It's the law

I switched on Radio 4 in time to hear someone talking about CCJs. Now I'm as smart as the next person at working out what the acronyms of modern life are all about and, since this programme was about the law, I jaloused that we might be talking about courts. But to get the full acronym, I had to google it. A CCJ is a County Court Judgement. It seems you can have a CCJ taken out against you without your knowledge and it can screw up your credit rating right royally for the rest of your life. It seems to be an England thing...or maybe an England/Wales thing or even an England/Wales/Northern Ireland thing. Hard to tell..

We don't have CCJs in Scotland, where there's a whole different legal system, much closer to the French system, so that Scottish lawyers can go and work in France. And they do. Have done for centuries. Same goes for Scottish doctors and dentists. On the other hand, people trained in law in England find it difficult to practise in Scotland or anywhere else in the EU because the legal systems are so different.

I think maybe it's a Scottish thing to pretend the same thing applies to education: we restrict people coming to teach in Scotland on the grounds that it's ok to know how to teach reading, writing and maths but can you do it the way the local culture needs you to do it? Why should we? Don't we need new thinking?

About 25 years ago, I came across a French teacher working as a foreign language assistant in Kintyre. She had trained in a way that was what you might call 'traditional' in France but was alien to us in Scotland: left school at 18 with the Baccalaureat and served a 5-year apprenticeship as a primary teacher, learning on the job alongside a qualified and experienced teacher. It's not what I would want for a teacher myself: in my opinion, it's better to have some time out to study the philosophy/theory of learning before being flung back into the classroom. But this woman was obviously well trained and brought worth-while skills to her school. It took 5 months but she finally got GTCS 'recognition.'

A lot of this has to do with the fact that the UK is (right now) a member of the EU: according to EU law, you can't prevent someone exercising their metier if they are qualified and experienced. If they have the paper showing their qualification, they're in. It wasn't so easy for my Chilean niece. Her degree in English (backed up by long-term work experience in the USA and the UK), a masters degree in English and education and her years in the classroom - well, none of it meant a damned thing to the GTCS. She still had to prove on paper - certificates, diplomas, letters of recommendation, etc - that she was 'fit to teach.'

I think there's arrogance at work here: an innate belief that the way we do it is best. A short visit to schools in several Scandinavian countries would persuade you of the folly of that idea. We can learn from what goes on in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. I know fitness to teach - qualifications in other words - was a hard-fought battle in Scotland but that battle took place 60 years ago and maybe we should have moved on since then.