The aim of this session is to share the extensive partnership working across the Scottish education system that was undertaken to refresh and restructure the suite of Professional Standards for teachers. In its report, “Improving Schools in Scotland: an OECD perspective” (2015), the OECD provided specific commentary on the Professional Standards for Scotland’s teachers as follows:

“The standards are bold and supportive [sic]... However, standards frameworks are much harder to implement effectively than to set in the first place. There is a question of how deeply the GTCS standards have moved from the theory to the practice and become embedded in the professional culture of the Scottish educational system.” (2015:126)

Subsequent to the OECD report (2015), in the context of the constantly evolving educational landscape, with increasing public expectations and to address the current climate of anti-intellectualism and mistrust of institutions the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) engaged in a review of the Professional Standards.

Increasingly, there are multiple purposes for the Professional Standards in Scotland.  They are used as a benchmark and professional competency; to provide a framework for initial teacher education; to support career-long professional growth; to develop and enhance professionalism; to create a shared language for teaching professionals; and to ensure and enhance public trust and confidence in the teaching profession. Through these purposes they can offer a narrative that prioritises the diverse needs of children and acknowledges their place as citizens of now and tomorrow, premised on the strong foundation of social justice.

In Scotland, the Professional Standards are values-based and encourage professional criticality and self-evaluation. Teachers’ values and beliefs guide their actions, classroom relationships and pedagogy. Inclusion is a universal value which requires all teachers to embrace the diverse needs of every learner and promote equity, equality, respect and compassion which can counter-act the fragmentation of traditional social structures.

Using the Professional Standards as tools to support professional growth enables the continued development of teachers’ identity and the undertaking of appropriate professional learning to support the diverse needs of learners. The suite of Professional Standards provide a guide to professional learning that is aspirational and represents what it means to be a teacher in Scotland.

The refreshed and restructured Professional Standards are the product of collaboration, engagement and consensus building across the Scottish education system. This collaboration and co-construction involved the convening of a strategic working group and other working groups review the existing Professional Standards and suggest areas for change and improvement. These groups were constituted from all parts of the education system. This was followed by a national conversation conducted over a six-month period. This national conversation, together with a commissioned literature review and research from Children in Scotland, gave a voice to teachers, parents, children and young people with a view to ensuring that the recommendations being made for change were relevant and appropriate. This was followed by a full public consultation on the first set of draft Professional Standards resulted in 28 recommendations. These recommendations were taken account of by the writing groups in creating the final draft version, which again was subject to an online public consultation and the convening of fifteen focus groups.

The final version of the refreshed and restructures Professional Standards was launched at the GTC Scotland Annual Lecture in January 2021, for mandatory enactment from 2 August 2021. Their publication will be followed by a 12-month period of intense enactment support from GTC Scotland and partners, to support teaching professionals understand the theory of Professional Standards and to connect and enact these in practice in learning spaces across Scotland.

The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) (2017) published a report to inform the development of Professional Standards in the South African context. The study found that the success of Professional Standards was premised on the following factors; construction and presentation, an inclusive consultation process, a well-constructed evidence base that underpins the suite of Professional Standards and supports teacher professionalism and professional learning. Taking this into account, the refresh and restructure of the Professional Standards in Scotland employed a grounded theory approach, posited by Charmaz (2006) based on a constructivist model of induction theory building. Grounded theory remains an ill-defined contested concept and can be regarded as a ‘mental construction’ (Thomas & James, 2006; Silverman, 1993). In this research, grounded theory was used as it acknowledges there is no tabula rasa within the field of Professional Standards and new knowledge will emerge from existing interpretations, perspectives and the broader structures and contexts of the teaching profession in Scotland. GTC Scotland employed a mainly qualitative approach with some quantitative data collected through the public consultation. This approach allowed GTC Scotland to collect interpretations and perceptions of the purpose and use of Professional Standards, which as Charmaz (2000) noted are reconstructions of experiences rather than the experiences themselves and took cognisance of the interrelatedness of actions as “the world does not occur in a vacuum” (Glaser, 1996). Through the use of grounded theory, inconsistencies and contradictions, gaps in the enactment of Professional Standards were captured, as it allows faithful data collection as to how people act and also takes account of the complexity and interconnectedness of teaching professionals and aims to recognise complexity by including contextual details (Flick, 1998). Through a variety of data collection methods, GTC Scotland gathered data that could be analysed to build on the current notion of teacher professionalism demonstrated through the enactment of the Professional Standards. Early data was coded and analysed to create themes to be further explored and inform the next stage of data collection in order to develop the emerging theory (Strauss & Glaser, 1967; Creswell, 2013). Professional dialogue with a variety of stakeholders from across the education system, further refined the themes and categories. A process of inductive construction and co-construction created the final iteration of the refreshed and re-structured Professional Standards, which come into mandatory use from 2 August 2021.

This research has explored the contemporary notion of teacher professionalism in Scotland through the lens of a refreshed suite of Professional Standards. In doing so, has positioned teaching professionals as a ‘social glue’ to support and promote the rebuilding of shared social and educational spaces. The goal of this paper is to share the research undertaken by GTC Scotland on Professional Standards and their contribution to the centrality of education to building better futures. The enactment of Professional Standards demonstrates in practice teacher professionalism which encompasses what it means to be a teacher in Scotland. Through the enactment of the refreshed Professional Standards, teaching professionals can counter the rise of anti-intellectualism in public life by being accomplished expert teachers who improve the life chances of the children and young people of Scotland. The recommendations from the multiple engagements with the education community to make improvement to the content and structure of the next iteration of the suite of Professional Standards will be discussed. Additionally, the enactment support being offered to teachers after their launch in January 2021 and prior to mandatory enactment will be outlined along with an evaluation of this engagement phase prior to mandatory enactment. Through the methodology based on a strong platform of social justice and seeking consensus across all educational stakeholders, GTC Scotland has delivered a high-quality set of refreshed and re-structured Professional Standards that can support teachers, children and young people to learn our way to a better future.

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