An inspector called –

to give me an

unmistakable message

David Eastwood

 

In case the reaction to Walter Humes (9 August) is just as he describes – a shrug of the shoulders, 'he would say that, wouldn't he' and business as usual – perhaps, as the former head teacher of three large secondary schools in Scotland, I may offer a few observations to illustrate the case he makes.
     I suggest that we need to revisit a number of issues affecting the operation of schooling in Scotland. Firstly, we need to ask if it is appropriate to suppose that the schooling system can be an effective agent of social policy. Secondly, if an accelerating rate of change in society makes prediction of the future uncertain, on what basis can we construct a suitable school curriculum? Then, if we believe in 'evidence-based policy', what are the reliable findings from research on which we should act?
     I find it surprising that, in all the expensive publicity for the Curriculum for Excellence, there is little attempt to promote critical discussion of these issues. I am no longer directly affected, but I recall the efforts by HMIE to promote a curriculum based on the Munn committee report. This supposed that it was possible to construct a curriculum on a philosophical basis derived from the nature of knowledge. It was claimed that there exist six or seven basic modes of human knowledge, each with its own particular test of 'truth'.      
     Quite apart from the difficulty posed by asking in what mode the Munn committee operated, it was apparently fortuitous that the modes corresponded, with a little minor adjustment, to the subjects already taught in secondary schools. Then there was the question of 'balance'. But, of course, if you are dealing with modes of knowing that are different in nature, there is no way they can be balanced except in common operational features, such as time.
     So we had the absurd notion that 200 minutes of mathematics were 'balanced' by 200 minutes of English. I wrote a number of articles attempting to address these issues, and one in particular in which I took the inspectorate to task for their habit of making no reference to research (other than their own subjective observations) in their publications.
     As a result I was visited by a senior member of the inspectorate who told me that it was not my place to criticise inspectors or to question the wisdom of the highly respectable members of the Munn committee. As a result, he would write to the director of education asking that I be disciplined and formally warned against such comments in the future, he would withdraw the school from ongoing Standard Grades trials and 'as I was clearly unfamiliar with the working of the inspectorate' he would arrange for the school to be included in the next round of inspections.      

 

     Fortunately, the director of education had a different view of the matter and 'lost' the discipline letter, the school was making too significant a contribution to the Standard Grade work to be withdrawn and – yes – the school did get inspected (out of turn) the following year. From that time, I was never considered to be 'a safe pair of hands' by the establishment.
     Yet here we are again with the Curriculum for Excellence. In spite of all the rhetoric, we have directors of services (somewhere in there is education) running scared of inspection and consequently employing various varieties of 'Quality Control Inspectors' to run round and keep the schools in order.
     Part of the problem was identified by Donald Schon: 'Large-scale developments may proceed for months or years beyond the point where they should have stopped; they continue because of massive commitments to errors too frightening to reveal. In these cases, the commitment of the people involved in the development, the apparent logic of investment, and the fear of admitting failure all combine to keep the project in motion until it falls of its own weight'.
     Is it that there is just too much capital investment in the present system of secondary schooling for anyone to admit that it may no longer be fit for purpose? Surely it is worth revisiting the work of Christopher Jenks in the 1970s. He undertook an extensive evaluation of the effects of schooling and concluded: ' … the character of a school's output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children. Everything else – the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers – is either secondary or completely irrelevant'.
     In a curious echo of this, the recent OECD Report (2007) on 'Quality and Equity of Schooling in Scotland' commented: 'Little of the variation in student achievement in Scotland is associated with the ways in which schools differ. Who you are in Scotland is far more important than what school you attend, so far as achievement differences on international tests are concerned'.
     Whether you agree or disagree with these observations, the issues we face at the present surely require creative and innovative thinking about schooling in Scotland. Given all the present pressures to conform I am not hopeful that we will see such thinking.

 

David Eastwood is a senior teaching fellow in the school of education at Aberdeen University. He is former headteacher of Bankhead Academy and Northfield Academy (both in Aberdeen) and Stranraer Academy, former depute director of education for Aberdeen City and former education adviser with the (then) Scottish Industry Department