Stewart Buchan
Tuesday 30 May 2006
The last Board meeting will be my last. Calum is off to The Grammar next term and we don't expect to meet as a board in June, emergencies excepted. So my thoughts have turned to those things that have changed during the seven years I've been a board member. And lots have but it was a piece on the news recently about boys' attainment being poorer than girls' that brought to mind a topic that has long been close to my heart and one which I brought to the Board a number of years ago, September 2001 to be precise, and it has been reported on, more or less annually, ever since.
Attainment at Campie is high but boys always do less well than girls in reading, writing and maths and in 2001 I wondered why. In 2006 I still do! Lots of plausible explanations were considered and various stategies implemented but still the gap rermained and then we focussed on the school's results: were the figures robust? did they show convergence? were they statistically significant? could they fairly be compared? What eventually dawned on me was that the original question, the difference between boys and girls, is far beyond the scope of a 90 minute monthly meeting, even if we discussed nothing else, so it was inevitable that we turned our attention to the figures as a kind of short hand and in that process learnt very little. Now, you may think this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, for a long while I certainly did, but for me it was resolved at a meeting last year when we were discussing this topic again and mooted the notion that the really important thing about attainment is its use as a measure of personal develpoment and the really important thing for a school to do is to promote personal development . It was a real turning point for me though looking back now I find it hard to imagine something similar not being said right form the begining. I think that what made a difference is the way in which that kind of thinking fits so well with the broader picture where the school's Development Plan is conceived as a plan to enable children to become 'successful learners, confident individuals, resposible citizens and effective contributors' and not a list of quality indicators, even if the aim was the same. So I am satisfied that while boys will be boys Campie PS is helping them to become the best boys that they can be.
