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Heart of the matter
Dr Bill Maxwell, interim Chief Executive of Education Scotland, talks to Teaching Scotland about the new organisation and what it means for teachers.
What do you see as the role of Education Scotland? Is it a straight amalgamation of two organisations, or does the merger change things?
Bill Maxwell (BM): It is potentially much more than the sum of its parts. Certainly there will be areas of continuity going forward, with some of the new inspection framework continuing along the lines that we've just launched. But this is definitely a new body, developing a new approach to driving quality and improvement in a much more integrated fashion in Scotland.
What about the teaching profession itself? In the immediacy, what changes
do you think teachers will see?
BM: From a teacher's point of view, they will see a more joined-up approach to providing national support. We'll be directly feeding the evidence we get from inspection in schools and turning that back into support for schools, which is really growing from the best practice we are finding in the field. I do very much see Education Scotland as an engine for accelerating best practice within the system. It's a great privilege seeing lots of people developing new practice out in the field and being given the opportunity to bottle that and let others learn from it.
What about the coming months and years, what about the longer term? What's your vision for how this new organisation will evolve and change?
BM: What we are doing, in part, is responding to the growing maturity of the Scottish education system - in relation to both self-evaluation and improvement, and indeed the professionalism of teachers.
We are building an improvement agency that responds to that growing professionalism. It's designed very much to help the system learn from itself and generate its own best practice, evaluate what's really working and capture that and recycle it into the system.
I think at one time the inspectorate would have been regarded as a set of experts - out there deciding what was good and telling everyone how to do things, but that's not how we do it now. That's no longer appropriate. That might work when you have a poorly performing system that needs to be dragged up to become good, but we've got a good education system that is aspiring to greatness, and to do that we need to continue to build capacity so the skills of the profession continue to expand.
So you see this new agency as being a facilitator that allows people to develop their own skills and their own practice, to empower them and not prescribe to them what they must or must not do?
BM: That is exactly the approach. It's the central ethos of CfE, to provide a broad framework and allow teachers and schools locally to interpret and apply it in a way that suits their own group of learners.
So we're now doing the same thing with the inspectorate. For some time they've been moving in this direction, where it's much more about the inspection with schools than of them. The role now is much more about being a performance coach, we are in there working with schools to help them improve their own performance wherever they feel support needs to be targeted.
So what about the practical steps, the priorities and changes this organisation and the education community need to make in order for this vision to be realised?
BM: At the moment we're concentrating on continuing to deliver some of the important services that we deliver safely, such as the new inspection framework and the programme of support for CfE developed by the former LTS.
We will also be undertaking a fairly deep organisational review, looking at how we integrate and get greater synergies out of the rich resource of talent and skills that we have inherited - to tie these together better for
the future.
Like everyone else, we're also having to deal with tight financial settlements for now and for the next two or three years. So we'll be looking at how we get the best value out of our resource and make sure it is focused on what will get the most impact for us in terms of improving outcomes for our stakeholders.
What about the teaching profession? How are you going to engage them in what you are trying to achieve?
BM: It's worth noting that actually quite a lot of practising teachers are involved in our organisation - both because they work with us in the inspection process, but also we
have a regular throughput of development officers. I'm sure that will continue and I'm determined to have our agency strongly engaged with the profession.
I think there are exciting opportunities going forward to use technology even more effectively, in ways that LTS has been pioneering in recent years through GLOW. We
need to build on that success so we can engage people in all sorts of flexible ways.
Part of our commitment going forward is we wish to be responsive.
We'll be developing a business planning system, which engages with key stakeholder groups like local authorities, teachers, and others to help us shape our activities in ways that are going to meet the needs of front line practitioners, and leaders of schools and colleges across the country. We're looking to consult year-by-year on what we are doing and how we can best target our resources to support people more effectively.
Professional Update - what are your thoughts?
BM: I'm a strong supporter of the whole Donaldson review, and as part of that I think it is a prerequisite that teachers need to update skills and learning continually throughout their career.
I think we absolutely need to have this if the system is going to move from good to great. We're keen to support Professional Update in a whole range of ways. For example, evidence of it is something we should be expecting to see when we are inspecting schools. Equally, there are lots of practical things we will be doing; supporting learning communities to provide CPD in formats that can assist continuous development and make CPD a more prominent part of the way teachers do their business.
You mentioned financial pressures, are you nervous about the pressures these will put on professional development?
BM: I think it would be a false economy for schools or local authorities to reduce support for CPD. It is important that opportunities for good quality development are protected. It will be important, of course, that they do get best value out of their resources, including
those for CPD - and it's perfectly right and proper that people pay attention to how they are spending the resources they have. But it is really important that CPD continues to
be supported.
How will you preserve the integrity of the inspection process while all of these changes are going on?
BM: It is vital both the public and the profession trust the new organisation and that we are making objective and impartial evaluations, so we need to ensure the structure of this organisation is designed in such a way to make sure the way we compile inspection reports illustrates impartiality and objectivity.
Something that has been a source of confusion in the past has been the misperception that HMIE is responsible for making policy. In fact HMIE did not make policy, to avoid any conflict which could have occurred if the inspectorate had been responsible for setting policy then evaluating its success in delivery. Education Scotland, likewise, has no such conflict because we will not be making curriculum policy, that remains with the policy makers in Victoria Quay.
The nervousness otherwise would be that the same people who are making the policy are inspecting the policy, and it would therefore be in their interests to say that everything is going well.
But there is no such conflict.
We will inspect. We will inspect impartially and objectively, as we always have.
Government continues to make policy, we build the infrastructure, mechanisms and support to facilitate the implementation of that policy, and we also measure how successful this implementation is. This creates a positive feedback loop, a virtuous circle, whereby the implementation of policy is constantly adjusted to support better performance. And we can also feedback to policy makers to do with the information what they will, helping create evidence-based policy-making.