'Why do staffrooms refer to it as Curriculum for Excrement?'

In the late 1990s, the old exam board (Scottish Exam Board) was revamped into the now 26-year-old SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority) – an organisation coming to the end of its natural life but once hailed as a unified qualifications framework, taking together both academics and vocational endeavours.

A few years later, in the early 2000s, what can cautiously be described as the ‘curriculum’ in Scotland was redesigned entirely, resulting in what we now know as CfE.  

The need for reform lay in global social, political and economic changes that had transformed the economy, jobs and the working world, as well as in homegrown desires for the nurturing of a healthier, more diverse, less impoverished and fairer nation. 

CfE’s new guiding principles – Challenge and enjoyment; Breadth; Progression; Depth; Personalisation and choice; Coherence; and Relevance – place the pupil at the centre of the new system, with secondary teachers no longer traditional subject specialists but now ‘facilitators of learning’.  

In an effort to address health and social ills, CfE put the idea of pupil health and wellbeing front and centre, becoming – along with literacy and numeracy skills development – every secondary teacher’s business and everyone’s responsibility. 

CfE sought also to blur the boundaries between traditional school subjects, meaning I am, strictly speaking, no longer a Teacher of English but a Teacher of Young People.   

With distinct school subjects (and fairly old school exams) remaining in place, learners are encouraged to spot links between areas of learning in the hope that they develop transferable skills for work.  

Addressing the economic needs of a fast-changing 21st century Scotland justified what curriculum designers called a shift of emphasis from content mastery to the acquisition or development of skills the new economy needed – like communication, problem solving and critical thinking.  

Modern CfE teaching and learning, therefore, features fewer content-based lessons and more open, exploratory styles of learning. Greater flexibility for all means that teachers and schools are free to innovate and tailor the curriculum to their pupils’ individual and collective needs.  

So what’s the problem? And how come so many teachers disdain CfE? Why is it so often referred to colloquially in many staffrooms up and down the land as Curriculum for Excrement?  

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Well, CfE’s radical reforms were restricted – as far as secondary schools were concerned – to the first three years of a pupil's school experience. When it came to senior pupils, traditional examination and assessment methods remained and served to somewhat undermine the changes made lower down the school and at primary level. 

Another issue was that the Scottish Government organisation bringing in CfE (Education Scotland) and the public body delivering exam results and qualifications (SQA) were not singing from the same hymn sheet in terms of assessing pupil progress and attainment.  

For example, the terms ‘Level 3’ and ‘Level 4’ exist both at S1 through to S3 to describe levels of attainment, and also in the Senior Phase, meaning entirely different things in different contexts.  

These niggling issues established in many teachers great and lasting scepticism about CfE’s lack of clear standards for reporting pupil progress to parents, in addition to the charge of its lacking an assessment strategy for secondary schools.  

Initial optimism, at least in some sections of the educational world, around CfE’s potential to deliver transformative change was kept very much in check by the clear issues in delivering so many changes all at once.  

Revamped exams and National courses for senior pupils were somewhat tagged on as a bit of an afterthought and remain now not entirely aligned with the principles and modes of assessment underpinning CfE.  

Consequently, almost two decades after CfE’s conception, Scotland’s educational sector is coming to accept this and is preparing to give birth to yet another new ‘unified qualifications framework’ – this time to replace the SQA. 

The particular challenges and the jobs market, for example, have drastically changed, but are we facing the same dilemma, the same essential transitioning between old and new, as we did last century? 

‘Our teachers are sailing uncharted seas, attempting new methods yet having to produce old examination results.’ Beatrice Esnor, ‘New Era’, 1922.  

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