Training staff to deliver the new curriculum is an ‘impossible job’

TRAINING teachers to deliver Scotland’s new curriculum is an almost impossible task, according to one senior member of school staff.

Dr Shaun Harley, a faculty head at a state secondary school, said the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was too large a concept to encapsulate in a course lasting one or two years.

CfE was intended to free up teachers and pupils to follow their interests, make learning more relevant to the outside world and move schools away from the concept of being exam factories.

However, its implementation has been confused and different schools have interpreted it in different ways.

Mr Harley told Holyrood’s education committee: “Schools are doing their absolute best to try and recognise what it is trying to do, but I am not sure we are all interpreting it in the same way.

“The profession themselves are working to mature into the curriculum and until the professional body has a stronger sense of their own identity with regards to Curriculum for Excellence it is very hard to convey that to trainee teachers.”

Mr Harley went on to call for a longer course to ensure trainee teachers had a more complex range of skills.

He said: “I favour a fouryear degree to make you a teacher because you have to mature so when you come out of the door you are ready.”