Professor Louise Hayward, University of Glasgow and Professor John McKendrick, Glasgow Caledonian University, will be honoured at this year’s AGM with EIS Fellowships for their sterling services to Scottish education, equality and social justice. Here, they offer their perspectives on Scottish education, its many successes, and the significant challenges that it continues to face.

Building a Better Place

Louise Hayward is Professor of Educational Assessment and Innovation at the University of Glasgow. She was a member of the internationally renowned Assessment Reform Group and is currently a member of the Curriculum, Assessment and Pedagogy Educational Reform Group and the International Symposium on Formative Assessment. Louise has a particular interest in assessment and social justice.

I guess it is only natural towards the end of your career in education to look back. For me, making education fairer has been a driving force. The language changes, social justice, equity, inclusion, getting it right for every child….and for those who have very long memories…every child is special.

Yet, underpinning all these terms is a desire to make education a better place for every learner- a desire to build learning environments where every learner gets a decent life chance.

Taking a step back from the frenetic world that is Scottish Education makes you think. In my view, we sometimes take things for granted in Scotland which perhaps we might value more. For example, the fact that we care about equity, and constantly strive to create fairer educational experiences, is not something to be assumed. Often, we don’t get it right and sometimes we act in ways that seem at odds with that aspiration, but I would far rather live and work in a country that has equity as an aspiration than one where inequity is an accepted norm.

The fact that so many of us care about equity is something to be celebrated. Poverty is a cancer that destroys aspirations and opportunities. Early years centres, schools and colleges, teachers and lecturers do more than might reasonably be expected of them to dismantle the barriers that many children and families face every day of their lives. They fight to give every leaner a decent life chance. Many national organisations also demonstrate commitment to social justice. It is core to the work of the EIS.

The fact that so many of us care about equity is something to be celebrated.

For example, the innovative PACT programme, a partnership between the EIS and the Scottish Government demonstrated what is possible when people are willing to work together to ‘empower teachers and schools in minimising the damage that poverty does to the education and life-chances of too many of Scotland’s children’.

Originally, what stimulated my interest in assessment was the realisation that assessment was one of the biggest barriers to equity. The Assessment is for Learning Programme (AifL) changed thinking about assessment as principally a means to judge or categorise learners, to an approach where evidence could be used to support and enhance all children and young people’s learning progress.

The way in which AifL was developed also mattered. AifL brought together all those who had roles to play in changing assessment and provided opportunities for them to work collaboratively; to develop assessment approaches that could work in different ways in different educational settings. In many ways the approach taken to AifL was a blueprint for the design of the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment.

For in the development of AifL, and later Curriculum for Excellence, the reform of qualifications was unfinished business. Report after report highlighted problems in our current qualifications system in practice; narrowing of the curriculum, subjects perceived to be in silos, teaching to tests that relied heavily on memory, constant rehearsal for examinations, problems with progression, achievements by some learners valued less…. When I started teaching, parity of esteem for academic and vocational qualifications was an aspiration; more than 40 years later, it still is.

I used to believe that there was a natural order to change. First vision, then curriculum, then pedagogy and only then assessment and qualifications. Now, I am less sure. They are all so interdependent that thinking about one necessarily means considering the others. The important thing is to make a start.

Qualifications drive much of what goes on in schools and should reflect what matters in the curriculum. Thus, rather than driving the negative behaviours previously described, they should encourage the kinds of educational experience we would want for every learner. That was the basic premise of the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment.

The idea of a graduation certificate (Scottish Diploma of Achievement) offers opportunities to begin to tackle parity of esteem, to recognize the achievements of all learners, to reduce (NOT remove) an over-dependence on one way of gathering evidence, the examination, to recognize far more of what learners achieve in education in and out of school, and to link that to lifelong learning.

Although amongst many there is frustration at the pace of change, things are happening. Qualifications are being reviewed and, in some cases, redesigned. The Curriculum is under review using a collaborative model very similar to that developed in IRQA.

Schools in different parts of the country are developing new approaches to project learning, finding practical ways to realise ideas and to think about the implications of Artificial Intelligence. Some local authorities are developing pilots of Diplomas of Achievement and are involving those who use qualifications to ensure the wider credibility for these qualifications. Examples, developed in the real world of today, discussed and shared with others, are helping to build an evidence base.

This evidence will support policy makers, practitioners and researchers who are determined to work together to transform Scotland’s approach to qualifications and its commitment to equity as an idea to become educational experiences that are truly more equitable for every learner. As I pass the baton to the next generation, that is something worth fighting for.

Back to Basics for an Equitable Education

Professor John H. McKendrick is a longstanding EIS member and enthusiastic supporter of the PACT programme. He was delighted to be nominated for an Honorary Fellowship of the EIS in 2025. He is also Co-Director of the Scottish Poverty and Inequality Research Unit, and Commissioner for Fair Access.

Fear not, the title of this thinkpiece is not suggestive that what follows is a plea for teachers to focus on the 3Rs, or the myopic pursuit of a knowledge-rich curriculum, or even a return to corporal punishment (or at least much greater use of suspension and exclusion of unruly pupils). Such simple solutions to perceived problems may be popular among some – notably those who are skeptical of the pursuit of equity in education – but our dismissal of these solutions does not mean that the problems they seek to address do not exist. Rather, in some ways, our pursuit of equity in education is not serving us well, and it is time for a back-to-basics reorientation of our purpose.

What I am proposing might be described as a relational capability approach to learning well. This would mean a shift in what we value and what we do:

• Shifting the focus away from outcomes (what pupils attain or achieve) toward processes (creating and delivering a rich learning environment)
• Creating the conditions through which learners and teachers would have the capacity to achieve what they value in learning and teaching
• Acknowledging the complexity of what is required in order for us to learn and teach well, and avoiding seeking universal explanations that attribute effect to direct cause.
• Owning and tackling our contributions to problems.

Waffle and idealism, I hear you say. Let me try to convince any naysayers with some concrete examples of how we are not learning well, in our pursuit of positive outcomes and educational equity.

• Higher education creates problems for the school system by under-investing in recruitment decision-making. Mechanistic deployment by HEIs of grades (even when they are contextualised in the pursuit of equity) leads to a pre-occupation with grades and qualifications in the senior phase of school, and some highly questionable practices. Allow me an anecdote: this school year, my daughter’s Art teacher announced that the class would now be focusing on graphics for their design work in Nat 5 Art, after she learned that last year’s pupils achieved higher marks for graphic design work, compared to the physical design work that they were intending to pursue.
  
• The school system creates problems for higher education. Traditionally, the transition to higher education involved the challenge of adjusting to life as an independent learner: now the challenge is trying to encourage students to value the pursuit of knowledge and not learning for assessment/grades. HEIs are complicit in this problem by placing greater emphasis on what is required to pass assessment, as opposed to what is required to learn well.
  
• Higher education creates problems for the school system by issuing unconditional offers halfway through the school year. This can lead to disengagement from learning in schools.
  
• The pursuit of inclusion can impair the learning of the silent majority who form the bulk of the target population for educational equity. The logic of inclusion is laudable and should be pursued, but it is counter-productive when the particular response to it restricts the ability to learn and teach well for other pupils and teachers.
  
• Our understanding of positive destinations is hierarchical. Put simply, higher education is regarded more positively than further education, while there is skepticism as to whether work straight from school is really the positive outcome that it is purported to be. This status hierarchy is blind to the needs, wants and abilities of individual pupils. Not only does this super-charge the accumulation of qualifications in the senior phase, it also shapes practice – how many teachers understand and value what colleges have to offer to the most able pupils (they are also providers and enablers of higher education, and are often the most appropriate destination for pupils who might only be encouraged by those in school to consider university as their desirable destination).

What these examples demonstrate is that we are part of a system that is sub-optimal. Although problems can be ameliorated locally, solutions cannot be found alone. We need a relational systems approach, and a sharper focus on the processes and conditions that underpin learning well.

This is not to ignore the wider realities and pressures that impact on schools, pupils and teachers. Family poverty is pernicious, and despite the claims to impact and good intentions of the Scottish Government, it is not going away anytime soon. New provisions in the latest Programme for Government are welcome, i.e., extending free breakfast provision and free school meal entitlement. But I want more. And, the time is right to pursue a relational capability approach to learning well in Scottish schools.

Note: The thinking behind this paper follows the work of Wendy Russell, Mike Barclay and Ben Tawil, who introduced the idea of a relational capability approach to inform playing and being well (forthcoming in the International Journal of Play).