Scotland's leading academic expert on education policy has called for the SNP government’s landmark reform of the school curriculum to be scrapped and restarted in this week's Herald on Sunday Big Read by Neil Mackay.
The demand came after it emerged that not only was AI used to shape the planned upgrading of the curriculum, but artificial intelligence also inserted mistakes and ‘hallucinations’ into official documents.
Lindsay Paterson, professor emeritus of education policy at Edinburgh University and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the curriculum, described the discovery as a “scandal”.
He said that once the current work is halted, it should be restarted under proper conditions.
However, the SNP Education Secretary, Màiri McAllan, told the Herald on Sunday she would not pause the work on the new curriculum.
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The process of reforming and upgrading the curriculum is estimated to cost around £2.8 million.
The use of AI was uncovered by Paterson’s colleague Brodie Runciman, a lecturer in education at Edinburgh University.
He found multiple errors in ‘background and evidence’ papers from Education Scotland prepared for what is termed the ‘curriculum improvement cycle’.
Runciman discovered repeated fabricated references. In some cases, books and academic articles cited did not exist. Quotes and sources were misattributed or were irrelevant to claims being made. Links to ChatGPT were even left in footnotes. Mistakes were inserted. A book review was cited as if it was a piece of academic research.
In one instance, a claim that social media can help “vulnerable” children was found to come from a column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
In another instance, AI “hallucinated” the title of an academic paper. Typos were found and numbers were left out. Mathematical examples were wrong.
One section claimed more than 200,000 pupils studied Higher PE. The real number is closer to 11,000.
The mistakes were made in papers covering subjects including expressive arts, health and wellbeing, literacy and English, languages, science, and numeracy and mathematics.
Runciman fears the background papers have been used to shape the full curriculum that will determine how children are educated. He pointed out that inaccuracies regarding mathematics were in what is known as a ‘draft technical framework’.
Runciman said: “These ‘technical frameworks’, currently in draft form, are what will be used by teachers to plan daily learning and teaching.”
Education Scotland is the Scottish government agency responsible for the quality of education in Scotland. The research is supposed to be evidence-based.
Education Secretary Màiri McAllan has previously called the work “the single largest update” to Scottish education in a decade.
She claimed it would “drive excellence”, “be taught in schools from August 2028”, and “be benchmarked against international standards”.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Herald on Sunday, Paterson said: “If evidence is fabricated, then the claim that the policy [of curriculum reform] is drawing on evidence is dishonest.
“That casts doubt on the integrity and capacity for careful thought of the organisation involved in making policy - which therefore extends far beyond this specific policy to everything that Education Scotland does.
“For a public body to be in that position is a scandal. Màiri McAllan has commendably said she is willing to think beyond the assumptions of the past few decades.
“She should be bold now, provide political leadership, and halt the review of the curriculum immediately, before further harm is done.
“It should start again with an independent source of research and ideas, and with proper scrutiny of the integrity of the whole enterprise.”
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Paterson said that when he saw Runciman’s findings: “I couldn’t believe my eyes. There are references that are completely hallucinatory, and references to papers that don’t exist.”
In the AI industry, ‘hallucination’ is a term for claims invented by artificial intelligence - in other words, misinformation.
Paterson added: “These are official Scottish government publications that are supposed to be guiding the current reform of the curriculum, which Màiri McAllan says is the most significant reform to the curriculum for the last 15 years - and it is being guided by AI slop.”
In email exchanges with Education Scotland, after alerting officials to the AI errors, Runciman was told: “We do not intend to change the underlying substance of the paper.”
Runciman added: “They used a very cheap, crude version of AI to produce the whole thing and it has not done a very good job.”
He pointed out that if he hadn’t spotted the use of AI, then the errors would have gone into the curriculum without the public being made aware.
“It’s quite shocking as this affects every school and every pupil in Scotland,” he said. “The buzzword in education is ‘evidence-based’ … but a lot of this evidence is made up or doesn’t exist. It’s fabricated from AI. It’s an absolute failure.”
Runciman said he wasn’t just speaking as an academic and an expert in education but as a “concerned parent of two kids who are about to go through this curriculum”.
Education Secretary Màiri McAllan insisted that “there is no reason whatsoever to pause this important work”.
She claimed that AI had not been used to write the curriculum “documentation”, but only to “support the review, clarity and quality assurance of the papers, which run to more than a thousand pages”.
“More than 3,800 teachers, practitioners, council education leads and experts have so far registered an interest in reviewing these drafts that were recently published, which will provide important feedback to inform future drafts.”
An Education Scotland spokesperson said: “There is a declaration on the Curriculum Improvement Cycle evidence papers and curriculum frameworks confirming that Education Scotland-approved AI tools have been used to ‘support the review, clarity and quality assurance’ of the papers.
“The declaration also makes clear that the contents of each document have been written by Education Scotland.
“It is important to note that this work is being co-created with a practitioner group and the materials within these documents are being deliberately shared by Education Scotland in draft, and will be refined as part of a process of engagement and testing with a sample of teachers.”
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