The revolution in Scottish education has been undermined by the “lunacy” of red tape, says a senior education figure.
Keir Bloomer said the roll-out of the Curriculum for Excellence, which he helped design in the early 2000s, was about giving teachers more time to enable pupils to truly understand their subjects.
But he said teachers had been overloaded with “near incomprehensible” guidance.
“You cannot really get depth in learning unless the time and space is available for it and that is dependent upon the original intention of Curriculum for Excellence, which is to declutter,” he told MSPs on Wednesday.
“And we have not been successful in decluttering.”
He referred to an analysis of CfE guidance, which included the setting of “1,820 experiences and outcomes” that teachers must follow.
“Now that is self-evident lunacy,” he added.
“We have allowed mountains of guidance – much of it very badly written and nearly incomprehensible – to accumulate over the years and that now stands in the way of the decluttering of the curriculum.”
Mr Bloomer, who convenes the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s education committee, was giving his verdict to MSPs on how the CfE has worked in practice since its 2010 launch.
The former chief executive at Clackmannanshire Council said no-one knows what progress has been made in education through CfE because “no serious attempt has been made to evaluate it”.
He added: “This is the most significant development that has taken place in Scottish education since the war and no evaluation system was set up at the outset.
“Successive governments have made claims of success in relation to Curriculum for Excellence and to be honest with you, they are based on no evidence whatsoever.”
Education Secretary John Swinney has already pledged to cut teachers’ workload, following complaints that the profession has been overburdened by bureaucracy as Curriculum for Excellence has been rolled out.
Plans include scrapping some unit assessments which are marked by teachers before pupils sit their exams, and “empowering” teachers as part of a review of how schools are run.
