Presidential Address

“MAKING THE DIFFERENCE”

“Making the Difference” in the last 60 years has been in many senses the unwritten, unstated but understood theme of this Association. Understood in the sense that for our members we have, since 1944, made the difference between success and failure; between the acceptable and the insane; between the possible and the impossible. Through all the major campaigns, individual battles and sometimes simple skirmishes at national and at local level, we have played our part, and I’m proud to say a central part, to make the difference for our members and their pupils. Sometimes we have won, sometimes we’ve achieved a partial victory and sometimes we’ve made a strategic withdrawal. But we’ve been there and we’ve made the difference. And as I stand addressing you today as your President, I have a feeling of overwhelming pride at what we’ve been and what we’ve become. Proud of not only our many achievements but proud of our members – uniquely loyal, ferocious in their defence of secondary education and outstanding in their level of professionalism.

However, it would be wrong for this Association to dwell excessively on past glories. They are part of what we’ve become and nobody is more conscious of that than me. But there is a long road that stretches in front of us, challenges ahead with which we must engage and continue to make the difference.

When we look at the present moment, perhaps the most difficult challenge that faces us is the problem of job-sizing. Many would depict us as standing isolated and idiosyncratic in our opposition to the nature of the job-sizing exercise. Out of step, out of tune, out of ideas has been the nature of the criticism we have attracted. This, Congress, is far from the case. Our position was clearly expressed from the beginning: misgivings were flagged up to the SNCT and ignored. We embarked a year ago on “Mail the Minister” Campaign. We continue to highlight some of the bizarre outcomes from the exercise. We continue to point our how badly Guidance has been treated. We persist in demanding an absolute review of the entire discredited process. This Association has never tolerated injustice in the last 60 years and we don’t intend now to sit back and simulate support for a process that clearly has not worked. And we wish that message to be taken from here – we believe job-sizing is fundamentally flawed!! We are not addressing any other agenda. We are not exploiting the mess of job-sizing for some sectorally-driven purpose. It didn’t work and we want to change it. That is our position stated as clearly as I can manage it.

Equally, we have enormous problems with the management re-structuring exercise that has been undertaken now by every local authority in Scotland. This whole process has been breathtaking in how ill-considered and foolish it has been. It has taken the meaning of the term “hasty and premature” to an entirely new dimension. Let me re-iterate the Association’s position on restructuring because once again there are those out there who would wish to depict us as “backwoodsmen” opposing all new ideas just for the sheer hell of it. We are not opposed to management restructuring. Far from it. We are well prepared to engage in meaningful dialogue about how schools can be better managed. Our Association would support thoughtful, reflective and research-based analysis of how different management structures could better deliver the Executive’s National Priorities. In particular, we would welcome a close analysis of the view that the UK achievement gap can be reduced by, amongst other things, reducing bureaucracy and upper management in schools and devolving decision-making to classroom teachers. That’s been the experience in countries in an OECD study with low achievement gaps like Finland. So what’s our policy. Our policy is crystal clear if you have research and evidence that demonstrates that pupil achievement in terms of the National Priorities can be improved by a proposed change in management structures then let’s hear about it. We welcome debate in this area and, just as in the last 60 years, we will progress clearly demonstrated improvement.

Congress, we are committed to making the difference. What we have not, are not and will not be prepared to do is to stand back and allow the present “fantasy management” process to go unchallenged. All that has been achieved in the last year has been a massive “cull” of principal teachers to be replaced by super principal teachers who are unqualified in the subjects they are managing. And this without one piece of evidence being led that this improves the quality of education in any way.

Our challenge to local authorities is clear: we want better schools and better management of schools. What we don’t want is yet another leap in the dark, another march up the hill closely followed by a disorderly retreat down the hill. We want research, debate and orderly reflection and we invite you to begin this process once you have rid yourself of pre-conception and prejudice. Let’s start looking forward!!

Similarly forward-looking has been the development that seems to arise out of 5-14 thinking. We detect a gradually evolving view that a “MIDDLE SCHOOL” structure and curriculum might well be the way forward. Secondary teachers have long recognised that S1 and S2 have become an area of great concern in terms of rigour and appropriateness. The SSTA stands ready and willing to engage in debate about how best to deal with the 10-14 area and we do so without prejudice and fully recognising that any move to a middle school structure could be potentially inimical to our structures. In a sense, we discount that potential because if it is the right direction in which to proceed then we would wish to proceed. That has been our imperative in the last 60 years!! We know S1 and S2 isn’t working – many of our members have engaged in innovative experiments using early Standard Grade presentations with the removal of age and stage restrictions to provide a more meaningful S2 experience. We recognise and support this but we are rapidly coming to the view that we all need to engage in a more meaningful, rigorous and fundamental analysis of 10-14 and we invite the Executive to do exactly this: NOT piece-meal; not partial and not knee-jerk but reflective and philosophical. We believe that this Association has something distinctive to offer such a process and we are anxious to inform such a debate.

I genuinely regret that this address may sound like a series of challenges to the Executive and to local authorities. The truth is that working relationships with our partners are exceptionally good. For us, one of the greatest triumphs of devolution has been the openness with which the Executive functions. Successive Education Ministers have certainly brought different styles to their performance, but all three have listened and responded to us in a manner that should give us hope for the future. That is why I am confident that by articulating our challenges we take the “debate” on and avoid being characterised as backwoodsmen, incessantly ranting about past injustices.

Similarly, the 32 local authorities have in the main engaged positively with us as well and, while we have great reservations about 32 different versions of the wheel, we have nothing but praise for those local authorities committed to open and non-ideological debate on the future of Scottish education.

It is important also to understand another changing dimension of this Association’s work. We work increasingly in an international context as education becomes globalised. In a sense this Association has been pro-active in becoming involved in the international debate and I pay tribute to our General Secretary who is well regarded by our international partners and who has worked assiduously to ensure that we punch above our weight. It was with great personal pride that I watched our General Secretary take a central rôle in Luxembourg in organising the ETUCE elections. This organisation has a great deal to offer in the Global Debate on education and I exhort all of you to raise your eyes beyond the horizons of Lewis to Lerwick and Wick to Wigtown.

I would also like to pay tribute to the Immediate Past President. George is someone for whom I have enormous respect. Two congresses ago, in his Presidential Address, George indicated that there is more to unite fellow teaching organisations than to divide us. I entirely endorse that and, in the fallout from job-sizing, I reiterate that statement. My experience both locally and nationally of working with other teaching organisations has always been positive. Personally, I hold courtesy and mutual respect to be the most important ingredients in our relationship but it is clear that we have fundamental differences and I believe that this Association will continue to “MAKE THE DIFFERENCE”. That is not to close any doors but rather to recognise that there are still doors that need to be opened further.

Talking about doors leads me on rather neatly to the issue of school buildings. For many years stretching back beyond the disaggregation of local authorities the SSTA campaigned hard for an improvement to school buildings. Certainly, without entering into a debate about PPP and “prudent borrowing” considerable improvement has been made in the last few years. But, inescapably perhaps, new sets of problems have arisen as new schools have emerged from the ashes of the old. The Association is now dealing with a range of these problems including inadequate classroom size; the need to control maximum classroom temperatures; failure to provide adequate staffroom facilities: “one step forward and two back” seems to be an appropriate description of where we are going! Watch this space.

Perhaps it is not surprising to many of us that teacher recruitment and retention remains a major challenge for us. “A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century” attempted to address these problems in conjunction with “Reward”. There was to be a long-term solution to the problems. Why is it that I stand here 3 years on feeling a little disappointed with the result? The clear indications are that there are still recruitment problems and, bearing in mind the ever ticking demographic time bomb, it is increasingly difficult to be other than anxious about the numbers of qualified teachers that can be in the system in the next five to ten years. Particularly, I would contend, there is a shortage of male recruits to the teaching force and this I would suggest is approaching crisis point as we grapple unsuccessfully with the twin difficulties of male underachievement and adolescent male behaviour. If there was ever a time to encourage men to become teachers this is it. In some schools males have become almost an endangered species and the sighting of a man in a staffroom leads to a press release. I’m not sure whether the Executive has a cunning plan to deal with this problem. It’s a bit worrying that targets for recruitment are simply not being met and a worrying level of complacency seems to exist about the issue of recruitment. Colleagues, frankly, are worried. They are worried about dilution; about the importance of rigorous qualification; about the possibility of the extension of the rôle of classroom assistant. Forgive the repetition, but, yet again, we challenge the Executive to enter into a debate on the issue as soon as possible in an attempt to focus on the real extent of the problem and the need to provide mechanisms to ensure sufficient quality recruits come forward. Let’s put the record absolutely straight – we do not believe that this problem has been solved!

Finally, colleagues, it is with continued concern that the Association views the problem of Diet and Exercise in relation to the health of young people. It is without the least sense of modesty that I trumpet the work done by the Education Committee three years ago that looked at the issue of Diet and Young People. Our findings are in the policy document ‘Helping Children Achieve’, copies of which can be obtained from Dundas Street. The problem has got worse since then or perhaps our realisation of it has become more acute. The statistics are frankly depressing – Scottish children are the third fattest in Europe. One in ten children in Scotland aged twelve are classed as severely obese and one in three is overweight. Now it is beyond the limits of my address today to enter into a full analysis of the causes, consequences and solutions of childhood obesity but I would like to take the opportunity of making a number of observations. Much has been done in fairness to try to address the problem but the evidence is beginning to gather that school-based intervention programmes that encourage “healthy eating” are failing. Similarly, the Scottish Executive’s launching of the “healthy living” helpline generated fewer than a 1% contact in the nine months since its launch. That is not to rubbish these kinds of interventions. Rather I would attempt to create a context to support this Association’s concern about the diet and exercise crisis that is clearly upon us. That is why this Association is committed to the principle of free school meals and takes an acute interest in the Private Member’s Bill in the Scottish Parliament. That is also why this Association is concerned that against this backdrop schools all over the country install vending machines that provide the very products that our intervention programmes are attempting to discourage children from consuming. Personally, I regard this as nothing short of cynical hypocrisy and the response that one receives on raising this issue, and I have tried at various levels, betrays a scandalous disregard for the health of young people. Councillors, MSPs, Ministers of State, teachers, head teachers and education department officials, I’ve spoken to them all on this issue and all answer in the same way: “Schools need the money that comes from the profit on vending machines”. It’s at moments like these that I honestly do lose the will to go on! We have read carefully “Being Well, Doing Well”, the Executive’s clear position on establishing health promoting schools by 2007 and we support much of what is said in it. But how can we take seriously the message of “Being Well, Doing Well” when virtually everyone is prepared to turn a blind eye to schools delivering profit from the unrestricted sale of junk food to young people.

Sixty years making the difference! Quite an achievement, Congress, but it is an achievement that has been the result of the hard work, dedication, discipline and single-mindedness of our membership. Sometimes it is instructive to look back and remember the people, the campaigns, the victories and even the defeats - as someone once said, “Nostalgia is not what it used to be”.

Please, in the course of Congress, indulge yourselves and be nostalgic. However, I make a personal plea to you. Let’s look forward. Let’s look forward to the coming challenges and be confident that, even in apparent adversity, there will be victories. Congress, let’s help this Association make the difference for the next 60 years!