Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No163

If you’re looking for a wee bit of summer stimulation – something to read on the beach and make you feel a little smug that you’re actually educating yourself – you could do worse than pick up a book by Lindsay Paterson called Lessons from Scottish Schools.

We’ll be reviewing the book soon, but before we do that, I thought it would be worth going back to the controversy over the ‘unfair’ Higher Maths exam discussed last week.

To that end, below you will see a detailed article by Andrew Moulden, who explains that ‘Scotland’s retrograde curriculum changes have resulted in more S5 pupils being unprepared for the rigours of the relatively unchanged Higher Maths course’.

The changes being referred to here relate to the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). To get a feel for what he is talking about, I got in touch with a friend of SUE to ask him, as a teacher, what had gone wrong. In particular, I wanted to know about this idea of ‘teaching to the test’ – a term that is often used to suggest that children are, in a sense, taught how to tick the correct boxes without understanding much about what it is they’re ticking. Here is what he said:

We have in Scotland, from primary one to third year of secondary school, what is called a broad education. Unfortunately, despite, or perhaps because of the name, it’s pretty broad but barely education.

Rather than having a tight curriculum that acts as a series of building blocks for kids’ knowledge over the years, the CfE ruined education in Scotland.

It did this by getting rid of structure and recognised achievement levels and expectations. It got rid of an expectation and reality of tests, measurements of progress, and rigour. Without this rigour what happened was that schools and teachers were left largely to themselves, and they had little or no pressure upon them to push children to reach certain benchmarks. So, when it came to teaching them National 5s, where kids do need to actually know something and have to pass something, you’re left with a bunch of children who often know very little.

You can see this in the declining standards in maths, reading and science in Scotland, for example.

The loosening of the curriculum or a disciplined building up of essential bodies of knowledge meant that primary schools were left adrift, and it continues in the first few years of high school. Some schools are better than others, but overall, the system has failed.

Given all of this, nobody is really being held to account and there is little sense of what a structured and purposeful education looks like. The Curriculum for Excellence is vague and meaningless and there is very little that is specific – has your child learned this, achieved that, passed the test and so on. There are no real standards.

Having failed to teach so many children and given them the broad knowledge we would previously have expected, schools are then left with a massive problem – how to get ill-educated children to pass exams!

After failing to teach them anything, they’re suddenly in qualification years and schools are under pressure to help kids who don’t know much to get the grades. So, we teach to the test – and teachers kind of cheat, whether that is allowing coursework done at home, by whom, we don’t really know. By helping with coursework in class and having more qualifications where a pass is achieved by work that is not done under exam or exam equivalent conditions. And we literally teach to the test – train them to pass exams – which can work but doesn’t mean we have well-educated children.

I think teachers are under a lot of pressure and qualifications are increasingly seen in terms of gaining points for the school, ticking the ‘pass’ box by hitting the required numbers, so we work out short cuts to get kids to pass – and that’s all.

In many respects, what is being described here is the takeover by progressive educationalists in Scotland – something that happened in many other countries.

Progressive teachers and senior educationalists hate traditional education and see it as dry old men in worn out suits talking at children, rather than listening to them. Feeding them boring and unnecessary facts rather than being ‘experimental’. From this perspective, talk of children’s rights and pupils as ‘active learners’ replaced structure and authority based on knowledge. Teaching fads and an obsession with technology were rushed in, undermining authoritative expert teachers – the sort of teachers who really know their stuff but aren’t that touchy feely.

This came at a time of New Labour and a growing desire to create citizens in a new way: through schools. And so we ended up with a combination of a push to prioritise social justice education and a demotion of education itself – something the Tories in England attempted, with some success, to limit, but something that was adopted wholeheartedly in Scotland.

What this all means for a subject like maths, as Andrew Moulden explains below, is having to deal with more and more children who lack the knowledge, the building blocks, the facts and figures, and the ability to think, which together enable them to deal with exam questions that don’t fit within the formulaic standard ones they have been trained to expect.

Ironically, it turns out, that disciplined education, hard work, rigour, and – dare one say – a lot of chalk and talk by knowledgeable teachers working within a structured environment with clear expectations, turn out to be exactly what you need to create critical-thinking kids.

Tragically, children in Scotland, having been ill educated for years, are left without a genuine broad education and a deep knowledge of subjects that allows them to think on their feet. For those having to deal with this situation, there is a serious problem. As Andrew Moulden notes, ‘Higher Maths teachers cannot build critical thinking on quicksand’.

A big thank you to Andrew for allowing us to reprint his article. Check out his brilliant website, which aims to be ‘the simplest, clearest, fullest and most rigorous free maths resource for Scottish secondary students’.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Andrew Moulden is a Glasgow-based maths teacher, ex-Principal Teacher and ex-headteacher, who now runs a tutoring centre and is working towards an MSc in Computer Science.

In a BBC article published shortly after the 2026 Higher Maths examination, which provoked a 15,000-signature petition protesting its alleged unfairness, an S5 pupil who hopes to study medicine said that she had felt ‘well prepared’ as she had ‘done four years’ worth of past papers’.

Explaining that she had ‘got really upset’ while sitting the non-calculator Paper 1, the pupil said: ‘I thought I was really prepared, and had the impression that I was over-prepared but it was so different to what I’d done before.’

This pupil’s experience was far from unique, but it drew predictable criticisms, with some teachers pointing to ‘four years’ worth’ of past papers as evidence of a shallow revision strategy. Yet blaming the pupils doesn’t get to the root cause, and in that respect, the petition has something of a point.

Objectively, this year’s Higher Maths papers were entirely fair. This has been robustly demonstrated by two separate analyses by Maths.scot (Paper 1) and by the Scottish Mathematical Council (both papers).

Yet subjectively, many candidates were genuinely distressed when faced with Paper 1, saying that they found it ‘totally unrecognisable’ and ‘out of step with every previous paper’.

To understand this situation, we must bridge the chasm between the objective reality and a great many pupils’ subjective experiences.

Several commentaries have suggested that ‘teaching to the test’ may be the primary reason for candidates’ ill-preparedness. James McEnaney, writing in the Herald, claimed that ‘a lot of what happens in National 5 and Higher courses is just some version of teaching to the test’.

Likewise, Dr Stuart Waiton, writing in the Scottish Union for Education Newsletter, warned of ‘school education coming to be a relatively unthinking form of teaching to the test’.

The Scottish Mathematical Council hinted similarly: ‘Teachers should embrace clever examination questions which do not mirror routine types but encourage deeper thinking, preparing students with such questions in class whenever possible.’

The Higher Maths Specification, published in 2013 by the Scottish Qualifications Authority and inherited by its successor body, Qualifications Scotland, details the course content, how it should be taught, the structure of the two exam papers, and how pupils should prepare for assessment.

The specification states that the course is intended to provide ‘breadth, challenge and application’, aiming to ‘motivate and challenge candidates’. Pupils should be prepared to ‘think logically, provide justification or proof, and solve problems’, and to ‘communicate mathematical information with complex features’.

Reasoning skills should include ‘analysing a situation’ and ‘explaining why a particular solution is appropriate in a given context’. Approaches to learning and teaching should include ‘solving problems and thinking critically’, as well as ‘explaining thinking, and presenting strategies and solutions to others’.

In respect of the exams, the specification says: ‘Candidates draw on and extend the skills they have learned during the course.’ The papers should ‘provide opportunities for candidates to apply skills in a wide range of situations, some of which may be new’.

With roughly 65% of marks allocated to routine operational skills and 35% dedicated more to reasoning, the exam papers are designed to test higher-order thinking, including some new and unfamiliar contexts, beyond the course content and skills.

Therefore, true ‘teaching to the test’ should mean teaching in such a way that actively prepares students for the actual test, including non-routine questions requiring interpretation, analysis and extension of the taught content.

The underlying causes of this situation lie not within Higher Maths but in the structural dismantling of Scotland’s previous curricular strength from P1 to S4 over the past two decades.

The Scottish 5–14 curriculum, used from the early 1990s until 2010, was built like a scaffolding system. It split mathematics into clear strands mapped across six strict levels (A to F) with highly specific attainment targets at each level. Progression was gated by teacher judgment backed by a bank of national tests, confirming mastery of each outcome at each level. Because the steps were small and sequential, it was difficult for a student to develop substantial gaps in their knowledge or skills without it being flagged.

Curriculum for Excellence, on the other hand, replaced this tight scaffolding with expansive ‘experiences and outcomes’ and multi-year ‘benchmarks’ that frequently favour generic competencies over specific skills. Progression from P1 to S3 is tracked loosely across broad bands as ‘Developing’, ‘Consolidating’ or ‘Secure’. Under this amorphous framework, a student can easily coast through primary or early secondary education appearing to be ‘on track’ because they have grasped general concepts, while fundamentally lacking mathematical fluency. Without regular diagnostics and interventions, group work and cross-curricular projects can mask significant learning gaps.

Similarly, the one-year National 5 represents a step backwards from the two-year Standard Grade. The Credit paper was unashamedly rigorous, abstract and targeted solely at upper-quartile ability. Passing Credit (grades 1 or 2) meant that you had proven your readiness for Higher Maths.

By contrast, National 5 Maths emphasises algorithmic drilling and predictable question formats. Teaching approaches imported from National 4 or Applications of Maths further compound these factors. Students can comfortably achieve at least grade B at National 5 by picking up accessible marks across a broad, shallow syllabus, despite substantial deficiencies in their knowledge and skills.

In addition, Standard Grade included mandatory ‘investigations’. Students explored open-ended mathematical scenarios by devising conjectures, proving results, communicating findings, and suggesting further avenues of research. At Credit level, this required genuinely deep understanding and helped students develop the emotional and cognitive resilience needed to get stuck but work their way out, providing a far superior foundation for Higher Maths than National 5, where no such rigour exists.

Scotland’s retrograde curriculum changes have resulted in more S5 pupils being unprepared for the rigours of the relatively unchanged Higher Maths course. Teachers, faced with this reality, do their absolute best. They teach the core content and drill their pupils in past paper question types, thereby helping them gain as many routine marks as possible. As a result, because truly strong mathematical foundations are now rarer, students rely heavily on pattern recognition and familiar wording rather than genuine understanding. The moment an exam introduces even slight changes to layout, focus or vocabulary, widespread confusion follows.

True ‘teaching to the test’ for Higher Maths would include exactly what the Scottish Mathematical Council says it should: ‘clever examination questions which do not mirror routine types but encourage deeper thinking’.

But Higher Maths teachers cannot build critical thinking on quicksand. The architectural failures of the current curriculum mean that the foundation years (P1 to S4) are no longer designed to build the necessary stamina, deep fluency or problem-solving resilience. When Qualifications Scotland designs an exam that perfectly satisfies the rigorous demands of the Higher specification, they are testing a student body that has been systematically deprived of the structural scaffolding needed to meet it.

What now? If Scotland wants to close the traumatic disconnect between student perception and exam reality, tweaking individual exam papers is not the answer. The solution requires looking backward to move forward. Policymakers must shelve the Hayward proposals, which threaten to further dilute external exams into internal assessments, and inject the systemic rigour of the old 5–14 framework and the unfiltered challenge of Standard Grade Credit back into secondary education.

Until the curriculum is explicitly redesigned to cultivate deep knowledge and mathematical independence over superficial pattern recognition, true ‘teaching to the test’ will remain an impossible task, and thousands more capable, hard-working students will continue to underperform at Higher.

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A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/i2gHq Victoria Smith, Women should not have to apologise for their rights. There is nothing cruel about women wanting single-sex spaces 25/05/26

Biology In Medicine, Our letter to the new Secretary of State. Welcome to Office and Priorities for Evidence-Based Healthcare Communication and Practice 26/05/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/28/how-the-blob-keeps-trans-activism-on-life-support/ Lauren Smith, How the Blob keeps trans activism on life support. Vast sums of taxpayer cash are still being funnelled into NGOs promoting dangerous medical misinformation to kids. 28/05/26

Frank Furedi, What is a Moral Crisis? Why have so many young people have become victims of a culture of low expectations? 01/06/26

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