Any review of Curriculum for Excellence should “clearly examine how anti-racist education is going to be embedded into every stage of the education journey, from primary to secondary and across all sectors”, according to a new paper by Professor Rowena Arshad.
Professor Arshad, who is chair of multicultural and anti-racist education and a former head of Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh, says the anti-immigration riots incited by the far right in the UK in summer 2024 were a reminder of “the continued need to address issues related to ‘race’”.
But in the paper, Anti-Racist Education: What Next for Scotland?, she says that if there is “no mandatory requirement to include curriculum content that assists learners to understand issues of racism and other forms of inequalities”, then practice will “remain ad hoc and with those already engaged in explicit anti-discriminatory education”.
Professor Arshad - who presented her paper as part of the British Educational Research Association’s Presidential Seminar Series 2024-26 - says the extent to which pupils in Scotland learn about racism and discrimination remains “dependent on the commitment of individual teachers or schools”.
Anti-racism as a concept needs to be “presented repeatedly with deepening complexity and applications” as pupils progress through school, while any curriculum reform should audit areas of strength and weakness.
Professor Arshad identifies some reasons to be positive, including the 2021 launch of the Anti-Racism in Education Programme by the Scottish government, annual reporting of data on diversity in the teaching profession, the Anti-Racism Framework for Initial Teacher Education and the Breaking the Mould document published by Education Scotland in 2023.
That document, she says, “sets out expectations and ambitions that broader curriculum reforms should engage with”.
Gap in standard of anti-racism work ‘unacceptably wide’
Even so, Professor Arshad says, the gap between those “pushing for the best in critical anti-racist work” and those “not doing it, or engaging in a piecemeal manner, remains unacceptably wide”.
She warns that “in a small country like Scotland”, it should be possible to close that gap, but says Scotland’s ambitions to be anti-racist could yet become “another promise that does not materialise”.
Education Scotland is in the early stages of its curriculum improvement cycle, with reviews of all subject areas due to get under way this academic year.
In a research paper published yesterday, it advises that the review needs to “declutter” the curriculum and pin down the knowledge pupils need at key stages.
The paper also says that establishing cross-curricular knowledge and skills could “streamline curriculum development”, and it criticises the “numerous additional layers” that have been added to the curriculum since its introduction. One potential cross-curricular theme it identifies is “social justice”.
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