Focus
Road to reform 25 June 2010 Does Curriculum for Excellence still stand a chance of success? It was born out of a solid consensus that things had to change and an ambitious vision of what that change would look like. The feeling across the political divide was that Scottish education was in bad need of overhaul. Over-crowded; over-assessed; leaving too many pupils behind. Curriculum for Excellence was the blueprint to cure those ills in one sweep and take Scottish education into the 21st century. But after seven years in the making, that consensus has been well and truly eroded. With weeks to implementation, teachers threaten industrial action while opposition parties decry the Government’s ‘failure’ of the curriculum. Plagued by a lack of resources, a lack of understanding and a lack of time, the optimism that once buoyed CfE has dissipated. In the final push to delivery, the Scottish Government has introduced a raft of measures to support and reassure. But will it be enough to rescue the reform? “Educational reform in Scotland – or anywhere – is difficult,” Education Secretary Mike Russell admits. And few know it better than he. Russell took over the role from his predecessor Fiona Hyslop in December after CfE had already been delayed a year and with eight months to go to the revised deadline. The new man took on the job with an energetic determination to get the programme back on track. That energy was soon put to the test, however. By March Scotland’s second largest teaching union, the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, was calling for a delay. A subsequent Scottish Government-commissioned survey of teachers that found that three in four were not confident about delivering CfE to senior pupils did not help diffuse the tension. The Cabinet Secretary responded swiftly with a ten-point plan of action including an extra £3m for councils and a scrapping of the proposed separate literacy and numeracy assessments. He has since announced an extra in-service day for teachers and suspended inspections in secondary schools for the first five months of implementation. After long criticism of the ‘vague’ and ‘woolly’ CfE guidance, Russell swallowed some pride and agreed to reproduce the documents in a clearer format. He has even written to the parents of all pupils starting S1 in August explaining the changes. Despite the Cabinet Secretary’s efforts, however, the country’s two biggest teaching unions remain unconvinced. At its annual conference this month the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) resisted an allout boycott of CfE, for which it argues its members are not ready, but backed a work to rule. Meanwhile at the time of writing, the SSTA is to hold a ballot on industrial action over the reform. The political opposition has not been slow to capitalise on these developments. Labour Party Leader Iain Gray lately claimed at First Minister’s Questions that “Parents and teachers do not believe that the Curriculum for Excellence is ready and they know whose fault that is,” and warned a work to rule would “kill the new curriculum stone dead”. Such controversy is hardly unusual when undertaking major educational reform. The nation’s knowledge, skills and economy are after all at stake, not to mention the future of its young people. The man who led the landmark 2007 OECD review of Scottish education, Professor Richard V Teese, believes Scotland’s experience with educational change is far from abnormal. “The controversy that Scotland is experiencing is not unusual,” says the University of Melbourne professor. “In Australia, the introduction of the Victorian Certificate of Education was nerve-wracking. Controversy raged for the better part of a decade (1984-94) and contributed to the fall of the state government. Several years ago, the Western Australian government dropped plans to implement an outcomes-based curriculum reform in the upper secondary years after intense controversy. “These were reforms at upper secondary level, where there is a great deal of competition and also institutional interest. Reforms of primary and lower secondary curriculum seem to attract less attention. Scotland is working across all stages of schooling (as well as pre-school) so this multiplies the points at which controversy can occur. Also the CfE reform goes to fundamental issues about how children and young people learn and how best to teach; it is not only structural or concerned with the qualifications framework. There was bound to be controversy, but there would be less engagement without it.” Closer to home, teachers in England last month staged a boycott of the so-called Sats tests for 10 and 11 year olds. After the tests were scrapped in Science but retained in English and Maths, a teachers’ and a headteachers’ union voted to disrupt the tests on the basis that they place pressure on school leaders and are used to compile ‘league tables’. The boycott went ahead in more than half of schools in some areas. Indeed, Scotland has its own experience with reform resistance to draw upon. The introduction of the Standard Grade in 1984 following the Munn and Dunning reports shows clear parallels. Concerns over inadequate training for teachers, rushed implementation and workload led to a series of industrial disruptions between 1984 and 1987 including non-cooperation with the implementation of Standard Grade and a boycott of all new curricular development work. The introduction of 5-14 testing in the early ‘90s and the Higher Still reforms in the late ‘90s also prompted threats of similar action. Parallels can be drawn with previous reforms but Curriculum for Excellence has in many ways broken the mould. CfE arose in 2004 out of a widespread dissatisfaction with the state of Scottish education. Two major reviews – The National Debate on Education and an Inquiry into the Purposes of Scottish Education by the Holyrood Education Committee – concluded that education in Scotland was too broad and insufficiently deep, over-prescriptive and over-reliant on testing. It was failing to raise attainment for the lowest achievers or stretch the most able. The new curriculum, launched by then Labour minister, Peter Peacock, promised to revolutionise learning and teaching, giving pupils a deeper learning experience. In line with developments in other developed countries, “the most radical reform of Scottish education for a generation” was designed to give young people the dynamic skills for a fast-moving world. Subject silos would be broken down and teaching would follow a more cross-curricular approach. The burden of assessment would be lightened, so teachers would no longer be compelled to teach to the test. Indeed, they would be granted more freedom to innovate and even lead the reform. The first all-through 3-18 reform covering both learning and teaching and qualifications, CfE was bound to be a challenge when it came to implementation. And the bottom-up approach it aspired to made the process particularly tricky. Keir Bloomer, a chief architect of CfE explains the difference: “Some of the controversy is the same as it’s always been… What I think is different about this, and maybe isn’t as widely understood as it should be, is that the way in which we think change takes place in complex systems like education is different now. The traditional model has basically been that you get experts to think up the perfect answer then you make everybody do it. Entirely top-down, command and control model of change. That’s how Standard Grade was brought about, it’s how Higher Still was brought about, it’s how 5-14 was brought about,” says the former Chief Executive of Clackmannanshire Council and member of the original group charged with devising CfE. “There is now a recognition that effective change takes place by releasing the creativity of the people who are involved, particularly those who are involved at the chalkface level. What you have to try and do is set out a limited amount of strategic guidance, invite people to be innovative, support them in being innovative, and allow the system to learn from the rich diversity of experience that that produces. Now that’s a completely different model of change. We’ve never run one like that before and we’re not very good at it, which is maybe understandable.” SSTA General Secretary Anne Ballinger argues that real engagement with the profession has been lacking. Though Fiona Hyslop set up a CfE management group in 2008 of unions and other stakeholders, she believes the involvement was too little, too late.  “The decision that I think put it in the wrong direction was the decision right at the beginning not to involve teachers at the core. I think educational reform can’t be something that’s thought up in ivory towers by experts and then imposed on teachers. Because teachers are the experts,” says Ballinger. Part of the problem has been a lack of understanding – or even misunderstanding – of what CfE actually is. Mike Russell freely admits this confusion, not helped, he says, by its name. “I don’t think it’s helped us particularly that we actually didn’t name this accurately because although we called it Curriculum for Excellence – somebody did in the mists of time – the thing that’s changing least is the content of learning and that is technically the curriculum. It is the methodology that is changing much more than content and I think that that slight confusion right at the beginning probably should have been avoided,” Russell says. The Cabinet Secretary says he is trying his best to rectify this mistake through clearer communication. As part of the effort, he has commissioned Keir Bloomer and former President of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, David Cameron, to rewrite the curriculum documents. According to Ballinger, however, it is all years overdue, “four years too late” in fact. Right from the beginning the reform has been marked by mixed messages and “a profound misunderstanding”, she says. Russell insists he is listening to these concerns and working to allay them. But Bloomer warns that in reassuring teachers, the Cabinet Secretary should not go too far, otherwise the whole purpose of CfE will be defeated. “There could be a temptation to be too reassuring at the moment in order to get teachers back on board. There’s a certain tendency to say, ‘Don’t worry about this, you’re doing it all already’. Well, if they’re doing it all already, it really isn’t the most transformational change in Scottish education for a generation. So what I think we need to do is make it clear that it is actually a radical and visionary series of changes but that it can be undertaken in a way that is gradual and manageable,” he says. The challenge facing Russell is certainly steep and the timescale short. So are there any cases of successful educational reform from which Scotland can learn? Finland offers an example of an education system that has, over the last 40 years, transformed itself. Beginning in the 1970s with the introduction of comprehensive education followed by an overhaul of teacher education in the ‘80s, Finland implemented a national curriculum reform in 1994. From a mediocre position in international league tables prior to the 1990s, Finland now regularly tops the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) table and its education system is considered one of the best in the world – prompting a visit from Russell in March. And the secret to its success? For Finnish educational expert Pasi Sahlberg there were two key ingredients: trust in teachers and consensus. The former chief inspector of education in Finland and adviser to the European Commission and World Bank tells Holyrood: “We must understand the role that teachers and school principals play in these reforms, in other words, they need to have clear responsibilities and freedom to do certain things. In Finland this was followed also by a significant amount of trust in teachers and principals and whole schools. But you cannot do this unless you know that you have teachers who are properly in place and receiving continuing support.” Finland created what he calls a ‘big idea’ or ‘Finnish dream’ of having a world-class educational system that serves everyone. This idea attracted buy-in across the political spectrum, to business, universities and civil society – a consensus that sustained the reforms. Another action that contributed to Finland’s success, says Sahlberg, was giving teachers the freedom to innovate. And this would not have been possible, he believes, without first abolishing the inspectorate. He applauds Russell’s decision to temporarily suspend inspections in secondary but warns that longer term, teachers must be given room to experiment – and even make mistakes. “Certainly when I look at the intention of this new curriculum it will take more than three or four months for teachers to be able to understand and implement it. Everybody understands that if you are trying to reform or transform not only your curriculum documents but also your work and behaviour in the school, nobody can do it in a month or two and people will not do what they think is the best thing to do if there is some type of external control or inspection. They will do what they think the authorities want them to do and that’s not a good idea. So I think it’s a great idea, actually, to have less control and at the same time, provide more freedom and room for teachers to try out things,” says Sahlberg. “When we introduced the new curriculum in 1994 there were several mistakes in the system. I’ve been working with the province of Alberta in Canada and I heard the minister there talking to teachers just a few months ago where he appealed to teachers to make more mistakes. There was a deadly silence in the room and then he said, ‘I want you to give me more mistakes that you make because if you don’t, I know that you are not trying hard enough, that you are not trying new things, that you are doing safe things’. But this is exactly the case in your situation in Scotland. Withdrawing the inspectorate, I think many teachers will read this from your minister that ‘now we can make mistakes’ because if we really try to make the best out of this new curriculum we will make mistakes.” EIS General Secretary Ronnie Smith agrees that if CfE is to live up to its aims the inspectorate and local authorities must prove to teachers that they will not continue to be measured against exam results. “I think particularly in secondary everybody knows in the back of their minds that they will continue to be judged quite harshly on the number of exam passes that come through and not necessarily be assured or comforted that this bright new world will be established and the old currency of measuring supposed success won’t carry on,” he says. The message from experts is clear: no educational reform can succeed without strong communication, consensus and trust in teachers. Russell insists he needs no convincing. “I keep saying that I think there are two distinguishing marks in great education systems that really work in the world. One of them is a dependence upon the highest quality of teaching… But the second is a consensus, a national consensus about what education should achieve. Now CfE was born out of national consensus in Scotland, I would like to see a continuing consensus about CfE and indeed, I would like to see a wider consensus about the purposes of education. I think my primary disappointment with where we are now is that that consensus is being broken particularly by Labour and I think that is to be regretted.” The Cabinet Secretary hears the messages. The question now is whether he will have the time, resources or political will to put them into action. It is not just his political fate on the line in this feat but the future of Scottish education. Holyrood Magazine - issue 237 | Previous article Related articles: Being green for a living 3 September 2010 Bricks and mortar 11 June 2010 Winning hearts and minds 28 May 2010 Bringing it home 26 April 2010 Signposting the future 12 April 2010 See all articles in this category Submit a comment |
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