"Our schools are about so much more than learning.”
The observation, made to me earlier this year by Maureen McKenna, Glasgow Council’s executive director of education, rings truer than ever after recent months. Perhaps no previous crisis has done as much as Covid-19 to underscore how many needs are met by those working in classrooms.
Ms McKenna was keen to highlight the crucial role her staff have in developing the “21st century skills” – communication, resilience, the ability to interact and socialise – that are so sought by employers. She also stressed the impact of schools on personal safety and wellbeing. “Quite often, children won’t share things going on in their house because they’re frightened of what might happen to a parent, even if a parent is being abusive,” she said, setting out the challenges created when access to campuses was restricted. “They need to be with that trusted adult in a safe environment. In my conversations with politicians in that first lockdown it was, ‘you need to find a way out of this’. We looked after 600 children a day on average out of 70,000 during first lockdown. It’s not enough.”
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On the economic side, businesses will be slow to forget the crippling effect of parents staying at home to look after children following classroom closures. And the realities of home-tutoring have generated a renewed respect for the skill deployed by teachers, many of whom helped deliver food to deprived youngsters as Covid-19 tightened its grip.
Now more than ever, any coverage of what’s happening in education settings – nurseries, colleges and universities, as well as schools – has to consider their role as social linchpins and the multi-faceted nature of the challenges they face. The Herald will always stay alert to such complexities in its reporting.
Of course, the learning that takes place in classrooms is, as Ms Kenna told me, “really important”. Qualifications and grades matter. And the Scottish education system is not short of critics on issues such as declining maths and science scores in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
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League tables might be seen as a poor or narrow measure of a school’s progress across the entire range of its activity – but it’s hard to ignore their popularity. Families are hungry for information about the quality of learning.
The Herald will seek to satisfy this appetite – and with the same balance it brings to reporting on other areas of life. Yes, PISA’s maths and science scores are cause for concern. However, the programme’s 2018 tests saw pupils here obtain some of the highest results in reading.
Scottish education faces huge challenges – but can also lay claim to significant successes. The Herald will strive to tell both sides of the story.
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