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The aim of the research reported here was to examine how confident student teachers, preparing for a career in secondary school teaching, felt to meet their responsibilities to teach skills across literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing. By inquiring into their oncampus and placement learning experiences, we aimed to explore the extent to which they felt their initial teacher education programme had enabled them to teach across each area, as the Scottish curriculum and professional standards demand. A significant percentage of student teachers across all subject specialisms from our sample indicated a lack of confidence in providing numeracy experiences for their learners from within their subject area. Confidence for teaching literacy and health and wellbeing was much higher.

Purpose Critical literacy foregrounds the relationship between language and power by focusing on how texts work and in whose interests (Luke, 2012, p. 5). It is highlighted as an “important skill” within Scotland’s national educational framework for 3-18 year olds, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), yet, as this paper aims to show, what the concept means is far from clear for policy users (Scottish Government, 2009e). Design/methodology/approach Using a lens that draws from critical discourse analysis, critical content analysis (Luke, 2001; Beach et al., 2009; Fairclough, 2010) and Ball’s method of policy analysis (2015), the authors find that the term “critical literacy” has been applied incoherently within key CfE documentation, including the frequent conflation of critical literacy with critical reading and critical thinking. Findings The authors argue that the CfE’s use of “critical literacy” is a misnomer, given that the version presented is an amalgamation of literacy-related competences drawing largely from psychological and not socio-political perspectives of literacy. Social implications This is a missed opportunity, given the Scottish Government’s stated commitment to social justice in policy terms (Scottish Executive, 2000; Scottish Government, 2016), not forgetting the powerful benefits that a critically literate stance could bring to Scotland’s learners at this time of communicative change and challenge. Originality/value While the authors offer a contextualized view of the ways in which the term “critical literacy” has been incorporated into Scottish educational policy, they propose that its implications go beyond national boundaries.

Following the announcement, in November 2018, that Scotland would be the first educational system to introduce an LGBTI-inclusive curriculum in all of its state schools, this position paper advocates critical literacy as a theoretically congruent framework within which LGBTI issues can be explored. We suggest educators could do this by problematising social structures and language practices including our own professional actions beyond what we teach, and by using children’s literature to actively teach LGBTI issues and to open up spaces for discussion of these issues across curricular areas. What we propose is challenging in a Scottish educational context since Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) presents critical literacy as ‘finding and using information’, and it is not grounded in any wider theoretical basis, effectively removing the active, challenging and transformative aspects of critical literacy pedagogies. As Vasquez et al. argue, one of the key ways for teachers to engage with critical literacy is through the literature on its implementation in different contexts; in this position paper we hope to provide both a theoretical framework and practice accounts of LGBTI education from the wider literature to inform the development of an LGBTI-inclusive curriculum in Scotland and elsewhere.

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