Educational Amnesia: Why England Is Sleepwalking into a Scottish Mistake

There’s a strange psychological tick in education. We like to think of ourselves as rational, evidence-informed professionals who learn from failure. We even point, sometimes smugly, to the failures of others: “Look at Scotland and their Curriculum for Excellence. What a disaster.”

And yet, England is about to repeat the very same mistake – perhaps even more spectacularly.

Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was Scotland’s flagship education reform programme, launched with grand promises and high ideals. It spoke the seductive language of holistic learning, pupil agency, cross-curricular skills, and creativity over content. These are noble aspirations. But CfE collapsed under the weight of its own vagueness. Its ideals have been hollowed by incoherence, poor implementation, and a lack of intellectual discipline around curriculum thinking. And yet its rhetoric – child-centred, holistic, “skills over knowledge” – remains highly seductive, particularly to policymakers and advisors who prize innovation and inclusivity without adequately understanding instructional design or classroom reality. Ask any serious Scottish educator – many MSPs included – and you’ll get the same verdict: CfE has been an unmitigated disaster. It failed to provide clarity, coherence, or direction. It eroded academic standards. It left teachers adrift and pupils underserved.

So, naturally, we’re importing it into England.

The mechanisms are already in motion. A likely change in Secretary of State for Education looms, with strong signals that the incoming leadership will favour the same values-led, “skills over knowledge” ideology that underpinned CfE. Inside No.10, the most influential education voices tend toward narrative-heavy, conceptually loose reform agendas – ideologically aligned with CfE, even if not consciously so. The conditions are ripe for a rebranded version of CfE to slip into England’s schools under a different name but with all the same flaws.

And it’s not just England. Wales has already fallen prey to the same lure. The Curriculum for Wales borrows heavily from CfE – right down to bringing one of CfE’s key architects on board as an advisor. It’s a copy of a copy, replicating many of the same conceptual errors: vague goals, weak knowledge progression, and a failure to ground vision in practical classroom realities.

This will sit uncomfortably alongside Becky Francis’s curriculum review, which – while not without criticism – at least acknowledges the need for structured knowledge progression and curricular integrity. A collision is coming. And if that weren’t enough, the government’s missteps on Ofsted reform – fumbled, delayed, and directionless – leave the kind of leadership vacuum in which a vague, ideological curriculum can thrive.

It’s the perfect storm.

But here is the deeper concern. Many individuals and institutions that loudly declare their allegiance to a “knowledge-rich curriculum” are far more vulnerable to educational fads than they realise. Multi-Academy Trusts, schools, teacher training organisations – they wear the badge of knowledge, but underneath, the intellectual foundations are often shallow. What they call knowledge is too often conflated with resources, schemes, or slogans. When the next shiny idea comes along – disguised in the language of empowerment or 21st-century relevance – they wobble. Sometimes they fall.

This isn’t hypocrisy so much as self-deception. People believe they are principled because they inherited the language of those principles. But when tested – when real curriculum trade-offs must be made, when ambiguous reforms arrive cloaked in friendly rhetoric, when leadership changes bring ideological drift – they reveal how little anchor they truly have.

That’s why the solution can’t just be about better people. Even the best people drift, or move on, or tire out. We need structures that withstand the drift. Systems that outlast fashions. Institutions that resist ideological capture not by shouting louder, but by embodying a deeper coherence – curricula designed with internal logic, governance that prioritises intellectual depth, training that cultivates genuine curricular expertise.

This is the real work ahead. Not just designing better curricula, but designing curriculum immunity – so that even when the next wave of reformers arrives, eager to ‘reimagine’ and ‘rethink’ and ‘disrupt’, the foundations hold. Because right now, too many are building on sand while congratulating themselves for standing on rock.

The most galling part is many in England’s education sector continue to view themselves as somehow above it all. They mock CfE from afar. They congratulate themselves for their commitment to rigour and clarity. Yet we’re lining up the very same conditions. We’re listening to the same siren songs. And we’re just as capable of deluding ourselves into thinking that this time will be different.

It won’t be.

The education system doesn’t change in 30-year cycles because new ideas come along. It changes in cycles because people forget. Forget what’s been tried. Forget what’s failed. Forget that curriculum isn’t a mood or a manifesto – it’s a disciplined act of intellectual design.

If we really want to build something lasting, we must stop mistaking sentiment for substance. We need fewer slogans and more schema. We need fewer committees and more clarity. And most of all, we need the humility to admit that we are not above the mistakes we mock in others.