Last week the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee met to take further evidence from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) as part of their review into the senior phase and multi-qualification teaching. 

Evidence given last year by the SQA and Education Scotland on multi-level teaching included this statement: “There is feedback from a range of engagements with teachers and young people that bi- and multi-level teaching may be challenging in aspects of some subjects…Education Scotland has yet to see any firm evidence from inspections of educational disadvantage due to multi-level teaching. The senior phase review will provide an opportunity to look into this issue.”

Is it an indictment of our education system that Education Scotland, a body which supports learning and teaching and also inspects, does not have firm evidence in this respect?

Multi-course lessons: SQA admits pupils could be taught ‘same stuff’ twice

Last week: SQA exam body announces review of National 3 and 4

Quick read: ‘A third of pupils feel the strain of schoolwork’

Multi-level teaching is not a new phenomenon. When I started teaching 15 years ago, my S4 physics pupils sat Standard Grade at General and Credit levels.  Then, however, there was better articulation between levels which allowed for blended learning. Standard Grade for me was true multi-level teaching, whereas all other combinations since then are more accurately described as “multi-course”.

In evidence to the committee in 2017, Dr Janet Brown, then the SQA chief executive, stated in regard to National courses: “They were not designed along the lines of Standard Grade; they were designed as a progression route, either to National 5 or to college.”

Multi-level difficulties

At the time of the design of National 5, around 2012, a highly respected and experienced colleague within my authority was working with the SQA on physics specifications.  I recall asking him how the specifications were being designed to articulate with National 4 to allow multi-level teaching within the same classroom. 

His response, like Dr Brown’s years later, was that it was not. 

It is my deeply held regret that this fundamental flaw was not corrected. There was no doubt that in physics the Standard Grade course wasn’t perfect and certainly dated in terms of some content - I have welcomed much of the new content in the Nationals - but teaching different abilities in the same class has been made unnecessarily more challenging, more stressful for all, and much harder to help get it right for each child.    

Multi-course teaching is not differentiation by outcome, but differentiation by task; there is only a small overlap between the courses and, where commonalities occur - say between National 5 and Higher courses - the pace of learning and prior understanding is very different.   

Teaching Intermediate 2 and Higher simultaneously, and now National 5 and Higher, led to high levels of stress and mental health issues for myself and some students. I did everything I could to make it work and made myself ill.  It broke my heart to be unable to help one set of students who had embarked on a task because I was explaining or demonstrating a different concept to another set of pupils.

In 15 years of teaching I have only been absent for more than a few days twice - and both instances were due to accumulated stress caused by multi-course teaching for months on end. If Education Scotland has yet to see any firm evidence from inspections of educational disadvantage due to multi-course teaching, I would suggest that is entirely due to the hard work of teachers who make a poor situation work the best they can.  I would also suggest they are talking to the wrong people, and that it is an indictment that teaching staff don’t feel they can have honest dialogue with inspectors without consequences from their senior management.  

A colleague describes assessment of mixed-course classes as the “falling off the bus approach”: everyone is National 5 until proved otherwise; when they fail, they are National 4; if they fail again after resits, they are National 3. The difference in courses means the teacher rushes about to teach just enough of the parts of the course that are not in National 5 in sufficient depth to pass the assessments - this is not, in my opinion, a quality learning experience for those students. 

Many in Scottish education - the government, SQA and unions - are advocating a period of constancy. However, I feel that the flaws of curriculum design are so substantial that change should be made now. 

While there would be short-term pain due to yet more change, in the longer term courses that can be taught together successfully will reduce workload and stress - and improve student learning and attainment for all.

Andrew Bailey is a science and physics teacher in Scotland. He is presenting workshops at ResearchEd Glasgow (1 February), an Association of Science Education Scotland conference (28 March) and an Institute of Physics Stirling meeting (6 May).