Barry Black: the intersection between education research and politics

Clearly one of the reasons that educational outcomes for young people who grew up in care are so bad is the instability and sometimes chaos that kind of foisted upon their lives. So I grew up in kinship care and being 'care experienced' more broadly was part of my childhood, but I always had this stability of a solid family unit.

I went to Causewayend Primary School which is just around the corner from where I still am in Aberdeen - although it was actually closed a couple of years after I left in a round of education cuts that led to schools being merged and primary schools getting bigger and bigger class sizes.

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Then I went to a high school here in Aberdeen called St Machar Academy. It is a school in one of the most deprived areas of Aberdeen and would have one of the most deprived catchments in all of Scotland. I received a fantastic education there and had a couple of teachers in particular that inspired my interest particularly and politics and society and sociology, and specifically around history and modern studies and those social subjects. I was incredibly lucky in that regard.

How was your experience of the education system growing up, and did it have any sort of impact on the work you are doing now?

It's not a shock to people to hear that I’m a bit of a geek and a nerd – you just take a wee look at me! – but I wasn’t always a straight-A student at all. My Standard Grade results were pretty poor actually including a four in maths, a five in French, and I think the only one I got a Credit in the old system was Modern Studies.

There are a few reasons for that and reflecting on these aspects of the education system has actually sparked my research interests.

One of them was in maths. I always thought I was bad a maths but it turns out we actually had about six or seven different supply teachers over the two years that I was studying Standard Grade. It was part of a recruitment challenge facing the school and actually speaks to the challenges that schools in deprived areas have in retaining staff. That obviously didn't occur to me at the time but reflecting back it became a pretty obvious issue. The fact I've now got a Master’s degree that includes statistics as a component of it kind of shows that maybe, you know, I'm better than a four in maths at Standard Grade would have suggested?

The other thing that happened during Standard Grades is I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which caused - and still continues to cause - a huge disruption to life. I didn't fully understand this at the time but reflecting back has really made me interested in the potential impact of disruption on young people in education. But I was lucky, I guess, that that happened during Standard Grades – I still had a chance to get better grades in fifth and sixth year when I went into doing Highers.

Barry Black's research looks into the biggest challenges facing Scottish schools today. (Image: Credit: Barry Black)

An area in which you have carried out quite a lot of research is subject choices for high school students, which isn’t necessarily a headline-grabbing issue for many people. What have you found and why do you think it matters?

A big part of my research has been focused on asking what are the influences on subject choices that young people face for the National 5s, Highers and Advanced Highers. What I found is that subject choices, particularly in S4 for National 5s, has reduced from where it was under the Standard Grade model. And that's particularly happened in poorer schools.

There are a few reasons why it matters. One is that we want young people to get as broad an education as possible, with broad experiences of different skills and different subject areas. But it also matters directly to what they want to do after school. So if you have less qualifications because you've managed to sit less courses it clearly has an impact on your ability to access university or college in terms of attaining qualifications.

But actually the fact that your subject choices will be narrower means that your experiences will be narrower, and that means that your perceptions of what you want to do will be narrower. It means that you are more strongly guided from a younger age into a certain path.

For many people, this is probably starting to sound quite political, and unlike some researchers you seem fairly comfortable entering a public and even a political space as part of your work. How do you see the role of politics in what you do?

Before I became a researcher in the sense of learning the skills at university and working on the PhD and doing research as part of making a living you know I was motivated by politics. There's no secret that I stood for the Labour Party a few times, and although I don't at the moment and haven't for some time, I've worked for the Scottish Labour party on education research and so on.

I would argue research can't be unbiased because we all have things that inspire our interest and motivate us to do the research that we do but I'd like to think that the research that I do isn't just for the sake of attacking a particular political party that's in government. It's actually about the system and inequalities in the system as a whole. Part of the output of that obviously becomes criticism of current policy as is, but where the research identifies that something needs to be criticised then that makes sense.

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The system is set up in a way that ingrains inequality and produces unequal outcomes, so we need research for the sake of creating that knowledge, but I don't think there's a problem with research as activism: to explore a wedge issues, highlight challenges and deliver change in a policy sense.

So you clearly don’t just see research as something neutral or aimless, but rather as something that can actually achieve things. What would you say is the purpose of your research and who are you trying to influence?

I feel quite privileged to have the platform that I've had over the past few years to get involved with debates around education, but I am always conscious that I'm not a teacher, so I want to keep my commentary in research and at the system and policy levels.

Teachers are the experts when it comes to delivering things in schools, so I always try and keep on the right side of that line, looking at education policy and pointing out issues, and maybe elevating the voice of teachers and young people. But in terms of what happens in classroom? Well I don’t have the expertise in that.

A lot of my research has focused on issues within the system, issues with curricular structure and so on. This is where we see the interaction between research and politics happen.

Who are the people in charge of these decisions, curriculum structures, resources, attainment funding, the amount of teachers? It's all politicians and it's all at Holyrood and in councils so that's a key group that you're trying engage with and influence with the work that I do because like a lot of system level, that's where the change can happen.

Finally, if I put you on the spot and ask about the biggest challenges in Scottish education, and the best way to improve things for young people, what would you say?

So the obvious challenge on a research level would be the outcomes for poorer young people – the difference in outcomes of attainment and the amount of qualifications that they'll leave school with – because clearly it is an incredible predictor of future life outcomes.

But actually I think a bigger issue has emerged. It's fairly clear that actually young people are still facing a huge amount of disruption at school, and the National Discussion kind of said that young people don't feel safe at school or that there's far too much disruption, bullying and discrimination that they face in school. You also hear from teaching unions that behaviour and disruption are a key issue, and that's particularly the case since the pandemic.

But I’ve also I've seen throughout my PhD research that teachers just inspire people every day to do different things: to be better, to try different stuff, to stick at it. We need to create an environment, and have education policy, where we actually just let teachers teach. One where there’s actually space and resources to allow teachers to do their jobs. Undoubtedly we would see better outcomes because every country that has a model that allows that has better outcomes.