It was as long ago as December 2015 when the last big review of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was published, on this occasion by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
However, it was only a partial review, looking at every stage of education up to - and, importantly, not including - the last few years of secondary school. It seems curious in retrospect that a curriculum that aspires to be seamless from 3-18 would not be subject to a similarly all-encompassing health check.
Yet, the period of education not scrutinised in that last review has been scrutinised intensely in recent months. This led to a conclusion of sorts last week, when the government suffered a rare defeat as MSPs voted in favour of a full review of CfE.
While the issue of subject choices (or lack thereof) has cut through to the mainstream media, another, rather nerdier topic continues to bubble away when people attempt to assess the merits of the “senior phase” of secondary education: the question of how much data exists on the senior phase.
Reflecting on some of the most heated debates about Scottish education of late, it’s surprising how little we know.
We do know, for example, that teacher shortages remain a big problem, but which subjects are schools most likely drop quietly because specialists can’t be found? And we’ve heard all the complaints about multi-qualification teaching - where subject teachers may, for example, have National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher students in the same class - but exactly how common is it? We hear anecdotally, too, that the vaunted three-year senior phase is increasingly common, but how many schools are running with this and how many are still effectively working to the 2+2+2 structures of old?
When speaking to colleagues in England, it sometimes feels like the education system there is awash with data, that if a problem is identified there’s a good chance someone can quickly find the data that lays out the extent of it. (Of course, the flip side is that amassing this sort of information does not happen easily: you would imagine it creates all sorts of bureaucracy and headaches that distract from the day job of teaching children.)
Interestingly, when we interviewed education secretary John Swinney this month, the only topic that got him anywhere close to releasing his inner Incredible Hulk was data. In December, we published an article by one of the key people running the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) surveys, from which Scotland withdrew some years ago; he argued that Scotland’s “long and venerable history” in large-scale international education assessments had been “tarnished” as a result. Also in December, the Commission on School Reform made the claim that the availability of data about Scottish education was the poorest it had been since the 1950s.
If Mr Swinney ever warns you not to make him angry (because you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry), this latter claim may be the sort of thing that pushes him over the edge: during our podcast, with his brow furrowed, he rejected it as “total rubbish”. He also questioned the usefulness of the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy - which the SNP scrapped in 2017, losing an annual source of extensive data - and suggested that the controversial Scottish National Standardised Assessments would be much better at diagnosing problems and showing teachers the way ahead (see bit.ly/PodSwinney).
The full curricular review voted for by MSPs last week follows the review of the senior phase ordered by the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee. But one wonders how useful these exercises will be - because if the very data you’re analysing is sketchy, how useful is the analysis of that data likely to be?
This article originally appeared in the 24 January 2020 issue under the headline “All this talk of dodgy data risks unleashing the Incredible Hulk”
