Scottish Learning Festival
Earlier today I visited the Scottish Learning Festival for the second consecutive year, and once again the biggest annual event in the Scottish education calendar was an informative experience.
Like last year, I met many people who are working hard to improve Scottish education. And I delivered the festival’s keynote address.
That gave me the chance to outline the Scottish Government’s key priorities for keeping up momentum on Curriculum for Excellence.
The introduction of the new curriculum to all Scottish schools has been a significant and positive step forward in raising attainment and ambition in young people across the country.
Local Authorities, schools, teachers and their partners across Scotland have made superb progress over the last year with its implementation, and every time I visit schools I see real improvements to learning and teaching.
But I am not simply going to sit back and let them get on with it.
We need to see a better flow of information between local authorities, schools, parents and pupils, not least around the development of new qualifications, due for introduction in 2013/14.
Today’s action plan will deliver that, and proposed legislative change following the schools handbook consultation, will strengthen the requirements of schools to consult parents and ensure school information is both relevant and appropriate.
A P7 profile for every pupil will also help schools identify the needs of individual pupils and capture their key achievements, ensuring that their development can be properly planned for in both the short and long term.
And the recommendations of the attainment group – due in December – will sit alongside work that’s ongoing on modern languages, literacy, numeracy and a number of other subjects. This work is vital if our children are to succeed and Scotland’s economy is to thrive.
Curriculum for Excellence will make our education system fit for the 21st century, and improve our children’s achievements, attainment and life chances. We are helping them develop an ever greater and more sophisticated range of knowledge, understanding and skills to meet the demands that being part of the future workforce will bring.
As we move forward, Scottish education can be even better, and the Scottish Government continues to have the same determination and unswerving commitment to improving learning for our young people we have demonstrated over the last few years.
Michael Russell
Cabinet Secretary for Education & Lifelong Learning
Further information
Curriculum for Excellence Action Plan
Attainment group established
Watch a video of the Cabinet Secretary’s keynote speech at the Scottish Learning Festival
6 comments
Re the Scottish Government’s action plan in relation to the new Q & A on cfe for parents. It does seem rather strange that this is being prepared for parents by head teachers with no input from parents themselves as To what they want and need. Too often parents are provided with documents full of education jargon. Surely there is a role for parents to play in drawing up this new Q & A in language we can understand
Some positive and some alarming statements from the Cabinet Secretary:
A properly detailed national P7 profile for students progressing onto the Secondary stage has got to be a good thing; current documentation from some Primary schools tends to be lacking in detail and attainment data (pre CfE and now) has not reflected actual attainment when tested inS1. The three broad categories of achievement in CfE has compounded this problem. More rigour at the Primary level can only help student progression- well done to the Cabinet Secretary for identifying this longstanding problem and being prepared to tackle it.
More alarmingly, the statement that new qualifications, such as the National 4, are “due for introduction in 2013/14″. That’s going to be a problem when teachers have been encouraged / ordered to deliver Level 3 outcomes inS1 and Level 4 outcomes in S2. Many schools have already planned to deliver National 4 in S3, which will begin in Summer 2012 for the CfE guinea pigs. I do not think that teachers and (more importantly) parents [all voters by the way!] will welcome an S3 of NO progression as Int1, 2 and SG will be rolled up in 2012.
Hopefully the Cabinet Secretary will have another look in his calendar and get the SQA to perform something they have rarely done in the past – a properly thought out set of course specifications delivered on time – OR invite other exam boards and remove SQA’s damaging monopoly.
I am tasked by those present at the SCEN Seminar, Young China and Young Scotland, to let you know of our conclusions and recommendations at the end of our meeting and roundtable discussions. The Royal Society of Edinburgh hosted us most generously on 27 September 2011 and Lord Wilson, who described his long experience of China and his aspirations for even greater mutual understanding and openness, inspired us. Adam Purvis, the driving force of The Power of Youth, encouraged us to see that our response to the world’s problems must lie in partnership and collaboration; we heard too from young Chinese and Young Scots already engaged in their professions who spoke clearly about the importance of learning about China and including Chinese in the suite of languages taught in Scottish schools. Those who make these recommendations to you include not only these young professionals but staff and senior pupils from a range of schools: Loudon Academy in East Ayrshire, Lasswade High School in Midlothian, Bathgate Academy in West Lothian, Madras College and Queen Anne High School in Fife, Bo’ness Academy in Falkirk and Holyrood High School and George Heriot’s School in the City of Edinburgh.
Participants believed strongly that, despite the progress that is being made through the network of Confucius Hubs and the leadership of pioneering schools, many pupils, especially in rural areas, do not have the right opportunities. ‘What is stopping me from learning more about China is that there are no facilities to teach us at school…we need the teachers and we need the materials’. We recommend that:
1. in pursuing your ambitious agenda to promote the learning of languages, you make specific reference to Chinese as one of the languages to be offered, ideally from early Primary, using the examples of Scottish pupils who have already qualified in Chinese: one undergraduate at Heriot-Watt University who has Higher Chinese said that the language is much simpler than people think;
2. you encourage schools and local authorities to work together to employ Teachers of Chinese and to make sustainable plans for the introduction of Chinese into the curriculum: ‘we have Teachers of Chinese trained in Scotland and they should be able to teach here’;
3. you emphasise that as part of increasing the momentum of Curriculum for Excellence, teaching about China should be included across subject areas, for instance in History, Geography and Modern Studies;
4. you promote the British Council Scotland’s excellent work in supporting partnerships between schools in Scotland and in China, with IT links to share work across the curriculum, e-pals for pupils and, wherever possible, exchange visits, as ‘we need to forge friendships’;
5. you advise businesses to think of the knowledge, skills and understanding they require from their future workforce and to give whatever support they can to schools, using their funding, expertise and connections;
6. you encourage the media to include more about China in their programming, inform parents on the importance of learning about China, support research on China in our universities, and invite Chinese students at Scottish universities to support learning about China and Chinese in our schools.
As you see, we believe that you have unlimited powers! We are very conscious that you are already a great supporter of the Scotland China Education Network and of the national agenda, led by Education Scotland and the Confucius Institute for Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, for promoting Chinese learning in our schools. Seminar participants are keen to have more such SCEN gatherings to enable ideas to be shared across the generations in this important initiative; they are starting a SCEN Ambassador scheme, so that young people themselves can speak out. SCEN will continue to strive to support you and is looking forward to contributing to the consultation on the Scottish Government’s new 2012 China Plan.
Lord Wilson has changed his tune on China. When I asked the former Governor of Hong Kong at an EGM whether Scottish Hydro saw China as a potential market, his advice was to avoid mainland China until they had dealt with the issue of corruption. He was at that time also on the Board of Trustees of British Council whose IELTS exam centres in China and Hong Kong were recently the subject of heated blog discussion over the issue of ‘industrial-scale’ cheating in exams and ghost-writing in Lord Wilson’s old Hong Kong stomping ground. Better therefore to give The British Council in China the proverbial body-swerve I think and leave developing closer links with China to Creative Scotland, Education Scotland and the Consulate in Edinburgh. http://dblackie.blogs.com/the_language_business/2011/07/the-ielts-ghostwriting-industry.html
Advice coming from dissident bloggers from inside China recently at a Green European University seminar in Poland chaired by the Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts (who sits alongside the SNP in The European Parliament) was incidentally very supportive of the strategy of constructive engagement with China. And interesting too that these Chinese activists – one of whom Michael Arti was the dissident whose Google account in China was blocked – said that micro-blogging within China has really taken off since that campaign and the country is now like a giant ‘intra-net’. What he also said was that paradoxically people now tend to trust these internal micro-blogging sites more than externally run ones as the view is that these are now so numerous they cannot be subject to manipulation to the same extent as e.g. British Council sites? Two of the other Chinese participants spoke with enthusiasm about previous visits to Scotland to address the STUC both in Glasgow and Inverness. I told them about the work Judith and others were doing in Scottish classrooms with Mandarin and also mentioned last month’s visit to China by the Scottish Information Commissioner Kevin Dunion from St Andrews.
Some interesting comments coming from the ongoing China fan club. With regard to JudithMcClure’s comments:
*’schools and local authorities to work together to employ Teachers of Chinese and to make sustainable plans for the introduction of Chinese into the curriculum’: Difficult when teaching for core subjects and support staff are beginning to be sacked left right & centre, and this situation is likely to increase over the next few years
*’teaching about China should be included across subject areas, for instance in History, Geography and Modern Studies’: One of the fundamentals of CfE is to allow professional freedom, where possible, in content, NOT to dictate content (although that would reflect Chinese government policy!). Many Modern Studies Departments already teach about China from the point of view of human rights abuses, and in History we still have no idea what the SQA will allow us to teach!
Ultimately Scotland’s curious relationship with the Chinese government, as opposed to the Chinese people, exemplified by the Cabinet Secretary’s nice trip, tends to be too accepting of the government line. Yes, there are some dissidents who support engagement, just as there are those who oppose it. Likewise there are many who can have no say, in China and Tibet, as they have been silenced in the most permanent fashion possible by a totalitarian dictatorship. Learn about China by all means, and engage with the many many wonderful Chinese people but let’s not forget what the Chinese government represents.