This article appears as part of The Secret Teacher newsletter.

I love my job, but it’s really challenging.

I put that challenge down to a clear crisis, in my eyes and in the eyes of every teacher I speak to, of leadership in Scottish schools. I just hope the new education minister Jenny Gilruth is up for the mammoth challenge that faces her in her new post. I don’t know if she’s a hillwalker but she’s got a mountain to climb.

I hope somewhere on her agenda she’s going to look critically, somehow, at the type of people being promoted, in recent years, in Scotland’s schools. That demographic has changed. Radically. It’s dominated – and that’s a fitting word – by ‘Yes Men’ (and ‘Yes Women’). I don’t mean folk who are in favour of Scottish independence, I mean often anti-intellectual people, who are totally opposed on every level, it seems, to rocking the educational boat.

The Herald:

As someone previously tasked with taking on whole school literacy, for example, the basic literacy levels among an increasing number of school leaders – depute head teachers – was and is frankly appalling. The fact is many struggle daily, and publish to the whole school daily, their struggle to construct a comprehensible, technically accurate email.

If I was assessing the literacy of these leaders via their email offerings, against Education Scotland’s standards and benchmarks, I would genuinely struggle to find evidence to formally place their writing level above much of the general pupil population, whose literacy development isn’t just my job but is the remit of leaders who seem ill-equipped to ‘lead’ much of anything but a chaotic and neglectful fiasco.

Every day pupils see staff literally being bullied and harassed by their own colleagues, and you’re then seeing a real correlation with spiralling levels of bullying in Scottish schools, because that’s the example being set by leaders. With many of the schools who are failing to deal with bullying, it’s because they’ve set that tone. That’s what they do.

All I hear in the media is ‘we have to deal with spiralling levels of pupil misbehaviour and bullying’, but you have to think what is the source of that, because it’s not happening in every school but there are spiralling levels of it in my view because there are spiralling levels of really poor leadership. 

In one school, as part of the attainment challenge, I took on literacy for the whole school. In another one, I took on Scots language. One school was introducing Scots language as a subject, distinct from English, so I was Scots language lead in that school and literacy lead. 

I wasn’t a ‘yes woman’, and I very much tried to implement change, and faced huge pushback in doing that. Just in terms of knowledge and understanding of leaders, when I tried to implement change in terms of Scots language, I had a headteacher who was telling me that they wanted Scots language introduced as a modern language. 

The Secret Teacher | 'Harassment, bullying and abuse of teachers... but not by students'

When I tried to point out to them that that didn’t really make sense because the fact is Scots predates standard English historically, and that’s what we’re teaching pupils in class, it doesn’t make sense then for the school to call it a modern language. 

They just refused to engage in any kind of intellectual debate whatsoever. There was no room for it. It was ‘this is what I’ve decided and this is what we’re doing’. I walked away from that school and walked away from that authority and took the Scots language program that I’d developed to the authority that I’m in now. I managed to see a benefit from what I was doing in that way, but I couldn’t challenge the leadership. 

I was one person trying to challenge a really, really authoritarian culture. It was impossible. 

Sign up for The Secret Teacher newsletter and receive a weekly update inside the staff room. You'll also get features like The Staff Room, Tweet of the Week, Quote of the Week and Today's Lesson included.

👉 Click to sign up