Why is The Herald trying to reimagine secondary schools?

The Herald Scotland

15-05-2025

Indeed, the demands became so loud and insistent that the SNP decided they couldn't be ignored. Instead, the government decided that it would be best to take control of the narrative.
We got a promise that the SQA would be scrapped, and an expert review that recommended fundamental changes to the organisations that help run the Scottish education system. In particular, Professor Ken Muir and his team explicitly advised the government to split the functions of the exam board so that it could no longer mark its own homework by being its own regulator.
We got something called a 'National Discussion' that was going to 'inform a renewed vision for the future of Scottish education'.
And we got something that many had demanded for a very, very long time: a review of qualifications and our approach to certifying school leavers. This report offered some genuinely radical ideas, including bringing Scotland into line with other countries by reducing the number of years that students spend working through exam cycles.
Some people were hugely optimistic about all of this, but few remain so.
The government has already rejected meaningful changes to the exam system, and the much-vaunted National Discussion – which was never anything of the sort – has disappeared with barely a trace.
As for scrapping the SQA, the government wants the 'new' body that replaces it to have all the same powers, and for it to be run by all the same people who were behind years of failure.
If you suggest to people in Scottish education that the Muir and Hayward reforms are effectively dead, they rarely dispute the point. Many just offer a resigned shrug, as if there was no point in ever hoping for anything else anyway. They may well be right.
But the goal of reforming Scottish education, and making it truly fit for the 21st Century, cannot simply be abandoned. The stakes are too high, and the failures too great, for us to simply accept that things have aye been this way and move on.
Which is why The Herald has decided to ask what it might look like if we really did reimagine secondary schooling in Scotland.
But 18 pages are not enough space for The Herald to explain why education reform matters, what options are available to Scotland, and who needs to be watched closely to ensure accountability. Getting into all of this properly would require tens of thousands of words and even then it could never be exhaustive. There are just too many ideas – too many options.
That has not stopped us from trying, however, and we hope that size of the task does not stop our readers from picking up our marker and filling in the gaps we leave in these pages.
And there are gaps. We've only really been able to look at one major possible change in each of the two stages of secondary.
For the first three years, known as Broad General Education, a teaching approach that blends the knowledge and skills developed across discrete subjects shows promise, but we've only been able to show you a snapshot.
In S4-6, the most obvious changes involve altering qualifications, so we've explored the current landscape and also considered one option – Foundation Apprenticeships – in a bit more detail.
Either of these areas could fill a book on their own, but our articles can, we hope, be a useful starting point for further discussion.
We have also examined a few examples from beyond our borders – three in Europe, and one from across the Atlantic. Once again, these are snapshots of the systems in place in other countries, but they also illustrate an important point: that completely different approaches to education are, in the end, just about the choices we make and the factors (or people) we decide to prioritise.
A lot of ink in these pages is also dedicated to the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and details about not only its legal transition to Qualifications Scotland, but also its – to many – more important cultural transformation. There's no escaping the fact that the exam board will have impact on what reforms might be achieved in future, so the outcome of these ongoing reforms really matters.
Trust between teachers and the SQA has broken down over the years, and a series of events post-Covid have accelerated the breakdown of that relationship. This is something the SQA has admitted, and the current, interim SQA leadership has put 'resetting relationships' as a top priority in its transformation process.
Outside circumstances have created a situation where the only people capable of changing the SQA are within the SQA. And this in turn creates a situation where the only choice for stakeholders who are desperate for change is to trust the name that they feel does not deserve it.
That means the conversation around education reform must continue beyond this special edition of The Herald. We hope this spotlight not only sparks some ideas, but encourages readers and decision-makers to go further.