This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.
It’s the end of another school year, and if conversations with teachers and parents have taught me anything it’s that this one has been particularly rough.
It feels like the last drops of optimism for major, desperately-needed reform to education have finally evaporated – instead, we now have an escalating sense of dread as the status quo is reasserted while the reality of current budget cuts, as well as years of bad policy and cowardly can-kicking, starts to become frighteningly clear.
It has been a hard year, so for at least the next month or so, teachers and pupils should enjoy a measure of respite during their well-earned summer holidays – although that will be easier said than done for all those educators who don’t know if they’ve got a job in August.
As I write this, Teachers’ Hogmanay should already be well underway in many council areas, but the end of the current academic year also means that it’s about a year since I stopped teaching in order to become The Herald’s new education writer. In fact, today marks exactly twelve months since I closed my college laptop for the last time and, in doing so, opened up a new very different chapter........