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Education and Skills Committee 08 May 2019

08 May 2019 · S5 · Education and Skills Committee

Item of business

Subject Choices Inquiry

Larry Flanagan (Educational Institute of Scotland) Watch on SPTV

Good morning, colleagues. I am the general secretary of the EIS. I was a classroom teacher for 33 years. Having been a principal teacher of English, I will be speaking in Scots for the remainder of the session. I have paid attention to previous meetings: earlier this morning we again heard the phrase “unintended consequences”. It is true that there have been some, but that was not unforeseen. Some of us have been warning that where we are now with the senior phase is well short of the ambition of CFE. The ambition that was articulated was about maintaining breadth across the senior phase of education and creating space for depth in learning. That was because one of the criticisms of our previous system was that we got kids through exams but did not give them depth of understanding linked to the skills for the 21st century that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was advocating that the jurisdiction should engage with. In particular, the ambition was that there should be parity of esteem between vocational and academic education. If those are the yardsticks, where we are at the moment falls well short and we are dealing with a system that is still in transition. When CFE was first developed and the senior phase in particular was being looked at, we were conscious that standard grade had been a well-trusted system. It is interesting that all the professional associations in the consultation on the new qualifications advocated retaining, upgrading and refreshing standard grades, but that was not among the options, so we moved to a new qualifications system. Standard grades were introduced in the 1980s as certification for all. One of the key issues had been that the demographic was such that the majority of students left school after fourth year, so standard grade was a huge success over the 20 years. As you have heard at previous meetings, we now have a demographic in which is about 90 per cent of our pupils stay on until fifth year. The qualifications system that we had in place—with the standard grade, intermediate grade, higher grade and the higher still programme—was a confused landscape for many of the students who were staying on at school. Quite often, students in S5 were doing intermediate 1 and intermediate 2, which was a repeat of the standard grade qualification that they already had; it was just a different way of assessing them. Part of what drove our system at that point was that it was obsessed with qualifications, because they were the benchmark against which schools were judged. The primary function of a teacher who had any kind of certificate class was to get the pupils through the qualifications with the best possible results. The SQA had tariff points, and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education would come in and ask for the school’s results and would judge it on those results. That led to a shallower learning experience for our young people. The senior phase was meant to open up a different approach, in which we would view the learning as being of equal value to the qualification. That is why the ideas of breadth and depth and parity of esteem became the benchmarks. We are absolutely not there; colleagues from the subject specialisms, in particular, will articulate the threat to their subjects from the current arrangements. 09:45 We have to consider whether we still have the same ambition for the senior phase, and, if so, how we will get there. Will we abandon what is being done and go back to the old system, which was largely a two-plus-two-plus-two system. If we go back to that, we will do a disservice, because we will not have addressed the kind of learning that needs to take place in order for our young people to be equipped for the century in which they live. My last point is just to say that CFE was not meant to be about a change to qualifications. It was meant to be a pedagogical change about the how we facilitate learning for our young people and was predicated on the idea that young people must have more than just qualifications and need a skill set that makes them resilient in an ever-changing market in the 21st century. That is where the space for depth in learning was meant to be pitched, but implementation of the senior phase has left us some way short of achieving that ambition. In considering subject choice, we must also look at the broader objectives and put subject choice in that framework. I will leave it there. I am sure that there will be specific questions to answer.

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Education and Skills Committee 08 May 2019

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