Former education secretary Michael Gove has lambasted what he described as Scotland’s “dumbed-down curriculum” and its “disastrous” impact on pupils.

Writing in The Times today, Mr Gove said that the SNP Scottish government had “presided over a dramatic drop in Scotland’s educational performance”, pointing to disappointing results in the latest Programme of International Student Assessment (Pisa) survey. Scotland’s pupils were performing “much worse” than their peers in England, he added.

Mr Gove, who attended a private school in Aberdeen and started his journalism career in the city, wrote: “The SNP’s adoption of a dumbed-down curriculum, its opposition to rigorous tests and open data on school performance and its hostility to more open data for headteachers has proved disastrous for Scots students.”

This situation had been “tacitly acknowledged” in last year’s appointment as education secretary of John Swinney, the SNP’s “most talented minister”, and the implementation of changes that “borrow from Conservative reforms in England”.

Mr Gove did not specify which reforms he was referring to, but Scotland is due to introduce a system of standardised national assessment for children as young as 5 and is in the midst of a school governance review that may lead to more powers for headteachers. The Scottish government has repeatedly stressed, however, that is not seeking to adopt English reforms such as the academies system, through which schools remain state-funded but are taken out of local authority control.

‘I’m not sure what he’s talking about’

Maureen McKenna, president of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland (ADES), said: “I’m not really sure what [Mr Gove] is talking about with attainment, because there has been year-on-year improvement.”

She said that 59 per cent of pupils were now gaining at least one Higher - the gold-standard qualification in Scotland - compared with 38 per cent in 2006. And 19 per cent were achieving five, the number essential for entry to high-demand university courses such as medicine - against only 10 per cent in 2006.

Ms McKenna, who is education director in Glasgow, said that Scotland had received visits from many international educators and politicians keen to find out more about its Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), including a recent delegation from Sweden seeking to move on from the “disastrous” impact of free schools in their country.

CfE aimed to move away from “centralist” and “didactic approaches [which] we know young people don’t respond to”, in favour of using research evidence to explore what actually has an impact in classrooms, said Ms McKenna. She added: “There is no evidence of a dumbed-down curriculum - CfE is an innovative and creative curriculum that has been looked on with envy by other countries.”

A 2015 review of CfE by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) proved a mixed bag, but the report found “clear upwards trends in attainment” and in school leavers going on to work, training or more education.

Mr Gove was Westminster education secretary from 2010 to 2014 but has been in the spotlight more recently for a newspaper interview with incoming US president Donald Trump and, last year, for his failed bid for the leadership of the Conservatives after running the Vote Leave campaign in the EU referendum.

A Scottish government source said: “Michael Gove’s ill-advised attempts to trash Scottish education just betray the astonishing arrogance of Westminster Tories fired up on Brexiteer rhetoric, who now think they can do anything to Scotland and get away with it.

“And nothing is guaranteed to make independence more likely than the sound of Westminster Tories like Mr Gove trying to lay down the law as they threaten to drag us out of the single market against our will, risking an economic catastrophe.”

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow TES on Twitter and like TES on Facebook