Curriculum and opportunity in Scottish secondary education: a half‐century of expansion and inequality

Abstract

Debate about the curriculum of secondary schools has centred on two competing claims. One is the aspiration to provide a broad, liberal curriculum to all students as a route into common citizenship. The other is that a curriculum of this kind, far from being potentially universal, is intrinsically merely the culture of dominant social groups, is inaccessible to people who are not members of these, and is also harmful to most students’ vocational opportunities. The analysis here considers these debates through data from a unique series of surveys of school students in Scotland, covering the whole of the second half of the twentieth century. It thus deals with a period when selection for entry to secondary school was ended for all public‐sector schools, and when, following that reform, there were deliberate attempts in policy to extend a liberal curriculum to everyone. The analysis provides some vindication of the reformers’ intentions that a liberal education could be experienced by a wider range of students than in the selective system. But it also shows that inequality of access to a broad curriculum became greater than previously.

Education and Social Science

“…10 Scotland is like Scandinavia, and unlike the USA, in its thorough mitigation of structural divisions in schooling in the 1960s and after, constructing one of the least socially segregated secondary-school systems in the developed world (even allowing for the existence of the independent schools: Croxford & Paterson, 2006;Smith & Gorard, 2002). Scotland also created, in the 1990s, a thoroughly common curriculum for all school pupils (Paterson, 2020a). And Scotland developed a quite pioneering system of educational guidance that made schools increasingly child centred and increasingly aware of children's rights (Paterson, 2020b).…”

“…Over the long duration, however, the sense that breadth and intellect are what education ought to be about gradually extended this liberal and competitive spirit to the experience of a majority of secondary pupils. It's true that this extension of an older liberal curriculum from small elites to wider groups was found in many other countries, including England, but in few did it proceed quite so thoroughly as in Scotland in favour of offering essentially the same kind of liberal academic studies eventually in the 1990s to everyone (Paterson, 2020a). So the problems currently of Scottish school education might be interpreted as the encounter between these traditions and the rest of the world, especially when quite different views of the liberatory potential of academic education come up against what has been inherited here.…”