Lindsay Paterson: Have we excellent curriculum or not?

A vagueness of purpose at the start of the education reform process means that, eight years on, little that’s really new has been created, writes Lindsay Paterson

The great puzzle about Curriculum for Excellence is knowing what it is. The changes to it announced this week and in recent months may have helped to put it into practice. But they have taken us far away from clarity. The answer to the puzzle is coming to seem: everything and nothing.

Let’s start, though, by going back to the beginning eight years ago, as it is in the initial vagueness of purpose that much of the subsequent confusion has its roots. There were three main concerns. Pupils, it was felt, were expected to do too much because the curriculum was crowded and there was too much assessment.

Too much of what they were expected to do was said by critics to be useless in the real world. And the judgment of teachers was being ignored as government handed down prescriptions on what to teach and how to assess it.

So the new curriculum was to be a great liberation. Knowledge would be applied to pupils’ own lives. Pupils would learn how to join subjects together. There would no longer be compartments labelled “English” or “Mathematics” or “History”, but instead a kind of seamless coat of many colours (the curriculum designer’s favourite metaphor). Learning would be about applying subjects. No longer would pupils have to sit through the allegedly pointless repetition of French irregular verbs or lists of historical facts. They would learn by doing.

They would learn this because teachers, too, would be free. They would design the courses. They would decide how to link them together. They would no longer be subject to the seemingly arbitrary rulings of the national quangos that are the bane of the teacher’s life.

What’s more, after decades of partisan controversy over many aspects of education, this entire reform commanded remarkably broad support. It was endorsed by all the political parties and almost all publicly expressed opinion. That bears reiterating when the partisan claws come out, as they have done this week. This was a reform devised by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, inherited with almost no demur by the SNP, and generally, with some grumbling on the margins, encouraged along by the Conservatives and the Greens.

Consensus ought always to raise suspicion. So too must concerns about education that have been raised many times before, to no avail. The worries about a crowded curriculum that is irrelevant to life are as old as schooling itself. As the vague rhetoric came to be translated into actual proposals, two major new worries arose. One was that the integrity of subjects was being lost in a cross-curricular mess. Where were pupils going to learn the basics of each subject without which working across subjects makes no sense? The other worry was that teachers were being expected to invent the entire curriculum for themselves, having to meet externally specified “outcomes” but with barely any time to work out how to get there.

That then was where it had all got to by about last summer, but by then a third looming problem had cropped up for secondary schools – the need to fit the new ideas into the structure of external examinations, which are being fundamentally revised as well. Now, there is nothing like an assessment crisis to concentrate the minds of policy makers (especially since the last reform of examinations, in 2000, nearly brought the whole system crashing down). Thus a great deal has been done in a short space of time, culminating in the announcement this week of new advice and resources for teachers and perhaps a new option for schools to postpone the new examinations. What we now have may address the earlier worries. But it is diametrically opposed to everything that the reform was supposed to mean.

On the integrity of school subjects, we now have quite detailed advice from the Scottish Qualifications Authority on the syllabuses for each examination. The full details will not emerge till this summer, but what has appeared so far is rather reassuring, but also rather disappointing. These syllabuses are barely different in principle from the syllabuses that might have been issued for Standard Grade or the Intermediates or all their predecessors, although the details of content have been brought up to date.

Thus in English literature pupils will “focus on character development, setting, narrative and author”: nothing new there. In biology, there will be an understanding that “genetic information can be transferred artificially to produce a product through genetic engineering”: again, welcome modernisation but hardly new in principle. In modern studies, pupils will be expected to “explain the relationships between each part of the UK political system”: that subject has been seeking such understanding since its inception half a century ago. In history, there is an example from the 1914-18 War, exactly the sort of standard topic that the critics of previous curricula complained about.

This is all very much to be welcomed as a sign that the sanity of experienced, specialist teachers is beginning to be listened to. But it is not new. In none of these new guidelines on syllabuses is there anything much about cross-curricular themes. Where there is some attention to real-world applications, it is of a kind that – despite the criticisms – has always come from good teachers. Thus pupils will be expected to learn how to apply mathematics by “choosing an appropriate strategy and employing mathematics” to solve it. That’s good, but has been around since the 1930s. In the new subject called “lifeskills mathematics” pupils will learn, for example, about “the impact of interest rates for savings and borrowing”, which is a modernisation of the kind of topic that used to be covered in the old arithmetic O Grade classes of the 1980s and earlier. With the curriculum still largely divided into traditional subjects, it is difficult to see how it can become any less crowded for pupils, and there is little prospect of a reduction in assessment.

Then, this week, we have the second significant undermining of the Curriculum for Excellence principles – the announcement that “national course materials” will be provided centrally. At a stroke, the notion that individual teachers are in charge is wiped out. That the teachers’ union, the EIS, has signed up to this is understandable in the light of the concerns about time and workload. But centrally provided materials was not what the reform was meant to be about, and asking for them seems a strange way to advance teacher professional autonomy.

In short, we now have the beginning of common sense as to the integrity of subjects and we have short-term pragmatism in not expecting every school to develop its own resources. Yet, in reaching this rather more feasible and probably desirable position, we have lost sight of why the reform came about – the need to link subjects together, the need to apply them in new ways to real-world problems, and the importance of putting teachers in charge. These aspirations may have been imperfectly realised in the proposals of the past eight years, but they remain important. The new curriculum has come to embrace essentially no more than existing good practice, which is fine. But it is also then likely to amount to virtually nothing at all.

• Lindsay Paterson is professor of education policy at Edinburgh University.