Curriculum design and reform works best when led by the teachers who will deliver it in classroom, says Ewan McIntosh.

The chief executive of global skills development company NoTosh is scathing about any curricular reform that pays lip service to teachers’ views in a few short weeks of consultation, then issues instructions without any further serious discussions with educators.

In short, he believes that any changes to a curriculum should start from the premise that teachers are “the best curricula makers in the room”.

Curriculum makers

When it comes to curriculum design and reform, McIntosh is sceptical about any process that limits the involvement of school staff and students to a few weeks of consultation; instead, any such process should conclude with changes being led by those who will live them from day to day.

“Engagement means that you come back to those same people and you say, ‘This is what you said, this is the problem we think we’ve prioritised - based on what you’ve said - and the most important thing to nail’,” he says.

And that should be followed by a very simple question: “What would you like to do about it?”

At this point, those who hold the purse strings could “stump up some cash” to pay for the best ideas, “just like [TV show] Dragon’s Den”. And the money in this contest must go to “the best idea in the room, not the loudest policymaking”.

“And can you imagine what would happen if, rather than a national conversation, we had a national competition? Why can’t we build a beautiful new system of education by stumping up investment in the very people who have the best ideas in our classrooms right now?”

McIntosh adds: “This isn’t new and it’s not revolutionary. [Professor Mark] Priestley’s work on curriculum making shows that if you give teachers time together and some reasonably good input, they are the best curricula makers in the room.”

Covid legacy

There was optimism during the bleakest days of Covid that there would be silver linings for education - that the pandemic would be a catalyst for much-needed change.

Three years on, though, McIntosh doesn’t see it, and the enforced period of online learning does not seem to have had the lasting, fundamental impact that many had hoped for.

“People are screaming to go backwards to normal - they really want to be back to normal as much as possible…Very few schools in Scotland are doing hybrid learning [or] offering genuinely broad learner pathways.”

Where pupils feel constricted by the subjects available in their own school, that is where McIntosh says the collaborative spirit among schools during Covid could come into its own in a long-lasting way. He adds: “What they could do is say, look, we don’t teach Chinese here but, if you want to learn it, you can learn online with our partner school up in Highland.”

Why does that sort of thing not happen more? McIntosh says it’s partly “a lack of imagination” but also “fear” - a culture that stems from policymakers’ priorities for education after the pandemic.

“It’s a really interesting narrative that comes from government, which tends to be still about recovery. I hate the language of recovery because it implies we were all sick.

“There was actually some great learning that happened during that period - and great learning for the profession. I’d like to stop talking about ‘recovery’ and talk about ‘renaissance’ instead.”

McIntosh asks: “What are the silver linings that we need to be very careful not to throw away; that we could innovate with and actually [use to] close the achievement gap?

“I think there are plenty of opportunities - they’re not missed yet.”

Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT

McIntosh’s former jobs include being Scotland’s national adviser on learning technologies and digital commissioner for Channel 4, so he brings an expert eye to topical debates about the impact of artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, on education.

As far back as 2008, as national adviser on learning technologies, McIntosh was suggesting that “if you’re asking a question in class, and the answer can be found with a quick search on a phone, maybe you shouldn’t ask it”.

He adds: “At the time, it was too early because no one had phones in class, but the point still stands: a lot of learning can feel quite dry when it’s just about packing your head full of facts...not thinking about the bigger concept.”

Back then he was thinking about “ungoogleable thinking”; now it is a similar but clunkier neologism, “unChatGPTable thinking”.

“ChatGPT can’t predict the future” and “there’s still massive opportunity for conceptual thinking”, says McIntosh.

“I would let the technology do the hard work. Some universities in Australia have already said, ‘We’re going to allow it, but you have to declare that as you would any other reference’.”

His message, then, is that artificial intelligence is not going away - so embrace it where it can save time and effort, and divert learning towards the things AI cannot do well.

Languages

McIntosh does not see instantaneous interpretation technology as bad for the future of languages in schools. Instead, he welcomes advances that are “good for business, for work, even for a social environment”  because they allow that “someone like me who doesn’t speak Bulgarian can still make connections with people in Bulgaria whose English is maybe not too competent”.

So why learn languages at all? Well, says McIntosh, translation technology can only do so much.

“What it can’t do is think differently - a foreign language helps you think differently about the world.”

He adds: “The currency of the future for young people is their capacity to think differently and to see things that other people don’t see. And technology is a massive help in doing that, but...it can’t imagine a different future.”

Scottish education’s biggest strength

Scottish education has been under huge scrutiny since Nicola Sturgeon became first minister in 2014, after she made it clear from the start that it was her number-one priority.

McIntosh was educated in Scotland and started his career as a teacher in the country, but now casts an eye over education systems from a global perspective. So what are the best and worst things about education in Scotland?

“Some of the best learning [in Scotland] is happening in the cracks between the curriculum. It’s the Duke of Edinburgh’s award, going to your orchestra in the city schools orchestra, [this is what] kids remember a decade later and the things that steer your life as an adult - your music, your sport, being part of a team, the student newspaper, whatever it is.”

He adds: “Scotland is really good at doing that, whereas other curricula around the world have actually squeezed a lot of that. A lot of curricula are packing way too much in and getting kids to focus early, and I think retaining that broad general education...we’re really good at that compared to other countries, where they’re much more hamstrung by the curriculum itself.”

Scottish education’s biggest weakness

Where, then, does Scottish education most conspicuously fall short?

McIntosh is scathing about education policymakers who are ”relatively unsophisticated” in their “understanding of what modes of learning today are proven the most successful around the world”. He stresses here that he means “educational leadership at government level and at Education Scotland level, not in schools - it’s not a critique of schools”.

His case in point is interdisciplinary learning (IDL), which he recalls Scottish education policymakers talking up in a big way a decade ago.

Ten years on, he is struck by the dearth of “truly interdisciplinary experiences going on in schools”, adding that “few of them are ones that we would trumpet”. Many of the best examples, he says, were a happy by-product of the pandemic, having been “stimulated through the flexibility of Covid”.

The underwhelming landscape of interdisciplinary learning, after all these years of Curriculum for Excellence, is a prime example for McIntosh of what seems like an eternal truth: no amount of high-minded rhetoric about education will amount to much if it is not backed up by money.

“Why did it not take off? Because no one paid for it. [IDL] means that teachers have to plan together, they have to share assessment together and they have to teach together, which means probably about 25 per cent more cost to the bottom line.”

Innovation in education, then, requires a collective mindshift but that is not enough. Schools and teachers, regardless of their expertise as curriculum makers, can only do so much if a government does not put its money where its pedagogical mouth is.

Ewan McIntosh will be one of the speakers at this year’s World Education Summit. Tes is the official media partner for the event. Click here to view the full event programme