The best laid schemes … Progress with the big questions site has not happened as I had originally intended, the reason being that my time has been taken up with the refurbishment of a flat in Aberdeen. What I thought might take me a couple of months has developed into a mammoth task which I anticipate will not be completed for another couple of months.

I continue to watch the unrolling of the curriculum for excellence with a certain sense of schadenfreude, knowing that I don’t personally have to implement it - not that I see anything new in it at all. It just seems to be a return swing of the pendulum away from a formal, exam led system back to an idealistic 60/70’s agenda. A few years down the line and all sorts of complaints will be raised about kids not being able to spell or count and then the pendulum will swing back. I do worry though: I am of the opinion that the system that we are presently throwing out was a highly evolved one that by and large produced good results. Where pupils failed to benefit from it, it was not due to failings in the education system but to endemic social problems and these are what need fixing – not the education system. I have a horrible worry that we have just killed something very precious and possibly replaced it with a monster. Hope am wrong and also that once I get this flat finished that I can return to the task of supplying some resource via bigquestions for the new RMPS (I refuse to call it RME) curriculum.