Despite many ups and downs in my 40-plus years in teaching, I still hold to the ideal that brought me into the profession: that schools should help young people find and develop their best selves, using their skills, knowledge and insight to make a valuable contribution as positive, capable, caring citizens in our rapidly changing world.
My generation, equating secondary education with secondary schooling, did not fully succeed in this challenge. Despite many improvements, the statistics of attendance, exclusion and achievement that we use as proxy measures suggest that many young people still see secondary schooling as something done “to” them, not “with” them. We need a better balance between pushing them to do their best and reaching out to them when they don’t; being interested not just in their performance, but in their individuality.
The discontinuous phases of Curriculum for Excellence intensify this longstanding tension. The broad general education crashes into a senior phase of individual pathways and competitive exams, in which some achieve Higher and others, therefore, lower. The message, underpinned by high-stakes accountability for teachers, is that the performance of young people in competitive public examinations is the only important outcome.
The Attainment Challenge to schools, while welcome for its focus on more equitable access, reinforces this message (though schools only play a minor role in creating the attainment gap). Abigail McKnight demonstrated in her study of the “glass floor” how advantaged parents ensure their children’s success. My colleagues and I show in Everyone’s Future, a book on comprehensive schooling, that whenever young people from less advantaged backgrounds gain highervalue awards, those from more advantaged backgrounds raise their game to retain their competitive advantage. Beyond the education system, our polarised labour market - in which some jobs demand high qualifications and some almost none - requires continuing inequalities in attainment.
Double disadvantage
I would never decry efforts to raise attainment. I want every young person to have access to the “best that has been thought and said”, to enrich their lives and our common life through wider knowledge and deeper understanding. However, young people have to want that, too, and despite the efforts of individual teachers, many of Scotland’s young people leave school early as demotivated learners - turned off by its competitive, comparative character. Already disadvantaged by low achievement, they are then doubly disadvantaged by a shorter education.
Demotivation starts in the first years of secondary, as subject teachers build the skills and concepts essential for later exam success. Those who do well become increasingly motivated to perform in exams. They look forward to clear, well-understood educational pathways. Others, seeing themselves as unable to compete, lose motivation and fail to realise their potential as learners. Few among us, after all, choose to work hard at competitive activities in which others easily outperform us.
Upon leaving school, these young people then have to navigate a complex, sometimes confusing, patchwork of local provision, some of which lacks broad educational components.
If we are to motivate all our learners, we need to value what they bring to the table, as well as what we teach them
Recent analysis of subject choice and exam success by the University of Dundee’s Jim Scott suggests that inconsistencies across schools have increased as the senior school curriculum has fragmented. Many such inconsistencies and confusions in post-15 provision stem from the absence of a clear educational design, a unifying rationale and framework. It should outline an equal entitlement for all to a full secondary education, right through to 18, whether in school, college, training or employment; it should recognise and value all beneficial learning, not simply exam success; it should do more than select and sort young people for future pathways, but liberate and nurture what is best in them, motivate and energise them to learn, challenge them to achieve - and value what they have achieved.
To do this, we need all provision up to 18 - in school or college, training or employment - to be included within a common educational framework, a redesigned senior phase. In Schooling Scotland, I argued that an accessible national graduation certificate would provide both an educational rationale and a means of assessment for such a framework. It would include and value academic achievements, as at present - such disciplines are essential in any worthwhile education - but also recognise and value a wider set of accomplishments.
If we are to motivate all our learners, we need to value what they bring to the table, as well as what we teach them. We should nurture and reward their best selves, not just their comparative performance against standardised objectives. The dedication of the young carer, the environmental protection of the John Muir awardee, community volunteering, sports leadership: there are so many valuable contributions that young people make to our common life, so many learning opportunities outwith schools, particularly in the digital age. Comparative exam performance is necessary but insufficient for measuring the diverse desirable outcomes of education. A graduation certificate, open to all at 18, would recognise the equal value and worth of each young person, not just their unequal value in the unequal labour market.
Scotland is building its educational capacity by developing the skills, insights and knowledge of its teachers and school leaders. Every day, they make the fragmented organisational structure of the secondary curriculum work as well as it can, and perhaps better than it should. They value each young person for who they are, not just how they perform.
But further progress is limited by the under-designed senior phase. In passing on the baton, I challenge national leadership to bring citizens, employers, teachers and school leaders together to plan and deliver a secondary education that does not merely select and sort young people for a labour market role, but helps each one find and develop their best selves. That is the real challenge of secondary education.
Daniel Murphy, retired secondary head and honorary fellow of the University of Edinburgh, is joint editor of Everyone’s Future and first wrote for TESS in the 1970s. This may be his last contribution
