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In my view: No more sink or swim
By David Drever, Convenor, GTC Scotland
I finished my last column keeking through a glass darkly, and it does seem that pessimism is rapidly becoming the default mode for education. What better time then to turn to the sunlit upper slopes of the past where things somehow always seemed better.
Before landing in my present billet, Kirkwall Grammar School, I taught in three Glasgow schools that all share the distinction of having been demolished since I left them. One was in Toryglen, Queens Park Secondary, built on top of old mine shafts in the low ground between Hampden Park and the edge of Rutherglen. The other two shared the highest elevation in Glasgow at opposite ends of the city. Cathkin High sat on the top of Cathkin Braes looking north across to the Campsies and Albert Secondary was above Springburn looking southwest - on a clear day we could see the Sleeping Warrior of the Arran hills from the English department staffroom.
In memory, my first years in teaching were full of fun. Every emotion seemed heightened: the fear, the exhilaration, the draining exhaustion, the sheer fun of survival shared by a mixed bunch of enthusiastic, and at times witless, probationers.
I started in my first school alongside eight other brand new teachers. We had some inspirational role models and we had some fairly dire colleagues who raised Chaos Theory to a practised art form. By and large we had to sink or swim: structured support, observed classes and buddying were fatal indicators of failure. At the end of our second year of probation we had to insist that the heidie sit down and write the two paragraph report that we needed in order to get our 'parchment'.
The past may well be another country, but we can look back to it with wise retrospection as well as remembered pleasure. The haphazard techniques of survival and arbitrary levels of support have gone, and probationer teachers are now treated in the best sense as developing professionals. This improvement, brought by the current Teacher Induction Scheme, has been hard won and needs defending in these dark days. I don't doubt that most of our new teachers today share the vivid and at times scary emotions that I felt; I know certainly that many of them love their work and find it deeply satisfying. It will be our job to make sure the coming generation of teachers also benefits from the Induction Scheme.