Laurie O’Donnell

Started writing this on the train home to Dundee after a great couple of days at the Scottish Learning Festival at the SECC in Glasgow. Just getting around to publishing it this afternoon.

Some highlights of SLF for me were:

Michael Fullan’s keynote on the seven secrets of school improvement. I have always liked his work and the way he is able to draw on a wealth of experience from across the world, and in particular from his native Ontario, grounds his work in reality. The key message of his work is that sustainable improvement is not only possible but that there is a substantial evidence base that we can draw on. As an aside he suggested that our own Curriculum for Excellence is still a little bit woolly. It will be interesting to see over the coming months whether this analysis is correct or as I suspect we are just taking our time to get to the detail.

The effervescent Marie Dougan and Margo Williamson showing the links between Curriculum for Excellence and Glow with wonderful work from the children of St Fergus Primary in Dundee (coached brilliantly by my former colleague Margret MacPhail).

Stephen Heppell displayed his usual brilliance at the twilight keynote session on Wednesday. Taking us on a learning journey across the world, stopping every now and then to remind us of where we have come from and helping us to paint a picture of what the future might look like. We have been working with Stephen over the last year and he is a joy to spend time with full of positive energy, enthusiasm and creativity. He has the knack of putting everyone at ease whether they are young children, teachers, policy makers or politicians.

Stephen and I then spent some time at TeachMeet07. Ewan McIntosh (recently appointed as LTS National Adviser on New Technologies for Learning) was using a fruit machine web ap to select colleagues to do 7 minute presentations on whatever took their interest. A great event with over 150 teachers sharing and having a lot of fun in the process. Planned to stay for 15 minutes and ended up staying for an hour and a half before dashing off to a nice dinner.

Thursday morning started with a breakfast session led by Sergio della Salla a neuroscientist from Edinburgh University who was debunking some of the myths about brain learning. Great stuff in the battle against pseudo science. One of the best bits of debunking was around the ‘theory’ that if you breathe through your right nostril you can pump air into the right side of your brain to enhance your creativity. As Sergio correctly points our this theory seems to ignore the important role of the lungs. He also gave Brain Gym a good kicking (not to say that exercise and relaxation might be good for learning – just that the justification is nonsense from a neuroscientific point of view).

I then got caught up with planning for SLF 2008 and beyond for a couple of hours. This meant that I missed one of the Uk’s top curriculum thinkers Mick Waters from the QCA – luckily I can catch his whole presentation on the LTS Online Service.

Managed to spend some time at the local authority practice sharing area, had a quick scout round the exhibition, thanked as many of our great staff as I could then ran off to catch the train.

All in all a worthwhile event – I think. The challenge for LTS and the Scottish Government is to make it better: align it more closely with Curriculum for Excellence; develop further its international reach; invest further in practice showcasing and sharing (TeachMeet being one model worth extending); provide opportunities to allow the fringe to develop further …

Anyway I am glad it’s over for another year but can’t wait for SLF 08.

A few entries ago I mentioned how much I had enjoyed reading Sebastian Faulkes’ ‘Birdsong’ but didn’t think it was a real classic.

Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ is well worth a read and don’t be daunted by the 800+ pages as it’s written in bite sized chapters (just like Dickens) and the mulit-layered story flies along with great pace. It’s a story of life and death; love and betrayal; aspiration and disappointment; class and social status; philosophy and politics; culture and history; science and religion; and much more. The grand scale of this book is quite breathtaking and, in my opinion, provides great insights into today’s world. In short it’s a real classic not just a good page-turner. My only disappointment was that it followed the structure of many books of this genre and without giving away the story let me just say that Anna doesn’t manage to shrug off her own slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in quite the way I had hoped.

Singapore is really quite an amazing place. A small island, 275 square miles (half the size of Fife), 85 miles north of the equator with a population of 4.5m people. Despite having no natural resources, not even its own water supply, Singapore seems to have prospered largely on the resourcefulness of its people with some help from geography of course – its location between India and China. Today Singapore is the 18th wealthiest country in the world, based on per capita GDP, has a thriving economy and is the second biggest port in the world after Rotterdam. [Edit: Ooop forgot about Shanghai and maybe Singapore is now bigger than Rotterdam?]
From what I understand spitting out chewing gum or dropping litter is still banned and punishable by a hefty fine. The streets are clean and it feels like a pretty safe place to be work or be a tourist. Maybe being harsh on small-scale anti-social behaviour is a good thing. The issue is, as ever, finding the right balance between rights and responsibilities. Everybody I have spoken to seemed to be very proud of their country and wanted to make their own contribution to Singapore’s continuing to prosperity.

Education has very high status in Singapore; very important both to the Government, reflected in spending, and to the people, if exam results and international benchmarks can be taken as a proxy measures.

I have seen schools that would compare well with the very best in Scotland despite having class sizes of 40. I visited a primary school with 2000 pupils operating a double session, i.e. 1000 in the morning and 1000 in the afternoon. I have met many hard working headteachers over the years but the operational management of this school would be a challenge to any of them.

One 14 [Edit: actually 11] year old girl at this school, that I spoke to, gets up at 0645 for a 0715 start, gets back home at 1300 and manages to pack in 1 to 2 hours of homework before starting on some other ‘test practice’ set by her mum. I have had the privilege of teaching some highly motivated young people over the years but very few 14 year olds in Scotland would be able to compete on this front [leaving aside whether this degree of work ethic is a good thing or not for the moment].

Overall this has been a very worthwhile visit for me. Our children and young people will be competing in the same small world that Singapore’s children and young people will be growing up in. As a country we have in the past thrived on the ingenuity of our people. There is no reason why we should not continue to thrive into the future. Let’s just make sure we make the right investments in our education system, continuing to keep our eyes on the horizon with a view to ensuring that when we say world-class we really mean it.

Just a week before the Scottish Learning Festival [which looks like it's going to be a great event again] I have had the opportunity to look beyond Scotland to see how we are doing.

I am aproaching the end of a visit to the Ministry of Education in Singapore and which allowed me to see round some schools and also meet with the heads of the Singapore Future Schools programme.

Singapore has followed a similar pattern to Scotland. The Singapore Government ICT Masterplan 1 ran from 1997-2002 with an emphasis on infrastructure and teacher skills – not too different from our own National Grid for Learning Scotland. ICT Masterplan 2 followed on with more of a focus on seeding innovation and ICT Masterplan 3 will be about beginning the process of the systemic scaling of innovation.

Singapore is very different to Scotland but there are aspect of their strategy that I really like. Increasingly their emphasis is very clearly on learning rather than technology for its own sake. So that rather than ask how might we use technology their teachers are asked to consider how they might improve understanding? One Government programme is called ‘Teach Less; Learn More’!

In all of my visits to schools, across the four countries of the UK and beyond, I have never seen a successful implementation of technology that is resource driven, ie puts technology before educational development. Maybe you have? I would be interested to hear your views.

More to follow on Singapore later but it’s midnight here and I’ve got an early start in the morning …