Education reform must go “far beyond” the proposals set out in the new Education (Scotland) Bill, and give greater influence to teachers and schools, the author of the 2022 Muir report said today.
Ken Muir had been given a “clear indication” to be “bold and radical”, and that the Scottish government was “serious” about reforming Scottish education before publishing his report in March 2022, he told the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee.
However, Professor Muir - previously chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland and head of inspection at Education Scotland - said some of that messaging changed towards the end of the time he spent preparing his report, Putting Learners at the Centre: Towards a Future Vision for Scottish Education.
Scotland an outlier in approach to scrutiny of qualifications body
He had been “very clear” that the awarding side of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) should be “subject to greater scrutiny”, like a “Scottish version of Ofqual” in England (Ofqual regulates qualifications, exams and assessments put together by other bodies). Today, he also made comparisons with Qualifications Wales - set up primarily as a regulatory body - and the Republic of Ireland, where operational and policy decisions on qualifications are more separated than in Scotland.
Professor Muir wants “much clearer boundaries” between awarding and regulation in Scotland to end concerns that the SQA is “marking its own homework”.
However, he was informed “very late on in my six-month tenure” that the reality was likely to fall short of his ambitions. He added: “I still think that the principle of separating the awarding and regulation functions is something that should be looked at [but] clearly the bill does not go down that road.”
Professor Muir also offered a more general critique that Scottish education reform should go “far beyond” what the bill outlines. For example, he said it does not pave the way for a “truly independent inspectorate”.
The Withers, Morgan and Hayward reports (the last of which will be responded to by the Scottish government tomorrow, nearly 15 months after publication) had raised expectations among teachers that “reform was coming down the line”.
Professor Muir noted education secretary Jenny Gilruth’s caution around the Hayward proposals and her oft-stated view that, with so much happening in Scottish education just now, there are risks associated with radical reform. However, he said that the risks of not reforming “are even greater”.
‘Clear timeline’ on Hayward essential for schools
Looking ahead to Ms Gilruth’s statement on the Hayward review tomorrow afternoon, he called for schools to be given a “clear, manageable, sustainable timeline” for the next five to 10 years, based on the “compelling vision” in the May 2023 National Discussion report from professors Carol Campbell and Alma Harris.
Graham Donaldson, author of a landmark 2011 report on teacher education, told today’s committee that Scottish education should be “very wary” of overly prescriptive legislation, as a system that is too centralised “creates a straitjacket”.
Referring to the time frame cited by Professor Muir, he added that “we haven’t got five to 10 years” to see through reforms: fast-changing technology already meant that pupils could “bypass” teachers and school, so reform has to go faster.
Professor Donaldson himself headed up the education inspectorate until 2010, and said that it had more independence in his time than a chief inspector would now have, adding that the education bill contains “a lot of references to getting approval from ministers [that] are not appropriate and not necessary”.
He said: “If the inspectorate was doing its job properly we wouldn’t have needed [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] reviews...if that had happened during my time, I would have been very angry.”
Barry Black, a University of Glasgow postgraduate researcher who has called for the education bill to be rejected, said it was designed as a form of “protection of the system [and] the structures that we already have in Scottish education” - it boiled down to “carrying on as normal”.
Mr Black added that, too often, Scottish education bodies propagated a “self-congratulatory system” that did not inspire trust and was “removed from daily practice in the classroom”.
Shortcomings of self-congratulatory education system
Mark Priestley, a University of Stirling professor of education who is an expert on the pros and cons of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, similarly said that “the system is set up to justify itself, to celebrate its success rather than taking a critical look”.
Scotland has lots of education agencies with overlapping functions, he said, leading to conflicts of interest as they evaluate their own work.
Recent concerns over this year’s Higher history paper would not have “blown up” in the same way if there was more trust in the system, said Professor Priestley, but bodies such as Education Scotland and the SQA were “remote” from teachers.
He called for a “middle layer” of Scottish education to connect policy and practice, and get teachers more involved in developing materials and resources.
But as things stand, Professor Priestley warned, Scottish education policy is “hierarchical” and does not do enough to help teachers “make sense” of it.
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