Ever since Curriculum for Excellence launched with its “four capacities” - successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors - a critical question has been this: beyond successful learners, how will we know if the curriculum is achieving its aims? It seems that, over a decade since CfE was first implemented, we still don’t have an answer.
Last week, auditor general Stephen Boyle gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Public Audit Committee, and one of his key messages was “there’s a lack of robust data to measure against the broader aspects of the Scottish education system”.
It is widely accepted that the goal of the education system should not just be to help pupils gain a clutch of qualifications, but also to create rounded human beings who contribute positively to society and are in good physical and mental health - under CfE, one of the three “responsibilities of all” school staff is health and wellbeing.
However, one of Audit Scotland’s key findings, Boyle said - as he gave evidence on its report Improving outcomes for young people through school education - is that “there is not a broad enough suite of data to measure the four aims of the curriculum”.
The impact of Curriculum for Excellence
He also noted that the feedback from people working in education was that “there’s an overt tone and focus on exam results being the measure that matters about how
well a school is performing”.
The main stumbling block to tracking the impact of the curriculum on things like pupil wellbeing and confidence has always been this: how do you monitor and measure them?
One attempt to do this is through inspection. One of the four quality indicators Education Scotland rates schools on in its inspection reports is “ensuring wellbeing, equity and inclusion”.
But when you look at the data recorded on the National Improvement Framework (NIF) interactive evidence report - which aims to monitor the performance of the education system - it records the proportion of schools rated “excellent” through to “unsatisfactory” nationally for the other three indicators (leadership; learning and teaching; and attainment), but not for wellbeing.
However, the NIF does identify health and wellbeing as a “key priority” and does record a substantial amount of information on that theme - everything from the proportion
of pupils who report they eat chips every day, to the proportion who attend a school delivering the target of 120 minutes of PE per week.
But another issue flagged in the Audit Scotland report and raised at the committee last week is that monitoring is not enough.
The report says: “The Scottish government’s national aim is to improve outcomes for all, but it has not set out by how much or by when.”
So, while we might know that 13 per cent of 11-year-old boys report eating chips every day, there is no sense of whether that is acceptable - and if not, by how much the government would like to see it reduce.
Boyle accepted that it was hard to measure things such as wellbeing and confidence but maintained it had to be done, saying: “If school is to shift away from being that sole focus on exams, as we see in the indicators, we have to overcome this hurdle.”
It’s not hard to see crossover between the Audit Scotland comments and those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development review of CfE, published in June, which said there was too much focus on traditional exams and that therefore the ambitions of CfE were not being realised.
Now, the auditor general is saying there is too much of a focus on exam results in terms of how the performance of the Scottish education system is monitored.
The focus on exams leads to teaching to the test and to students complaining about an emphasis on rote learning and memorisation. That’s because, as Boyle put it in his opening remarks, “we, in many ways, perform to what we are being asked to measure against”.
We know that Scottish schools and teachers go to great lengths to support their pupils and to provide a safe and nurturing environment - but what would happen if the positive impact of this work was better recognised and valued on a par with academic attainment
and exam results?
Surely, after over a decade of CfE, it is time to find out.
Emma Seith is a reporter at 91 Scotland. She tweets
