This plan – written by the Scottish Government’s Curriculum for Excellence Management Board – sets out what primary and secondary schools and local authorities should be doing. The author/s clearly have not benefited from a CfE education themselves: one extra point for the table format, but immediately lost for foggy language. The plan includes several actions for staying in touch with parents on matters such as assessing progress, reporting to parents, tracking progress, publication of CfE materials, etc. Apparently, Edinburgh education department has been pretty slow off the mark with much of this, but CfE guidance and exemplars produced by the Scottish Government have also been slow in coming out. Quite a lot of the actions from Education Scotland are simultaneous with schools and local authorities delivering the same actions. If the Scottish Government would like schools and local authorities to be creative and progress rapidly with all these, timely publication would be helpful. On the other hand, everyone knew all of this was coming for years …

Here is Education Scotland’s report on the progress of CfE implementation in schools as of 23 May.

Chairman of the Broughton Parent Council says, ‘[The report] provides an overview on how well secondary schools and education authorities across Scotland are prepared for CfE. Since I like my reports to contain numbers, tables and telling examples, I’d probably give it a “C” at best. At least the conclusion is clear: “There are no requests for whole-school delay in the implementation of new National Qualifications and the audit did not identity any individual departments which have requested delay through the exceptional circumstances arrangements.” Independent of the report, I am pleased to note that, thanks to a lot of hard work by staff, CfE at BHS is moving forward at the right pace.’

Here is a letter from Alasdair Allan, Minister for Learning, Science and Scotland’s Languages, in response to communication from Harald Tobermann, Broughton PC Chair. Says Harald, this letter was ‘clearly written by a civil servant and signed by the minister – he appeared a lot livelier on the phone!’