We have just come through an election campaign in which the problems facing Scottish schools were barely mentioned. There was rhetoric about standards and the curriculum, about behaviour and attendance, about the importance of teachers. Much of that was welcome, though superficial and uncosted. But what was absent was any sustained engagement with the depth of what has gone wrong.
My new book about the curriculum, Lessons from Scottish Schools, sets our problems in context, in three ways – recent history, international comparison, and cognitive science.
History
Until the 1970s, Scottish schools were among the best in Europe for the highest-attaining pupils, and were above average for the average pupil. But they were far below average for low attainers.
That inequality then shaped the several waves of reform that have transformed Scottish education since the 1970s. The reforms up until the 1990s sought to extend to all pupils Scotland’s academic traditions that had been so successful for the best. The means was mainly comprehensive schooling and courses that would cater for all levels of ability. By the 1990s, social inequality was falling through the raising of standards for all social groups. Scotland was showing that a rigorously academic curriculum – based on knowledge in traditional subjects, taught by expert teachers, assessed through challenging examinations – could be made accessible, in some form, to almost everyone.
But democratising access to academic learning was not how the fashionable consensus on education was developing internationally. According to that, academic education was harmful to low attainers, and to pupils from socially disadvantaged households. Despite the evidence from Scotland’s actual experience, these beliefs have dominated policy making since the Scottish parliament was established in 1999. Out of that came the Curriculum for Excellence – an undermining of academic standards, a naive belief that the most effective way of teaching is to let students discover things for themselves through cross-curricular projects, and a relegation of teachers to being guides rather than sources of knowledge and wisdom. The result is that, since the turn of the century – and especially since the full implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence – attainment has been falling and inequality has been rising.
International comparison
The same conclusion can be reached from the second context that the book sets – international comparisons. It is still often asserted in Scottish educational debate that we should emulate Finland. That country, it is believed, has high attainment and low inequality, and it is further claimed that this is because of an approach that is similar to the Curriculum for Excellence. In fact, Finnish attainment has been steadily falling since it introduced that kind of curriculum in the late-1990s, and inequality has been widening. It is true that Finnish attainment was very high at the beginning of this century, but that was with students who had spent almost all of their schooling in the preceding system, which was as academic as Scotland’s comprehensive schools were at that same time.
Finland is not the only country in which moving away from a knowledge-based curriculum has led to decline. The same has happened in Sweden, France, New Zealand, South Korea and New Zealand. In contrast, Finland’s neighbour Estonia has been going in the opposite direction – rising attainment and falling inequality – with an approach that is firmly grounded in knowledge. Some Scottish commentary has denied this, misleadingly drawing parallels between the political decentralisation that happened after Estonia’s escape from the Soviet empire and Scotland’s weakening of a centrally prescribed curriculum. In reality, the post-communist decentralisation in Estonia has gone along with a persistently academic curriculum and with a leading role for expert teachers.
Other examples internationally confirm these conclusions. The Republic of Ireland has been strengthening subject-based teaching in the past couple of decades, with impressive results by international standards, especially in reading. The basis has been ‘disciplinary literacy’, the recognition that the way we think about and discuss knowledge varies between subjects. Beyond a certain level, literacy is subject-specific, not generic.
The outstanding case is Singapore, with extremely high attainment and a strong focus on subject-based knowledge. One of the reasons is a continuing belief in that approach among teachers and parents. A similar social consensus may be found also in other Asian countries. South Korea is then interesting in different ways. Although its attainment has been falling since the relaxing of the knowledge-based approach, it remains high. A social consensus can mitigate the effects of policy even when there is a political consensus for change.
The most relevant external example for Scotland is, as always, England, where a knowledge-based curriculum has been gradually strengthened in the past 25 years. England’s attainment as measured by international surveys was rising until the Covid pandemic, and seems to have recovered from that in surveys conducted since 2022.
The science of learning
The final question is to ask why a knowledge-based curriculum seems able to raise attainment and reduce inequality. Research on how human memory works is the key. We have two kinds of memory – long term, and working. Learning is getting things into long-term memory, the capacity of which is infinite. But the only door into that is working memory, which is extremely small. The skill of good teachers is based on that – how to package knowledge in ways that pupils can grasp in working memory, store in long-term memory, and retrieve later.
This is where a well-designed curriculum is crucial. Packaging knowledge is helped if the curriculum is structured. The packages are schemas. These can be thought of as the way in which facts are organised into meaningful patterns.
The basic multiplication tables are an example. These provide schemas that are organising principles for multiplying any numbers. Other examples are: gravity; photosynthesis; plot, narrative and character in novels, plays and films; the process of decolonisation after the second world war; the grammatical structure of most European languages. When we have a schema embedded in long-term memory, learning new information is easier, because we assimilate it to the structure we already have. Teaching and the curriculum should be about building schemas in pupils’ long-term memory, and getting them to practise using these to retrieve knowledge from there.
The problem with the Scottish curriculum is that it isn’t structured into schemas of this kind. That also widens inequality. Students who can acquire some of the relevant schemas at home – for example, through having graduate parents – are able to grasp some of what is required. Students who don’t have that social advantage fail.
So this research shows that a knowledge-based curriculum is necessary. But is not sufficient. Equally important are teachers who have disciplinary expertise. Abundant research shows that teachers have to be in charge of learning – not the pupils. Teachers have to plan, question, test, and organise. They also have to be pupil-centred – knowing each student well, knowing where each is starting from, knowing how each learns. That is why the most student-centred classroom is one that is teacher-led. It is also why good teaching is so difficult and so exhausting.
Our impoverished public debate about education barely scratches the surface of what is required. But the complacent consensus that has led to the failures of the Curriculum for Excellence has to be strenuously challenged The politicians in our newly elected parliament have the authority to do that. Now that the partisan heat of campaigning is past, will they rise to the occasion?
Lindsay Paterson is Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at the University of Edinburgh