Joan McAlpine: Lesson here about learning to teach the teachers

IT'S not particularly surprising that a number of people have leapt on the idea that fixed term contracts for head teachers could be just the thing to turn around poorly performing schools.

The suggestion by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education is sound in principle. It was made as part of a submission to the government's review of teacher training that also claimed some newly qualified teachers lack the basic skills to teach numeracy and literacy.

The head teachers and staff consulted by HMIE blamed teacher training colleges for failing their graduates - but is it the job of universities to polish up rusty long division or correct students who have no grasp of basic grammar? No, these newly qualified teachers were let down by their own schools, despite being relatively high achievers with sufficient exam passes to embark on a degree course. If such young people cannot count or construct a sentence, pity their less academic peers.

There is an alarming spiral of decline here. Schools fail to teach reading, writing and arithmetic adequately, then complain when their pupils return as teachers, to be unleashed on a new generation in the classroom.

The man charged by the government to review teacher training, former chief schools Inspector Graham Donaldson, is only too aware of this. It is 20 months since we saw the publication of his own HMIE report, "Improving Scotland's Schools". Though noting that progress was being made, Donaldson said it was uneven and sluggish. He highlighted an urgent need to tackle weak teaching and underachievement in literacy, numeracy and science.

There is a simple solution. At the moment those who want to be secondary school teachers don't need any sort of maths qualification and only a C in Higher English to train for most subjects. The primary training course does require a standard grade maths at credit level and higher English, but fails to specify the minimum grade. Perhaps tougher entrance requirements would make all the difference? They might also expose the failings of the education system which refuses to raise sufficient numbers to this level of competence.

A buck-stops-here system has considerable appeal. Fixed term contracts for head-teachers, if they were long enough, would offer the individual an incentive to improve schools. Performance related pay often goes hand in glove with such contracts. Again, if it results in improved life-chances for generations of kids, who would argue?

But head teachers would need to be far more autonomous. At the moment, they are middle managers, not executives, and large amounts of their time are spent, not in innovation, but in jumping through hoops for the benefit of their local authority employers. Few young teachers aspire to school leadership. Vacant posts don't attract enough quality applicants and often need re-advertised. This problem has itself been the subject of another recent report, "Recruitment and Retention of Head Teachers in Scotland" (if only we were as good at solving problems as we are at ruminating about them…)

Anyway, the report concluded that head teachers' job satisfaction was directly related to their perceived autonomy. Most had complaints about their local authority bosses, who didn't appear to trust the heads' experience and professional judgement - a cynic might say to justify their existence council officers must pick fault.

Heads also complained of lack of flexibility over their budgets. They had only limited "discretion over staffing", the hire and fire power which really could transform schools but which unions have long resisted. In addition to all this, local authorities and other organisations bombard heads with requests for information.

The report talks of a sense of being "hemmed in", without the latitude to make decisions and also "responsibility without control". In the old Scots nursery rhyme, the "baldy heided maister" prays to God to "gie him strength to skelp the weans on Monday". Life for his modern counterpart is less black and white. If prayers are said, they are likely to be to the patron saint of paperwork. And it's not the weans he dreams of skelping.

The Head Teachers Retention report offers a few platitudinous solutions, such as "closer consultation" with council education departments ie more meetings. A more radical conclusion would be to remove the power over education from our 32 local authorities. Schools could draft in extra support with the money. Then we would be justified in giving heads fixed term contracts as they would have the power to perform.

There are too many layers of management in Scottish education. Heads have guidance from Learning and Teaching Scotland, The Scottish Qualifications Authority, The Scottish Government Education Department and HMIE itself. A merger of two or more of these would be a cut worth making. Better than reducing teachers, closing popular schools and sacking classroom assistants to deal with the deficit.

But there is another barrier in the way of empowering head-teachers. Speaking about the fixed term contract suggestion in yesterday's Scotsman, Ken Cunningham, general secretary of School Leaders Scotland, pointed out that the performance-related thinking behind it was at odds with the "ethos" of the Curriculum for Excellence.

As anyone who has ploughed through the gobbledygook will know, the CfE "ethos" is anti-competition, anti-assessment, and anti-achievement. It sees no real value in expertise or knowledge that's not immediately "useful" or relevant. The old idea of education stretching a young person, stimulating the imagination and taking them into areas they did not previously consider interesting, is frowned upon. So is the idea that some things worth learning are hard - but it's worth passing through the pain barrier. Teachers do not lead their pupils in the CfE. They are mere "facilitators".

The mastery of skills does not seem particularly important to those putting the CfE together. This is a continuation of a trend in Scottish education, which has seen the end of individual classroom testing. National exams still exist - though some of the ideologues would get rid of these if they could. School results are no longer published, so any meaningful measurement of how an institution or teacher is performing is denied to the user ie parent or pupil.

This is the culture which has produced innumerate teacher trainees, and it seems set to get worse with CfE. The expertocracy are much more interested in vague outcomes like "confident learners" which cannot actually be assessed, than the ability to read and count well, which can be measured easily. It's difficult to see how any individual head teacher could turn the ship around.

The captain is not the one in charge. His hands are tied and the course has been set already by a higher, faceless power.