What's the purpose of curriculum?

Scotland

In 2015, the OECD proclaimed: “This is a watershed moment for Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence”.

But any notion that 2015 might have been a watershed moment was thrown into sharp relief in 2020.

It was the events of 2020 that brought "lift off", “a historical change in direction”, a “monumental event”. Within weeks. 2020 brought many in Scottish education that watershed moment, showing what’s possible where there is a will and need for change.

Those events also made us question the purpose of our education system.

Commissioned by Education Scotland, our independent team listened to the voices of around 150 educators, youth learning specialists and over 600 young people over the first five months of 2022. We also included the voices of another 130 or so educators whose ‘curriculum stories’, told during the height of the pandemic, showed how curriculum's purpose and its "four capacities" perform under pressure.

We adopted our trademark empathetic approach, reflecting an appreciation for the work educators do and the incredible achievements of our young people, the vibrancy and dynamic of Scottish education.

What did we discover?

We discovered that any importance initially attached to the four capacities in designing curriculum has been diluted, crowded out in a busy policy marketplace by two decades of new initiatives, guidelines and expectations. We also learned that:

• Learners and educators share a consensus about the point of school.
• The learning experience has to be about more than just ‘preparing’ for the future.
• The language of the capacities isn’t the language of learners.
• People need to understand where curriculum ideas come from to know if they're still worth pursuing.
• We have to include a broader input in defining them from those working in youth and community learning.
• We shouldn’t be embarrassed talking about creative ideas.
• We should avoid any further conversations being too quick, and we should avoid leading questions in our quest.

2022 is perhaps the year we need to decide what to do with this watershed moment we’ve experienced.

That’s why we explore the four capacities in a short but powerful paper, in order to understand the purpose of Scotland's curriculum. It's even more important as the country enters its first 'national conversation' in twenty years, exploring the future of education in the country's schools.

Read through the paper section-by-section and use it to stimulate your own discussions on curriculum purpose.

Or download the full paper, Exploring The Four Capacities (pdf).