Exactly five years ago, I wrote a blog post about teacher leadership. Having recently attended the inaugural Scottish College for Educational Leadership (SCEL) conference, I had been appalled to hear of teachers’ apparent lack of confidence in their own abilities.

Cited as a key barrier to educational reform, it felt to me as if enough was enough. It was time for change.

It was May 2016 and lots of exciting things were happening in Scottish education. The TeachMeet movement was invigorated. Lots of teacher-led, grassroots opportunities were popping up all over the country to learn and share from colleagues. The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) was about to begin its five-yearly review of its professional standards and professional code. SCEL was offering a whole raft of new professional-learning pathways for teachers and school leaders, designed to empower and inspire. Teachers were connecting online and using social media, particularly Twitter, at an unprecedented rate to create professional learning networks, each uniquely curated by the needs and interests of the user. It felt like a period of change and growth.

Fast-forward five years and what has happened? SCEL is no more, having been subsumed by Education Scotland in 2018. The professional learning and leadership directorate housed within Education Scotland now holds strategic responsibility for the professional learning offer for Scotland’s teachers. The GTCS is putting the finishing touches on its next tweak of its professional standards, mandatory from August 2021.

Far from the early promise of supportive networking, edutwitter has become an increasingly grumpy and often hostile environment for the average scroller, with polarised views and outright nastiness becoming ever more prevalent; 2020 saw the rise of teacher TikTok and Instagram, predominantly among younger teachers and, perhaps, in response to the vitriol that is now the norm on older social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Many of the hopeful and curious questions asked five years ago about teacher empowerment, about who and what a teacher leader is or should be, linger on unanswered.

Change in education is a funny thing. In one sense, change is all there is. Nothing stays the same for long. Schools are places of incremental change, of continual shaping and reshaping of all they do to better meet the needs of children and young people. Schools are perpetual motion machines, forever in dogged pursuit of improved outcomes through tiny, determined, repeated acts of change.

In a broader sense, though, change can appear far more elusive. Hopes and dreams for genuine reform are often dashed. The lofty ambition of A Curriculum for Excellence (ACfE as was - the indefinite article has long since been dropped) to “enable young people to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors” is now a decade old and, although the four capacities will trip off the tongue of most Scottish teachers, critics question whether CfE has really achieved any of what it set out to do.

Transforming schools and education after Covid

There is an old adage, often muttered as teachers file out of yet another staff meeting, that if you hang around long enough, “new” ideas in education will come back around again. I am approaching the age and stage of my career where listening to plans for wider improvement and reform create a sense of déjà vu, an impression that I have heard this all before.

It is hard to shake the feeling that sometimes in Scottish education we are on a five-year loop, a merry-go-round of good ideas that get watered down beyond recognition or lost along the road to implementation, only to be gathered up and recirculated with the next turn of the wheel.

March 2020 saw that merry-go-round brought to a shuddering halt. The Covid-19 pandemic rewrote the definition of the word “unprecedented” and, for education, the unthinkable happened: schools closed. The dependable, steady-heartbeat rhythm of school life, worn and weathered into communities through decades of predictable routine, was suddenly gone and, in the silence that followed, new rhythms emerged.

Education Scotland’s publication What Scotland Learned - 100 Stories of Lockdown Learning seeks to “showcase the work undertaken to support learners and communities through innovation, creativity and resilience”. An accompanying paper, What Scotland Learned - Building Back Better, aims to take these inspiring stories and synthesise them with education research.

In her introduction, chief inspector Gayle Gorman asserts that she really hopes “we can take forward the positive and innovative approaches we saw blossom across Scotland in order to build back better as we move on from the pandemic, and progress our vision for an education system that enables all children and young people to fulfil their potential”.

The challenge for schools and local authorities is clear: find what worked and do more of it. Emerge stronger, grasp and implement change, use innovation to power reform.

These messages make perfect sense when you consider that going back is not an option. There is no possible way to return to pre-pandemic life, much as we might sometimes wish we could. Our world, and particularly the world of education, has changed fundamentally and forever. To quote the much-loved opening line of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”

But can we really be hopeful that Scottish education can, as Building Back Better asserts, “realign our rationale for education to ensure it meets the relevant demands” ? Can an education system that seems to move only in circles ever really break new ground?

Perhaps the key to that lies in the very uncertainty that brought normality to a halt in the first place just over a year ago. The language of educational reform is peppered with references to navigation. It is full of route maps and improvement journeys and signposts toward development. But what we are experiencing now is a brand-new landscape for which no one has a map. There are no expert guides - and perhaps that will be what makes the difference.

Organised under six key themes, the closing section of the leadership theme in Building Back Better highlights this new and unexplored potential: “Covid-19 has pushed the education system out of its comfort zone into a situation of ongoing uncertainty and revision. On the other hand, it has also potentially pushed the system into a place of opportunity for long-term renewal and growth.”

Instead of directing schools towards a generic end goal, perhaps growth will come from empowering schools to set their own course. What is needed is a firm insistence that each school community tiptoes through the wreckage of the past year, and carefully and systematically collects up all the moments of success, the areas of strength and innovation that helped get children, young people and their families through the worst of times.

Crafting these moments into a strategic plan will lead each school and educational setting to a review of its curriculum rationale; a reassessment of what matters in this new landscape. Bespoke curricula that meet the needs of learners will follow and, in turn, these will help school communities thrive as they step out of the shadow of Covid-19.

To achieve ambitions as lofty as these, Scottish education will need to get serious. There must be collective agreement to throw a permanent spanner in the works of that old merry-go-round and a joint decision to step forward, to purposefully break new ground.

Don’t fear the price of progress

In 2016, I ended my blog post about the need for change with the following anecdote. Perhaps, five years and a pandemic later, the time is finally right for real change to actually happen: “My eight-year-old daughter went to Brownie camp this weekend. She had a ball. Lots of tree climbing, marshmallow roasting, the full nine yards. On the last afternoon, she went canoeing. At the end of the session, the instructor said, ‘See that island in the middle of the lake? Brownies always want to wade out to it but no one ever has’. ‘Why?’ my daughter asked. ‘Well, look at it!’ the instructor answered, pointing to the distant clump of mud and reeds in the murky water. ‘You’d fall over. The water’s freezing. You’d lose your wellies before you got halfway!’

“Needless to say, the challenge was set and my daughter and her friends began wading out. Just 15 minutes later, she stood alone on the island, soaking wet, shivering and welly-less. Three baths and a shower later, I asked her if it was worth it. She answered, ‘I knew I’d have to give up my wellies, Mum, but I got somewhere no one else has ever been’.”

As an education system, we need to give up our wellies. We need to let go of the “aye beens” and get a bit uncomfortable. We need to change our culture, our old ways of doing things. It will be tough and people will tell us it can’t be done, that no one’s ever done it before, that we shouldn’t attempt it. But we need to keep going anyway - because we might just end up somewhere no one else has ever been.

Susan Ward is headteacher at Kingsland Primary School in Peebles, in the Scottish Borders

This article originally appeared in the 11 June 2021 issue under the headline “Nothing to lose but your wellies”