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CurriculumforExcellence:acritique
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(How much this cost I shudder to think, and I would question that every single teacher needed one. Surely one
per department or even per school would have been sufficient).
I have also been overjoyed to receive various other documents such as 'Building the Curriculum 5 a
framework for assessment' and 'Quality assurance and Moderation'.
I have attended in service CfE days and discussed the implications of CfE with colleagues in my department
and others in other subjects. So surely with all that I should be an expert, and every teacher in primary and
secondary schools across Scotland should be jumping up and down in eager anticipation, doing a Wendy
Alexander and shouting 'bring it on!'
Unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead for many teachers there is uncertainty, confusion and
apprehension.
The EIS (Educational Institute for Scotland Teacher's Union) argued for a year's delay in implementation so
that teachers could prepare for the changes a request rebuffed by Mike Russell, the Education Secretary.
In a survey by the SSTA (Scottish Secondary Teachers Association) 79% of teachers who responded disagreed
that the outcomes and experiences set out in the new Curriculum were adequate.
88% said that they required additional resources to implement CfE.
90% said that the main problem lay in the lack of assessment materials.
79% said they had not been adequately consulted on timetabling and curriculum models.
67% said that their school's curriculum model either enjoyed nil support from them or only a small amount of
support.
And 73% agreed that communications from local authorities, LTS (learning and teaching, Scotland), SQA etc
have been neither effective nor supportive.
The President of the SSTA at the SSTA Annual Congress in May 2010 said "We know why secondary teachers are
not fully behind CfE. It's because much of it is mince."
Surely in the intervening two years these issues have been resolved?
Sadly no, andin fact some other issues have appeared to perplex the nation's teachers and parents.
Recently an online survey was carried out by the EIS to which 2,700 from a random sample of 10,000 EIS
members in the secondary sector responded.
Here are some key findings:
Over 90%of respondents feel that the senior phase ( years 4 6 )implementation of CFE has increased their
workload over the past year.
Almost 80% feel that their workload increase has been "very high " or "high"
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Well over 90% of respondents believe that additional resources will be required to implement the senior
phase of CfE in their school.
More than 85% of respondents believe that more additional inservice training will be required to support CfE
senior phase implementation.
Only 3% of respondents are "fully confident " that their department will be able to deliver the new
qualifications from next year, and less than 5% are "very confident ".
By contrast , over 70% of respondents are "barely confident " or "not confident at all of their department's
readiness to deliver the new qualifications on the current timescale.
Teachers also displayed very high levels of dissatisfaction regarding the level of information / support
provided to support their work in developing CfE senior phase.
Over 80% of respondents rated Scottish Government support as "unsatisfactory"
EIS Education Convener and General Secretary (then designate) Larry Flanagan , said,
"The overwhelming message from Scotland's secondary teachers is that currently they do not feel confident
regarding their school's state of readiness to deliver the senior phase of CfE , particularly the new National
qualifications, on the current timetable."
In March the Education Secretary , Mike Russell ,announced a package of support for teachers to ensure that
CFE remains 'on track '.
This includes:
Additional funding of 3.5 million for secondary schools for additional training and support materials where
these are required.
Two extra inservice days for secondary schools to allow teachers additional time to prepare for new
qualifications.
An expanded programme of SQA events for every principal subject teacher.
Education Scotland will work with teachers to tailor their teaching to the needs of their pupils while also
developing course materials for the National 4 and 5 qualifications which will be distributed to schools.
These materials will be for every subject and will be distributed to schools in advance of the commencement
of the new qualifications in 2013/14.This is aimed primarily at reducing the workload implications of schools
having to prepare new coursework materials.
This sounds all very fine and well but it seems a bit of a belated response to the very real concerns that
teachers have been expressing for a long time.
There is now apparently an option for some schools to delay the introduction of the new exams for a year if
departments or schools feel they are not sufficiently on track. This is a decision which East Renfrewshire took
unilaterally much to the bemusement of the rest of the country 's teachers who had been told that this was not
possible. However I believe that the likelihood of individual departments or whole schools putting their heads
above the parapet and admitting that they are not coping is very low.
Moreover Mike Russell has stated that he did not think there was a need for any school to delay implementing
the exams.
He said: "Every single director of education has made it clear there will be no such delays."(apart from East
Renfrewshire of course).
It will take very brave individual teachers and departments to stand up to their senior management and
directors of education and tell them that they are unsure of or not prepared for the new exams.
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"Mr Russell needs to take the concerns of teachers seriously. Many Directors of Education may
genuinely believe they are well placed to deliver the new qualifications because head teachers tell
them that is the case. Head teachers either don't know or won't admit that they really don't know if
their school is or is not."
2.Curriculum
As far as I'm aware curriculum means a course of study over a variety of subjects, and for most people this is
understood as a national curriculum which children inPrimary and up to the end of the second year/ third year
in Secondary will all follow, at which point they will choose options .
CfE changes this. Subjects will still be taught in that, of course, there will still be English, Maths, Science etc
and the core content will, as far as I'm aware, remain the same.
However the CfE is not a national curriculum to the end of S2/S3. It's not even a regional curriculum. It is, in
fact, a school to school make it up as you go along curriculum.
This first rears its ugly head in primary schools in coverage of 'specialist' subjects such as Art and Design,
Languages, Music and Drama. Due to financial pressures, primaries are making choices of what they can cover
in those areas. I am an Art and Design teacher and I can report that coverage of my subject is patchy to say
the least. Quite a lot of students coming into S1 have had no specialist art teaching since Primary 4.
Things get even murkier as children move on to S1 and S2. Each individual school decides on the curriculum so
there is no consistency across the local authority area, let alone nationally.
As I understand it one of the big ideas of CfE is a Broad General Education ( BGE) meaning that pupils would
experience the whole range of subjects as they're supposed to do in S1 and S2 right through to the end of S3 at
which point they would choose their options for S4 and be tracked into either National 4 or National 5.
However, increasingly in schools, constraints on staffing and budgets have led to some departments being
forced to choose between teaching either S1 or S2.
Even more confusing is the complete lack of consistency across regions or across the country of the adoption
of the BGE 3 ( junior phase ) 3 ( senior phase ) model.
My own school and many others across the Highland region are ignoring it and sticking to a 2 ( S1/S2 ) 2 ( S3
/ S4 ) 2( S5/S6) traditional model.
This means, of course, that our S3s who have started the new session have already begun the course that will
lead to National 4/ 5 and any new coursework materials which arrive in 2013 may lead to changes of
emphasis.
However it could cause more problems for children moving from school to school within the country or even
within a region.
For instance a child who has been doing a subject in S1 or S2 may find a different curricular model at a
different school which makes certain subjects unavailable and if a child moves from a school which has
followed a 33 model to a 222 school at the end of third year they will find that the 222 pupils will have
spent more time on the subjects they have opted for.
"We have worked very hard to embrace the principles set out in all BTC (Building the Curriculum )
documents. We are committed to delivering. However, there are some contradictions. We are offering
more choice and more service in the shape of support whilst at the same time having our conditions
and pay reduced in real terms. The idea behind CfE feels like an idea born out of a service with money
and time , but it has to live in a world with a diminishing well of both. There is some headache and
challenge ahead.
The differing systems of 222 and 33 means this system is not equitable across regions. We can now
add to that different regions starting at different times. Another year's delay and some decisive
planning seems to be the only way to salvage what is fast becoming a burden rather than the saviour of
Scottish education."
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"...information is coming to us too late for planning. Teachers do not really understand the curricular
frameworks. Schools are not confident about taking forward their own models when they hear the
school up the road is doing something different. There is no time to evaluate courses already
implemented. We are in year 2 of CfE in secondary and I find it hard to see how schools can abandon
CfE in favour of existing courses. There is reassurance from HE and FE as to how they view the new
qualifications but that is wellnigh impossible as the drafts are only just out. That is the real issue. Also
HMIE are suggesting that all of the experiences and outcomes need to be covered and there is little
time available in schools to discuss all of this."
Crosscurricular activities
This ad hoc school to school approach becomes even more confusing when cross curricular activities are
considered.
I think it has always been the case that good teachers will quite naturally reference other disciplines or draw
in information from other areas to enliven and inform their own subject. In my department we do this all the
time. For example, in S1, as part of their course, the pupils design and make a poster for a local Pictish
museum along the way learning about Pictish art and the book of Kells. This, as it happens, ties in with a unit
of work the History department does about that period of Scotland's history.
However, the CfE insists that cross curricular activity is actively shoehorned into a school's curriculum
regardless of cost or relevance. Suggestions as to how this is concretely done are left to each individual school
and consequently vary enormously.
An example might be a school devoting a week or a month for the whole of S1 and/or S2 to work on a theme.
So if the theme was 'Russia', then History could do the revolution, English a Russian author, Home economics
could get a samovar going etc. Another example might be different departments linking up to work on a
project.
My main problem with this is that every single school would be doing different things, and not only school to
school but year to year as teachers left or enthusiasm waxed and waned. Learning becomes ephemeral rather
than systematic, with false weight attached to particular elements of a subject in order to meet the
requirements of the crosscurricular Big Idea.
One of the main planks of CfE is literacy and numeracy across the curriculum. This has gone through various
manifestations from the idea that pupils make a folio of examples of their work in these areas from each
subject to teachers reporting on what each child has done. As far as I can tell no firm decision has been made
on this.
The discussions about numeracy across the curriculum in my school ( I have no idea what other schools in the
region or in the country are doing ) have led to each subject having to identify when instances of using
numeracy happens in their courses and the particular outcomes and experiences which it addresses. These
outcomes and experiences must be tackled using the same methods as the maths department and cannot occur
in another subject until it has been covered by the maths department in their course.
For example in S2 in Art and Design ,as part of the course, we design and make a gift box based on beetles and
insects hypothetically for sale in the Natural History Museum in London.The children use a template and draw
a net of a box which they fold and put together. As drawing a net of a box is also part of the second year Maths
syllabus I will now , in theory , have to ensure that the children have covered this in Maths before I do and that
I teach them to do it in the same way.
There was a proposal some time ago that pupils would sit some kind of literacy and numeracy test but I've no
idea what happened to this. At one point it was suggested that this would happen in S4 which always seemed
a bit daft as by then it would be too late to do any remedial work that was required.
"Farcical. CfE is an excellent idea unbelievably badly implemented. Schools scared to hold their hands
up and say they're not ready. Immeasurably glad I don't have a 12/ 13 year old who is going to be a
guinea pig for National 4/5."
3. Levels, outcomes and experiences
If you are as yet uninitiated, let me introduce you to the mantra of CfE, which is called the four capacities.
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fine if a) there was a massive increase in teaching resources and b) if you teach a subject like Art or Music or
something like that which is practical and/or creative because one to one evaluation flows naturally from the
nature of the subject being taught.
In any subject, any good teacher will strive to match their teaching to specific pupil needs and seek to remedy
lack of understanding or spur on and develop pupils with particular ability. But individual tailored learning
while a great political sound bite is not so easily done on a lesson to lesson basis in many subjects. Moreover,
as CfE pushes teachers in the direction of doing group work a lot more it can become wellnigh impossible.
As every teacher knows, in the dynamics of group work a couple of able children tend to take over and
perform the tasks while the less able can hide behind the others and have only peripheral involvement.
Self assessment, moreover, is to become an integral part of reporting. This means that pupils may have to
write a comment on their progress in each subject which will be included in the reports which are sent to their
parents/carers. This might allow child to reflect on what they think they have learned or achieved in each
subject but it could also be completely frivolous or even damaging in the long run.
For instance, some children who are very able will quite often report that they haven't done very well because
they are highly self critical, while others who are not aware of their limitations can assess themselves as
having done extremely well in a subject. Pupils' comments are unlikely to bear any relation to the objective
standard expected in any given subject at any given stage.
But therein lies the problem what are the standards? Apart from a teacher's own existing experience in
assessing how well or badly any child might be doing at any given time there are none.
From August two years ago grades were abolished (the 514 grading system is became defunct). As I have
pointed out, every pupil in S1S3 will be deemed to be working towards or at level 3.
The only differentiation to let anyone, pupils, teachers or parents, know where their child is in relation to
grasping any given topic or subject is contained in the words Developing , Consolidating and Secure.
When teachers write reports for pupils in secondary they will be able to say that any given child is at level 3
and that they are putting in excellent, very good, good or satisfactory effort, that they are developing ,
consolidating or secure in the subject and then they will add a more personal comment. They will also indicate
what they have covered in literacy and numeracy in their subject but they will not be allowed to comment on
what their actual level of ability is in terms of grades. This could have a very unwelcome knock on effect
when it comes to national qualifications. Here is a quote from a lecture given by Professor Lindsay Paterson of
Edinburgh University.
"So far as the matching of assessment to students levels of understanding is concerned there are such serious
concerns about the proposed new National Qualifications as to render very dubious indeed the claims that
they are an improvement on what we currently have or even that they are in any sense consistent with what
CfE seems to need."
When pupils reach the start of S4 they will be divided into two tracks; those who are judged to be at the level
where they could be presented for the National 4 certificate and those who are deemed to be ready for
National 5..
One of the effects of the reporting system could be that the parents of children who have been receiving the
standard information that their child has been making 'good progress' or is 'consolidating' could be mystified as
to why they are not allowed to sit National 5. Of course, misunderstandings can be sorted out, but what I
really think is going to cause a stushie is National 4 exams.
I have yet to encounter a teacher who is happy with the idea of National 4 being internally assessed. Internal
assessment could be open to all sorts of pressures. There is what is known as the Halo effect, where a teacher
who likes a pupil can award higher marks based on a favourable perception of that child. Moreover there will
inevitably be pressures for departments or schools to be seen to be doing well, or pressure from parents who
may have an inflated notion of their child's abilities. On top of this an internally assessed qualification is
unlikely to command the same respect in the wider world as one which is externally assessed.
"This department is very concerned as to the speed of implementation and about the " wooliness" of
the assessment. What will a parent make of a report in which all their child receives for every subject
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