Before the summer holidays, we celebrated teachers who achieved the Standard for Headship in the 2024 to 2025 academic year. It was particularly special to bring together this group of people in GTC Scotland’s 60th year.
The Standard for Headship is one of the aspirational standards within the suite of Professional Standards for Teachers and provides a developmental framework for teachers in or aspiring to the headteacher role.
This standard outlines the strategic vision, professional knowledge and understanding, interpersonal skills and abilities and professional illustrations that support teachers in a headteacher role.
Professional Standards describe teacher professionalism in Scotland. As well as creating a shared language for teachers, they provide a framework for professional growth and ultimately ensure and enhance public trust and confidence in the profession.
The Standard for Headship has the additional purposes of:
- supporting self-evaluation and reflection
- informing the process of recruitment and selection to ensure public trust and confidence
- contributing to dialogue about leadership and management.
The Standard for Headship has the additional purpose of being a legislative requirement for teachers permanently employed in headteacher roles from August 2020.
Reflecting on leadership
The theme of the event was ‘talking trusted leadership’ and we asked everyone to consider 2 provocations.
The first was about key strengths in relation to the Standard for Headship and what skills people felt they needed to develop.
The second asked people to think about trusted leadership as the essence of leadership. How do you trust, value, support, and challenge teachers so that the Professional Standards are an integral part of their professional life?
We asked people to consider:
- what is working well in your context in championing and embedding the Professional Standards with your colleagues?
- what actions need to take place to build this into the learning culture?
- what impact will this have?
Successful embedding of the Professional Standards relies on the headteacher’s leadership of the school and the effective leadership of the learning community. Headteachers have a responsibility to support and develop a professional learning culture for the colleagues they lead.
Leaders of and for learning
Leadership is one of the central underpinning and interconnecting themes within the suite of Professional Standards and is a key aspect of teacher professionalism.
No matter where you are in your career, the provocations above may have prompted you to think about the wider Professional Standards and how you implement them in your daily work.
The important work we do in the Education and Standards team is to promote teaching standards. Educating and engaging in this way helps achieve GTC Scotland’s core statutory aims to contribute to improving the quality of teaching and learning, and maintain and improve the professional standards of teachers.
Resources
The Professional Standards for Teachers are the core framework for professional growth. We have produced a range of resources to promote teaching standards and the benefits of maintaining and enhancing them. You can find tools to help you plan and evaluate your learning in our Professional Standards knowledge base.
