In Scotland, the curriculum has been reviewed in response to “controversy” but not in a “planned and proactive” way.
So said a 2021 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) that was itself instigated over fears that upper-secondary offerings had narrowed, with some subjects - including modern languages and social subjects - being squeezed out.
The OECD report, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: Into the Future, called for “a systematic approach to curriculum review” within “a planned timeframe”.
‘Internal-system capacity should be prioritised’
It said external perspectives could be useful “from time to time”, but that building internal-system capacity “should now be prioritised”.
This “curriculum-improvement cycle” is what Ollie Bray, a former headteacher, is now trying to realise in his role as Education Scotland’s strategic director, responsible for curriculum, pedagogy and innovation.
Following a series of pilots, a curriculum-review model has been settled upon (more on that later) and Education Scotland plans to begin reviewing all curricular areas this academic year.
The way CfE is organised - the so-called “technical framework” that includes the “experiences and outcomes”, benchmarks and related approaches to assessment and moderation - is also under the spotlight.
A series of working papers are to be published by Education Scotland from November. The first will set out the case for change; the second, in December, will look at “how we evolve the technical framework from the current model”, says Bray. A third, due in early 2025, will look at how change will happen.
However, in an exclusive interview with Tes Scotland, Bray is keen to reassure hard-pressed teachers and heads that “none of this is really going to hit schools and settings for at least a couple of years”.
It is, he says, about “evolving” CfE, “not ripping it up and starting again”.
CfE’s “four capacities”, the purposes of the curriculum and the four contexts for learning - one of which is curriculum areas and subjects - “remain valid”, he says. But the technical framework - “what teachers and practitioners use to plan their lessons” - needs to be “revisited”.
This, he explains, is about another finding from the 2021 OECD review, that “the role of knowledge appears somewhat fragmented and left to interpretation at the school level”.
One consequence of this lack of clarity was spelt out in an Education Scotland paper summarising findings from the pilot curriculum reviews.
Lack of common knowledge base
The paper, made public by a Tes Scotland freedom-of-information request, found secondary teachers “starting again” because, when primary pupils moved up, they lacked a common knowledge base.
The idea, therefore, is to improve CfE’s clarity around the knowledge, skills and attributes young people should have - while retaining flexibility. (In an article for Tes in July, international education consultant Lucy Crehan explained how this delicate balance could be struck.)
In terms of the curricular area reviews, maths is first out of the blocks.
The maths review was started by education secretary Jenny Gilruth in December, in response to Scotland’s poor performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which tests 15-year-olds in maths, reading and science.
The goal is a high-level framework for a new maths curriculum by the end of 2024, which will start being tested with teachers from January.
This will not be “the complete curriculum”, says Bray, but will set out “the big mathematical concepts that we expect children to be able to know, do and understand”.
Timelines for other curricular reviews will be published after the Easter holidays. Reviews are already underway in English and literacy, Gaelic and literacy, science, and health and wellbeing.
However, Bray stresses that for other curricular areas, the process is likely to take longer.
Maths had a head start because it had come under the spotlight before. There was the Making Maths Count group that reported back in 2016 and the National Response to Improving Mathematics Board, set up in 2021.
This gave the maths review team - led by former maths teacher Andy Brown - a jumping-off point that does not necessarily exist for other curricular areas.
It is expected that curriculum review cycles will span 10 years, starting and ending with an exercise similar to the National Discussion on Scottish Education, which reported in May 2023.
The model for reviewing the curriculum involves four stages: analysing existing evidence (this could include national test results and SQA data, for example); engagement and co-creation with teachers; implementation; and monitoring and evaluation to ensure the changes have been enacted.
The engagement stage is “the important one”, says Bray. An open recruitment exercise will lead to a “core group” of “about 15 people” who will “do most of the work”, with a “heavy bias towards teachers and practitioners”; the balance should be 70:30 teachers to stakeholders.
Then there will be a “collaboration group”, where the core group “tests its ideas”. This will include 80-100 participants and again be “highly biased towards teachers and practitioners”.
Bray acknowledges past criticisms from teachers over a lack of involvement in reform, and that Education Scotland and the Scottish government have tended to do things behind closed doors.
He wants to be transparent: a podcast goes out today in which he discusses the curriculum-improvement cycle with Education Scotland chief executive Gillian Hamilton, and there will be a dedicated Glow Blog.
Different ways to get involved
It is not possible to involve everyone, he says, but there will be “different pathways for people to be involved if they genuinely want to be”, with pre-existing networks of teachers key to reaching the profession.
Education Scotland will lead the work, but as “the facilitators” rather than experts.
This is about ensuring buy-in when change arrives in schools, but there is also a sense that this approach is born of necessity. Giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee in September, Hamilton highlighted the small number of staff working in different areas - the early-years team comprised just three people.
She said that Education Scotland associates - “colleagues working in the profession, in early years establishments and across our schools” - were being recruited to “bolster” existing teams.
Bray envisages that for each curricular review area, 10-15 associates will be recruited, each spending at least 10 days out of school over a year. The body is also recruiting for national adviser posts, which will entail up to 23 months out of school working with Education Scotland.
Ultimately, getting this right not only means a more coherent, less vague, up-to-date and “future-orientated” CfE but, Bray argues, could also help solve challenges around behaviour and attendance.
The other prize is, of course, improved attainment: there has been “a clear slide in outcomes” in Scotland, according to Pisa chief Andreas Schleicher.
In an interview with Tes Scotland after last December’s Pisa results, Schleicher described CfE as “ambitious” but questioned whether schools and teachers had the capacity to implement it.
If not, he suggested “a little bit more prescription” in the curriculum was necessary, “to better support struggling teachers and struggling schools”.
Striking that balance between clarity and flexibility is what Bray is trying to achieve - but it will be years before it becomes apparent whether this latest effort to fix CfE has succeeded.
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