Is Curriculum for Excellence getting its second wind? CfE, as a concept, has appeared rather beleaguered for some time now, with even the most supportive rhetoric sounding laboured. Proponents have had to perform a rearguard action as education has become increasingly politicised, ever since Nicola Sturgeon declared it her top priority upon becoming first minister in 2014. Partisan critics have feasted on successive disappointing results for Scotland from Pisa (the Programme for International Student Assessment) that have fuelled their narratives of steep decline in Scottish education. Even the more measured commentators have looked at CfE and adopted the air of football pundits picking over the bones of yet another mediocre performance by a once-great team.

But something happened last month. When Tes Scotland tweeted a story about a different sort of Pisa study, there was a huge reaction. Our report on Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) research, which got very little coverage from other media outlets, was retweeted more than 700 times and liked more than 1,700 times - levels of engagement far beyond what we usually see. And the comments were fascinating.

The study - covering 27 countries and economies that took part in a new assessment of “global competence” - found that Scottish 15-year-olds were among the most likely to understand and appreciate the perspective of others, that they demonstrated some of the most positive attitudes towards immigrants, and that they scored highly on the ability to evaluate information and analyse multiple perspectives.

One educator on Twitter reacted by suggesting that “these results would suggest CfE is achieving exactly what it set out to”. Another response, from an education academic, read: “Well. It’s almost as if CfE might have been the right thing to do all along…” while a secondary teacher suggested that the research was firm evidence of CfE’s “four capacities” - which put “responsible citizens” on a par with “successful learners” - in action. A primary headteacher declared that the report “fills me with pride”, while an additional support needs teacher, similarly, said: “So proud to teach in Scotland.”

In short, it seemed that the study - which Tes Scotland will look at more closely in next week’s issue - was cathartic to a lot of people, having provided apparent vindication that, despite the many bumps in the road along the way, CfE was taking Scottish education in the right direction. The findings matched the lived reality of many who work in schools, who do not recognise the unmitigated negativity about their sector that they often see in media and political spheres.

A little earlier in October, however, came an event that showed the flipside to such optimism - a sharp reminder of the widespread fear that, whatever the worthiness of its aims, CfE is in the doldrums and may struggle to find an escape route. The Scotland Policy Conferences online event “Curriculum for Excellence - implementation and performance, raising attainment, options for reform, and priorities for the OECD review” referenced the independent review of CfE, which is due to report back in June 2021 (see box, below). The event had a constant undercurrent of urgency and a consensus that CfE principles were right all along - but that the actuality of curricular reform has been underwhelming at best and, in some ways, has simply perpetuated longstanding problems.

There was a memorable cri de cœur from Inverclyde Academy headteacher Denise Crawford about the shortcomings of CfE in practice: “How did we not reach that inspired height that sounded so good on paper?”

Her school had gone all-in with CfE, “stripping back our curriculum” to look afresh at what students need and shifting the exclusive emphasis on “the more traditional subjects” to create space for the likes of photography, music technology, barista training and lab skills - and, generally, on giving students not only a firm grounding in literacy and numeracy, but also “the skills to find out what they didn’t already know”.

“No longer could we rely on teachers alone delivering this curriculum: it was quickly realised that we needed [more] experts,” said Crawford, citing community learning and development (CLD), the third sector and further education colleges, among others.

And, crucially, she added: “We know we’ve been successful because we’ve raised attainment.” This was not purely measured against “the old-fashioned type of attainment” measures - such as Higher and National 5 exam results - but also “the number of children who have received a whole range of other awards”.

She was disheartened, then, that she still routinely encountered the stubborn view that “it doesn’t count unless you sit exams”, that “unless you’ve sat in that exam hall, can you truly say you’re clever?”

“These old-fashioned views are the things that are holding us back,” said Crawford. In other words, there has been a culture shift in schools - but not in wider society. For CfE to truly flourish, Crawford believes parents and the media need to gain a better understanding of education’s changing priorities.

Often, however, the signs she sees are not good - particularly the “media circus” around exam results day each August, and the unofficial school league tables that follow. This, she fears, sends an implicit but powerful message to students taking qualifications that do not rely on external exams that what they are doing is less important.

But Crawford believes that blame cannot be pinned solely on outside forces - educators, too, must take a long, hard look at themselves.

“We have created this monster ourselves - teachers are always very mindful about these league tables and the Insight [online benchmarking] data that’s going to come out at the end of the day.”

Inverclyde Academy has actually shown up well in league tables, but Crawford insists that if Scottish schools are really to hold true to the principles of CfE then they cannot have their cake and eat it by then trumpeting their ranking in exam league tables.

“We’ve been branded the second-most improved school in Scotland, and lots of people celebrated that, but we didn’t - because these league tables don’t help anyone,” said Crawford.

Speaking at the same Scotland Policy Conferences event, South Ayrshire Council education director Douglas Hutchison was even more disparaging about an over-emphasis on exam performance, describing a system that had become “obsessed by the exam” and in which “the design principles of Curriculum for Excellence come to a shuddering halt when we arrive at the senior phase”.

He added: “Every year we have this carry-on where Scotland tries to look like England - we get a bunch of kids turning up at schools and opening their results as if we don’t already know what they’ve actually got…they do this whole charade of, ‘Oh, I’ve got five As’, ‘I’ve got four As’. We need to stop privileging that one moment in time.”

Exams prioritise “a certain type of learning” that often amounts to little more than memorisation, said Hutchison - yet, if anything, despite CfE, Scottish education had become even more exam-heavy in recent years. The removal of unit assessments from 2017, for example, resulted in longer exams for many subjects and the addition of written exams to subjects that previously had none, such as practical woodwork and metalwork. The appeals process, meanwhile, had become so limited that “almost everything rides on the exam”, he said.

Hutchison stressed, however, that the blame should not be laid entirely at the door of the Scottish Qualifications Authority: like Crawford, he advised critics in the teaching profession to look at their own priorities, too. “We need to take responsibility for the way we’ve contributed to an exam-focused curriculum in the senior phase,” he said, adding that “we haven’t used the freedom available to us in Curriculum for Excellence”.

The results “car crash” in August - in a year when Covid-19 ensured that there were no exams and students from less privileged backgrounds were far more likely to have their marks downgraded - was “almost inevitable” in a system that relies so fundamentally on exams, said Hutchison. And he fears that, despite all the lofty ambition from the Scottish government about bridging the attainment divide between poorer and more affluent pupils, a continued reliance on exams inherently favours certain learners: “As long as the only way to accredit learning is principally by a written exam, I don’t think we’ll ever close the poverty-related attainment gap.”

Hutchison wants far more ways of “cashing in your learning”, not just SQA certificates with their bald lists of Highers: “Maybe we need to look at some sort of leaving certificate or baccalaureate…a basket of ways of demonstrating the skills you’ve learned throughout your time in education.”

Despite his fierce criticism, Hutchison ultimately remains hopeful about CfE: “I still believe Curriculum for Excellence is the right way forward, but we need to constantly discover the great potential it has and make sure that the high-stakes exam system that dominates the senior phase doesn’t crush the creativity out of the broad general education.” In short, “it is time for serious reform of the exams system”.

Louise Hayward, professor of educational assessment and innovation at the University of Glasgow, said at the event: “Scottish education is not in crisis: there’s a great deal that’s very positive, for example the way we collaborate across research, policy and practice.”

But she warned that, if CfE is to be realised fully, education must measure “what matters, rather than what is easiest to measure”. She also sees tell-tale signs in the language routinely used within education that old habits are dying hard. The notion of “transition” between different levels of education, for example, shows that the CfE aspiration of a seamless “3-18” curriculum is still some way off. Meanwhile, supposedly “practical” and “vocational” learning is separated out from “academic” paths - even though “there’s nothing so practical and vocational as the skills of a surgeon”.

However, like a number of speakers, Hayward sees the pandemic as a potential catalyst for true change: “Covid opens up possibilities, and this is the time to act.”

The most impassioned criticism of the gap between CfE aspiration and CfE reality came from Rod Grant, headteacher at the independent Clifton Hall School in Edinburgh.

He said the exams system was “rigged” to ensure that the same proportion of students pass at each grade of each subject each year - a sign that protecting the system is ultimately more important than rewarding a student’s achievements. CfE offers admirable choice and breadth from the age of 3 to 15, “and then we destroy it” with a system that still prioritises a “mad rush” over nine months to accrue Highers and that is full of absurdities, such as students losing marks for failing to memorise specific sentence starters and exams that are “far, far too long”. Grant believes no exam should last more than an hour and a half.

He said that “we still have this hierarchy of subjects” - why, for example, is it so rare to be able to take music, art and drama simultaneously? - with Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) prioritised over expressive arts, the subjects that “feed the soul”.

University of Glasgow researcher Barry Black, who works with the Urban Big Data Centre, admits that before he carried out research with 100 pupils in a range of schools across the west of Scotland, he bought into the “discourse of failure” around Scottish education. But his preconceptions were “massively challenged” and “far away” from the reality that he saw: “Over these few months, I witnessed a dynamic, vibrant, innovative and exciting system, packed full of dedicated professionals striving to do the very best by every single young person.”

They were doing a lot of great work that brought CfE to life - but, Black stressed, staff and students were hampered by a “disjointed system which sometimes prevents them from taking advantage of the full curriculum offer”. He cited the “rigid criteria of our qualifications system” and an S3 experience that often amounted to an “empty year”, where students marked time before things ramped up in the senior phase. And the experience of 2020-21 so far - when ministers are determined to run Higher and Advanced Higher exams, even though National 5 exams have been cancelled - showed that “the system and those who govern it prioritise the exam diet above all else”.

One of the greatest innovations in the CfE era, believes Black, is the Developing the Young Workforce (DYW) agenda, which aims to put other skills and learning on a par with more exam-based routes - but Black says that exams still ultimately “override” such aspirations.

“I fully believe that until a straight-A student sees [an apprenticeship] as a viable alternative to university, DYW will not have been fully integrated and its potential not fully realised,” he said.

Further education offers some hope that more nimble approaches to qualifications are emerging in significant numbers, with a flattening of old hierarchies between different education sectors.

Simon Hewitt, principal of Dundee and Angus College, said that 33,500 school students in Scotland are now pursuing qualifications that involve colleges, while 1,500 learners are pursuing apprenticeships. Meanwhile, his college had largely overcome a “perception in our staff that we’re adult educators, [that] we shouldn’t be delivering to younger learners”, and it had seen a big rise in applications from school students for courses at colleges.

There was a common feeling at the conference event that CfE ambitions and principles had led to many changes for the better, but that there were many obstacles - both systemic and cultural - still to be overcome. Lesley Robertson, East Lothian Council’s head of education and children’s services, called for a “commitment to stay the course” but also some “bold steps” to address what is not working.

And Crawford, the Inverclyde Academy head, had a similar message for those suffering from CfE fatigue: “Change is slow, it’s draining, it’s exciting - and it’s worth it.”

Henry Hepburn is news editor at Tes Scotland. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 20 November 2020 issue