The Scottish government will announce the host university for the proposed Centre of Teaching Excellence “by the end of this year”.
And the centre should be “up and running” from the spring, Tes Scotland can reveal.
Clare Hicks, the government’s director of education reform, set out the timeline for the introduction of the new centre in an address to education directors’ body ADES at its annual conference in Cumbernauld last week.
Ms Hicks said the government had received applications to host the centre - which is expected to have a budget of around £4 million a year - from “a number of very interested universities”, and that a shortlist had been drawn up.
The plan for a Centre of Teaching Excellence was announced by education secretary Jenny Gilruth at the SNP annual conference in October 2023.
She said it would make Scotland “a world leader in new approaches to learning and teaching” and ensure that all teachers are “supported and empowered” in the classroom.
In the wake of the announcement, Ms Gilruth was criticised over her failure to consult.
The EIS teaching union said the new centre might “offer additional and welcome advice and support on pedagogy” but also warned that it would not address other key issues impacting on excellent learning and teaching, including “rampant and increasing poverty” or “the chronic under-resourcing of ASN provision”.
Scottish education’s ‘tarnished word’
Other bodies, meanwhile, have raised concerns about the title of the “university-boosted institute” - as Ms Hicks described it - and, in particular, the use of the word “excellence”, with school leaders saying that in the wake of the difficulties around Curriculum for Excellence, this had become a “tarnished word” in Scottish education.
Secondary heads’ body School Leaders Scotland (SLS) suggested “a more aspirational but reachable goal rather than excellence”.
More recently SLS has questioned how the new centre will fit into the government’s ongoing education reforms, with general secretary Graham Hutton describing it as “a costly innovation, which quite simply isn’t needed”.
He told Tes Scotland in October that Education Scotland had “proven over the years that they are able to provide high-quality professional learning and support” and that “adding another organisation into the mix seems unnecessary”.
Speaking at the ADES conference last Thursday, Ms Hicks said that Education Scotland would continue to have “that strategic role in terms of professional learning and supporting curriculum improvement”.
The role of the Centre of Teaching Excellence, she said, would be to provide “added value…in terms of supporting quality learning and teaching”.
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