The position of knowledge in Curriculum for Excellence – a response to the paper tabled at CAB, 30/01/2024

The following paper was circulated to the Scottish Government’s Curriculum and Assessment Board in January. I am posting it here, as there has been some interest in the paper, following publication of an article in TESS by Emma Seith about the issue, drawing upon papers tabled at the meeting (https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/cfe-pupils-knowledge-base-curriculum-education-scotland-report),

The position of knowledge in Curriculum for Excellence – a response to the paper tabled at CAB, 30/01/2024

Mark Priestley, Joe Smith and Lizzie Rushton

University of Stirling

We are delighted to see this topic getting some attention, as part of the CfE reform cycle. The issue of knowledge, and specifically the so-called downgrading of knowledge, has long been a source of criticism, amongst curriculum scholars, of competency-based curriculum approaches such as CfE (e.g., Young & Muller, 2011; Biesta, 2014; Priestley & Sinnema, 2014). The critiques centre largely on what might be termed ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young & Muller, 2011) or its absence in the curriculum. This relates to two main aspects:

1. What knowledge might be considered as ‘powerful’. Young and Muller make a distinction between disciplinary and everyday knowledge, arguing that students need to be exposed to the former in schools, as many will not have such opportunities otherwise. Such knowledge represents the accumulated wisdom of humankind – understandings of how the world works, formulated by communities of scholars over the ages. This, of course, needs to be considered in relation to the question of ‘whose knowledge?’, raising important issues about how the curriculum might be decolonised.
2. The question of what knowledge is powerful for. Having such knowledge is necessary in order to participate meaningfully in society’s conversations (e.g., for active and critical citizenship or to possess the technical knowledge needed for increasingly complex workplaces). Education systems which restrict access to powerful knowledge, or which differentiate it socially, limit access to society’s conversations. This is an ethical issue, as pointed out by Joe Smith (2022), because to deny students access to powerful knowledge is to deny them understanding of the complexity of the world.

Our recent work (e.g. Priestley, et al., 2024 in press) suggests that the majority of countries worldwide have fallen into the trap of downgrading or neglecting knowledge questions in their curricular specification, in a headlong rush to promote skills acquisition. This ignores the fact that people need knowledge with which to demonstrate or apply skills; moreover, in the lack of central specification, research in Scotland suggests that teachers fall back on instrumental (e.g., meeting the needs of future assessment or offering ‘sexy’ topics to attract students to a subject) rather than educational rationales for selecting content (e.g., Shapira et al. 2023; Smith, 2019). This in turn can lead to an enacted or experienced curriculum that lacks coherence and any sense of connection with educational purposes.

The Education Scotland paper is a welcome development because it raises the issue of knowledge, and because it starts to identify some of the issues which impinge upon how knowledge is addressed in the curriculum. In particular, we welcome the recognition that:

• a curriculum framework needs to ‘clarify the way that knowledge is covered’;
• the technical form (Luke et al., 2012) of the curriculum (i.e., its expression as a framework of hierarchical learning outcomes) raises concerns ‘in terms of the content and its suitability as the technical framework which supports the four capacities of CfE’;
• and the curriculum review offers an opportunity to update the curriculum, developing ‘clearer, more simplified guidance for practitioners (“instead of” rather than “in addition to”)’.

The Education Scotland paper thus provides a useful starting point for addressing what is a crucial curricular issue; one that should involve a much deeper and more nuanced discussion than previously, drawing especially on expertise in the areas of disciplinary knowledge and curriculum studies. There is considerable work required to reframe the curriculum to take more account of the importance of knowledge.  In the light of the above, we offer some observations, which may guide the review process.

What is knowledge?

We start by emphasising that we are not advocating a simplistic, so-called knowledge-rich approach, which has become popularised in some parts of the world, notably England. A curriculum which properly takes account of knowledge will consider what constitutes disciplinary knowledge. A useful distinction here is as follows:

• ‘knowing that’ – propositional knowledge, including general and discipline-specific substantive concepts, set out in progression frameworks;
• ‘knowing how’ – this includes procedural knowledge, related to skills; essentially the ability to apply knowledge to practical and theoretical situations. It also includes ‘knowing how to know’ – epistemic knowledge of the structures and processes of disciplines that allows us to engage in enquiry in particular domains (e.g. scientific method).

By taking account of the above distinctions, one can avoid the all-too-common tendency to conflate knowledge with information/facts/content, with the subsequent conclusion that knowledge=facts and is therefore inert (and can be easily Googled by anyone wishing to know). There needs to be an understanding that the structured development of knowledge itself illuminates new ways of seeing the world, and is fundamental to any educative process. Related to the conflation of knowledge and facts, there is a pervasive idea that knowledge can be counted as discrete, itemised (and atomised) statements, to be ticked off as evidence that someone is educated (see below on the organisation of knowledge).

Another key point here to reiterate, is that skills cannot be developed in a knowledge vacuum; it is necessary to teach the knowledge, then provide pedagogical opportunities through which skills can be practised and developed.

What knowledge should be developed through schooling?

This is a key question, implicitly devolved to schools under CfE. There is a lack of adequate specification – either of content or the processes through which content might be selected from the corpus of human knowledge. Crucially, content selection should derive from consideration of education purposes – both individual and societal. We note here that there is a logical progression from ‘why?’ to ‘what?’ to ‘how?’. This has tended to become subverted in recent discussion by an unhelpful progression, derived from the world business innovation, of ‘why?’ to ‘how?’ to ‘what?’. We also note that the Refreshed Narrative of CfE specifies the former. The key point here is that clarity of educational purpose should lead to questions about what should be taught – with consideration of how there should be progression in learning, and how the overall curriculum articulates (e.g. how does learning at any given stage in science fit with learning in the humanities). Only then, should how questions (pedagogical, organisational) be considered.

How should knowledge be organised?

A related question is provision. Society tends to view education in terms of traditional subjects, with occasional additions (e.g. Modern Studies) to address emerging needs. Subjects are conflated with disciplines. There are at least three key problems here: 1] subjects have to select from disciplinary knowledge, rather than being mirrors of disciplines; 2] some subjects are multi-disciplinary (e.g. Modern Studies); and 3] there are areas where subjects cannot adequately address questions in isolation, and where an interdisciplinary approach is required. These raise questions about whether the traditional subjects model is indeed always appropriate, whether it is adequately developed when it is applicable, and whether alternative forms of organisation are needed to supplement it. Deng (2012) has addressed these issues in his work. For Deng, the proper question is ‘what knowledge should be selected?’. He distinguishes clearly between disciplines (as the main source of knowledge) and subjects (as containers or mechanisms for organising knowledge in school). Thus, there is a clear distinction between disciplinary knowledge and school content, organised into subjects, providing one, but not the sole approach to organising knowledge in schools. There are very clear implications here for both curriculum planning, and the framing of knowledge question in curriculum policy.

How might knowledge be specified?

This brings us to the big question of how a national curriculum should specify content, thus addressing knowledge questions. One question is the degree of specification. Some curricula, (e.g., some iterations/subjects in the English National Curriculum) specify in minute detail. Others specify high level concepts and leave it up to schools to select content that allows these to be developed. Our preference is for the latter, but with clear specification of some core content, questions that need to be addressed and processes to be followed when selecting content. This relates further to the question of the technical form. The current technical form of CfE (the hierarchical framework of generic learning outcomes) is not a suitable model if we are seriously about knowledge in the curriculum, because it encourages an audit approach, driven by assessment, that in turn leads to a fragmented,  and incoherent approach to the selection of content. Big ideas frameworks (e.g. https://www.ase.org.uk/bigideas) have been adopted and developed in jurisdictions such as Wales and British Columbia, and show considerable promise as an approach to specifying knowledge in a coherent manner, as a conceptual progression framework  – and as a replacement for the competency-based framing of CfE.

Connecting everyday and powerful knowledge

One final question to address is concerned with how we enable students to see the relevance in powerful knowledge. Often this is presented as a dichotomy – we either teach abstract knowledge, or we work with student interests. Recent work (e.g., Skelton, 2017; Smith & Jackson, 2021; Riddle et al., 2023) posits a more nuanced approach. This engages students with powerful knowledge, but from the starting point of the ‘funds of knowledge’ that they bring to school. One can point, for example, to geography education that conceptualises disciplinary knowledge as being informed by the geographies of the everyday spaces where humans live out their lives (Skelton, 2017), or a powerful knowledge+ approach (Riddle et al., 2023) that develops disciplinary understanding from the pedagogical starting point of the everyday concerns and interests of students. This is essentially a pedagogical approach, but stands as a powerful reminder that pedagogies are curriculum practices – pedagogy and content selection cannot be disentangled, and the role of teachers as ‘curriculum workers’ of ‘curriculum makers’ is paramount here. It is worth noting that early findings from Riddle et al’s (2023) project suggest increased engagement and attainment amongst traditionally marginalised groups of students.

Finally, we highlight the importance of spaces and communities of practice which enable ongoing dialogue about curriculum and curriculum making between practitioners, policy makers and education researchers. This is a fundamental rationale for the newly established Stirling Centre for Research into Curriculum Making.

References

Biesta, G. (2014), Pragmatising the curriculum: bringing knowledge back into the curriculum conversation, but via pragmatism. Curriculum Journal, 25, 29-49.

Deng, Z. (2012). School Subjects and Academic Disciplines: The Differences. In: A. Luke, A. Woods & K. Weir (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity: A primer and model (pp. 40-53).  New York, NY: Routledge.

Luke, A., Woods, A., & Weir, K. (2012) Curriculum Design, Equity and the Technical Form of the Curriculum. In:  A. Luke, A. Woods & K. Weir (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity: A primer and model (pp. 1-5).  New York, NY: Routledge.

Priestley, M., Angier, C., Schuler, B. & Smith, J. (2024, in press). Towards a typology of curriculum approaches. University of Stirling/UNESCO.

Priestley, M. & Sinnema, C. (2014). Downgraded curriculum? An analysis of knowledge in new curricula in Scotland and New Zealand. Curriculum Journal, Special Edition: Creating Curricula: Aims, Knowledge, and Control, 25, 50-75.

Riddle, S., Mills, M. & McGregor, G. (2023). Curricular justice and contemporary schooling: Towards a rich, common curriculum for all students. Curriculum Perspectives, 43, 137–144.

Shapira, M., Priestley, M., Peace-Hughes, T., Barnett, C. & Ritchie, M. (2023). Choice, Attainment and Positive Destinations: Exploring the impact of curriculum policy change on young people. University of Stirling/Nuffield Foundation.

Skelton, T. (2017). Everyday Geographies. International Encyclopaedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0881

Smith, J. (2019). Curriculum coherence and teachers’ decision-making in Scottish high school history syllabi. Curriculum Journal, 30, 441-463.

Smith, J. (2022). The ethics of knowledge in curriculum design. https://www.gtcs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/the-ethics-of-knowledge-in-curriculum-design-provocation-dr-joe-smith.pdf.

Smith, J. & Jackson, D. (2021). Two concepts of power: Knowledge (re)production in English history education discourse. In: Chapman A (ed.) Knowing History in Schools: Powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge. Knowledge and the Curriculum (pp. 152-176). London: UCL Press.

Young, M. & Muller, J. (2010). Three Educational Scenarios for the Future: lessons from the sociology of knowledge. European Journal of Education, 45, 11-27.

What can PISA tell us about Scottish Education?

This article has been authored by Marina Shapira and Mark Priestley, University of Stirling

Context – PISA 2022

One of the more interesting features of the regular Programme for International Student Assessment is the ways in which its results are selectively appropriated to support pre-existing ideological positions on Scottish education. The release this week of the latest scores has produced contrasting narratives. According to the government press release, ‘Scotland has maintained its international standing’. Conversely, other media reports have contained hyperbolic headlines about  results falling ‘off a cliff edge’.  The reality falls somewhere in between – Scotland has clearly suffered a long term decline it in its overall PISA scores in reading, mathematics and Science. This decline predates the introduction of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) by some years, with occasional upward trends (notably in reading in both 2012 and 2018. These long-term declines are not atypical across OECD countries, with similar tends evident elsewhere, including in Finland (often held up as a shining example of a successful educational system). Many countries have experienced a decline in PISA scores between 2018 and 2022. The  impact of global pandemic on this decline cannot be dismissed, although of course this is not the sole reason. Moreover, the decline is quite gradual over time, with shorter term changes between different PISA cycles – although the long term picture looks more dramatic.

For many commentators, the issue is the failure of CFE, and that the answer is to replace it an English-style, so-called ’knowledge-rich’ curriculum. While CfE undoubtedly has many problems, related to its structure and coherence, lack of attention to knowledge and its implementation, and badly needs reform, we do not believe that CfE is the sole, or even the primary issue affecting the PISA results. It is worthy of note that the top-performing Estonian curriculum – a competency-based model – has much more in common with CfE than it does with the English approach. Our belief is that the issues in Scotland are much more systemic, including the following:

• The shift from the 1990s onwards from a system premised on support to one premised on measurement. A focus on performance indicators, curriculum standards and benchmarks, reflecting broader neoliberal tendency in public governance, has created perverse incentives and a culture of performativity (often evidenced in a short-term focus on improving data and formulaic teaching to the test). This is a business rather than an educational rationale for schooling.
• A continued over-emphasis on qualifications in the secondary school, to the detriment of curriculum making that considers the broader question of what it means to become educated. This issue was, of course, identified by the OECD (2021) in its recent report and has been a key focus of the 2023 Hayward review.
• Poorly specified processes for supporting the implementation of CfE. These have led to a piecemeal approach, and often poor understanding of the core aims and principles the curriculum, in the lack of clear processes (and time) for practitioners to make sense of policy in relation to their own contexts.
• Poor resourcing of schools in an age of austerity, including limited teacher non-contact time and a lack of available cover for teachers to attend courses.

It is necessary to take a more nuanced systemic view of Scotland’s education system – but, inevitably, what we are seeing is the usual politicised point scoring.

Curriculum making in secondary schools – our recent research

In this context, it is useful to consider our recent study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. This explored curricular practices and the experiences of young people in secondary schools across Scotland under CfE. This study is considered in relation to the earlier 2018 PISA findings, as we have not yet undertaken a detailed analysis of the 2022 results.

Among our findings, we discovered a decline in National Qualifications entries in S4 under CfE, known in Scotland as curriculum narrowing.  Additionally, we observed evidence of social stratification in subject entry patterns in S4, indicating a greater decline in entries for students from disadvantaged areas, limiting their subject choices.

The findings from our study also suggest that the curriculum decisions made in schools are primarily driven by the demand for better attainment data, particularly in National Qualifications during the Senior Phase (school years S4-S6), with less emphasis on what it means for an individual to become an educated person in a modern and complex society (Shapira et al 2023[1]).

Considering the above, we argue that using attainment as the primary measure of curriculum success is unhealthy, counter-educational, and contradicts the goals of CfE (ibid). Given the pressure placed on schools by the government, local authorities, and school inspectors to raise attainment, to evaluate whether CfE meets its goals and provides comprehensive educational experiences, additional indicators are necessary.

The PISA dataset, while not directly linked to specific curriculum national features, evaluates 15-year-olds’ ability to apply school-acquired knowledge in real-life situations (OECD, 2020[2]; Schleicher, 2020[3]). PISA’s measures assess skills and competencies across an expanding range of countries, making it an invaluable resource for informing national educational policies and evaluating education system performance (although with the caveat that narrow use of its findings can lead to knee jerk reaction in policy, following so-called ‘PISA shock’ engendered by what has become in many respects a self-defeating global arms race).

It is important to note that CfE architects emphasised that attainment wasn’t the curriculum’s sole focus (Scottish Executive, 2006). CfE purposes are defined through the Four Capacities, aiming to enable learners to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, and effective contributors through a framework emphasising learning experiences, skills for life and work, and individual potential maximization (Education Scotland, n.d.).

The OECD’s measures of global competencies, available in PISA’s 2018 data, align with CfE’s vision. The Global Competences framework emphasises young people’s multidimensional capacity for understanding global issues, appreciating different perspectives, engaging in effective cross-cultural interactions, and contributing to collective well-being and sustainable development (OECD, 2020[4]). This alignment justifies the use of PISA measures to evaluate whether CfE has indeed achieved its goals and enables young people with developing the Four Capacities.

PISA’s global competences encompass students’ cultural awareness, problem discussion, and recognition of their ability to contribute to well-being. Thus, the 2018 PISA dataset, combined with Scottish administrative education data, offers a chance to compare outcomes across various competences assessed by PISA and those measures of attainment and outcomes available in administrative education data (such as subject entries, attainment in National level qualifications, and short-term destinations of school leavers). This would contribute to our understanding of the Scottish education system and its alignment with the goals outlined in the “four capacities” framework. Additionally, PISA data includes a rich set of family and school-level characteristics that are absent from administrative education data, providing valuable insights into how individual, family, and school-level attributes impact various outcomes for young people.

In our study, we used the 2018 Scotland PISA dataset linked with the administration education data.  We explored the relationship between the breadth of the secondary curriculum experienced by 15–16-year-old students, the level of attainment across National 5 qualifications and the outcome measures available in the PISA dataset.

We found (for detailed findings, see Shapira et al. 2023) that students who attended schools with a broader S4 curriculum were developing better competence in using general language, mathematics, and other knowledge and skills obtained in schools for solving real-life problems.

Furthermore, students exposed to a broader upper secondary curriculum not only achieved better academic outcomes but also developed a better understanding of the complexities of modern societies, self-awareness, resilience, and active citizenship. In schools with a broader curriculum in S4, students scored more highly on the OECD measures of global competences. For example, students attending schools with more subject entries for National 5 level qualifications in S4 were more likely to feel a sense of belonging to the school, learn about different cultures, feel proud of their accomplishments, and feel empowered to do something about the world’s problems.

Higher scores in international tests such as PISA English and Maths, and higher scores for OECD measures of global competences correlate positively with the schools that allow 15-year-old students to enrol in the larger number of National 5 qualifications in school year S4 and with the schools that demonstrate higher attainment in national qualifications at SCQF level 5 (National 5).

In summary, using the PISA data in conjunction with other data about a national education system can offer additional invaluable insights about national education, that can be used for informing national educational policies and evaluating education system performance.   Our findings indicate that the narrowing of the Scottish secondary curriculum under CfE not only correlates with poorer attainment in Scottish National qualifications and less successful transitions to positive destinations, but also has adverse effects on a broader range of student outcomes. Specifically, it positively correlates with measures available in PISA datasets, such as reading, mathematics, and science competencies, as well as those associated with the Global Competences Framework. Considering the alignment between the Global Competences Framework and the ‘Four Capacities’, we can conclude that employing additional outcome measures, such as those found in PISA data, provides additional valuable insights into how CfE achieves its objectives. It demonstrates that in schools offering a broad secondary curriculum, young people are more likely to acquire enhanced learning experiences, life skills, and realise their maximum individual potential. Given that curriculum narrowing disproportionately impacts disadvantaged learners attending schools in socioeconomically challenged areas, our findings from the analysis of 2018 Scotland’s PISA data reinforce our other findings obtained from the analysis of administrative data, as well as the data collected by our study, about the necessity of developing policies that enhance the range and structure of subjects offered to 15-year-olds to enhance their educational experiences and outcomes.

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[1] See the main  public report for details: Choice, Attainment and Positive Destinations: Exploring the impact of curriculum policy change on young people (nuffieldfoundation.org)

[2] OECD (2020) Global Release of PISA Global Competence Assessment Results. 2020 Global Conference, AFS Intercultural Programmes. 23-24 October.

[3] Schleicher, A. (2020) PISA 2018: Results and Interpretations. OECD. Retrieved from: PISA 2018 Insights and Interpretations FINAL PDF.pdf (oecd.org)

[4] OECD (2020) Global Release of PISA Global Competence Assessment Results. 2020 Global Conference, AFS Intercultural Programmes. 23-24 October.

Scotland’s proposed new Centre for Excellence in Teaching: the right approach for developing teacher agency?

Last week’s conference of the Scottish National party included an announcement by Cabinet Secretary Jenny Gilruth about the proposed establishment of a Centre for Teaching Excellence. The announcement was short on detail, beyond stating that the Centre will be co-developed by the government, Scotland’s teachers and professional associations. The announcement has stimulated a various reactions from teachers on social media. Some have offered a cautious welcome to a development which they hope will be ‘for teachers, with teachers’. Some teachers have greeted the announcement with weary resignation. Others have responded with cynicism about what they see as yet another shiny (and expensive) top-down initiative, in the absence of already promised actions on persistent issues such as reduced non-contact time.

Further details have been slow to emerge. The government news release that followed the announcement this week offers little new detail and is as notable for what it does not say, as much as for what it does say. So, what does all of this mean, and what are the implications for practice in Scottish schools?

The pluses

Let’s start with the positives. First, the development might be seen as a shift away from the obsession in recent years for ensuring quality through the measurement of performance, towards a realisation that excellent practice requires substantive support and resources. These might include the development of technical knowledge and skills about particular approaches to education (e.g., pedagogical approaches such as collaborative learning and/or classroom inquiry). They may include the development of the capacity for teachers to be curriculum makers – as Walter Doyle (1992) has argued, “to teach effectively, teachers must be responsible curriculum theorists” (p.77) – and curriculum making is a “a deliberative process of interpretation, judgment and responsibility” (p.69). And crucially, it should include the development of shared resources (e.g., curricular materials), for use across the education system.

Second, the announcement talks about ‘excellent teaching’ – as opposed to ‘excellent teachers’. This is refreshing, as it perhaps acknowledges – at least tacitly – that education is not just about the individual capacity of professionals, but is highly contingent on the conditions within which and by means of which excellent teaching can be enacted. As I have consistently highlighted in my work on teacher agency, education systems have tended to focus too much on building the capacity of individuals, and have neglected the cultural and structural domains for teaching. Broadly speaking, the former concerns ideas about what matters in education, and how to enact education. The latter is about the ways in which teachers, as professionals are situated in relation to others in the system. I shall say more about these in due course, but suffice to say for now, to develop excellent education, we need to attend to individual, cultural and structural factors if we are to avoid disabling our teachers. There is little point in developing excellent teachers if we continue to constrain them in hierarchical systems with limited time to develop their practice and with limited access to conceptual resources about education.

Some caveats

So far, so good. But perhaps I am reading too much into what is essentially a detail-free announcement. Scotland does not have a good track record in this area. The Regional Improvement Collaboratives (RICs) were conceived to fulfil a similar function and have had limited impact to date. I note here that they are being reviewed currently (again), and that their future may be in some doubt. I also note that, in common with many recent developments, the new Centre seems to focus narrowly on schools and schooling, neglecting wider contexts for education (e.g., Further Education, Community Learning and Development). The following paragraphs illustrate some of the bear traps that are associated with the development of the new centre.

My first concern relates to the danger that this will be a top-down initiative. Yes, the announcement talks about co-design with teachers, but it is a government-led development that is already explicitly linked in the announcement to current policy agendas (viz. closing the attainment gap). There is a real danger that the new Centre will become little more than a medium to disseminate ‘approved’ approaches to learning and teaching, essentially creating orthodoxies and reinforcing existing tendencies to see teaching as the ‘delivery’ of certain techniques and the teachers as an uncritical technicians. We need to educate/develop teachers as critical thinkers who decide on most appropriate actions, not train them to follow a particular strategy which may not be appropriate for all children.  Reducing teaching in this way ignores the importance of context. It adopts a reductive ‘what works?’ approach rather than developing more nuanced views about ‘what might work in particular contexts?’. It ignores the wealth of research that positions teachers as critical professionals who mediate policy and interpret ideas as they translate them into practice as part of a community.

Linked to the above, and something which rings alarm bells for me, is the apparent lack of consideration about the involvement of researchers, alongside the place of educational research and theories in the development of excellent teaching. How will a centre ‘co-designed with our teachers and professional associations…. put Scotland at the forefront of innovative research in teaching practice’ if it does not engage with researchers? Our research strongly illustrates the value of collaboration between teachers and researchers (e.g., Priestley & Drew, 2019). Researchers bring different kinds of expertise to the conversation, which complements the expertise of teachers. Of particular value is the role that research plays in interrupting habitual practices; this is an essential prerequisite if new initiatives are not to be shaped by existing patterns of thinking. One of the major success stories of Scottish education in recent years has been the part-funding of Master’s level study. Participants have reported a range of benefits, including enhanced professional knowledge and understanding, more expansive thinking about education, increased professional confidence, and more effective working patterns leading to sustainable change, which in turn impacts the outcomes for children and young people (feedback from student cohorts – see also: Watson & Drew, 2015; Priestley & Drew, 2019). The government’s decision to discontinue this funding seems myopic to say the least, and it is difficult to see how in-house training in existing agencies and the proposed Centre will provide the same benefits.

This brings us back almost full circle to the issue of teacher agency. Agency can be seen as potential – in the case of teachers, the potential to respond in a critical manner to problematic situations in their complex roles and to act meaningfully. An ecological understanding of agency (Priestley et al., 2015) would suggest that agency is not an innate capacity of individuals, but is achieved in particular circumstances, as individual qualities interact with available resources and constraints in teachers’ contexts.  High-capacity teachers may be thus enabled or disabled by their working conditions. The proposed centre, through working with teachers, may go some way towards enhancing teacher agency, through developing some of the technical skills required for excellent teaching. It may even have the potential to develop resources and to form professional networks that enhance teacher agency through developing conceptual and relational resources. Nevertheless, such efforts may prove to be futile if the system does not address the cultural and structural conditions that shape agency. We therefore need to think much more systemically about what it means to enable excellent teaching. This involves challenging prevalent ideas about what constitutes a good education in a system largely driven by the imperative to improve data – with its focus, especially in the senior phase of secondary education, on formulaic teaching-to-the-test. It involves reforming accountability processes which reward schools for gaming the system, and which limit the space needed for developing teaching and learning through encouraging time-consuming second order activity to evidence success. And it entails recognising that excellent teaching requires resources to flourish – relational resources afforded by professional networks, cultural resources afforded by engagement with research and other external perspectives and, crucially, the time and space for teachers to work in more constructive ways as curriculum makers.

References

Doyle, W. (1992b). Curriculum and pedagogy. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 486–516). New York: Macmillan.

Priestley, M., Biesta, G.J.J. & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Priestley, M. & Drew, V. (2019). Professional Enquiry: an ecological approach to developing teacher agency. In: D Godfrey and C. Brown (eds.), An Eco-System for Research-Engaged Schools (pp. 154-169). London: Routledge.

Watson, C. & Drew, V. (2015). Teachers’ desire for career-long learning: becoming ‘accomplished’—and masterly… British Educational Research Journal, 41, 448-461.

‘Choice, Attainment and Positive Destinations’: a summary of key findings and their implications

A post by Mark Priestley and Marina Shapira

In this post, my colleague Marina Shapira and I reflect upon the findings of our recently completed study, ‘Choice, Attainment and Positive Destinations: Exploring the impact of curriculum policy change on young people’. This research explored patterns of curriculum provision in Scottish secondary schools, along with the impact on young people in relation to subject uptake, attainment and transitions within and beyond school. The full public report is available for download here. The findings paint a stark picture of curriculum reform that has diverged considerably from its original aims with significant unintended consequences for young people, teachers and schools, and serious equity concerns. We therefore start this blog post with some reflections on the goals and principles of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), before providing a summary of our main findings and some reflections on the future, as Scotland grapples with the reform agenda following the 2021 OECD review, and subsequent Muir and Hayward reports.

CfE was first proposed in 2004, and subsequently enacted in schools from 2010. Its principles and vision (e.g. see below)were widely praised around the world. Introduced by a Labour/Lib Dem coalition, and subsequently pushed forward by the SNP, the curriculum’s core philosophy and structure long enjoyed all-party support at Holyrood. Despite this consensus on the overall direction of travel, however, the implementation of CfE has been considerably more troubled, and cracks have begun to appear as education has become a political football, and as the Scottish Government and its agencies have come under fire, leading to a series of ‘independent’ reviews, most notably by the OECD in 2015 and 2021.

Criticisms have been leveled at the implementation of CfE by political opponents of the SNP, but also from within the teaching profession and by education scholars. Particular concerns have been raised about the role of assessment in driving learning, curriculum narrowing, and excessive bureaucracy. Critics have pointed to a downgrading of knowledge in the new curriculum, as skills became the primary focus, and to the structure of the curriculum, framed as hundreds of learning outcomes, which encourages tick-box approaches to curriculum making in schools. There has been unhappiness expressed by teachers about the lack of opportunity (and time) to engage meaningfully in collaborative curriculum development, about poor resources, and about the lack of connection between national agencies and teachers.

When evaluating these claims, it is useful to consider the 2004 curriculum review, which aimed to:

• reduce over-crowding in the curriculum and make learning more enjoyable
• better connect the various stages of the curriculum from 3 to 18
• achieve a better balance between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ subjects and include a wider range of experiences
• make sure that assessment and certification support learning
• allow more choice to meet the needs of individual young people

(Scottish Executive 2004)

Issues such as these were at the forefront of our thinking when we embarked on our recently completed research project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Set in the context of debates about whether the curriculum was narrowing as a result of CfE, and whether this was indeed a problem, the research investigated the nature of curriculum provision in secondary schools in Scotland. We sought to understand the factors influencing curriculum decisions made by pupils and their families, teachers/schools and Local Authorities. We explored the effects of curriculum-making on educational attainment, transitions of young people and other outcomes. The research employed mixed methods, comprising analysis of linked existing datasets (the Scottish Longitudinal Study, administrative education data held by the Scottish Government, and Scotland’s PISA dataset), along with new data generated through a survey of school leaders (completed by a third of Scotland’s secondary schools) and focus groups and interviews with key stakeholders (Local Authorities, school leaders and teachers, young people and their parents). This research thus provides the most comprehensive picture of Scottish secondary school curriculum provision to date).

So, what did we find? Our findings fall into three areas: patterns of provision, explanations for these patterns; and effects. We conclude with some reflections on the implications for the reform process.

In the senior phase, we see an overall reduction in subjects studied and entries for National Qualifications in S4, confirming that the curriculum at this stage has narrowed. There has been steeper decline in enrolments in subjects such as Social Subjects, Expressive Arts and Modern Languages, compared to subjects seen as core curriculum (e.g., Maths and English). There is evidence of social stratification in overall and subject entry patterns in S4, with a steeper decline (e.g., fewer entries, a narrower range of subjects) affecting students from comparatively disadvantaged areas. This is accompanied by a greater likelihood of delayed patterns of entry to SCQF level 5 qualifications (in S5 rather than in S4) and Higher qualifications (in S6 rather than in S5) for students in these schools.

In the earlier Broad General Education (BGE) phase, there is some evidence of innovation (e.g., interdisciplinary learning), but the overall picture is one of traditional subject configurations, to prepare students for senior phase study. In many schools there is considerable fragmentation, with students in many schools seeing 15 or more subject teachers in a typical week, teaching unconnected content. The research suggests that, rather than being driven by the principle of the BGE to provide a broad foundational education for life, this provision is more often than not shaped by a desire to provide a series of taster courses for the senior phase. While such provision is certainly broad, it is difficult to maintain coherence in the face of this fragmentation. Conversely, in some schools, there is evidence of very early subject choice (often as early as the end of S1), as students are channeled into senior phase subjects when they should be experiencing, in accordance with the aims of CfE, a secondary BGE phase covering years S1 to S3.

The research confirmed earlier studies’ findings that the broad purposes and principles of CfE are welcomed by many teachers, but also suggested that these purposes (notably the Four Capacities) are only moderately influential in many schools, as the foundation for curriculum planning. Instead, the research indicates that much curriculum making is driven by external demands for data, especially evidence of raised attainment in National Qualifications. This backwash effect from National Qualifications encourages a culture of performativity, leading to the instrumental selection of content, the development of teaching approaches and the organisation of the curriculum to maximise attainment in the Senior Phase. Examples include the extreme fragmentation of the BGE curriculum mentioned above, as well as the existence of practices which are counter-educational and designed to enhance the school’s attainment statistics. These practices include abolishing low-performing subjects in the Senior Phase (regardless of whether these might be an essential part of a broad and balanced curriculum provision), teaching-to-the-test and channelling students into courses where they will gain the best grades, regardless of individuals’ interests. These practices are widely disliked by many in the system, including Directors of Education, but are seen as difficult to mitigate. The above tendencies are exacerbated by teacher shortages in key subjects, notably Technology.

Despite fewer young people entering SCQF level 5 qualifications in S4 since 2013, a higher proportion of those who took up these qualifications have passed. Similarly, the proportion of successful passes of Higher qualifications in S5 has increased since 2014. This could imply that more selective entry into SCQF level 5 qualifications introduced under CfE might have positively impacted the qualifications pass rates and may have also resulted in better pass rates for Higher qualifications.

This must be offset, however, by clear evidence that, in schools with a narrower curriculum, there seem to be negative consequences for young people in relation to wider attainment, transitions to subsequent study in school, and destinations beyond school.  A narrower curriculum in S4 is associated with fewer qualifications attained at SCQF level 5 qualifications in S5, at Higher level qualifications in S5 and at Advanced Higher levels qualifications in S6 (when taking account of demographic and school characteristics). There are also associations between a narrower curriculum in S4 and lower attainment in PISA tests, including measures of global competence, and between a narrower curriculum in S4 and less positive destinations after leaving school, especially in relation to Higher Education entry. When we consider the fact that schools serving disadvantaged areas are more likely to offer a narrower curriculum, this raises serious equity concerns.

In summary, we see a picture of curriculum provision in Scottish secondary schools primarily driven by factors that are not necessarily educational – or in other words to develop in young people the knowledge, skills and attributes necessary for living in an increasingly complex world. Instead, the research provides ample evidence that a great deal of curriculum making is driven by a need to fulfil external demands for the right kinds of data, particularly relating to attainment. In such a culture of performativity, it is difficult to keep educational purposes and principles at the forefront of thinking about the curriculum, with the potential for unintended consequences, such as those described in this article. It is concerning to see evidence that curriculum provision, designed primarily to enhance attainment statistics, can act contrary to the stated goals of CfE and may even be counter-educational (viz. the PISA global competence tests). It is a cause for concern that some curriculum making practices have negative consequences on subsequent attainment and transitions, predominantly affecting young people from less-advantaged backgrounds. These social justice issues are particularly ironic – and alarming – given the government’s policy focus on closing the gap. It is thus imperative that these issues are taken seriously by all stakeholders, as Scotland redesigns the system following the OECD, Muir and Hayward reports.

Some thoughts on Scotland’s education reform agenda; a contribution to the National Discussion on Education

Scotland’s National Discussion on education is now underway, concluding on 5 December 2022. This is intended to engage as many as possible in a conversation about the future directions of Scottish Education, following the 2021 OECD review of Curriculum for Excellence and subsequent Muir report on reforming governance. The purpose of the Discussion is to frame ‘what matters’ in Scottish Education, and to inform subsequent reforms. It is therefore important that as many people as possible – education professionals as well as young people and the wider community – partake in the conversation and have their say. The Discussion can be accessed via https://consult.gov.scot/learning-directorate/other-ways-to-get-involved/.

This short paper, in addition to being published on my blog, is my formal response to the National Discussion. I preface my thoughts with several caveats.

1. First, it is important that the education reform process is not rushed. While there is undoubted enthusiasm for reform, the last thing that Scotland’s hard-pressed system needs at present is a new wave of innovation overload. The first task is to develop a clear sense of what matters, then to develop a proportionate agenda for reform in the short, medium and long term. It concerns me greatly that we are already proceeding apace with reviews of and reforms to qualifications and governance without considering how changed priorities and visions might require different structures and policies, including curriculum frameworks.
2. The second caveat is an understanding of curriculum as being much broader than simply selection of content. Instead, I see curriculum as the multi-layered social practices, through which education is structured, enacted and evaluated (Priestley et al., 2021). These practices include the formation of ideas about education, selection of content, the structuring of that content, assessment processes and pedagogic approaches to learning and teaching.
3. Third, any reforms must be conceived, planned and enacted systemically, rather than undertaken in a piecemeal fashion, in order to avoid the emergence of conflicting practices caused by tensions between and within policies. The former approach allows us to view the interconnections between different practices and anticipate the tensions and unintended consequences that have all too often been the hallmark of the latter approach. I thus structure my arguments in this paper using the layered curriculum making typology outlined in our recent book, Curriculum Making in Europe[i]. This understanding promotes a systemic approach to curriculum making, where curriculum practices across the system are formulated to articulate with one another.
   • Supra curriculum making is the formation of ideas (i.e., ‘what matters in education?’)  that inform the more concrete tasks of curriculum design and development. While supra practices are often transnational in nature (e.g., promulgated by bodies such as the OECD), the National Discussion is certainly supra curriculum making, in that it will set the direction – purposes, principles and values – for subsequent reform.
   • Macro curriculum making is the operationalisation of ideas into policy, for example curriculum frameworks, often undertaken at a national level.
   • Meso curriculum making constitutes the activity that connects practitioners and policy. Often in Scotland, this has taken the form of guidance, but I would argue that active meso curriculum making, involving the activities of people, is more effective. This can take the form of expert teachers working across clusters of schools, teacher networks and capacity-building activities.
   • Micro curriculum making is the development of programmes of study at a school/college/organisation level.
   • Nano curriculum making is found in the day-to-day transactions that occur in classrooms and other educational spaces – that is, pedagogical interactions or curriculum events (Doyle, 1992[ii]).

With the above in mind, I shall briefly consider each layer, offering some thoughts about implications for the reform agenda.

Supra

I am pleased that the National Discussion has been placed up front in the process, notwithstanding my concerns expressed above. Clarity about what matters is a necessary precursor to other curriculum making, for example the development of infrastructure and qualifications reform. In this process, there needs to be a clear delineation between the following: purposes of education (i.e., the knowledge, skills and attributes to be developed through education need to be defined in relation to deeper questions of what education is for); educational principles that guide our thinking (e.g., the need to be inclusive); and the methodologies we adopt to achieve our purposes. Consideration of purposes is the best starting point for curriculum making. I would argue that while principles such as inclusion are important, they are not the ends of education in their own right. Similarly, methodologies such as cooperative learning and direct instruction are means of achieving our goals and need to be fit-for-purpose, rather than goals of education.

These are the elements that should frame the National Discussion in the first instance. I am concerned that some decisions that should rightly stem from this conversation appear to have been made already: for example, we seem to have already decided that the Refreshed Narrative[iii] is the starting point for considering reform (it was only ever intended as a ‘refresh’ of the message, rather than a reform of the curriculum); that the Four Capacities will only need tweaking; and that there is no need to reform the Experiences and Outcomes (Es&Os) as the fundamental framing of the curriculum. This leads me to consider macro curriculum making.

Macro

There are two aspects I wish to consider here.

1. Policy will need to be framed carefully to reflect both the National Discussion about what matters and to take into account expertise about curriculum design. Of particular concern is what has been termed the ‘technical form’ of the curriculum (Luke et al. 2012[iv]). I have serious concerns about the apparent dismissal of any need to reform the architecture of CfE, specifically the Es&Os. There is ample evidence of the malign effects of this curriculum framing on practice, for example a tendency to engage in audit approaches to curriculum making in schools to ‘tick off’ the learning outcomes (e.g., Priestley & Minty, 2013[v]). Moreover, I am extremely sceptical that this framing is capable of systematically developing substantive knowledge in the curriculum, a need highlighted by the OECD, as the Es&Os and subsequently developed benchmarks to not provide a coherent conceptual progression framework. In this respect, alternative ‘Big Ideas’ approaches seem to offer some potential[vi].
2. The likely directions of the post-Muir reforms to governance are a cause for concern. Critics have pointed to the number of senior people from existing agencies – arguably with an interest in maintaining the status quo – involved in the strategic boards tasked with redefining the national agencies. Current trajectories suggest that the reform of these may become to a large extent a rebranding exercise, with the new education agency at risk of becoming a Frankenstein organisation that has far too many disparate functions and an unclear sense of its overarching mission. More meaningful would be an overhaul which reconfigures the governance structures: an independent (from government) and smaller scale agency, incorporating expertise in educational thought and with an entirely strategic function (something like Ireland’s NCCA[vii]); and a series of operational bodies, some of which may be regional – for awarding qualifications, to undertake curriculum leadership etc.

I will refrain here from commenting on the current Hayward review of qualifications, except insofar as to emphasise that it needs to go beyond considering assessment methodology, to encompass the structure of the senior phase – as current approaches comprising a series of two term dashes can lead to formulaic teaching and exert a significant backwash effect on the preceding Broad General Education phase.

Meso

This leads us to look at meso curriculum making. The European case studies in our recent book (Priestley et al., 2021) suggest that meso curriculum making is highly significant in successful systems. This includes activities such as shared sense-making (e.g., Finland[viii]), expert curriculum leadership (e.g., Sweden[ix], Cyprus[x]) and practitioner networks (Ireland[xi]). Meso curriculum making is fundamentally about connecting practitioners with policy in a meaningful way, with a focus on developing practice that is fit for purpose. It is about utilising expertise and building additional capacity. And it is about generating and pooling resources that can be used across the system, to avoid schools and other organisations having to reinvent the wheel. My view is that the Regional Improvement Collaboratives (RICs), if repurposed to focus on support rather than the measurement of performance, could fulfil this function. They need to develop a distinctive identity and sense of purpose that does not simply duplicate Local Authority operations; and they need to become more responsive to – and recognisable by – people in the system than at present, and my suggestion is to make extensive use of experienced practitioners, seconded part time but remaining in their own settings for part of the week, to act as network leaders.

Micro

I see two main issues to be addressed in the reform agenda, both of which relate to professional agency (e.g., see Priestley et al., 2015[xii]).

1. The capacity of people in educational organisations to engage in curriculum making is key. This is partly cultural. There is an urgent need to develop both the conceptual and the practical basis for curriculum making. This can be achieved through the government funded Master’s level study that already occurs across the system, and I would recommend that this be extended. It can also occur through a more systematic use of meso structures such as the RICs for extended professional learning. A great deal can be achieved through engaging practitioners as curriculum makers, in a systematic approach that takes to heart Lawrence Stenhouse’s (1975[xiii]) axiom that there is not curriculum development without teacher development.
2. The problem is also structural, in that it is about much more than raising individual capacity and changing organisational cultures. We urgently need to address the system issues that stand in the way of practitioners realising the goals of curriculum. This primarily relates, for example, to the ways in which system demands call the tune for young people, schools and teachers. Our soon-to-be-published Nuffield-funded research[xiv] in secondary schools has cast a very bright light on how demands linked to producing the ‘right sort of data’ lead to decisions being made that can be counter-educational. There is a culture of performativity in secondary schools, which produces strong backwash effects as National Qualifications attainment drives curricular decisions as early as S1, in turn leading to a host of problems such as fragmentation, incoherence and curriculum narrowing. Anecdotally, we are also seeing curriculum narrowing in primary schools as a relentless focus on measuring literacy and numeracy leads to what one teacher described to me as the ‘’virtual disappearance’ of other subjects such as expressive arts.

Nano

I do not have the space here to write extensively on the pedagogical interactions that form nano curriculum making. I will make, however, one observation here: that the nano curriculum – as the purposeful and meaningful curriculum events through which young people become educated – is arguably the most important curriculum. It makes little sense, therefore, to have a situation where nano curriculum making is shaped – and distorted – by external demands that effectively turned the system on its head. A key finding of our recent Nuffield research is just this – that instead of the system supporting meaningful nano curriculum making, nano curriculum making more often serves the arbitrary demands of a system geared to produce a narrative of success. As Michael Apple noted more than 20 years ago (and matters have deteriorated further since then), there was a ‘subtle shift in emphasis … from student needs to student performance, and from what the school does for the student to what the student does for the school’ (Apple 2001, p. 413[xv]). Reforms leading from the National Discussion provide an opportunity to break this destructive and counter-productive cycle in Scotland.

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[i] Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald. https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Curriculum-Making-in-Europe/?K=9781838677381 

[ii] Doyle, W. (1992). Curriculum and pedagogy. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 486–516). New York: Macmillan.

[iii] https://scotlandscurriculum.scot/

[iv] Luke, A., Woods, A., & Weir, K. (2012) Curriculum Design, Equity and the Technical Form of the Curriculum. In:  A. Luke, A. Woods & K. Weir (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity: A primer and model (pp. 1-5).  New York, NY: Routledge.

[v] Priestley, M & Minty, S (2013). Curriculum for Excellence: ‘A brilliant idea, but..’. Scottish Educational Review, 45[1], 39-52.

[vi] For example, British Columbia. https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/

[vii] National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. https://ncca.ie/en/

[viii] Chapter 10, Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald.

[ix] Chapter 9, Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald.

[x] Chapter 2, Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald.

[xi] Chapter 8, Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald.

[xii] Priestley, M., Biesta, G.J.J. & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

[xiii] Stenhouse, L. (1975). An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinemann.

[xiv] Shapira, M., Priestley, M., Peace-Hughes, T., Barnett, C. & Ritchie, M. (2022). Choice, Attainment and Positive Destinations: Exploring the impact of curriculum policy change on young people. University of Stirling/Nuffield Foundation.

[xv] Apple, M.W. (2001). Comparing neo-liberal projects and inequality in education. Comparative Education, 37[4], 409-423.

The Muir Report: reflections and implications

The long-awaited publication of Ken Muir’s report on the agencies that govern Scottish education comes at a time of turmoil in the system, as schools continue to struggle with the impact of the pandemic. Added to the wider set of recommendations for reform stemming from last year’s OECD reports, and the likelihood of significant change to qualifications that will follow the publication of Louise Hayward’s review in December 2022, one has to ask: ‘How on earth will such a stretched system cope with this magnitude of change?’.

However, according to many respondents contributing to the Muir review, the time is ripe for change, and many in the system welcome it. This is a conclusion shared by many of the participants in our ongoing Nuffield-funded research study on curriculum making, and one which I would heartily concur with. I am convinced that change is eminently possible, but that the window for enacting it is limited, and will rapidly close if we do not seize the moment.

The report offers a useful and fairly comprehensive analysis, and should be taken seriously by the government, and by the system more broadly. Recommendations include: the establishment of a new national debate on education, to develop a strong vision for renewing the curriculum; the abolition of SQA; separation of the current accreditation and awarding functions of SQA (the replacement agency would lose the former to avoid potential conflicts of interest); the establishment of a new national agency with oversight of curriculum and assessment to replace (or reform) Education Scotland; and the establishment of an independent inspection body.

The report has elicited a range of responses, from outright cynicism to unbridled enthusiasm. Exponents of the former suggest that the system will readily assimilate the report, leading to at best only cosmetic changes; and to be fair to them, the Scottish Government has a mixed record in this respect. For example, the various initiatives that stemmed from the 2015 OECD review have tended to be piecemeal and fairly superficial, failing to address some of the fundamental issues that continue to impede the development of Curriculum for Excellence (more about these in due course). I share some of these concerns that the reform agenda will focus on maintaining the status quo, driven by the interests of the system; or to cite Ken Muir, simply rearrange the deckchairs. The somewhat muted response of the government, with reservations about, for example, ceding control over curriculum policy to a new agency, only serves to reinforce these sentiments. More is needed if we are to address some of the long-term policy clutter and incoherence which shapes curriculum making in schools.

Muir’s report offers an insightful view of the current system with its various strengths and considerable weaknesses. While affirming the professionalism and expertise that reside in the system, it paints a vivid picture of an over-complex landscape of multiple, often conflicting agencies and policies, combined with poor support for curriculum making; these render the enactment of CfE very difficult for many schools. There are some shocking testimonies about the educational experiences of many young people, which relate not just to contradictions in official curriculum policy and its enactment in schools, but also to the hidden curriculum – the often-unspoken assumptions about what really matters in schools.

The Muir Report suggests that a new agency should encompass not just curriculum and assessment but also learning and teaching. This suggests the perpetuation of a rather dated and narrow view of curriculum as content (or perhaps limited to the official curriculum documents), which has been endemic to practice in Scotland, and which artificially separates out content from other curricular practices such as pedagogy, assessment and provision. I agree with Muir that the new agency needs to be concerned with all of these, but believe that it will remain ineffective and fragmented unless we develop more holistic ways of understanding curriculum. For example, we develop in our recent book the idea of curriculum as the social practices through which education is planned, designed, developed and enacted in schools – content selection, assessment, pedagogy, support infrastructure, provision, etc. This approach allows us to think more systemically about curricular practices in different sites, from policy making, through support and guidance and to curriculum planning and enactment in schools and classrooms. It also allows us to analyze how different policies might act in tension with one another, for example how accountability practices might undermine curriculum aims. This is something identified by Muir in his report.

The report neatly conveys the idea that changing the structures, while necessary, should only be a starting point for more wholesale cultural change. I strongly agree. A rebranding exercise will not fix the endemic problems that exist in the system, but structural change will provide the mechanisms, potentially, to address them, including decluttering the crowded and often incoherent landscape for curriculum making in Scotland.

I note here that the proposed national agency will have a very broad scope, creating the potential for yet another monolithic organization, with rigid hierarchies, demarcations and communication issues. If this happens, then we will have wasted our time.

There is an urgent need to tackle issues of hierarchy, bureaucracy, lack of trust, control from the centre, and the crude accountability and data mechanisms that are associated with current structures and systems. Simply changing the structures will not on its own address these issues. Muir acknowledges this, calling for:

‘a redistribution of power, influence, and resource within Scottish education to one that reflects the principles of subsidiarity, genuinely empowers teachers and practitioners and where learners’ voices, experiences, perspectives and rights are central to decision making.’ (p.15)

We also need to consider how the RICs might articulate with these new structures. Moreover, what sort of expertise is needed in this agency? Yes, there needs to be a strong practitioner voice, but wider expertise is also needed in my view, for example in educational research and theory. This combination of experience and expertise is manifestly limited in existing agencies, including (as noted by Muir) key government departments:

‘Ultimately, it is Scottish Government and Ministers who are responsible for all aspects of education policy. However, how those policies are arrived at and what they should contain are felt by many in the system to be something that is closed off to them, lying almost exclusively in the domain of civil servants, many of whom have little or no direct experience of education.’ (p.55)

Muir also notes the revolving door between senior agency and government roles, that can act as an impediment to new thinking.

Building capacity is a key issue – in agencies, in the newly independent inspectorate and across the system more widely. Master’s-level study in Education generally, and curriculum studies specifically, needs to be a key component here, for practitioners and agency staff, expanding expertise and interrupting taken for granted assumptions about education.

A simple question, one which should perhaps be more prominent in underpinning the structural reforms is: ‘To what extent will they enable the development of purposeful educational practice – for example pedagogy – in schools and other settings?’. If we take the view that the important curriculum is that experienced in classrooms and other educational spaces, then we should also take the view that the role of the system is to support this (with particular attention to professional learning), and the agency of staff and children. Too often, the inverse seems to be the case, with activity in schools being organized to support system goals, for example boosting attainment statistics. What matters are the knowledge, skills and attributes we wish to develop through education (purposes), how that is achieved in practice in classrooms, and how the system can best support this. This means being clear about what matters (i.e., the proposed national conversation about purposes and a clear expression of these – a new version of the Four Capacities – in any future curriculum framework). It also means being clear about process (i.e., how purposes are enacted into practice).

We live in interesting times, and pressures on schools are significant at present. Nevertheless, the Muir Report offers an opportunity to break the mould in Scottish education, and we should work to achieve that goal – the result could be a system more grounded in educational purposes and principles, and one that genuinely serves the interests of children and young people.

Some thoughts on qualifications reform in the context of the Stobart report

Today sees the long-awaited publication of Gordon Stobart’s comparative review of international qualifications systems – see https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/upper-secondary-education-student-assessment-in-scotland_d8785ddf-en. This report, written to complement the main OECD review of the Scottish Curriculum, published in June, seeks to develop a broader understanding of issues relevant to qualifications reform, both examining systems that are similar to Scotland (some grounded in the same British tradition of awarding qualifications via terminal examinations) and alternative approaches. The report provides a comparative analysis of nine systems, four situated within the British tradition, with an emphasis on terminal examinations, and five taking alternative approaches.

Stobart’s report makes a number of recommendations related to reconfiguring the current system, including increasing its “resilience” through a greater recourse to continuous school-based assessment and technology-based approaches to assessment, supported by effective national moderation systems. It explores the “decluttering” of the current three-tier approach with its two-term dashes and overloaded diet of examinations, which reduce learning time.  I would suggest that this is dependent on Scotland becoming a system which both places high-trust in its teachers and provides the system resources needed to support this way of working. Stobart also calls for greater levels of consultation with young people, and an increase in the range of vocational qualifications, affording greater parity of esteem with their academic counterparts.

The report points to the social rather than scientific origins of public qualifications systems and their associated assessment methodologies. An important observation to make is that Scotland’s current system is not a natural, God-given phenomenon, nor indeed even the best approach. Stobart suggests that Scotland’s approaches, with their social grounding in the British (Victorian) tradition of the high-stakes exams and multiple tiers/exit points are out of step with the rest of the world in many respects, and implies that Scotland could learn much from the comparative OECD study.

The report repeatedly talks about the notion of the resilient qualifications system, making the point that the UK systems, with their emphasis on terminal examinations, have coped comparatively badly with the pandemic. COVID-19 has thus provided impetus for reform, with one lesson being that systems reliant on continuous, school-based assessment have been more resilient in a time of crisis.

A key question relates to how the senior phase might be aligned better with CfE, which in line with curricular reform worldwide, has placed an emphasis on new skills and domains of knowledge (including digital technology) that are not always readily assessed by exams.

The report also highlights considerable challenges in moving to new systems. These include issues relating to cultural change (often opposition from within the system), the reliability of different forms of assessment and workload. For example, Stobart points to evidence from the 2021 Alternative Certification Model, which suggests that a move to a particular teacher-based assessment approach increased workload, as teachers and young people embarked on a treadmill of mini-exams, marked internally. This illustrates, as Stobart points out, that assessment systems are essentially a compromise between issues of validity, reliability and manageability.

“A dependable assessment is one that can reliably give a trustworthy estimate of students’ capabilities. It involves an optimal trade-off between construct validity, reliability, and manageability. A dependable assessment is one that can reliably give a trustworthy estimate of students’ capabilities. It involves an optimal trade-off between construct validity, reliability, and manageability.” (p.8)

The above suggests that school-based assessment will need two developments:

1. work to enhance teachers’ assessment literacy, thus broadening the assessment methods used, and in particular embedding them more in the day-to-day learning that takes place in classrooms;
2. and the development of rigorous but manageable moderation systems.

The Stobart report also refers to the increasing use of national qualifications results for school accountability purposes, which has contributed to their lack of alignment with CfE and to tendencies such as formulaic teaching to the test, backwash into the earlier BGE phase (which becomes shaped by the demands of future qualifications) and curriculum narrowing. This is a serious issue that will need to be addressed as part of any programme of qualifications reform; Scotland will need to develop data collection related to attainment that does not exert significant backwash effects on the system, thus encouraging performativity, for example surveys of achievement that sample representative populations.

It seems to me that this report raises three board implications for reform of Scotland’s qualifications system. First, there are implications related to the structure of the qualifications phase. For example, this raises questions about whether a series of steps on a ladder, as in the three-tier Scottish system, is tenable, or whether Scotland should develop a more holistic senior phase allowing longer and/or modular courses and fewer points of assessment. A related issue here is whether there should be a single leaving certificate (even a Baccalaureate), signifying completion of secondary schooling, or single subject certification, as is currently the case across the UK. According to Stobart:

“This raises questions about the nature and purpose of national examinations at age 16 and the message they send. If they are intended to certificate the successful completion of the curriculum in the first five years of secondary school education, a curriculum which now involves a wider range of skills, are there more valid ways of assessing educational progress? Are traditional single-subject examinations outdated at this stage?” (p.17).

National testing at 16 is rare internationally, and where it occurs it is generally much more limited in scope. In New Zealand, a system formerly very similar to Scotland’s three-tier approach, the School Certificate taken at 16 has been abolished. Stobart also points to systems where both vocational and academic qualifications can contribute to a school leaving certificate, addressing issues of parity of esteem between different pathways.

A second implication relates to assessment methodology, for example whether a qualification is based on examinations and formal tests or assessed through a wider range of methods, including portfolios, orals, continuous assessment of course work, and whether qualifications are externally or internally assessed. Of course, these are not simple either/or dichotomies. I do not advocate the total replacement of exams by other forms of assessment. But we need to remember that an exam is simply a means of assessment, not an end in its own right. I do, however, support developing a more eclectic approach that is based upon the principle of fitness-for-purpose – and this will vary from subject to subject. Developments in technology open up new possibilities here. Stobart makes the point – contrary to a much repeated trope that exams are fairer for disadvantaged children – that varied methodologies are more equitable in diverse populations: “The use of more varied formats, for example school-based assessments and practical work in vocational qualifications, represent ways of making qualifications more fit-for-purpose for a more diverse candidature” (p.18). He also reiterates that, in many systems, the bulk of marks constituting a qualification derive from teacher assessment (e.g., Ontario, 70%; Norway, 80%).

A third implication relates to the underpinning model for the qualification. In the case of Scotland, qualifications reform raises the possibility of questioning Scotland’s adherence to the competency-based education and training (CBET) model, originally designed for vocational assessment. This may seem like an academic point, but CBET comes with consequences. For example, its emphasis on mastery has led to the notion that all content needs to be tested, leading to the procession of unit tests that have taken up teaching and learning time in National Qualifications. Demonstrating mastery may well be important when learning to wire a plug, but is arguably less necessary when discussing a topic in History. Indeed, the use of the competency-based model for assessing academic subjects has been the source of much critique over the years

A strong message from the report is that wholesale reforms of systems need to account for the views of teachers, as opposition to reforms imposed on the profession (no matter how well-thought through) is likely to contribute to their failure. Full participation of the profession in qualifications reform would seem to be an essential prerequisite. Winning the hearts and minds of students and parents is also necessary – although existing evidence cited by Stobart suggests already strong support amongst these groups for a shift away from exams. As the Stobart report states:

“Public confidence is vital if an assessment system is to be effective, while a loss of faith in a system will undermine the status and value of qualifications. If they are perceived as unfair, a validity and reliability issue, or unmanageable (by students and teachers), results will not be trusted.” (p.36)

In summary, the Stobart report provides much food for thought. It seeks to dispel a number of assumptions about the existing Scottish system, through comparison with other systems. And it offers a tentative blueprint for reform – arguably much needed – to Scotland’s qualifications system. Of course, the way forward is up to us.

Reframing curriculum making

In our recent book (Priestley et al, 2021), we build upon existing conceptual models or framings of curriculum making, formulated over the past 50 years by eminent scholars such as Goodlad, Doyle, Deng and van den Akker. One of the enduring critiques of these approaches is that they are linear and hierarchical, or can be used in ways that lend themselves to seeing curriculum making as a top-down exercise that percolates down an education system. In developing our own conceptual framing, we have tried to move away from the notion of ‘level’ to towards an idea that curriculum making, as a social practice, occurs in different ‘sites of activity’. This is captured in the diagram below, which appears in chapter one of the book. This framing sees sites of activity as being connected in multiple, and non-linear/hierarchical ways, allowing for movement of actors between sites and for influences to work in multiple directions in an education system. Thus, for example, teachers may be involved in curriculum making in nano, micro, meso and macro sites of activity, as was recently the case in Wales, where some pioneer teachers were involved in day to day curriculum making in schools, in the support activities that span schools and in writing national curriculum specifications.

Site of activity	Examples of activity	Examples of actors
Supra	Transnational curricular discourse generation, policy borrowing and lending; policy learning	OECD; World Bank; UNESCO; EU
Macro	Development of curriculum policy frameworks; legislation to establish agencies and infrastructure	National governments, curriculum agencies
Meso	Production of guidance; leadership of and support for curriculum making; production of resources	National governments; curriculum agencies; district authorities; textbook publishers; curriculum brokers; subject-area counsellors
Micro	School level curriculum making: programme design; lesson-planning	Principals; senior leaders; middle leaders; teachers
Nano	Curriculum making in classrooms and other learning spaces: pedagogic interactions; curriculum events	Teachers; students

By presenting this as a table, we are of course vulnerable to the same charges that this model is linear and hierarchical, and it has been pointed out to me, quite rightly, that we place students merely in the nano site, suggesting that they are (and perhaps should be) only involved in curriculum making in the classroom. Of course this was not our intention. Indeed, we were cognisant of these risks when writing the book, and so the concluding chapter of the book discusses the issue and presents the conceptual framing differently, as a set of interlocking wheels (below). This, we hope, captures better the idea of curriculum making as a system, whereby actors can move between sites and fulfil different curriculum making functions. Indeed the evidence from the European case studies in the book suggests that this is highly beneficial: for building capacity; for developing shared understanding across systems; and for fostering meaningful curriculum making.

Reference

Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald. https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Curriculum-Making-in-Europe/?K=9781838677381

Remaking curriculum making: how should we support curriculum development?

Over the past couple of months, I have spoken at several events (research seminars, Education Scotland’s Excellence in Headship programme, etc.) about ideas in our new book (Priestley et al., 2021), Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Foremost amongst these has been the idea that curriculum is made (and remade) across different sites of activity within education systems. In particular, I have been asked about meso curriculum making, as this is an idea that appears to be unfamiliar to many. In this blog post, I will explore this idea briefly, showing how well-developed meso curriculum making seems to be in some countries, as illustrated in the case studies in our book, a crucial element in successful enactment of curriculum policy into practice. I start with some general thoughts about curriculum making.

Curriculum making

In the book, we draw upon case studies from nine countries to illustrate the idea of curriculum making, to which there are at least three dimensions.

• The notion of curriculum as social practice; something that is made by practitioners and other actors (e.g. policy developers) working with each other.
• The multiple layers or sites of education systems, across which curriculum is made in its various forms, for example schools and district offices, policymaking arenas, and national agencies.
• The various practices which comprise curriculum, including: the selection of knowledge/content; pedagogical approaches; organization of teaching (e.g. timetabling); and the production of resources and infrastructure for supporting curriculum making in schools.

These dimensions are captured in the table below.

Site of activity	Examples of activity	Examples of actors
Supra	Transnational curricular discourse generation, policy borrowing and lending; policy learning	OECD; World Bank; UNESCO; EU
Macro	Development of curriculum policy frameworks; legislation to establish agencies and infrastructure	National governments, curriculum agencies
Meso	Production of guidance; leadership of and support for curriculum making; production of resources	National governments; curriculum agencies; district authorities; textbook publishers; curriculum brokers; subject-area counsellors
Micro	School level curriculum making: programme design; lesson-planning	Principals; senior leaders; middle leaders; teachers
Nano	Curriculum making in classrooms and other learning spaces: pedagogic interactions; curriculum events	Teachers; students

(Priestley et al. 2021)

This view of curriculum strongly emphasises the fact that curriculum making is systemic. As Michael Connolly reminds us, curriculum:

“is a complex system involving teachers, students, curricular content, social settings, and all manner of impinging matters ranging from the local to the international. It is a system that needs to be understood systemically. The question is […] how it all works together.” (Connelly, 2013, p. ix).

Meso curriculum making: ‘strengthening the middle’

Within any education system, meso curriculum making is activity which sits between policy and schools – in other words curriculum making that connects practitioners with policy. At a basic level, meso curriculum making can comprise written guidance on policy, but we saw evidence across Europe of more nuanced and developed activity than the simple provision of glossy booklets and websites. These included processes for sense-making in Finland, and the provision of leadership, networking opportunities and professional learning for schools (e.g. the Subject Counsellor in Cyprus, Junior Cycle Teams in Ireland). These examples are all premised on a view of meso curriculum making as support, whether this be through fostering understanding of new policy that goes beyond slogans and soundbites, or though the facilitation of local curriculum making via leadership or connecting teachers with each other. They do not emphasise externally imposed accountability, but instead focus more on developing teachers’ agency to become curriculum makers.

Misguided curriculum making

The above discussion casts strong doubt on many of the ways in which curriculum policy has come to be made and implemented in recent years in many countries. System complexity readily leads to unintended consequences. Attempts to micro-manage policy implementation, for example through over-specified teacher proof curricula (so-called input regulation), have been shown to be ineffective. Fidelity from policy to practice is a pipe dream, rendered impossible by the inevitable processes of interpretation, mediation, and translation that occur as professionals operationalize curriculum policy across widely different settings.

More recent trends for less prescriptive curricula, accompanied by a rhetoric of schools and teacher autonomy, have ostensibly afforded greater agency in curriculum making. They have, however, often been accompanied a removal of support, and its replacement by output regulation, through performance indicators, evaluative use of attainment data, benchmarking and external scrutiny, which have combined to erode teacher autonomy as effectively as did their more prescriptive predecessors. Moreover, these approaches, with their emphasis on evaluation methodologies, have led to a performative audit culture in our schools, intensive bureaucracy, increased workload, perverse incentives and instrumental decision making.

Curriculum making in Scotland

In Scotland, the development of Curriculum for Excellence has been characterised by much of the above. As a result, the curriculum remains, in my opinion, at best only partially enacted in many schools. Curriculum making has often tended to be driven by imperatives other than the core purposes and values of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). This can be seen in secondary schools, where the crucial S1-3 Broad General Education phase, intended as a foundational stage of education, remains, more often than not, as little more than a fragmented preparation for the senior qualifications phase that follows. It is also visible in primary schools, where a narrow focus on literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing, and STEM seems to be crowding out other subject areas. In my view, this situation is largely a result of two defining characteristics of the Scottish education system. The first is hierarchy. Scotland is most certainly not short of educational ideas and initiatives (or reams of written guidance); but many of these are formulated in offices remote from schools and imposed externally. I have seen plenty of evidence from teachers of examples where innovation has been discouraged because it is seen as straying from official priorities; these include a headteacher instructed by the local authority that curriculum development was not to be on the school plan because the immediate imperative was to raise attainment, and a teacher told that she could not cover a topical subject with a primary class (who had expressed an interest in this) because the priorities were numeracy and literacy. The second characteristic is an over-emphasis on evaluation methodologies, often external to the school, which might be termed ‘evaluationitis’. This can encourage competition rather than collaboration between schools. Even where evaluation is done internally (for example the use of HGIOS 4 indicators), these are often evidenced primarily for an external audience, and become quite performative. And even where there has been a serious attempt to introduce new meso curriculum making structures, Regional Improvement Collaboratives (RICs) established as infrastructure to support the development of practice in schools, this worthy initiative has been captured by the twin blight of hierarchy and evaluationitis; the RICs seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time and resources generating performance data and evaluating their own initiatives.  In combination, I would argue that these two features of Scottish education have militated against constructive curriculum making in the context of CfE.

Where next?

It is of course easy to criticise without offering alternatives, and I propose to sketch out here how meso curriculum making in Scotland might be reconfigured to make it more effective. This is fundamentally about developing new strategies that are more participative.

“Curriculum making strategies that allow actors to experience themselves as trusted and capable participants in curriculum making and make sense of it together with others are the most effective ones – ‘effective’ meaning here that people relate to the aims of the curriculum they co-construct and feel ownership, and through that are willing to adapt and develop not only curriculum, but also the educational system and settings within which they work” (Alvunger, et al., pp. 288-9).

I would argue that the forthcoming OECD report into the Scottish curriculum, like the ongoing pandemic, will offer an opportunity for reflection on what matters in education – a moment in which sacred cows can be questioned, and where real change may, for a short period, be possible. This will take some courage, as it will mean challenging some of the institutional structures and cultural assumptions that underpin the system; but it is necessary if we are to realise some of the laudable ambitions for the system set out in CfE, and in accompanying policies such as the empowered system, which aspire to maximise teacher agency.

A good start is a refocusing of macro policy making, from a primary focus on the measurement of outputs to a greater emphasis on the design of quality inputs. This will require curriculum policy as conceptual framing rather than prescriptive regulation. I note here that the ‘technical form’ of the curriculum (Luke, et al., 2012) – curriculum framed as ‘measurable’ outputs – exerts particular effects on schools and teacher curriculum making, and consideration should be given to reframing this approach. Greater consideration needs to be given to policies which undermine or act in tension with curriculum goals, especially the evaluative use of data for accountability purposes. Importantly, macro curriculum making includes creating the conditions for curriculum making in different parts of the system – this points to the important role of the government in reconfiguring the infrastructure for meso curriculum making. This will involve the allocation of significant resources – and it also involves affording trust to professionals.

As we indicate in the book, meso curriculum making seems to be a highly significant factor in fostering constructive curriculum making in schools, and this seems to work well when it actively involves teachers. In my view, this activity needs to be completely reconfigured in Scotland, mitigating the effects of hierarchy and evaluationitis. In practice this might mean the following:

• Revisioning the RICs, so that they cease to be yet another layer in the hierarchy, with performance management functions. Instead, their explicit focus should be on supporting practice, and they should act as a conduit for pooling local authority resources to support curriculum making in schools.
• Re-structuring the RICS as teacher networks. This means fewer full-time staff, and more recourse to teachers currently working in schools, perhaps through 50/50 school/RIC secondment arrangements. Such teachers would simultaneously have their feet both in the day-to-day world of teaching and have opportunities to develop their capacity as curriculum makers through leadership roles across schools. Importantly, they would seem less remote from schools than the current system of full-time secondees working in Education Scotland and the RICs.

These measures would serve to shift the curriculum making focus from an individual, departmental or single school level activity to one that draws more widely on cooperation across schools, and would do much to address common criticisms; that the curriculum is the responsibility of individuals and that curriculum making often entails reinventing the wheel across multiple settings.

While the structural barriers in the Scottish system would make establishing such an approach difficult, we also currently have opportunities. As I stated previously, the pandemic and OECD review have created a window for change. Moreover, Scotland has developed excellent system capacity in recent years, through the thousands of teachers completing funded Master’s level study; these people are an excellent resource for the system, but we need to start trusting them more, and we need to utilise their expertise in more imaginative ways.

The sort of approach that I envision here has great potential to transform the ways in which we plan, enact and evaluate educational practice. Teacher networks might serve as crucibles for developing subject specific resources across groups of schools and fostering critical system level curriculum development based on cooperation rather than on competition. They may act as a conduit for operating the sorts of national assessment and moderation systems needed if Scotland overhauls its qualifications following the OECD review. Moreover, such networks provide an excellent basis for peer-evaluation of practice, with the potential in the long term to provide an effective replacement for the current system of external inspections. In all three examples, I see opportunities to build the capacity of the system for improvement, and to enhance the agency of teachers as curriculum makers. Emerging evidence suggests that this has been exactly what happened in Wales, where Pioneer Teachers have been involved in macro curriculum policy making, and meso curriculum support and leadership, while continuing to work in schools for part of their time.  In the case of the Welsh Pioneer Teachers, an outcome has been the development of significant curriculum making capacity amongst a sizeable cohort of teachers (Priestley, et al., 2019). This has to be a good thing, with the outcomes of better curriculum making, more meaningful educational experiences for our young people, and ultimately a more coherent education system.

References

Alvunger, D., Soini, T., Philippou, S. & Priestley, M. (2021). Conclusions: Patterns and trends in curriculum making in Europe. In: M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou. & T. Soini (Eds.), Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts (pp. 273-293). Bingley: Emerald.

Connelly, F.M. (2013). Foreword. In: Deng, Z., Gopinathan, S., & Lee, C. K. E. (Eds.), Globalization and the Singapore curriculum: From policy to classroom (pp. vii-xii).  Singapore: Springer.

Luke, A., Woods, A., & Weir, K. (2012) Curriculum Design, Equity and the Technical Form of the Curriculum. In:  A. Luke, A. Woods & K. Weir (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity: A primer and model (pp. 1-5).  New York, NY: Routledge.

Priestley, M., Crick, T. & Hizli Alkan, S. (2019). The co-construction of a national curriculum: the role of teachers as curriculum policy makers in Wales. Paper presented at the ECER conference, 5 September 2019, 3-6 September 2019, Hamburg, Germany.

Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald.

What does it mean to make a curriculum?

Here is my newly published article in the GTCS Teaching Scotland magazine. The original can be accessed at https://www.gtcs.org.uk/News/teaching-scotland/teaching-scotland-magazine.aspx

Curriculum should be at the heart of educational practice in schools. And yet, in recent years, curricular questions have to some extent been eclipsed by a narrow focus on standards, outcomes and accountability, which can preclude us from asking educational questions about the practices of schooling. It is, therefore, a cause for celebration that curriculum has once more become a major focus in Scottish schools. In particular, the term ‘curriculum making’ – a rather old concept – has recently re-emerged in educational discourse. But what does this mean? And why does it matter? These questions are raised in our new book, Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice Within and Across Diverse Contexts, which explores curriculum making through nine country cases studies (Priestley et al., 2021).

To answer these questions, it is first necessary to define what we mean by curriculum. I do not adopt the commonplace idea that the curriculum is merely the booklets or webpages produced by national agencies, or simply the configuration of subjects represented in options columns. Instead, it is more helpful to view the curriculum as the multi-layered social practices, through which education is structured, enacted and evaluated. There are at least three dimensions to this.

• The notion of curriculum as social practice; something ‘made’ by practitioners and other actors working with each other.
• The idea that curriculum is made across multiple ‘sites of activity’ within education systems, for example schools, district offices and national agencies. Different enactments of curriculum may not cohere with those in other sites (for example, an implementation gap between policy and practice). This is not necessarily a bad thing, as schools, for instance, adapt policy to meet local needs.
• The multitude of practices that comprise curriculum. These include: the development of policy frameworks; the selection of knowledge/content; pedagogical approaches; organization of teaching (e.g. timetabling); and the production of resources and infrastructure for supporting curriculum making in schools.

The table below illustrates the range of practices (or activities), the actors who undertake them, and the different sites of activity that form the curricular eco-system.

Site of activity	Examples of activity	Examples of actors
Supra	Transnational curricular discourse generation, policy borrowing and lending; policy learning	OECD; World Bank; UNESCO; EU
Macro	Development of curriculum policy frameworks; legislation to establish agencies and infrastructure	National governments, curriculum agencies
Meso	Production of guidance; leadership of and support for curriculum making; production of resources	National governments; curriculum agencies; district authorities; textbook publishers; curriculum brokers; subject-area counsellors
Micro	School level curriculum making: programme design; lesson-planning	Principals; senior leaders; middle leaders; teachers
Nano	Curriculum making in classrooms and other learning spaces: pedagogic interactions; curriculum events	Teachers; students

(source: Priestley et al., 2021, p. 10)

Why is this relevant to current developments in Scotland? I would argue that a lack of systemic understanding has potentially negative effects on practice, including incoherence across different curriculum making sites. As curriculum scholar Michael Connolly (2013, p. ix) reminds us, the curriculum:

… is a complex system involving teachers, students, curricular content, social settings, and all manner of impinging matters ranging from the local to the international. It is a system that needs to be understood systemically. The question is […] how it all works together.

This is important, because actions taken in one part of the system exert effects on other parts of the system – analogous to squeezing a balloon – and these are often unintended and even work counter to curricular policy intentions (e.g. the distorting effects of national qualifications on the BGE). 

Thinking systemically provides clarity about who is responsible for what. This raises questions about the extent to which governments and national agencies should specify content and pedagogy, and the degree to which local actors such as teachers should have autonomy in these matters. Too much regulation – or the wrong type – can stifle innovation and lead to instrumental curriculum making in schools, for example the tick-the-box approaches that have so bedevilled CfE. Conversely, too little regulation can deprive practitioners of the resources needed to be effective curriculum makers. Both approaches diminish teachers’ professional agency.

Many of our case studies in our book clearly illustrate that curriculum support, sitting between schools and government, provides a crucial impetus and support for school-based curriculum making. A key finding is the critical importance of this meso curriculum making in supporting micro (school-level planning) and nano (pedagogy) curriculum making. For example, in Ireland, the Junior Cycle Teams provide this function; in Sweden (expert teachers) and Cyprus (subject counsellors) play a similar role. This points to the potential of the RICs to provide, in the longer term, a substantial resource for supporting schools as they develop the curriculum.

Research shows the inevitability of teachers interpreting and translating – as opposed to merely delivering – the curriculum to meet local needs, even in the most prescriptive ‘teacher-proof’ systems. Well-developed approaches to meso curriculum making, particularly when led by experienced teachers, help ensure that this is a constructive process, and enhance teacher agency. Understanding curriculum making as a complex system is a necessary first step in the establishment of such approaches.

References

Connelly, F.M. (2013). Foreword. In: Deng, Z., Gopinathan, S. & Lee, C. K. E. (Eds.), Globalization and the Singapore curriculum: From policy to classroom (pp. vii-xii).  Singapore: Springer.

Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S. & Soini, T. (Eds.) (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald.