Curriculum deregulation in England and Scotland : Different directions of travel ?

England and Scotland provide interesting and in some ways contrasting case studies for studying the balance between curriculum freedom and regulation. In common with the pendulum swings between these two positions, identified across different curricular jurisdictions by Nieveen and Kuiper (2012), teachers in both countries have experienced shifting terrain, the general trend being an apparent move from more extreme versions of prescription (especially in England) to greater degrees of freedom for schools to develop the curriculum (particularly in the case of Scotland). However, such trends need to be viewed cautiously. Questions remain about the extent to which school autonomy in curriculum making is actually happening; as noted (ibid.), the worldwide development of accountability systems (output regulation), the phenomenon termed GERM (Sahlberg, 2011), has superseded and counter-balanced the input regulation formerly seen in many cases. Such mechanisms, according to Wilkins (2011), produce cultures of performativity, with three distinctive features: the evaluative use of statistical attainment data; external inspections; and increasingly marketised education systems, driven by publicly available data collated into league tables. This in turn is said to have created a worldwide phenomenon of performativity in schools, comprising perverse incentives, game playing and even cheating (Ball, 2003; Keddie, Mills & Pendergast, 2011). Thus, one might ask, in the specific cases of England and Scotland, against the backdrop of these global trends, whether claimed deregulation is genuine, or illusory and rhetorical. Indeed, it has been argued that outputsdriven methods have done more to erode teacher agency (Biesta, 2004,) than has any recourse to prescriptive inputs. Linked to this, there is the further question of whether, as is often claimed, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) offers hitherto unknown levels of autonomy in curriculum-making, in contrast to England, which is widely seen as highly prescriptive.