Fears have been raised that new awards schemes and areas of learning are overwhelming primary schools - contradicting the often-expressed view that primaries would adapt relatively seamlessly to Curriculum for Excellence.

Susan Quinn, education convener for the EIS teaching union, has warned that primary schools are often trying to cover too much ground every week, at the risk of diluting the quality of pupils’ learning.

She told the Scottish Parliament’s education and skills committee last week that the problems resembled those of the “overcrowded” and now-defunct 5-14 curriculum - even though CfE was meant to liberate teachers from the strictures of its muchcriticised predecessor.

Ms Quinn, a former primary headteacher, pointed to the impact of many “special interests” being added to the school week, including the “1+2” languages policy and a drive for more science and maths, as well as the pursuit of accolades such as green flags, Fairtrade status and the Rights Respecting Schools award.

“Those things are genuinely worthwhile to young people, but not if we try to do them all,” said Ms Quinn.

‘Those things are worthwhile to children - but not if we try to do them all’

She added that primaries were “still probably trying to do a bit of art, a bit of music and a bit of drama every week”. “Teachers are only doing what they know [and] need better guidance on the primary curriculum architecture,” Ms Quinn said.

Disclosures about these problems that schools are having adapting to the reform challenge the view - often voiced over the years - that the primary sector was already largely “doing CfE” before the reform came into being.

Ms Quinn was one of four expert witnesses to address the committee last week on CfE. Ann Grant, headteacher at Glasgow’s Shawlands Academy, delivered an upbeat message from the secondary sector: “I am an optimist, and I think this is a good time in Scottish education.”

Ms Grant was “positive” about CfE, saying that its “four capacities” - encouraging each young person to be a successful learner, a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor - had “provided a strong and clear statement for the profession”.

She was also encouraged by recent action to address some of the secondary sector’s biggest bugbears around CfE, such as the announcement that mandatory unit assessments at National 5 and Higher would be phased out from 2017-18.

Concerns ‘addressed’

Ms Grant said she was “delighted” that the “assessment burden” was being addressed and that “the new approach will make a significant difference”. The “benchmarks” published in August - an attempt to simplify CfE - were “now the working document that I expect to look at with my staff”, and had “subsumed” some “Es and Os” (experiences and outcomes, which number 1,820, across all sectors), she added.

Keir Bloomer, convener of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s education committee, agreed that CfE had had a big impact on Scottish education. “What we can say with some degree of confidence is that there has been significant change in pedagogy and a greater emphasis on depth of learning,” he explained, noting that analysis last year by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found “a lot of positive things” about CfE.

But Mr Bloomer, one of the architects of CfE, heavily qualified that statement: “We do not know what progress has been made [with CfE] because no serious attempt has been made to evaluate it.”

And he criticised the “very repetitive and badly written” series of Building the Curriculum documents since, saying that although they contained “much that is useful”, they had some glaring omissions. “For example, interdisciplinary learning…is a key part of CfE with which teachers were not familiar, but there is no Building the Curriculum document that deals with it,” he said.

@Henry_Hepburn