Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No89
Themes: the Battle of Ideas, are our children ‘on track?’, and lessons from the Curriculum for Excellence
Battle of Ideas festival, SUE’s Kate Deeming, Julie Sandilands and SUE Chair, Stuart Waiton
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Last weekend, SUE ran a stall at the Battle of Ideas festival in London. We were in the main conference hall, and were inundated with questions, and support, from other organisations and individuals from across the UK and beyond.
We organised a lunchtime panel to discuss Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) and its impact on standards and impartiality. Our session was a cautionary tale for those optimistic about the Labour government’s plans for curriculum reform in England. Kate Deeming, Julie Sandilands and Stuart Waiton, our Parent and Supporters Coordinator, our education policy expert, and our chair, respectively, described the ways in which curriculum reform had undermined educational standards and allowed a highly politicised set of agendas to thrive in Scottish schools.
At the event, I was reminded that it was Claire Fox and the Battle of Ideas team who helped us call an open meeting in Glasgow in November 2022 to gather people from different political persuasions and faiths to discuss problems of politicisation in Scotland’s schools.
My own children were the first victims of the Scottish government social experiment known as the Curriculum for Excellence. Back around 2010, when the experiment took off, I was aware that change was on the cards. The newly qualified teacher who ‘entertained’ my daughter in her final year of primary school was a very different kind of teacher from the woman who two years earlier, before her early retirement, had managed to instil in my son a sense of both discipline and the joy of learning. I’d watched as the new laws on parent participation had ‘professionalised’ the parent teachers groups to create ‘parent councils’ and I had been struck by how contemptuous councillors and headteachers were of parents raising objections to the new curriculum.
On the parent council, we were told that they were reorganising the system around the needs of the individual child, and who could object to that? It sounded lovely. In fact, however, the changes seem to have impoverished our education system, and to have limited pupil’s choices and clipped any broader cultural aspirations they might have had and that would have helped them to understand the world; for example, modern languages have pretty much gone from Scottish schools. When my daughter consistently skipped PE, she was subjected to the cod-psychological ideas of guidance staff, while girls who didn’t want to do sport were offered activities at a ‘nail bar’, to address their ‘low self-esteem’.
Now that my children are adults, and my students are too, I am seeing the full impact of the education system on a generation. Often, those educated in the Curriculum for Excellence know less about Scotland’s history and the western intellectual tradition than the overseas students who sit beside them. We have let down an entire generation, and we need a proper independent review of education policy. We can only hope that parents and teachers in England can learn from our mistakes. Here are the arguments presented by Kate Deeming and Julie Sandilands.
If you are a teacher, a parent or a pupil, we are keen to get your thoughts on the Curriculum for Excellence – contact info@sue.scot.
Penny Lewis, editor
A Maoist assault on our children’s minds
Kate Deeming is SUE’s Parent and Supporters Coordinator. She is a long-time advocate for childhood and children, who for over 30 years developed and delivered dance and performance projects in educational and community settings globally. https://www.deemingdreaming.com/
We are now witnessing a Maoist assault on our children’s minds via the Scottish education system. For over 30 years, I worked in educational settings across the world, developing performance projects for children, including Scottish ones. When my son started school, I was excited for him to ‘get on with his education’, as I had enjoyed a positive experience of it and hoped he would as well. Very quickly, however, I got the feeling that ‘all was not OK’, specifically in relation to his reading and writing. When I would question the teachers and headteachers about his progress, I was told that he was ‘on track’.
‘On track’? ‘On track’ for what? The nearest drug den? No one was able to answer. So when I finally had him tested independently in P5, I discovered that he was at P2 level. He had been denied the opportunity to reach his full potential.
Most people here will be aware of the increasingly ideological programming being placed into schools, and Scotland is a hotbed of this, with ‘embedded’ curricula including ‘sexuality education’, ‘LGBTQ+ education’, ‘eco education’, ‘anti-racism education’, ‘rights-based education’, and on and on and on. Is it any wonder there is any room left for … education?
These new programmes are politically contested, not age appropriate (therefore dangerous), and badly designed. They treat children as adults in small bodies and get teachers to think of pupils as such, they have no democratic mandate, and they face no criticality in either content or design.
In addition, the schools themselves are increasingly placing a wedge between parents and teachers. Many will be aware of Joanna Williams’ work on this for Civitas, which looks specifically at the changing face of the teacher’s and parent’s role in education. This is a significant issue for our time. Teachers are taught to mistrust parents, and parents often drop the ball and do not assert their own authority. At the same time, our main teaching union, the Educational Institute of Scotland, propagates this ‘careless parent’ myth, for example in their guidance on ‘supporting transgender and non-binary learners in schools’.
Soon after raising concerns, I found myself being told that I was no longer able to address questions to my son’s teacher directly; instead, everything had to go via the headteacher. So, I was releasing my son into the care of an individual teacher, who had intimate access to my 9-year-old for 30 hours a week, without being allowed to talk to them directly.
When I discussed my concerns with others and found that other parents were facing similar issues, I was told that the school would not deal with any issue collectively but that, rather, it was to be dealt with on a solo basis. This served to isolate parents from one another.
Ninety-six percent of schools in Scotland are run through the centralised Scottish government education system. I call it ‘the Blob’ or ‘the Marshmallow’. Too many people are so immersed in the system that they have no sense that what they are part of is suffocating them. When my American sister suggested that ‘I just change schools’, she could not believe that in a system that is 96% run through the same system the options are not so easy.
When I followed up through ‘the proper channels’, I was pulled into an Orwellian bureaucratic structure wherein, in a swirl of papers, e-mails and meetings, much noise was made, many papers were generated, many boxes were ticked … and nothing changed. When I questioned the quality improvement organiser about the validity of this ‘Brave New World’ of activism for primary-school children, she informed me that ‘it’s important our children understand they are global citizens’.
I said, ‘Can you just teach him math please?’
But no, in this new space neither math nor literacy are being taught, which is why we have the worst literacy and numeracy rates in decades. It was in the head-banging frustration of this experience that I found SUE. I have now been writing for SUE for two years and have been the Parent and Supporters Coordinator for one. We have 12 regional groups. And it’s remarkable how many parents are facing the same exact issues I did but felt isolated. We know instinctively that this educational ‘Marshmallow’ is impoverishing our children and will fracture society beyond measure if we do not address it.
Parents are the last frontier to ensure that Scotland is not in ruins in another generation. Find other parents with experiences and concerns that reflect your own. Start working together, for example through WhatsApp groups, to find solutions. Adults need to wake up to their obligation of providing for children, so that they – and society – can reclaim education.
Lessons from Scotland
Julie Sandilands is SUE’s education correspondent. She is an English and business teacher who worked in several secondary schools in Fife until 2017.
It is simply no longer possible to maintain that Scotland’s education system is the envy of the world: its steady decline, for well over a decade, has been widely acknowledged and reported. For other nations to understand the how, where and why, it is worth looking at the Scottish experience through a series of questions.
What preceded the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), and did it work?
Scottish education used to be split into three parts: the 3–5 curriculum, the 5–14 curriculum, and finally the National Qualification phase, with its Standard Grade, Intermediate and Higher examinations.
Was this prior system fit for purpose? Yes, it was. In fact, Peter Peacock, the then minister for education and young people in 2004 stated, ‘The curriculum in Scotland has many strengths. Its well-respected curriculum for 3- to 5-year-olds, its broad 5–14 curriculum, and National Qualifications structure have been carefully designed to meet the needs of pupils at different stages.’
Mr Peacock was correct: the exam system was structured to allow even those of the lowest ability, for example a foundation or general student, to leave school having completed a two-year course, an internal assessment, and two formal examinations in each subject, giving them credible qualifications in at least seven subjects. Contrast that to today, where the same-ability student taking the replacement National 4 qualification will leave school having completed a one-year course with a handful of in-house marked assessments and no formal exams in, on average, five subjects.
Lesson 1:
Don’t allow the politicians to change things that are working
There are now so many examples where the actual reality is such a far cry from government’s rhetoric of raising standards and closing the (poverty-related) attainment gap. It is important to question changes, and once they happen, hold educationalists to account for the decisions that they made.
So who and what drove the change?
In 2002, the Labour McConnell-led government held a ‘national debate’, and while at the same time praising the existing system, Mr Peacock insisted that ‘this debate showed that people want a curriculum that will fully prepare today’s children for adult life in the 21st century, be less crowded and better connected, and offer more choice and enjoyment’. However, given that this ‘debate’ lasted for only three months – and that people, including children, had to opt into it and respondents were asked to consider fourteen very open questions – it is worth questioning whether there was ever a mandate from the public to rip up the existing system in its entirety and replace it with an experimental, untried, untested alternative.
At the same time as the national debate was taking place, the Education, Culture and Sport Committee of the Scottish parliament conducted an inquiry, and in 2003, a Curriculum Review Group was set up with a remit to identify ‘the purposes of education’. Now, this is where the origins of Curriculum for Excellence are often misunderstood. In fact, Kier Bloomer, who was then the Chief Executive of Clackmannanshire Council and a member of the Review Group, recently explained in a public discussion, aptly titled What’s gone wrong with Scottish education?, that when talking about Curriculum for Excellence, it is important to make clear which one you are talking about, because there are two completely different ones: there is the document produced in 2004 by the Curriculum Review Group, and then there is the curriculum which was launched in 2010, and there are significant differences between the two. The 2004 document, which was only eight pages long and based on the group’s remit, set out a number of principles; it did not have detailed content and was more a mission statement – it most certainly was not a curriculum. Interestingly, Mr Bloomer further explained that during the next stage, the actual development of the curriculum, nobody from the original Review Group was asked to take part. This stage was done by a new group which, he noted, was much more dominated with traditional figures from within the Scottish educational establishment.
So for those wielding power – Labour, and from 2007, the SNP – this newly formed development group, operating under the shield of a public consultation, created an opportunity to use the Curriculum for Excellence as a vehicle to shape the education system to fit, or enforce, a political agenda. Unfortunately, this hijacking of education in Scotland is continuing at pace, with activist groups supporting a range of ideologies, some generously funded by the Scottish government, given access to schools, Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and other institutions to provide training and resources which not only support their particular narrative but are regarded as indisputable, with the threat of public denigration for anyone bold enough to challenge its truth or legitimacy. Currently, there is immense pressure from these groups, and from the government itself, to embed these ideologies into every aspect of the curriculum, risking the erosion of both the accuracy and credibility in what is being taught.
Lesson 2:
Create and maintain an evidence-based curriculum free from political and ideological bias, where open discussions about controversial subjects are actively encouraged, thereby avoiding indoctrination.
What happened after the launch of CfE in 2010?
Despite the publication of long, vacuous guidance documents, the lack of clarity on what and how to teach, the direction to declutter the curriculum, and the emphasis on a skills-based curriculum, it was becoming obvious that teachers were struggling to deliver a broad-based quality education; standards were in decline. It wasn’t just international comparisons such as PISA coming to this conclusion. In 2016, I was working in a secondary school on the east coast of Scotland. Within the first term, we were advised by our additional support for learning department that a significant number of our new intake of S1s had a below-expected reading age, some as low as 7 years of age. Now, I would imagine that my school wasn’t an isolated case, and that this information was filtering back to both local education authorities and the Scottish government. And in March 2017, Education Scotland published additional guidance on delivery and assessment in the form of ‘Benchmarks’ and ‘Experiences and Outcomes’ for each curriculum area at each level.
Education Scotland claimed that the introduction of Benchmarks was required ‘to make clear what learners need to know and be able to do to progress through the levels, and to support consistency in teachers’ and other practitioners’ professional judgements’ (p. 2). Absolutely no mention of declining standards!
Lesson 3:
From the onset, provide concise objectives supported by practical, realistic teaching methodologies that can be implemented in the planning process and delivered in the classroom.
Some lessons from Sweden
It isn’t just Scotland that England can learn from when considering curriculum reform. Sweden too has seen a decline in standards over the past 15–20 years. In their paper ‘Post-Truth’ and the Decline of Swedish Education, Magnus Henrekson and Johan Wennström highlight that ‘Sweden has gone the farthest toward abandoning a knowledge-based core curriculum and a pedagogy in which students internalize and learn to apply knowledge under the teacher’s instruction and supervision’. Worryingly, they also report that ‘Sweden has one of the highest levels of absenteeism and late arrivals in the OECD. Depression and anxiety among children aged 10–17 also increased by more than 100 percent from 2006 to 2016.’ While they acknowledge that subsequent more centre-right governments have attempted, with a modicum of success, to reverse this decline by reinstating more former regulatory functions, they warn that ‘any country considering implementing school reform based social-constructivist practices should proceed with caution’.
Where are we now?
Well, after a recent independent review of qualifications and assessment, encompassing the Hayward report and suggestions from a range of influential groups, Jenny Gilruth, on 19 September 2024, made a statement to the Scottish parliament, where rather than accepting the ambitious recommendations pushing for fewer exams and the idea of a Scottish Diploma of Achievement with its three learner pathways, Ms Gilruth has opted, this time, much to the disappointment of some, not for a complete overhaul but more of a status quo with a bit of tweaking here and there. Now, depending on your point of view, this could either be a missed opportunity or a case of hard lessons learned? Time will tell, but the world is watching, and perhaps future international assessment indicators, which Scotland has committed to rejoin, will not only provide more useful benchmarks than Education Scotland but will make plain whether Scottish education is once again to be a jewel in Scotland’s crown or an embarrassing, unforgivable failure.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://substack.com/home/post/p-150256039?source=queue Joanna Williams, What’s so triggering about The Canterbury Tales? 15/10/24
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13957275/Chaucer-Canterbury-Tales-trigger-warning-Nottingham-University.html Chris Hastings and Mark Duell, Fury as university puts ‘demeaning’ and ‘ludicrous’ trigger warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales because of ‘expressions of Christian faith’. 14/10/24
Jon Bryan, The legacy of lockdown and the future of education. When a school shut its doors for a month, two years after the last national lockdown, parents decided to fight back. Dad Jon Bryan tells his story. PLUS our education debates at the Battle of Ideas. 15/10/24
Dolan Cummings, The limits of critical thinking. Doubt is just one of the intellectual virtues. 16/10/24
https://freespeechunion.org/how-the-stonewall-gravy-train-came-to-an-end/ Frederick Attenborough, How the Stonewall gravy train came to an end. 15/10/24
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2024/10/18/girl-autism-faces-ban-asking-transgender-player-are-you-man/ Ben Rumsby, Girl with suspected autism faces 12-match ban for asking transgender opponent: ‘Are you a man?’ Exclusive: Girl, 17, distraught and is latest case to raise major questions about FA’s failure to ban those born male from women’s game. 19/10/24
https://www.thetimes.com/article/4ae7f8f1-7c44-42ef-9db2-5b3371379c19?shareToken=e20f085cc94d3bc95d38de025e5ffbd2 Eleanor Hayward, How the Cass Review has reshaped care for transgender children. Implementing the findings of the report by Dr Hilary Cass has meant overcoming ‘disinformation’ from US sources spread by the British Medical Association. 18/10/24
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24663104.call-government-action-higher-history-investigation/?ref=ebbn&nid=1388&u=3113c1b3a77b3e25e409aaa02c22166f&date=211024 James McEnaney, Call for government action over Higher History marking. 21/10/24
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/10/20/snp-guidance-public-bodies-24-genders/ Daniel Sanderson, SNP claims there are 24 genders. Party accused of being ‘disconnected from the real world’ as it issues guidance to public bodies about recording identities. 20/10/24
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/starmer-shakespeare-portrait-removed-downing-street-wall-b1188857.html John Dunne, Sir Keir Starmer sparks backlash after ‘removing Shakespeare portrait from No 10 wall’. 19/10/24
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"Was this prior system fit for purpose?"
I found Julie Sandilands article of particular interest. Ever since reading Peter Hitchens: A Revolution Betrayed, it really brought into focus the infamous empty platitude, that gets rolled out everytime Scottish education is in the limelight "Scotland's world beating education system".
Hitchens, in his own self deprecating manner, describes his impetuous for writing his books based purely on the lack of meaningful studies or research on any of his chosen subject matters.
I would love to read something both insightful and factual on "Scotlands world beating education system" - when did it exist? Was is it the product of the adoption of the American Comprehensive school system (Scotland being ahead of the "curve" on this in the UK)? Or was it purely based on the favourable outcomes of the Elite classes via the wealth of Scottish Private Schools?
The aforementioned platitude has been used so often, that it's now rendered meaningless! Does anyone have any insight into this? Would love to hear about it.
Cheers