One of the symptoms of the malaise of Education with a ‘big E’ in Scotland has been the advent of an in-group code used to propagate whatever the latest ideas are, in an attempt to give teaching the same mystique as medicine or the law, when, of course, it might rather be better if these honourable professions moved as far as possible towards Plain English.
I have always, in particular, had an aversion to describing the young people in our schools as “learners”. In the latter years of my career as a teacher and a senior manager in schools, I used to screw up my face when a prospective recruit to the staff used that.
