Writing in Teaching Scotland, the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s chief executive Dr Pauline Stephen discusses the future of education in Scotland for the beginning of 2023.
We started 2022 with a provocation from Dr Shirley Van Nuland about ethics in education. Shirley’s considered input at the GTC Scotland Annual Lecture kicked off a deep focused conversation about why what we value, think and do, really matters.
Throughout last year we gathered different views in the form of provocations from across the education system, in Scotland and beyond. We held roundtable events with the teaching profession to talk through the issues these inputs have raised for us in collaboration with the provocateurs themselves.
Taking the temperature
As is the way with all best laid plans, we had to divert our planned engagement with the profession on ethics to later in the year so we could respond and provide a mechanism for the teaching profession to come together to talk about the Scottish Government and COSLA’s national discussion on the future of education. This was a theme for us last year (as it was during the height of Covid): reprioritising and replanning in response to what is going on around us.
There is no doubt that education is still responding to the impact of the pandemic, so too are organisations like GTC Scotland. There are lots of the same challenges and demands there always were, but there are new and emerging ones too, and we are all continuing to adjust to living, learning and working in community with others again and in some cases managing the effects of our time isolated from others.
In addition to this ongoing adaptation, our profession has also been engaged in both broad and deep system change work. Informing work on education reform, a skills review, an assessment review, the National Discussion on education, a review of inspection in early learning and probably a few more that I have forgotten.
“This year, we need to take direct control of issues that are ours to lead and change”
Time, space, value and trust
Like a lot of people who spend much of their days in meetings and talking with other people, I reflect on the words that pop up across contexts time and time again. My engagement at the edges of some of this ongoing national work has caused me to notice a few key words.
A couple were not a surprise, and I doubt they will be for anyone reading this as I’ve written about them before. Time and space are two words I believe have been in the teaching language for a long time – how is the time and space created to think, develop, plan and reflect? These words are particularly pertinent in the context of informing change work; how is the time and space created (or given) to meaningfully inform, share and learn together?
A couple of other words have also struck a chord – value and trust. To be direct, how valued are teaching and teachers, what value is placed on the teaching profession’s expertise and how well is our voice valued, heard and acted on? Value and trust are linked.
Trust in teaching
As the teaching profession’s independent registration and regulation body there can often be misunderstandings or misconceptions about what kind of body we are or what we do, even what powers we have or don’t have. When you boil everything down to the essence of why GTC Scotland does something, it’s this: trust in teaching.
Our ethics discussions last year took us back to a deepened focus on our core reason for being – maintaining and improving trust in teaching. This will be the essence of our plans and our work later this year, and over the next five years, as we start a new strategic planning period. It has already begun, with trusted teaching playing a central role in our own organisational feedback to the National Discussion on the future of education, along with valuing the whole system and system coherence.
This year, we also need to take direct control of issues that are ours to lead and change. This will see us in conversation with the profession about the importance of registration as we work to inform changes to our registration rules. We also want to reflect on feedback from the profession, about Professional Update. The arrangements by which GTC Scotland meets our legal obligation to provide a re-accreditation scheme for registered teachers have been in existence for almost a decade now.
This all means that we are taking a different approach to the start of 2023. There is a lot going on, we don’t want to further crowd the time and space for thinking with a GTC Scotland new year’s lecture. There are, at the time of writing, planned strikes over pay and, while salary and working conditions are not within GTC Scotland’s statutory remit, we are acutely aware of the broader context within which teachers work.
We need space as a profession to await, consider and respond to the outputs of 2022’s range of consultations and reviews. When these are available, GTC Scotland will be considering them from the view that trusted teaching should influence the leadership of education.
This article originally appeared in Teaching Scotland
