Scotland’s children’s commissioner is calling on ministers to “take the leadership role” and produce a timeline for the delivery of the Scottish Diploma of Achievement - the school leavers’ certificate recommended in Professor Louise Hayward’s 2023 .
In an exclusive interview with Tes Scotland, Nicola Killean said it had been clear “for years and years and years” that pressure from exams was having a negative impact on “not just children’s right to education but the right to health”.
She said: “I would really like to see an implementation plan that is timed that says, ‘What are the steps that will take us towards the Scottish Diploma of Achievement?’ Because not only will it relieve some of the pressure for children and young people, but it will actually recognise more of the strengths that children and young people bring even before they have their input from education.”
Scottish Diploma of Achievement
The idea of the Scottish Diploma of Achievement (SDA) was to recognise more than just academic attainment. It comprises three elements: “programmes of learning”, including subjects and courses already typically studied in the of school; the “personal pathway”, which would reflect students’ interests; and “project learning” to allow in-depth exploration of an issue such as climate change.
However, while Killean described Professor Hayward’s proposals for reforming assessment as “visionary”, she said the Scottish government’s response had been “tentative”, and criticised a failure to act “at pace”.
She said that now was the time for the government to “absolutely take the leadership role to look at what a truly children’s rights, inclusive education system look likes, and what we need to do in terms of long-term resource for that”.
Earlier this year Killean published - compiled after well over a year of gathering young people’s views - setting out her recommendations to improve the education system.
It warned that too many children were failing to thrive under the current system and that, while change had been promised - and there had been many reviews - “children in school feel no improvement”.
The report made wide-ranging recommendations, including: fundamental reform of the support and resourcing for children who have additional support needs; more equitable access to secondary subjects; a child-friendly complaints process in all education settings; an adequately resourced national online education offer; and a call for councils to address the prevalence of shouting at children in schools.
Killean told Tes Scotland that she had made education a priority because it “kept coming up consistently” in conversations with young people.
There were “good examples out there” of successes in education, but many children in Scottish schools needed improved support - from children with disabilities to those with experience of the care system.
“That’s what we are hearing from professionals as well,” she said. “They feel like they are working in a system that hasn’t been designed and set up for all the children they are working really hard to try and deliver for.”
Scotland ‘could do something incredible’
Killean was clear that Scotland could “do something incredible” if it “put children at the centre” and designed the education system “around their needs” - but she acknowledged that this would “need money”.
“The Scottish government will need to have a long-term investment plan for this,” she said.
There were, however, also “simple things” that could make a difference in the short term to children and young people, Killean said.
Schools should stop overloading pupils with homework, she said, and adapt “routines and habits” to create more suitable environments for neurodivergent children.
She also advocated introducing support and supervision for school staff to provide them with “a safe place to process” so they could build resilience and “feel calmer and make better decisions”.
“Support and supervision, from my perspective, is about a safe place for people to process the complexity of the roles that they have. It just recognises how complex it is to be a teacher and to be consistently putting the needs and rights of children first.”
Social workers, youth workers and educational psychologists all already benefit from supervision, but school staff are “an anomaly”, said Killean.
“When you look at the amount of time they spend with children every day, every week, and the complexity of the needs of the children that teachers and support workers are supporting, then it feels like an unusual gap.”
A programme in Highland Council - implemented by educational psychologists - has shown the potential of the approach to support headteachers in particular, she said, and since then it has also been adopted by Moray Council.
Space to reflect on the job of teaching
Bernadette Cairns is the principal educational psychologist at Highland Council who pioneered the approach.
In a , she said that supervision is “not counselling” nor is it about “overseeing somebody’s work or being judgmental” - rather, it is about space to reflect on the job.
Killean said: “I’m not suggesting that you put in place support and supervision and everything is solved. This is an example of one area of good practice that I think could be embedded more quickly.”
The Hayward independent review of qualifications and assessment was published in June 2023. The government commissioned the review but took over a year to respond to its proposals.
On the SDA, education secretary Jenny Gilruth said the government was “supportive of the development of a leaving certificate as a shared longer-term goal for Scottish education”, but more work was needed “to determine its exact content and how it would operate”.
Killean’s call for the review recommendations to be implemented follows similar pressure from secondary headteachers, education directors and teaching unions, all of whom were involved in the drawing up of the recommendations.
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