I’ve just had a very positive meeting with some senior colleagues from Queen Margaret University. The new QMU  has just been built in East Lothian and has been named as one of the top 10 modern universities by the Sunday Times Good University Guide. It’s mission statement reads as follows:

I’ve been working on a letter to go out to all members of staff at the beginning of the new term.  It started off being a list of “must dos” but as I reflected on how I would have responded to such a letter if I were still a teacher I moved to try to capture the essence of the approach which we have tried to follow over the last few years.  It’s best expressed in the recent Building the Curriculum 3: Framework for Learning and Teaching

“Establishments have freedom and responsibility to meet the needs of children and young people in their local communities”

In line with that very powerful statement this draft letter sets out to stimulate thinking, dialogue and the development of practice.  Does it hit the mark?

Dear Colleague

A Curriculum for Excellence in East Lothian

I wrote to you last summer outlining our implementation strategy for A Curriculum for Excellence in East Lothian, which is firmly based upon improving the quality of learning and teaching.

At the beginning of the last session I pledged to spend a day and half each week visiting classrooms in order to focus our attention upon the importance of the learning and teaching process

Over the last year I’ve had the privilege of observing practice in almost every school in East Lothian.  A comment from my Learning Log captures something of what I observed:

“One thing has become abundantly clear to me over the last few weeks - we have wonderful teachers in our schools! The creativity, passion and commitment to what they are doing with young people are common features of every school I’ve visited.”

My impression is supported by schools’ own self-evaluation in this area. Yet it’s a mark of our determination to set high standards that few schools are satisfied with their current practice - especially in relation to the level of consistency across the school. 

Our key focus last year was to “learn from each other” and the range and extent of partnership events that have enabled colleagues from nursery, primary and secondary schools to work together have been remarkable.

It was during one of my visits to Preston Lodge High School that a pupil summed up the true notion of progression and how we must build upon what has gone before when she described the practice in the department as follows:

“They take what we know and help us learn more” Natalie

The most recent publication from the Scottish Government entitled “Building a Curriculum for Excellence 3: A Framework for Learning and Teaching” sets out in more detail than previously how schools and authorities should seek to progress over the next four years.  A key dimension of that guidance is the concept of freedom and responsibility that encourages schools to adopt a flexible approach, which meets local needs and changing circumstances.

East Lothian Council’s approach to the Curriculum for Excellence adopts a similar perspective whereby schools and clusters are to be encouraged and supported to find solutions that meet local circumstances that enable every child to achieve and attain within a coherent 3-18 educational experience

Nevertheless, within this flexible strategy there are some key imperatives that will characterise how we progress over the next few years.  I’ve set these key points out as a series of questions as they might help to provide some context for the work going on in your own classroom, school and cluster.

In the coming session it will be my pleasure to chair the Curriculum for Excellence Steering Group.  A key part of my responsibility will be to visit schools to learn how A Curriculum for Excellence is being implemented in the classroom, the school and the cluster.  I would ask that individual teachers, schools and clusters to reflect upon the following questions in order to continue to develop our Curriculum for Excellence within a local context.

It is my sincere hope that by building upon the existing good practice in East Lothian that we can develop a curriculum that meets the needs and aspirations of our children and our community.

I look forward to discussing these questions with you over the coming year.

Kind Regards

Don Ledingham

Acting Director of Education and Children’s Services

East Lothian - A Curriculum for Excellence - Building our Curriculum

Values:

• Can you identify all those things that you do to help children feel as if they are valued as individuals and “belong” to their school community?

Learning, Teaching and Assessment:

• How do you adopt engaging, enterprising and active learning approaches in a variety of contexts to promote effective learning ?

• How do you enable personalisation and choice within the learning and teaching situation?

• Where do you involve learners in planning and reflecting on their own learning, through formative assessment, self and peer evaluation and personal learning planning?

• How do you know how learners are progressing in relation to their own targets and others in their school, authority and different parts of the country, against the outcomes and experiences at different levels?

• How well do your transition procedures operate between all stages of learning to ensure a smooth, seamless transfer with continuity of learning and teaching approaches and appropriate progression? How could you best develop these procedures?

• In what ways do you ensure that children (and parents/carers) are partners in the learning process?

Literacy, Numeracy, and Health and Well-Being:

• How can you develop your individual and collective approaches to learning and teaching to ensure that you contribute to the development of these key skills and attributes across the curriculum?

Skills for Life, Work and Learning:

• Can you identify explicit examples of how you have embedded learning, which place an emphasis on real-world and employability skills that will be made use of in future working life?

• How might you overcome the planning and delivery implications of providing young people with opportunities and support to stay in learning after 16?

• How do you ensure good partnership working to deliver skills for life and skills for work?

• Does your school have clear, robust processes in place for ensuring that all young people completing compulsory education have an offer of an appropriate pathway for post-16 learning?

Curriculum Areas and Subjects:

• How can you cluster experiences and outcomes into meaningful groupings to provide appropriate and exciting contexts for learning?

• How can you best plan opportunities for learners to progress within levels through deepening learning and understanding within a curriculum area?

• What possibilities do you see for developing curriculum structures for S1 to S3 to ensure breadth and depth of study?

• How would you develop your curriculum framework to ensure opportunities for collaborative working across curriculum areas?

• How would you develop a balance between subject-based learning and interdisciplinary learning?

• What strategies need to be adopted to embed literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing across the curriculum

Scottish Contexts:

• How do you take account of Scottish contexts, Scottish culture and Scotland’s history and place in the world in your curriculum planning?

Opportunities for Personal Achievement:

• How could you develop partnership working to build a shared picture of achievement particularly in literacy and numeracy which made use of a variety of partners?

Personal Support:

• How might you develop your existing structures to provide the personal support that will help young people plan their learning in the most appropriate way?

• What additional support might vulnerable young people, including looked after children and young people and care leavers, need? How could you involve other learning partners e.g. Community Learning and Development, voluntary agencies etc. in supporting your young people?

• How do you ensure a smooth transition from one stage of learning to another for your most vulnerable young people, including your looked after children? How could you best develop this?

Principles of Curriculum Design

• Do you think you spend sufficient time on discussing learning, explaining it to others, applying what has been learned in different contexts, spending time to probe and research in order to promote a depth to learning?

• How do you ensure that activities provide appropriate support and challenge to enable young people to develop as independent and cooperative learners?

• What opportunities are there for staff to work collaboratively to review and plan structured and balanced programmes?

• How well do you plan the delivery of interdisciplinary learning using experiences and outcomes across curricular areas to provide a coherent curriculum?

• What support will be required to help make informed decisions about allowing learners to progress between levels at appropriate points?

• How would you develop your curriculum framework to ensure opportunities for collaborative working across curriculum areas?

• What are the key partnerships you have with other agencies or groups, which support the delivery of the curriculum?

 Flickr - landofnod

Back to work today after a great two week holiday without any contact with the web.  It’s been the longest time I’ve been disconnected for over three years and I can’t say I missed it.

Having said that there have been lot of ideas floating around my head over this period and I look forward to trying to post about them over the next few weeks.

It was a pleasure to get an e-mail from Sarah Ebner who has just started a parental perspective blog entitled School Gate for Timesonline. It set me to thinking again why - or it certainly seems that way to me -  that it’s always mums who seem to blog about education from a parental point of view.  Where are all the dads??? 

As Director I also have a major corporate responsibility as a member of the Board of Directors, alongside the other directors and the chief executive.  It’s this area that has perhaps the greatest potential for seeing a change in the way that we do things in East Lothian.  For example, we have agreed following our recent Managers Conference to revise our corporate plan to consider things in a much more thematic approach than simply from a service perspective.  For example, by considering the corporate parenting agenda as a theme we can begin consider how each of the discrete services can work together more effectively to provide a service which has a positive impact on the lives of Looked After and Accommodated Children - as opposed to one where the needs of the individual service took precedence over the needs of the child.

As a Director I also play a key role in the interface with the elected administration through working closely with the convener pf education and children’s services and other senior members of the administration in assisting them to fulfil their democratically elected agenda. The range and number of meetings can be a burden in terms of the time required but this is a necessary outcome of democratic accountability if we are to ensure that local government is properly managed and effectively delivered.

I’m also heavily involved in developing our strategy and practice in relation to the integration of various services to ensure that we work together effectively to meet the needs of young people and families.  As the chair of the Chief Officers group which includes senior representatives from education, police, health, the voluntary sector, children’s services and elected members we have begun to see a more connected approach to planning and the use of limited resources.  One of the exciting dimensions of this approach is our emerging strategic emphasis on Early Year and Parenting.  I have used this concept as a prism through which to reflect upon all aspects of our practice - that is not to say that everything that we do can be explicitly connected to early years or parenting - but that it’s a useful process through which we can begin to align resources and our practice to make substantive , long-term impact on the lives of children who otherwise would be trapped by the generational cycle of disengagement and poor outcomes which can afflict so many families.

In addition to these long term agendas there are of course the wide range of day-to-day issues which can land on my desk as the person with whom the “buck stops” - in many ways these are the bread and butter of my job but there does remain a danger that they can draw you into that cycle of “fixing things” - a phenomenon I recently wrote about - as opposed to considering the underlying issues which often underpin the day-to-day problems. This does require a disciplined approach if I am not to get lost in the detail and keep myself focused upon the bigger picture - which doesn’t always happen.  To that extent I think the role of this Learning Log is absolutely crucial as it’s the one of the few times in my working week when I have the freedom to explore ideas, reflect upon my work and consider the “opposite worlds” which might provide a more fruitful outcome than our current practice which can so dominate our lives.

Looking forwards I reckon I also have key role to sustain and support my colleagues who are dealing with issues at a face-to-face level with our customers - our senior leaders in schools and children’s services face innumerable challenges and do so in such positive and professional manner which explains why our respective services are of such a high standard. Nevertheless, such challenges inevitably take their toll which is why it is my intention in the coming year to work with my colleagues at a much closer personal level by regularly visiting them on site, attempting to understand their problems and offering my support both in a practical sense and in a longer-term strategic manner to change the way in which we do things.

Our son - Doug - is currently out in Australia playing rugby and generally having a tremendous time (I’m not really envious!). In the past week he’s been staying with Mark Walker’s  family in Melbourne.

I met Mark out in Harvard last summer and we struck up a great rapport.  He’s doing some very innovative work at Elsterwick Primary School where he is living out his professional life a reflective professional dedicated to improving the quality of learning and teaching in his school - whilst still retaining his innate sense of fun.

I enjoy reading Mark’s blog and realising that the challenges we face in Scotland are not as unique as we might think. I can’t really thank Mark and his family enough for showing such exceptional hospitality to our son.   

Perhaps Doug summed it up in one of his texts home when he said ”They are great people”.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been continuing to exploring the concept of school based management.

Some authorities in Scotland have implemented the concept of Learning Communities based around the secondary school  and the local primary schools, Glasgow runs New Learning Communities, Falkirk has Integrated learning communities and South Lanarkshire has Learning Communities.

Each of these schemes has very positive features, most notably in relation to the integration of other services to support vulnerable children and to co-ordinate developments across local schools.

However, there would appear to be scope to develop these schemes by exploring further devolution of budgetary control and employment of staff within the community of schools.

I haven’t been able to find many international examples of such a development aside from on in Madagascar which might suggest that such a idea is not that practical but in the interests promoting a dialectic of possible worlds I thought I might take the Learning Community concept and extend it to community-based management of schools.

Would it be possible for a local authority to establish a concordat with a group of local primary schools and their associated secondary school and devolve all budgets to a Learning Community Board of Management? 

A Head Teacher from the schools would take on the position of Chief Operating Officer.  The Board of Management would have representatives from the parents, staff, local community, elected members, health service, police, community learning and social services.

The biggest problem I see with this idea is the fear from some schools that they get subsumed within a larger community and lose their identity.  Yet the potential for every member of staff being employed by the Learning Community and the possibility of using the collective resources in much more coherent manner than at present might allow real progresss to made on promoting education as a true progression from 3-18 and the associated ownership of the school and the wider educational agenda by the local community.

This morning I met with colleagues from our Cultural Services Department to discuss how we might promote the East Lothian Council’s commitment to:

“Embed Scottish history, culture and heritage throughout school life and make every effort to support Scotland’s languages - both Gaelic and Scots.”

The associated outcome that schools have to work towards is:

“All children and young people will be able to demonstrate an appropriate knowledge of Scottish culture, history and heritage at key stages in their school careers.”

Obviously such an outcome still triggers further questions about what might constitute “appropriate knowledge” and what do we mean by “key stages” but over the next year we will be fleshing this out with the help of staff in schools.

Nevertheless, it does provide a stimulus for schools to begin to try to explore these areas for themselves.

Our discussion this morning focused upon the huge amount of work already going on in schools, which would link, to Scottish culture, history and heritage. The challenge for us is to find a way of tying this together into a coherent set of experiences that will fulfil our desire to give children a robust knowledge of their cultural heritage - without adding yet another layer of the curriculum to schools at a time when we are trying to declutter.

It was during this discussion that I recalled something that one of our quality Improvement Officers had brought back from a study visit to Oslo last year. On her return Valerie Irving had described a wide range of interesting elements of what’s going on in Norwegian education but the item which caught everyone’s imagination was the concept of the “Cultural Rucksack”. This metaphorical construct is used to ensure that children are acquainted with Norwegian Art and Culture and as they go through the education system they collect these experiences and place them in their rucksack.

We wondered this morning of we could establish a Scottish Cultural, History and Heritage “Rucksack” where young people would be entitled to have a number of personal experiences throughout their school career which provided them with a framework upon which they can develop their understanding of their country.

So what might go into such a rucksack? Here are some ideas for starters:

I have visited a Scottish Castle.
I can dance five Scottish dances.
I have attended a Burns Supper.
I can speak some Gaelic.
I have visited a Pictish fort.
I can recite a Scottish poem from memory.
I can cook oatcakes.
I can describe a famous Scottish battle.
I have a favourite Scottish historical character and can tell you all about them.
I can tell you about a former Scottish industry and why it has declined.

These are just a few examples but you can begin to how see we could establish a wider range of learning experiences - in an inter-disciplinary manner - which could help promote a true awareness and appreciation  of their country’s culture, history and heritage. The exciting thing about this approach is that it allows schools to make best use of their local  environment.

Would it work?

Every educational leader, regardless of position, has to wrestle with the powerful temptation to intervene or to meddle in the business of those whom they manage. The logic is fairly simple - “I’m being paid to manage and to be accountable for the work of others - so it’s reasonable that I take action in order to ensure that the desired outcome is achieved.” Maybe it’s something to do with the Scottish work ethic that we feel there’s a need, in the inimitable words of Billy Connolly, to “dae sumthin”.

It’s perhaps one of the most addictive elements of management - “I can fix this” - as the manager learns to solve the problem through direct action. Unfortunately the hidden cost of such behaviour is that it helps to create a dependency culture as everyone comes to know that any problem belongs to the manager - and that the manager will “sort it”.

The ironic consequence of such a relationship is that it leads to dissatisfaction from both sides, i.e. the manager complains that people don’t accept the responsibility which goes with being a professional; and the managed complain that the manager is always interfering with solutions, policies and structures which run directly counter to their ability to do their job.

Yet to challenge such orthodoxy is much more difficult than one might imagine. The pressure to conform to the traditional role of the manager is almost overwhelming. Not to take action, is to be seen to be indecisive, lazy, cowardly, unimaginative or simply not being up to the job. In a similar vein the manager’s own boss has expectations about effective management behaviour and in many cases is expecting the manager to come up with a plan of action that is, most probably proactive, innovative and definitive. It’s this latter adjective which is the most telling in terms of the relationship between the manager and the managed. The definition of the word “definitive” in this sense is “final and unable to be questioned or altered”. In a sense this form of manager’s plan is the Holy Grail, that is something that can be passed on to others and is implemented without question.

Of course, things are never as simple as that for as we know others must carry out the manager’s plan and there exists “many a slip twixt lip and cup”, especially if the “managed” do not fully subscribe to the manager’s solution. It’s into this educational Middle-earth that the manager’s initiatives and centralised plans are launched only to be subverted, modified or ignored. And so it goes on with managers having to conform to their role by taking action, to which they are probably addicted anyway, and the managed expecting the action, criticising if no action is taken, but being free to criticise the action as they have played no part in it’s development.

So how might we help managers escape from the tyranny of the need to always “dae sumthin” in the face of a perceived problem? Perhaps a starting point might be for local authorities to shift from being action focused, i.e. we will implement, act, do; to becoming outcome focused and supporting and enabling the schools to work out the most appropriate action for themselves.  The reality is that what works well in one school is not necessarily the best solution in another school. Yet the pressure to work out the universal solution and to implement it across an entire council is difficult to resist – particularly for those of us who have been addicted to taking action throughout our careers. That’s not to say that local authorities should never seek to implement an action across all schools but at the very least there should be a loop where we ask ourselves if our preferred course of action empowers or disempowers our colleagues in schools.

Nevertheless, Scottish education does appear to be thirled to the idea of “daen things”.  It would be a brave person who wouldn’t back a highly technical, carefully managed and comprehensive plan to implement a course of action across every school in an authority, against a strategy which placed the decision about what type of action to take in the hands of the individual school.

I watched one of my favourite films this evening. Kes made a big impact on me when I first saw this film as 13 year-old. I remember laughing and crying in equal measure and it's interesting to reflect upon how much it might have influenced me throughout my career.

As a former PE teacher and Head Teacher I’d like to think I didn’t conform to these stereotypes - but perhaps I’m not best placed to judge.