Quitting the Fray!

It is now almost three months since I threw in the towel as a principal teacher of RMPS. The fighting metaphors reveal what latterly my job had become. I seemed to be battling on many fronts; bad behaviour, the inadequacies of the Curriculum for Excellence; the damage caused by Aberdeenshire Ed's programme of facultisation; the pressure for cross-curricular collaboration when there was insufficient time to teach the basics of RMPS; the attack on RMPS's time allocation; a sinister move to generic teachers and the subsequent loss of specialist enthusiasm; an increasingly authoritarian education system; a conflict with senior management who insisted on allowing a fundamentalist religious group free, unsupervised access to pupils against my advice.
I was lucky to get out alive.
Anyway this is number one of the bigquestions blog which will accompany the new bigquestions website. The purpose of the blog will be to encourage debate and discussion apropos the direction of RMPS in Scotland. There already exist several GLOW groups directed to this end and being a former GLOW mentor I wish these groups every success. However GLOW exists within the educational establishment under the tutelage of Teaching and Learning Scotland. It has been my experience that both locally and nationally the educational establishment has become increasingly authoritarian and intolerant of criticism. Critics of policy are not engaged in debate but often bullied and dismissed with ad hominem epithets. So bigquestions will stand freely outside the system but with a view to offering both support and criticism of the curriculum.