rounded school leavers with a better clutch of qualifications who are less likely to require support from the state later on in life, highly skilled teachers are the key.
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