CfE is taking a real beating in the press at the moment. The articles range from the superficial & simplistic to downright factually incorrect nonsense. You can judge for yourself which is which:

A controversial overhaul of classroom teaching in Scotland will take effect as secondary pupils begin returning to school after the summer break. BBC

As thousands of children returned to school yesterday for the first time under the Curriculum for Excellence, critics said falling teaching numbers and reductions in assistants and school finances could make it impossible to implement. Scotsman

Teachers across Scotland are facing “burn-out” over the delivery of the controversial new school curriculum because of a lack of time and resources, unions warned yesterday. Herald

What is being done in our schools is a massive act of vandalism, and those first to suffer will be the least academically able. For, in the guise of modernisation, public exams at 16 are being abolished. In place of Standard Grades will be teacher assessments. Scotsman

There are many many bones which I could pick in reference to some of these pieces; but I’m worried that if I attempted to do this, I might well end up throwing something at my nice shiny iMac. I like my iMac. I’m not going to do that. Suffice to say, I disagree.

I did try to respond to the BBC piece when offered the chance by Claire O’Gallagher at BBC Learning Scotland. It was when writing a comment on here that something dawned on me. There is an important difference between CfE and its implementation.

I couldn’t understand how journalists, including some at the BBC, had ended up always putting the word ‘controversial’ before any mention of CfE. How did we get to this point? CfE arose from a National Debate. The Curriculum Review Group which devised it was very well represented, as is the CfE Management Board. CfE has successfully migrated from one Education Secretary to another and has even crossed from the Lib/Lab Coalition to the SNP. The assessment principles of CfE build strongly on Assessment is for Learning, which is very widely supported amongst the teaching profession. In fact, a few years ago a lot of Scottish Teachers would have told you that CfE was going to be a great thing.

So given this, how has CfE acquired the ‘controversial’? I think perhaps this is fuelled by many teachers’ (mainly secondary) uneasiness with the way CfE is being implemented. Many teachers have quite legitimate concerns regarding the timings involved and I would imagine that the vast majority of these teachers are more concerned for the potential impact on their pupils than on themselves. Many of these teachers however are still in favour of the principles of CfE. They would just like more time to make it a success or wish that the process had been handled differently. In these cases, which I find often amongst my colleagues at least, CfE is not controversial. Its implementation is.

Meanwhile, some seem to be taking advantage of this relatively nuanced position to develop a slightly different narrative. This upsets me. Not because of the impact of this on me, but of the impact this could have on Scotland’s young people.