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Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee 26 January 2011

26 Jan 2011 · S3 · Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee

Item of business

Review of Teacher Education in Scotland

Graham Donaldson (Review of Teacher Education in Scotland) Watch on SPTV

First, I thank the committee for taking the time to consider the report “Teaching Scotland’s Future: Report of a review of teacher education in Scotland”. It has been published at a very important time for Scottish education, because the decisions that will be taken in the current financial environment could have far-reaching implications for Scottish education. One of the things that I hope the report will do is help to inform the decision-making process so that the necessity of dealing with the financial situation also takes account of the need to build for the future rather than deal just with current issues.I was asked an interesting question about halfway through the review by a colleague from the Netherlands, who said there is an awful lot to admire in Scottish education and that the perception internationally is that we have a very high-quality education system that has a great tradition going back centuries, and that we have a well-qualified teaching profession, for which the McCrone agreement has put in place a number of things in respect of the contractual position of teachers that many other countries would like to get into. With reference to my previous post, she said that we have an approach to inspection and school improvement that is world class: it is recognised across the world as being at the forefront of thinking about how to bring about school improvement. She also said that curriculum for excellence is absolutely setting the right agenda for our education system to move forward. Then she stopped and asked, “Why are your outcomes not better?”We have in place most of the conditions that would suggest that we ought to have not just a generally high-quality education system, but one that produces the kind of high-quality outcomes that, for example, Finland, New Zealand and Australia produce. We should be in that company. We are not at the other end of the spectrum, but we are not in that company. One of the things that I hope the report and its recommendations will contribute is an answer to why we are not. We have perhaps given insufficient attention in recent years to how to support and develop the capacity of the teaching profession as individuals as opposed to doing so for schools in the abstract, or for teachers in general. The question is how we support and develop and build the capacity of each and every one of our teachers and school leaders.I hope that the report will partly help to answer that. The report’s recommendations are intended to deal very directly with the two big questions of how we ensure that the quality of our teaching force is as high as it can be, and how we ensure that it is led as well as it can be. In that sense, the report builds on the philosophy and practice of McCrone, and prepares the ground for, and works with the grain of, the philosophy of curriculum for excellence. I see this report as being designed very much to bring those two together in a way that can lead to the next step in Scottish education.It is important for me to put on the record two points. First, a lot of what I say in the report is possible only because of existing strength, so I am not talking about a deficit model: the report builds on existing strength. Secondly, throughout the nine months of the review, the response that I invariably got from all quarters—not only in the education system, but more widely in the business and political communities—was significant engagement with the issues that I was dealing with and support for the need for us to examine the relationship between how we develop our teachers and the quality of education.

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Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee 26 January 2011

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