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For the second of her posts, we asked Mollie Tubb to listen to the Keir Bloomer interview about Curriculum for Excellence and to respond with her initial reaction to the published guidelines and headlines...

I doubt if there's a teacher in the land who wouldn't subscribe to the basic principles underlying the new Curriculum for Excellence which was launched in a blaze of political rhetoric earlier this year. We'll not be quibbling about those four key goals, to produce those 'Successful Learners', who become 'Confident Individuals', 'Responsible Citizens' and 'Effective Contributors' to society. Did any of us go into teaching to produce anxiety-ridden, abject failures? Even the most jaundiced member of the public, wondering how a teacher could ever complain about being over-worked after that long, long summer holiday, might concede that most of us are in it for the right reasons. We like our students, and we want to see them thrive.

So if I'm allowed to take the four goals as read, and nothing very new, let's turn to the that follow from them. The new curriculum is to offer Challenge and Enjoyment, Breadth and Depth of subject matter, , and Individual Choice, and it's to be Coherent and Relevant - all laudable, and all familiar. There's not much to quibble about here either, although no doubt more critical thinkers across the land will take me to task on this.

It's the way the goals and design principles are to be achieved that rings a little hollow to an old-timer who's been in the teaching business for - well let's say we're counting decades now. We're to provide the right 'Environment for Learning', choose the best 'Teaching and Learning Approaches', and think creatively about the 'Ways Learning is Organised'. The trouble is teachers don't choose the environment, and creative thinking about your delivery methods is difficult if the classroom's bursting at the seams and you've no real support for the disturbed pupil who's bent on wrecking any activity.

I started in schools, but I'm teaching in a college now. We have our own issues of course, and when we're teaching to national exams and qualifications we're working to strict frameworks like all our school colleagues. But I have friends still in school, still bent on delivering that high quality education, (they're mostly parents themselves after all), and still trying to foster all those aspirational values. I don't have the right to speak for them, but here goes. Their view of the 'vision' outlined in some of the papers might be clouded by a major change in the system introduced years ago, and the burden it imposed on their time. We all spend disproportionate amounts of our day on running and recording the results of endless internal assessments. The immediate demand to lay vast paper trails of checklists for everything you do absorbs the energy and time that we'd rather spend on those innovative and engaging lesson plans - which we'd love to deliver in an ideal environment to reasonable numbers of kids.

If you want excellence, let your teachers plan their classes and teach - hire someone else to manage the assessment system, and get us off the paper trail. Dream on?

Mollie Tubb