Future for teacher employment
9 February 2012
One Comment
Plans to support teachers to improve learning outcomes for children and young people have been announced.
In response to the McCormac review of teaching employment, the Scottish Government intends to:
create a new masters level qualification to replace the Chartered Teacher scheme
introduce a refreshed system of professional review for teachers
give further, careful consideration to the role of external experts in schools
Speaking in Parliament, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning Michael Russell said:
“Teachers have a fundamental role in nurturing and supporting the development of our children and young people. I recognise the high standards and achievements of our teachers and our pupils, but at the same time we need to be ambitious for our education system and young people.
“We should aspire to a vision of teaching as a masters level profession and we will do so by building on the Chartered Teacher scheme. I have therefore set the National Partnership Group the task of bringing forward proposals to deliver opportunities for teachers to work towards masters level qualifications. Chartered Teachers and those in the process of becoming Chartered Teachers should be given credit for the work that they have already undertaken and will be among the first to access these opportunities for masters qualifications.
“We want to achieve a strong, confident and reflective professional teaching workforce. Professor McCormac recommends that a refreshed system of Professional Review and Personal Development (PRPD) should be introduced, reinforcing the recommendations from Graham Donaldson’s review into teacher education. I have therefore asked the National Partnership Group to work with GTCS to take forward the recommendations related to professional development.
“I have listened to stakeholder opinion on the issue of external experts. There is broad agreement on the positive opportunities that employers, the local community, universities, colleges and others can bring into schools, but there are also concerns. We will therefore take forward a measured approach. To start this process I have therefore asked Education Scotland to consider the current arrangements, identify best practice and recommend whether further safeguards or guidance are required in this area.”
The review of teacher employment was established in January 2011 to consider the current arrangements for teacher employment in Scotland and make recommendations designed to secure improved educational outcomes for our children and young people.
The review was chaired by Professor Gerry McCormac and operated independently of Government. The review report, ‘Advancing Professionalism in Teaching’ made 34 recommendations and was published on September 13, 2011.
The recommendations in the McCormac review that relate to the pay and conditions for teachers are the responsibility of the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT). The SNCT has agreed a plan, including a clear timetable for consideration of these recommendations.
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about him when I heard, while on the road in Michigan, that he had died. I had no clue that he was so close to passing, and so the news was a srorowful shock to me. (Some of what I write here is thematically interwoven, and will be, with what I write for the group of essays.)It’s a real task to, in any number of words, cover the vast and deep econoospheric life region that was and is Peter Berg. A book or 2 could, and may well be, written just on the subject of his seminal role in the development of the 60 s counterculture, and his great talents as an activist performer and social innovator, as with the Diggers, where he and his wild crew of coyotes, more than one a Peter, characteristically went for the radix elemental of freedoms: personal, political, economic: free everything dispensed as performance piece of great and funny seriousness, real stuff dispensed for the benefit of living beings.When and where the ecological thunderbolt hit him I don’t know, or maybe it was there all along, but his relentless primal drive powered by his mind nonpareil to the live foundations of palpable truths sent him into the mostly untrammeled by humans of neo-european origins or those associated by appurtenances of modern civilization realm of the pioneers of functional ecocentrism. Here he discerned and divined the numinous vajra of how and indeed why the Earth physically delineates its body ecosphere, the bioregions, and how, from right out of the nature of bioregions, comes a new and ancient way of life for our species, of a whole cloth, all-encompassing, depthless, specific, palpable truth pervasive, something way beyond theory but, and necessarily so, applicable and capable of being implemented in all the appurtenances of ecological design: reinhabitation and its greenprints.The bioregional revelation can, and has from my own experience, fully and ecstatically possess mind body soul, and I believe it did for Peter from the first transmission of who knows when to his last breath. I believe his divination of bioregionalism’s ecstatic nature played fully into his original passion and performance of the arts of freedom and gave it vibrant ground and source.To me he abides on a very short list of the original ecocentrics who, some passed and some still with us, translated not just the idea but the ecological decentralist roadmap to implementation of a way for the humans to stay here on the planet, and taught it brilliantly through all manner of performance, on stage, lectern, written word, and pulling up the concrete on the streets of San Francisco to plant native trees and the seeds of green cities.It was of the greatest of honors to have worked with him in the bioregional movement, though it was not at times easy, and why should it have been? Peter was indeed a force of nature. With all that implies. Just like his bioregional vision. One of Turtle Island’s Holy Coyotes. Goodbye Peter, and thank you beyond all measure for what you did and what you left with us.delh
20 July 2012 at 10:17 PM