Meeting of the Parliament 29 March 2017
On Monday, I witnessed Whiteness primary school’s senior pupils performing “Henry VIII”. The play has a lot to say about politics at the moment, but I particularly enjoyed the blood-curdling decapitations that took place in the classroom. I am not proposing decapitation today, but surgery is certainly needed, both on the role that central Government plays in our schools and on how exams are set and marked in Scotland.
This week, the Government’s main education quango helped that analysis enormously. In “Quality and improvement in Scottish education 2012-2016”, Education Scotland’s chief executive published his interpretation of his own inspectors’ reports into Scotland’s schools. For the record, Dr Bill Maxwell is both Her Majesty’s chief inspector of education in Scotland and the chief executive of Education Scotland. He retires in June, and I wish him well. The chief executive is responsible both for what happens in the classroom and for inspecting the quality of teaching in our schools. Those two roles have not previously been and cannot continue to be in the same organisation. If ever a report graphically illustrated that Education Scotland’s policy and guidance functions and school inspections functions must be separated, it is the one that I have just mentioned.
Dr Maxwell’s introduction to the report could have been written by Mr Swinney, because it is a restatement of Government policy, not a hard-nosed assessment of Scottish education with recommendations for all involved. By any objective assessment, four out of the six curriculum for excellence implementation years were not well managed—2012 to 2016, on which the report is based. However, the report makes no observations about the roles of Education Scotland, the Scottish Qualifications Authority or the curriculum for excellence management board. Instead, there is a tendency to blame schools for any failings. I will cite just three examples.
The report states:
“Evidence gathered from inspection shows that schools now need to put in place better arrangements for assessing and tracking children’s progress, including having a shared understanding of standards within Curriculum for Excellence levels.”
Whose fault is it that schools’
“understanding of standards within Curriculum for Excellence levels”
has been problematic? The answer is given in the 2015 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Improving Schools in Scotland: An OECD Perspective”, which specifically questions the
“complexity of the layers and dimensions”
of CFE. CFE has four capacities, 12 attributes, 24 capabilities and 1,820 experiences and outcomes statements, with 1,488 in the eight curriculum areas and 332 in the three interdisciplinary areas. I could go on, especially as Education Scotland admits to presiding over the accrual of more than 20,000 pages of advice to schools. Why did the inspectorate not question the effectiveness of that mountain of paper? Was it because those 20,000 pages were produced by the same office? Before the Deputy First Minister says that it is all fixed, a teacher pointed out to me at the weekend that, last week, Education Scotland published its six new curriculum benchmarks to add to the two drafts on literacy and numeracy that it issued last August. That brings the new, streamlined CFE advice that has been issued to schools just this session to 348 pages.