Margaret Alcorn from the CPD team pages.
The Scottish education scene is at a real crossroads. HMIe is reinventing itself (allegedly) to reflect the needs of a profession being asked to innovate instead of conform. GTC Scotland is becoming more independent in the mould of the General Medical Council, and is potentially about to usher in regular re-registration for teachers. LTS is being reviewed to what effect, no-one really seems to know. Local authorities are clawing back on expenditure and either restructuring or cutting central support services. In the midst of all of this change, the government line on our new Curriculum has held fast and steady. As of yesterday, the Education Cabinet Secretary changed to Argyll man, Mike Russell; what this will mean for the national strategic leadership, no-one knows.
Against this background of flux, there is one organisation that I have a particular interest in. The national CPD team has been the main support body for people like me, (professional learning co-ordinators in authorities), and it too finds itself in a state of change. The national team, under the leadership of Margaret Alcorn has steered the 32 local authorities through the challenges of setting up or developing their CPD provision during the last five years or so in the immediate post-McCrone landscape. I think its fair to say that most local authorities are pretty relaxed about their delivery of CPD now and have shifted their concerns from McCrone agreement implementation to an almost total focus on how to implement the new curriculum. The question for the national CPD team after this success is, “what if anything is our new role”?
I would like to suggest that this team is uniquely well placed to fulfil a new set of CPD needs for Scottish local authorities. Local authorities are facing the challenge of implementing the Curriculum for Excellence with less funding in the short to medium term, and with commensurately shrinking training catalogues. Authorities need to do what NASA in the USA had to do a decade or so ago, and that is to do more with less. “Cheaper, Better, Faster” was their slogan at the time. The thing about doing more with less of course is that you really need to know what are the most effective, focussed things you can do; this implies a high degree of knowledge about the areas of learning involved and about the systematic effect of school learning within these areas. I have argued for a long time that the Scottish education system needs to move into a more overt learning mode. The answers to the challenges of moving the curriculum forward will not be given to us by people who simply repeat old default solutions, or those who have a few good ideas, but without a real overview of how they all interlink. In short we need something like our own Scottish education embedded think-tank. This think-tank should seek out the best thinkers and refine our knowledge of how our schools work and where the levers of change are located at a deeply analytical level. Once you understand where the levers are and the limits of their usability then you can begin to act from a position of knowledge.
We already have great think-tanks in Scotland; my own favourite is the International Futures Forum under the amazing Graham Leicester’s direction. IFF taught many of us in the public sector about the 3 stage response to increasing complexity and confusion in our system. Stage 1, deny the problem exists. Stage 2, Drive the machine harder, do more of what we did before. Stage 3, admit that you have only limited control and learn to do the best you can with the hugely complex system that you have. I have maintained that the decade of hard-inspection we are beginning to emerge from is exactly the stage 2 situation that IFF described; but now we must learn. In fact to quote Michael Fullan, “Learning is the work”. IFF and Scottish Council Foundation among others have their place now, but in truth they are not located in mainstream education and their credibility with the main body of teachers and their managers is limited. We need to place a learning agenda at the centre and for that we need our own think tank located firmly within the system. We need this now.
To return to the National CPD team, over the last 5 or so years they have amassed a great deal of goodwill and confidence from the CPD and learning leaders across the 32 authorities because they have been learning-focussed connectors of all our organisations and external thought leaders and thin- tanks; critically they have done this with no agenda other than supporting good learning. They have been COSLA located and have worked for the local authorities’ agendas rather than any single national or political one. Indeed as a small and focussed team of 5 constantly renewed secondees they have been kept so busy learning for the CPD network that they have probably never had the luxury of developing a political leaning beyond the networked learning on everyone’s behalf. So this team has a record of effectiveness in networking our national learning across all areas of school business, they are seen as politically neutral to authorities and they now have a body of internationally derived knowledge and methodologies to share. It doesn’t take a great amount of imagination to see this body move from connecting learning in the post McCrone confusion and worry, to leading a more sophisticated model of learning in the new curricular environment. How would this look?
With a remit of “more effective learning, more often for less” (to paraphrase NASA wickedly), the national CPD team could do the following things for all of us.
- Continue to run networking events and structures for all authorities. (Network members universally say they want this).
- Generate system level learning for us all about how we learn to change at this critical time. (Like IFF but more located).
- Identify the links between various CPD opportunities and desired outcomes for the new curricula. A plan to identify the strategic learning strands should underpin this.
- Act as a conduit and hub between more politically located bodies like GTCS and LTS to co-create the required new learning models to move us forward in the minimum time.
- Communicate through a new series of papers outlining how authorities can learn faster, more effectively with less.
- Broker strategically important training directly as an agency. Where essential new learning is developed, work with agencies like Government and LTS to source and direct it.
As it is the CPD team is well located with the profession and possesses the shared knowledge to take this agenda forward. Perhaps a new focus may mean that staff would be increasingly selected to support these new agendas, but as they are at present, they could do this and move it faster than we have any evidence that the big beasts of Scottish education could.
Just one personal plea. CPD for Scottish teachers means post-McCrone hour counting and course catalogues. Maybe it’s time the National CPD team became the Schools’ Professional Learning team?