Education Leadership and Professional Learning Subgroup - minutes: June 2021

Attendees and apologies

Present

• Samir Sharma, Quality Improvement Officer, Glasgow City Council
• Khadija Mohammed, Scottish Association of Minority Ethnic Educators (SAMEE)
• Murid Laly, Intercultural Youth Scotland (IYS)
• Amy Allard-Dunbar, Intercultural Youth Scotland (IYS)
• Carol Young, Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER)
• David Smith, ITE (University of Aberdeen, Scottish Council of Deans of Education
• Mélina Valdelièvre, Education Scotland
• Lesley Whelan, Education Scotland

Apologies

• Pauline Stephen, General Teaching Council (Scotland)

Items and actions

Brief note of meeting

Second meeting of the sub-group took place on Monday 7 June.

The main areas discussed were related to culture and ethos in the school and wider community to aim to develop a better understanding of specific actions needed to make progress.

Group members agreed that one of the main outcomes required to underpin this work was to ensure teacher leaders are comfortable in their racial literacy. This then led to a discussion about what elements would be needed for that outcome to be realised.

Points discussed included:

• recognition of the importance of culture and ethos in the school and school community as well as a recognition that the school structure may need to change to reflect the changes needed. The group felt it was important that schools and school leaders are open to the learning that comes from cultural change with the community included in how decisions are made and in the overall life of the school
• develop a series of sessions to support leaders to trial and learn from actions/mistakes – this links back to cultural and ethos and role modelling
• the group felt it was necessary to openly recognise the size and scale of the challenge and to map the changes that are currently underway/being seen and identify what has worked well. For example work currently underway in Glasgow – can more be learned and shared from current approaches?
• positive action on recruitment – share strategies related to how to establish different recruitment approaches, deal with push back, ensure transparency of approach and to ensure roles are set in context and fully explained
• are there other approaches that may be helpful for us to learn from in taking this work forward. For example Rights Respecting Schools model – what do we understand about that model that is driving change? Would elements in that model support the work that we are now taking forward? Is there a need for more visible signs that this is an area of work for schools for example anti-racist charters/awards etc? However group members recognised that there is a need to move beyond a tokenistic or superficial model to a meaningful framework to benchmark areas for development and areas that are working well. Potential for some aspects to be pupil led
• there is potential for the Lead Teacher role to support elements of professional learning support and development
• again group members emphasised the need for an overarching evaluation framework for all workstreams, that connections be made across all workstreams and that initial mapping of existing outcomes/targets etc is required as an initial start point. This work is likely to require funding. L Whelan committed to discussing this with the programme board