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The ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ (CfE) guidelines and associated learning experiences and outcomes have been developed following a national debate on the purposes of education in Scotland. The recent development shifts physical education's (PE) role in Scottish education, changing from contributing to the ‘Expressive Arts’ area of the curriculum, to one central to the newly created curriculum area of ‘Health and wellbeing’ in the CfE. This paper provides an analysis of the broader policy context at national and global levels examining the policy developments for PE in Scotland situating them within a globalised discourse emphasising concerns about ill-health and obesity within society. Drawing on the work of Bowe et al., the paper examines the context of production and the context of influence that has contributed to the recent development of ‘Health and wellbeing’ within the CfE. It is argued that the role for PE and the focus on schools promoting daily physical activity within the CfE masks the complexity of addressing the issues of health and well-being. In conclusion it is highlighted that in the interpretation and implementation of policy there will be further issues for PE and as yet unknown consequences for the context of practice and pupils' experiences of PE in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The restructuring of teachers' work in Scotland, under the reforms of both the New Right and the New Left, has not exhibited the starkness and radical edge evident in the history of reform in England. This paper argues that the professional context of Scotland's teachers has changed, if perhaps in a Caledonian form, under the action of the same forces that have been altering the educational landscape south of the border and internationally. While comparisons with England tend to place Scotland in a more favourable light in relation to the recasting of the professional context of teachers, there is a danger of overstating the social democratic virtues of policy-making and educational reform under New Labour. Three examples are discussed by way of illustrating the performativity climate within which Scotland's teachers now work: the use of development planning, quality indicators and statistical monitoring; the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc. Act 2000; and the agreement on pay and conditions of employment for teachers following from the McCrone report (McCrone, G. A Teaching Profession for the Twenty First Century (Edinburgh, SEED, 2000)). We conceive the role of the teacher as being essentially malleable: what is expected and desired of teachers is susceptible and sensitive to the historically and politically contingent. The paper argues that the professional context of Scotland's teachers has been restructured by the same reform imperatives manifest internationally across education systems. However, the form and constitution of restructuring in Scotland can only be illuminated in relation to the interaction and compromises of such reform imperatives within the national political climate and policy-making process. The paper concludes that this vernacularization of international trends goes some way towards accounting for a distinctive Caledonian form of 'modernization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the key periods, players and events which have contributed to the shaping of the current landscape of teacher education in Scotland. Starting with the Wheatley Report and the formation of the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in the 1960s through to the most recent Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, we examine ebb and flow amongst GTCS, government, colleges of education and universities. Following its own trajectory, Scottish Education resisted and rejected policies emanating from an ‘English’ ideology, capitalised on respect for and influence of the GTCS, and successfully moved teacher education’s base from autonomous colleges to high-status universities. At the core of teacher education in Scotland is the continuing desire for partnership-working amongst key stakeholders: local and national government, GTCS, schools, teacher education institutions, teaching unions, parents and pupils. A teaching profession of trained graduates, underpinned by university-led subject study, is now moving steadily towards Masters-level professional learning for all. Although having faced some troubled episodes, this period has also been characterised by remarkable stability and consensus and, although still tackling the improvement agenda suggested by the recent Donaldson review, teacher education in Scotland has retained a high degree of public and political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scottish secondary education was radically extended in size and social reach in the first four decades of the twentieth century, bringing significant new opportunities in secondary schooling to girls, to children of the lower-middle and upper-working classes, and to Catholics. Most of the new secondary schools were based on those parish schools that had in the nineteenth century sent a few boys directly to university, and so this new secondary sector was a modernising of the mythological tradition of the lad o' pairts. The main reason it succeeded was that it sought to extend to new social groups the benefits of the version of liberal education that had come to be regarded as the foundation of professional careers. Thus the reforms also had the effect of transferring to the senior years of the secondary schools the old undergraduate curriculum that had been replaced by more specialist university courses in the late-nineteenth century. The paper offers an evidence-based critique not only of that strand of pessimism which has claimed that Scottish education was stagnant between the wars, but also of George Davie's influential view that the tradition of a broad general education was lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents updates on special education in Great Britain. The outcomes of the May 2011 elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are said to provide educational reform to the countries. The number of schools in England that are shifting to academy status is said to be increasing. The All Wales Attendance Framework was launched in Wales in March 2011.

The article focuses on the education remit presented by the Scottish Parliament's Education and Culture Committee between February and July 2013. Topics include the national qualifications for the educational initiative Curriculum for Excellence, an educational research study conducted by the Centre of Educational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and the implications of cyber-bullying.