Children’s Commissioner: Education Reform’s Glacial Pace and Wrong Focus Fails Children

Commissioner Nicola Killean has made recommendations to improve the education system in a new report – warning that too many children are failing to thrive in the current set-up. 

The Commissioner and her team have spent over a year listening to children and young people’s current experiences of learning. The recommendations – which come both directly from children, and from the office – build on existing education reform reports and push for much more urgent and substantial change.

Her recommendations in the report, called ‘“This is our lives, it matters a lot”: Putting children’s rights at the heart of education’, include:

• fundamental reform of the support and resourcing for children who have additional support needs

• a co-ordinated and adequately resourced national online education offer to support children who need and can benefit from that option for many reasons

• more equitable access to subject choice, as children can’t always study the things they want to

• ensuring the purpose of education is to prioritise the development of a child’s full potential, not be dominated by exam results

• accelerate the implementation of the Hayward Review, which will reform assessments and qualifications.

Ms Killean said: “Too many children are being let down by our current system. Every child has a right to an education that develops their personality, talents, and abilities to their full potential.

“We’ve had review after review, and the promise of change, but children in school feel no improvement. The pace of education reform has not only been glacial, but it is fundamentally focussed on the wrong areas. Time is being spent on restructuring adult agencies and not on addressing the needs of children within a system that is clearly failing them.

“Children should be at the heart of shaping change to education, working alongside all those adults tasked with delivering it – government, decision-makers, and practitioners. Within education children are the ultimate stakeholders, and they have been very clear that they want change in education to be a priority for the government.

“Many children need improved support – this includes disabled children, children with neurodivergent conditions, and those living in poverty. We can’t deliver a rights-respecting education when children’s needs are not recognised or met.

“We have people trying to change the system from inside, we have examples of innovation that can make a huge difference to children, and we have vision for real change in the Hayward, Muir and Morgan Reviews commissioned by the Scottish Government.

The Commissioner’s Young Advisors were involved in the research and have made an accompanying film to the report. They visited schools with the Commissioner to work with children and hear their views.