Flexible Route to Headship Report 2011 worddocThanks to all of you who contributed to this review of the Flexible Routes to Headship Programme. And thanks to all the participants, coaches, supporters, officers who have made it so successful.
We are currently recruiting for FRH Cohort 6 and are delighted with the early interest.
The Scottish China Education Network
SCEN is having a busy and productive time. The SCEN/Royal Botanic Garden Event earlier this month, Plants of China and of Scotland, was a resounding success, thanks to Susie Kelpie and her amazing RBGE team: see the comments by SCEN Field Worker Simon Macaulay on our website, http://scen.uk.com.
The SCEN Board meets on the morning of Tuesday 27 September in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in the afternoon the SCEN Seminar, Young China and Young Scotland, will be introduced by our distinguished President, The Rt Hon The Lord Wilson of Tillyorn. We have a marvellous crowd involved: it will be so good to see the lively interaction of young professionals such as Adam Purvis of The Power of Youth and Chen Jie from the Confucius Institute for Scotland, with senior pupils from a wide range of schools. Even old codgers like me are excited about it!
But now there is something with a focus on educators, whether your involvement is in school, college or university education or in national government or local authority; parents too:
THE SCEN LECTURE 2011: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education
What Scotland can learn from Shanghai China and other successful education systems around the world.
Michael Davidson, Senior Analyst from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and development (OECD) will present the latest results from the Programme for International Assessment (PISA) to show how well Scotland’s 15-year olds perform in reading, mathematics and science against their international neighbours. Together with an analysis of the policies and practices of those education systems that perform best or who are advancing rapidly, the discussion will examine what Scotland can learn from such leading performers as Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Liberton High School, Edinburgh
Friday 18 November 2011 from 2.00 to 3.30 pm
FREE admission to all participants – but spaces are limited!
Scottish born Michael Davidson currently leads for OECD on PISA work. He presents around the world on the messages behind the statistics of PISA findings and the significance to education systems world wide. This will be the first time that Mr Davidson has presented publicly in Scotland. PISA findings, currently based on tests sat by 15 year olds in 65 countries, represents the most authoritative data available on the educational progress of school students across the world. The data helps form governments’ education policy development, including in Scotland, and is a point of reference in major recent reports on education in Scotland, including the Donaldson review of teacher education and the McCormac report.
This presentation will be of significant importance to anyone interested in the future direction of Scottish education – whether teachers, lecturers, students(school & university), parents, academics, policy makers at national and local level.
The event is organised by the Scotland China Education Network (SCEN)
Please email JudithMcClure12A@aol.com NOW if you want to book your place
Many of you will remember with pleasure the visit of Dr Avis Glaze to Scotland a few years ago. Many more Scottish educators have had the privilege and pleasure of visiting Avis in Ontario as part of the SCIPD programme.
A highly respected leader and mentor to many Ontario educators, Avis has worked in several school districts, both rural and urban, and has been a supervisory officer and director of education in both public and catholic school boards. She knows education systems across the world firsthand and has been asked to work with educators in many countries, including, of course, here in Scotland.
The CPD Team were delighted when Avis agreed to act as a critical friend to the team, particularly in relation to the Leadership Framework that we are developing with our network partners.
She contacted us recently to say:
“Scotland’s leadership development model represents innovation at its best. It is current, creative and progressive in its approach. It is research-informed. It appeals to all domains of learning and achieves its strategic intentions by challenging minds, inspiring hearts, honing and acquiring new skills and stimulating action. It assumes an inside-out approach, beginning, as great thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle would, with the importance of self awareness and knowledge. It includes values, personal attributes and commitments. This Framework is truly comprehensive.
I commend the work of the National Continuing Professional Development (CPD) team for its fidelity to research, respect for the promising practices that exists in the field and its efforts to ensure international comparability for their model.
Well done! I am impressed! With such assiduous attention to deep implementation, the school system will continue to improve as you build upon current successes and push the boundaries for higher levels of student achievement. I hope there will be opportunities for us to work together as we continue in our efforts to close the achievement gap and ensure that schools deliver on their promise to educate all children successfully.
Within today’s global economy, and with international efforts to improve school systems, Scottish children deserve no less.
Congratulations!”
Needless to say we are delighted with this very positive endorsement and look forward to continuing to learn from this inspirational thinker and leader.
Lots of you will remember the funding that Scottish Government provided to every local authority in 2006/2007 to support a range of coaching and mentoring projects. Given the renewed interest in this topic, as discussed at the recent CPD Network meeting, I thought it might be helpful to remind you of the outcomes from this piece of work. Below you will find the final report which contains a large number of case studies reflecting the wide range of activity that was supported by this funding.
The theme of the recent SELMAS dinner on May 24th at the St George’s Centre, Edinburgh was Donaldson and Me and a succession of impressive speakers shared their personal responses to the Teaching Scotland’s Future review.
The themes picked up by the various speakers didn’t hugely surprise: Linda McTavish, Principal of Anniesland College was enthused by the prominence of partnership working in the review and talked about how this was a functional necessity in her setting – without their partnerships with business, industry, schools etc the college really couldn’t operate. This addressed the issue of providing a bit of the “how” that discussion was identified as missing from the report – bearing this in mind sharing the Anniesland experience in partnership building and working might be a useful thing to do.
Jaqueline Scott, HT at Trinity Prmary School Edinburgh mentioned improving quality and entry selection as priorities, and also called for greater flexibility with time commitments for probationers, suggesting greater flexibility with time management and allocations for probationers. She suggested longer continuous stretches in class, then concentrated, focussed periods out of class to really reflect, share, consolidate and build on their experience. The weekly 0.7/0.3 split is sometimes seen as rigid and disruptive, and it stands to reason that a more flexible system would be more user friendly. Something for further discussion at the Probationer Support event we’re organising next week at SMC.
Gillian Hamilton was on her favourite subject – leadership; and asking what difference Donaldson will make to this theme. Looking to the future, the role of HTs will no doubt change, as it already has since Gillian was in the role and not necessarily in a positive way, with more attention to risk assessment, budgeting, behaviour and grievances tending to sometimes eclipse the HTs role as lead learner in a school. The virtual college, as suggested by Donaldson via the national CPD team, will provide a focus for CPD and connecting school leaders and should also help shape and support the various leadership roles a forward-thinking profession for the future might require.
The most contentious discussion of the evening came during the panel discussion at the end when Cara Aitchison Head of School at Moray House, Edniburgh saw Donaldson’s recommendations as an invitation to the TEIs in Scotland to diversify and offer specialisms, but suggested that the “traditional” model of teacher education ( research and university based) is best suited to an institution like Edinburgh, and more “vocational” approaches might be better if left to ” institutions in the west.” Not surprisingly, there was quite a reaction to this Interesting! No matter how teachers enter the profession, there is some merit in what Stephen Heppell says: “if they can’t make schools spectacularly good, what are they doing training teachers?” It makes sense – TEIs should be modelling the best in education and for a profession fit for our times, is that best done through lectures, essays and seminars? This relates tangentially to the discussion but is relevant none the less.
Other memorable moments: HT from Govan said his best teacher was his granny because
she knew him
she loved him
she knew how to get the best out of him. Simple, really.
And another HT from Edinburgh expressed some concern at the homogeneity of students coming into the profession; regretting the demise of the outlyers, the mavericks, the independent thinkers (and operators) who took risks, often defied authority and still commanded respect, made big impressions and like the aforementioned granny, got the best out of young people.
Sadly the discussion was just beginning to get interesting when the evening was brought to a close. SELMAS is a loosely constituted, open organisation which provides a forum for leadership – I hope we continue the conversations.
Report of a review of teacher education in Scotland
The CPD team welcome the publication of “Teaching Scotland’s Future” with its clear case for a high priority to be given to teacher quality and leadership. We are delighted to see lots of themes that build on current CPD Network concerns and activities. There are many relevant references, for example:
We are delighted that the report recommends that our work on CPDFind should be developed (see recommendation 41), and that PRD emerges as a key tool to improve school and teacher effectiveness.
However the Report describes many challenges in the “ambitious and far-reaching agenda” set by the Report, and success will require new partnerships, creative solutions and new ways of working for many of us involved in all aspects of teacher education. We look forward to contributing to this agenda.
In the paper below, written in 2006, I gave my view of the professional development implications which might arise from the development of curriculum for excellence. The paper outlines five essential elements that are present in excellent teaching. Although described separately, they are of course closely linked and interdependent. Taken together, I believe, they describe a model for developing teachers for excellence.
The paper is now four years old, but much of the argument is still relevant and, I hope, helpful in developing good models of teacher CPD.
This is the final report from the survey of leadership development within the local authorities that the team completed in May 2010. The findings in this survey have continued to shape and influence much of our work on leadership since we initially published this report.
Interesting day spent with lots of familiar faces at the John McIntyre Centre at Pollock Halls in Edinburgh talking about the options around the governance of our schools.
Keir Bloomer of Tapestry set us off by suggesting that there was a strong case now for national funding for education, and that we needed to consider whether we should be access
ing funding from beyond our current system. He argued that we needed to review accountability and policy systems to give schools more autonomy from local authorities.
This view was challenged by Ken Greer (Executive Director of Education in Fife) who believes that there are enough freedoms already present in the system and that changes to school governance structures will not of themselves bring the necessary cultural change.
In a packed day we also heard from Mike Russell, Peter Peacock MSP, Professor Richard Kerley of QMUC and Professor Jouni Valijarvi of the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland. Ken Cunningham and Greg Demspster both spoke, as did Eileen Prior, Executive Director of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council.
And still they came. We heard from Karen Whitefield MSP, Councillor Paul McLennan of East Lothian, Ben Thomson of Reform Scotland, John Stodter of ADES and Tom Hamilton of the GTCS. The final sessions were led by Bill Maxwell of HMIE and Chris Montacute who is a Director of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust in England.
So no shortage of views; some of them pretty controversial. A few key themes emerged for me:
DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP IN A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE
IMPLICATIONS FOR PRD & CPD
Professional Review & Development and associated CPD is very topical and is currently a focus of discussion between the National CPD Team and the CPD Network. The team is also exploring the implications for PRD and CPD within the context of distributed leadership. This month’s article offers a perspective on the relationship between the two and one approach which is being trialled by the team to explore the impact of distributed leadership in establishing and sustaining a community of practice. .
If CfE in all its aspirations is to be successfully embedded into practice there is a clear need for all colleagues to be aware of their role and responsibilities and how a staff team complements each other to ensure that children and young people benefit holistically from the skills and experience which determine the quality of the learning experience.
In terms of distributed leadership there is a danger that it is a phrase which can be easily used but not necessarily understood in the same way by colleagues. If it is to be an influence to the good , colleagues must have a shared understanding and commitment to a culture which sees it as empowering staff rather than as a means of delegating unpalatable tasks. It can only operate effectively in a climate of trust and respect. Colleagues who are active in leadership roles focus their contribution on the development of practice which relates to the needs of the pupils in their particular school. Their contribution should be recognised as professional development in the colleague’s own CPD profile and also as a contribution to the professional development of others. This in turn provides a focus for PRD discussions and related ongoing CPD activity. The challenge in schools where children and young people are also accessing support from partner agencies is complex – where does the balance of distributed leadership lie ? What are the mutual benefits ?
The National CPD Team in collaboration with Kersland special school in Renfrewshire is exploring these themes in relation to defining a community of practice which recognises and values the impact of distributed leadership. The collaboration will also consider a model for PRD and CPD to support the approach . The National CPD team recognises that in a climate of inclusion these questions are also highly pertinent in a mainstream setting and will be engaging with colleagues to consider the related PRD and CPD implications.
As ever we would be delighted to hear from you : either in terms of the perspective which has been outlined or any approaches being undertaken in your school or authority.
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