Hansard

I remind members that I am the parliamentary liaison officer for the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills.

My youthful appearance may dissuade members from believing this, but a decade ago I was preparing to take up my place at Jordanhill, which was then the University of Strathclyde’s teacher training campus, to study for a postgraduate qualification in modern studies teaching. CFE was in its infancy. On my course was a former police officer by the name of Colin, who told me that, by the time the police had arrested someone, the damage had already been done. To him, criminality was cyclical but he felt that, as a teacher at the chalkface, moulding minds in the classroom, he could really make a difference. It was an observation that has stayed with me.

Last week, my colleague James Dornan posed perhaps the most pertinent question that someone could ever be asked in teaching: “What made you want to become a teacher?” The panel in the Education and Skills Committee answered with a variety of responses. Some stood out, such as that teachers could make a difference and change lives. The one that I liked best was:

“I really wanted to be there for the light-bulb moment when a child ... just gets it.”—[Official Report, Education and Skills Committee, 10 May 2017; c 3.]

We should not lose sight of the reasons that pull people into the profession, particularly given the current climate in Scottish education.

The Government’s amendment to the motion does not hide from the very real challenges that we face in Scottish education. The narrative of challenge has been quite clear since the 2015 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development review. Last week the SSLN data was published and the Government’s report into initial teacher education was published today. There is a robust rationale for reforming Scottish education, but reform should not come at the expense of the morale of those working hard in the system right now. As a headteacher in my constituency put it to me: “We need to attract the best of the best.”

The Conservative motion raises issues regarding the teacher-training placement process. In August 2015, I was called by the deputy head in my school and asked whether I could take a student teacher. I thought about it and decided that, with a wee bit of rejigging of the timetable, yes, we could probably accommodate a student teacher. A few days later I was told “Actually, Jenny, there’s another one. Could you take two? The university has nowhere to send them.” Course choice for pupils in our secondary schools kicks in after the exam diet, so by June of every academic year our high schools know how many pupils they have in every department and our primary schools know what the intake is for the new primary 1. Universities should therefore be proactively engaging with local schools far earlier to establish suitable student placements. I never thought that I would hear myself saying this, but I absolutely agree with Daniel Johnson on that point.

The teachers who gave evidence at last week’s Education and Skills Committee meeting commented to my colleagues that teaching cannot be learned until it had been seen and that placement was the real benefit and highlight. However, anecdotal evidence is disparate, as we would expect in any profession, so I carried out my own homework. A teacher who qualified in 2013 and completed the bachelor of education degree told me that he had had some fantastic placements. In one school, he spent time visiting specific teachers who were focused on certain areas, observing Mr McDonald’s co-operative learning strategies, Miss Somerville’s use of effective tracking and monitoring and Mr Swinney’s behaviour management strategies, for example. Another friend who is a secondary headteacher told me that, yes, there was a real need for our teaching universities to focus on literacy and numeracy, but she also flagged up the importance of the health and wellbeing of pupils as a fundamental in teacher training. The last person I spoke to is a principal teacher in an additional support needs school with straight-through provision, and she said, tellingly, “You learn how to teach well if you get a good mentor on placement.”

So, yes, there is work for our teaching universities to do on course content, but if we accept that the majority of student teacher learning happens on placement, we need to address radically how our schools timetable that student teacher experience.