The Review and Development of Professional Standards through the Lens of Democratic Anchorage Points

Charlaine Simpson (Lead / Corresponding author), Anna Beck, Louise Campbell

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Abstract

The recent review of the Scottish professional standards for teachers, led by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, offered a unique perspective to interrogate participative approaches in policy-making in the Scottish education context and to provide insights and implications for future policy-making. Using one of the authors’ experiences as a General Teaching Council Scotland Officer during the review of the professional standards, this paper conceptualises the consultation process as a form of democratic governance, using Sørensen and Torfing's framing of the four anchorage points that enable democratic legitimacy in governance networks. This perspective places policy-making within a governance structure that is created by networks that interact, overlap and are entangled with each other, implying a decentralised form of governance. An analysis of the stages of the review process demonstrated that it was participatory. However, there was an over-reliance on the established policy-making community. In addition, authentic participation was restricted as choices were limited by the metagovernor. We argue that Sørensen and Torfing's anchorage points for democratic legitimacy allow an interrogation of the extent to which policy-making in Scottish education is authentically democratic and conclude by offering a framework of critical questions for more transparent democratic participation in future iterations of similar professional standards reviews.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages20
JournalBritish Educational Research Journal
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2024

Keywords

  • democratic legitimacy
  • policy networks
  • democratic anchors
  • participatory policy-making

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education

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