Professor Lindsay Paterson talks to our Writer at Large about what’s gone wrong, who is to blame and whether Scotland can become a leading nation in education once again
WHEN Professor Lindsay Paterson’s colleague discovered that not only was artificial intelligence being used to help draft the Scottish curriculum, but the AI was inserting errors into the process, it seemed to sum up everything that has gone wrong with education in this country.
Paterson is Scotland’s leading academic authority on education. He’s professor emeritus of education policy at Edinburgh University.
His colleague, Brodie Runciman, a lecturer in education at the university, discovered while reviewing official documents from Education Scotland on the “curriculum improvement cycle” – essentially a process of reforming and upgrading Scotland’s school curriculum – that faulty information from AI had been used as part of the research.
Education Scotland is the Scottish Government agency responsible for the quality of education in Scotland.
Multiple references, for example, had been fabricated. In some cases, books cited did not exist. Quotes were wrongly attributed. ChatGPT links were left in footnotes. Facts were wrong. Book reviews were cited as if they were research findings. There were spelling errors. One section claimed more than 200,000 pupils studied higher PE. The real number is closer to 11,000.
Paterson met in recent days with The Herald on Sunday to discuss the decline in Scottish education standards and how to reverse it.
For Paterson, Runciman’s findings are symbolic of all that’s gone wrong with Scotland’s schools. AI is “notoriously vacuous”, he says. It generates “lifeless prose that is empty of any spark of imagination. That is indeed what we are getting in debates about Scottish education”.
Paterson said of his colleague’s findings: “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.”
He called on Education Secretary Màiri McAllan to “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 process”.
When Paterson saw Runicman’s findings, he says: “I couldn’t believe my eyes. There are references that are completely hallucinatory. There are references to papers that don’t exist.” In the AI industry, “hallucination” is simply a term for claims made up by artificial intelligence – in other words, misinformation.
“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.”
Neuroscience
Paterson takes education policy in Scotland apart the way a mechanic reduces an engine to its constituent components. He starts with the science behind education – principally the neuroscience of how our memory affects learning.
The civil servants and “quango bureaucrats” in charge of education policy have paid no attention to “the developments in research about how people learn. I don’t know if they don’t want to address it or don’t know about it, but they have simply failed to address it. There’s no excuse for not knowing about it”.
Essentially, neuroscience shows that our short-term memory – or working memory – is fairly limited. Even remembering a random string of, say, a dozen numbers can be tricky. However, the long-term memory is vast, and has a huge capacity.
The problem when it comes to learning and teaching, though, is that the only way to store information permanently in the long-term memory is via the working memory. Paterson says we should imagine the process as “an enormous beautiful cave with a very narrow entrance”.
The best way to use the short-term or working memory to place facts and figures and information in the long-term memory is through “schemas”. Multiplication tables are schemas. The causes of the First World War are a schema. Schemas organise facts.
Paterson says: “Absolutely none of this cognitive neuroscience has impinged on the current Scottish leadership class when it comes to education.”
The problem with the current teaching model in Scotland is that “there is far too much emphasis on the application of knowledge before people have acquired any knowledge”.
In other words, before all those schemas are used to put information in young minds – like the causes of the First World War – children are being asked to apply knowledge they don’t have.
An example in high school might be asking a English literature student to consider the role of colonialism in Elizabethan Britain before they have read The Tempest by William Shakespeare – which is one of the first works to explore the role of Europeans in the New World.
Similarly, Paterson says, it’s like asking someone to make a cake before they understand the chemistry of baking or how an oven works.
These schemas are just as important for practical skills as they are for abstract, academic thought. Plumbers, engineers and designers all need schemas before they can apply their knowledge. Architects need a schema to understand gravity before they build a house.
“The problem with the Scottish curriculum at the moment is that it jumps the gun – it starts talking about applying knowledge before pupils actually have the knowledge,” Paterson adds. “We’re doing it the wrong way around, and that’s not helpful for students.”
One of the ways of getting schemas of knowledge into our long-term memory is “rote learning”, Paterson explains, like being taught to recite the seven times table. Rote learning is most definitely off the agenda in Scotland. It is frowned on by those who shape the curriculum.
Charisma
Another method involves the use of what’s called “episodic memory”. This depends, says Paterson, on “the charisma of a good teacher”. Many of us will speak fondly of a particular teacher who brought a subject to life for us in school which we then excelled at.
Paterson speaks of his English professor at Aberdeen University as an undergraduate who made learning the plays of Christopher Marlowe a joy.
The “emotional intensity” of a moment makes it stick in our mind forever. The best teachers can use this to accelerate a child’s learning. “It helps smooth the transition from working memory to long-term memory,” Paterson adds.
He cites, as an example, using The Diary of Anne Frank to teach the history of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The book doesn’t really give that many facts about events, but “the emotional intensity of the text” aids teaching.
Evidently such techniques require time, smaller class sizes and highly trained – and therefore well-paid – teachers. “That’s why teaching is so incredibly difficult,” Paterson adds.
He is full of praise for teachers, but says that teacher training is “abysmal. It pays no attention to scientific research and the way human memory operates”.
Many teachers compensate for the inadequacy of their training through their own personal reading and studying, as well as exchanging best practice online with other educators around the world.
“If there’s one thing that has to change fundamentally, it’s teacher training,” Paterson says. “The best teachers are doing their own teacher training. They come out of teacher training establishments and feel it was inadequate and so have found ways of working with colleagues to refine their practice.”
He compares this can-do approach among many teachers to official bodies like Education Scotland, as well as the Scottish Government, where “you just find the dead weight of bureaucratic conformity”.
The use of AI misinformation in documents for curriculum reform is, he says, “an example of the shocking inadequacy of bureaucrats”.
Paterson stresses that he is not attacking “colleagues in teacher training establishments. They have very little freedom. What they have to teach trainee teachers is laid down by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, Education Scotland and the Scottish Government. In a sense, they are as much victims of the system as school teachers”.
In Scottish education, rote learning for pupils, he says, is “officially discouraged. There is absolutely no endorsement of it anywhere in official Scottish curricular documents”.
However, Paterson adds, “many thousands of teachers know that rote learning is the only way to get core principles into students’ minds. So they are surreptitiously doing rote learning. They’re doing it when the inspector isn’t present, sometimes even when the headteacher isn’t present. They’re doing rote learning in an almost subversive way”.
Children are not being taught multiplication tables by rote, or spelling. “Children have to learn to spell and learn to do multiplication but there is no indication [in the curriculum] of how to do that.”
Paterson contrasts this with “school systems around the world that are doing quite well, including our neighbours in England and the Republic of Ireland”. The use of rote learning in England and the Irish Republic underscores “the need for routine learning exercises. Without that, you never get on top of the language or basic arithmetic”.
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Triggering
Indeed, the “boring” nature of some aspects of learning is important, he notes. It’s hard to master medieval English, but when you do the world of Chaucer opens up. “You have to do the hard work in order to engage properly,” Paterson says.
The fear of offending or upsetting students – particularly older students – is an issue of concern. Paterson says he wishes that “we weren’t surrounded by these culture wars because they reduce difficult and sensitive issues to dichotomies”.
For instance, how do you teach the Holocaust without showing images of death camps or discussing Nazi antisemitism?
Paterson taught the work of the philosopher Franz Fanon to undergraduates studying education. Fanon was a radical black writer who “used the n-word” in his work. Without quoting him fully, Paterson explains, “it is impossible to give an accurate representation of his very radical anti-colonial, anti-slavery, anti-racist views”. However, racialised language may offend some students.
Paterson says a talk from teachers about language or images, which explains what is about to follow, may shock but it is required for a proper understanding of the issue being studied and is preferable to a “simplistic trigger warning”.
He does note, though, that no students objected to his lectures on Fanon in nearly four decades. Paterson, incidentally, is not very impressed by “anti-woke warriors”.
While much of the blame which Paterson attributes to the decline in education standards is laid at the door of bureaucrats, he stresses that, in a democracy, any mistakes in public services are “the responsibility of politicians”, especially for a party like the SNP which “has been in power nearly two decades”.
He adds that “successive education secretaries have simply failed” to challenge the views of bureaucrats. Paterson notes that McAllan has said she wishes to be a “reforming education secretary. That’s encouraging. But many of her predecessors in the last 19 years have said exactly the same and nothing has changed”.
On a positive note, Paterson says he was invited to speak to Holyrood’s education committee recently and found the cross-party approach “extremely constructive. There were no raised voices. It was very calm. Away from the soundbite vehemence of First Minister’s Questions, they listened to what their political opponents had to say”.
Some spoke of wanting to challenge civil servants more on education but feeling that they lacked knowledge to do so.
Paterson says that when Holyrood was established 27 years ago, there were concerns that Scotland was “governed by bureaucrats. Now, 27 years on, we still have this rule by bureaucrats just as bad as it was in the days of the old unreformed Scottish Office”.
He wonders whether bureaucratic opposition to change – particularly in education – is “ideological”. Historically, he said, a political consensus formed in Scotland among teacher trade unions, local authorities and academics during the Thatcher and Major governments that “Scotland had to act in unanimity if it was to resist any of the changes regarded as unattractive.
“So one of the things the Thatcher government never managed to do in Scotland was to break up the Scottish comprehensive secondary school system”.
England
That left a legacy. Today it is “very difficult to find any variety of educational views in any element of Scottish society. Part of the problem is that we don’t have enough pluralism of thought for a healthy political environment”.
He notes that from the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, the comprehensive system was “successful”. Matters began to change in the early years of the 21st century, as new ideology took hold.
Too much policy has become framed around opposition to what is happening in England. “There’s a tendency to regard England as a threat. If things are working well in England, people will say there must be some snag.
“The idea that we might admire England has become almost anathema to the entire Scottish political class. England is seen as a cultural enemy. It seems impossible to look at England and say some good things are happening there as well as some bad things, like any country.”
The great irony is that England is doing much better in terms of education than Scotland currently. The latest Pisa results – that’s the Programme for International Student Assessment – from September show England outperforming Scotland in core subjects like reading, mathematics and science.
Paterson notes that the Scottish Government “withdrew from all but one of the international comparative surveys”, staying within Pisa alone.
To rub salt into the wound for the Scottish Government, England’s success is mostly down to reforms undertaken by Conservatives.
Problems began to solidify in Scotland from around 2010, “when the Curriculum for Excellence started to have its effect” and Tory reforms became embedded in England. “That’s the point at which things begin to diverge,” Paterson adds.
He says English reforms “tried to build on” the neuroscience around education and memory. “England is an example of the application of that research knowledge.”
England also returned to rote learning. “There was a great emphasis on the need to learn multiplication tables and spelling.”
However, Paterson says that rather than being stultifying and dreary, the English curriculum is in reality “creative and imaginative”.
He notes how England’s mathematics curriculum is both thorough and vibrant and “doesn’t sound like rote learning”. However, it accepts that in order for education to be creative, imaginative and vibrant, pupils “must have the building blocks”.
Scotland could easily adopt the model used in England, he says. He does, however, stress that the Scottish education system shouldn’t be considered “disastrous”, rather he sees it as merely “mediocre”.
Pisa
He dismissed claims from SNP supporters that Pisa findings aren’t to be trusted. It is, he says, “the best and largest piece of educational research that’s ever been done. It’s done to extremely high standards. If we believe any educational research, we should believe this. The quality thresholds are extremely high”.
Standards used are the same for every country, including Scotland and England. “Yet after the most recent Pisa round, there were all sorts of absolutely wild, ill-informed claims made that England had cheated; that English schools were unrepresentative of the whole; that Scotland had put forward a higher proportion of students with learning difficulties than English schools. All those claims were completely wrong.”
Scotland is on a similar trajectory to France and Finland, Paterson explains, though not doing “quite as badly”. Both are “two European countries which used to be brilliant.
“Since the late 1980s, the French system has been in steady decline, partly because it adopted a similar philosophy to our Curriculum for Excellence. Finland was doing very well until the turn of the century when it too shifted its curriculum in the same direction and went steadily downhill.”
Meanwhile, Estonia and Poland have improved dramatically. Estonia is now top of the Pisa table in Europe, after effectively adopting a model closer to England rather than the Curriculum for Excellence. “The Estonian curriculum fits into the kinds of schemas of thought I’ve mentioned.”
Paterson says, however, that the concerns around curriculum standards are “a luxury compared to the daily reality in so many schools: the level of violence against teachers, the general disruption in class, and the levels of absenteeism”.
Between 30-40% of pupils are “missing the equivalent of a day a fortnight depending on the stage you’re looking at”.
He adds that effectively no exclusions take place. “Virtually no-one is excluded from school.”
Some pupils get “suspended from a classroom but that doesn’t happen quickly enough, and teachers feel reluctant to do so as they can’t trust being backed up by the headteacher or local authority”. He added: “Even words like ‘punishment’,‘discipline’ and ‘sanctions’ don’t appear in official documents.”
Paterson said that “restorative justice” was used to solve discipline problems, involving “the perpetuator sitting down with the victim to talk”.
He equated this with the victim of a violent crime being expected to sit and talk to their abuser or attacker and “accept their apology. That is how shocking this is”.
Paterson points out that sexual assaults against teachers have been documented.
Disruption through bad behaviour is widespread. “If you have a class of 30 and three are so disruptive they command 90% of the teacher’s time then that interferes with the human rights of the other 27 pupils.
“We should be focusing much more on the right of the other children to learn in a calm environment than on the rights of a few not to be punished or excluded.”
Persistent disruption should result in “immediate removal from the classroom. That’s the basic starting point. Then, of course, you must think of the wellbeing of the children excluded from the classroom”.
He adds: “That’s absolutely important, as they are children. That will require money, and more staff and accommodation. It’s expensive, and will require more specialist support”.
In some cases, pupils will need to be excluded and moved to a different school.
Discipline
Unless the system changes, then disruptive pupils will never “reform” and so they too will be failed by the system. “They’ll be let down, as well as the majority being let down.”
Parents should be told clearly that the class teacher’s “judgement is final”. Many teachers feel that “parents are not on their side any more”. When the parents of disruptive pupils complain to headteachers, class teachers are left “demoralised and apprehensive about their daily life in the classroom”.
The issue of exclusions and suspensions should not be used to measure a school’s success. “Schools are judged on the proportion of pupils excluded or suspended,” Paterson explains, adding that the concept of exclusion or suspension should not necessarily be seen as “bad”, given those punishments are used to improve standards and combat violence.
An increase in suspensions, like an increase in criminal convictions, indicates matters are being taken seriously by authorities. “It’s evidence improvements are being made,” he adds.
Working-class children are being “left behind” in the Scottish education system. Until the end of the 1990s, educational opportunities for working-class children were improving, Paterson explains. “They were doing better than ever before. Middle-class children were also doing well, but working-class children were catching up. The reason for that was the recognition that the main barrier to learning for working-class children wasn’t culture or identity but material circumstances – like a quiet room to study, your own desk, or nowadays a computer and internet access.
“We stopped recognising that and started to say that the reason working-class children weren’t engaging with Shakespeare or the history of the Second World War or difficult science was because they were ‘culturally alienated’ from these elite practices.
“That became common currency, not just in Scotland but globally. It is utterly patronising to imply that the working class are just incapable – so put them onto vocational courses. It’s absolute nonsense. It was wicked and a class version of racism. It is outrageous. This pervades Scottish curriculum documents.”
Some of the greatest artists and scientists have been working class, Paterson points out. He also notes that the approach to working-class children simply repeats discrimination faced in earlier generations by girls, people of colour, and Catholics in 1920s Scotland.
Elitist
The ideological shift occurred after a 2007 OECD report “claimed that the traditionally academic focus of Scottish education was elitist”. It was commissioned by the Labour-LibDem coalition at Holyrood, then taken up by the first SNP administration.
The notion that low-income pupils were alienated from subjects led to course content being changed “to appeal more to working-class children”.
As a result, the educational experience of all children was damaged, regardless of class. But, of course, Paterson points out, the problem is mitigated for middle-class children as their parents can afford trips to the theatre, or educational foreign holidays, or private tutors.
“There are many schools in Scotland now where you can go through the entire six years of study and not read a Shakespeare play at all. If a parent thinks that’s outrageous, they can take their children to a Shakespeare production, but that’s not possible if you don’t have the resources.”
The tide may be turning against the emphasis on “digital first” in schools. Not only is AI rendering computer scientists redundant, but, says Paterson, nations like Norway, which once gave a screen to every child, “have gone back to books” and taken screens out of the classroom. “That’s good,” he adds.
AI is “causing enormous disruption in education. It interferes with the integrity of learning”. Children are using AI to do their homework, meaning “they learn nothing, except how to read out a paragraph created by ChatGPT”. This has rendered homework “a pointless exercise. Pupils don’t have to understand anything at all”.
Equally, assessment is also rendered unreliable if it is through coursework done at home. “The only reliable form of assessment is old-fashioned pen and paper exams invigilated in an exam room, and oral exams in which the pupil is directly asked questions. All other forms of assessment are suspect because of AI.”
The digital world is also clearly impinging on the mental health of pupils, Paterson adds. He favours the banning of mobile phones in schools due to the effect on students’ emotional wellbeing and concentration levels, as well as their role in disruption and bullying.
There has also been a “rapid escalation in the proportion of students identified as having ADHD, autism and dyslexia”. Paterson believes there are three causes: an improvement in diagnosis, a genuine rise in such conditions – which he suspects may be down to factors like social media – and then what he terms “cynical manoeuvring” by middle-class parents.
Conditions like dyslexia, he says, “are more common in affluent neighbourhoods than in poorer areas”. This implies that middle-class parents could be seeking a diagnosis for their children so they get greater help at school. He stresses he is not “victim-blaming”.
The present system “isn’t manageable. It’s far too expensive. You can’t have a situation where 40% of children, as it is in Scotland, have a condition which requires extra support within current budgets. There must be reform”.
If Scotland stays on its current trajectory, education will simply continue to “stagnate”. The only reason is won’t “fall off a cliff” is due to the dedication of most teachers who are doing their best for pupils “despite the policy, despite the curriculum, despite the quangos and bureaucrats”.
Paterson attended secondary school in the 1970s. If he was a pupil today, he doubts he would fare as well in life as he has done. Subjects are no longer taught in such “depth” or “breadth”.
He adds: “I was fortunate in the schooling I had, but my experiences were the ideal, which was gradually being extended to the majority of students until standards began to be seriously eroded at the turn of the century.”
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