I love my job, but it’s really challenging.
I put that challenge down to a clear crisis, in my eyes and in the eyes of every teacher I speak to, of leadership in Scottish schools. I just hope the new education minister Jenny Gilruth is up for the mammoth challenge that faces her in her new post. I don’t know if she’s a hillwalker but she’s got a mountain to climb.
I hope somewhere on her agenda she’s going to look critically, somehow, at the type of people being promoted, in recent years, in Scotland’s schools. That demographic has changed. Radically. It’s dominated – and that’s a fitting word – by ‘Yes Men’ (and ‘Yes Women’). I don’t mean folk who are in favour of Scottish independence, I mean often anti-intellectual people, who are totally opposed on every level, it seems, to rocking the educational boat.
As someone previously tasked with taking on whole school literacy, for example, the basic literacy levels among an increasing number of school leaders – depute head teachers – was and is frankly appalling. The fact is many struggle daily, and publish to the whole school daily, their struggle to construct a comprehensible, technically accurate email.
If I was assessing the literacy of these leaders via their email offerings, against Education Scotland’s standards and benchmarks, I would genuinely struggle to find evidence to formally place their writing level above much of the general pupil population, whose literacy development isn’t just my job but is the remit of leaders who seem ill-equipped to ‘lead’ much of anything but a chaotic and neglectful fiasco.
