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Hyndland Secondary School in Glasgow has just become the first secondary in Scotland in almost a decade to be rated “excellent” for learning, teaching and assessment. But crucially, staff at Hyndland don’t talk about learning and teaching - they prefer “learning and engagement”.

Talking about engagement instead shifts the focus from the teacher to the experience of the students in the classroom, explains headteacher Louise Edgerton. It is a subtle but powerful difference that makes it easier to have conversations about how to improve without professionals feeling under attack, she says.

Depute head Jodie Stewart, whose remit includes learning and engagement and staff development, echoes this: “We need to remember that all staff are professionals and we’re all in this job for the same reason: to improve outcomes for young people.

“So the minute you start talking about ‘how do we improve outcomes for young people?’ as opposed to ‘how do you become a better teacher?’ things take a different direction. Staff become much better at working together and collegiate and supportive of each other.”

Teachers working across subject areas

The model that Hyndland uses to promote reflection is called “lesson study”, and it is imported from Japan.

It involves teachers from different subject areas working in small groups - usually of three - to improve learning and engagement by developing their skills in a new area - for example, active learning or more effective questioning - and then observing each other to assess the impact.

“Once they’ve planned the lesson, they let us know they would like to go and observe the engagement in each other’s classrooms. So we protect time for them to do that,” says Stewart.

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In total the school, which has about 1,000 students, had 76 informal lesson study observations taking place in 2023-24.

“That’s on top of our learning walks and our middle-leader learning walks, so you can see how much people are in and out of classrooms and supporting each other to improve outcomes,” says Stewart.

“Some schools will have a principal teacher of learning and teaching or they’ll have a learning and teaching working group, and it’s their responsibility to drive it. The difference in this school is learning and engagement is the responsibility of every single member of staff in the building.”

The , published on 21 January, says the quality of teaching is at “a very high standard”.��There are “creative and innovative approaches” being taken to lesson planning, with maths and science singled out for praise. The report says: “Young people across the school love mathematics.”

Set this against what Education Scotland’s schools inspectorate found in November when it reviewed the quality of maths education across the country - for many children it was “repetitive, lacking in challenge and disconnected from real life” - and Hyndland’s achievement is all the more significant.

However, what inspectors chose to home in on first, in the opening line of their report, was not the school’s “high-quality professional learning” or its “highly effective approaches to improving learner engagement”. Rather, they talk about the “mutually respectful and caring relationships between staff and young people”. It is these that underpin “the sector-leading learning environment of Hyndland Secondary”.

Students ‘deserve a calm environment’

Edgerton, whose background is as a music and pastoral support teacher, describes student support as her “passion”.

She entered teaching in the mid-Nineties, when she says there was a culture of teachers shouting at students and slamming doors. Even as a raw probationer, she wanted no part of it.

“Young people deserve a calm environment,” she says.

Restorative practices and nurturing principles are embedded in the school, which Edgerton joined over 16 years ago as a depute. She took on the role of head officially in 2018 after a spell as acting headteacher.

Teachers, she says, should be positive role models; the vision of the school is “be the best version of yourself”, and that applies to both staff and students.

Hyndland has a house system so that students stick with the same pastoral teacher from one year to the next, allowing relationships to build.

Pastoral support teachers are responsible for wellbeing, but they also know how their cohort of students is attaining.

“They are understanding the whole journey,” explains Edgerton. There is “a hook for every child”, she says, and once the school finds it “we can make it happen for them”.

In order to get to know individual students well, teachers have regular “learning conversations” with them. In the these will take place around four times a year - with the pastoral staff also engaging.

The focus of these conversations is “making young people understand where they go next in the learning”, says Edgerton. The conversations are described in the inspection report as “a major strength across the school”.

Little feedback on learning

The approach was introduced after an analysis showed that traditional reports contained very little feedback on learning.

“It was all the stuff about ‘Fiona is lovely and she’s great to have in class’, which I’m sure parents love to read but was not about learning,” says Edgerton.

Now reports still go home but not as often, given that learning conversations are recorded and logged on Microsoft Teams (which the school moved to as its sole platform for sharing work and communicating after students complained about different departments using different platforms).

“Nothing sits still in here - it always moves, and that includes the curriculum,” says Edgerton.

She credits depute headteacher Clare Hayes and her timetabling prowess for making that possible.

Students making course choices are not hidebound by columns at Hyndland; instead, they make their choices “and then we work back and create the column structure from their options”, Edgerton explains.

“A lot of people talk about student voice being a driver in their school, but pupil voice should not be tokenistic. The pupils are involved in everything here - they’re involved in all the decisions that are taken, in writing policies, and they are also involved in the curriculum.”

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Education secretary Jenny Gilruth, who visited the school after its positive inspection - in which it was also rated “excellent” for raising attainment and achievement - spoke about Hyndland being a “brilliant example of how collaborative working with pupils can have a significant impact on outcomes”.

Scotland’s interim chief inspector, Janie McManus, who also visited the school, praised its “exceptional learning environment…where young people are genuinely empowered to be active partners in their education”.

The courses that run in the school, therefore, change depending on the cohort. However, as a general principle the school has scaled back its offer - the equivalent of Advanced Higher - in order to offer more breadth at lower levels.

“We’ve introduced Higher politics, Higher economics, Higher media, Higher photography, musical theatre, cybersecurity, computer games development, travel and tourism,” says Edgerton.

Broader range of qualifications

Like many schools, Hyndland is now offering a range of National Progression Awards as well as National 5s, Highers and Advanced Highers.

As students in the senior phase move through the academic year, the school tracks their progress and identifies where they need more support - partly by using a bespoke system designed by the principal teacher of computing.

There are two 50-minute periods in the timetable that can be used flexibly, so that if a student is “on the cusp”, as Edgerton puts it, that time is used to get them over the line.

Other students might “double up”, so as well as going to their own history classes they join another class studying the same subject at the same level but at a different time and get twice as much time with a teacher.

“The difference you can make between now and the exams is quite considerable,” Edgerton says.

Hyndland is even open to students on Saturdays at certain times of year. Saturday study support sessions, starting at 9.30am and aimed at senior-phase students, run in 10-week blocks ahead of prelims and final exams.

They were introduced after students complained about being too tired to take part in an after-school version and also said they preferred to engage in extracurricular activity after school. Hyndland offers more than 50 clubs and activities across the school week.

Bacon and sausage rolls are used to entice students into the Saturday sessions. Attendance is best among S4 students. “We have half the year group attending - around 90 kids,” says the headteacher.

No school uniform

And then there is the aspect of the school that is most obvious to the outsider: Hyndland is one of the few schools in Scotland not to have a uniform.

Has this had any influence on the school’s success? Edgerton says it is part of the picture. Teachers can welcome students at the start of the day instead of getting things off to a bad start because students are not wearing a tie or the right shoes, she says.

“They’re also comfortable. In the cold they wrap up; if it’s hot they also dress for the weather,” she adds.

Students at Hyndland are also, quite simply, more likely to turn up. The inspection report flags the school’s “relentless focus” on attendance and its “highly effective systems to monitor and improve attendance”. Attendance is “generally above the national average” at 93.1 per cent in 2023-24, compared with the average rate of 87.6 per cent across all secondaries.

Computing staff have designed an attendance tracker bespoke to Hyndland, which the school uses to understand the impact of different interventions and respond quickly if attendance tails off.

It can be hard to sum up all the different elements that make for a highly successful school.

But sitting with Edgerton and her four deputes, it is clear that their remits reflect much of the practice that the inspectors praised. Stewart and Hayes have been mentioned, but Laura Forrester is responsible for student support and child protection, and Vicki Letford is responsible for transitions and partnerships.

Inspectors said: “Aspects of outstanding practice in primary to secondary transition result in continuity and progression in children’s learning.”

Edgerton acknowledges that some will dismiss the school’s achievements, believing that it serves a “leafy suburb” in the West End of Glasgow. Yet the school has just over a fifth of students registered for free school meals; the average across Scottish secondaries is just under a fifth.

Ultimately, the reality is that plenty of Scottish secondaries serve “leafy suburbs” but Hyndland is the only one to secure that “excellent” rating for learning, teaching and assessment since the current inspection model was introduced in 2016.

In terms of raising attainment and achievement, just three other secondaries have been rated “excellent”: Gryffe High School in Renfrewshire, in 2020; Douglas Academy in East Dunbartonshire, in 2023; and St Ninian’s High School in East Renfrewshire, in 2019.

It is also a common thread through Hyndland’s inspection report that it is outperforming its - generated based on the characteristics of the school’s students - with inspectors describing attainment at S4, S5 and S6 as “exceptional”.

Pride in students being ‘ambassadors’

Edgerton says she is proudest of the report’s observation that young people are recognised “for being ambassadors of the school”.

At a time when behaviour in schools is regularly cited as a concern, the inspectors’ comments about Hyndland students are effusive. They are “outstanding ambassadors of learning”, almost all show “very high levels of sustained engagement in their learning”, and their “mature outlook during learning is of an impeccable standard”.

The goal surely has to be to make the findings of the Hyndland report a reality for schools throughout Scotland.

McManus says “the bar for an excellent rating in learning, teaching and assessment is high, and that is by design”. It requires schools to demonstrate “sector-leading practice that is deeply embedded, consistently sustained, and making a measurable impact on all children and young people”.

However, “there is still too much variability across the system” and “more can be done to support improvement across all schools”.

And the chief inspector adds: “While this standard is deliberately challenging, the ambition must always be to see more schools consistently delivering the highest quality of learning and teaching for all children and young people.”

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