Education reform in Scotland has a high chance of success because state education enjoys more support than in many other countries, according to a keynote speaker at next week’s Scottish Learning Festival (SLF).

Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, an education consultant and chief research officer with Michael Fullan - the Canadian educationalist and former adviser to Tony Blair who was instrumental in transforming Ontario’s school system - also says: “Scotland is one of the leading countries right now with regards to the vision they have for students.”

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) and its “four capacities” have been around for a long time and no one would describe CfE as an unqualified success.

However, in an interview with Tes Scotland, Rincón-Gallardo says that the four capacities remain “a very powerful vision for what we want our students to be - and that should not be taken for granted”. He adds that “most countries don’t have that expressed in such a succinct and powerful way”.

• Context: Slimmed-down Scottish Learning Festival returns for 2023
• Exclusive interview: Education Scotland chief executive Gillian Hamilton
• Long read: Michael Fullan speaks to Tes in 2017

Rincón-Gallardo will address the revamped SLF next week, which now takes place largely online as a series of keynote speeches and has been branded SLF Conversations. A programme of shorter SLF seminars will be spread throughout the year

In the run-up to his keynote, which takes place online from 4-6pm on Tuesday 26 September (details here), Rincón-Gallardo has met numerous key figures in Scottish education, including headteachers and education directors. That has given him high hopes for the future of Scottish education, as he picked up a “tremendous unity of purpose that is not the case everywhere”.

“What you see in Scotland that you don’t see in many countries, is that there is strong support, commitment and pride for public education,” he says. “And the ‘national discussion’ [on Scottish education] that just took place, it showed that there is a genuine interest, care and concern for what happens with our children.”

He adds: “I think that’s that’s not to be dismissed...because if you have a society that believes in education, you have a lot of the ingredients you need for any reform to be successful.”

A ‘bold, ambitious vision’ for education

Rincón-Gallardo has reviewed a range of reports published recently by or for the Scottish government and picks out two in particular that have impressed him as examples of the “bold, ambitious vision for education centred on students” envisaged by CfE.

First, he points to the “highly ambitious” Learning for Sustainability action plan for 2023-2030, which he describes as “profoundly relevant for the present moment and the challenging times ahead”. By aiming to “transform every 3-18 place of education into a sustainable learning setting by 2030”, the plan “sets a pioneering example and a high bar for education systems around the world”. 

He also highlights the recent Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy as “another important upgrade to adapt support for students to the current times”. However, he also warned that the strategy must be “seamlessly and coherently integrated” with learning, rather than giving schools “one more thing in a long checklist of things to do”.

Rincón-Gallardo describes his work as striving to “enhance system coherence, deepen student learning and cultivate professional capital across entire educational systems”.

He says that deep learning does not take place in most classes where “conventional schooling” remains the norm, because “we’ve learned to be taught, but we don’t learn”.

He highlights different approaches now used in thousands of primary and middle schools in Mexico and Colombia - often in poorer, rural areas where many children have not thrived at school in the past - that he says offers a far better model for the future.

Visitors to these schools will see children “moving freely within the space” as they choose from a range of activities presented by the teacher, and they typically show “a lot of concentration”.

“Students are expected to demonstrate mastery of what they’ve learned out there,” says Rincón-Gallardo, which they might do in writing or as an oral presentation to the group.

“The final stage in your learning is when you demonstrate publicly that you’ve mastered the topic,” he says. “You are [then] expected to become a tutor, for someone else who wants to learn what you learn.”

He adds: “You are suddenly in a place where everybody can learn one one-on-one with somebody else.”

The role of the teacher in these schools is “not just to make sure that the students are doing their work”, but to “facilitate their learning, engage in dialogue with them”. Teachers establish “what [students] are still missing” and then “ask them questions so that they come up with their own answers”.

Rincón-Gallardo says that such approaches have not extended in the same way to high schools in Mexico and Colombia, but that students at that level who have been through the primary and middle schools in question tend to do well in their final years at school.

He also stresses that, in attempting to make fundamental changes to long-established approaches to school on a large scale, the “challenge is enormous”.

While SLF Conversations will take place next week - with education secretary Jenny Gilruth among three other keynote speakers - the Scottish Learning Festival will now also entail CPD sessions taking place over the course of the 2023-24 school year.

Find out more about the Scottish Learning Festival and register here.