Some people have wilfully misunderstood Jenny Gilruth’s recent comments about Scotland’s poor showing in the PISA standings (Programme for International Assessment). Scotland’s Deputy First Minister was attempting to explain why English pupils performed better than those in Scotland in this survey which is considered the gold standard of global educational standards.

Ms Gilruth, a former teacher, said that the gap in achievement between Scottish and English pupils was due to a reliance on ‘narrow, algorithmic teaching methods’ south of the Border.

Ms Gilruth’s views were endorsed by Andrea Bradley, General Secretary of the EIS, Scotland’s main teaching union. She dismissed the PISA league tables as “only marketing” and that the authentic metric of a healthy and robust education system was Scotland’s more holistic approach rooted in problem-solving, creative expression and wellbeing. Having given this a great deal of thought over the years, I’d like to proffer my own model of what an enlightened school curriculum could look like if it were to be ‘holistic’ and driven by ‘creative expression’.

For starters, I’d be ditching the PISA assessment and replace it with our own version. Let’s call it the Programme for Internal Scottish Horizons (PISH). It would deploy the advanced methods favoured by the Teletubbies. These stalwart seers of daytime television often address complex subjects and deconstruct them using a suite of easy-to-understand pedagogical tools based on empathy and kindness underpinned by a robust work ethic.

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