Will Scottish curriculum reform end ‘teaching to the test’?

The story so far…The Education (Scotland) Bill shared in summer 2024 confirmed that a new body called Qualifications Scotland would be established in 2025. It has also created a new office, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education in Scotland, as an independent inspectorate.

Meanwhile, Education Scotland has initiated its “curriculum improvement cycle”, often referred to as CIC, and it feels like there is finally some momentum for Scotland’s young people behind initially hesitant curriculum reform.

Much of the stakeholder feedback and responses published by the Scottish Parliament welcomed the bill’s developments and agreed that these moves - which can be traced back to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2021 review of Curriculum for Excellence and Professor Ken Muir’s 2022 report on education reform - would be a positive move to build trust and confidence in both Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority (as it remains for now).

Scepticism over SQA ‘rebranding’

Despite this, the key theme that emerged from stakeholder responses to the bill was scepticism that Qualifications Scotland will turn out to be nothing more than a rebranding exercise for the SQA and its retained employees. Such concerns have been addressed by SQA chief executive Fiona Robertson (a role she was still in when I first wrote this piece).

Why, then, is there evident mistrust in the reform process? Does the answer lie in Scotland’s national assessment agency having operated as a separate entity from the body responsible for Scotland’s curriculum?

• Related: SQA chief executive Fiona Robertson to step down
• Inspection: Inside the first Scottish secondary rated ‘excellent’ for learning
• Also this week: How are schools tackling pupil absence around the world?

As most classroom teachers will agree, who is better equipped to assess learners’ understanding than the teacher or lecturer who devised and delivered the teaching in the first place? Formative assessment theory and pedagogies are founded upon this fact, and the tertiary education sector has successfully delivered this model for centuries.

Have Education Scotland and the SQA been out of synchronisation with each other? It is a common view that, while the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) has brought success in primary schools, it has fallen short of the rigour required for students’ secondary education.

A “broad general education” is promoted by most of Scotland’s secondary schools, but how many are delivering this education as intended? Grassroots evidence suggests that a great number of schools are stealthily delivering distinct SCQF 5 learning programmes within the third year of broad and general secondary schooling, the reason for which presumably is to assure success for learners going on to complete external national examinations - whether we like it or not, schools are teaching to the test.

One of the most radical proposed changes to emerge from all the recent reviews of Scottish education was to scrap National 5 exams - in order to allow more freedom to provide a broad general education - but that was vetoed by education secretary Jenny Gilruth.

Synthesising curriculum and assessment

Perhaps we need to consider how to better synthesise delivery of a reformed Scottish curriculum with the measures in place for assessment. The SQA has dictated the senior-phase curriculum delivered in Scottish schools for the past decade - SQA course specifications act as the reference point for teaching content and skills, not Curriculum for Excellence’s “experiences and outcomes”.

Therefore, responses to the new bill have bemoaned curricular changes made throughout this time as feeling misaligned, out of sync and reactionary.

Perhaps legislation is not required to seek better collaboration between the new Education Scotland and Qualifications Scotland. However, to deliver an adaptive, flexible, future-proofed Scottish curriculum - which can respond to rapidly changing technological advances and societal changes - legislatively driven cohesion of these two crucial bodies might be necessary. We need to ensure that Scotland’s teachers can coherently prepare students for external exams while also realising the fundamental principles of Scotland’s reformed curriculum.

Ways of achieving this will be discussed at a Scotland Policy Conferences online seminar, Next Steps for Qualifications and Assessment Reform in Scotland, on Wednesday 2 April. Please tune in or take part in the event via the Scotland Policy Conferences website to share your thoughts - there’s still time to ensure that reform leads to transformative changes for Scotland’s curriculum.

Dr Nicola Kiernan is a teacher-researcher at the High School of Dundee - where she is head of chemistry and science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) - and the University of Edinburgh

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