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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nIt could be inferred from the question posed by the title of this debate that we\u2019ve journeyed together, reached a destination and exhausted all that the destination has to offer. That hanging around too much longer would be futile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if it were the intention of the question to suggest that we\u2019ve been there, and done that as far as CfE is concerned, the EIS wholeheartedly disagrees. We don\u2019t believe that we\u2019ve ever arrived at the intended destination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We believe that Scotland has been time-wasting en route to achieving the promise of CfE, dilly-dallying, straying here and there, mistaking some wrong turns for shortcuts, rather than steadily staying the course that was set in the early 2000s. Our destination, directions and landmarks back then? The values inscribed on the Scottish Parliament mace: wisdom, compassion, justice and integrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These words still encapsulate where we should be going- our destination – and how we should be getting there – the routes that we take and how we travel – in all aspects of policymaking and implementation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are we there yet? I\u2019d suggest not nearly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We made good headway in the early days. We had a strong consensus that we needed a new curriculum designed to enable a richer, fairer, more child-centred, inclusive and equitable educational experience for our learners aged 3-18. We had a shared understanding of the multi-purposes of education reflected in the four capacities of CfE: the enabling of young people to be successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The destination was clear, the directions were clear, the means of travel were obvious. But since then and since the onset of austerity, particularly, we\u2019ve been making wrong turn after wrong turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a time when, as a country, we should have been investing in education solidly, when we should have been building the professional trust in teachers so that they had wings to fly with CfE, what we\u2019ve seen instead is a plethora of expectations, an insatiable demand for accountability data but a paucity of funding that\u2019s put teachers on their knees, and you can\u2019t journey far with an innovative curriculum when you\u2019re not even on your feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The curriculum itself isn\u2019t the problem here at all. A curriculum for excellence needs investment for excellence and that\u2019s where we\u2019ve fallen short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A curriculum for excellence needs investment for excellence<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Class sizes in Scottish schools and the number of hours a week that teachers are delivering lessons, continue to be amongst the highest of all OECD countries. Meanwhile, the numbers of young people with recognised additional support needs has risen to 40.5 per cent-that\u2019s 15 children per class of 33. The number of specialist ASN teachers has fallen, there aren\u2019t enough pupil support staff in schools and the specialist services that sit outside of schools have been cut to the bone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So how did we arrive here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Quite simply, Scotland as a country, isn\u2019t on the right road to addressing the impact of a decade and a half of austerity, compounded by the harms of the pandemic, followed by the ongoing cost of living crisis, all of which have wreaked the worst damage upon the poorest and most marginalised in our society and our school communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have a \u2018points make prizes\u2019 culture that sees schools and local authorities under pressure to compete with one another in the national accountability stakes. In this high-stakes competitive environment, the young people who fair least well are those who are already the most disadvantaged by socio-economic inequality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We need less rote learning, more critical thinking; less big-bang and more deep learning; and we need parity of esteem across all types of learning and a genuine commitment to the principle that all learners matter. No more the vicious, data-driven cycle of workload, stress and performativity; instead the values of wisdom, compassion, justice and integrity guiding the design and delivery of the Senior Phase curriculum and learning, teaching and assessment all the way back to age 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With that in mind, we\u2019ve still to get to our intended destination so rather than move on we should get a move on towards that better educational future that CfE promised, pressing on in the shared understanding and agreement that a Curriculum for Excellence needs investment for excellence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been an English teacher in Edinburgh for over 30 years; I became an APT in 1997 and PT in 2007. The range of educational initiatives and changes that my department and I have introduced is broad and extensive \u2013 we oversaw the introduction of Level F at 5-14; the introduction of National Testing at 5-14; the introduction of Higher Still, of Curriculum for Excellence and of the new qualifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Together, my team and I have succeeded in embedding into our practice many positive developments over the years: Assessment is for Learning, Global Citizenship, Higher Order Thinking Skills, Cooperative Learning, Restorative Practice, Learning for Sustainability, a decolonised and diverse syllabus, a deep understanding of hidden poverty and intersectionality as components of the attainment gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I itemise these different things to remind us all of the huge range of different initiatives that Scottish teachers have had to bring into our practice, often at speed, over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it comes to judging CfE, there is no doubt in my mind that the vision, the four values, the four capacities, and the seven principles of CfE offer, and always have offered, is the most meaningful opportunity we have had to create a Scottish curriculum fit for, and adaptable to, the demands of the 21st Century, and one which has the best chance of equipping our young people with the values, critical skills, aptitudes, knowledge and understanding that they are going to need to face those challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not to say that CfE is perfect and it\u2019s not to say that it doesn\u2019t need some reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember at the start of CfE, a colleague gave a speech at EIS AGM, likening the support that teachers had been given to help them introduce the new curriculum to the arrival of a heavy IKEA package.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Opening such a package is usually done in a state of fear that the instruction manual will be missing; with CfE, teachers dismayed to discover that a very heavy instruction manual was there all right, but all the materials were missing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n the key problem with CfE \u2013 not its design or intent \u2013 but the devastating under-funding and austerity, primarily at UK government level but then from Scottish Government as well<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n And that is the key problem with CfE \u2013 not its design or intent \u2013 but the devastating under-funding and austerity, primarily at UK government level but then from Scottish Government as well, that coincided with CfE\u2019s inception, and which has not let up since. That, and political interference, problems with the senior phase, exams, and the SQA, a deeply embedded culture of top-down managerialism, and an obsession with attainment data and accountability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When CfE first came in, I welcomed the opportunity to look at our syllabus and schemes of work in the English department through the lenses. Especially of the capacity relating to citizenship and the principles of breadth, depth and relevance, and for the opportunity, related to those things, for Interdisciplinary Learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the English Department we filled our S1 and S2 syllabus with engaging projects and units of work like that: examples include a cross-curricular project with the Art department to write poems and deliver talks about artworks; units on Shakespeare, Scots language, persuasive writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CfE felt liberating in terms of the junior school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of the senior phase, it was the polar opposite. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the way the senior phase was constructed, and the way the SQA developed the exams for CfE, amounted to a complete betrayal of what CfE was supposed to promise in terms of depth of learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it wasn\u2019t just the SQA\u2019s fault, it was also the government\u2019s: the political decision not to make National 5 a wholly internally assessed course baked in, and the annual treadmill of exams that our system has become synonymous with, a treadmill which young people themselves have said time and again they want to see scrapped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But beyond all this, and probably most important of all, the UK Government\u2019s policy of austerity from 2010 onwards, adopted by Scottish Government and passed on to local authorities, is to blame for the huge educational cuts that first started right at the time schools needed vital resources to help them introduce CfE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From its very inception, CfE has suffered from lack of support for teachers; lack of materials; lack of funding; and all this has meant that it was always going to struggle to succeed. You cannot introduce a new curriculum at the same time as slashing investment into the education system and expect that curriculum to succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" EIS General Secretary Andrea Bradley, and President Allan Crosbie, contributed to the recent Colloquium Debate on the future of CfE. It could be inferred from the question posed by the title of this debate that we\u2019ve journeyed together, reached a destination and exhausted all that the destination has to offer. That hanging around too much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2660,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mainfeatures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2627"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2721,"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions\/2721"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sej.org.uk\/apr2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Allan Crosbie, EIS President<\/h3>\n\n\n
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