ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the advancement of key aspects of policy and practice of professional development in Scottish education and explores emerging issues. Teacher professional development has represented a major area in Scottish policy since the early 1990s (O'Brien 2011). Over recent years, a significant shift in policy focus has seen a move from the provision of professional learning as an implementation tool for policy reform to an ongoing project concerned with the mobilisation of the teaching profession, as part of a drive for system-wide improvement. A part of this drive has been to tackle an enduring ‘poverty-related attainment gap’ (ScotGov 2016). A concept underpinning the current reforms to educational governance structures, curriculum, and assessment is that of a teacher- and school-led system (ScotGov 2019) as a way of achieving system-wide improvement.
