From the Head of School

 

What the Experts Tell Us

It is not common for policy makers to talk about what they got wrong. So when Professor Ken Muir, the former director of education and current advisor to the Scottish government, is willing to be candid, it is worth taking notice.  

“One of the failings of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is that we have ended up with an exam driven system” he told an audience of educators at yesterday’s annual meeting of the Scottish Council of Independent Schools (SCIS).

However great the aims on CfE the focus had stopped being the students for whom those aims were for, instead it had switched to the tools for measuring their implementation.

Earlier in the meeting, Linda Bauld, professor of public health at Edinburgh university was asked what school’s should be teaching students to stop the next pandemic.  She didn’t hesitate.  “The fight against Covid was based on international cooperation. Having an international experience will stand students in good stead.  Above all they need to be adaptable and be able to communicate with many different people.”  What in ISA we call ‘global citizenship’.

The last speaker was Professor Roy Graeme, who is on the advisory council for economic transformation.  He talked about the big economic changes of the last 15 years, and speculated on those to come.  For him, the most important thing to learn at school was “the skill to retrain”.  What in ISA we call “lifelong learning”.  

All three eminent speakers were advocating education reform so, in the words of Professor Muir, there could be an “absolute focus on individual learners and their diverse needs.” Something that has always been at the heart of ISA’s mission of ‘every child, every opportunity.’

Exams measure specific subject specific skills and knowledge.  All three speakers were clear: we need skills and knowledge to tackle future local and global issues. But we also need adaptability, resilience, a global outlook and the ability to collaborate.  These are qualities that accumulate through a variety of experiences that an exam cramming school simply cannot provide. 

For Grade 12s, May will be dominated by their diploma exams. These will rightly be their focus for that time.  But for ISA, they are not the culminating moment all students are working towards.  They are one more experience, albeit the last, in the road to becoming a “socially responsible, active global citizen.”