In Scotland professional standards for teachers are overseen by the national regulatory body, the General Teaching Council of Scotland, the first regulatory body for teachers in the world. The role of professional standards in promoting teacher professionalism in Scotland has advanced considerably since the introduction of the first professional standard in the 1990s, to the adoption of a full suite of professional standards in 2012, covering the all key stages in the career trajectory of teachers (GTCS, 2012). The introduction of a ‘Professional Update’ scheme in 2014, through which teachers are required to demonstrate and evidence how they are maintaining the relevant professional standard, represents a further development in the use of professional standards in the Scottish context (Watson and Fox, 2015). However, while regulatory mechanisms and architecture have been put in place, the extent to which professional standards have been adopted by the profession and become embedded within the wider system for teacher development has not been fully tested (OECD, 2015: 126). The challenges associated with this were noted in the 2015 OECD report ‘Improving Schools in Scotland: An OECD Perspective’, acknowledging that ‘standards frameworks are much harder to implement effectively than to set in the first place’ (ibid). This paper reports on the Scottish strand of the multi-country survey on professional standards. As the first major study in recent years to survey teachers in Scotland on their understandings of the professional standards and specifically, on how the standards are used to support professional development through ‘Professional Update’, the findings provide important insights into current levels of understanding and engagement of the teaching profession ahead of the forthcoming five yearly review of the suite of professional standards. The paper offers a contrasting perspective from an apparently ‘stable’ education system, characterized by consensual, partnership approaches (Kennedy and Doherty 2015) in comparison to the emerging regulatory system in Russia and the more volatile model in Portugal.

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Journal of Education Policy 
Vol. 30, Iss. 1, 2015