Peter Peacock Keynote transcript 2006

Introduction - Heather Reid

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SETT 2006, the Scottish Learning Festival.  This year, as I’m sure you’ve gathered already, is bigger than ever before.  We have more delegates, more seminars, more spotlight sessions, and more keynote lectures.  SETT 2006 is also hosting the largest exhibition of educational products and resources available here in Scotland.  All that’s missing perhaps, is some sunshine, and I’m sorry that I failed to fix that.  Ex-hurricane Gordon is kind of getting in the way, but as compensation, new activities for this year include poster sessions, an international lounge, a Gallic learning festival, live radio and I’m sure you didn’t miss the colourful OB truck sitting outside, so please explore with a brolly, if necessary.  It’s an exciting two days with lots of opportunities to find out the latest on current topics, like a curriculum for excellence, while also obtaining some international perspectives on education.  Now, before I introduce this afternoon’s speakers, can I ask everyone to ensure your mobile phone’s been switched off?  Can I also point out the fire exits in the auditorium here at the front and at the back.  We’ve not been informed of any fire test today, so if the alarm sounds, we will be vacating the building.  And please also be vigilant.  There’s a lot of people here at SETT today, so don’t leave any unattended bags, including the show bags.  So, with all that housekeeping out of the way, I’d like to welcome our first speaker this afternoon, he’s someone who needs no introduction.  We’re very grateful he’s found the time to address the conference today and also to take some questions afterwards, so to tell us something about the Scottish Executive’s ambitions for Scottish education during the next year, please welcome Scotland’s Minister for Education and Young People, Mr Peter Peacock.

Presentation

Thank you very much, Heather.  I’m not accustomed to walk-on music anywhere I normally perform.  We don’t get that in the, the parliament, so it was a bit of a surprise.  I also have to say, coming from Inverness, I’ve seen another big audience in Glasgow just a couple of weeks ago, coming from Inverness and supporting Inverness Caledonian Thistle, I’m not accustomed to being in a crowd of this size, [laughter] so I’m slightly intimidated by it, I have to say.  I want to start by following on from what Heather’s said and really congratulate Learning and Teaching Scotland for organising this ever more successful event. You are part of a much bigger audience that’s here at this week, some six thousand, over six thousand, I understand, delegates coming through, teachers and other educationers from around the world, not just from Scotland, and that makes this event in Scotland, one of the biggest anywhere in the modern world for people who can come together and hear ideas, fresh thinking and refresh themselves for the tasks that you have back at the ranch every day.  And you’ll have seen that Learning and Teaching Scotland has attracted a very wide array of international speakers to this event, and these speakers are taking part in what I believe is a very, an ever richer debate that’s taking place in Scotland on education.  Only two weeks ago, we had Professor Howard Gardiner here, who was launching his latest thinking about learning.  Next year we’ve got Professor Richard Ellmore from Harvard University also here.  Next summer, or next autumn, we haven’t quite decided yet, we will stage an international school, both to learn from, but also to showcase the best practice practiced in Scotland which bears comparison with practice in education anywhere in the world.  And that’s exactly where we want Scotland to be.  In my discussions with the First Minister, we’re very clear that we want Scotland to be right at the centre of international debate, international dialogue and thinking about education.  We’ve got a great deal to benefit from by keeping our minds open to international perspectives, but we’ve also got a lot to contribute to those international perspectives as well.  And I think for too long, too many around eduction in Scotland have had England as the only reference point for us.  Now, I think in a much wider context than that and I’m sure that you do as well.  And if there’s good debate to be had anywhere in educational thinking, anywhere in the world, I want that to be right here in Scotland and with Scotland being at the heart of that.  And that’s very much why I welcome the international flavour of this event.

But, you know, listening and learning from others, taking international perspectives, isn’t just desirable, it’s, I believe, essential for us to do that.  I’m more aware than at any previous time of the way in which global trends present big challenges for us in Scotland.  As the process of economic globalisation continues apace, new forces in the world economic stage emerge.  As our world shrinks because of the sophistication of modern travel and communication technologies, so our small nation faces challenges never seen before.  And our young people, and the generations to come, are entering a world starkly different from the one that you and I have entered, and they’re going to face competition for work that you or I have never experienced in our lives.  And they’re going to need to be prepared, fully prepared for that global environment, that global competition they’re going to face.  And they’re also going to have to make contributions to solving some of the very big challenges facing our world; the new and complex, very complex, human and cultural tensions that exist in our world; the uncertainties of the pace of change and technological advance in our society, and the challenges of sustaining our planet, perhaps the biggest challenge facing any of us.  Now, add to that mix the fact that every other nation with foresight and with ambition is investing in their education and then add the challenges of demographic and social and technological change here at home, and our ambition for a more equal and a more inclusive society, and then the challenges of improving leadership in our schools, the challenges of those who are disengaging from learning at our schools, mostly boys, who often lack self-esteem and behave badly, the challenges of attainment and achievement in our most deprived communities in Scotland, which is still a profound challenge for us, the challenges presented by our looked-after children, who still have got lamentably poor outcomes from their educational experience, the challenges that we have of the differences in performance between classes within schools, which can be as big as, or even bigger than the differences as between schools.  And also the challenges we have from that lowest performing group in our education system, who, without better interventions are headed for the “NEET” category, those who are Not in Education, Employment or Training, and if you’re in that category, you’re heading for the margins of our society for the rest of your life, potentially.
 
Now, to meet those challenges, to upskill, to have the creative problem-solving young people we need, to have more of our young people and more of the adult population playing a full part in our society economically and socially, our education system has got to respond to the influences that are bearing upon us.   And that means further investment in our education system, but it also means change in a whole variety of ways.  There are some reasons … these are some of the reasons, rather, that lie behind the focus that we’ve given as an Executive, to education since devolution, and these are the reasons why my political colleagues and I see education as our top priority into the future.  Only two weeks ago in the Parliament, in the first debate in the Parliament this session, the First Minister very clearly set out in Parliament that in an uncertain world of the kind I’ve begun to describe, the one thing you could be certain about is that those nations with the best educated young people stood the best chance of success.  And he made it clear, very clear, that our ambition for Scotland is to have the best education system in the world.  Now, as Labour politicians, both he and I have always believed in the power of education, to liberate people, to empower people, to open opportunities and find personal fulfilment.  And it’s by successfully tackling the challenges I began to set out, that we know we face, that we can become the best.  And that means not accepting second best whenever and wherever that arises.
 
Now daunting though the challenges may sometimes seem, we should meet them with absolute confidence.  First, you can be assured that with our First Minister and my political colleagues, you’ll have a government behind your efforts in schools and in classrooms; a government that’s committed to invest in you and above all else, wants you to succeed in what you’re doing because you’re the foundation of the future success of our nation.  And we can also be confident because we know from our international contacts and our international studies, that Scotland’s got a strong education system and a system that we also know is getting stronger in a variety of ways.  We are already among the best performing nations in the world, and you should be very, very proud of what you’ve done to make a contribution to Scottish education occupying that position in the world.  You are the foundation of the strength of our system.  I have to say to you I’m constantly inspired by what I find in all the schools that I visit, and I try to visit schools a great deal.  I find enthusiastic teachers going the extra mile for their pupils and genuinely are inspiring people are individuals and collectively.  Now, Scotland is already in the top third of performers in the OECD countries, with our fifteen year olds performing amongst the best in the world.  Attainment, we know, is improving gradually, with gradual trends upwards, with most pupils performing at or above literacy and numeracy levels expected for their age.  Over half our school leavers go into further or higher education.  Our chief inspector of schools recently said that we did many things well and some things particularly well, and you don’t always hear that from inspectors.  And across the globe, I can tell you, others are beginning to look with some admiration at our approach to many of the issues we’re trying to tackle in Scotland.  And since devolution, we’ve tried to be creative, we’ve tried to invest in strengthening the foundations of Scottish education.  We’ve not got universal pre-school education available, itself one of the biggest changes we’ve ever seen in Scottish education for a century.  We’ve got the biggest building programme of schools we’ve ever seen in modern times; some 2.5 billion pounds currently being invested in new buildings.  We’ve got an historic teachers’ agreement, bringing better recognition and reward for teachers.  We’ve got more teachers being employed at a time of falling school roles, giving us the capacity to cut class sizes and you know, since 1997, pupils in our system have fallen by over fifty thousand, and the number of teachers based in our schools has risen by close to three thousand at the same time and giving us that capacity to cut class sizes.  We want to continue with these positive changes and those investments and I’m absolutely confident if we do so, we can rise to the challenges and achieve our goal of becoming the best in the world.

And we’ll continue to drive some of the changes that are currently in our reform programme, which we set out in our document “Ambitious Excellent Schools” a couple of years ago.  There were sixty-nine different actions in that, and we set out, for example, to improve our class sizes, as I’ve just touched on, and we’re making great progress with that, and we’re well on our way to meeting our current class size reduction targets.  We’ve got a new excellence standard now in our inspections in schools; that’s now in place.  We’ve got twenty-seven Schools of Ambition helping to drive transformation in particular areas, but also trying to set new standards of excellence in our schools.  We’ve got a revised standard of headship, trying to ensure that our head teachers are better prepared for the very tough task that they have.  We’ve removed outdated barriers to primary teachers teaching in our secondary schools.  We’ve established new schools for work courses, trying to improve the employability and skills of our young people.  We’ve got new laws, designed to harness greater involvement of parents in their children’s learning.  We’ve strengthened Gallic education, we’ve tried to strengthen support for learning in a variety of ways.  Now, unlike, I hope, in the past, our reform agenda is not designed to be top down or to be dictatorial.  It’s an agenda designed to remove barriers to you, to try and give schools and teachers more freedoms and more flexibilities than you’ve enjoyed in the past, and it’s in a large part about trying to return professional trust and giving new freedoms to teachers and schools to exercise and to operate within.
Now, in becoming the best are four areas that need to be absolutely fit for purpose as we move into the future.  The first relates to the quality of teachers and teaching, and quality teaching is at the heart of future success.  Now, it may seem ridiculous to say that, a ridiculous point to make; the most obvious point perhaps, that could be made about education, but for too often in the past that’s the central insight that’s actually been lost sight of.  And teachers also need a clear context within with to operate, so the curriculum and what it demands is fundamental to getting that context right, and so is the exam system and we need to ensure our exam system supports the curriculum and learning outcomes it sought.  And the fourth area’s about leadership, how our schools and our teachers are led and managed.  Now, I’m very clear that with the best teachers and leaders, and with the right curriculum and exams framework, our ambitions to become the best will be fulfilled and far as we’ve come in those areas in recent times, we need to finish what we’ve started but we also need to go further.

Now, one of the real strengths, and I mean this with absolute passion and commitment, is the strength of our teaching profession in Scotland.  As I’ve said to you, I regularly come across the most inspiring, committed and effective teachers; teachers who would stand comparison with the best anywhere in the world, and I’ve got no doubts about that whatsoever.  Teachers and other educational leaders are telling me in Scotland that for the first time in perhaps decades, there’s a new sense of hope and optimism arising among our teachers; that we’ve moved into better times and there’s real political commitment to education.  And for the first time in decades, much more time is now spent in Scotland in educational circles debating educational issues, where for far too long in the past, education debate in Scotland was dominated by terms and conditions of service.  I believe a large part of the reason for this change is what we decided to do in the early days of devolution by creating the McCrone enquiry and the subsequent settlement that came with teachers on the back of that enquiry, and then going on to have a four year pay deal in the recent negotiations with teachers.  And rather than being preoccupied with the annual bargaining round, Scottish education is now, as I say, focused on improving standards of learning and teaching, and teachers, more importantly, are involved actively in that debate.  We now know that the McCrone outcomes have allowed us to move on from that prolonged period of industrial unrest and mistrust that existed.  We all experienced the boycotts, and even a strike about the McCrone enquiry just a few years ago.  Teacher unions and local authorities at the turn of the century mistrusted each other with a vengeance.  Teachers felt beleaguered and blamed, they felt done down and distrusted.  They felt disillusioned and despondent.  Many felt, and I know this from lots of conversations I’ve had with teachers, and some still feel, that their profession has been de-professionalised, reduced to a waiting on the next central instruction of what to do, and that’s the antithesis of what was and is needed to giving the greatest success to our nation.  And I’m clear, very clear, that we need a profession that’s valued, that feels trusted, that feels empowered to practice the professional craft that you all practice.  That’s the route to higher professional, the highest professional standards, and that’s the route to success.  And that’s why we signed up, after the McCrone enquiry, to significantly pay, or to pay teachers rather, significantly more, now amongst the best in the OECD countries in terms of pay.  That agreement in turn led to the four year pay settlement I referred to earlier, and that was just an impossible notion just a few years ago, but it’s one we would all be wise to try and repeat when the time comes.  And it’s why we secured with the Teachers’ Union agreement, ongoing commitments to continuing professional development, commitments now leading Europe in what we do, and among the best in the developed world.  It’s why we created chartered teacher status, allowing teachers to stay in the classroom and earn more.  It’s why we’ve challenged our initial teacher education institutions to ensure that they’re delivering the best and reforming their practices to achieve that.  And that’s why we’ve radically changed the induction procedures for new teachers, where we’re now seeing fantastic results in our classrooms and staff rooms, and head teachers tell me that our new probationers are the best they have ever seen.  And that’s why we’ve cut class contact time to allow more time for preparation and marking and that’s why we’ve substantially increased the number of support staff in and around schools.
 
Now these and other changes have been set in the climate for today’s discourse on Scottish education to be about teaching and learning.  Now having lived through, as I have, both as a councillor and as an MSP and a Minister, the bad times, I’m not in any doubt whatsoever that the investment we made in the McCrone settlement was absolutely the right thing to do for Scottish education.  Now our actions in that regard are the subject of close scrutiny and we recently had the Audit Scotland report into the McCrone settlement.  And for the most part, it was extremely positive and you can’t always say that, I have to say, about Audit Scotland reports.  Even the headline on the Audit Scotland press release included a reference to the positive impact of the teachers’ agreement.  Now following on from Audit Scotland, the inspectors of schools HMIE will be publishing their interim report on the teachers’ agreement later this year.  HMIE sit apart from me, they’re independent of me and I genuinely don’t know what they will report in detail.  But I would be very surprised if HMIE doesn’t highlight the benefits and opportunities that have come following the agreement, but I’d also be equally surprised if it didn’t point out that in some regards there is still some way for some people to go; that some teachers still exist in a mindset suited to the pre-McCrone era; that some have still to step up to the mark; that some have still to ensure that the benefits and the opportunities are delivered in every school and in every class.  And if that is the analysis of HMIE, I would certainly agree with it.  Many of those I meet in and around Scottish education, head teachers, education administrators and teachers themselves, tell me of the huge numbers of teachers who have recognised the difference in the post-McCrone era; the teachers who are embracing change and seize the opportunities that change brings; the teachers who are enthusiastically embracing this continuing professional development that’s now available to them; teachers who are completely reinvigorated by participating in our Assessment is for Learning programme; the teachers who can’t wait to seize the opportunities that are coming from a curriculum for excellence.  However, they also tell me there are still some, too many, who have failed or are failing to make that journey post-McCrone; the staffroom cynics; the refuseniks, those who are not taking responsibility; those who take a narrowly defined interpretation that it’s possible to take of any proposed change.
 
But let me make this absolutely clear to you for the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever; I have the highest possible regard for the overwhelming majority of our teachers, and I talk with pride wherever I go, anywhere in the world, about your achievements; the teachers who are innovative; the teachers who are seeking out the new opportunities that now exist, not unquestioning, not uncritical whenever necessary, but professionals, who see the professional opportunities in the new climate that we’re trying to create.  But these are the teachers who also tell me of their despair at some colleagues who are not making that journey to change; who are locked in the old order and who are not delivering always for the children in their school.  Now, in the first instance, of course, those teachers must be given the opportunity to deliver, but if they can’t or if they don’t, then there must be no delay in acting on that, and I’m working on proposals to ensure that where teachers are falling short, that small minority, that will be required to take action in regards to, that that matter can be dealt with quickly and fairly.  And these proposals will include the idea of a spell back on probation.
But my message today is not about just the need to act to root out underperformance; it’s about my very strong desire to do more to invest in you; the bedrock of what we can achieve in Scottish education, to build on the McCrone effect; to invest even more time and more attention into developing the teachers to deliver the best education system in the world and I’m in no doubt we’re well on the road to doing that.  We need teachers for excellence to deliver our curriculum for excellence, and we need to articulate ever more clearly the ethics, the values and attitudes of teachers for excellence; the new professional identity.  These will be the teachers who themselves, demonstrate the four capacities from a curriculum for excellence; the teachers who see themselves as partners in the continuum of a child’s learning; the teachers who have a sense of community with the whole school and a sense of responsibility for all that happens in that school; the teachers who are reflective of their own practice, who welcome and who are open to dialogue about their development; who are collegiate and collaborative and open to collegiate support; who are continuing to develop as professionals and are learning all the time; teachers who are prepared for and can use the new flexibilities coming with the curriculum for excellence and teachers taking responsibility and sharing in leadership in their school.  Now many are already there and they embody all that is good about Scottish education and over the coming weeks and months I intend to stimulate a lot more debate about the new professional identity, the teachers for excellence we require into the future.  And I want to be fully enabled, as a Minister, to put in place from that debate, the measures to build the capacity of the profession even further, and I want you to be at the heart of that debate; to take ownership in that debate of the ideas and the emerging trends and I’m going to publish a brief document to stimulate further discussion about that, just within a few weeks.
 
So, investing in you, further developing teachers and the teaching profession is absolutely central to our ambitions for the future.  And as I’ve said, teachers don’t exist in isolation; they’ve a context within which to work and part of that context is their role as part of the leadership of their school.  And in the leadership of any school, the performance of the head teacher is absolutely critical.  And we know that most of our schools are led by people who are meeting the required standards in the modern era.  Our best school leaders, who stand comparison with leaders in any aspect of our society and in any part of the world.  And I also know, because inspectors tell me this, that between fifteen and twenty percent of our school leaders, their leadership is regarded to be weak.  Now, that’s got profound implications for how our schools are managed, how our teachers are led and motivated and in turn, how our pupils are led and motivated.  And I’d like to see that figure of fifteen to twenty percent reported by HMIE falling and falling quickly, because local authorities are taking the difficult but necessary actions to ensure that our schools are well led and they have my full support in taking that forward.  And I’m going to take action myself by chairing a new leadership board to take forward our leadership development agenda in Scotland; a critical part of how we plan and prepare for the future.  Part of that will be about better identifying early those with leadership aspirations and potential and how we make the right investments in them to carry out the future tasks that they want to carry out.
 
And I think also, if you look across Scottish education and the debates taking place today, I think without question the curriculum for excellence has caught the imagination of almost the entire teaching profession in Scotland.  And I know it’s also exciting interest overseas, where many believe Scotland is showing a real initiative in building a new framework to secure the best learning.  The curriculum for excellence is founded on simplicity and clarity in its central proposition, and that proposition is that we’ve only got four things we’re required to do in Scottish education to secure our young people are successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors to society and responsible citizens.  It’s also though about having a coherent view of learning from the age of three right through to eighteen.  Now having defined the outcomes that we want with clarity and  with simplicity, the outcomes we want from our education system for our young people, we’ve got the potential to free up considerably the means by which we achieve those aims and that central idea gives us the ability to significantly free you, our teachers in schools, to use your professional judgement about the right ways to structure teaching and learning to meet the outcomes, and it’s a vehicle for returning more professional freedom and more trust to you.  Now, as ever, the devil in this is in the detail and I can tell you that a huge amount of work is underway, some of it behind the scenes but increasingly becoming public to flesh out enough of the detail to give you the clarity and the broad framework within which to work in the future.  Now together with clear statements about where there will be scope for flexibility, without falling into the traps of the past of specifying everything, and curriculum for excellence is not about what is taught in the narrow sense.  You need excellent teachers using the full repertoire of excellent teaching practice, working together so that everything that a young person experiences in school contributes to their development.  We want to meet the needs of every child in our school system and to smooth out the journey children make through education from age three to eighteen.  And we need to give you teachers the space in which you can do that and do it most effectively and do it well.

The framework for the new curriculum is taking shape.  We’ll be publishing very soon, I hope within the next couple of weeks, the first of a series of documents which will pave the way for the full implementation of the new curriculum.  Now this first document sets out the contribution that each of the areas of the curriculum should make to the development of learning of every young person in the system, and it represents a very important stage in the review process and I want councils and schools and you as individual teachers, to see its power as a document, its liberating power as a document, I believe, and also to use it for professional development and to prepare for the future that’s coming with the new freedoms that we want to see.  Work has also begun on the detail of what children should learn at each stage of their education; of what choices will be available at each of those stages.  We must have a clear and renewed emphasis on ensuring that every child can be functionally literate, reaching the agreed standards of reading, writing and counting, however, we must also allow teachers to help young people develop skills and abilities; to be enterprising, to be creative, to be healthier as individuals.  And we must provide greater choice and greater motivation including more work-related options in the future and better recognition of what young people achieve in all the aspects of their lives, inside and outside school.  We’re talking about the opportunity for very real and very genuine change in our system.  And we’re also looking at the implications of the changes in learning and teaching, that those implications will have for the qualifications system and the organisation of our schools. 
 
Now today, we’ve seen the publication of exam results by local authority and I’m going to, in tomorrow’s newspapers, there’ll be some form of league tables about which councils are up and which councils are down.  But what those figures will mask completely is a change taking place in many of our schools and change for the better, but which may perversely, make the schools appear less successful.  Many schools are now tailoring their curriculum to better meet the needs of individual pupils, and that’s one of our big challenges; to personalise increasingly the learning of our young people.  Schools are offering ASDAN qualifications, Duke of Edinburgh awards, they’re doing the European Computer Skills Driving Licence, just to mention three.  Now these experiences and qualifications can help pupils at all levels of ability.  For some, there’ll be a trade-off between the number of standard grades they sit and these other courses, however, these other achievements don’t receive the recognition that they deserve in our system, and that’s simply wrong.  We need to do much more to recognise wider success in education.  We need to recognise that success extends beyond passing exams and achieving qualifications.  Important though those are and will remain as part of our system, and I’m absolutely determined to secure better recognition of wider achievement and for that recognition to be seen as part of the same currency as success in our exams.  I believe this may be achieved in part by using our Scottish Credit in Qualifications framework in new and imaginative ways, and I’ve got a group of officials and others currently working on how we can best capture and reflect the value of wider achievements, and that will in turn result in a package of proposals covering a number of these issues being published in due course.

Now in the meantime, our ongoing engagement with teachers continues, and that means the curriculum review is gaining momentum as more and more teachers participate in debate and discussion about that.  Now many schools are already using new approaches, adopting new approaches to learning and teaching to ensure their pupils can succeed in that changing world that I’ve described, and to help schools deliver a curriculum for excellence this year, we’re also going to see new technology starting to arrive in our schools in the form of GLOW, the world’s first schools intranet, which will deliver twenty-first century technology to support twenty-first century learning and teaching.
 
Now Heather, wherever she is, I know I could go on for many hours talking about these issues, but I’ll try and draw now to a close.  My ambition and that of my political colleagues is to make Scottish education the best in the world with a clear awareness of some of the challenges that we face and what they mean for our system if we are to become the best.  We need to keep an international perspective in all that we do and we need to be aware of the changing nature of the challenges and devise appropriate responses.  Whatever the uncertainties of the world, and they are huge and growing, it appears, the one thing that is certain is the better educated our population, the better chance for them to be successful as individuals and for Scotland to be successful in that changing world.  We should face the future with confidence; we already have a strong education system on which to build, and right at the heart of our ability to succeed is going to be teachers and teaching.  I want Scotland to be recognised as clearly having the best teachers in the world.  In the post-McCrone era we are all well on our way to achieving just that.  But I’m ready to do more to support your work, gaining more clarity around the values, attitudes and dispositions of teachers for excellence that this era needs is going to be part of that process and in doing that, we’ll build a our capacity to delivery fully the spirit of the curriculum for excellence.  Teachers for excellence delivering the curriculum for excellence, with an exam and a wider recognition of achievement system supporting their efforts; the best teachers supported by the best leaders in our schools.  Now these are at the heart of the actions that will bring Scotland even greater educational success in the future.  As I say, we should face that future with confidence that it is absolutely achievable, that Scotland can become the best in the world.  Thank you very much for listening.

Q & A - Heather Reid / Peter Peacock

End of transcript.
 

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