Laurie O’Donnell

I was shocked and devastated and to hear that Tony van der Kuyl died on Thursday afternoon. Although he had been ill for a few short months he was really positive and up for a fight to win back his good health – exactly as anyone who knew him would expect. Last time I saw him was just before the Christmas holidays and he was in great form.
I have lost a great friend, the world has lost a real character and education has lost a tireless campaigner. The biggest loss is to the family he loved so much.

John Connell has blogged a great tribute to Tony. Tony was quite simply an inspiration.

This is my first attempt to pick out some of what I have done and to look ahead to next week. Let’s give it a try and see how it evolves.

Some stuff from last week
Straighforward week after spending so much time in London the previous week – 3 days in Glasgow and 2 in Dundee.
• Had a great meeting at BBC Scotland with their Learning team. Despite the loss (for the moment) of the long promised and potentially wonderful BBC Jam offering the BBC continues to set a very high quality threshold. The Reithian aspiration of ‘Educate, Inform and Entertain’ (my order) provides an excellent platform for innovation and public service. The BBC in my view continues to be a world class institution. LTS has had a great relationship with the BBC over many years and the meeting continued the conversation around mutual areas of interest and in particular support for the Scottish Curriculum in the context of Curriculum for Excellence and Glow.
• Presented to a delegation from the Singaporean Ministry of Education on the Scottish Education system. The delegation were particularly interested in innovation and change, how to foster creativity and of course Glow the world’s first national schools intranet.
• Chaired a LTS Dundee Office staff meeting – nailed my colours to the mast with definite moving dates to our new Distribution Centre (Tom Johnston Road) and to our temporary office (Overgate House). Dealt with all the usual stuff about what can be taken, what has to be left behind, parking, opening hours etc. Minor concerns at one level but important to deal with properly and professionally.
• Met with Polly Purvis of ScotlandIS the Scottish IT industry trade association to discuss everything from skills, curriculum and qualifications to the gender profile and image of the IT industry. The number of school leavers taking computer science courses in HE is in decline and the gender balance is also very poor. So what might schools do? Are Computing Studies courses fit for purpose in the 21st century? Are they a good preparation for HE or for work in a fast changing sector of the economy? What can the IT industry do to help attract school leavers?
• The loss of personal data by HMRC (and the more recent loss by the MoD over the weekend) has put the spotlight on all public bodies to ensure that we have robust procedures for handling sensitive and personal data. LTS was already reviewing its policies and I met with our IT manager to monitor progress. We don’t hold a lot of sensitive data and most of what we do hold is subject to Freedom of Information. Nonetheless this is important work and we have a duty to our public responsibilities very seriously.
• Met with my senior colleagues within LTS to explore programme structures for next year. Over the last 6 years I have been closely involved in moving the organisation from an approach that involved moving large numbers of disparate projects into coherent programmes (using the Government’s Managing Successful Programmes methodology). This has involved closing many projects down, moving work from project and programme to business-as-usual and trying to establish some work as core function rather than short-term project funded.

Some Stuff Happening Next Week
Looks like 2 days in Glasgow, 1.5 days in Dundee, 0.5 days in Edinburgh and 1 day in Stirling – so a fair amount of travelling especially as the 1.5 in Dundee is over 3 days! The week starts with a 0900 in Glasgow so the 0636 train for me on Monday morning.
• First meeting is our Corporate Management Team with Michael Cross and his team from the Scottish Government to look at joint work around ‘More Choices, More Chances’
• Supporting our CEO Bernard for a meeting with an opposition spokesperson on education in the Scottish Parliament
• Meeting Greg Dempster, General Secretary of AHDS, the primary heads and deputes association to consult on the LTS Corporate Plan (ie what should LTS be doing to support primary schools) and to look at structures for the Scottish Learning Festival 2008 and beyond.
• Representing LTS at the Scottish Government Glow Executive Board chaired by Liz Lewis, Director of Schools. The main item on the agenda will be the roll-out of Glow. We now have 19 local authorities signed-up to the Customer Agreement with 2 more ready to sign so getting close to critical mass. Last week 40,000 users had been ‘provisioned’ and over the next few weeks the numbers move into 6 figures.
• Meeting Michael Kowbel of e-Skills UK with a similar agenda to that with ScotlandIS last week.
• Catching up with former Glow Programme Director John Connell
• Meeting Sally Fulton of Stirling Council. Sally is just about to take up a secondment with LTS and HMIe to work on the next phase of Journey to Excellence.
• Jim Buchan the LTS Chief Technology Adviser is just about to leave to join CISCO and I hope to able to buy him a pint and thank him for the support he has given me and for the wonderful work he has done to get Glow to where it is today.
• Ace blogger Ollie Bray from Musselburgh Grammar is coming in on Tuesday to do some work with us.
• Finish the week at a seminar on ‘New Technologies’ organised by my colleague John Low for local authority representatives.

Yesterday afternoon the OECD Report was discussed in the Scottish Parliament.

The full transcript makes interesting reading. There is the odd lapse into political point scoring (as you would expect in any democratic parliament). My reading of what was said by our MSPs is that it was generally a thoughtful and constructive debate around the main themes of the report. There seemed to me to be a good level of understanding of the strengths of our education system and more importantly a high degree of consensus around the areas we need to address if we are to improve it.

I was interviewed last week by Nicola More of White Light Media – the company that does the journalism, design etc for our award winning Connected magazine. The theme was Glow and Nicola asked me some questions that had been rasied by our readers. The full text will appear within our ConnectedLive site but for the meantime here is a preview:
Nicola

You have been quoted as saying that Glow is the most ambitious education ICT project in the world. How are we doing so far?

Laurie

We are putting in place the world’s first national schools intranet, and that’s a very ambitious programme. Glow is an attempt to provide a level playing field, so that whether you are living on a remote island or a big city, you will have the same access to high-quality ICT resources. It’s about equality of access, creating a national service that’s available to big, small, rural, urban – that’s really important.

I think every country in the world will connect schools like this – we’re just the first. Scotland has a long and proud record of building a high-achieving and high-equity education system. Part of that national tradition is to innovate and change. We were one of the first to have a curriculum that was not based on the Classics, and among the first to base education around universal literacy. Glow sits within that tradition. It’s not about having a backward education system that need updated; it’s about innovating part of a system that’s already built on very strong foundations. It’s not a technology solution – it’s an enabling technology infrastructure.

We are still in the foothills of realising the benefits of ICT in schools and this is supported by the findings of the 2006 HMIE ICT report. Our curriculum, assessment, CPD and infrastructure will continue to change as we seek to engage our children and young people in learning and give them the means to make a good life for themselves in an increasingly globalised economy.

Glow is just another step along the road of continuous improvement for Scottish education – a journey that has always tried to make use of the best available technology, from the slate to the pencil through the blackboard and the overhead projector, and of course in terms of ICT, from the stand-alone computer of the 1980s to the web-enabled device connecting to Glow anytime and anywhere of today.

One indicator of how we are doing is the level of international interest in Glow from across the world. Recent visits to schools in Singapore, USA, England, Wales and Northern Ireland suggest to me that education systems are all facing the same challenges. One of these challenges relates to how we make sophisticated ICT services available to schools. We expect cost-effective, sustainable and scalable services on the one hand (i.e. providing best value to the public purse) and on the other hand they need to be able to support personalised learning as well as collaborative learning, enable and facilitate the sharing of resources and the development of communities of practice, and much more (i.e. systems that are fit for purpose in the context of 21st century education).

I expect other countries to follow in Scotland’s steps as they attempt to connect their teachers and learners to bring their schools into the 21st century – or should that be to bring the 21st century into their schools!

Nicola

The best part of £40m of taxpayers’ money has already been committed to this project. What do you think the return on investment will be for the country as a whole?

Laurie

The return on investment has three dimensions. First of all it’s about economies of scale, secondly it’s about releasing teacher time from routine tasks, and thirdly it’s about investment in the future of our young people.

The numbers are big with Glow not only in terms of cost but also coverage: all 32 local authorities; 3,000 schools; 750,000 learners; 53,000 teachers; all trainee teachers and their lecturers; all local authority education staff; SQA; HMIe; LTS and others. Over time we also want to work with local authorities to provide access to parents, but that may be a few years down the line.

When you take that into account, £40m doesn’t seem as much. That’s not to say that I’m not conscious that it’s £40m of taxpayers’ money that could have been spent on health or other key areas, but you have to have a sense of scale.

We have gone through a rigorous European procurement process which generated fierce competition for the Glow contract and we have been able to secure excellent value to the public purse because we a talking about a country rather than a school, cluster of schools or local authority. The five-year £37.5m Glow Intranet contract with RM divides into two parts – roughly half to develop and integrate the systems with the other half to provide Glow as a service.

So, firstly there’s a sense of scale. Secondly, there are the savings. In the short-term, if every teacher saves even an hour a week by being able to access support, advice and high-quality resources through Glow, then it very quickly starts to pay for itself. If you assume a teacher costs roughly £20 an hour and only half of Scottish teachers save an hour a week you generate £500k of ‘savings’ every week through Glow. If every teacher saves an hour a week then it’s £1m a week – or the total investment in Glow every year. These ‘savings’ are not cashable, i.e. the Government does not make savings on teachers’ salaries, but rather teachers are released from routine tasks to spend more time on teaching and supporting learning.

Thirdly, and in the longer-term, it is about the overall quality of Scottish education as it continues to innovate and develop. Scotland has many natural resources but our most important resource is our people and Glow is an investment in the future of our young people. What do our schools look like in the 21st century? I think it’s unimaginable to have a school now without technology, just as it would be for a bank, hospital or just about any modern workplace.

Glow provides a trusted and safe resource to bring the benefits of social networking. It uses the power of technology in a learning context, making it much safer. That’s why the investment was agreed and that’s why it remained even after the change of administration at the national level.

In the same way that other countries are interested in the Glow model for education, there is considerable interest from elsewhere in the public sector in Scotland and it may be that another aspect of the return on investment for the country is in the development of Glow as a prototype for a wider public sector shared online service.

Well I have managed 61 posts over the last 15 months – getting close to one a week. Much better than I managed the first time round with my blog back in 2005. Some weeks and months have been better than others but I seem to have established the habit.

Key turning points in getting my blog established were:
• Developing an understanding of my audience. By and large my readers are working in Scottish Education, many are known to me personally and some are my work colleagues at LTS. I am acutely aware that my blog is out there and calls from journalists based on what I have written in my blog reminds me that this is on the public internet not hidden away on a private intranet.
• Thinking of the blog as a learning log (following Don Ledingham) has been important for me. So for example I wanted to capture the main points from the OECD Report on Scottish education. In the past I would have got the highlighter out, drawn a mind map and taken some notes for my own personal use. Now my preference is to put my thoughts up online for my own future reference and for anyone else who might be interested.

So what next? I think I have a developed a model that works for me and found what my colleague Ewan McIntosh has called ‘my voice’. I am going to try to do a regular ‘Last Week/Next Week’ as part of my learning log. I will continue to post largely on Scottish education and my role in LTS and look out for the odd random entry on whatever comes into my head.

If the findings of the OECD report are generally accepted then the main implication for LTS lies around the development of the curriculum. I remember reading a policy document many years ago (must dig it out, but I think it was from HMI) which made the claim that the main cause of indiscipline/disruption in school is the ‘design and presentation’ of the curriculum.

My reading of the OECD report is that the main reason that too many of our young people fail at school lies in the design and presentation of the curriculum.

If we want more inclusive schools and are serious about tackling poverty more effectively then it’s just not enough to dilute the cognitive content of the curriculum (and qualifications) we need a laterally differentiated curriculum – a curriculum for all.

The key implications for LTS is that curriculum review is not something that should be happening once every 10 years but is more of an ongoing continuous improvement process. A process that draws on the experience and expertise of teachers and puts the interests and aspirations of young people at its heart. The real challenge of Curriculum for Excellence is to establish a dynamic, provisional curriculum that facilitates lateral differentiation and secures ongoing change and development as the norm.

So what does this mean for Glow? One way of thinking about Glow is to see it as part of the technology infrastructure that enables what I have called ‘My Curriculum for Excellence’. Over time Glow should provide a highly differentiated and personalised curriculum experience, to use Alvin Tofler’s term a ‘demassified’ experience.

Every teacher wants to customise the curriculum for every learner but unless you have a 1:1 ratio of teachers to learners there is only so far you can go. Well designed technology (Glow!) in the hands of effective teachers can be used to support personalisation but we need to be careful and learn from the mistakes of the past technology implementations. Anyway more of this later. For the meantime I am going to run with the Glow as the enabler of ‘My Curriculum for Excellence’ to see where that takes us.

I spend much last week at the BETT Show in London. It’s hard to believe that it is more than a year since I posted prior to my visit to BETT 2007.

This year I managed to have good old trawl through the exhibition. I am always on the lookout for something that I have not seen before and as usual I was completely disappointed. Not much changes in a year and most of what is presented as new often represents little more than incremental change to existing products if not old products repackaged in the hope that nobody will notice. I suppose I shouldn’t be disappointed because it means I am on top of my job and it is only just over 3 months since I last worked my round an exhibition of educational suppliers at The Scottish Learning Festival.

Having said that if you take a longer term view 3, 5 or even 10 years you really can see some changes. The shift from floppy disk to CD-ROM to DVD and of course the web as the platform of choice. The massive change in the processing power of the desktop computer and as a result the significant change to the quality of graphics and interactivity. Peripheral devices used to be limited to printer, scanners and a limited range of switches etc for special educational needs learners. Now the array of digital input and output devices means that professional standard tools are available to all teachers and learners to use in the classroom. Only a few years ago early education was very poorly served at BETT now the offerings are considerable. All good progress I suppose but really nothing that has really set the educational heather alight – although as you would expect there are many who would want you to believe that it does or at least will soon. What will set the educational heather alight is not the technology but the practice and you just can’t capture that in a product suppliers exhibition.
Having said all of that the best of BETT is in the opportunity to meet people. I met with staff from: Scottish and English local authorities; Becta and QCA; BBC; the commercial educational ICT sector; policy makers from across the globe; and many old friends and aquaintances.

So overall was it worth spending 12 hours on trains and three nights in a hotel? On balance probably yes but I may just give BETT 2009 a miss … so that I get more out of BETT 2010.

National priorities funding through local government compacts
1. Develop a funded national innovation plan
2. Link Schools of Ambition closely into 1.
3. Extend the Scottish Survey of Achievement to all children and make the results against targets the basis of negotiations over resources between central and local government
Greater school autonomy in a local government framework
4. Local authorities to develop their own policy and priority frameworks for improvement
5. Targeting of resources for equity purposes should be done within the context of 1.
6. Local authorities cede more autonomy to schools in return for agreeing platform of improvement in learning opportunities and outcomes.
A comprehensive, structure and accessible curriculum
7. Each local authority develops it own contextualised charter of learning opportunities
8. Vocational courses be made available to all young people from S3 spanning 14-18
9. Government to support school-based provision of vocational courses (North Lanarkshire model)
10. Each local authority to establish a curriculum planning and pathways network linking schools, FE and employers
11. Standard Grades phased out and replaced with more effective pathways for all young people
12. A content flexible Scottish Certificate of Education (graduation certificate) be developed to sanction completion of education and training in schools or college
13. S5 and S6 pupils to have programme of study that leads to the Scottish Certificate of Education as a minimum
14. Development of 2 year plan for those who choose to leave at 16
Continuous review of curriculum and teaching
15. Local authorities to examine approaches to the gathering of feedback from learners on the quality of teaching
16. Teachers to be consulted on course quality and design
Monitoring school leaver destinations
17. Consider extending the scope of the Scottish Survey of School Leavers by making contact well before leaving dates
18. Careers Scotland to enhance the data sets they currently provide to schools and local authorities

This is a really important document and an essential read for anyone interested in an external perspective on how Scotland’s schools are doing.

I read it over the holidays and wanted to capture it for my learning log by doing three things: 1. Try to summarise the key points; 2. Pick out the recommendations and; 3.Try to identify what I think are the main implications for my work at LTS.

Don Ledingham and John Connell both blogged on the document in December and their posts are well worth reading.

The report was published in December 2007 and commissioned by the Scottish Government in 2006 (the previous administration – so strictly speaking by the Scottish Executive) as an in depth examination of the performance of our school system. The review group visited Scotland early in 2007 and was chaired by Professor Richard Teese from the University of Melbourne.

The report looks at:
• The Strengths of Scottish Education
• The Comparative Performance of Scottish School (against international comparators)
• The Achievement Gap in Scottish School Education
• Staying on at School, Building on School
• Reforming the Curriculum and
• Going Forward

The report is a fine piece of writing but more importantly provides a superb overview of how we are doing and what we might do to improve through 18 recommendations.

The highlights of the report for me were:
Strengths
• The recognition that Scotland is ‘a well schooled nation’ and continues to be high performing with very few countries doing consistently better in mathematics, reading and science (the usual suspects from among Finland, Korea, Netherlands, Canada and Japan). Though many others are close behind and closing in.
• Segregation by type of school (public, private) is very limited in Scotland (with the exception of Edinburgh).
• Headteachers are amongst the most positive in the OECD when it comes to how their schools are resourced
• Students are generally very positive about their schools
• Pre-school education is near universal and high quality
• We have world class primary schools – ‘the greatest strength of Scottish schooling is its primary schools’.
Weaknesses
• Our achievement gap now widens up later than before [a result of early education? LO’D] but from P5 to S2 too many of our young people get left behind
• Children in Scotland who fall behind often stay behind [see earlier post on How to Be Top]
• Social & regional disparities continue to be amongst the highest in the OECD. ‘Not all schools work equally well in Scotland. But the gaps between them are far less important than differences between students. In Scotland who you are [ie your social class and ‘region’ LO’D] is far more important than what school you attend. But the fact that it does matter who you are also says that the school system as a whole is not strong enough to make this not matter.’
• Too many young people leave school with little or no qualifications especially those living in poverty [It is a national disgrace that some of our children are effectively born to fail! LO’D]
• Standard Grade may have provided qualifications for all but is no longer fit for purpose in an age when the majority stay on at school beyond the minimum leaving age of 16. Worse than that Standard Grade ‘ranks all individuals and offers a guide as to whether an individual should stay or leave… Low achievement predicts failure, high achievement predicts success.’ [It’s not enough to lower the examination platform for ‘weaker learners’ the challenge of Curriculum for Excellence is to raise the raise the achievement platform for all learners. LO'D]
• Our approach to vocational education is too narrow. The tendency to outsource the problem of motivation, engagement, and attainment to FE too often leaves schools untouched by the need to work with all learners.
• In secondary schools getting qualifications as the passport to university provides an extrinsic motivation for many young people and allows them to stick with a curriculum that often lacks any meaningful intrinsic motivation. For those without the ‘going to university’ motivation it is even harder to find it in and through the curriculum.
Challenges
1. How to make all schools work more inclusively by making sure that the curriculum provides challenge to all beyond serving up a diluted cognitive curriculum to those who have fallen behind, ie raise achievement and reduce gaps through breadth of content and approach (lateral differentiation) rather than through our traditional model of hierarchical and exam led curriculum (vertical differentiation)
2. How to tackle deprivation more effectively