Welcome

A process is now in place for reviewing and evolving Scotland’s Curriculum. This will be known as the Curriculum Improvement Cycle (CIC).   

This Glow Blog is designed to act as temporary home¹ or hub for information and announcements about the CIC. It will include, for example, items on:

• Why we are evolving Scotland’s Curriculum; 

• What is being reviewed;  

• Who has been involved in the review cycle so far, and,  

• How to get involved.  

Where are we now? 

Work has now begun on the Curriculum Improvement Cycle. We are still at an early stage of the planning process and recognise that reviewing curriculum takes time. We are committed to keeping you updated on the process and the progress being made as well as giving a clear idea of what you can expect and when and how you might prepare for any changes that could happen in the future. 

If you are interested to learn more about the Curriculum Improvement Cycle (CIC) and how we got to where we are, then a good place to start exploring would be the About the CIC tab in the navigation at the top of this page. If you want to dive a bit deeper, you will find lots of information and links to a variety of publications in the Useful Reading section. You can also find this in the navigation. From October we will be publishing a termly eBulletin giving updates on progress with the CIC. You can sign up here.  

Next Steps

Between November 2024 and March 2025 we are publishing a series of three CIC discussion papers. The papers talk through the background work around the curriculum improvement cycle and shares the evidence that we need, to show we are moving forward in the right direction.  We have now completed a number of pilot curriculum reviews and this series of papers share what we found out, as well as outlining options for evolving the technical framework for Scotland’s Curriculum and how we plan on achieving change in the future.

Paper one is called Background and A Case For Change : Findings from the Pilot Curriculum Reviews 2023/24 . We published this in November. This paper explains why we are doing this work and talks about the pilot curriculum reviews. These pilot reviews were really informative and this paper shares everything that we learned. It also talks about evolving the technical framework and aims to inspire thinking.

Paper two will be published in December 2024. It is called Towards and Evolved Technical Framework This paper draws on the finding from the pilot curriculum reviews and other evidence to explain what the options might be to evolve the Technical Framework of Scotland’s Curriculum.

Paper three is due to publish in March 2025. It is called Working Together to Make Change Happen and will suggest how we might go about evolving the technical framework of Scotland’s Curriculum.

Language matters! When we talk about the Curriculum Improvement Cycle as an education community, we want to make sure everyone is using words that have the same meaning. We are developing a paper called ‘Language Matters’ to make sure these meanings are as clear as possible, removing as much technical jargon as possible. This was a recommendation in the OECD report.  We aim to have this paper ready in December 2024.

We will be sharing the three discussion papers and the Language Matters paper in our Curriculum Improvement termly News Bulletin. Sign up here.