Scottish Schools Focus on More Than Just Tests Robert Omerod for The International Herald Tribune Lauren Neilson, a biology teacher at the Bishopbriggs Academy, helped students with a science experiment. Education in Scotland has long been run differently from the rest of Britain. EAST DUNBARTONSHIRE, Scotland - In this leafy subdivision outside Glasgow, the hallways of Bishopbriggs Academy were buzzing from a production of the musical "Bugsy Malone" that took place the night before. Inside Kathryn Macleod's English class, a group of 12-year-olds was watching a clip from the film version of Louis Sachar's novel "Holes," paying close attention to the actress Patricia Arquette. After making notes on Ms. Arquette's character and comparing her performance with the novel, the students each composed a director's note for the actress. Down the hall, Lauren Neilson's science students were boiling red cabbage over Bunsen burners as part of a lesson about measuring acidity. In the same week that Britain's education minister, Michael Gove, announced yet another measure to make the national exams taken by high school students in England more rigorous, their counterparts in Scotland were taking a curriculum in which national exams for 16-year-olds had been abolished. In recent years, schools in Britain, like those in the United States, have struggled under an increasing burden of testing and assessment designed to improve quality and to enforce some version of national standards. Critics of such changes have pointed to the success of Finland, which despite imposing many fewer tests on its students has consistently performed well in exams of the Program for International Student Assessment, organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the association of free market democracies. Perhaps English parents and policy makers would do better to turn their attention slightly less far north. While schools in England encouraged students to specialize, Scottish schools traditionally aimed for a greater breadth of knowledge. Scottish secondary education lasts six years, ending with a single set of national exams known as Highers and administered by a single exam board; English students take G.C.S.E."s - the exams that Mr. Gove keeps trying to change - at 16 and then A-levels before going to a university, with schools having a choice of three exam boards for each subject. Scottish university degree programs last four years, compared with three years in England and Wales. In England, the current government and its predecessor put increasing emphasis on using standardized testing to determine which schools were underperforming. Based on these measures, they closed some schools, put others on "special measures" and turned yet others into "academies" answerable to the Education Ministry rather than the local authorities. Scotland is taking another road. "When the Scottish Parliament came into being in 1999, we realized our schools were not performing as well as they should," the Scottish education minister, Michael Russell, said in an interview. Our students were overexamined, our schools were overinspected and the curriculum was too bitty, too divided up and too shallow. In 2005, Scotland introduced the Curriculum for Excellence. While education in England became increasingly prescriptive - with public debate on precisely what students were expected to know and whether, for example, there ought to be a greater focus on kings and queens, or the history of the British empire - the Scottish decided to pay more attention to how subjects were taught. "It felt like you were always lurching from one set of exams to the next," said Bill Maxwell, the chief executive of Education Scotland, the government agency charged with carrying out the curriculum. So we decided it would be better to spend less time jumping through hoops, making the syllabus more flexible and more interdisciplinary. Starting with kindergarten, the curriculum has progressed through the system one year at a time, and has just reached Stage 4, for the 16-year-olds who, until this year , would have taken Standard Grade exams. Students still take exams in as many as 15 subjects but those are pass/fail and set by their teachers. The curriculum is designed to encourage students to make connections between subjects; the emphasis is on debate and discussion rather than memorization. Gordon Moulsdale, head teacher at Bishopbriggs, is adamant that the changes have meant no loss of rigor. "I don't believe for a minute that Curriculum for Excellence is touchy-feely or that we are watering down standards," he said.