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Education and Skills Committee 19 September 2018

19 Sep 2018 · S5 · Education and Skills Committee

Item of business

2018 Exam Diet (Curriculum and Attainment Trends)

Dr Alan Britton (University of Glasgow) Watch on SPTV

I thank the committee for inviting me. I will try to offer my insights into the issues that are under consideration. My analysis mainly stems from a long-standing research project; I have been tracking the origins and evolution of CFE more or less from the outset and, indeed, looking back to its precursor in the national debate that Jim Scott mentioned. Your predecessor committee—the Education, Culture and Sport Committee—carried out an inquiry into the purposes of Scottish education in 2002, which is in many ways at least as interesting as the national debate when we look back at it, because it explored the purposes of education. I think that we have reached that point again in the process. The issues that Jim Scott has articulated take us back to that starting point that we have perhaps lost sight of, which is about what it is that we are trying to do through this process. The analysis that I can present to you is based on interviews with senior policy actors who were involved in CFE from the outset and a lot of document analysis. I was asking what the underlying drivers of that process are. What are the power dynamics between the different stakeholders in the process? What is the balance of power between the different organisations? Also, crucially in today’s context, I have kept an eye on both the governance and the sequencing of the implementation process. What follows on from which thing in that sequence? That has turned out to be critical in reaching the point that we are now at. I have continued to monitor the evolution of CFE and I still engage regularly with practitioners and new teachers on how the system is adapting to CFE—the policy translation from the original vision in 2004 to what we have today. Drawing from that research, I have set out a number of short bullet points in my submission, which is in annex A of committee paper 2. I will not repeat all the points just now, but I hope that some of the following observations will help to frame the discussion this morning. First, the issues under consideration emerge as unintended but inevitable consequences of the way in which curriculum for excellence was conceived and implemented. I do not think that anyone has consciously set out to create the rather chaotic pattern of provision that Jim Scott has outlined across all the different schools and local authorities. It is accidental in nature but still inevitable. For example, in relation to assessment and qualifications, a conscious policy decision was made in 2004 that sought to delay the thorny issues around certification. The vision of education that was presented in the review group report was not a good fit for the assessment and qualifications regime that existed at the time. That conscious delay meant that the problems were simply delayed and there was no opportunity to do pilots to work through some of the inevitable problems that would emerge. We are left with the legacy of that today. What we tend to find now—the picture that Jim Scott describes is important here—is that schools and school leaders are having to retrofit solutions to the nature of the policy and the architecture that we are left with, and the decisions that they are making are not necessarily educational decisions. That is a critical point to consider. It is not through any fault of the individual schools, but they have to make pragmatic decisions on timetabling and the resources that are available to them, and those are not educational decisions. The variation in practice across the country that Jim Scott has described is indicative of underlying and unresolved tensions in governance. We are still caught in the tension between having very centralised forms of accountability and a presumption of, and rhetoric about, devolved responsibility and subsidiarity in other elements of education. There is no coherent rationale for identifying which elements of governance sit centrally and which are devolved either to local authorities or to individual schools. Finally, as Jim Scott has hinted, the operational version of curriculum for excellence that we have ended up with is not the one that was originally intended. I think that it is time to revisit some of the key principles and objectives that were set out at the outset and which are, if you like, part of the genealogy from the national debate and the ESC report—explicitly stated aims and high-level objectives such as curriculum coherence from three to 18; more choice to meet individual pupils’ needs; and ensuring that assessment and certification support learning—and to work collectively and without blame to identify ways of moving forward on the matter.

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Education and Skills Committee 19 September 2018

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