Meeting of the Parliament 28 February 2024
There are two elements to that, the first of which is curriculum improvement. The curriculum improvement that I announced in December will have a maths specialist lead. That process will involve working with the teaching profession and it will report later this year. We will update the curriculum in maths this year, followed by the English curriculum. We also need to engage with the new qualifications agency, which I hope to legislate for in the coming months. Finally, the Government will submit its formal response to Professor Hayward’s recommendations, setting out the timelines that the member refers to. That is hugely important.
However, the point that I was making is that there are a number of actions that we can take in the here and now to update the content of our courses. It is important that teachers and our young people see progress to that end.
We like tests in Scotland. As Professor Gordon Stobart observed,
“In comparative terms, Scottish upper-secondary school students are more frequently examined than those in other jurisdictions”.
We should contrast the school exams approach with that adopted by our universities, for example, many of which have moved to a much more flexible approach to continuous assessment post-pandemic. Why not our schools? Our teachers would say—rightly so—that it is because of the requirements that are stipulated by the SQA at the current time. The role of the new qualifications body will therefore have to be central to a move away from a focus on examinations-heavy qualifications towards more continuous assessment. How that requirement is implemented needs the Government to learn lessons from the introduction of the national qualifications.