One of the goals of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) when it was introduced was to free teachers from the shackles of an overly prescriptive national curriculum and give them more freedom to exercise their professional judgement about what their pupils should be learning.

However, an expert panel last week at the 2022 Scottish Learning Festival clearly demonstrated that, while some north of the border want to remain free from the “weight” of prescription, others want a more clearly mapped curriculum.

Dr Marion Burns, chair of Early Years Scotland, argued against a curriculum that needed to be “delivered” and for one that could be experienced and led by children. At all costs she wanted to avoid a “top-down curriculum”, she said.

But secondary headteacher Bruce Robertson disagreed: the curriculum was about experience, but not purely that, he said.  

He argued for mapping out the curriculum “very, very clearly” and for a balance between school design and national prescription.

But while there was some disagreement among the panel members about the best way forward for Curriculum for Excellence - which was officially implemented from 2010-11 - there was also much consensus. The panellists agreed the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review of CfE was, by and large, accurate in its findings; that CfE remained broadly right for Scotland; and, crucially, that if schools, teachers and leaders were to have more of a role in creating and developing the curriculum they needed more time and support to do it.

On the panel was also Dr Jehan Al-Azzawi, a transitions teacher working across primary and secondary; Rob Houben, an educational leader and public speaker from the Netherlands; David Mitchell, a secondary headteacher; Professor Mark Priestley, a curriculum expert; and Jenny Watson, a primary headteacher.

Their discussion at last week’s event lasted over an hour, and here are six key points:

1. Schools and teachers need more support - from extra in-service days to resources

The “meso layer of curriculum making” was missing in Scotland, said Mark Priestley.

This was “the middle layer that sits between schools and policy”, he said. It could be about guidance - and he conceded there had been plenty of that in Scotland - but it was also about “curriculum leadership where expert teachers work with colleagues to develop resources and to develop the curriculum”.

“One thing this meso layer can do is to produce resources that can be used by teachers across the system, and that is something I think we need to investigate much more closely in Scotland.”

Bruce Robertson said that if there was going to be that balance between national prescription and school design, teachers needed time to develop the curriculum and “there needs to be modelling”.

“There need to be strong examples and there need to be non-examples. We are trying to teach teachers and schools how to develop curricula and the way we teach them that, well, the principles are the same as the best ways to teach students.”

David Mitchell, meanwhile, made the case for more in-service days: “Professional learning is key to developing an effective curriculum but we don’t have the time. That’s the big issue. We’ve got five staff development days a year and that’s not enough.”

2. More consistency in what is taught across sectors

As a transitions teacher, Jehan Al-Azzawi works across four primary schools supporting pupils as they move up to secondary. The curriculum experienced by the pupils was “very different” across the primary schools, she said.

“There’s a question there over consistency of experience and particularly of what knowledge is deemed to be required for those pupils to then be successful when they come up to high school.”

More precise mapping of the curriculum wasn’t just needed so that there was consistency across schools, said Bruce Robertson, but also so that teachers in primary understood what was taught in early secondary, and teachers in secondary understood what was taught in upper primary. Without that, he said, “we risk a fragmented curriculum where there is unnecessary repetition” or “gaps”.  

Robertson said: “There are things that we just take for granted should be taught and learned but that aren’t, because it hasn’t been mapped out in the level of detail that I think it needs to be.”

Al-Azzawi called for more time for primary and secondary practitioners to work together to plan learning experiences. “Collaboration is key,” she said.

3. A call to move away from a curriculum based on outcomes

Experiences and outcomes are “a set of clear and concise statements about children’s learning and progression in each curriculum area”. So says the Education Scotland website, but Mark Priestley and Bruce Robertson were in agreement that it was time to do away with outcomes.

Robertson doesn’t like them because of their lack of specificity. Priestley doesn’t like them because he believes there is a need to think more deeply about the knowledge students need - and an outcomes-based approach does not support this. 

Priestley said that one of the key functions of schooling was to develop knowledge and that the way that was developed had to be “coherent and progressive”. But sometimes decisions about what was taught came down to what textbooks a school had, or if the topic was considered “sexy”.

“What we don’t always do is think about what knowledge young people need to acquire and how we go about organising that,” said Priestley.

He suggested Scotland could learn from the “Big Ideas” of British Columbia’s curriculum.

In a recent article for Tes, curriculum expert Mary Myatt said “there is a lot of evidence that we know more and remember more if we understand the big ideas or concepts underpinning what we’re learning”. A big idea in history, she said, might be a concept such as democracy.

4. We can’t just keep adding to the curriculum

There can be frustration that whenever society faces a problem - be it rising obesity or the climate emergency - the solution is for schools to shoehorn it into the curriculum. Rob Houben said, when the list of core knowledge was added to, it was important to “have the guts” to take something else off.

“In the last 100 years we added more and more, what I call, core knowledge,” he said. “We expect far more basic knowledge from children than a hundred years ago. I believe that’s impossible - their heads have not grown twice as big as a hundred years ago. So we have to have a good look at the core knowledge these kids need for their future.”

5. The impact of assessment

High-stakes exams have a “backwash” effect on the curriculum, said Priestley. He favoured a wider range of assessment and said that the school of education at the University of Stirling had done away with exams, although he thought there was still a place for them in schools.

Bruce Robertson said he would be “sad” if exams disappeared. If the problem was that exams tested “rote learning” and “shallow knowledge”, the solution was not to throw out exams but to “come up with better questions”.

He also called for schools to get exam papers back from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), so that they were not just used to provide a grade but could also influence approaches to teaching.  

6. Think outside the box

There were calls aplenty for schools to be bold and to take risks.

“We are all institutionalised,” said Rob Houben. He said he had spent his life in schools and he saw a temptation to keep delivering the same school experience

There was nothing wrong with elements of traditional education but students should have a say in what they are doing and when they do it. He called for teachers to find their “kindergarten mode”, observe their pupils and introduce learning in line with the interests of the child and not demotivate them by “force feeding” them reading or maths at the wrong time.

“Every kid wants to read between the age of 4 and 8; the only thing we can do is demotivate them by forcing all kids to learn how to read at the age of 4. So what if we respect this window of opportunity and start at the moment that we see the spark?”

David Mitchell said that if Scottish schools were willing to “take a risk and a gamble” they could design a curriculum that suited their school.

He also said “young people learn while they are doing and not sitting in front of a textbook”, and that he was “very jealous of primary teachers” because of the active learning taking place in their classrooms.

He questioned if going from two teachers in primary to 14 or 15 in secondary was “the right way to ensure our young people are learning”.

“There’s a big debate in there,” Mitchell added. “Is that depth appropriate? That’s a real hot topic question as far as I’m concerned.”