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'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal':
Essays on Education
by Tony McManus

Background Paper: A brief History of the reform of the examinations and curriculum in the senior years of Scottish secondary schools, 1994-2000 [1]

by Lindsay Paterson

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The Highers

The Higher Grade exam has formed the cornerstone of Scottish secondary education since it was inaugurated in 1888 by Henry Craik, head of the new Scotch Education Department from 1885. It had two purposes. One was to provide a mechanism for selecting students for university. The other was to provide a public measure of the quality of a system of secondary schools which he was intending to establish. [2]

The Higher Grade exam was at first taken by only small numbers of students (still fewer than 5% in the 1930s), but it became the measure by which proper secondary education would be judged. The educational debates through the 1920s and 1930s were mainly between a radical vision of secondary education for all - Tawney's slogan that was advocated in Scotland by the enthusiasts for the New Education, such as William Boyd, head of the Department of Education at Glasgow University - and a much more restricted interpretation which the government Education Department attempted to impose.[3] In the late 1940s and 1950s, the compromise had been provisionally accepted that the Highers would certificate the roughly 40% of students who entered selective senior secondary courses, but would not be available to the remaining students, who attended the junior secondary courses. But the democratising pressures of the late 1950s and 1960s first induced the Department to introduce the Ordinary Grade in 1962, and then, more famously, forced the transition to comprehensive secondary schools from 1965 onwards.

By the late-1970s, all public-sector Scottish secondary schools had become comprehensive,[4] and a further reform of intermediary certification was needed, since the Ordinary Grade was then catering for some two thirds of the age group, twice the level it had been aimed at. The outcome by the early 1990s was Standard Grade - a common structure of curriculum and examination for all students aged 14-16, with courses, exams and certificates differentiated according to ability. This was introduced with almost none of the bitter controversy that accompanied the development of a common curriculum and GCSE in the rest of the UK. It seemed the natural accompaniment to comprehensive schools, which also by then had become accepted as the natural way of ordering post-primary schooling, with around two thirds of people favouring it and with no serious political campaigning to abolish or even significantly modify it - all in stark contrast to debate in England.[5] The broad acceptance of a system of common secondary schools teaching a common curriculum right up to the school leaving age at 16 provides the immediate background to the Higher Still reform of the 1990s.

Why Reform?

The relative success of these reforms of the 1960s and 1970s pushed increasing proportions of students to stay on into post-compulsory education, and so provoked the question of what they should do there. The eventual response was that government ministers acceded to the inspectorate pressure to establish a committee of inquiry, headed by John Howie, who was professor of mathematics at St Andrews University. Howie's report [6] was published in 1992. Its critique had six main elements:

  1. The full potential of the Highers was not available to more than a minority of students.

  2. Most students had extensive experience of failure in fifth and sixth year, precisely because of the flexibility that the admirers of the current arrangements lauded.

  3. The flexible combination of Highers and the new vocational modules that had been introduced in 1984 had not really done anything to raise the status of vocational education, which remained a pariah alongside the traditionally academic style of Scottish schooling.

  4. Although the flexibility was undeniable, it was also wasteful. It prevented coherent planning of courses, it lowered expectations, and was inefficient in the sense that 'substantial numbers of students drop out in arbitrary ways in a fashion which limits the continuity and cohesiveness of teaching'.

  5. Moreover, 'the Scottish system offered few opportunities for searching scholarship'.

  6. Although the Scottish system might have stood up well compared to that in the rest of the UK, in some respects it looked weak compared to other European countries. The report claimed that 'the key feature of most continental systems is that students cover a broad, quasi-mandatory programme, so ensuring substantial coverage of a whole range of subjects or curricular areas'.

The committee then recommended that there should be two 'pathways' starting in fourth year, a year earlier than the existing courses. One of the pathways would be predominantly vocational, the other academic.

The critique was widely accepted, but the recommendations were not, mainly on the grounds that they involved tracking - the fairly rigid separation of students into these two paths as early as age 14. This, it was widely felt, ran counter to the principles of comprehensive schooling. As a result, less than a year after the Howie report had been published, an impasse had been reached.

Higher Still

Into this vacuum stepped the inspectorate. Their resulting 'Higher Still' proposals of 1994 had seven key elements:

  1. The Highers would remain - a politically potent point in the context of allegations that the Conservative government were trying to 'anglicise' Scottish education - but would be extended to include an Advanced Higher in school sixth year. [7]

  2. Both the Higher and the Advanced Higher would be turned into modules, and these would be drawn from an amalgamation of the courses (such as the Higher Grade) issuing from the Scottish Examination Board and those that were part of the vocational National Certificate administered by the Scottish Vocational Education Council.

  3. The proposals talked about 'a unified system of courses and assessment'. Although this idea of unifying academic and vocational courses was later cited as one of the main features of the system, such philosophical issues were not given any prominence in the document.

  4. These new courses would be offered at three levels below Higher, giving five levels altogether, thus taking forward the principle of differentiating levels that had been put in place for Standard Grade.

  5. Despite the general abandonment of Howie's idea of moving Standard Grade to third year, able students would be encouraged to do so. This became known as 'fast-tracking'.

  6. There was an unequivocal statement that assessment would be 'criterion based', not norm referenced. [8]

  7. All students should demonstrate that they possessed certain 'core skills', similar to those identified by Howie.

 

Questions about Higher Still

Broadly, that was the reform that was put in place, and the first students to take the new courses embarked on them in autumn 1999. The move towards the new system involved the merging in 1998 of the body that had administered the examinations since 1965 - the Scottish Examination Board - and the body which, since 1984, had run the new system of vocational modules, the Scottish Vocational Education Council; the new organisation was called the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA).

During the intervening five years, eight serious questions were raised about the entire project:

  1. Timescale: The inspectorate originally allowed only three years for implementation, and never accepted that that was unrealistic. The programme was delayed twice as political events gave opportunities for new ministers to make their mark, but there remained a lingering fear among teachers that the speed of reform had precluded careful planning.

  2. Fast-tracking: This was believed to be potentially divisive, almost as much as the Howie proposals for two distinct pathways.

  3. Advanced Higher: Questions were raised about the implications of the Advanced Higher for the length of courses in higher education. If the Advanced Higher really did lead to a reduction of the Scottish honours degree to three years, at least in some institutions, then that would truly disadvantage precisely those candidates of middling academic ability who formed the bulk of the new clientele as higher education expanded.

  4. Modularisation: Although this had been endorsed by many commentators on Howie, his committee's doubts about it began to be shared more widely. Partly that was a matter of excessive assessment, partly it had to do with the integrity of some courses - it being doubted, for example, whether a coherent English literature course could be broken up into 40-hour chunks - but the general concern was simply about the anarchy of choice. Was it really educationally defensible to let students choose with no constraints apart from those dictated by the resources available?

  5. Assessment: As the paperwork started to flood out from the SQA in the second half of the 1990s, it began to become evident that internal modular assessment would impose enormous burdens on schools, for which they were not prepared or resourced administratively.

  6. Curriculum: Issues were raised in many subjects, partly because there turned out in practice to be much more curricular change than the inspectorate had forecast at the beginning.

  7. Multi-level teaching: The prospect of this had arisen ultimately because there was a severe limitation on the resources that would be available for implementing the programme. So, with five levels in Higher Still, teachers would find themselves teaching, in the same class and at the same time, students who were aiming for quite different qualifications.

  8. Philosophy: The last objection was to the lack of a coherent educational philosophy in Higher Still.

Teachers' doubts came to a head in November 1998, when they voted by a majority of about six to one to boycott the reform.[9] Their unions negotiated a rather weak way out of this. In return for postponing the boycott, they agreed to join a Higher Still Liaison Group that would, in theory, oversee the last stages of implementation. But it turned out that this Group had little impact on official thinking.

The First Year

Nevertheless, the reform went ahead from summer 1999, with the Advanced Higher to be brought in during the following year. Management problems immediately became apparent. Teaching materials arrived late, especially examples of what would count as a successful performance in either the internal modular assessments or the external exam that was to take place in late spring 2000. Indeed, the situation concerning the formal internal assessments - or 'unit assessments' as they were officially called - was approaching the chaotic. Students had to pass all the unit assessments in a course before they were allowed to sit the external exam. Yet the arrangements for these crucial tests were awry from the start. Some of the assessment instructions were actually changed after the assessments were due to have taken place. Students found themselves being assessed almost all the time. The resulting stress might have been justifiable if the unit assessments were performing an educational role, but the mechanisms by which their contribution was monitored seems simply to have collapsed.

But if the unit assessments were causing educational problems, rumbling in the background was what happened to the data that emerged from them. Schools tried to submit their lists of candidates and the SQA repeatedly failed to record them. That was very serious: because students had to pass all the unit assessments to be allowed to pass the course, absent data would be interpreted as a fail, regardless of the performance in the external exam.

In August 2000, these problems culminated in the near-collapse of the whole system. Thousands of students received wrong grades, or received none at all, or received awards in subjects which they had not sat. Officially, around 17,000 students were affected, representing about 11% of candidates and 2.7% of exam presentations.[10] Even an error rate of 2.7% is unacceptably high in an exam-processing system, for which the only appropriate target level of accuracy is 100%. There are reasons to believe that the problem may have been three or four times greater than these numbers indicate. [11]

Conclusions

The administrative system recovered for the next diet of examinations, in summer 2001, mainly because of a large injection of money from the Scottish Executive. Schools, despite the reservations of teachers, had to go ahead with the new courses, because there was no realistic option. But that the concerns have not gone away is evident in the intermittent complaints surfacing at conferences of teachers, and in the pages of specialist journals such as the Times Education Supplement Scotland. It also appeared in a dossier of evidence compiled in 2005-6 by Bill Smith, a teacher at Ellon Academy, and published in February 2006 with the title Listen to the Teachers.[12]

By then, the concerns had had a much wider airing, not only in the parliamentary inquiry immediately after the disaster of 2000, but also in the National Debate on Education in 2002-3 (partly occasioned by the experience of Higher Still)[13], and in the policy changes which are still flowing from that. The style of the Minister since 2003, Peter Peacock, could hardly have been more different from that of his recent predecessors, and his intentions seem to be genuinely to listen, to respect the judgement of teachers, and gradually to reform the curriculum so that a more humane education could escape from the intrusive burden of mechanistic assessment. The richest fruit so far of this new thinking is the consultative document A Curriculum for Excellence.[14] The issues raised by Tony McManus have certainly had an impact on public debate.

But, if there are some reasons to be optimistic, Bill Smith's compilation warns us also to be cautious. The dilemma is summed up well there by Donald Morrison (a teacher of history), referring approvingly but sceptically to A Curriculum for Excellence:

Less assessment, more flexibility and enrichment are laudable aims. But the risk of this approach is that pupils will not do so well in external exams (although be better educated). Will politicians, the inspectorate, quality assurance officers, the league-table-obsessed Sunday Times and 'concerned' parents tolerate real education?

 

Footnotes

[1, return to reference in text] By Lindsay Paterson, School of Education, Edinburgh University. See also Raffe, D., Howieson, C. and Tinklin, T. (2002), 'The Scottish educational crisis of 2000: an analysis of the policy process of unification', Journal of Educational Policy, 17, pp. 167-86; and Paterson, L. (2000), Crisis in the Classroom, Edinburgh: Mainstream.

[2] Anderson, R. D. (1983), Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[3] McPherson, A. (1993). 'Schooling', in Dickson, A. and Treble, J. H. (eds), People and Society in Scotland, vol III, 1914-1990, Edinburgh: John Donald, 80-107; Stocks, J. (1995), 'The people versus the department: the case of Circular 44', Scottish Educational Review, 27, 48-60; pp. 60-71 in Paterson, L. (2003), Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[4] McPherson, A. and Willms, J. D. (1987), 'Equalisation and improvement: some effects of comprehensive reorganisation in Scotland', Sociology, 21, 509-39.

[5] pp. 129-54 in Paterson, L. (2003), Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[6] Scottish Office Education Department (1992), Upper Secondary Education in Scotland, Edinburgh: HMSO.

[7] The rather odd title of all this ('Higher Still') owed more to the Conservative government's politically embattled position in Scotland than to any educational arguments. They needed to show that they were not undermining a key part of Scottish cultural traditions, while at the same time not evading the pressure from London and from the right-wing press to 'raise standards'. Expedient though such reasoning may have been, the name stuck.

[8] Norm-referencing means that students are judged by how they perform in comparison with the other people sitting the exam, rather than on the grounds of their own capacities. The alternative is usually called criterion-referencing, and the classic instance is learning to drive a car. In principle, everyone could pass their driving test, and whether an individual candidate is successful does not depend on how other candidates perform. In a norm-referenced test with a fixed pass rate, by contrast, an individual's chance of success depends on the quality of the other candidates in the same diet of exams.

[9] For the result among members of the largest union, the EIS, see p. 3 in Times Education Supplement Scotland, 13 November 1998; for the smaller union, the SSTA, see p. 6 in Times Education Supplement Scotland, 4 December 1998.

[10] paragraph 3.2.3 in Scottish Executive (2000), A Review into Exam Results Issues Concerning the Scottish Qualifications Authority, report from Deloitte and Touche, Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Available on the web at www.scotland.gov.uk/library3/education/sqar-00.asp.

[11] See pp. 15-16 and 21-2 in Paterson, L. (2000), Crisis in the Classroom, Edinburgh: Mainstream, which summarises the evidence available in the autumn of that year. A further reason came later. In mid-December, the SQA announced that, out of 117,021 instances of people sitting a Higher Grade exam, there were 83,163 passes. Before the extent of the computer errors was known, on 9 August, they were reporting 76,101 passes (email from SQA to Education Department dated 9 August 2000, in evidence submitted by the Scottish Executive Education Department to the inquiry by the Scottish Parliament's Education committee). So the computer errors seem to have accounted for 7062 extra passes - that is, awards in the range A, B or C which had originally been recorded as a compensatory Intermediate grade or a fail. If we make the crude assumption that these 7062 cases all involved moving people from below the pass line to a C, and that the incidence of errors at each cut-off point (below A, below B, below C and below compensatory Intermediate) was proportional to the number of results which ought to have been placed just above the point - numbers which we can obtain from the SQA's own statistics (Scottish Qualifications Authority, 2000, Preliminary Statistics for Diet 2000, Dalkeith: SQA, 11 December) - then we would conclude that there would have been about 5,100 mistakes at grade A, 6,800 mistakes at grade B, and about 2,700 mistakes at compensatory Intermediate award. That would give a total number of errors of just over 21,000, which is 18% of 117,021, very similar to the figure issued in August by the universities' admissions service UCAS, which had been told by the SQA that 2800 (that is, 16%) of the 17,800 results it had received were wrong. So the error rate in terms of presentations seems likely to have been at least six times as great as the 2.7% that was officially admitted.

[12] Times Education Supplement Scotland, 10 March 2006.

[13] see, eg, Munn, P., Stead, J., McLeod, G., Brown, J., Cowie, M., McCluskey, G., Pirrie, A. and Scott, J. (2004), 'Schools for the 21st century: the national debate on education in Scotland', Research Papers in Education, 19, pp. 433-52.

[14] See: http://www.acurriculumforexcellencescotland.gov.uk/index.asp

 

(Published Online: 28 June 2006)

Other essays available

Introduction by Lindsay Paterson

Paths of Perception (1997): an essay on the Celtic and European basis of Scottish thought.

Philistinism and Cultural Renewal (2000): a general cultural critique, with particular attention to the state of education.

New Labour and the Poverty of Ideas (2001): a political polemic, arguing that the UK Labour government and its predecessors have come close to destroying the intellectual basis for social renewal.

Higher Still and Lower Yet (1997): critique of the reform to the examination system in the senior years of Scottish secondary schools that was put in place between 1994 and 1999.

Inaugural Lecture to the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature (1999): political activism set in the intellectual context explained in the other essays.

[This essay ]Background paper by Lindsay Paterson

 

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