Not just posing in front of books but higgledy-piggledy ones?

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Regulars here will know that we’ve been reacting, often angrily, to Prof Paterson’s attempts to shame Scottish schools, based on the skills he picked up in his own early research into barley crop yields, bull testicles and other agricultural products.

I won’t re-tread these today.

I have another reason to question his motivations, that I’d forgotten about these 13 years since I did quantitative research into BBC/STV reporting of the referendum campaign and found, a 3 to 1 bias at BBC Scotland and a 3 to 2 bias at STV against the Yes campaign.

In January 2014, it was published online by Newsnet Scotland and went ‘viral’, with around 100 000 hits in one week. It’s still there at: https://newsnetscotland.com/8598-broadcasters-favouring-no-campaign-according-to-new-academic-study/

What, for some reason, I have forgotten to mention much is that at the end of 2013, I had sent the study to the editor at Scottish Affairs, an Edinburgh University ‘research’ journal of modest status. I had previously published there – Naming the First Minister: Scottish Adolescents’ Knowledge and Perceptions of Political Decision-Making Processes – in 2004 at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/scot.2004.0053 I remember that all of our subjects could name PM Tony Blair but not one could name the First Minister of Scotland though one came close with ‘Jack McGoogle!’

As I remember and this gets a bit sketchy, I spoke to ‘a man’ at Scottish Affairs, who said they might publish my research but only after the referendum so as not to influence it (!), I think. At the time, I’d never heard of Lyndsey Paterson but he was, I’ve checked, editor at the time. Realising then, that even had it been published in Scottish Affairs, it would’ve taken months and only a few hundred would ever have read it, I decided to go online with it.

Paterson’s early career (1980s) early career included, epidemiological research in medicine, work as a statistician for the Agricultural Research Council and a lectureship in actuarial mathematics and statistics at Heriot-Watt University.

His published work in that period was in statistical methodology, especially the design and analysis of experiments. Examples include:

• “Circuits and efficiency in incomplete block designs” (Biometrika, 1983)
• A 1987 Biometrics paper with A.E. Ainsley and H.D. Patterson on predicting the efficiency of incomplete-block trials (a collaboration with the well-known agricultural statistician H.D. Patterson)

He moved to Edinburgh’s Centre for Educational Sociology in 1989, as a Research Fellow. https://registryservices.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2024-07/e-Senate%2014%20-%2028%20September%202022%20-%20Agenda%20and%20Papers.pdf

So, no undergraduate study of education, no teaching qualification, no experience of teaching at any level, no experience of teacher or curriculum development, no postgraduate qualification in education, no leadership role in education, no doctoral supervision in education, no research ethic leadership….SFA!

You have to say WTF does he think he is, telling us how to develop curricula and run schools?

WTF do I think I am?

For nearly 40 years a schoolteacher, a teacher education lecturer, Associate Dean for Quality Assurance, research methods lecturer, PhD supervisor and Faculty Research Ethics Chair

Angry? Me? Too right.

Help Talking-up Scotland keep goin

Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going

Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421