Hansard

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is something of a challenge to condense all that has happened in curriculum for excellence into about three minutes, but I will do my best. I will not read out my evidence on attainment or the curriculum, because the committee has seen that. What I will say is that I have drawn evidence by sieving the documentary pile of every school and local authority: the websites, the papers—the lot. I have examined agency papers and Government papers, and I have interviewed 100 of the governance actors, to the level of headteacher and depute headteacher. It is by triangulation of a great deal of evidence that the conclusions in my paper arise. Curriculum for excellence is a very difficult, but highly commendable, thing for Scotland to achieve, and I spent many years of my professional life trying to help it do just that. It is worth noting that major initiatives tend to take 10 to 15 years to work through, and in the past they tend to have covered two years of the secondary curriculum or aspects of the primary curriculum. We are attempting to improve the entire curriculum. One would have expected, therefore, that there would be issues and that the process would take a significant period. My evidence suggests that there are issues and that we are by no means at the end of the process. I have looked at two parts of the curriculum: the broad general education in secondary 1 to secondary 3 and the senior phase in S4 to S6. Members have in their possession a cut-up version of a map of the entire Scottish S1 to S3 curriculum. It demonstrates beyond any doubt that the things that Douglas Osler, when he was the senior chief inspector of schools back in the late 90s, told us not to do have been implemented in the flesh in Scottish schools. There is significant fragmentation of the curriculum; taster courses have reappeared in many schools, despite the fact that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education always warned us not to do that; and languages appear or do not appear. I was hoping that I could smile at Dr Allan, because he and I have had many conversations about the one-plus-two model. The reality of the situation is that that model is by no means implemented in the broad general education, although it should be. Approximately two thirds of Scottish schools more or less implement the one-plus-two process. In the S4, S5 and S6 curriculum, the real problem lies in S4. However, there is a subterranean problem there, because much of the problem lies in the articulation of S3 and S4. If you have tried to work your way through the curriculum map that I supplied you with, you will see that articulation—the idea that courses are coherent and progressive, which are things that the CFE would wish them to be—does not seem to take place. If we look only at the schools that are progressing towards six courses in S4, we see that that happens with anything from eight courses to 24 courses in S1. I suspect that none of us would take the view that eight courses or 24 courses is an appropriate way to educate Scottish children. That happens in S2 as well, but in S3 there appears to be significant confusion in the profession. That is backed up by interviews that I have carried out recently and not so recently. S1 and S2 are often quite consistent, but the progression route through S3 to any one of those six-course, seven-course or eight-course models in S4 can appear to be almost random. In one block of schools that do, say, 16 courses in S1 and S2, you can have 12 to 15 different processes through to the next set of courses in S4. That is not something that we should support. We did away with the curriculum guidelines at the end of the 1990s and replaced them with circular 3/2001 and then curriculum for excellence. All of that allowed headteachers, in communication with their school bodies, to choose the curriculum. It appears that either headteachers or school communities have made some very random choices. There is another layer there, because some Scottish local authorities have chosen to mandate their schools to carry out a certain core structure. That is evident in the map that I supplied to the committee to show what happens in the S4 curriculum. Many of the local authorities in the north have opted for six courses; most of the rest have opted for something else. The Scottish Parliament information centre and I have produced numbers that demonstrate what is happening in S4 in Scotland. I have just finished another survey of all 359 Scottish secondary schools, so I can tell you that the latest position is that 54 per cent of Scottish secondary schools are offering their children—I say this carefully—only six courses. Slightly less than one third are offering seven courses and 11 are offering eight courses. There are still three or four hardy souls who are offering five courses. The problem is in the detail for the child, because in the end it does not matter tuppence what the curriculum structure is unless it meets the needs of the child. The evidence demonstrates that the problem for many middle and upper-ability children is that their choice is being squeezed, particularly in the five and six-course schools. What happens in a six-course S4 school is that most children choose maths and English—understandably—and then choose two sciences and a social subject or two social subjects and a science, depending on their aspirations. That leaves the entire remainder of the Scottish curriculum fighting for one column in those schools. Needless to say, much of what would have been a beneficial experience for those children in times past has gone. That obviously has an impact on attainment. Some of my critics have chosen to point out that I have focused on S4. The only reason why I have focused on S4 is that there was data for S4 sooner than there was for S5 and S6; it takes time for these things to work through. However, we will leave that to one side. If things had continued in S4 as they were in 2013—and 2013 was not the strongest of the pre-CFE years; 2011 and 2010 were stronger and 2013 was only a middling year—we would have had an extra 622,000 qualifications in Scotland over the five years since. I struggle to say that in a public forum—it is almost unbelievable. We have chosen to do something different, but that curriculum narrowing has impacted significantly on both the quantity of attainment—I will come back to quality in a minute—and the progression pathways available to children. Most of you are probably aware that I am an ex-headteacher of several schools, which had quite different catchments. In all of them, children who were aiming for a particular thing frequently did not end up doing that because things went wrong in exams, so they had to use other subjects as back-ups in order to move forward. We were able to assure children that those progression pathways were there, but is harder now and almost impossible in a five-course school. Anecdotally, one school in Scotland that chose to do five courses opted to do English, Gaelic native speakers and mathematics as mandatory subjects for two years at the beginning of CFE, which left them with two other subjects for everything else. That is a refined form of madness, I have to say. If one moves on into S5 and S6, one sees that the current mantra is that we should look at leavers’ attainment. I have no problem with that. Those of us who worked in schools and local authorities always looked at leavers’ attainment—there is nothing new there at all. The evidence suggests that things have continued to improve in terms of leavers’ attainment, and that is true. However, if we look at the profile of what has happened with leavers’ attainment, we see that it grew quite strongly from the beginning of recording the data in 2009-10 up to the point when we hit curriculum for evidence. Since then, leavers’ attainment has either grown much more slowly or plateaued, or, in one case, it looks as though it might be beginning to go down. If it is going down, that would be in line with what seems to be happening in the senior school. Level 7—advanced higher—progresses more or less smoothly. There have been a couple of little ripples, but they could be experimental error—there is no suggestion that there is anything wrong there. That is probably not surprising, because the most able children tend to survive changes of system most effectively. They have all the additional benefits. The thing that concerns me most about my curriculum and attainment findings is that it seems that those who are worst affected by curriculum for excellence are at the lower end of the average group of children and in the lower group of children. I do not know a headteacher or educational researcher in Scotland who would not subscribe to the concept of equity. It is something that education professionals spend their lives attempting to achieve. The evidence suggests that equity is not being achieved and that, in fact, things appear to be getting somewhat worse. That is not a happy thing to say to a group of politicians, because that is not what you want either. I was aware that there was a limit, so among the many pieces of school-based evidence that I did not give you is a profile of schools that still declare their attainment. We all understand that, since 2001, parents and children should be consulted about the nature of the curriculum that children experience, but the problem is that the pattern from schools that declare their attainment—not many of them do—demonstrates that, generally, the schools in which attainment has gone down are in less affluent areas. 10:15 There are quite marked profiles on what has happened among schools across Scotland. Some schools have allowed their level 3, level 4 and level 5 attainment to rise and supported that in effective ways. In other schools, there has been no change in attainment. There are other schools in which attainment has gone down a bit or, in a small number of cases, gone down quite significantly. One of my colleagues will talk about our findings in that context later. We have the problem that we do not seem to be achieving excellence. If attainment in S4 has dropped by 33.8 per cent since 2013—again, I find that statistic difficult to say in public—and if equity appears to be diminishing rather than increasing, we have a problem. There are three layers of problems. One lies with the national process. I will just have a drink of water—I do not know why I have a dry mouth while sitting in a political meeting. We might describe curriculum for excellence as a process of four committees and two administrations, and the trouble is that the process has not been smooth. I am a mathematician, so I might be tempted to describe the process as orthogonal, but it might be worse than right angled. We had a national debate, a ministerial response to that national debate, a curriculum review group, a ministerial response to that curriculum review group, then we went to a curriculum board and then another curriculum board. The process of going from one group or board to another is not smooth. I have been involved at the front edge of all the national developments since higher still—and possibly the one before it, to some extent. In all the developments that have gone through, this is the one that has had the most random national governance pathway. The bodies that are responsible for implementing the process are Scottish local authorities. As an ex-headteacher and an ex-local authority officer—on and off—I can say with some feeling that it has become harder and harder for Scottish local authorities to carry out those actions, because their residual level of highly experienced educationalists has diminished over the past 10 to 15 years. Then there is the school situation. I do not know whether the committee speaks to headteachers a great deal, but we would all commonly accept that not all headteachers are curricular experts. All headteachers have quite different skill sets, so if there is no curricular guidance to guide headteachers, we must assume that they will do the best that they can in the circumstances. They will meet the needs of their constituency as best they understand it. I used to be chairman of the building our curriculum self-help group, which is the only body in Scotland that has produced consistent exemplification of how curriculum for excellence can be implemented in secondary schools. My successor was a guy from Glasgow called Gerry Lyons, whom I suspect the committee might have heard of. The two of us have spent considerable time trying to support schools. One thing that we learned from holding national conferences year after year through the curriculum for excellence development process was that headteachers claimed that they were uncertain, that they were not as well informed as they should be and that their colleagues were confused by going to different national meetings with different national agencies, because some said one thing and some said another. Before I came to the meeting, I did a small resurvey with some of my key witnesses to check whether they were still saying those sorts of things. The response was that the situation is better, but that some recent changes have resown some confusion. There are three fronts. On the curriculum, there is fragmentation, narrowing and—in one or two cases—excess broadening. On attainment, there has been a significant drop in fourth year and the beginning of a drop, by the looks of it, in fifth year. There is also the point about the ability of the various bodies in a school community to come together and improve things. There are challenges in all those areas. Those challenges are not insurmountable, but my bottom line to you would be in line with that of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2015 report, which suggested that there should be a reconceptualisation of CFE and, to underpin that reconceptualisation—I remember my evidence to the committee that wrote that report—the CFE process, documentation and support materials should be worked through more effectively.