Louise Hayward is an assessment expert at the University of Glasgow who has been asked by the Scottish government to advise it on reforming Scotland’s national qualifications - although we have already been told that externally marked exams will remain part of the system.

Speaking to Tes Scotland, Hayward - a former English and learning support teacher - talks about how she became interested in assessment after realising that the grades and marks that teachers assigned were one of the biggest barriers to learning.

She says that, if she became education secretary, she would build time into teachers’ working day for the “sophisticated business” of curriculum and assessment design. She also hopes that Scotland is finally addressing its “shameful” poverty levels so that every young person can have a fair shot at life.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

I was at school in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was an English teacher called Joyce Lindsay. She was one of these people who was gently inspirational. She wasn’t showy or flashy, just really caring.

I always enjoyed reading and I remember that she had a cupboard full of her own books in her classroom. One day, she flung it open and said, “Help yourselves - read what you like and then talk to me about it.” That was the first time I really understood the motivating effect of choice and being treated like a person, someone who might have a view that would be of interest.

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

The best things took place outside of normal classes. It was the relationships, the friends, the going to and from school, the lunchtimes and the breaktimes. As teachers, we always focus on what goes on in the classroom and forget that the young person’s experience is so much more than that.

In particular, I really enjoyed some of the extracurricular activities. Joyce Lindsay was married to the poet Maurice Lindsay, who was part of the Scottish poetry renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s, so she invited people like Edwin Morgan and Norman MacCaig to school. Listening to these poets talking about their work was both inspirational and grounding because you started to understand that poets are - it sounds bizarre - real people and that they are learning the craft of language in the same way you are, just in a far more sophisticated way.

The worst thing for me was the range of teaching quality. I had wonderful English and modern languages teachers, but I have other memories from classrooms that were just painful. When it was announced who your teachers were going to be at the beginning of the year, I still remember that horrible sinking feeling when you heard a name and you knew for a whole year life was going to be dull.

So, that was one of the worst things: the range of experiences that you got and how much the teacher influenced how you felt about the subject and the progress that you made. Teachers really matter.

3. Why do you work in education?

Because I think there is no better job than working with other people to create better, more equitable societies. Education is all about transforming societies collectively into something we would all like to be part of. It’s in everyone’s interest that every young person has a fair shot at life.

I started out as an English teacher and then moved into learning support because I wanted to focus on inclusion and how social and educational disadvantage might best be tackled.

That led me into assessment because I began to see that it was perhaps the biggest barrier to learning - as soon as a teacher puts a letter or a number on a piece of work, that’s a really powerful communicator. So, if a child got something like 3 out of 20, that was a powerful indicator to them that they couldn’t do it. It meant you had to work in the background to build up their confidence even before you started talking to them about what it was they did not know or were not able to do. Their starting position wasn’t “here’s what I must do to improve”, it was “I can’t do this”.

4. What are you proudest of in your career and what do you regret?

I learned most from being involved in the Assessment is for Learning programme. It was the early 1990s when that project was initiated and it was about using assessment to improve learning - so sharing learning intentions, giving good feedback, sharing what a good performance looks like. It was about engaging learners far more actively in thinking about their own learning and what they might do to improve. Peter Peacock, the education minister at the time, described it as the quiet revolution in Scottish education.

It was the first project I was involved in that did not pretend to have all the answers. This was when I realised that if you want change to be meaningful then you have to pay attention to research, policy and practice - you can’t look at any of these separately and expect change to be sustainable.

The second big thing I learned from that project was that up to that point, when looking at innovation, I had focused on the research linked to the topic. But we also looked at research on processes of change, so what the design of the system should look like if change were to become deeply embedded and sustainable.

My regret is that you are either in the classroom or out of it. In all the wonderful opportunities that I have had to work nationally and internationally, there is still nothing that gives you the buzz that you get when you watch the lights come on in a young person’s eyes and you see the joy they take in the progress they have made. It would be great for everyone if our jobs were all a bit more flexible and we crossed boundaries a bit more often.

5. Who would be your colleagues in your perfect school staffroom?

I would be very happy to have the colleagues that I have just now in the University of Glasgow education assessment network and my colleagues from the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change. These are the colleagues I have at the university and I am lucky to work with great people. They are caring, intellectually stimulating, supportive and innovative.

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

The best thing about so many of our schools in Scotland today is that they are powerful communities.

So many teachers care passionately about learners and work beyond what it is reasonable to expect to give young people good life chances - and I think that is particularly true in schools where young people have a real voice.

I think that the worst aspect of the system is that there is still such social division across schools. Schools and colleges have crucial roles to play in opening up opportunities for young people, and many of them do that - things are much better than they were. But I find the level of poverty in Scotland really shameful. I do have the sense that change is coming, but it should have come decades ago.

I am hopeful, because for so many decades poverty was Scotland’s secret shame - there was an acknowledgement that it was there but a belief that nothing could be done about it - whereas now there has been a radical shift in thinking and, fundamentally, I have faith in people. Once we take issues seriously, we are a sufficiently creative species that we find ways through.

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

It’s groups of people working in teams that have influenced me most. I’ve talked about the Assessment is for Learning team, and then there is the assessment group I’ve worked with in Glasgow for years - people like Ernie Spencer, George MacBride and, more recently, colleagues such as Kara Makara Fuller and David Morrison-Love. The Assessment Reform Group - people like Paul Black, Jo-Anne Baird, Richard Daugherty, John Gardner, Wynne Harlen, Mary James, Gordon Stobart - that whole group of people who were internationally leading assessment researchers, and working with them was always a mixture of awe, joy and terror.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would do?

I would tackle the issue of intelligent accountability - I would continue the journey in Scotland from accountability being about judgement to being focused on Scotland becoming a learning system. It’s about changing the culture so that if things are challenging, people don’t hide the problems but see them as issues to be tackled collaboratively.

At the moment, there are different perceptions of the same reality. Take inspection, for example - if I were discussing inspection with inspectors, they would say the process of inspection is about helping schools to improve and grow and develop. If you talk to schools, they are worried about the judgement that the inspection will bring.

The goal would be to get to the point where the email to the school saying an inspection is about to happen is welcomed. Schools would be saying: “Great - there’s a particular area we’d like a professional evaluator to have a look at.”

I’d also rethink the role of the teacher. Just now we are too heavily focused on the number of hours teachers spend in front of classes. We see that as the job and the rest is on the periphery. We need to rethink that. Curriculum and assessment design is a sophisticated business and it’s part of the role of the teacher, but it’s something that should be recognised and supported and built into the teacher’s day.

The model of the teacher in front of the class was fine when it was a factory model of education, but in moving beyond the idea of industrial models of education we do need to rethink what it is to be a teacher.

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

I hope there will be far more sophisticated ideas of personalisation. I think there will be more coherent progressive pathways through schools and into different kinds of learning opportunities. I hope that we will no longer be using the words “academic” and “vocational” - that you will instead have different pathways that can lead to the same or similar destinations. We still have it in our heads that there is one good way to do it - and other ways to do it if you can’t do it that one good way.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools during the pandemic?

I’m not much into the cult of the individual. I think the truth is that it’s everybody: it’s every teacher who went beyond what was reasonable to reduce the impact of the pandemic; it was every learner who worked really hard; every parent who found ways to make what was unbearable bearable for their children; and it was every educationalist who made life in lockdown a little less bleak.

The only thing that got us through the pandemic is that sense of community. And that’s what is potentially most powerful about Scotland: a strong sense of community. Scotland at its best is when you see that power in action.

Louise Hayward was talking to Emma Seith, a reporter at Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 3 December 2021 issue