Joanna Williams speaking at the SUE Conference, Election 2026: Why Scottish Education Matters
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This week the Times reported that England is to copy Scotland’s curriculum. Apparently, Scotland’s ‘life skills over knowledge approach’ appeals to the UK Labour government, whose plans to reform the English Curriculum ‘appear to be heavily influences by policies implemented north of the border by successive SNP administrations’, according to the Times’ Marc Horne.
This is concerning news at a time when curriculum reform in Scotland could be learning from the knowledge-centred approach adopted by Sir Nick Gibb as Education Minister under the Conservative government. The English curriculum review led by Professor Becky Francis will take its inspiration from Scotland’s disastrous Curriculum for Excellence.
Some leading Scottish educationalists are flattered by Labour’s attention. The Times reports that Professor Chris Chapman and Professor Graham Donaldson from the University of Glasgow have welcomed the news that England will be following Scotland. The Scottish approach, which ‘values subjects as building blocks that combine to promote creativity and problem solving’, ‘sets higher standards’ and encourages criticality and creativity, they argue. This is despite the fact that Scottish standards in reading, maths and science have been falling, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
In this week’s newsletter, we print the opening remarks made by Joanna Williams at the Election 2026: Why Scottish Education Matters conference held in Glasgow earlier this month.
Penny Lewis
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What’s gone wrong with Scottish education?
Joanna Williams is the author of several books including How Woke Won (2022) and Consuming Higher Education, Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (2012). She began her career teaching English in secondary schools, and subsequently became an academic. Joanna has worked for think tanks including Policy Exchange, Civitas, the Centre for Independent Studies (Australia) and MCC (Brussels). She was most recently a Visiting Fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. Earlier this month she, alongside Tom Bennett OBE, provided the opening remarks for the Election 2026: Why Scottish Education Matters conference. Her reflections provide important insights for both parents and teachers.
Scotland’s progressive, child-centred school curriculum has focused on skills rather than knowledge, and politics has been allowed to creep into Scottish classrooms.
I want to begin with three statements of the blindingly obvious:
Children in Scotland are no less intelligent or academically capable than children in England or anywhere else in the world.
Teachers in Scotland are no less capable or hardworking than teachers in England or anywhere else in the world.
Nothing that has gone wrong with Scottish education is unique to Scotland. The same trends that have led to declining standards in Scotland were very much present in schools in England before 2010 and are alive and well today in schools in Wales and large parts of America.
To answer the question, ‘What’s gone wrong with Scottish education?’, I want to focus on two things in particular. First, for several years now, Scotland’s progressive, child-centred school curriculum has focused on skills rather than knowledge and on what children should be able to do rather than what they should know. Second, politics has been allowed to creep into Scottish classrooms. This leads teachers to focus less on academic standards and more on cultivating pupils’ attitudes and beliefs.
But it is worth repeating: neither of these trends is unique to Scotland. In fact, I would be lying if I said they have disappeared from schools in England. Instead, what we have south of the border is akin to an elaborate game of whack-a-mole, with continual challenges to a knowledge-based curriculum and exams, and constant calls for a more child-centred, progressive approach to teaching. We are only fortunate to have had an Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, who were prepared to wield the mallet and, in so doing, introduced changes to the curriculum and exam system that made education more rigorous and, significantly, legitimised schools and teachers who wanted to reject child-centred fads and pseudoscience for a more evidence-based approach to teaching.
However, since 2015, we have seen: the departure of Michael Gove, repeated Covid lockdowns that saw schools closed to all but a tiny minority of pupils for weeks at a time, replacing exams with teacher assessment for two years, a subsequent return to grade inflation, the departure of Nick Gibb, a change of government, and a full curriculum review. Every single one of these changes has edged schools in England nearer to those in Scotland.
It is important to recognise that what has gone wrong in Scottish schools is not unique to Scotland because if we don’t, we risk falling into the trap of thinking that the problems we face stem only from a handful of bad decisions made by Scottish ministers over the past few years. If this were indeed the case, it would be relatively easy to fix Scotland’s schools by simply introducing new policies.
I want to argue that the problems with Scotland’s schools are indicative of a broader culture or a dominant ideology that has, over the course of many decades, become deeply entrenched in what we might term the educational establishment – government ministers, civil servants, think tanks, teaching unions, teacher-training departments in universities and, let’s be honest, a significant number of school leaders and classroom teachers. This culture exists throughout Britain and many other countries; it has just been given the most freedom to thrive in Scotland.
Falling standards
First, let’s face up to the scale of the problem. Back in 2022, the international PISA test results made clear that the performance of Scotland’s pupils in maths, science and reading had been falling for at least 15 years. While maths scores fell in all four UK nations, children in England scored well above the OECD average, while children in Scotland scored well below. Significantly, results in England fell sharply from a 2018 peak (most likely because of the impact of lockdown school closures) but were still above 2015 levels. However, in Scotland, there has been a decline every year since 2006 and a more significant drop since 2012, a decade before Covid-19 had an impact on education.
PISA results provide a useful finger-in-the-wind indicator of standards. But they are a snapshot in time and focus on skills – whether children can read, write and add up – rather than what they know. Public exam results are difficult to compare directly because pupils work towards different qualifications in Scotland and England. In any case, in both nations, exam results and academic standards have long since diverged; other than in England during the 2010s, the story of the past 50 years and more years is of falling standards masked by grade inflation.
What reveals the declining attainment of Scotland’s pupils is not exam results, then, so much as what, exactly, children are being taught. I am going to focus on literature, because that is the subject I taught myself.
The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) updated the set text list for National 5 and Higher English courses this time last year. Popular choices such as Tally’s Blood and short stories by Iain Crichton Smith remain. But the new list now includes ‘more modern and diverse works’. These include Duck Feet, a 2021 novel that follows a teenager’s experience of high school and is written in Scots, the play Sequamur [Kwe-ah-moor], works by Jenni Fagan, poets Imtiaz Dharker and Kathleen Jamie, and playwright David Greig. There is work by more writers of colour, female writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and ‘authors from a wide range of backgrounds’. Significantly, children themselves were asked to contribute suggestions for set texts.
Ely Percy, author of Duck Feet, said about the new specification: ‘It is important for young people to have the opportunity to experience writing and stories that they can see themselves in. Engaging with your reader is often one of the biggest challenges facing writers but having readers who can hear their voice in your characters gives you an opportunity to connect and reflect their experiences.’ This comment is – conveniently! – echoed by Amelia, one of the pupils who contributed to the consultation. She said that she and her fellow classmates felt it was important for pupils to have the chance to study writing that reflected their lives and experiences: ‘We said we would like the opportunity to read novels, poems and plays that we can see ourselves in.’
Several things are worth noting here. First, the inclusion of pupils in the curriculum review. Rather than adults stepping up to the plate and determining what children should know, that responsibility is passed back to – or at very least shared with – children themselves. They are asked to direct their own learning. This is a progressive challenge to the idea that education is a means of passing on to children their intellectual inheritance or birthright. Hannah Arendt’s idea that education is an opportunity for adults to demonstrate they love the world enough to assume responsibility for inducting children into knowledge of that world has been rejected by SQA. Indeed, it is not knowledge of the world that children are expected to take from their study of literature at all; rather, it is knowledge of themselves.
Relevance seems to be the primary criterion for inclusion in the curriculum, and relevance is defined in the narrowest possible terms as ‘all about me’. This focus on children ‘seeing themselves in literature’ suggests the purpose of reading is not to expand your mind, to enable you to experience worlds and emotions beyond your limited horizons, but simply to see yourself reflected back to you, almost as a therapeutic process of affirmation. To prove the point I made earlier, this is not unique to Scotland. In England, Labour’s recently published curriculum review also echoes the refrain that ‘all children must be able to see themselves in the curriculum’. The ‘all’ here is interesting – it does not imply a common experience of childhood, or a common experience of being British, but that a potentially infinite number of identity groups must each be given their own period in the spotlight.
I think a good curriculum should do exactly the opposite of what SQA suggests. Indeed, the very starting point should not be children, but literature. Rather than asking children about their lives, adults should think about the very best novels, poems and plays that have ever been written and that future adults should know. When we aim to show children their own lives, we are consigned to the present. We see the truth of this when we look at the literature most recently added to the SQA syllabus, all of which was written in the twenty-first century. This means that children are not being introduced to knowledge and culture from the past, or to the best that has been thought and said, but only to that which is most recent.
According to SQA, the only way that literature introduces children to new ideas is through ‘diversity’. So, different identity groups are checked off a list, and we lose any notion of literature as beautiful or meaningful in itself. The criteria for entry to the curriculum are not the quality of the writing but the identity of the author, with some group identities deemed more worthy of inclusion than others. This is politics, not education.
Let’s contrast this with what happened in the past. I’m going back a long way here, but it is possible to find online questions from a 1959 Scottish Leaving Certificate Examination in English Literature. The lower-grade paper asks candidates to answer four questions in two hours. Options include:
What do you regard as the best poem you have read or heard recently? What features of the poem made a strong appeal to you? Illustrate your answer as fully as you can by appropriate quotation.
Which one of the following characters would you like to have with you in a position of danger and difficulty, and why? Salvation Yeo; Allan Quatermain; Alan Breck Stewart; Sherlock Holmes; Richard Hannay; Horatio Hornblower.
As an aside, I must point out, to my shame, that I had to Google a good many of these characters. Today’s SQA bigwigs will no doubt be fainting at such characters – all men, most of them white and British, all of them involved in one form of adventure or exciting mission or another. These characters embody the values of bravery, stoicism, quick-wittedness, determination, and courage – all of which would no doubt be labelled ‘toxic masculinity’ today. Notably, they allow children, even boys, not to ‘see themselves’ but to be excited by literature. Both the questions assume children are not being taught to the test, there are no hoops to jump through or techniques to display, but that they will have read widely and deeply. Finally, knowledge of the literature specified gives children access to a shared cultural realm – they will have a connection not just with their peers but with older adults too.
The same trends can be seen in questions from the higher-grade paper. They include:
Choose from any Shakespearean tragedies you know, two examples of innocent people who are involved in disaster through no fault of their own, and show how Shakespeare enlists our sympathy for them.
‘Though Chaucer scarcely ever refers to contemporary events, yet he is the social historian of his age.’ What references or allusions does Chaucer make to contemporary events, and what kind of historical information can we derive from his works?
Pupils were actually expected to know about literature in 1959, and to have such familiarity with canonical texts that they could make comparisons and construct and defend an argument. This required classical education of the highest standard, and it needed to be accessible to the vast majority of pupils. This is not nostalgia for a mythical past; it was the daily reality of many children. My mother-in-law was born in a Glaswegian tenement before moving to a council house in Bridge-of-Weir, where her father worked as a decorator. She took her school leaving exams at this time. A bright girl, she passed with flying colours and went on to Glasgow University.
What’s tragic is that this quality education is part of Scotland’s great history. As far back as 1708, the writer Daniel Defoe praised Scottish schooling, writing that even the ‘poorest people have their children taught and instructed’, in contrast to England’s ‘dark villages [...] full of ignorance.’
Sadly that is still true in some English villages! Today’s GCSE and A level English papers also fall far short of this 1959 ideal. In England, education suffers from teaching to the test, narrowly focused exam questions that require students to become experts in jumping through hoops rather than a wide range of literary texts, and schools that game the system by selecting only the shortest and most accessible books. But, thanks to the continued legacy of Gove’s curriculum reforms, there is, currently at least and far more so than in Scotland, some attempt to have children study a variety of books, some more demanding than others, from a range of historical periods.
Curriculum for mediocrity
Sadly, it seems to me that the differences between the English literature courses studied by children in their final years of school are reflected in the differences between the English National Curriculum and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. Since education policy was devolved more than a quarter of a century ago, Scottish schools have been driven by a more radical and ideological agenda. Notably, the decline in PISA scores first became apparent in 2012, when the Curriculum for Excellence was fully implemented.
The Curriculum for Excellence, as I am sure you will all be aware, did not specify key texts or knowledge; instead, it set out broad expectations for children’s learning experiences. While the national curriculum in England listed in detail (some say too much detail) what children should learn each year, the Scottish curriculum employed ‘benchmarks’ to ensure each child became a ‘successful learner, a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor’.
To sum up the problem with this progressive approach: it creates an education system locked into a permanent present, without a clear sense of purpose or direction and with no academic standards to be met. As E. D. Hirsch makes clear, literacy is not simply a skill to be mastered; children might be able to decode words, but genuine understanding requires cultural knowledge. The progressive approach leaves all children ignorant – unaware even of what it is they do not know. But it penalises the most disadvantaged children who do not have parents with cultural knowledge and family resources to compensate for gaps in learning. Only a rigorous, knowledge-based curriculum, determined by subject experts, can provide children with a genuine basis for understanding the world they have been born into and the capacity to operate in that world as future adults.
Getting politics out of schools
The absence of a knowledge-based curriculum is the number one problem facing Scottish schools. But the second problem I want to turn to is what has replaced the transmission of knowledge in the classroom. All too often, it seems that a progressive approach to teaching aligns with the promotion of progressive political views. I want to argue that Scottish education has become overly politicised.
We see evidence of this politicisation in the teaching of notionally academic subjects like history, in non-academic subjects like Personal, Social and Health Education, and in wider school activities such as the choice of speakers for assemblies and the causes taken up by activist teachers. So, to run through a few examples:
The Scottish government’s Anti-Racism in Education Programme, established in the wake of Black Lives Matter, aims to embed anti-racism initiatives and practices throughout every part of school life. There is no place for racism in schools, and it should, of course, be challenged immediately. However, a major concern of the anti-racism in education programme is ‘decolonising the curriculum’, which often means not just removing work branded ‘racist’ but placing a question mark over all work by Dead White Men in favour of diversity. To return to the list of characters children were asked to choose between in the 1959 literature exam, it is impossible to imagine Charles Kingsley, C. S Forester, John Buchan or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle surviving a decolonisation drive. This is how we end up with Duck Feet! Likewise, when it comes to teaching history, the Scottish government wants schools to teach ‘Black History’, as if this is a separate strand of the past, distinct from the rest of history. The danger with all these initiatives is that they racialise knowledge and, ultimately, racialise children. Pupils are no longer ‘children’ or ‘Scottish’ but black or white.
Children in Scotland have lessons in Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood. Lessons cover masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, prostitution, consent, coercion and pornography. The emphasis throughout seems to be on instructing children in their ‘sexual rights’. The move from sex education to sexuality education pushes the curriculum away from biology and into a far more moral and sexualised terrain, lessons in relationships and ‘parenthood’ infringe upon family life. These are personal values and codes of behaviour that are negotiated with others through the process of growing up and interacting with others. These are not objective facts that can be taught in a classroom. Parents’ rights are undermined when teachers are expected to step into this role. RSHP lessons also open the door to gender ideology. I know Jennifer Cunningham has done some excellent work in this area for SUE. Suffice to say, telling young children that a person can change sex is not only scientifically illiterate, it risks setting children up for a life of medication, surgery and infertility.
Yet we know that children are picking up on these messages not just through the taught curriculum but through activist teachers who mistake the classroom for a pulpit and bring their own pet causes to work. Rather than the Scottish government restricting such activities, it promotes them. In 2021, the General Teaching Council for Scotland produced guidance stating that all teachers must promote ‘social justice, diversity and sustainability’. This forces teachers who do not want to engage in politics to promote a political agenda. Words like ‘social justice, diversity and sustainability’ sound nice, but they mask assumptions that are heavily political and hugely contested.
The problem with bringing politics into the classroom is not just that it takes time and resources away from teaching subject knowledge. It represents a moral and anti-democratic overreach on behalf of the teacher as a figure of authority and the school as a public institution. And it leaves children whose parents fundamentally disagree with the values imposed by schools at odds with the entire education system.
Conclusion
To raise standards in Scottish schools, neither teachers nor parents should accept anything less than parity with England. As I said at the beginning, Scottish children are not less intelligent and Scottish teachers are not less hard-working than their English counterparts, so there is no reason whatsoever to accept that Scottish children perform less well than their peers south of the border, whether that’s at university, in national exams or in international league tables.
But we need to be more ambitious than mere parity. When England’s education system disguises falling standards with grade inflation and government ministers are looking to swap GCSEs in modern foreign languages for instruction in financial literacy, Scotland should aim higher. The starting point has to be removing politics from the classroom and doing the hard intellectual work of thinking through not just what children should be able to do, but what they should know. We owe them nothing less.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://archive.is/h7qLz Geraldine Scott, Trans people could be banned from single-sex spaces based on how they look. The Times has seen the equalities watchdog’s final guidance, which Whitehall figures fear Bridget Phillipson is delaying to avoid a political backlash. 19/11/25
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/11/11/the-olympic-ban-on-cheating-men-is-long-overdue/ Joanna Williams, The Olympic ban on cheating men is long overdue. The IOC owes an apology to the women who had their dreams shattered and safety compromised to appease trans activists. 11/11/25
https://archive.is/cyLf9 Michael Searles, NHS trans drug trial ‘betrays our children’. Puberty blockers will be given to more than 200 young people, potentially as young as eight, who think they may be transgender. 22/11/25
Andrew Doyle, The puberty blocker trials cannot be justified. The UK government is preparing to experiment on healthy children to investigate a belief it cannot even define. 24/11/25
https://archive.is/VAgPp Joanna Williams, Trigger warnings are out of control at the University of Essex. 25/11/25
https://archive.is/ff7Eo Michael Day, The BBC’s new Civilisations treats us like idiots. 25/11/25
https://archive.ph/LOBnzCraig Simpson, BBC accused of attacking British history in ‘biased’ Empire documentary. Broadcaster’s ‘morally self-righteous’ series omits benefits of empire, says academic. 26/11/25
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