At a recent congress of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA), the education secretary at that time, John Swinney, stated that he would be horrified if headteachers across Scotland spent all their time filling folders with evidence in preparation for “that” phone call from Education Scotland.
Energised by this green light for a bonfire of paperwork, I returned to school to relay this to my headteacher, who smiled before I was shown 15 blue quality-indicator ring binders, subdivided into 48 colour-coded themes, bursting with forms, pictures and even links to video interviews. Headteachers feel it is essential to be “inspection ready” - and who can blame them?
HGIOS (How Good Is Our School?) is a child of the Nineties, when an era of accountability replaced meaningful progress as a sign of effectiveness. It grew in 2002 to HGIOS 2, by 2007 we had HGIOS 3, and now, like that famous action movie series, Die Hard, the franchise has reached number four.
I would suggest that, like latter instalments of Bruce Willis running about in a vest, the four-part franchise is tired, not much loved and losing impact.
Background: Over 200 school inspections planned in Scotland this academic year
A headteacher’s view: Why school inspections don’t make sense right now
SSTA congress 2021: Seven major barriers to improving Scottish education
More from SSTA congress 2021: Call to end ‘dictating from the top’ in Scottish education
The mere survival of the inspection experience is seen as a triumph: the school community enters a state of frenzied prayer in the hope that its ratings mean “they don’t need to come back”.
The problems with school inspection in Scotland
But when the pandemic hit, the leadership vacuum in Scottish education was filled by teachers, not by inspectors, quality indicators or themes. Ring binders became redundant and human interaction and mutual support and trust were established as the indicators that meant most.
When online learning became essential, teachers turned towards Twitter, which was the very epitome of autonomy and empowerment - by default, not design. School staff were doing fantastic work without being needing to be led.
And the “scrutiny function” was suspended in March 2020 because it had nothing positive to contribute to the emergency learning process.
I do recognise that some aspects of schools do require inspection to meet legislative and child-safety requirements, but perhaps a more agile system of inspection can be designed and implemented? Surely small teams of experts inserted to support and seek ways to improve areas in, say, science or pupil support would be more forensic and effective than generalists waving a framework at a service struggling after a decade of austerity?
Once the concussive effect of lockdown wore off, our leaders at a national level responded with underwhelming agility and precision. Slowly, support came from Education Scotland - in the form of scrutiny calls. But feet on the ground in our schools were rare; decent material for online learning supplied by our top agencies rarer still. It was teachers seeing the holes in the dykes and rushing headlong to fill them.
HGIOS 4, as it stands, refuses to accept that its time has been and gone: as a document, policy and philosophy, it impedes the learning process; it is an accountability tool.
Now, there has been a long interregnum where the lack of inspection has not led to the world collapsing and schools degenerating to anarchy.
HGIOS took over our working lives when headteachers had a substantial leadership team to back them, when a school was bursting with principal teachers who were experts in their fields, and when teachers were expected to teach and hone their craft via interaction, nurture and experience. Now we tick boxes and file evidence on barely working ICT systems.
The self-evaluation process and attached bureaucracy have become a beacon of performativity in itself.
And schools do not have the capacity to operate as required. Each level of leadership has a workload beyond its capacity. The wellbeing a 35-hour week was meant to address is a distant dream.
Is anyone still doing the job they are employed for? Doing a job designed for at least a level above is a sign of system failure, and it needs to stop. The development of “lead teacher” posts was a small crumb designed to address some of these issues, but overall progress is crushingly slow.
If we want schools to thrive, then cut the bureaucratic scrutiny, ditch the lack of trust - and empower staff to be reborn as the autonomous graduate professionals we once were.
Paul Cochrane is salaries and conditions of service convener for the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association. He tweets @mrdissent
