The focus on “clocking up” Highers and other national qualifications in Scottish education is leading to increasing disengagement in school among disadvantaged students, MSPs have been told.
However, they also heard that the focus on “very traditional” qualifications was letting down those destined for university, who need a wider range of experiences in order to secure places.
Secondary headteachers giving evidence to a parliamentary committee today said they were constrained by the metrics used to judge them. These measures of success incentivised them to run national qualifications - such as National 5s, Highers and Advanced Highers - but not necessarily the courses best suited to the students in front of them.
They said that students from disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular, were increasingly “voting with their feet” and not going to class, because they could not see the point of lessons.
School attendance has worsened in Scotland in the wake of the pandemic: recent figures showed almost a fifth of secondary students attended school less than 80 per cent of the time last year.
The panel - which comprised three practising secondary heads and the general secretaries of Scotland’s primary and secondary school leaders’ organisations - also highlighted staffing as “a massive issue”.
They said they could not recruit staff in subjects where they wanted to expand their course offer, such as home economics, technological education, business and maths.
A lack of resources more generally was also making it tough to deliver a wider range of courses. They said councils were “pruning” their budgets, which ultimately resulted in schools having to cut staff.
The panel was giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee, which was looking at the way the curriculum is currently being delivered in schools and the potential impact of education reform.
‘Counterproductive’ accountability
Pauline Walker, headteacher of the Royal High School in Edinburgh, said her freedom to develop a curriculum that met her students’ needs was “constrained” by “what is a measure of success nationally”.
She said: “At the moment that is a points-gathering exercise. Highers are still considered the thing, the ‘gold standard’, and we’re not moving in any way towards a more inclusive Curriculum for Excellence.”
Ms Walker added that current accountability measures were “counterproductive” and focused on the “wrong areas”, instead of looking at “positive destinations” or “skills”.
Peter Bain - executive head of two high schools and two primary schools in Argyll and Bute - said that the desire to improve “5+ Higher figures” (the proportion of students gaining five or more Higher qualifications) was coming “at the expense of putting on a vast array of vocational courses that would best suit young people”.
Even those students destined for university were being let down because they did not just need qualifications, they needed a “wealth of experience”, and to be able to answer the question: “What makes you interesting?”
Mr Bain said he ran courses that gave students the volunteering and leadership experiences that allowed them to answer that question well, but that meant his school statistics plateaued because pupils were “clocking up” fewer Highers.
He said that accountability measures were “partly killing the curriculum”, as well as killing “choice” and “opportunity”.
Instead of focusing on statistics, Mr Bain said a better measure of a school’s success would be “a qualitative analysis” looking at “youngsters going on to positive destinations” and whether students had “made a success of their school lives”.
Students ‘voting with their feet’
The panel said the cohort of students being most badly let down by the focus on accumulating national qualifications was disadvantaged young people, who were “voting with their feet” in increasing numbers.
Falling school attendance is recognised to be a problem in Scotland - as it is across the UK - in the wake of Covid, and an engaging, interesting and relevant curriculum is seen as key to getting more pupils to come to school more often.
However, Ms Walker spoke of students turning up for school and roaming the building instead of going to their classes, because they simply could not see the point of what they were being asked to learn.
She said that these students, who had often been in “cycles of poverty for many generations”, needed “something different”. But the curriculum - which was “geared towards young people somewhere around the top 50 per cent” - constrained schools and did not allow them to make changes to meet those needs.
Ms Walker said that running a course like hairdressing had the potential to act as a “hook” but the “experiential” broad general education did not allow for that. Then, Ms Walker said, by the senior phase, students were often “so disenfranchised” that it was difficult to engage them.
Calls for Higher to be abandoned
The panel reiterated calls for the Higher brand to be abandoned in favour of referring to qualifications based on their Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework level.
The Withers independent review of skills, published in June, criticised the “often bewildering” array of names for Scottish qualifications and called for “a common language” to describe courses at an equivalent level.
The panel also called for headteachers to be given more freedom over spending. Mr Bain said he was able to offer over 90 courses at Oban High School because of partnership working, but also because he had “the autonomy to move money between different budgetary lines” - so he could choose to put resources into employing engineering tutors, dance tutors and piping tutors.
However, Mr Bain - who takes over as president of School Leaders Scotland at their conference in Aberdeen this week - said half of local authorities were not abiding by the Scottish government’s devolved school management guidelines and were dictating staffing formulas and restricting headteacher autonomy.
