The Scottish ‘Curriculum for Excellence’: A Good Example of What NOT To Do
In Scotland, in theory, there is a national curriculum. On paper, there certainly appears to be. This is set out as a framework of ‘Experiences and Outcomes’, organised by ‘curricular areas’ and ‘levels’.
Here is a snapshot of what this looks like:
As a teacher, you are expected to make sense of these statements. Have a go just now, if you like. Good luck.
Assuming you can decode them, it’s probably fair to assume that the chances of you and I interpreting them in the same way are slim. If I asked you: ‘What are you going to teach students to cover the Social Studies Experiences and Outcomes?’, it’s unlikely that you would pick the same content as me. If you are a parent, unless your school has decoded these for you (which most haven’t), these statements are all you have to help you understand what your child is learning at school. If you are a student, the same is true.
I’ll be honest: this is not a curriculum. Certainly, it is not a curriculum as I understand the definition of the term. The vagueness and ambiguity of the statements are prohibitive to anyone – teachers, students and parents – understanding what, specifically, students should be learning.
As written, this ‘curriculum’ is the equivalent of saying to a group of people, ‘I want you to go to a city in Europe’, and then expecting everyone to arrive at the same city. Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s more like: ‘I want you to go to a section of land in the continent that lies somewhere between Asia and North America, which has lots of people in it, a significant number of buildings, and a wide variety of trees.’ Let’s not be too shocked when everyone ends up in a different place.
A ‘being busy curriculum’
Teachers, students and parents need to be able to look at curricular statements and be crystal clear about what students should be learning. The time teachers spend in planning should focus on how best to teach them this. If what is to be taught isn’t clear, we inevitably end up with teachers planning activities that are loosely related to a theme, but which lack a specific focus on helping students to learn specific things. We end up with a ‘being busy curriculum’, filled with random activities and experiences, most of which most students will engage with and enjoy, but which is devoid of a focus on specific learning. If we accept that schools are places of learning, and that it is through this learning that we transform lives, this is not acceptable.
Diagnosing the issues
The example we have looked at relates to Scotland, but curricula of this kind can be found across the world. There are two main issues:
Content isn’t specified.
‘Curriculum’ has been confused with ‘pedagogy’.
Let’s explore both of these.
Content isn’t specified
As is clear from the terminology, ‘Experiences and Outcomes’ specify outcomes. The outcomes being specified are things like ‘describe’, ‘explain’ and ‘predict’. However, by not specifying content, teachers, students and parents are left in the dark about how these outcomes are to be achieved. It’s a bit like expecting someone to assemble an Ikea bookcase from a drawing of the finished product, but without the instructions. For specific outcomes to be achieved, specific content needs to be clear.
Specific content also needs to be clear to ensure that students are taught it. What students learn shouldn’t be a matter of chance, depending on which school they went to or which teacher they had. If it is, we create knowledge gaps and knowledge advantages. As Young and Lambert have argued in their book, Knowledge and The Future School, a knowledge-based curriculum is the best shot we have at overcoming educational inequalities.
One further consideration relates to assessment. If curricular content is vague, assessment will be, too. Not being clear about what students are learning, teachers will be unclear about what they should be assessing. As a result, judgements about student progress become little more than a guess. In the Scottish context, teachers report that a student has ‘achieved a level’, but this is based on curricular ‘coverage’, not evidence of learning. Ticking off curricular statements as ‘covered’ is very different from ensuring specific learning has happened.
Curriculum has been confused with ‘pedagogy’
For the most part, a curriculum does not need to specify how students should be taught – this is pedagogy. Rather, it needs to specify what students should be taught. Content is the curriculum.
For this reason, a curriculum does not need to specify that students learn something by ‘researching’ or ‘investigating’. In fact, it shouldn’t. As we have said, this is pedagogy.
The issues with prescribing pedagogy are two-fold:
It clutters and confuses content statements unnecessarily.
It disempowers teachers from teaching content in the best way.
As discussed in detail in The Teaching Delusion series, ‘researching’ and ‘investigating’ are unlikely to be the best way for most students to learn most of the time. While such approaches do have an important role to play in teaching and learning, this will not tend to be in the early stages of learning anything new. Specifying them as mandatory pedagogy, masquerading as ‘experiences’, risks teachers trying to teach students things in a second-rate way.
Clearly, this is not what we are trying to do in schools. All schools should be ensuring that all students are taught using first-rate pedagogy. Ensuring they are is what lesson planning is all about. Curriculum planning does not need to be concerned with this. Curriculum planning should be concerned with content.
Addressing the issues
None of the issues we have discussed are insurmountable. If schools take curriculum frameworks of the kind we have looked at and use them as a starting point from which to derive specific content, they can develop the very knowledge-based, skills-orientated curriculum we are aiming for.
Perhaps this is what bodies such as Education Scotland intended to happen from the outset. Perhaps they intended to give a broad steer and empower schools to make their own content decisions, informed by this. Potentially, this could strike a good ‘tight–loose’ balance. Core national expectations would be clear, but schools would also be empowered to make some content decisions of their own. The trouble is, this is not what has typically happened.
One reason is that an expectation wasn’t made sufficiently clear. Another is that the curriculum statements are just too vague, making it very difficult to understand what they mean in the first place. One more is that teachers and school leaders haven’t been given sufficient training about how to do this.
As a result, the curriculum in too many schools today is worryingly unclear. As they near the end of a week, teachers start to fret about what they should be teaching the next week. For example, they know that this should relate to students learning ‘why people and events from a particular time in the past were important, placing them within a historical sequence’ – because that’s what the Experiences and Outcomes say – but they have no clarity beyond that. As a result – and I mean no disrespect to teachers with this comment – they grab something off the shelf or the internet, thinking: That’ll do.
This is not how it should be. Teachers should not be having to worry about what they are teaching and how they are teaching this. The ‘what’ should already be crystal clear in curriculum plans. If it is, then teachers will be free to focus their planning time on what they should be focusing on: pedagogy. If it isn’t, then we are never going to be able to give all of our students the learning experience they deserve.
Taken from The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back by Bruce Robertson, published by John Catt Educational. Available at:
The book goes on to discuss a suggested better approach to curriculum design and implementation, an extract on which can be found here.