Improving Scottish Education

Quiet day again today. NABs with Advanced Higher, Revision with S4 and Higher and introduction to arable farming with S3.

I also took a phone call from a primary school trip that is having problems with their risk assessment for a school trip. They have come across an interesting problem and I am going to think creatively about the best way to get the activities they are proposing ‘green lighted’. More on this when I find out more details. I will describe the process that we go though on this blog as I think it will be of interest to other schools in East Lothian. I must also get round to setting up a school trips section in the resources section of exc-el web site.

There have been a number of publications from LTS, SEED and HMIe that have crossed my desk recently. Although I have read many of them electronically before, I only tend to get reminded of them when I receive a hard copy from the school. I am keen to pass comment all of the recent documentation and provide a teachers perspective on what I think they mean for Scottish Education.

The first document that I will comment about is the Spring 2006 HMIe Briefing letter. It is a special edition on the HMIe ‘Improving Scottish Education’.

Overall I enjoyed (sad isn’t it!) reading this document as it gave me a good insight into the inspection and education system at all school levels (pre-school, primary, secondary and special). I was also interested to read the sections on college and CLD (Community Learning & Development). I have to admit that I didn’t know that HMIe were involved in inspecting CLD.

The new Journey to Excellence Model looks interesting, see below:

Although I think I would prefer Learning and Teaching to permeate all parts of the model? For example:

I’m not sure and this is just an idea, what do you think? and how are we going to follow the journey to excellence in East Lothian schools? I guess I'll know more about it when I've finished reading all 127 pages of 'How Good is Our School: The Journey to Excellence'.

Elsewhere in the publication, it was also nice to see that Ken Muir had been promoted to Chief Inspector in Directorate 1. This looks like some job and has an interesting remit. Ken is a fellow Geographer that I know from SAGT meetings / conferences. Good luck Ken.

I also downloaded Graham Donaldson’s (Senior Chief Inspector) key note address PowerPoint presentation from the HMIe web site. One suggestion that I have is that I would have really liked to hear the presentation, how about an audio recording or video file of the keynote for the next big event?

One last point. Looking at the pictures on the back page of the publication I could spot a few familiar faces (including East Lothian’s own Gordon Brown – currently seconded to SEED). Most of the faces were other inspectors, quality improvement officers, directors of education, academics and LT Scotland Staff. Obviously I don’t pretend to know or recognise everyone in the photographs, but how many classroom teachers were at the launch event? How many NQTs? Surely these people are the most important in Improving Scottish Education?