Annual Congress 2003, General Secretary’s Report

President, colleagues

JABBERWOCKY

‘ Twas brilling, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
‘ Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!’

Thus read Alice in the “Looking Glass” book, having entered the Looking-Glass world created by Lewis Carroll.
Anyone who has been paying any attention to the education scene in Scotland over the last year must have shared Alice’s experience upon entering the world of the Looking Glass.

Jabberwocky was, of course, written back to front: it used language which neither Alice nor the King and Queen could have recognised and was capable of being interpreted at will by the reader.

This must resonate with many of us here in Aveimore today. We seem to have entered unbeknown into a looking-glass world of education in Scotland, a world in which every document seems to have to be read from back to front, and is capable of any form of interpretation by anyone reading it. Local authorities, the Scottish Executive, yes, even the Court of Session, seem to be able to find strange new meanings in our looking glass book. The chapters of this book including, inter alia, the 35 hour week, the Chartered Teacher, and the mystic path to job-sizing should be all too familiar to us, but in the looking-glass world in which we now exist, nothing, it seems, can be taken as read any more.
I thought that when I reported to you last year about the state of play in the implementation talks we had reached close to the bottom of the barrel – not so!

The last year has seen both headlong pursuit of the orthodoxy of job-sizing, and absolute stalemate in conditions of service. It has seen backtracking on the cost of CPD for Chartered Teachers and the narrowing of access to the programme for Chartered Teacher status. It has seen perverse and fanciful interpretation of the 35 hour week, notably by North Lanarkshire Council aided and abetted by the unlikely combination of Lord Nimmo Smith and the EIS. It has seen the Agreement used as justification for the intolerable culling of promoted posts in many areas and the spectre of demotion of many promoted staff, notably in Argyll & Bute.

The looking glass has been used to good effect over the last year.

“ Primus inter pares” of these is job-sizing. At a probable cost of £1.5m, including co-ordinators and additional expenses, we will shortly have chaos visited on an already demotivated profession, particularly in secondary schools.

“ and still the Queen cried, “Faster, Faster!”, and dragged her along. Are we nearly there?”, Alice managed to pant out at last.”
“ Nearly there?”, the Queen repeated, “why we passed it ten minutes ago. Faster!”

We truly have run very, very hard to get nowhere at all. What are the benefits of job-sizing; for the local authorities and the Executive it is all about two things – equal pay claims and re-structuring. Job-sizing will prevent the former and enable the latter. For teachers there will be move from an existing set of pay criteria for promoted posts which was quite arbitrary and difficult to comprehend to …a set of pay criteria for promoted posts which is arbitrary and impossible to comprehend. Like Alice, we have run very hard to be under the tree the whole time.
The only consolation is that our independent school colleagues have heeded the dire warnings and are dealing with job-sizing in a much more pragmatic and realistic way, and I commend them for this and have been happy to assist their path.

I want to speak now about control of education. Most of us, if asked from where education is controlled and managed, would probably refer to local authorities and the Scottish Executive, and this would be true for operational purposes. More on this later. However, for strategic control of education, we need to look much further afield. The roots of this lie not in our own domestic scene, but rather in the much less visible world of international and intergovernmental organisations such as OECD. We probably only hear of OECD when studies like PISA – the comparison of “standards” across OECD countries – are published. But out there, working away on a daily basis and giving the forum for meetings of senior civil servants, ministers and other policy makers, are organisations like OECD. And from whence comes their input? Well, for example take the De Se Co programme of November 2002 – Definition and Selection of Competencies – or being translated, “what it is we need to get the weans to learn”. This programme seeks to inform OECD policy on these matters and is sponsored by the Swiss Government, quangos in the USA and Canada and is backed by OECD itself. This kind of work will emerge as the new orthodoxy in schools over coming years, regardless of who we voted for last week.

Take the Dublin meeting of OECD Education Chief Executives in February of 2003. This was a forum for both sharing views and tasking OECD to develop strategies for, inter alia,

It is at such meetings that policies which affect us here are first formed and later defined for implementation.

It is at this level that the definition of education is increasingly made by cost factors rather than by the need of young people. Education in this looking glass world is a commodity, the last great commodity not yet in the hands of the private sector, where analysts understand the price of every action of a teacher, and the value of none of these. This is the world in which data analysis reigns supreme, the looking glass world of digits in a computer and not young people and their futures. It is the reality of this looking glass world, but it must not be allowed to hold total sway over the real world in which we operate on a daily basis.

If such distant bodies have such significant influence over education, how then do we reflect upon the levers of control which are more visible to us on a daily basis? We have had four years of our devolved Parliament and much comment has been made about how successful it has been as a new institution.

Much less, nay, almost nothing, has been said, however, in assessment of the seven years of our reformed local government. While many speculate about the relative success of the Parliament, few muse on the success or otherwise of the 32 local authority system which directly controls schools. Equally, no-one argues in favour of the pre-1996 system of 9 mainland authorities and 3 island councils, but has the experiment of replacing 8 of the old 9 authorities with 28 new councils worked? Has the new system brought greater value to the education of young people? Unarguably, it has brought us an additional 20 Directors of Education (or whatever nomenclature is used to describe the postholders) and 20 more Education Committees.

At the same time it has brought us 32 variations of agreements reached at national level through collective bargaining and a plethora of “interpretations” of any document issued nationally. It has led to countless local meetings to examine ways, usually at least three in each authority, of differently interpreting national documents. On job-sizing, Chartered Teacher, APT/Senior Teacher, temporary teachers, and even sick pay, it has led to differential interpretation leading to diverse outcomes for colleagues who may teach only a few miles apart across the county line.

So, has dispersed control of education been of benefit to young people? I do not believe so, but you, as practitioners, are best placed to judge this.

In Northern Ireland, education is organised by 5 Education and Library Boards, one covering Belfast and 4 the remainder of Northern Ireland. They are currently discussing the possible reduction of this to a total of 4 for a population of roughly one-fifth of that of Scotland.
In France, as you will already know, the system is highly centralised with a very tight rein used by the Ministry of Education. By contrast, in Finland, virtually all power is devolved down to the local municipality giving 4,000 or so school districts. Key decisions are taken at National level and are then implemented town by town.

Given the vogue for assessing everything in sight, I believe it is time for the Association to re-examine our stance on this matter. Our existing policy, which has never been rescinded, is in favour of joint boards between local authorities for the control of education.

Perhaps it is time for us to revisit our “Roger de Coverley” policy and see how it stands in the light of the 21st Century.
In the final part of my report to you, I want to look ahead to the future of the Association and to the future of the profession as a whole. Clearly these two themes are inextricably linked, but they are not necessarily identical.

We are, as you can no doubt observe at first hand, an ageing profession. 76.5% of secondary teachers are aged 40 or over; 30% are aged 50 or over and a massive 43.5% of the workforce is aged between 46 and 55. Assuming each cohort survives intact to the age 60 (and it will not due to progressively mortality and morbidity) then the numbers of teachers retiring each year will rise from 250 at present to 1350 in less than 10 years.

The implication is clear – either recruitment levels will need to increase by a factor of 5 or more, or we can look forward to the prospect of the era of the super classroom assistant taking over many of the duties of teachers who will revert to a role equivalent to the High court judge – wheeled to dispense wisdom and wheeled out again.

Will current pay levels be adequate to recruit sufficient staff? Will conditions and workload be sufficient to deter potential recruits? The answers are yes and no, but in which order? The challenge for the current profession is to ensure that there is a profession for future generations to join!
For the Association, the implications are also clear. We are currently thriving in terms of membership. Our profile, especially at the entry-end of the profession is exceptionally high, largely due to over a decade of concentrating on student recruitment.

However, the inescapable fact is that the ice-slabs of the professional glacier will crash in our direction too, and only by continuing to develop our recruitment at all age levels of the profession will we survive this particular ice-age. By way of consolation, we should note that we will not be alone in facing this demographic challenge. Our larger competitor will also face similar and equally profound problems.

Which brings me neatly and finally to the matter of professional unity. There are many sound reasons for adopting professional unity, and moves towards this continue throughout the trade union movement. In the last year, however, I have never been more struck by the need for an independent voice amongst Scottish Secondary Teachers. If not us, who?