Consultation and engagement? The reshaping of teacher professionalism through curriculum reform in 21st Century Scotland.

Currently schools in Scotland are engaged in major curriculum and assessment reform entitled Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). In common with other areas of education policy pre- and post-devolution, the CfE development process has been characterised by consultation, but additionally `engagement' has been sought with stakeholders. This paper offers an account of the development of the engagement process and reports key findings to emerge from within the profession. Drawing mainly from data derived from teachers who participated in the process, the paper considers the re-professionalising claims attached to the new flexibilities within the revised curriculum. The paper initially addresses the challenges faced by the profession in working with looser curriculum structures that afford a higher degree of professional judgement to teachers and greater autonomy to school leaders to build the curriculum to meet local needs. In the discussion that follows, it emerges that those teachers who experienced fuller `engagement' with the draft curriculum materials, through piloting them, tended to be more wholehearted in their disposition towards the new curriculum and its associated pedagogy, than those who had only been `consulted', through completing questionnaires, for example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]