I FELT that perhaps your front-page article (“‘Snapshot’ inspections risk school standards, fear parents”, The Herald, October 15) revealed a knee-jerk reaction from the parent teacher body, Connect.
I suggest that the idea of a squad of inspectors descending on a school for a whole week must be considered as last-century thinking. I suspect that a two-day inspection has been struggling to get out for some time. Any external monitoring of the workings of a school must simply be a review of the validity of their self-assessment process and accuracy of the subsequent report to parents. If the staff responsible for quality assurance in a school do not have the robust level of objective self-criticism required then the issue of why they are retained must be addressed.
The focus on inspections by Scottish Education Inspectors must be directly on the harder things to evaluate such as how effectively the individual needs of pupils are identified and met. In the context of 2018 this must embrace the use of programmed e-learning for pupils as computers now have the capability to learn individual learning profiles and actively tailor programs to suit their specific needs.
The days of Her Majesty’s Inspectors reporting on the state of a school toilet should be long gone. Teaching unions have a developing role to play in officially inspecting and reporting on such practical issues as the fabric of a school and resources within it.
I would be most surprised if the reduction to a two-day inspection had any measurable effect on the performance of a school in its exam results for one simple reason: it is very difficult to find any convincing evidence documented which proves that school inspections of the past had any real impact on the capacity of a school to sustainably improve.
Bill Brown,
46 Breadie Drive, Milngavie.
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