Hansard

On behalf of the Scottish Conservatives, I am happy to congratulate all the headteachers, teachers, support staff—who are often forgotten in this process—parents, pupils and students who have been involved in the initial stages of the implementation of the curriculum for excellence. I do so with enthusiasm. Change is never easy, especially in the teaching profession. Given that that change, which involves adopting an entirely new methodology, has been extensive, people have done well.

I hope that I will continue to make a positive contribution on the theme as we progress through the debate. However, I am sure I am not alone in expressing just a little surprise and, perhaps, frustration that, after just three months of the implementation of the curriculum for excellence, so much of our precious parliamentary time has been taken up by a further debate on the subject, rather than on more pressing issues such as higher education, improving literacy, teacher unemployment and delivering better-quality physical education—I could go on.

I could be cynical and suggest that the motion is less about congratulating those on the front line and more about giving the cabinet secretary a “mission accomplished” moment, but I will remain my normal, charitable self and try to link together some of the debates by concentrating on two key principles of the curriculum for excellence: greater autonomy and flexibility in schools. Both principles are designed to provide an educational experience that is more carefully tailored to the individual needs of pupils and to raise standards of attainment.

Although there is a strong temptation for me to enter into the realms of the school management debate, I will refrain from doing so—not least because I am sure that I would upset the Presiding Officer—except to respond to an important comment by Keir Bloomer, one of the architects of the curriculum for excellence. Earlier this week, he said:

“progress is made in the modern world by releasing the creative energies of people, in this case the teacher”.

I agree entirely and applaud the efforts of the architects of the curriculum for excellence to do that and, by definition, to release the creative energies of our pupils. I was interested in the second part of his comment, in which he said that the current school management system constrains teachers

“far too much by direction from the top.”

That continues to give me and, I hope, my colleagues food for thought.

When I read the initial documentation for the curriculum for excellence, I was struck by the starting point, which was to ask what education is for—a question of which we too often lose sight, but one that I genuinely believe was behind the philosophy of the curriculum for excellence. What a pity it would be if the potential of the curriculum for excellence were to be constrained by the current system of school management, which too often moves in the opposite direction from the pursuit of greater autonomy and flexibility.

I note the comments of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which, rightly, is seeking assurances that built into the system will be an effective means of evaluating just how successful the curriculum for excellence has been, both in raising attainment levels—more critical now than ever, if we are to heed yesterday’s warnings from Scottish Qualifications Authority chiefs about where pupils in Scotland are falling short on basic skills—and in producing well-rounded young people. The society makes an important point about the evaluation process; the cabinet secretary may want to tell us a little more about his plans to address it.

There is another important debate around applying the three-to-18 ethos of the curriculum for excellence—which will, I hope, establish better links between each stage of a child’s education—to the wider developments that are required in further and higher education. Those developments are quite separate from the debate about the current funding crisis. I suggest that it is inevitable that we will see major changes in the structure of FE and HE—changes that will affect the content and length of degree courses, increase the flexibility of movement between courses and institutions, and challenge the status quo of how HE and FE institutions operate.

If the curriculum for excellence does its job properly, it will make our young people more flexible and give many of them greater purpose in their academic careers. The Scottish Conservatives have long argued that the curriculum for excellence should provide more opportunities for pupils to leave school at an earlier stage to take up places in formal vocational training or apprenticeships and should reduce the pressure on too many of our youngsters to feel an obligation to seek university places when that may not be in their or the country’s best interests.

The curriculum for excellence provides good scope for a radical remodelling of Scottish education at all levels, but one thing must underpin all its teaching—improvement in basic literacy and numeracy. I am well aware of the fact that the cabinet secretary and my colleagues in other parties intend to ensure that literacy and numeracy underpin the whole system, but I return to the comments of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the issue of how we can build in effective evaluation of the process.

We are all aware of the problems that we face. Although it is unhelpful to scaremonger, it is essential that we understand just how much we have to do to drive up standards in the area. We should be concerned about the fact that many teachers do not feel comfortable with teaching the basic skills, because they recognise that they may be part of the problem. I repeat my plea for the curriculum for excellence: it will succeed only when it is the agent that complements a good-quality grasp of the basics and of important subject knowledge.