It’s been just over a week since the excitement of the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow. It was a busy two days; lots of interesting conversations with new and former colleagues as well as the opportunity to hear great keynote speakers, including Sir John Jones. If you weren’t able to go along, you’ll find the keynote speeches here.

At GTC Scotland, we took the opportunity at this year’s learning festival to share our early thinking about professional update in one of the seminar sessions. We had an interested audience which included teachers, local authority folk, representatives from the Scottish Government, the National CPD team and international visitors from Denmark! Tony Finn, our Chief Executive, explained what the Professional Update working group had done so far and outlined the key purposes of Professional Update:

-  To maintain and improve the quality of our teachers and to enhance the impact that they have on pupils’ learning

-  To support, maintain and enhance teachers’ continued professionalism

If, that’s what Professional Update is about, a question you might be asking is, “so, what’s it not about…?” Tony pointed out that it’s not about teacher competence and I’m sure that you’re already aware that local authorities have processes in place to address this in line with GTC Scotland’s Code of Practice on Teacher Competence.

Tony spoke about Professional Update being supportive and challenging and stressed that it’s about “improving, not proving”. Teachers in the audience seemed very supportive of this thinking. They were also interested to hear about the planned entitlement to a system of supportive PRD and an emphasis on the importance of CPD. A very positive session, in all!

As you can imagine, the audience asked some interesting questions, including:

-  What about supply teachers not working in schools?

-  How will this be different from current CPD and PRD systems?

-  If school and local authority budgets are getting smaller, what might this mean for CPD and Professional Update?

Lots of interesting questions for us to ponder over the next few months then as we move to the next stage of development. We’re just about to pack our bags and head out on the road, with a series of regional events where we can talk to groups of teachers about their views on professional update and what it might mean for them. These should be great, lively discussions and will provide us with lots more questions to think about, I’m sure.

So what’s next? There will be a formal consultation launched around the end of the year, so look out for information on our website about this. We are really keen to hear your views. There’s already a fair bit of information on the GTC Scotland website already and our list of frequently asked questions is being updated regularly.  If you have any suggestions or questions about what you’ve heard so far, you can contact us at professional.update@gtcs.org.uk

We’re also starting to think about what pilot projects might look like. What an interesting time for me to have joined GTC Scotland!

Gillian Hamilton
Head of Educational Services
GTC Scotland