Pointers to the main players of the system

played in teacher training.

AT one time colleges of education were big news. Famous political

figures like Millan and Younger became embroiled in the debate over the

contraction of the college system. By 1981 the number of colleges had

been reduced from ten to seven, with the closure of Hamilton and

Callendar Park and the merger of Notre Dame and Craiglockhart into the

new Catholic college, St Andrew's. Today there are five left, with only

St Andrew's and Northern College independent institutions.

The period from 1959, when the training colleges became colleges of

education, to 1981 is chronicled by Dr Willis Marker in his book, ''The

Spider's Web?'' As assistant principal of Jordanhill College until 1986

and a part-time consultant with the Scottish Education Department for

five years thereafter, he is ideally placed to depict the complex

network through which the SED guided the policy-making process.

Even then, many Scottish Office files were closed to him under the

30-year rule and, to obtain access, he had to sign the Official Secrets

Act and to guarantee to use information on specific individuals in a

manner that they could not be identified. So much for open government.

Of course, it was not always a case of college contraction and Dr

Marker presents a meticulously researched picture of the expansion of

the system in the 1960s. New colleges at Hamilton, Callendar Park and

Craigie and extensions to several others resulted from a massive

increase in the pupil population.

Decisions on the locations of the new colleges provoked fierce strife

and a Conservative minister objected to Hamilton because he could

envisage ''a swarm of girls going out to do their practical work in the

overcrowded, difficult and in places still grim surroundings of

Lanarkshire schools, and these young and emotionally impressionable

girls being subjected to constant contact with the militant

'agin-it-ness' of Lanarkshire teacher politics.''

The expanding system of the 1960s was given another stimulus by the

influential Robbins Report, which prompted the first BEd courses and

raised issues of linkage between colleges and universities. Indeed, Dr

Marker reveals that the renowned principal of Jordanhill, Henry Wood,

told him that ''at one point I went to Glasgow and suggested that they

should take over Jordanhill as a Faculty of Education''.

Such pioneering ideas took another quarter of a century to blossom.

Sadly, what goes up must come down. By the mid 1970s the school

population was collapsing and unemployment among new teachers resulted

in some colleges failing to meet their intake quotas.

The SED, with no chance of achieving consensus in what Dr Marker calls

the ''policy community'' -- mainly the college principals, the leading

unions and the General Teaching Council -- proposed the closure of

Craigie and Callendar Park and the merger of Craiglockhart with a

non-denominational college.

The department ''did not make any educational case for the closures''

and the Secretary of State, Bruce Millan, was forced to yield,

especially as Harry Ewing, a minister but also Callendar Park's local

MP, almost certainly threatened resignation.

By 1980 the SED was back. Callendar Park now had only 181 pre-service

students, Craigie 200, Craiglockhart 202 and Hamilton 254. The education

department officials must have expected united opposition but salvation

came, unexpectedly, from the GTC, which stated that ''10 autonomous

colleges, each substantially underused, can only serve to weaken the

training system''.

This division in the policy community encouraged the SED to announce

that Callendar Park and Hamilton would be closed. They had to concede,

however, after an effective campaign by the Catholic Church, that

Craiglockhart would merge with Notre Dame.

The decision to reprieve Craigie was, in Dr Marker's words, ''almost

certainly made by Younger against the advice of the SED'' and was

described by the then Glasgow Herald as ''blatantly political''.

Dr Marker offers an intriguing analysis of SED's relationship with the

policy community. Normally it worked through informal contacts towards

consensus, unless political imperatives or crisis management intervened.

It operated frequently through its ''powers of patronage'' e.g.

appointments to committees. It employed a team approach -- ''once policy

was agreed on . . . it was presented to the outside world by a unified

team''.

Dr Marker considers portraying the policy community as the spider's

web of the title -- SED holding central power, creating the structure

and weaving the links that run ''round the web (i.e. between groups in

the community) as well as out from the centre''. He rejects the analogy

because it offers ''the misleading suggestion that the other groups were

trapped helplessly in meshes of SED's making''. Misleading, Dr Marker?

''The Spider's Web?'' by Willis B Marker. Available at #10 (plus #1.50

pp) from Sales and Publications, University of Strathclyde, Faculty of

Education, Jordanhill Campus, 76 Southbrae Drive, Glasgow G13 1PP