Hansard

I open the debate by reiterating our belief on the Conservative benches that Scottish education should be based on excellence and equity and that it can once again lead the world in delivering the highest standards. However, that will not happen until the Scottish Government changes its focus.

Scottish education was so admired around the world because there was universal understanding that good schooling was the key that could unlock so many different opportunities in life, never mind in employment. There was an expectation that everyone, irrespective of class or background and whatever type of school they attended, would have a good grounding in the basic skills and that poor standards would never be tolerated. Teaching was a highly valued profession, leadership was generally strong and good schools were seen as the central component to build strong communities.

In short, many schools in Scotland were synonymous with excellence, and they did not need endless edicts from local or central government telling them what to do, because aspiration was ingrained in their DNA. The Scottish Government knows that it can no longer make that claim of all-round excellence.

This Parliament has spoken many times about the evidence that we should be doing a whole lot better if we are to match up to our full potential, as identified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in its most recent report on Scottish schools. It is our contention that we will not be able to unlock fully the potential that is undoubtedly there until we address the fundamental weaknesses in delivery of the curriculum for excellence, in relation to which the question of subject choice has become one of the most significant and pressing issues. It is causing considerable worry to parents, teachers and young people, and, of course, to the Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee.

One of the other great attributes of Scottish education was the breadth of the curriculum, which was maintained not just in early secondary schooling, but in later secondary schooling, too. Indeed, that breadth, whereby young people could acquire national qualifications in a balanced group of science, social science and language subjects, as well as in English and maths, meant that the Scottish system was seen as superior to the A-level system in England and to several other curricular systems elsewhere.

At its inception, 15 years ago, the intention of the curriculum for excellence was to build on that success, but also, rightly, to recognise that, in the modern world, society required a greater focus on skills and personal and social responsibility than had previously been the case. In other words, education should not solely be about knowledge-based learning in the abstract; it should also be about how that knowledge is applied. Young people should have as great an understanding of why they are learning something as they should of what they are learning. As such, one of the intentions of the curriculum for excellence was to widen subject choice, not to reduce it. In 2008, the Scottish Government’s curriculum guidance made that principle abundantly clear.

No one could disagree that young people should understand why they are learning a particular subject or learning additional skills; the trouble is that the curriculum has completely lost its balance. As Professor Lindsay Paterson said in a recent article in The Sunday Times, the focus on core knowledge has been diminished. Our hard-pressed teachers have been so busy measuring “experiences and outcomes” and wading through the thousands of bits of paper that the education agencies have issued that they have had less time to get on with teaching what most people recognise as the core curriculum.

In the context of subject choice, the facts of what has happened have become increasingly clear over the past two years and the details are currently before the Education and Skills Committee. That said, concerns about the narrowing of subject choice were raised by Aberdeenshire schools as far back as 2013 and again in this Parliament by the Conservatives in 2015.

As the Parliament knows, the norm was for Scottish schools to offer eight subjects in secondary 4 and the subject choice column structure in the vast majority of schools was designed to do just that. We now know—thanks largely to the work of Professor Jim Scott—that the majority of schools in Scotland are offering only six subjects in S4. Those schools will undoubtedly offer other courses, too, many of which have a good pupil uptake and are highly educationally beneficial, but the fact remains that they are offering fewer core subject choices than they were previously. I will address the impact of that shortly.