Exclusive:Could a Scottish private school have the solution to teacher shortages in state secondaries?

Online classes have evolved since the coronavirus lockdowns

A private school believes it has developed an online resource that could protect teacher jobs and expand subject choices for state school pupils across Scotland.

RGC Online is a not-for-profit initiative launched by Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen, with the help of high profile backers, including the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

It was born during the Covid-19 pandemic and is now starting to interest local authorities, including Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire councils.

“We're trying to do our bit for wider Scottish education, but also to protect teaching jobs. I think that is really important,” explained Robin Macpherson, head of Robert Gordon’s College.

Schools in parts of Scotland, particularly more rural areas, have long struggled to attract and retain sufficient teachers, with Aberdeenshire Council recently revealing it was having to use primary teachers to plug gaps in secondaries.

Pupils often suffer from a restricted choice of subjects as a result, or face long commutes of up to 87 miles to other schools in order to sit particular courses, including Highers and Advanced Highers.

Teachers across the country, meanwhile, find it a struggle to secure permanent jobs, with only slightly more than 30 per cent of new teachers securing a permanent post in the year after their probation.

These kinds of problems are only being exacerbated by ongoing local government funding pressures.

The developers behind RGC Online believe it can help resolve such issues by offering courses online, with live lessons, regular one-to-one support and personalised feedback from teachers.

It is already delivering SQA accredited Higher computing science and Higher applications of mathematics, with particular interest coming from the Highlands and Islands, and the Scottish Borders. The school is keen to expand the offering.

“We're looking at RMPS (religious, moral and philosophical studies) right now, for example,” Mr Macpherson told The Scotsman.

“Most schools will not staff that. Where you've got maybe three, four or five kids wanting to do, say Higher Philosophy, the school can't justify hiring a teacher just on that basis, so it gets pulled. 

“That means across across maybe 20 schools there might be 50 or 60 kids that want to do it, but no single one that can afford to employ a teacher for it, whereas we can, because we're not bound by geography."

Mr Macpherson was appointed head of the college in November 2019, but did not officially move from his previous role as assistant rector of Dollar Academy until August 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As he prepared for his new job during lockdown, he monitored the switch to remote learning, finding the majority of people were not enjoying it, but that there was a “core” group of teachers and pupils who found it quite “liberating”.

He recalled: “The idea kind of crystallised around, ‘well if we were to take these really innovative teachers and a lot of the pupils who have seen the benefit in this, then you could actually create something quite special.”

When he moved to Aberdeen, he found a school “very much ahead of game technology wise”, including its partnership with MIT, which dates back to 2015.

When the second lockdown was announced, the school quickly moved to adopt a Swedish platform called “exam.net” in order to run its preliminary exams online.

"Within two weeks we had it up and running and working. I might be wrong on this, but I think we might have been the only school in Scotland to run their entire prelim diet S4 to S6 in January, early February 2021, without missing a beat,” said Mr Macpherson. Staff at the school began to develop the idea further, initially calling it “College in the Cloud”.

Mr Macpherson said: "If you were to create your own tutoring company from scratch people don't necessarily buy into that because it doesn't have any tradition or history behind it, any quality assurance I suppose.

“So by keeping the RGC part of it, it was saying that, 'yeah, this is a school that has been around for the better part of three centuries, and spawned a university, and gets good exam results, so if we're doing this, you know you're going to get a good quality teacher.

“I think that has always been at the core of the identity of it - there is a teacher there, it is live taught, it's not downloading content and doing something with it. So you still get that relationship and you still get reports.

“Parents still get feedback about how their children are doing through the platform. That is essential for us because we're not in the business of replacing teachers.”

The team also learned from the example of e-Sgoil, a similar initiative developed in the Western Isles, which expanded during the pandemic.

Mr Macpherson admitted there would not have been a “gap in the market” for RGC Online if e-Sgoil had been “scaled up successfully” in the same way by the Scottish Government.

RGC Online charges £795 for a Higher course, via a trading subsidiary.

The college aims to make one in five places “completely free” to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, under its scholarship model.

In an ideal world, Mr Macpherson admitted he would “love” to work in partnership with the Scottish Government to help staff the resource.

“What I'd like to see in five or 10 years time is that this has been scaled up across the country, we have turned around presentations in computing science so it is going up the way, rather than down the way, and it's creating opportunities for kids in parts of Scotland that might otherwise not have it,” he said.

“And I'd certainly like to see this as part of an ongoing partnership between independent education, state education and private sector companies that are helping us shape a future-proofed education.

“It would be really exciting - it would give Scotland a model that nobody else in the world has really been able to pull off yet.”