If you were to make a list of things you admire in Scottish education, what would you put at the top? In mine, without question it would be “teachers and support staff”. The quality of the school workforce in Scotland is second to none. If anyone ever doubted this, they simply need to look at what teachers and support staff have achieved over the past 16 months or so in the most challenging of circumstances: it has been hugely impressive.

Sadly, some way down my list would come “the curriculum”. Being such an important facet of education, I don’t like putting it there. The curriculum underpins everything that goes on in classrooms and schools, so I would like to put it higher.

However, I just don’t think I can. As painful as it is to say, I just don’t think the curriculum we have in Scotland today is good enough.

Discussion of the Scottish curriculum is timely because, on 21 June, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published its eagerly anticipated review of Curriculum for Excellence. It found room for improvement - and this improvement needs to come about quickly.

Weaknesses in the curriculum are holding our students back. Too few are learning as much as they could or should be at school. Too many are leaving school at the end of the day or week without knowing, or being able to do, much more than at the start of it. Sometimes, this is a result of poor pedagogy. More often, it is the curriculum to blame.

The need for clarity

At the root of the problem is the fact that, in too many schools, the curriculum simply isn’t clear enough. This causes issues for teachers and parents as much as for students.

For teachers, a lack of clarity about what students should be learning from day to day leads to avoidable worry and workload.

Come the end of a week, rather than look forward to a well-earned rest, the realisation hits teachers that they don’t know what they are teaching next week. Often, Google comes to the rescue, but it needs to be trawled and that takes time.

Alternatively, teachers rack their brains and come up with activities that are good for keeping students busy, and which most students enjoy, but which have little in common with a challenging, coherent curriculum. I want to be clear: this isn’t the fault of teachers, it is a fault of leadership.

For parents, a lack of clarity in the curriculum means they don’t understand how their child is progressing as well as they should, and they don’t know how to support them. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard friends with school-age children say things like: “They’re not being taught anything in school!”

That’s not really how it is, but such statements do highlight an issue that stems from a lack of a concrete curriculum that everyone understands.

The curriculum as it stands

The curriculum in Scotland today is mapped out as statements, commonly referred to as “experiences and outcomes”. These are organised by “levels”, which students aim to achieve in particular stages. For example:

• I can use exploration and imagination to solve design problems related to real-life situations (expressive arts, first level).
• Through carrying out practical activities and investigations, I can show how plants have benefited society (sciences, second level).
• Through researching, I can identify possible causes of a past conflict and report on the impact it has had on the lives of people at that time (social studies, third level).
• I can select and use digital technologies to access and select relevant information, and solve real-world problems (technologies, fourth level).

While well intended, it is from these statements that many of the issues with the Scottish curriculum stem. There are two reasons why: first, curriculum and pedagogy have become blended; and, second, there is a lack of specificity.

The problem with blending curriculum and pedagogy

By “curriculum”, we mean what students are learning in school. By “pedagogy”, we mean how we are teaching this. For example, “the anatomy of the heart”, “calculating the area of a circle”, “recognising a steady beat” and “Richard III” are examples of things on a curriculum that we could plan for students to learn about.

Meanwhile, “group work”, “research”, “discussion” and “direct-interactive instruction” are examples of ways we could teach them. Statements about what students are learning don’t need to specify how we are teaching this. In fact, they shouldn’t.

The best way to teach a particular thing depends on which stage of the “learning sequence” students are at, not what content we are teaching.

Those in the early stages are novices who lack detailed knowledge and understanding of the content at hand. Those who have developed a secure grasp of concepts - who can connect ideas and who can apply their learning as and when required - are more expert.

Whenever anyone starts to learn anything new in any subject, they are novices in that area. With learning comes the development of expertise.

This is independent of age and stage. A P5 student learning how to calculate percentages is a novice in the early stages of the learning sequence, just as a fifth-year secondary student learning how to factorise polynomials is a novice in the early stages of this.

The reason this is such an important distinction to highlight is because novices and experts think and learn differently. Hence, pedagogy that might be effective for teaching experts won’t necessarily be effective for teaching novices and vice versa.

For novices, teacher-led approaches are almost always best. Experts will often benefit from leading their own learning more, for example, through research and investigation.

The key point is that, by specifying pedagogy alongside curriculum, we risk telling teachers to teach students in a way that might not be best for them to learn. I’m afraid that’s what we see in many of the experiences and outcomes.

Researching, investigating and collaborating have an important pedagogical role to play but only at the appropriate stage in the learning sequence.

The need for specificity

The second issue with the experiences and outcomes comes from their lack of specificity.

This was a deliberate design principle from the outset. The intention was to strike a tight-loose balance, whereby schools and teachers would be empowered to design their own curricula, using the experiences and outcomes as an overarching guide. Unfortunately, this hasn’t played out particularly well.

Ask a school to show you a document that sets out its curriculum and most will give you something detailing which experiences and outcomes are covered and when, but little more besides. For the reasons already discussed, this isn’t particularly useful to students, teachers or parents.

To become useful, the experiences and outcomes need to be “unpacked”. By doing so, we can make clear the specific knowledge and skills we want students to learn.

For example, in science, for the subject of planetary motion, orbit and rotation, you might want to make clear that students will cover how day and night on Earth are caused by the Earth’s rotation; sunrise in the east and sunset in the west; and how the seasons are caused by the Earth’s orbit around the sun and the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

In history, for a “life in the Roman Empire” topic, you might want them to have an understanding of the forum, temples and the marketplace; the Colosseum, circuses, gladiator combat and chariot races; and roads, bridges and aqueducts.

In maths, you might want them to learn to multiply decimal numbers by 10, 100 and 1,000. For example: 0.1, 0.01 and 0.001.

And in music, you might want students to compose chord sequences on the keyboard or guitar in C major or A minor, using mainly primary chords.

However, too few schools have done this unpacking. The reason is that the expectation to do so wasn’t clear enough and there was a lack of concrete examples about how to do it. Indeed, when I recently suggested to a school leader that this unpacking would be a sensible thing to do, they asked: “Are we allowed to do that?”

The specific content that comes from unpacking the experiences and outcomes is a world away from the vagueness of generic skills, such as “problem solving”, “critical thinking” and “creativity”, which we see the curriculum of so many schools focusing on today.

Yes, we want students to learn to solve problems, think critically and be creative. And no, there isn’t a problem with making this goal explicit.

However, in order to be able to do these things, students need to have specific knowledge and skills to work with.

Making clear what this knowledge is and what these skills are is what curriculum unpacking is all about.

Moving up the list

In the coming weeks and months, the recommendations of the OECD’s review of the Scottish curriculum will be discussed and debated. As this is done, I hope we can all keep the distinction between “curriculum” and “pedagogy” at the forefront of our minds and remember the importance of specificity. This is essential if we are to escape the confused curriculum we are seeing across Scotland today.

Let’s get the curriculum back where it belongs - sitting near the top of everyone’s list of things we admire in Scottish education. It’s too important not to be there.

Bruce Robertson is the rector of Berwickshire High School and author of The Teaching Delusion, a series of three books

This article originally appeared in the 23 July 2021 issue under the headline “How clear is your curriculum?”