At a recent conference I suggested a new evidence-based, inclusive strategy for Scottish education. The national Curriculum for Excellence is dead. It started life already behind and wasn’t nurtured. How could it be expected to succeed with such a start?
Establishing what Scottish education was for never happened at the outset of CfE. There was a national debate, but the questions “what is working well?” and “what is not working well?” were never set in any philosophical framing of the purposes of education. Thus the blend of “whole-child”, self-actualisation approaches were not reconciled with performance management of exam results in a broad, inclusive education philosophy.