Education Reform in Scotland: Achieving Excellence With Equity

• In Event: 72.011 - The Atlantic Rim Collaboratory: An Emergent Movement for Global Educational Change

Abstract

The Scottish Government responded enthusiastically to the invitation to join the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory because it is keen to learn through collaboration and mutual learning with other education systems pursuing similar visions of excellence and equity for their young people. That means systems that are transforming to pursue broad, progressive goals for their learners, which are committed to improvement approaches which value education as a societal good rather than as a market commodity, and which invest strongly in evidence-based professionalism amongst teachers as a key driver for change.
This session will explore how Scotland has pursued a vision for a system which aims explicitly to ensure all young people are developed to be successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens (Scottish Government, 2008). It will discuss the interplay between different strands of a sustained programme of key reforms including; Curriculum for Excellence, a comprehensive re-design of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment covering the full age range from 3 to 18 which gives teachers much greater professional freedom and flexibility about what and how they teach; a programme of reforms to initial training, career-long professional learning, and leadership development designed to strengthen the “professional capital” (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012) of the teaching workforce (Donaldson, 2011); and nationally consistent approaches to self-evaluation and improvement planning in schools, complemented by proportionate and improvement-focused approaches to inspection and accountability (Education Scotland, 2013).
As the process of transitioning over to Curriculum for Excellence was nearing completion, Scotland commissioned a review of progress from the OECD (OECD, 2015). The OECD report, published in December 2015 recognised many strengths and endorsed the broad direction of travel, but also highlighted that the system must now remain bold and focused in fully embedding its reforms. This session will discuss how Scotland has tackled some key issues and challenges in pursuing that next phase of its improvement journey. It will discuss specifically the development of a new National Improvement Framework (Scottish Government, 2016b), which aims to accelerate progress on a small number of key priority areas for improvement, including literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing, and which has a particularly strong focus on improving outcomes for young people from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds to match those of their more affluent peers. The Framework focuses on strengthening “key drivers” of improvement, aligned at every level of the system, and seeks to establish a better flow of data and evidence around the system to drive improvement in a context where teacher professional judgement is given a primary role and sterile approaches of high-stakes, test-driven accountability are avoided (Scottish Government, 2016a). With its First Minister now placing the highest possible priority on making significant progress in reducing the attainment gap, this session will explore how Scotland is aiming to realise fully the benefits from a wide-ranging, progressive programme of reforms which are promising, but have yet to reach their full potential.

Author

• William Skene Maxwell, Education Scotland