Strengths And Weaknesses Of Cfe

Scotland’s recently introduced Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is an innovative and ambitious new curriculum often described as “the biggest educational reform in Scotland for a generation” (Priestley and Biesta, 2013). Development on CfE has focused on establishing a child or young person’s citizenship, enterprise and creativity in their working adult lives. Curriculum for Excellence offers a way of uniting the curriculum, instilling health, creativity, enterprise and sustainability into the curriculum. The intention of the curriculum is to provide a single framework for learning and development from the ages of 3-18. Designed to give teachers more freedom to teach in more creative and innovative ways; moving the persona of a teacher from a ‘deliverer of content’ to a ‘facilitator or manager of learning’. Curriculum for Excellence is seen as distinctive as it intentionally moves away from the prescribed curriculum towards a model that can be adapted to a schools needs and capabilities as well as having the ability to transform and
The course is so dense with ‘experiences and outcomes’ (E’s and O’s) that Scotland’s teachers are drowning in the thousands of ‘I can …’ statements spread across all curricular areas. Each subject has over 100 statements; some subjects have up to meet up to 300 different outcomes. Making it extremely difficult for teachers to interpret and teach in the classroom as the curriculum model is not clear. With multiple starting points for both experiences and outcomes the statements are not only complex but bureaucratic. Insufficient consideration to the details regarding what should be on the curriculum set in place by the government results in a teacher failing to understand the learning intentions for their subject downgrades the knowledge passed on in the