SNP’s Curriculum for Excellence put to the test

THE SNP’s implementation of new National exams has turned into a battle involving parents, politicians and teaching unions

IT IS seen as A Good Thing. Tina Woolnough, a parent at Edinburgh’s Royal High School, talks of the kind of maths homework her S2 son brought home earlier this week. “He was to look at the Royal Bank of Scotland website, and he was to put cases for and against credit cards and debit cards, and to assess what are the pros and cons. He’s being asked to research the whole concept of what banks do. I don’t recall my girls, who are older, doing anything like that,” she says.

This is the Curriculum for Excellence in action. Across the political spectrum in Scotland, a consensus prevails. Embedded in primary schools and secondaries, the new way of learning is seen as a big success. No more “teaching to the test”, the new way is designed to get even the most stroppy, turned-off teenager to realise the relevance of what they’re learning. Backers talk of getting youngsters to understand why learning is important, and connecting subjects together so they can be applied in the real world.

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Education secretary Mike Russell mused the other day: “When I was at school – I have a good memory – I learned things without knowing why I was learning them. However, if you go to any school that is undertaking Curriculum for Excellence, the young people know why they are learning and they know the connectedness of what they are learning.”

Headteachers, he claims, tell him that pupils are now wanting to get into school because “they see that connectedness and understand how things work”. Teachers, backers add, are loving the fact they can now exercise their own judgment and creativity, rather than being told what to do by the Man from the Ministry. This, it is hoped, could burnish further Scotland’s reputation for educational excellence.

So, all sweetness and light then? Not quite. This weekend, Russell addresses the SNP conference in Glasgow with a problem in his own backyard. One key aspect of Scottish schooling that arises from the Curriculum for Excellence is causing problems. On his back is the leading teaching union, the Educational Institute of Scotland, which last week published a major poll of teachers offering a picture of very unhappy classrooms. It comes a few weeks before the next big phase of Curriculum for Excellence begins, as more than 50,000 S2 pupils across Scotland prepare to begin studying for new National exams which will replace the old Standard Grades and Intermediates. Fewer than 10 per cent of the teachers who responded said they were ready for the new exams. Just 3 per cent described themselves as “fully confident” of being able to teach their pupils the detail.

On Thursday last week, the crisis came home to Russell: meeting a group from Campbeltown High School in his constituency on a visit to the Scottish Parliament, one of the teachers present raised it with him in person. One of Scotland’s leading educational authorities, East Renfrewshire, has already decided to delay it for a year. Russell is now facing calls from Labour to do the same for Scotland as a whole. In England, health secretary Andrew Lansley has found out the cost of implementing poorly explained and complex reforms to a system resistant to change. Is Russell facing the same fate?

The new exams system has been long in the planning, ever since the philosophy of Curriculum for Excellence was adopted by the previous Labour-Liberal Democrat Scottish Executive in 2004. For all its plaudits, the new way has long been accused of vagueness. (A typical sentence explaining it on the Education Scotland website declares: “Learners are entitled to a curriculum that includes a range of features at the different stages of learning.”) It is the teachers in Scotland’s 372 secondary schools who are now having to get their heads around how to turn such blue-sky platitudes into something that can go on a blackboard.

Larry Flanagan, an English teacher at Hillhead High School in Glasgow, and the incoming general secretary of the EIS, puts the difficulties in context. Teachers are having their pensions and working week reviewed. The cost cutting that has hit the entire public sector is now striking the classroom. Lack of cash means class sizes rising. They feel, he says, that the support is no longer there. And now this.

The big issue is that next year, as the rolling Curriculum for Excellence programme hits S3, teachers will both have to do that new course and get their heads around the new National exam those pupils will take in 2014.

“Introducing the new curriculum for S1 and S2 has been a significant challenge,” says Flanagan. “To do it this year in S3 at the same time as trying to prepare for the new qualification is too much workload.” The worst-case scenario, he adds, is that schools begin the new school year under-cooked. “The concern is that pupils then underperform because the teachers aren’t confident in it.”

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A big complaint is that the details on the new exam won’t be published until April. Liz Smith, the Scottish Conservative’s education spokeswoman, says: “With hindsight, there has been too much of a gap between developing the coursework for the classroom and publishing the exam detail.” For all the high ideals of no longer “teaching to the test”, teachers and parents still know it is the grades that count. How can they prepare to hit high marks if no-one yet knows exactly what the exam will look like?

The uncertainty has seen MSPs’ email baskets groaning with complaints. Labour’s education spokesman Hugh Henry last week used a debate in the Scottish Parliament to read many of his own out. One declared: “Ask Mike Russell this: can departments be expected to deliver three courses… for August if the final versions are only being published in April? Is it good planning to have a four-week window to write these three, two-year courses?” Another added: “It is like the Emperor’s new clothes. There is no detail, but everyone is afraid to say so.”

Anne Ballinger, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, adds: “There are reports of teachers lying awake at night with worry. They are working all day Sunday. They are talking about a lack of direction and a lack of any sort of collaboration with others. The response has been: ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ ”

At the Scottish Government, ministers and officials dispute the claims that a majority of teachers are opposed to getting on with it. The education secretary believes there are a “small group of teachers” who do not like the new way of doing things. This vocal minority, he argues, has been handed a megaphone by his Labour opponents. The truth, he argues, is that most schools are on track, and eager to get on with it. Speaking to MSPs last week, he said: “If I could summarise the thing that is said to me most commonly, it would be, “Don’t delay because we’ve worked so hard on this and a delay will check our progress”. Teachers are not having new material “dumped” on them this April, he adds – the new programme has gradually been developing over the past few years. To prove it, he has now ordered a deep audit of all secondary schools to see exactly what the picture is. Despite the EIS’s complaints, intuition would suggest Russell has a point; after all, any major change is always going to meet resistance, particularly when enacted at a time of cutbacks. What’s more, both directors of education in Scotland’s councils and the Scottish Qualifications Authority note, it is now too late to go back. Standard Grades are now no more for this year’s batch of S2 pupils.

The National Parent Forum – a new independent group set up to represent the views of mothers and fathers – agrees. It argues that, if there were a delay in the new exam, it would cause just as much work for teachers as they would have to do for new Intermediate courses. A spokeswoman adds: “If we delayed, we would have Intermediate 2 exams that don’t tally to the learning the children are now having.” She adds: “To be fair there were always lots of people who don’t like change. But if the children come out with a better set of skills then that’s a good thing.”

The group also suggests darker forces at work. The spokeswoman adds: “We are concerned that this is the politicisation of Curriculum for Excellence in advance of May’s council elections.”

Russell and the EIS are now set for more talks this week, with the education secretary having pledged to offer more support to any school which feels it needs it. The EIS, however, says it will not be fobbed off with good intentions. Flanagan says: “We are looking for hard cash on the table. The key thing is how do you create time for teachers to do the development work on this. It comes down to staffing and giving schools some extra time.”

If at the end of it all, schools still feel ill-equipped to carry the exams out, Russell has said he will consider individual byes for the coming school year. He must hope, however, it won’t come to that. Many parents and pupils will hope so too. «

Exam plan: What the teachers say

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AT THE end of February, Mike Russell met leaders of the Scottish Secondary Teachers (SSTA) Association on the roll-out of the exam programme. He told the SSTA group that schools were enthusiastic about the next phase. After the SSTA leaders said there were concerns, they agreed to provide evidence to the minister after emailing members for their views. These are some of the responses they received:

• “At a time when we are trying to support our fantastic young people and in turn their families to make informed choices about their career pathways, how can we honestly say we have given them a fair and full set of information, when there remain – after all these years – so many uncertainties about course structure, course assessment, not to mention the ongoing review of teachers’ pay and conditions?”

• “Vague suggestions of objectives (experiences and outcomes), extrapolated from existing good practice and therefore leading back to existing good practice do not help us realise ‘the greatest change in Scottish education in 25 years.’ ”

• “It seems as though we are going to try and teach the new courses whilst only perhaps a few weeks ahead of the pupils. Is this what Mr Russell envisaged?”

• “I personally am stressed out of my box. I am not alone in my school in stating this. There are serious workload issues here and work-life balance is a complete joke. The local authority has provided no support and has formed no writing groups to help with preparation. We have been left to our own devices in each school. The Scottish Qualification Authority’s own website is so convoluted in its structure that it is almost Byzantine. Why do we have to hunt through several documents to be able to find small snippets of useful information amongst big piles of useless verbiage? If someone had set out to make my life a misery, they could not have done a better job. It looks as though each course outline has been written in a vacuum by a mental patient.”

• “I feel we are heading for a disaster when the first pupils go to sit external exams and I feel it is inevitable that it will be teachers who carry the blame for it. We have had years of vague information being dripped to us about what the courses will look like but we have not been able to do anything with this until we have had more detailed information.”