Teacher and lecturer James McEnaney has written a book on Scottish schools - here are his four priorities for education in the months and years ahead.

How to improve education in Scotland

1. Gather better data

A significant part of the problem in Scotland is that a lot of the data we gather on education is of really poor quality. Some of it is even actively misleading.

The Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels (ACEL) data should be scrapped and replaced with a restored and expanded SSLN (Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy). The ACEL data attempts to do several jobs - classroom feedback, school comparisons, national benchmarking - and does none of them well, while the method of collection, in particular the fact that results are tied directly to schools and even individual staff, actually just makes it more unreliable while exerting perverse pressure on the system. The sample-based SSLN was only ever abandoned for political reasons as the SNP desperately tried to defend their doomed standardised testing policy - it’s time for them to swallow their pride, admit they were wrong and reintroduce the SSLN.

We could also do with better data at the other end of the system. Right now everything seems to hinge either on the number of pupils getting “one or more qualifications at Level 6” or the number getting five Highers. But as we have found out in the past few years, when you dig past the headline figures you often find horrifying inequalities lurking beneath. More nuanced data about end-of-school qualifications could help to ensure a more informed and effective debate about this key output of the school system.

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2. Bonfire of the Es and Os

Curriculum for Excellence was going to be a revolution, but in the end it became just the replacement of one bureaucracy with another. Perhaps the biggest single factor in this is the “experiences and outcomes”, the labyrinthine demands that make up the actual structure of the curriculum. They came about as a result of demands for more detail in the curriculum (problems that should have been solved by proper exemplification) but were also, very clearly, driven by a lack of trust in the teaching profession. The clearest consequence of the Es and Os approach was the imposition of an audit-driving, box-ticking, make-sure-all-the-paperwork-is-in-order mentality that puts the needs of a spreadsheet ahead of the needs of students.

We’ve tried tinkering with them by introducing a whole new layer of benchmarks, but it’s not enough. We need a vastly simplified curricular structure outlining what students should know and do at each stage, accompanied by clear examples of different levels of performance. And then we need to get out of the way and let teachers do their jobs.

3. Reform the exam system

The status quo doesn’t work: it didn’t work before the pandemic, it didn’t work during the pandemic and it won’t work after the pandemic. The exam system may not be the source of inequality between different groups, in particular rich and poor, but it is certainly a part of the problem rather than the solution.

Our current approach, the one that grinds students through a needless annual exam cycle and ties so much of their future to performance in just a few hours of a single day, has failed far too many people for far too long. The richest pupils are more likely to leave school with five Highers than the poorest are to leave with one. Those from the most deprived backgrounds are also more likely to fail their courses than achieve an A grade.

We need a broader range of assessment approaches and more variety across subjects. It’s not hard to see the case for interdisciplinary assessment - especially if we’re supposed to be “preparing young people for the real world” - and that might even lead to a debate about whether the way in which we currently organise and timetable secondary subjects is really the best approach.

4. Slash class contact time

Teachers in Scotland spend more time in front of their classes than in almost any other comparable country, and I really don’t think that you can overestimate the impact that this has on teachers and their pupils. Even the basics of the job - planning high-quality lessons, reviewing students’ work, providing responsive feedback - are made near-impossible by the lack of time available to do them properly, leaving us with a profession that also works more unpaid overtime than any other.

But, of course, we want teachers to do more than the basics: we want them to construct a curriculum, not just deliver it, and to focus on young people’s health and wellbeing just as much as their academic progress. And naturally, we also insist that the teaching profession is one in which individuals are constantly engaged in continuing professional development.

We expect all of this to be done in a small and constantly squeezed proportion of the working week and then wonder why the system appears to be under such incredible strain.

A truly world-class education system, the kind that our children deserve, is only possible with world-class working conditions for teachers. It isn’t possible to radically improve the quality of Scottish education without radically reducing the contact time of teachers - and then trusting them as professionals to make the best possible use of that time.

James McEnaney is a writer, FE lecturer and former schoolteacher in Scotland. His new book Class Rules: the Truth about Scottish Schools is published on 10 September and a launch event will be held at Blackwell’s in Edinburgh on Tuesday, 14 September - details here.