There was something approaching catharsis in the air when the long-awaited review of Scottish education finally surfaced on Monday. Finally, it seemed, someone was listening to concerns that had been falling on deaf ears for years.
The report on Curriculum for Excellence from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development was, as always with OECD publications, a dry, dense and - at 139 pages - lengthy affair. Yet, in its own slow-moving way, it felt like a wrecking ball was being taken to some eternal truths of Scottish education.
Between the report itself and the Scottish government’s response less than two hours later - which backed every OECD recommendation - there was a catalogue of change promised.
The Scottish Qualifications Authority? Scrapped. High-stakes exams? Their future looks in doubt (see pages 8-9). Education Scotland? Its inspection remit is being taken away. Class-contact time? Coming down. Scottish National Standardised Assessments? Their days seem numbered.
If there was a bingo card of what teachers wanted to hear, there can scarcely be any boxes left. The OECD criticised, for example, an overly politicised and reactive approach to curriculum development, which has led to “a busy system at risk of policy and institutional overload”.
The impact of the OECD report on Curriculum for Excellence
For anyone who has waded through jargon-laden CfE documentation, another box was ticked by the quietly scathing observation that vague and overly technical messaging “remains confused [and] can hinder implementation by leaving CfE open to wide interpretations and [can] overwhelm schools, learners and parents”.
There was, however, little to cheer those who question the very principles of CfE. Yes, there was overwhelming support for it when conceived, but we’re nearly 20 years on and surely some sort of reappraisal would be timely. You won’t get that from the OECD, whose philosophy of education closely matches that which drives CfE, and it would have been fascinating to read what a truly critical, CfE-agnostic voice had to say.
But for all the OECD’s criticism of CfE implementation, there was much to take pride in, too.
Before the senior phase of secondary, for example, the OECD sees CfE as largely successful. The report authors were impressed, too, by Scottish education’s commitment to equity and signs of improvement in how disadvantaged students fare before and after they leave school. And they are full of praise for teachers - any major faultlines in Scottish education are attributed to bad systems and policies, not the people who work within them.
Scottish educators’ determination to give every student the best start in life has been well documented by Tes Scotland, but it was not always the case. As EIS union general secretary Larry Flanagan told us in May, in the 1980s “young people leaving school without qualifications was just par for the course”.
The huge lengths that teachers in Scotland now go to for all their pupils can be seen in an incredible essay by Graeme Armstrong (pages 16-19) - whose novel The Young Team has been described as “Trainspotting for a new generation” - in which he recalls a headteacher with “a superpower for seeing potential where others couldn’t”, who gave him a springboard out of the vicious circle of gang culture.
And it’s hard to think of a school showing a more concrete commitment to students and their families than helping them claim £400,000 in benefits, as happened at Bellahouston Academy - read about the remarkable work of “financial inclusion support officers” in Glasgow schools on pages 20-25.
In short, the commitment of schools to their pupils is permanent and unstinting - now we just need to get everything else right.
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 25 June 2021 issue under the headline “CfE may have taken a beating, but teachers are beyond reproach”
