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This paper provides a short history of social work education in Scotland. Its aim is to understand the patterns of the present through the lens of the past. A key argument is that social work education and practice exists persistently in the crossroads, that is, in the spaces between competing and often conflicting perspectives regarding that ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘who’ of social work and social change. At the same time, there is a dearth of robust theory and research underpinning social work education and practice, leaving the profession vulnerable in periods of rapid social and political change. Attention is given to the implications of these constants for education and practice, and to how we might address these going forward. The paper concludes that if we wish to realise the potential of social work education, learning and practice, we need to more collectively address long-neglected questions of learning identity, learning philosophy and learning practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the intersection of Spiritual Motherhood, early childhood education and child welfare in early twentieth-century Edinburgh. Its focus is St Saviour's Child Garden (SSCG), which opened in the Canongate, in November 1906, part of the Free Kindergarten movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. The paper focuses on the SSCG's founder Lileen Hardy, in order to trace the development of this new approach to child welfare and women's work in Britain. It discusses her training at the Sesame House for Home-Life Training in London, her move to Edinburgh, and the network of predominantly women reformers, whose interests ranged from urban reform to medical welfare, she found there. It shows how this network facilitated the founding of the SSCG and discusses the form it took and Hardy's implementation of a modified form of Froebelian praxis. In so doing its concern is to show how Free Kindergarten forms part of a wider history of social welfare and urban reform as well as to the history of early childhood education, and to move attention away from the men usually associated with innovations in Scottish social reform like Patrick Geddes, and onto a group of women who created a women and child-centred proto-Welfare State in pre-First World War Edinburgh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading. But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage knowledge on paper. Focusing on Scotland, handwritten manuscripts are used to reveal that children learned to write in a variety of modes, each of which required a set of graphic techniques. These modes and skills constituted a pervasive form of graphic literacy. The article first explains how children learned to write for different reasons in diverse domestic and institutional settings. It then explores how they acquired graphic literacy through the common techniques of copying, commonplacing, composing, bookkeeping, scribbling and drawing. In the end we shall have a more detailed picture of how children used writing as an indispensible mode of learning during the Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the provision of schooling to Catholics in eighteenth-century Scotland. In the first half of the century, schools established in the Highlands by the SSPCK mainly served a religious purpose, because Protestants were convinced that education was both a preservative against and an antidote to popery. As for the Catholic Church in Scotland, it concentrated its efforts on providing education to those boys intended for the priesthood. However, as the century wore on, there was a clear shift in the attitude of Scottish Catholics towards education. This paper presents evidence which suggests that Catholics came to regard education as an asset rather than as a threat, and that the changing perception of the uses of education mirrors the evolution of the standing of Scottish Catholics in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical background The history of medical education in Scotland is quite well known. It is largely told as a story of universities, of high standards and of an education mainly available to men from ordinary backgrounds who became general practitioners and servants of the British Empire. This paper asks whether there was anything peculiarly Scottish about the medical education to be had north of the border. Discussion The answer to this is yes. The paper shows there was a commitment among Scottish teachers to present medicine as a practical art based on general principles that brought the subject together in all its aspects, notably uniting internal medicine and surgery. Conclusion Modern academic medicine has ironed out these differences and medical education in Scotland today is much the same as western medical education in excellent universities anywhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the key periods, players and events which have contributed to the shaping of the current landscape of teacher education in Scotland. Starting with the Wheatley Report and the formation of the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in the 1960s through to the most recent Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, we examine ebb and flow amongst GTCS, government, colleges of education and universities. Following its own trajectory, Scottish Education resisted and rejected policies emanating from an ‘English’ ideology, capitalised on respect for and influence of the GTCS, and successfully moved teacher education’s base from autonomous colleges to high-status universities. At the core of teacher education in Scotland is the continuing desire for partnership-working amongst key stakeholders: local and national government, GTCS, schools, teacher education institutions, teaching unions, parents and pupils. A teaching profession of trained graduates, underpinned by university-led subject study, is now moving steadily towards Masters-level professional learning for all. Although having faced some troubled episodes, this period has also been characterised by remarkable stability and consensus and, although still tackling the improvement agenda suggested by the recent Donaldson review, teacher education in Scotland has retained a high degree of public and political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is an examination of the history of Scottish religious education (RE). Focusing on 1962–1992, it distinguishes the temporal processes that unfolded during this period to identify the circumstances that led to a serious case of neglect of the subject, especially in the non-denominational sector. Next, it highlights the less emphasised but important issue of how RE ‘survived’ in public education, going on to explicate the antecedents of a paradigm shift in the subject. Finally, curriculum reforms undertaken in the subject from the 1980s onwards are described, showing how these reforms helped to transform Scottish RE into an ‘academic’ subject well aligned with the curricular principles of ‘5–14’, the country’s first (1992) ‘educational’ RE programme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rapid programme of school building undertaken across Glasgow by the School Boards (1873-1919) left the city with a rich legacy of architecture designed by the top architects of the day. This was in contrast to most other UK cities whose Board schools were designed by a single, directly employed architect. Most analysis of the Glasgow Boards' output has tended to focus on individual schools in isolation, primarily (and with good reason) Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Martyrs' and Scotland Street Schools. However, this approach overlooks the context within which the Board Schools were designed, built and operated. This paper aims to redress the balance, by providing an overview of the creation of the School Boards, the commissioning of architects, development of school design and the educational and social impact of the Boards, with a view to highlighting the importance of what remains of Glasgow's often neglected School Board heritage today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2007 Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's only Adult Residential College, celebrated its seventieth anniversary. Its survival during this relatively short span has always been contingent. Its greatest crisis occurred in 1987, when the Scottish Office announced its intention to withdraw public funding from the college. This event reveals one of the problems to have dogged Newbattle from its beginning: its relative isolation from mainstream Scottish education. Its unusual size, structure and function all made it an important addition to mainstream education provision, but they also historically caused Newbattle to be both overlooked and underfunded. Yet the campaign to save Newbattle also reveals the extent to which the ideals associated with the college continued to resonate with important sections of Scottish society in the 1980s. This paper examines the debates concerning the role of residential non-vocational education in Scotland from the 1960s to the 'Save Newbattle' Campaign of 1987-1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's only adult residential college, was founded in the 1930s by Philip Kerr, 11th Marquis of Lothian. This paper traces the debates concerning the college and the rationale for adult residential education until the 1950s, focusing on the difficulties that Newbattle faced in establishing itself as a central part of adult education provision. It explores the ideals that Newbattle was held to represent by its supporters, and the variety of languages (spiritual, humanist, socialist and communitarian) used to defend and advocate the project. It also discusses the arguments posed by those who opposed Newbattle, and relates these to perceptions of the lack of necessity for adult education in the postwar social scene, and to the apparent lack of interest in Scotland in non-vocational education. It concludes by indicating that the survival of Newbattle demonstrates the existence of persistent if fragile support for the ideals it espoused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]