Agenda item 2 is evidence on the review of teacher employment in Scotland. I welcome Professor Gerry McCormac, the chair of the review team, and Isabelle Boyd, a member of the review team. I believe that Professor McCormac has a short opening statement.
Yes, I have. Thank you for inviting Isabelle Boyd and I to discuss “Advancing Professionalism in Teaching: The Report of the Review of Teacher Employment in Scotland.” We look forward to discussing the recommendations with committee members. I appreciate your interest in the subject.
As you said, we had a round-table session last week with several interested stakeholders to discuss their initial reaction to your review. One broad theme of that discussion was that a clear difference of opinion exists about what a number of recommendations meant—about the interpretation of them. With hindsight, do you think that your report could have had more clarity about what the recommendations meant, to avoid some of the dispute that we heard when we took evidence?
That question is difficult to answer. Different constituencies will take different views on a report, and I guess that that is what you heard from the unions, employers, teachers and so on.
That is not the recommendation that I was thinking of.
It is important to say that, if the reading of any report is limited to the recommendations, room for misinterpretation can exist. However, reading the recommendations together with the text in the report that led to those recommendations leaves less room for misinterpretation.
It is fair to say that I did not ask last week’s panel members whether they had read the whole report.
Good afternoon. There has been much discussion of flexibility, of what teachers might perceive as safeguards in having annex B and annex E of the teachers agreement and of local negotiation over changes to school timetabling, for example. Concern has been expressed about how the workload might affect teachers. Will you give us more insight into how flexibility will work?
I think that there are four issues there, the first of which is flexibility. When we looked at that and gathered evidence on it, it was clear that teachers operate a fairly inflexible system. Take the example of a primary school. There are 25 contact hours in a week, of which the teacher will be in contact for 22.5 hours. Typically, there are 2.5 hours that are referred to as McCrone time. We did not refer to it in that way in the report, but that is the general terminology. We heard of many examples in which if a teacher missed 30 minutes of that 2.5 hours in one week because a class ran on, they were given it back, or felt that they were due it back, the following week, when they would have three hours. It is not so much clock watching as time allocation and time owed, and it is done on a weekly basis.
We recommend flexibility for time. Outside of class contact time, time is divided into blocks per week. We consider that inappropriate to the teaching profession now. Annex B and annex E were of their time. It may have been important during negotiations on the teachers agreement to have a clear indication of teachers’ duties and the duties of others, such as support staff, within the system.
In relation to flexibility in the classroom, Isabelle Boyd talked about the fact that the annexes might have been appropriate at the time that the McCrone agreement happened. In the evidence that we took last week, there was a feeling that we have reached another critical point in time in terms of budgets. Concerns have been expressed that if we remove those annexes, that will be an opportunity to remove support staff such as classroom assistants because teachers could take on many of the roles that were being performed by those staff. Many of the concerns last week were driven by the financial context. Do you have any comments on the evidence that we received last week?
In section 8.3 of our report, we talk about the value of other staff in schools. We comment not just on administrative support in schools, but classroom assistants in primary schools, where a second adult in the classroom can be hugely beneficial. The removal of annex E of the McCrone report was not about reducing cost in a school. Our focus was outcomes for children and young people. In our report, we said that it is extremely important that, with the removal of annex E and annex B, outcomes should be the priority, not the reduction of costs, but I can understand why there might be concerns.
I think that there was recognition that that was not the report’s intention, but it was felt that taking those moves might provide the opportunity, in the current economic circumstances, for schools to go down that route.
The motivation for removing annex B and annex E was to advance professionalism. Professions do not, typically, create a list of dos and don’ts. That approach was seen as being of its time, as Isabelle Boyd said. It might have been appropriate at a particular point in time, but we are trying to advance professionalism and, in doing so, to remove lists of dos and don’ts. We think that working to a standard and delivering on outcomes is more important than having such lists, which tend to be prescriptive.
You mentioned outside experts, which is an issue on which there is quite a heated debate among the unions and parents. The national parents forum was strongly supportive of the idea, to the extent that it suggested that parents should be more involved in that kind of thing. In Renfrewshire, where I am a councillor, we put forward a model for primary school provision. Last week, the EIS said that your idea of involving outside experts was not the same as the Renfrewshire model. I just want to get my head round what you mean by the term “outside experts”.
They are people who can contribute to the learning outcomes for children, but they are not a substitute for teachers in the class. We see teacher-led involvement of outside experts in the educational process as valuable for the delivery of curriculum for excellence. We think that there needs to be oversight of those outside experts who go into the classroom, which is why we proposed in the report that any local authority scheme for having external experts in the classroom be overseen or facilitated by the General Teaching Council for Scotland.
Just for argument’s sake, if we were to go down that route, would you be thinking along the lines of involving healthy lifestyles or health and fitness people?
The example that I have given is that the Barcelona agreement said that children should get the opportunity to learn two languages in addition to their mother tongue. Someone could come into the classroom to take French or Spanish. The classroom teacher might not have those skills and that person could be utilised to broaden the children’s educational experience. That is the sort of thing that we are thinking of.
In the report, we wanted to make a clear distinction between the use of external experts in an ad hoc fashion and their use in a planned fashion. We were not recommending their use in an ad hoc fashion. The clear indication was that they would be teacher led. An external expert would be someone who could make an enhanced contribution to the learning outcomes for children and young people. It would not be a case of replacing the teacher for the sake of replacing the teacher; an outside expert would be someone who could make a positive contribution to children and young people’s learning outcomes as part of a planned, teacher-led education programme.
That is what the unions were confused about. They knew that the process would be teacher led, but they wanted to know that the teachers would definitely be in charge of it. That is how I read the proposal, but I just wanted clarification.
May I seek further clarification? I think that I know what is meant by teacher led—George Adam is right to say that that was questioned last week. What do you mean, in a practical, classroom sense, by the term “teacher led”?
The explanation is more straightforward in the primary school example, so I will talk about that. The teacher would plan the delivery of classes over the school year and think about periods when they might involve external experts in the process. The teachers are instrumental in the delivery of the curriculum, because they ensure that each of the component parts is available. The process is teacher led in the sense that they are doing the planning and using the other resources that exist, very much in the way that curriculum for excellence envisages that they should do.
That is clear, but I want to get it absolutely clear. The teacher would plan the year ahead and would formally book in the outside expert as part of the planned process of education under the curriculum for excellence, but they would not necessarily be in the class when that element was delivered.
That is the clear distinction that we are drawing. If, in planning an education programme for the class and considering outcomes and experiences in terms of curriculum for excellence, a teacher identifies an external expert—say, a native Spanish speaker—that they could use, that person could deliver certain outcomes and experiences. We recommend that, where appropriate, the teacher could withdraw from the class during the time when the expert is engaging with children.
That is very clear.
Thanks for your presentation and for the report, which is an extraordinary and interesting document.
We recommended that the chartered teacher scheme be discontinued because it has not delivered against its objectives.
You are right that recommendation 19 is unambiguous: it says clearly that the chartered teacher programme should be discontinued. However, I point you to recommendation 21, which makes a point about professional recognition. We recommend that some kind of professional recognition should be developed by the GTCS, so that teachers who can demonstrate long-term innovative classroom and collaborative practice or who are successful in mentoring get professional recognition. That is common practice in other educational sectors, but it is not so common in the schools sector.
Did the people from whom you took that evidence have any ideas? Did teachers say that, instead of a charter mark that they did not want to tell anybody that they had—
The discussion fell into two areas: continuing professional development and professional review and personal development. The recommendations in the rest of the report highlight the need for opportunities for teachers to engage in CPD, which chimes very much with the conclusions of Professor Donaldson’s report. The provision of such opportunities should be a duty and responsibility, and they should be available to all teachers. The benefits of the chartered teacher scheme should be available to the teaching profession as a whole.
The reason for recommending that we abandon the chartered teacher accreditation is the fact that there is no evidence of an improvement in pupil attainment or outcomes that makes it relevant to your focus in the report. You go on to discuss professional development. I think that there should be such development, but there must be some creative thinking about what makes a good teacher in the classroom produce the outcomes and results that we are looking for. There are some really good examples of that across Scotland, but they do not appear in the report—they are not recommended. The report does not say, “Here’s something that has that outcome and is evidenced to show child development and advancement in education”, yet the lack of such evidence is the reason for recommending that we abolish the chartered teacher programme.
We recommend a revised and revitalised professional review and personal development system that follows on from the recommendations in Graham Donaldson’s report, and we think that it should be a national system. We heard that the approach was patchy across Scotland—that continuous professional development and PRPD tended to be tick-box exercises. People had to accumulate their 35 hours a year and just get it done as opposed to seeing those things as part of a real professional development process.
To answer the specific question, we recommend in the report the work that is under way by the General Teaching Council for Scotland on producing professional standards. We want to take that further. We say in our document that, through a revitalised PRPD process, all teachers should have a personal development plan that is based on the new professional standards and includes actions that they will undertake for the specific purpose of improving teaching and learning. That gets to the nub of the quality teaching issue.
My point about chartered teachers has been made, so I will move on.
The question relates to the flexibility of responding to the particular needs of particular schools and the schoolchildren and young people in them, and the creation of a senior management team—a group of individuals in promoted posts in the school that is fit for purpose. We see there being such flexibility rather than creating a one-size-fits-all approach throughout Scotland and saying, “This is the way it shall be. There shall be X number of posts in schools.” That does not allow people to be responsive to local needs. Our report recommends that the career structure as defined is sufficient to do that if it is used flexibly and if some control is devolved to school management so that it can organise the promoted posts in a way that suits it. Through discussions with headteachers and teachers in the school, the solution that best fits the needs of the school and its pupils can be arrived at.
There are a couple of points that are worth making. Your point about a national system is well made. Recommendation 30 of the report says clearly that there should be a review of the job-sizing toolkit by the Scottish negotiating committee for teachers to look at the anomalies that exist across the 32 local authorities.
So you are recommending that staffing structure with regard to promoted posts should be decided at a school level rather than at local authority level, because that provides greater flexibility than we have at present.
We said two things. First—I am paraphrasing this, because I do not remember the exact words from the report—we said that the current prescribed models should be discontinued. There is a need for flexibility at a more local level about what kind of structure a specific school needs. We heard evidence that sometimes the structure did not fit the needs of the community—I say community rather than school, because the issue goes much wider than schools. We made a clear recommendation on that in the report.
You have touched on temporary promotions to principal teacher grade and recommendation 18. That recommendation caused some anxiety among some of the witnesses at the round-table discussion last week, particularly with regard to whether it meant that a post could remain vacant and be filled on a long-term temporary basis. Will you clarify exactly what recommendation 18 means?
Are you asking whether the temporary posts would replace long-term principal grade posts within the school, for example?
There was anxiety about exactly what the recommendation meant.
It is exactly as Isabelle Boyd just described: there would be opportunities for temporary promotion to point 1 on the principal teacher grade to do a specific piece of work in order to gain experience of a particular aspect of curricular work—or many other things.
In your view, there is no risk that that might be abused.
The practice exists in some Scottish local authorities. Indeed, where local authorities and schools have used such flexibility, it has led to enhanced professionalism among teachers and allowed schools to make best use of their excellent teachers. However, such opportunities were time-bound and fixed for a specific purpose. Recommendation 18 is not about having some kind of revolving mechanism that prevents the filling of a permanent post.
Good afternoon. We started off this session by discussing the question whether different recommendations have been misinterpreted—or have been interpreted differently. You will be aware of concerns from the unions, in particular the EIS and the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers Scotland, that the review was driven by the imperative to save money. However, a collective concern has also been expressed about what you called the inevitable
It is quite clear that this is not an either/or situation. What we said was that when the economic base is restricted the medium-term priority should be to enhance the teaching profession’s quality instead of marginally reducing class sizes. That said, we saw evidence that suggested that reducing class sizes, particularly in the early years, has benefits. If there were unlimited resources, the way forward would be to reduce class sizes and put resources into improving teacher quality. However, if choices have to be made about where money should be put, we suggest that teacher quality should be the priority. Indeed, that very much builds on the theme in the Donaldson report of investing in the professional development of teachers. Does that clarify things?
I do not know whether that will allay concerns that the phrase amounted almost to a suggestion that somehow the review has not been driven wholly by a need to improve educational outcomes. After all, improvements can be made by, for example, reducing ratios in particular classes.
There is no question but that reducing class sizes is a laudable objective. However, the question was where money should be allocated to best effect and, on balance, our view was that the current pupil-teacher ratio should be kept and that whatever limited resources there are should be used to develop the quality of the teaching profession. We felt that that was the most likely way of producing better outcomes.
You said that the current ratios should be kept. Are you ruling out any extensions that headteachers might see as necessary in particular circumstances?
Our recommendation says what it says. We have not made a recommendation about changing the pupil-teacher ratio.
We have already touched on the financial context in which the report has been published. At last week’s meeting, Drew Morrice from the EIS commented that, although we might have this report and the Donaldson review and although there are other things going on in education, the most critical issue for improving schools and delivering on the recommendations was the comprehensive spending review. You have said that, although you were aware of economic pressures, that issue did not direct the report, which will now go on to the next stage to be examined by the tripartite group. It might be difficult to answer this question, but what do you think the debate about the financial pressures will centre on? How intact will your report be after the tripartite group has examined it?
As you have said, I suggested that the review was about looking at ways of improving outcomes for children and young people. We focused on that and did not want to recommend schemes that would have added millions of pounds to the cost of education because we were aware that that money was not readily available. In other words, we were in the real world and recognised the situation in which we found ourselves. It is now for the SNCT and the Government to discuss the recommendations in our report, to look at the Donaldson report, David Cameron’s report and even some of the Christie commission’s recommendations, and to consider the issue in the round to find out what can be done and how the advancement of professionalism and our recommendations might help the education system in Scotland to move forward.
We hope that at the next stage of the report’s consideration the focus stays on outcomes for children and young people. Indeed, at each of our review group meetings, we always brought ourselves back to the question of the difference that the review would make to children and young people.
I am aware that it is after 1 o’clock and that members still have a number of questions. I ask for brief questions and brief answers, if possible.
My question is very brief. Professor McCormac, I hope that the Government will introduce as many of your recommendations as possible. What are your top three recommendations for improving teachers?
To pick three would be very difficult. After all, these 34 recommendations were considered as a complete set and in many ways interact with one another with regard to, for example, professional development and flexibility in time. It is not a cafeteria-type thing where you might say “Let’s take the top three” and everything else falls into place. This well-considered report is integrated not only within itself, with recommendations playing off one another, but with the suite of documents that have recently emerged on education, devolved school management and so on to ensure that they are coherent in a way that will move education in Scotland forward. As a result, I would not like to pick three.
Let us hope the Government goes for all of them, then.
I want to go back to annex E of the McCrone agreement. I always thought that the strength of McCrone was its guarantee of teaching time because certain tasks were given to support staff in schools. I am acutely aware that the tasks in annex E have different impacts in different schools and that in areas of high deprivation some of them, including paperwork and liaison with social workers, children’s panel administration and increased and often unplanned contact with parents, carers, grandparents and a multitude of other people who might have a stake in one particular child’s life, take up an inordinate amount of time. Moreover, in such areas, information technology is less reliable—IT itself was included in annex E because there were not as many resources. Have you carried out a poverty impact assessment of taking annex E out of the McCrone agreement?
As I said earlier, the group’s view was that teachers’ primary purpose was to teach and not to carry out that range of other activities. However, in relation to some of the examples that you highlighted, we would want the teacher to be involved in various discussions and that wider educational role. Again, we reflect on that issue in the report.
Do you acknowledge that, if annex E is removed, teachers in schools in more deprived areas will spend a lot more time on these roles than teachers in schools in better-off catchment areas? Will that not reduce the amount of teaching time in the more deprived schools?
The amount of teaching time is already specified elsewhere and will not be reduced. I make it clear that there is no intention to reduce teaching time or to have teachers carry out additional duties that are not appropriate for a professional.
I thank Isabelle Boyd and Professor Gerry McCormac for attending this morning—and this afternoon. Your evidence has been very helpful in our consideration of your review.