Partnership out of conflict: the emerging relationship of teacher learning representatives and local authority continuing professional development quality improvement officers in Scotland

摘要

Union learning representatives have become significant in the Scottish educational system—particularly in response to the McCrone Report, which dealt with the future of continuing professional development (CPD) of Scottish teachers and made significant recommendations in this area. The Educational Institute of Scotland, the teacher union that represents the overwhelming majority of teachers in Scotland, took up the challenge and launched a learning representatives initiative with the expressed desire that these representatives work to advise, broker and facilitate improved CPD opportunities for their colleagues. The aim of our article is two-fold. Firstly, to examine how the second main cohort of multi-establishment representatives operate within their local authority area; and, secondly, how their relationship with local authority CPD quality improvement officers has developed since the publication of an earlier evaluation that examined the first main cohort of Educational Institute of Scotland multi-establishment learning representatives and found a significant non-connection between this cohort and their quality improvement officer counterparts.