But Mark Priestley, a professor of education at the University of Stirling, said it was too much of a stretch to link that clarity to improved reading scores in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results, although it may have led to “slight improvements”.
“Actually, we don’t have the evidence to say whether Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is responsible for the decline or otherwise in Pisa results,” said Professor Priestley (click YouTube video below to hear his comments in full).
Today’s Pisa results may have indicated some “slight improvements” in reading, although “maths and science seem to be sitting pretty much where they were”, he said.
But, while he predicted “what we’ll also see over time is teachers becoming more comfortable with working in the way that CfE demands”, he stressed that “I don’t think we can draw hard and fast conclusions” linking CfE improvements to Pisa improvements.
In recent times, he added, there had also been “a major policy push” on literacy, and that may have had an impact on Pisa scores.
Over the years, however, there had been “a lot of confusion about what CfE actually is” and “what we’re not seeing is a full implementation of CfE as it was intended”, Professor Priestley said.
He added: “I think there’s been some progress since. What I am seeing is a slightly greater sense of clarity in schools about what Curriculum for Excellence is. And that will improve this year because there is a new resource called Scotland’s Curriculum, which is providing a one-stop-shop for all the CfE resources so that people don’t have to go looking for them all over the place - the 20,000 [online] pages that were produced and which were criticised by the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] have been slimmed right down.
“But, most importantly, the resource is providing a process for engagement. Now, it’s early days yet, but what I am seeing is schools engaging far more substantively with the idea that they have to produce a curriculum rationale, for example, and that they have to do something to fix the years 1-3 broad general education phase in secondary school, which has been largely neglected with the focus on the senior phase.
“So I think what we’re seeing is the emergence of a degree of clarity, and I suspect that if that continues we’re going to see a far more meaningful implementation of CfE.”
Professor Priestley also said: “That doesn’t alter the fact that the curriculum itself has some structural problems - particularly the over-emphasis on learning outcomes and assessment benchmarks, which are producing often very ‘ticky-box-type’ approaches - but I think over time we’re starting to get people who understand it better.”
*These comments were made during the recording of a broad-ranging interview with Professor Priestley, which will be released as a Tes Podagogy podcast early in the new year
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