Toxic culture sparks school strike threats! 

This headline,  referring to a fairly newly built Dumfries multi school complex, was recently drawn to my attention. Toxic culture seems a rather vague term and in discussion of the topic I suggested that a failure to properly manage problem pupil behaviour was often at the root of staff unrest, and in the subsequent back and forth of this conversation the problems arising from the experience of Covid, increasing defiance of some pupils in the face of teacher authority and  parents often weighing in to give support to their offspring all being reported. In a former era, a reflexive deference would have been more likely to kick in, with parents giving their backing to the school.

A teacher friend pointed out the pressures arising from a performance indicator driven culture. This is a top down system, put in place by educational leaders who have not been in front of a class for some time and, it was suggested, have not fully understood the shifting ground on which teachers are now operating. 

Way back in 2004 a Labour/LibDem coalition in the Scottish Parliament set in motion the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), a vision of a school curriculum which could be flexible and inclusive of all, regardless of background ability and inclination.  This developing project was adopted by the incoming SNP administration, under the leadership of Shona Hyslop, and finally implemented in 2010.

I became aware of the policy in 2007, when I was seconded to Dumfries and Galloway Council from Dumfries and Galloway College, to become, for two years, the More Choices More Chances Implementation Officer.  I thought the ambition  of the Curriculum for Excellence very pertinent indeed to the needs of the group of young people, not in employment, education or training, that  the More Choices More Chances initiative was trying to serve. CfE was, I thought,  a brave attempt to create a flexibility in the school curriculum which would meet the needs of all learners. The private sector often does this better for paying customers who will not accept a null outcome for their progeny, and so every effort is made to find what will engage an individual and allow them to develop.  This is not an argument for private education but rather an argument for the state to find a constructive way forward for every young person. 

Even in 2007 I could see  there was resistance in the secondary sector and amongst educational managers to the idealism embedded in the CfE. Later, when back in College, I had some experience of what may have been at the root of this disquiet. I had been assigned to the delivery of a Psychology Higher as part of the Schools-College link outreach. I went out to work in Kirkcudbright Academy, Dalbeattie High School  and Annan Academy to deliver the course as it was then structured.  There was something bargain basement about the whole deal, not  least  my own questionable qualification to deliver a course in  psychology at Higher level.  Anyway, I was willing, and mostly quite enjoying the experience of this teaching, but then I was made part of a College team to develop the new CfE version of Higher Psychology, which gave much more freedom to students to come up with their own projects and do their own research. I was an enthusiast. 

Suffice to say, the College was a bit ahead of the game so far as this development was concerned, but when I started to deliver the new Higher, I met with a lot of pupil resistance, and in one case, something of a rebellion. I’ll spare you the unsavoury details.  “Just give us the answers,” I think is a fair summary of what my classes were saying. Perhaps seduced by the glamour of the subject, they had mostly signed up as a way of getting an extra higher in one year through a programme of rote learning. One member of my class even spoke about wanting to do a “crash higher.” She was not at all happy about the demands that the CfE Higher appeared to be making. Some pupils responded really well, but mostly these were the smartest and best motivated. Others really hated it. The idea that psychology could be studied on the basis of a personal interest and enquiry into the subject had no appeal for these students whatsoever.  

I could see that an anxiety about passing exams underlay this resistance to the CfE, but that there were ambitious parents in the background, also concerned about this new direction of travel, which they probably perceived as wishy-washy, woke, nonsense. And then of course there were the school teaching staff, already lining up to call a halt to the whole exercise and not entirely displeased to witness my struggles.

I modified my approach in subsequent years, pulling the delivery back to something more aligned with the students’ learning experience in their schools. For all of this compromise, my perception was that some students really got a lot out of this more flexible delivery. I came to enjoy teaching the new CfE Higher, but the positive student engagement was not consistently matched by favourable exam outcomes. Constructive participation in the weekly class discussion and activities was not always  enough to raise the standard of the project submitted for assessment and performance in the end of course grade examination.  There was no place for the highly commended I would have liked to award many of these students who were left with nothing for their commitment. 

I retired at the beginning of the pandemic and don’t know what has happened to the CfE in the meantime. Technology has moved on a great deal since it was introduced in 2010. So much now can be learnt independently online, whether it’s how to fix your mower with a YouTube video presented by someone in the USA or Bulgaria, or learning a language with Duolingo or a podcast. And now AI is about to further upturn the apple-cart. If I’d had ChatGPT when I was in school, I’d have been using it to do my maths problems and write my essays – more time for football don’t you know!  Let’s face it. The role of the teacher as we knew it in those days, before a fully developed Internet and the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, is gone.

I stand by my enthusiasm for the Curriculum for Excellence but the time has now come, in the light of these new tools, to completely rethink education, particularly so, in the secondary and further education sectors. 

Endnotes

Featured image generated with WordPress AI.

BBC News Industrial action threat over school’s ‘toxic culture’

Curriculum for Excellence https://education.gov.scot/curriculum-for-excellence/

Billy Dodds

Billy Dodds is always chattering

About the folk that he’s been battering

He would give a hen a kicking

Just to prove he isna chicken.

Verse written about a pupil in Elmbank, Lovers Walk, Dumfries, when I was a special needs auxilliary there back in the late 1980s. Elmbank took in excluded pupils from a number of secondary schools in Dumfries and Galloway. Billy Dodds is not the real name of the pupil who was this inspiration for this verse.

Here’s a verse, written in less than 10 seconds, by CHATGPT, to the instruction: Write a four line verse about a teenager who boasts about his fighting abilities. I think mine’s better by the way, but that’s not quite the point.

In the alley shadows, he struts with pride,
Claims he’s a champ, never backs down from a fight.
With fists like thunder, he’s quick to ignite,
But deep down, he knows it’s just talk in the night