The one thing Scottish schools get caught out with

When it comes to inspections, there is one thing that schools get caught out with.

Because you tend to get two to three weeks’ notice of an inspection, the school will implement all these great things in the build-up to it so it functions really well, but inspectors will sit in focus groups with kids and say ‘you know that thing the teacher took you through at the beginning? Does that always happen or has that only been in the last month?’.

A pupil will say ‘oh no, that’s new’, and so the school gets caught out.

The good news for my school is that we thought this inspection was coming for three years. It’s now an excellent school, and I do anticipate a very positive inspection.

Don’t get me wrong, we are rushing to do some of the aesthetic stuff like getting nicer displays up on the wall, but in terms of what happens in a lesson one of the big things the kids are asked by inspectors is ‘what’s your level for English? What’s your writing and reading level?’.

They’re supposed to know all of that, and we’ve made it our business to normalise that. A typical lesson that we have here has an overarching aim, which is ‘what are we learning about today?’. Within that, you use the Scottish curriculum and Scottish Government stuff to build success criteria that should be related to levels.

For some reason, teachers have typically tried to hide this. When the criteria is levelled, the pupils are able to tell you by the end what level they think they’ve worked at. All of it is an accomplishment, but in my experience they get really into the idea of moving up a level.

It’s an incentive, but it isn’t baseless. If a child has reached Level Four by the end of their third year they’re going to go straight into their National 5 course. If they’ve not, they’ll do National 4 to get to Level Four. It’s meaningful, but for some reason they’ve always hidden that aspect.

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When I was a pupil, apart from knowing which spelling textbook I was on, I didn’t really know much about how I was ranked until the report cards came out.

When the inspections take place, there are a few quality indicators that they look for. A couple of them only really matter day-to-day to the leadership. The main one that they look for is quality of learning and teaching.

Everyone in that school will get observed, unless they are off sick. Everyone is going to be seen once.

There are more cynical teachers who don’t necessarily buy into the kind of things that they’re looking for, like the idea of every lesson having a clear aim and specific success criteria, but to me that just makes sense.

A child should walk into a lesson, no matter what it is, no matter how easy or difficult they find it and no matter what the subject is, and know what the teacher is wanting them to focus on today, and what they need to do to hopefully find some degree of success in that lesson.

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That’s the kind of transparency that was lacking for a lot of my education. You can debate the pros and cons of that until the cows come home, but it’s not about being overly prescriptive in terms of the minutiae of each lesson having to follow a certain template.

No matter what you do, whether it’s a fun, practical lesson or something quite theoretical and literature-heavy, there should be a clear outcome intended, and kids should know what it takes to be successful.