“You cannot seriously exercise teacher leadership or agency if teachers don’t have time,” one of the Scottish government’s international advisers has said.
Professor Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator who is now based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, spoke to Tes Scotland immediately after the education secretary John Swinney’s address to the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow today.
Mr Swinney said that work to increase the professional “confidence and autonomy” of teachers needed to “intensify” in Scotland.
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Talking about a recent visit to Finland, Mr Swinney said he did not think that there was much for Scotland to learn in terms of having a curriculum “relevant to the learners of the day” but that more needed to be done to “support a culture of teacher agency and professional autonomy”.
In the past, Mr Swinney has advised teachers to “proceed until apprehended”, and he again told schools and teachers that they should focus on what is relevant to the teaching and learning of young people and ignore “the rubbish”.
However, Professor Sahlberg, who sits on the Scottish government’s 10-strong International Council of Education Advisers, said this could only be done “if there is the room and space and the time for doing it”.
Figures published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) earlier this month showed that the amount of time Scottish teachers spent teaching was far above the international average.
The report finds that, at the lower-secondary level, teachers spend an average of 43 per cent of their working time on teaching across 24 countries analysed. However, that ranges from 35 per cent or less in Austria, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Poland and Turkey, to 63 per cent in Scotland.
In Finland - the country Mr Swinney said he was keen to emulate in terms of professional empowerment, teachers spend less than 600 hours per year in front of classes - while Scottish teachers spend in excess of 800 hours per year in front of classes.
Mr Sahlberg said: “You cannot seriously exercise teacher leadership or agency if teachers don’t have time for that. It can’t just happen - it has to be done - and it can only be done if there is the room and space and time for doing it. If a profession is leading itself it needs time to do that; if you require teachers to do more of something, then something has to come out.”
He added that Australia was another country where overall time in front of classes was much higher and the bulk of a teacher’s time was “spent with the kids”. Finland, he said, was very different - as were other high-performing systems, such as Japan and South Korea.
The danger of not making time for teachers to talk to each other was that “suspicions and rumour” could take over and infect the culture of a school.
“They [Finland, Japan and South Korea] are all performing relatively well, which, of course, is indicating that running a successful school or school system should include more time for teachers to do other things within their school day than just teach. Finnish schoolteachers have much more time each and every school day to sit down with one another and talk about what they do.
“This is why the OECD is beginning to say now if you want to run a successful modern organisation, where professionals are a core part, you have to have more time to spend on informal things like conversations and sharing ideas and experiences.”
Professor Sahlberg added; “When teachers have more times in the school day to have these informal conversations with one another that of course helps to shape the overall professional culture.
“If you don’t have that time often what takes over in the school is the unspoken - the suspicion and rumours. Here and in Australia, you see the signs of that much more than in Finland.”
