School Leadership - A Scottish Perspective

This week one of my schools has been having an inspection by the HMIE. The week was full of ups and downs, some stress and a fair bit of pressure. Just like a normal week in school really, but different. The system of inspection we have in Scotland is a lot more supportive than those that exist in some other systems, and certainly different to the approach that seems to prevail in England. From our first contact with the Managing Inspector she was at pains to reassure us all that her and her team aimed to support myself as headteacher, and the school as a whole, to better recognise where we were in our continuous journey of development and to help us with our plans for moving on. This would be a professional dialogue around where we were, and how we might improve what we do. She also asked me to reassure teachers that when they came into classrooms the inspectors would be looking at the learners and their learning, not them.  This post is not about the whole inspection experience ...

Yesterday I travelled some eighty or so miles to Edinburgh to take part in a professional development event for teachers, organised by teachers. Yesterday was Saturday and almost forty teachers had signed up and travelled from as far as Shetland off the north Coast of Scotland to take part. It's worth noting that there were other similar events happening elsewhere in Scotland yesterday but perhaps the uniqueness of this one was that it was organised and attended by teachers working in schools and because it's what they wanted to do. No-one had told us we needed to attend, we weren't being directed by others. We were there because, we wanted to learn,  we wanted to collaborate and we wanted to contribute to the learning 'conversations'. We weren't sponsored, there were no keynotes and nobody was trying to sell us anything. The agenda was loose and various people had volunteered to lead conversations and to share experiences and practices. No-one was being paid to...