I blogged about my ‘conference week’ ( or two days…). The part of my week that was potentially the most interesting and perplexing though was the input from the National Implementation Board (NIB) of Teaching Scotland’s Future (TSF) leadership team at our delightfully named CAQ (Curriculum and Qualifications) network. What fun we have with acronyms in education….
What a task they have in front of them. They have to engage across the profession and wider bodies to scope out and present models for a national virtual Leadership College. This is not a consultation as their task is to implement the recommendation but they are determined to meet as many of us as possible and listen to how we want our national college to operate. This made me reflect on all the different aspects of leadership development across the country and on all the ‘vested interests’ that remain as relics or legacy of previous leadership development initiatives.
The team are lively, engaging and their backgrounds are as academic/researcher, secondary Headteacher and education authority officer reflecting as broad a view as possible, They need to look ahead and negotiate very diverse positions and encapsulate a myriad of views in practical recommendations to the NIB.
Whatever they come up with has to meet the needs of a vastly changing landscape for the profession. It has to support the implementation of the new GTCS standards- and must encompass all the standards (not just for school leadership) as the college has to address leadership at all levels, which has not previously been achieved. It has to be accessible to all involved in leading learning- wider than teachers? Interesting dilemmas ahead for the team. When I visited the National College in England as part of TSF investigations, I was struck by the quality of online resources and I hope we can garner the tremendous resources we have in one resource that is sensible and accessible to all. That takes a lot of coordination and already you can foresee discussions around GLOW, GTCS website, Education Scotland website, SQA, Local Authorities’ web- based resources, Twitter, Blogs etc etc.
More importantly however is finding a clear identity for our leadership college, our leadership intentions, our beliefs and values. This is daunting but my first impressions of the team is that they are a courageous bunch…my advice would be to get involved, invite them to your school, local authority, Teachmeets, whatever…we have to help them in this to help ourselves.
Yvonne McCracken 