Four big ideas for our schools

Scottish education is not short of impasses at the moment. What do we do about teachers' pay and conditions? How do we finance higher education? How do we stop school examination reforms collapsing in chaos? Should we start teaching tiny children even earlier than we do now?

The dilemmas seem to pose impossible challenges to a system that is allegedly stagnant and introspective. How do we ensure that Scottish education takes up the most interesting international ideas - about, say, emotional intelligence; or about the educational role of the family and the community; or about varying teaching styles to respect the diverse learning styles of pupils?

All this creates a sense of crisis. And it's not alleviated when politicians and some segments of the press stomp around claiming to know what is wrong and what to do about it.

But are we looking at all this in the wrong way? What if the really important things about Scottish education are being ignored by commentators - although not by the thousands of learners and teachers who make the system work day after day? Could a fuller understanding of the strengths of Scottish education actually provide a more durable way forward?

Four ideas might give us a better way in: flexibility, traditions, social capital, national autonomy. The first of these is invoked by educational policy makers all the time. The others don't usually make an appearance in this discussion. But they should, because they are the key to unlocking the first.

We are told that teachers' conditions have to be radically altered to achieve flexibility. Let's just think for a minute about what teachers already do. They teach groups of enormously varied ability. They teach large groups and small ones. They handle technology that ranges from the latest web browser to simple chalk. They also have to understand and respond to the surging and contradictory emotions of children and adolescents: their rebelliousness, their trust, their anti-socialness, their generosity, their selfishness, their amazement at newness.

They, as a profession, have to respond flexibly and promptly to daily edicts from on high - from headteachers, education directors, school inspectors and government officials. And they have to do all this while being told that they cannot.

The truth is that teachers are already as flexible as any other professionals, and far more so than most of their detractors. It is what inspires them. They are flexible because their fundamental motivation is helping students to learn.

They stay in their underpaid and denigrated jobs because there are few things more wonderful than helping someone take the step from confusion to enlightenment. You can't do that dozens of times a week, thousands of times a year, unless you are already infinitely flexible in the ways that really matter.

So flexibility is a natural part of every teacher's daily practice. Compared to this, the current management mantra of job flexibility is a bureaucratic weed: the outward form of something that simply cannot be legislated for. What our education system really needs are resources and conditions that allow teachers to do well what they already do - enable diverse learners to learn - and to attract into the profession more people who would be inspired by that.

Of course they need more staff and more time to think and prepare. Not indiscriminately, however. They need support staff to allow the main class teacher to concentrate on teaching, not photocopying or sorting computers. They need extra teachers to allow small groups of pupils to be taught intensively on things that excite them. They need proper means of dealing with the behavioural and emotional problems of many of the children. Enough specialist and auxiliary staff, that is, to prevent persistent offenders from disrupting the learning of the majority and, where possible, to reform the offenders so that they can learn too. And they need drastically smaller classes - not the slight reductions proposed at present, but class sizes cut in half.

Unless we start recognising that teachers are already astonishingly flexible, hard working, and - despite everything - idealistic about the students in their care, then we will be condemning Scottish education to decades of creeping demoralisation and decay.

Teaching the whole child flexibly and broadly - emotions as well as intellect, social responsibility as well as individual development - is not new. In Scotland, it is our dominant educational tradition, a tradition that continues to shape us.

It involves breadth. Long before there was any talk of a core curriculum, Scottish philosophers were saying that no society can afford to let its citizens disappear into specialised black holes. It involves intellect.

Contrary to the philistine spirit of much current educational theory, the main Scottish tradition valued analytical rigour and asserted that most people, given the right opportunities, were capable of it.

And - in case these first two were tempted into aridity - the Scottish educational traditions also valued experience. Or wisdom. Or human understanding.

Now, this is not some fusty attempt to attach current debates to ancient footnotes. These traditions of breadth never died: indeed, they ensured that we avoided the bitter controversies over a common curriculum that have dogged these debates in England and the USA. Our controversies have been about resources - about how to achieve a common curriculum - not about the principle.

The tradition of learning by experience has meant that child- centred teaching methods have been adopted with little difficulty here since the 1960s, but the tradition of respecting intellect ensured that they were taken on board judiciously (and claims to the contrary simply ignore the Scottish evidence). That's one reason why attainment in school examinations has steadily - not alarmingly - increased.

Our traditions allow Scotland to draw on its own resources when responding to international currents of educational thought. One example: Scottish teachers have been developing what we now call "emotional intelligence" in their pupils for a long time - and Scottish philosophers have been thinking about it for two centuries. Developing self-confidence has been Scottish education's most important interpretation of child-centredness. As a result, Scottish pupils today are far more articulate and socially adept than their predecessors.

The point of mentioning the traditions is not to wallow in them. It is to suggest that adopting the most advanced educational ideas is not impossible, because - at the level of the classroom - they can be interpreted as sensible developments of existing good practice. The common sense of the system already contains them.

Teaching for democracy - how to be good citizens in a healthy community - is much in vogue. But again, it's always been part of Scottish reality. There has always been a strand in the educational traditions which celebrated the social purposes of education. That is one reason why Scotland's system of comprehensive secondary schools works well. They promote high attainment, they narrow the gaps between social classes by levelling upwards, and they forge the bonds of community more enduringly than any amount of government exhortation could ever achieve.

Teachers take on a remarkable range of leadership roles in local communities: they are deeply embedded in civic life in ways that politicians can only envy. Within that overall civic strength, Catholic schools have a lot to teach the rest of the system. In Scotland as elsewhere, they are particularly good at making what academics now call "social capital" - the basic resources of trust and common standards which a society needs to function.

But it's not just about religion. By refusing to remove schools from local authority control, Scottish communities showed that they share that sense of trust more widely. They also show they share it when they repeatedly tell social surveys that they respect teachers and schools much more than they respect politicians (and journalists).

The point is - again - not just to celebrate what Scots teachers, pupils, parents and communities already achieve. It is also to indicate their openness to change. If we want our schools to create socially responsible citizens, don't start by saying they don't do so already. They can do more only because they have already done so much.

Scottish education can change because it already knows how. It is already flexible. It has - within its own living traditions - the seeds of what needs to be done. But the future of education is not a technical matter. It is intimately tied up with the extent of our national autonomy - political, economic and cultural.

We need to ensure teachers are freed-up and able to respond to the broad goals society sets and not always constrained to respond to the latest detailed prescriptions from politicians. We also need to ensure education receives cleverly targeted resources so we can unleash the creativity teachers struggle to exercise in current conditions.

More resources do indeed mean more tax. That cannot happen unless Scottish fiscal policy becomes rather more independent than it can be now. We should insist that taxation is not the same as profligacy. It's a form of investment through redistribution - an investment which, by creating a strong community through education, also benefits those who pay most.

Further change also requires that the national community learns to think of its own traditions as containing a rich stock of adaptable educational ideas. One of the first lessons a good teacher learns is to start from the knowledge of the learner, because only on that basis is development possible. If our governing politicians want to improve Scots education, then they should pay more attention to what Scottish education has already successfully done.

And they had better recognise that all the aspirations they claim to have for it - flexible, innovative, world-class - have never ceased to be the everyday hope of Scottish teachers.

Lindsay Paterson is Professor of Education at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Autonomy of Modern Scotland.

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