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Scotland’s education system is facing a moment of truth. After years of reviews, reports and reorganisations - and with a after last week’s election - the members of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland are calling for a decisive shift from discussion to delivery.

Our , published in March 2026, argues that Scotland has the expertise, evidence and professional commitment needed to move from “thinking about doing” to actually doing - but only if the system stops reorganising itself and starts acting on what is already known.

Demographic change is reshaping Scotland. The has fallen by almost 5 per cent over the past decade, and the number of children aged 0-15 is projected to drop by 80,000 by 2032. Migration is now the only source of population growth, with around 10 per cent of Scots born outside the country.

We believe that this must drive a more strategic approach to planning:

• Workforce planning aligned to real population trends, ensuring the right mix of teachers, support staff and specialists.
• A learning estate designed for future needs, not historic patterns.
• A proactive commitment to diversity and antiracism.

Rise in additional support needs

One of the most striking trends is the near doubling of pupils identified with additional support needs - from 153,000 in 2015 to almost 300,000 in 2025. In some areas, most pupils now have an ASN label.

The system must urgently understand what is driving this rise and ensure support is targeted effectively, both nationally and locally. It’s important to remember in this work that deprivation is not an ASN, but remains a powerful predictor of poorer outcomes.

Tackling poverty requires coherence, not fragmentation. Despite years of investment, the attainment gap remains stubbornly resistant, and university progression is still strongly linked to family income.

We are calling for a long-term national strategy on poverty, replacing fragmented funding streams. The system needs to learn from the , identifying what has worked but in a sustainable, scalable way. We also need better alignment of national resources, ensuring that investment reaches the children who need it most.

It will also be essential to stop restructuring and build policy coherence.

In the past decade, Scotland has produced a number of high-quality reports, including the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Council of Education Advisers (who were saying in 2023 that the time for reviews was over), and professors Ken Muir and Louise Hayward.

However, implementation has been slow and has felt disjointed. We believe that structural reform has become a distraction, with changes such as the removal of Regional Improvement Collaborative funding also undermining progress.

What is needed now are:

• A small number of clear national goals, understood across the system.
• Respectful collaboration between national bodies, local authorities and schools.
• Stronger self-evaluation at every level and across all partners in the system.

Deliver the agreed curriculum and qualifications reform

The Curriculum Improvement Cycle (CIC) is the right approach, but it must be delivered at a manageable pace. The Hayward review’s recommendations on qualifications need to be revisited and progressed, and the system must do more to prepare for the impact of AI on learning and assessment.

Our key messages are clear: start empowering those closest to the challenges to design the solutions; stop reorganising the system in search of quick fixes; and continue long-term curriculum reform, grounded in a shared national vision.

Scotland has the talent and evidence to move from good to great. What it needs now is stability, coherence and the courage to act.

So what would some of the courageous actions of the incoming government look like?

Our immediate asks include a clear overview of the many new pieces of legislation, reviews, reports and guidance that will have an impact on the education system over the next few years. The reality of the scale of expected change will then be visible to all.

Moratorium on new guidance

There should also be a moratorium on the production of any new guidance until all existing guidance has a review cycle built into it. Guidance needs time to be understood and adopted before any impact can be discerned.

Ministers should also review, then conflate or collapse many of the existing boards and groups, to ensure that everyone’s time is used in the most effective, efficient and impactful ways.

They should also provide the right conditions to ensure that meaningful engagement with and preparation for implementation of the CIC can happen across every local authority and in every school, in a planned, considered way.

There is a need, too, to work constructively and respectfully with all partners, through appropriate mechanisms, to plan for a fully costed and resourced implementation of reduced class-contact time, in a way that will lead to improved outcomes for children and young people.

And, crucially, in all of the above, any change must be informed by data and led by evidence.

Sheena Devlin is general secretary of ADES, Scotland’s education directors’ body