Eileen Prior is executive director of Scottish parents’ organisation Connect, formerly the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC). She took up her position in 2010 after starting to play a more active role in education, spurred on by the desire to ensure that her own children with additional needs got the support they needed to flourish. A constant frustration for Prior is the rigidity of an education system that she - like the late educationalist Sir Ken Robinson - believes too often stifles children’s creativity instead of nurturing it.

However, the many “courageous, passionate and committed people” working in Scottish education give her hope that, in the future, all schools will treat their pupils as individuals instead of putting them through a “sausage machine” - and that parental involvement will be about genuine partnerships between families and schools, not just the setting up of a parent council.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

The first one was a primary teacher in P1-3, I think. I was in a very small school - St Kieran’s Primary School in Campbeltown - so there were three classes: P1-3, P4-5 and P6-7.

There was a young Irish teacher, Miss Dooley. She didn’t shout - she didn’t do any of that stuff - she was just enormously kind. She was a gentle soul but she was also young and I think that was the thing - all the other teachers in the school, to me, were ancient. It was a lovely introduction to school.

The other one was in secondary and he was a maths teacher, funnily enough - I was never particularly good at maths - but John Kerr at Campbeltown Grammar School was a great teacher. My memory of him was that he actually just treated you like a human being. He made us feel we had opinions worth listening to and was just very down to earth.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?

The best thing about school was discovering I had a bit of a talent for music. I hadn’t ever played a musical instrument - except the recorder, which never sounded good - but I discovered a bit of a talent for music in secondary school, so I ended up in a little band with a couple of school classmates and one of our teachers.

We used to do little gigs - all folk stuff. It was Streets of London and a few Scottish songs, and we were called ACE, which was our initials: Ann, Catriona and Eileen. Our teacher - Mr Jack, I think - played mandolin and we all played guitar.

The worst bit was the punitive stuff: we were still belting children at that time. I didn’t get the belt, I always kept my head down and avoided it, but that punitive, authoritarian approach - shouting, throwing blackboard dusters - all of that kind of stuff I found really intimidating and bullying.

That has stopped - we don’t have the belt and that physical side any more - but, sadly, in schools you still have restraint, you still have isolation, detentions and too much of that goes on, but it’s all behind closed doors.

It has got to stop - it’s as simple as that.

3. Why do you work in education?

Twenty years ago, when my son Antony was quite young - he was in preschool - I took part in a course called Partners in Policymaking. The course basically makes you an activist. It still runs and it’s for parents of children with additional support needs or disabled adults, and is designed to help parents and individuals with disabilities make change, to get involved in policy. At that time, my focus was very much on education and it just kind of stayed there.

Antony has Down syndrome and fairly significant learning disabilities [he is also a champion swimmer, a keen climber and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of football and rugby, and took the picture illustrating this article].

I just had a growing sense, even through Antony’s early years, that his experience was just going to be so different. It was clear to me that we were already in a deficit model and it was all about what he couldn’t do, and the problems, rather than what he could do and where we could support him.

But it wasn’t just for him. My daughter, Sophie, who at that time was in late primary, has significant dyslexia, and our council had a massive budget crisis and they made swingeing cuts. Almost all of them focused on additional support needs, so I got involved in things at a local and a national level. I was involved in the General Teaching Council [for Scotland], I was involved in various groups and then this job came up in 2010 and it just seemed like “that’s the kind of thing I want to do”.

4. What are you most proud of in your career and what is your biggest regret?

I don’t do regrets - I try very hard not to because they don’t get you anywhere. We just do the best that we can at the time, we make the decision we think is best and we just have to live with it if things don’t work out. I think regret is a waste of energy.

I suppose what I’m most proud of would be really taking SPTC down a more expansive and inclusive route in the past 11 or 12 years. We’re a membership organisation and that’s where our key focus needs to be, but we now have the means to hear from parents about their experiences, hopes, wishes and challenges.

Now we use Facebook, social media and our online forums to communicate with parents, but before we had very few ways to hear from folk - they wrote to us or they phoned us. So the digital era has opened many doors and given us opportunities to take a broader, more inclusive route, meaning we don’t just hear from a particular set of very motivated parents.

During Covid, we have had more than 10,000 parents taking part in our surveys about their experiences and that’s gold dust. No one really wants to know what Eileen Prior thinks - the point is, we have to share what parents are telling us.

5. Who would be you colleagues in the perfect staffroom?

My existing colleagues - who are so motivated and fiery and massively committed - would be my ideal staffroom. We can get the business stuff done online but we have really missed the opportunity to all be in one place [during Covid].

6. What are the best and worst aspects of our schools system today?

We’ve got some really courageous, passionate and committed people, who really see education as work for the common good, and for children and young people. That’s the best aspect - there are some amazing people out there. They are just absolutely motivated to do their best for the children and the families they work with.

The flip side of that is, sadly, there are still some for whom these things don’t apply. For them, the system is the priority. It’s a constant frustration to me.

I see education as a human service: it’s about people - primarily children and their families, and the staff and the relationships that make education work, not a system and a process - but there are still those in education who see it in those terms.

The consequence is that you try to fit children and young people into an outdated model that is about churning young people out through the sausage machine. By forcing people to conform to the system, which is very rigid and reluctant to change, we miss out and we lose a lot - and young people lose a lot.

There are a lot of folk who have the passion and the courage to do things and ask for permission after - or say sorry afterwards. But our system does not encourage innovation and difference. The rigidity of the Scottish system beats that out of folk. We need to encourage the wild cards and the folk who are prepared to stick their necks out.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you the most?

Sir Ken Robinson [the educationalist who died last year and argued that the current system educates people “out of their creative capacities”]. When I came into this job, although I had been in and around education, it had quite specifically been within that additional support needs area, so I had to go and read and watch and listen and learn. And I did. I listened to lots of TED Talks and read lots of books, and I just thought Sir Ken was inspirational. He talked very clearly about the need to stop this sausage-factory model that we still have in schools, and move on to something that is about the individual, and their strengths and abilities.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d do?

I would take the Parental Involvement Act and replace it with an Education Partnership Act. Parents and families don’t need legislation to be involved in their children’s education - that’s what they do. What we need is something that says schools and nurseries need to work with parents and families, and form partnerships, because [schools] can’t do their jobs properly unless they do. We need to turn it around.

At the moment, the way the act is framed is very tight and process focused, as if having a parent council is the end game; it’s not. The important group is the parent forum, and how schools and nurseries engage with all the parents and carers.

If we learn anything from the past year, it has to be that parents stepped up and were put through really difficult times. We have heard from parents who feel bereft because they were immersed in their children’s learning and now they are maybe hearing from the school once a week.

Children do better when schools and families work in partnership and parents are fully involved - and a lot of schools and teachers already understand that.

9. What will our schools be like in 30 years?

I hope they will be much more inclusive places for all children and young people, that their families’ contributions are integral and valued, and sought after as a matter of course. I hope education is seen as a human service that’s about supporting young people to be what they want to be and can be.

Part of that would be a revamp of the qualifications. We started down the route of helping youngsters to get a wider perspective on work and training and education with Developing the Young Workforce, but there’s a whole lot more that needs to be done.

Schools and education are not just about producing fodder for the universities - they should be about supporting young people to create the life they want.

10. What one person do you think made the biggest difference to schools and education more generally in 2020?

There is a huge number of unnamed soldiers out there - we’ve got the teachers, the parents, the community organisations round schools, all of whom just went that extra mile to support children and families over the past year. They provided all sorts: food, activities, cash, devices and links to other advice and support.

They are the ones who made the biggest difference because they provided grassroots support - and that’s what makes the biggest difference to people’s lives and relationships. A lot of schools and parents’ groups have done this - they have really worked incredibly hard and strengthened their whole community as a result.

Eileen Prior was speaking to Tes Scotland reporter Emma Seith

This article originally appeared in the 7 May 2021 issue