Curriculum for Excellence is becoming more problematic. Its capacities point to wider capabilities and relevance, but are turning into slogans. The outcomes and experiences embody coherent learning, but are degenerating into the ugly “Es and Os”, shovelled, parcelled and dismembered into what we had before.

Scottish education has not embraced the responsibility and professionalism of Building the Curriculum. Audit constrains us to six-point specifications of yesterday’s notions. Seven point implementation constrains thinking. Imposed commentary finishes us off.

We hear little of de-cluttering now. No wonder with what is coming at us. We just cannot shed prescription and elaborated procedure. Pinning something down does not let it grow. As Linda McNeil of Rice University points out, “Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning”.

The pursuit of excellence has become a mythic quest. HMIE’s Journey to Excellence has it that: “Excellence describes the furthest end of the quality spectrum. When we think of excellence, we think of an outstanding aspect, a model of its kind – the very best there is”.

But excellence is an abstraction, an idealisation, one rent with ideological supposition. So defined, it becomes not-matching-up to an ideal. That is why “excellence”, in these terms, takes us on a hiding to nothing. Unrealisable, it stokes fear. Need we head in this direction?

I have known staff engage with the most challenging and disaffected children, and gain their interest, respect and productive engagement (some of the time). Walk into the room and nothing leaps out as “excellent”. But get to know those pupils, and those staff, and you will find they have genuinely excelled themselves in what they have achieved, over time.

The incoming framework embodies a more profound inner kernel. Its inner core is the living of learning. This switches children on, and staff too. Once children find purpose in their activities they come to live through them (experiences), and then readily seek knowledge or skills to enhance them (outcomes). In doing so they grow as a person (capacities). The essence of a child thus forms in learning through living and being. Therein lies the purpose of formative assessment, not disembodied next steps “feeding back to the teacher the same marbles that the teacher gave out to the class”, as Edward Rothman put it.

Let us create a culture to get the best out of people; not a futile striving for the “very best there is”, but a humane endeavour to bring out “the very best in us”. This points to a radiant inner core, not of excellence, but of excelling, cooperating but not constraining, fostering a culture wherein we may excel. That is an inner journey, which cannot be imposed. It has to be enabled and opened up.

We need to focus on purposes, what we are seeking to achieve, not crawl up the notches of imposed measures and indicators. Without fixed specifications there is nothing to inspect. But there is everything to discuss, review, develop, implement, communicate, moderate, disseminate, enhance, build and learn.

Thereby capacity-building needs to join evaluation as a single process, not be tagged on afterwards. It should apply in fair weather and stormy, halcyon calm and normal bluster. All schools go through all such states, this is why “snapshot” audit is so inappropriate. Pupil, staff and institutional learning connect and work together. This should be the basis for developmental review. What aspects of richer, experiential learning are we seeking to enable, (and they won’t all be the same)? How are we going about this? How are we getting on? What is helping, or hindering? For this we need a conversation, not a monologue, or worse a diatribe.

Journey to Excellence counters the incoming principles. They are not “for excellence” but “for excelling”, in a far wider sense and in far wider dimensions than the traditional attainment agenda. Shovel-it-in has had its day. That was the rationale for the shift to capacities, outcomes and experiences, not screeds of “I can” statements cross-matching to 5-14 attainment targets, as now occurring. We must not wrap the new concepts in the practices of old.

What of the future? It is time to foster a culture of true learning, engender trust and, in W.E. Deming’s terms “banish fear”, enabling us all to grow, to be what we are capable of becoming.

The merger of HMIE and Learning and Teaching Scotland heralds a new prospect. We must eliminate the deficit connotations of improvement, inspection and excellence. Suppose the new merged agency became the Scottish Network of School Learning Engagement or The Educational Enhancement Agency? Suppose its ethos shifted from “support and challenge” to “engagement and understanding”? Words matter for they frame and form social reality.

An overall name change is essential. The principles of the 2004 review are world leading, but the current name has given birth to a pushmi-pullyu, pointing away from its principles and philosophy. The name should enshrine its ethos: Living Learning, the process of getting there: Building the Framework (since it is not a curriculum).

Stifling, pervasive micromanagement must end. We need a learning culture founded on local responsibility. Funding cutbacks beckon. Cutting specifications and judgementalism will release substantial resources now allocated to pointless audit and induced stress related absence. Living Learning is a plausible, affirming and energising prospect.

Niall MacKinnon

Plockton Primary School