Meeting of the Parliament 28 February 2024
I welcome this debate on what has become known colloquially as the Hayward review.
Arguably—I think that Ross Greer will pick up on this point later—we should have more time on this, so that the overview that the cabinet secretary has given, and the one that I will give, could be picked up on in more depth as we go through the afternoon.
To quote the commission on school reform:
“Since the pandemic a veritable plethora of reports on education have been published”.
There has been a lot of reviewing and report writing but very little actual reforming. I looked into that and discovered that, since the last election, there have been about seven reviews or reports in this space, five of which alone contain more than 130 recommendations. There have been 15 ministerial statements and 38 Scottish Government groups, which have met more than 300 times, and more than 300,000 words have been written.
It is now eight months since the publication of the Hayward report, nine months since the publication of “All Learners in Scotland Matter: The National Discussion on Education” and Withers’s “Fit for the Future: developing a post-school learning system to fuel economic transformation” and nearly two years since the Muir report. That matters because, just last Monday, we read of warnings that the prolonged instability that is being caused by the stalled reform programme was damaging staff morale and the delivery of services for teachers and pupils.
The danger that I worry about is that, the further we move from the 2021 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development review of curriculum for excellence and the pandemic, the greater the likelihood of reform stalling. Despite the barrage of reports and recommendations and the proposals that the cabinet secretary outlined in her speech and, for example, the Minister for Higher and Further Education outlined in a useful letter on Withers yesterday, I do not see any overarching consideration that ensures that duplications—or, perhaps, the contradictions—in the reports are addressed. Neither do I see that an overall strategy is in place to ask what resources might be needed, particularly given the cabinet secretary’s comments on the various pressures that need to be addressed and will require resources.
I agree with the cabinet secretary that quick wins are good, but what is in place to ensure that such quick wins do not inadvertently prejudice other areas? As Dr Brown of the Royal Society of Edinburgh warns, we need to ensure that we learn from any mistakes that have been made in the past. My overall concern is that, absent all that I have mentioned, any reforms might not take teachers, staff and professionals along with them.
Although the Hayward recommendations have received strong backing, some of the results of the consultation that were published yesterday are sobering. As Andrea Bradley of the Educational Institute of Scotland demanded, it is imperative that the people who implement any reforms are listened to very carefully. Those results, which come from around 9,300 people, tell us that there is far from universal agreement with the Hayward recommendations. In particular, more than half of respondents disagreed with the recommendation to do away with external exams below higher level, such that assessment would be internal only.
Those respondents and a significant number of commentators raised concerns about the proposal and suggested that removal could lead to pupils struggling with the transition to highers and beyond. I recall Mike Corbett of the NASUWT last summer warning that it risks making exams in secondary 6 incredibly high stakes in a context where there has been no meaningful practice. Questions have also been raised about standardisation and consistency of assessment, quality assurance, verification of what assessments count and how they might be cross-marked, and, of course, the perception, understanding and tolerance of employers.
The point about practice was made by Professor Lindsay Paterson last year, when he suggested that exams help to prepare pupils for progressing to further or higher education. That point was made to me by several providers. It is not only about the ability to set up new admissions procedures and the cost and time for them to implement them but about the ability of certain institutions to move away from traditional methods of consideration. I also worry about the workload implications for teachers, particularly in the context of class sizes remaining greater than is desirable, if they will have to take on an even greater burden of internal assessment.
That approach is part of the proposed Scottish diploma of achievement, which is intended to transform the senior phase. It consists of the three elements that the cabinet secretary set out in detail—the programmes of learning, the personal pathway and project learning.
A lot in the proposal is interesting, as the cabinet secretary set out, and we will no doubt hear more as the afternoon progresses. However, I have real concerns about the inadvertent but definite possibility that bringing in a Scottish diploma, with its inherent project learning and personal pathways that would be based on assessed coursework, could disadvantage pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, given the fact that, for example, pupils from wealthier backgrounds will have greater access to extracurricular activities. Young people in rural settings, looked-after children, young carers and disabled pupils might be similarly disadvantaged. In a context in which there has been little meaningful progress in closing the attainment gap—which we all know remains stubbornly high—and in which the gaps in primary school writing and numeracy are higher than pre-pandemic levels, the last thing that we can do is risk exacerbating that problem.