“Radical” changes to the courses on offer in senior secondary are underway in Scotland, according to the schools inspectorate.

Scottish pupils are increasingly being offered a “web” or “matrix” of courses in their final years of high school, as opposed to following “a linear pathway” through qualifications, said Education Scotland’s strategic director Alan Armstrong, who was giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s education and skills committee yesterday.

In the past, pupils tended to progress from Standard Grade to Higher, and then on to Advanced Higher, with some dropping off along the way, he said. But now “a large number of schools” were bringing pupils together for the final three years of secondary - S4-6 - to open up opportunity and give pupils “a larger menu of courses and options”.

That menu included the new school-based apprenticeships, known as foundation apprenticeships.

The MSPs heard that Skills Development Scotland was on track to deliver the commitment to make 5,000 foundation apprenticeships available by the end of 2019, with 1,345 undertaken last school year and 2,600 planned for this year.

However, Mr Armstrong admitted the extent of the course change varied from school to school, with some secondaries more “forward thinking” than others.

Mr Armstrong, who was giving evidence to the committee as it investigates the routes young people take through school and beyond, said: “The senior phase as it is conceptualised is radically different to what was in place before, and that means that schools have had to take quite considerable time looking at what they were doing, how they were doing it, and the young people in their school, and co-designing what the offer should be.”

Later he added: “It’s an uneven playing field just now [in schools] but that’s exactly what we would expect with such a fundamental change.”

However, Scottish Conservative education spokeswoman Liz Smith challenged Mr Armstrong’s assertion that pupils were being offered more course choices in senior secondary, given the research into the narrowing of the secondary curriculum carried out by the University of Dundee’s Professor Jim Scott.

She also questioned if pupils and their parents were fully aware of the range of courses on offer in schools given another piece of research carried out by Professor Scott that had shown school handbooks and websites were often not kept up to date.