Toxic culture of mediocrity that's ruining schools
In the week that Scottish education slumped in the world rankings, a retired teacher’s excoriating verdict on the damage done by politicians in thrall to trendy educationalists – and why the Curriculum for Excellence has been such a disaster for pupils
IT was a day of profoundly mixed emotions when I retired from teaching 18 months ago. After all, it was more than just a job – it was a vocation that required dedication and commitment – and I’d been doing it for 36 years.
For 30 of those years, despite the difficulties, I really believed in our state education system and was proud to be a part of it.
Having the opportunity to influence the development of young people was a privilege and I honestly believed no one was disadvantaged on the basis of their background and where they lived – the underlying principle of comprehensive schools.
But then came the introduction of the Scottish Government’s inaptly named Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), six years before I retired.
It was described as the biggest shake-up of education for a generation and lived up to that billing – but for all the wrong reasons.
Under CfE, key pillars of factual learning were swept away to make pupils so-called ‘effective contributors’ and ‘confident individuals’. Experts spent years looking at key subjects and trying to come up with better and more modern ways of teaching and assessing youngsters.
It was described as a huge rethink of what parents, teachers and wider society wanted schools to do – and the kind of pupils they wanted to produce.
Yet, on reading the original documentation, I realised the curriculum was in reality quite empty and vacuous.
Despite the deep misgivings of staff, parents and indeed pupils, our education system has been turned upside down trying to deliver the impossible. As a result, the final years of my career – teaching science and biology – were utterly demoralising, and my experience was far from unique.
There are serious problems with the Scottish education system, evidenced by the raft of appalling statistics this week showing that Scottish teenagers now lag behind their peers in many countries, including Slovenia and Estonia.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), undertaken every three years, made for ‘uncomfortable reading’, as Education Secretary John Swinney has admitted. Standards of reading and science in Scottish schools are declining while performance in mathematics is stagnating.
The report concluded that Scotland’s performance is now ‘average’ compared with other developed countries in all three disciplines. In 2000, when Scotland first took part in this global survey of 15-yearolds, its performance in reading, science and maths was above average.
Any claim we had to be world leaders in education – historically one of Scotland’s proudest boasts – has been lost.
These are the hard facts; neither is this an assessment borne from weary cynicism, for despite the fact that teaching is difficult and demanding, it can be a wonderful job.
But it needs a secure and organised environment if you are going to be successful and there has to be a clear understanding of what is required.
When I began my career and for most of the first three decades, teaching practice embodied principles that ensured that children were treated equally.
WE were given detailed specifications of what was required and what standards were to be applied. These courses provided a detailed structure for all years and all abilities and exams at the end of S4. No matter what your level, there was a course for you and exams were externally marked, encouraging ambition in all.
Staff were involved, teachers’ professional expertise was valued and consultations were genuine. People therefore had a belief in what was produced.
There was a rigour about the process and professional criticism was expected. Criticism is – or should be – a positive term. You apply your professional expertise to a concept in order to try to improve it. I do not pretend all changes were good but the system as it used to be allowed an individual to have pride in what they were doing.
So why change what was working? Put simply, CfE was born out of arrogance.
A group of influential educationalists had the ear of government and political decisions were taken to enact the ideas of a few. The implementation was incredibly clever – because all the stages of development were approved at the start. There was no opportunity to stop what had been agreed over the heads of the profession.
The arrogance stemmed from the belief that the underpinning ideas were correct. In fact, they were fatally flawed.
In essence, a detailed and specific system was being replaced by generalities; teachers were expected to define what was meant while being chastised if they got it wrong. Resources – textbooks and project work – built up over many years had to be binned and, at the secondary level, all schools had to write assessments and then gain the approval of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA). If you got it wrong, there was a feeling of public humiliation.
Prior to this, you were given assessments that skilled writers had produced and were guaranteed to be correct.
Teachers had amazing freedom – but also the constraint of the external exam. The new National exams have proved deeply controversial as the work of many pupils is not externally examined, meaning some of those who are less academically able have been ‘written off ’, subjected only to internal tests – a hugely retrograde step. Able pupils are not progressing as they should. As a result, the system has been left open to accusations of ‘dumbing down’.
It is certainly true that some teachers are more able than others, but my experience is that the average teacher is incredibly hard-working and professional: they want to do things well. Now the certainties that governed their way of working for so long have been removed.
When you have all your resources and you work in a secure and structured setting, you can succeed. We work with young people who are all different and bring with them differing expectations. CfE introduced aspirations for what children should be: successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. Laudable in intent, but meaningless in
practice: these were, after all, aspirations for any education system throughout history.
What they were not were pillars of a modern education system. Teachers are no longer expected to focus solely on teaching because of a range of extra duties. Schools are seen as having responsibility for the health and ‘well-being’ of children. On the one hand, this is laudable but it is also surely a parental responsibility – and the responsibility of the child.
In secondary schools, the traditional structure of three levels – S1/2, S3/4 and S5/6 – have been replaced with S1-3 and S4-6. Why? Frankly, no one knows – but it has happened.
The effect of this is more time is spent on generalities and less on specifics. In addition, the number of subjects at National and at Higher levels has been reduced: pupils now attain fewer qualifications. For years, Scotland was more successful than England in the number of qualifications, of a comparable level, pupils attained.
At a stroke, CfE has made the country less successful. One of the major problems has been the growth of internal assessments that pupils have to pass in order to complete a course and (if they are lucky) sit an exam. Fail a unit assessment and you fail the course.
This places unbelievable pressure on pupils and staff. At the same time, you are not allowed to have pupils failing – indeed, questions are asked if you try to fail someone. If you do, then you are left with the feeling that you have done something wrong – even if, as often happened, the pupil had put little effort in.
Schools are not allowed to go their own way and the Education Scotland quango has responsibility both for curriculum development and inspection of schools – something of a conflict of interest.
Teachers’ and parents’ trust in the SQA is at an all-time low and these quangos place demands on schools to comply and conform.
A school cannot go its own way because everything has to fit the straitjacket. The very things we challenge pupils to do – to think independently, to take risks and not to fear failure, to generate ideas and try them out – have been stifled.
There exists a climate in which you are expected to do exactly as you are told. Woe betide you if you put your head above the parapet. I did speak out and was simultaneously applauded by my colleagues, while being viewed as negative or troublesome by my superiors. There is an assumption you have to meet the needs of all pupils all of the time but, in reality, this is impossible. The culture demands continuous improvement and expects that you somehow get fantastic performance out of a child – even when they don’t have the capability.
This demand for improvement, coupled with the lack of belief in the workforce, means that a teacher is not allowed the satisfaction of having done a good job because whatever you do, it is not good enough.
THIS, to me, is criminal. If you knowingly demand so much that it affects someone’s health, for example, then where is your duty of care?
I believe this toxic culture has purely political origins – an administration that depends upon an effective party machine has little truck with criticism.
The effect on pupils’ performance has now become painfully apparent. The repercussions for staff, after having years of unreasonable demands placed on them, is unknown as no one has honestly asked them, but the result will become apparent in individuals’ lives over time.
All of these problems are allied to a general management style which functions by edicts.
In addition, the unions have been incredibly weak and have not in any way protected their membership. So teachers have lost control over their own professionalism. Instead of a climate in which you have the opportunity to contribute and develop your professionalism, you become merely a cog.
It gives me no pleasure to say I think I was right, but I still believe the problems can be resolved, if the teaching profession’s voice is allowed to be heard.
What pupils experience and the world in which they find themselves is, of course, very different from 40 years ago, but I honestly believe that their needs are the same.
They are being denied the best opportunity to develop their full potential – and that is a dereliction of duty for which the politicians and educationalists responsible can never be forgiven.