At a time of change and reform in Scottish education, chief executive of The General Teaching Council for Scotland, Dr Pauline Stephen, asks how Scotland’s teachers can meaningfully be heard amid all the complexities of the education system.
I recently had the privilege of meeting with new headteachers across a Regional Improvement Collaborative. We talked about leadership, particularly adaptability as leaders in the context in which we all work. In my notes in preparation for the event I wrote for myself ‘power is watched closely – education is complex – education is a small world’.
Education is indeed complex. So too is leadership. Leadership in education is complex because teaching is complex. Teaching is complex relational work and complex intellectual work in a complex system. Aspects of our complex system are currently under review as education reform is debated and considered. We know that one of the reasons that education is so complex is because of the connections between elements – how information flows through and between the system and who or what has the right to make decisions as a result of that information. So, we can anticipate that any reform, be it be big or small, is likely to impact on other parts of the connected and complex system. These might be big waves of impact, small ripples, or elements of both. A question must surely be: do we await on the shore for the water to arrive or do we get in the water first?
How do we all meaningfully make our voices heard in this space? Engagement in the process requires us to undertake another one of Scottish education’s favourite words: collaboration. I am never sure we all mean the same thing when we use that word to describe our work together. I also wonder if we need a deeper focus – a move to collective expertise or collective intelligence even – a recognition that the solutions that we can create together are usually so much more powerful than the ones we generate alone. D’Olimpio emphasises that as social and political beings, we can flourish only if we collaborate with others and that successful collaboration with others requires trust.
Here’s another favourite word. Trust, in my view, speaks centrally to what it means to be part of a profession. Cruess, Johnston and Cruess offer a comprehensive definition of ‘profession’ which includes ‘Its members are governed by codes of ethics and profess a commitment to competence, integrity and morality, altruism, and the promotion of the public good within their domain. These commitments form the basis of a social contract between a profession and society, which in return grants the profession a monopoly over the use of its knowledge base, the right to considerable autonomy in practice and the privilege of self-regulation. Professions and their members are accountable to those served and to society.’
Accountability too is a favoured word in Scottish education. The use of this word is often in a political context, inferring accountabilities identified by government and employers rather than teachers themselves. Judyth Sachs’ description of teaching as a mature profession has particular resonance here. Sachs states that ‘during periods of increased accountability and regulation, different discourses of professionalism will circulate and gain legitimacy and impact on how professionalism is conceived and enacted’. Teachers are accountable to the students they teach and the communities in which they work. While the system therefore focuses on improving learning and teaching, albeit through different lenses, there are fundamental differences in terms of how that quality is defined and how it is measured. Our current context of education reform provides an important opportunity to make these differences explicit and use collective expertise to find different solutions.
Ethics and the profession
During this period, while the notion of accountability is considered alongside trust, collaboration, empowerment, and agency [two more key words in our system], different discourses of professionalism will likely emerge. Anyone on the Register of Teachers in Scotland has a social contract with learners and the public through the Professional Standards and the Code of Professionalism and Conduct [COPAC]. While the Professional Standards for Teachers were recently refreshed and Professional Standards for Lecturers were established in 2018, the existing COPAC has been in place since 2012. Professional Codes are instruments that formulate positive ethical principles for the profession and provide specific guidance on the conduct and practices expected from registrants.
COPAC can be described alongside a description of accountability or even regulation when questioning the actions of teachers or the outcomes for learners. Sometimes this description misses the notion of being accountable as a positive quality, owned by the profession itself. There are some foundations of regulation that would valuably be explored: regulating does not mean you don’t trust, and trusting doesn’t mean you don’t have to regulate. It is this complex space where trust, regulation, accountability, and collaboration meet that we want to explore with the profession. As we begin a process to review COPAC, the journey starts not with the document itself but in a conversation about ethics and what that means to the profession of teaching.
Starting with our Annual Lecture in January 2022, GTC Scotland plan to lead and host a conversation on professionalism which has the potential to inform the further review of COPAC. Teachers’ values and relationships with others are central to successful Professional Codes and GTC Scotland’s relationship with the profession is core to their development.
At the time I met with the new headteachers we had also started some work at GTC Scotland to explore what effective leadership means to us as an organisation. A central theme under discussion has been that one of the foundations of leadership is thinking in and dealing with complexity with an associated skill being the ability to effectively distil the essence of complex information. The discussions that lie ahead for our profession will no doubt be challenging, requiring us to draw on our skills as leaders of learning, but it is only through these conversations that our collaborative understanding of professionalism can influence and inform.
This article originally appeared in Teaching Scotland
Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash
