By our Education Correspondent.
I have taught in schools in Ireland, England and Scotland for over thirty years (Scotland for just over 20 of those). I have worked at management level; but for the past ten years, have returned to the classroom as it is my passion. I feel the upcoming EIS industrial action on workload highlights one of the few maladies at the heart of Scottish education. Over the next few months, I will write my thoughts for Ungagged on what I have observed. I see amazing work every day in underfunded, understaffed schools. I see teachers’ creativity crushed by bureaucracy and the stultifying orthodoxy of observations, buzzwords, and the latest top-down imposed scheme. It is time for teachers to reclaim their professionalism and assert their power in order to move towards actual collegiality -and to ensure that power structures are flattened in order that the most powerless people in our society, our children and young people, truly see and seek ‘power with,’ rather than power over as the most desirable and necessary tool towards eradicating societal imbalances that lead to mental health problems, the loss of creatives and professionals from education, and ultimately produce young people who are confident enough to understand their worth when confronted by top down power structures designed to “keep them in their place.”
Power Over…
Scottish education is saturated with the rhetoric of collegiality and teacher agency. It paints a picture of flat hierarchies and collaborative growth. Yet for those labouring at the chalkface, this vocabulary often feels less like a professional standard and more like a curated fiction. In reality, the system is underpinned by a manager-as-superior culture. This is a rigid, top-down architecture where power is used to enforce compliance and encourage performative falsehoods. Central to this is a pervasive surveillance culture that transforms schools into glass classrooms. In these spaces, the fear of the evaluative gaze trickles from the Director of Education down to the Primary 1 pupil.
The Weaponised Word: “Professional”
In a healthy organisation, the label of professional denotes expertise, autonomy, and the right to provide evidence-based challenge. In the Scottish school system, however, the term has been tactically inverted. It is frequently weaponised by leadership to silence dissent. When a teacher raises concerns about the pedagogical validity of a new mandate or the crushing weight of policy clutter, they are often met with a chilling reminder that as a professional, they have a duty to engage.
This linguistic framing transforms the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) Standards from a scaffold for development into a leash for obedience. As the 2021 OECD report, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: Into the Future, acutely observed, teachers’ perceptions of their own agency were often limited by the perceived requirements of the inspection and qualifications systems. When professionalism is equated with compliance, teachers learn that survival depends on –playing the game– rather than speaking the truth.
The Panopticon of Quality Assurance
Surveillance in schools is rarely as crude as a camera in the corner. Instead, it is woven into the very fabric of Quality Assurance. This surveillance culture operates on a Panoptic principle. Because a teacher might be observed or their class jotters or their folders might be audited at any moment, they begin to self-police. They hollow out their own creativity to ensure they are inspection-ready at all times. Their lessons are crammed into the boxes created by superiors who have built them after misinterpreting data and research- or cherry picking self promoting ex-teacher’s books on aspects of education they’ve found profitable.
Observations
In a manager-as-superior culture, the classroom observation is not a peer-to-peer exchange of craft. It is a high-stakes audit. This environment breeds a culture of falsehoods where practitioners do not show what is real but rather what is correct. Lessons are staged and risks are avoided because the cost of failure under the surveillance gaze is too high. This constant state of being watched replaces genuine professional trust with a cold, metric-driven suspicion.
The Expertise Gap: Logistics vs. Pedagogy
A fundamental schism exists between those who teach and those who manage. Many in school leadership have made a deliberate choice to exit the classroom (nb. my own experience was to become a manager in order to, as I naively thought, change school cultures in order to change children’s lives- I was not sui generis; many other managers do the same. But I found many, like me, drowning in demands for data and documents that changed nothing. I also found many managers who enjoyed “Power Over.”).
The ambitious trade the complexities of pedagogy for the Management State, which is a world of budgets, data returns, and public relations. Yet despite this departure, they retain a totalising remit over the leadership of learning.
The 2021 OECD report highlighted that the Scottish system is characterised by a high degree of policy clutter. It is within this clutter that the manager-as-superior culture thrives. Management often confuses the logistical necessity of running a building with the authority to micromanage classroom practice. Because the hierarchy rewards those who satisfy Local Authority data returns, the deep and nuanced expertise of the chalkface practitioner is disregarded. The teacher who holds the most relevant data on student learning is treated as a subordinate technician. They are forced to mirror the priorities of a manager who may not have navigated a full timetable in a decade (or others who have played the tickbox game and are the leeted clones in a self replicating management system).
The Feedback Sandwich and the Death of Realism
True collegiate dialogue cannot survive when every conversation is a data-gathering exercise for a report. This performative requirement is best exemplified by the feedback (shit) sandwich model. By flanking a core criticism with superficial layers of praise, management avoids the uncomfortable realism of the classroom in favour of a reportable and sanitised narrative.
This is not leadership; it is the management of optics. The OECD report noted a perceived lack of alignment between the curriculum’s goals and the assessment and qualification system. Yet rather than addressing this gap, the hierarchy forces teachers to pretend it does not exist. They must flank systemic failure with the bread of performative positivity. Surveillance ensures that no one breaks character. The “sandwich” keeps the feedback polite, predictable, and ultimately useless for real pedagogical growth.
The Trickle-Down: Two Stars and a Wish
Organisational cultures are not contained within the Heidie’s Office and staffroom. They permeate every aspect of the school. The surveillance and performativity experienced by teachers are mirrored in the feedback models forced upon pupils. The Two Stars and a Wish and Extra Challenge models are simply the feedback sandwich and the School Improvement Plan miniaturised for children.
In this mirrored hierarchy, the Authority evaluates the School, Management evaluates the Teacher, and the Teacher evaluates the Child. At every level, the power dynamic remains the same. The subordinate must perform for the observer. The Wish often becomes a mandatory directive. This socialises children into a system where improvement is something performed for an authority figure rather than an internal drive for mastery. The OECD’s concern regarding a narrowing of the curriculum is realised here. When children know they are being tracked and monitored via stars and wishes, they also stop taking risks and start playing the game.
The Cost of the Game
The tragedy of Scottish education is the systematic devaluation of its greatest asset, which is the pedagogical expertise and creativity of the classroom teacher. As the OECD concluded in 2021, there is a desperate need to move from a culture of accountability to a culture of learning and improvement. This cannot happen as long as the surveillance-heavy manager-as-superior culture persists.
Until we move away from ritualised reporting,”playing the game” for observations and the weaponisation of professionalism, true collegiate decision-making will remain a polite fiction. As long as the system prioritises the performance of improvement over the reality of the chalkface, it will remain an organisation built on fear and filtered truths. It is a system where everyone, from the Head Teacher to the youngest pupil, is simply playing a role in a report that no one quite believes.
