Niall MacKinnon is head teacher of a primary school in the Scottish Highlands. In his teaching career he was a winner of the second round of the Learning and Teaching Scotland, National Grid for Learning Innovation Awards for an action research project developing innovative use of IT in teaching, and published in Connected magazine (Learning and Teaching Scotland 2004).
He directed a play which was winner of the David Nelson award for primary drama in Highland for a bilingual Gaelic-English play he co-wrote and produced with his class.
He has held two action research grants (2006, 2007) from Learning and Teaching Scotland for multi-school projects seeking to link approaches in Assessment is for Learning with Curriculum for Excellence and summaries of the findings are published on the LTScotland website. For the second project he took the emerging principles of the new curriculum and working with another school sought to construct a planning framework on a pilot basis to the new curriculum principles. School and class planning was conducted to the new draft curriculum framework. The report linked the methods and formats they devised to the emerging principles of the new curriculum framework.
He was jointly awarded an action-research project grant from the Oracle Foundation for innovatory work in using their Thinkquest Virtual Learning Environment to link four schools in four countries, subsequently published by The Oracle Foundation as a case study brochure for The Scottish Learning Fair 2007 and BETT 2008 and in the Times Educational Supplement, November 2007.
His work has appeared as a case study for 2Simple software for their 2control program (2008) and published by them as a leaflet also for these two education fairs.
He has also been engaged as an external assessor for BECTA on the national (UK) judging panel for the UK BETT awards 2005-09, identifying best practice in educational software and hardware applications and their use in UK schools.
Outwith school teaching he worked for five years for the Arkleton Trust, an independent institute set up ‘to study new approaches to rural development and education to improve understanding between rural policy makers, academics, practitioners and rural people’. As a researcher and consultant he worked on projects concerning rural affairs, agricultural policy, farm incomes, community organisations and arts policy.
His major work function for the Trust was as research officer for the twelve country research project Rural Change in Europe: Farm Structures and Household Pluriactivity in Europe 1987-1993 funded by the European Commission and Governments and Institutions in the 12 participating countries. Major support for the international comparative research was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council. Responsible to the director of the programme he worked as the research officer with responsibility for the methodology and also for the joint coordination of the participating institutes and universities of the programme by the Arkleton Trust. He was dual grant holder for the programme’s overall coordination role and writing of research conclusions, with the director, for the principal ESRC grant award.
Prior to that he conducted an ethnographic study of musical performance for a doctoral study at Aberdeen University, also funded by the ESRC, subsequently commissioned and published for a book in the Open University Press Popular Music in Britain series: MacKinnon, Niall (1993) The British Folk Scene – Musical Performance and Social Identity, Open University Press, Buckingham.