was set up to review the teaching profession that sought to reaffirm the status of the
teaching profession. In this process of‘re-professionalisation’professional devel-
opment was a key defining feature. In the subsequent agreement reached between
central government, the local authorities (the employers) and the teacher unions,
The Teachers’Agreement(Scottish Executive 2001 ), professional development
remained a key dimension. Thus, all teachers were contractually obliged to
(1) engage in an additional thirtyfive hours professional learning per annum,
(2) contribute to the school’s development through collegiate activities and (3) take
part in the annual professional review and development process. To support this
programme of reform, substantial effort was put into enabling schools to create
programmes of CPD for their staff. In addition, all teachers at the top to the main
grade scale (six years service) could enrol on the Chartered Teacher Programme, a
form of incentivized professional learning whereby, through successful completion
of the programme, teachers were able to apply for Chartered Teacher status and
gain significant salary increments.
In 2010 a review of teacher education was set up by Scottish Government and
part of the impetus had been a concern that the pace of implementation of the major
reform of the school curriculum, the Curriculum for Excellence. Teaching
Scotland’s Futurehad some harsh criticisms of much of the provision of CPD,
characterising this as‘mass“force-feeding”’(Donaldson 2011 : 10) related to either
a particular national or local priority or the transmission of guidance for a particular
area. This approach did not foster sustained engagement and ongoing teacher
development and so the impact on practice and therefore on pupil learning, was
severely limited. The Report called for a re-professionalisation of teaching, an
‘extended professionalism’(Donaldson 2011 : 15) where the impetus for change and
improvement comes from inside the profession and teachers become the prime
agents for change.Teaching Scotland’s Futurepresented a vision of the teaching
profession of the twenty-first century:
Education policy should support the creation of a reinvigorated approach to twenty-first
century teacher professionalism. Teacher education should, as an integral part of that
endeavour, address the need to build the capacity of teachers, irrespective of career stage, to
have high levels of pedagogical expertise, including deep knowledge of what they are
teaching; to be self-evaluative; to be able to work in partnership with other professionals;
and to engage directly with well-researched innovation (Donaldson 2011 : 15).This new policy focus looks to‘career long professional learning’across the pro-
fession and as a consequence, the Chartered Teacher Programme was discontinued.
However, there remain issues about how you engage a critical mass of the pro-
fession in forms of professional learning that will have a systemic impact. From this
brief overview of policy on teacher development over the last twenty years in
Scottish education, we can see that it has been a series of‘starts and stops’. There
have been a number of attempts to re-professionalise the teaching profession with
different initiatives launched to engage the critical mass of teachers in professional
learning to bring about system level improvement in pupil learning outcomes.
6 The Development of Accomplished Teaching 89