Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth has suggested that there is no mandate to adopt key education reforms recommended by the recent Hayward Review of Scottish qualifications.

Speaking at the annual STEP conference in Stirling, Ms Gilruth described a need to break the “perpetual change cycle” in Scottish education, in which repeated reviews are commissioned without making a difference for schools. 

Since she first took office, Ms Gilruth has spoken repeatedly about the need to take teachers’ opinions seriously. In doing so, she said that she has found the appetite for reform is not what she first envisioned.

“When I was appointed cabinet secretary last March, I was told there was this urgent appetite for radical reform.

“Then I went into schools.”

Teachers aren’t necessarily against reform, she said, but they “want me to hear and understand about the challenges they’re dealing with.”  

Teachers don't want to be patronised, she said, and any attempts to force changes without taking the realities of Scottish classrooms into account are doomed to fail. 

Read more: Gilruth 'gets it' but after nearly two decades that just isn't enough

When asked about delays in implementing reforms and addressing recommendations, she said that her goal is to find out where teachers want reform to "move at pace" and where there needs to be a more measured approach.

She added that, in her experience speaking with teachers, she found recent reform attempts commissioned by the Scottish Government have lacked a genuine engagement with professionals.

“When I went into my old school and spoke with teachers there, most of them didn’t know that reports were being commissioned.”

When asked when the recommendations from the 2023 Hayward Report would be implemented, Ms Gilruth made it clear that she is under no obligation to adopt all wholesale reform.

“I don’t need to agree with every single recommendation in the Hayward Review. There is a mindset out there, particularly when I was first appointed, that I would agree with all of it.

“I don’t need to do that. And I will reflect on how those recommendations match up with the reality of our classroom teachers.”

She will respond formally to the Hayward Report in the coming weeks, she said.

But the tone of her comments on Saturday left room for her to push back on many of the recommendations brought forward by the report.

Read more: The Hayward Report explained: What is a Scottish Diploma of Achievement?

In particular, she referenced recent survey results which suggest that teachers may not fully support some of the Hayward Report’s key recommendations, including ending S4 exams, and implementing a new Scottish Diploma of Achievement to replace the current qualifications model.

Through a consultation with school and college teachers that she commissioned, Ms Gilruth found that 57% of the 719 respondents disagreed with calls to reduce senior phase exams and scrap eternal assessments for S4.

Despite her calls for better engagement with Scotland’s teachers and warnings of a lukewarm appetite for reform, teachers at the STEP conference expressed a slightly different view.

Many expressed disappointment that, following her prepared speech, Ms Gilruth only answered a few prepared questions and then left without opening up the room for discussion.

Others agreed that any reform programme needs to be based on teachers’ classroom experiences, and some even warmed to the suggestion that the consultation process could be improved.

But more expressed concerns that teachers aren’t being given genuine opportunities for engagement, and many still worry about professional repercussions if they speak out about areas for improvement at their school across education more broadly.

One teacher put it bluntly: “Where are all of these opportunities for teachers to express their opinions freely without fear of punishment?”

Later discussion at the conference raised more questions about the reform process, with Professor Walter Humes, whose speech followed Ms Gilruth’s, suggesting that the current reform processes were “constrained” by the government’s policy decisions.

He pointed explicitly to the announcement that the SQA would be scrapped, which occurred hours before the publication of a long-awaited and, it turned out, critical review of the government’s handling of Scottish education.