Up for better way
implemented with sufficient ambition? What more will be needed to secure improvement, not only over the next few years but as far into the future as we can see? These are the issues that the Commission on School Reform seeks to address.
The Commission was set up at the end of 2011 by the think tanks, Reform Scotland and the Centre for Scottish Public Policy. Its membership includes people professionally involved in education, others from business and the third sector and people engaged in public life. It is nonpolitical but includes members associated with each of the major political parties.
Its aims are to form an objective view of Scotland’s educational performance, to consider the challenges that education will face in the future and to offer suggestions on how those challenges might be met. Its perspective is long-term: it is not focused on immediate issues like the introduction of the new ‘National’ examinations. The Commission has no wish to engage in destructive criticism or to allocate blame. Its hope is that its suggestions will be helpful to schools, local authorities and governments of any political persuasion.
The paper that is published today is an interim report. It offers an assessment of where Scotland currently stands and indicates the lines of enquiry that the Commission will be pursuing over the coming months. It reflects members’ growing belief that schools should be more autonomous and that the system would benefit from greater diversity but it contains no recommendations. Those will come in a final report to be issued around the end of the year.
The interim report sets out a formidable agenda for the Commission to follow. It will look at change processes, the place of diversity in a system noted for its uniformity, the need for greater empowerment of individual schools, the implications for governance, the scope for greatly increased use of new technology and much more. It continues to welcome comment and contributions on any of these subjects from anyone with an interest in Scottish education.
Within this list, the first item is of crucial significance but tends to be neglected. In a complex system like education, how is real change best achieved? The last 50 years have seen a succession of policy initiatives from comprehensive reorganisation in the 1960s through to Curriculum for Excellence today, all designed to produce transformational change. In the last case, it is far to early to assess what has been achieved. However, the record of the past is of programmes that promised much and delivered far less, often at a high cost, both financially and in teacher morale. Yet the process of bringing about change has been little explored. How is the right culture put in place? How is a shared sense of purpose created? Is change more effective if led from the top or fostered at classroom level? These are questions that the Commission will explore.
Every country in the developed world is engaged in educational reform. They all have their mission statements, most of them having much in common with . Yet they all struggle to break free from the organisational constraints of systems designed in the nineteenth century. Nobody has yet developed the change processes that lead to genuinely transformed practice. No country yet offers an education service fit for the 21st century. Could Scotland be the first? l KeirBloomerischairman of theCommissiononSchool Reform
“Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here
“Ev’ryone who should be here is here
“What a smashing, positively dashing
“Spectacle: the Ascot op’ning day”
Of course Eliza, gives herself away in spectacular style. Despite her borrowed finery the mask slips. She looks like a duchess but sounds like a dustman: “C’mon Dover, move your bloomin’ arse!” she cries.
You can take the girl out of Poplar but you can’t take Poplar out of the girl.
Nowadays, the more mangled your Cockney vowels, the better. Snobbery has been turned on its head. Eliza would do just fine, so long as she could flash the cash.
But one rule most certainly still applies at Royal Ascot – dressing appropriately, and this year the organisers aren’t taking any chances. They’ve issued strict new guidelines on how to dress. They’ve installed their very own fashion police. A team of dress code assistants armed with baskets of pashminas, fascinators and ties are manning the gates. Visitors who fail to meet the code – shoulders and midriffs covered, jackets and ties on, headgear in place – risk a bruising brush with the new enforcers. One poor woman, dressed in a strappy scarlet number was issued with a clashing limegreen scarf. Worse still, her husband had to suffer the indignity of putting on a nylon tie plucked from the bottom of a minder’s basket. And no, that’s not Cockney rhyming slang. In the royal enclosure, things step up a gear – fascinators are banned and ladies must put down a refundable £50 deposit for a hat.