Building teacher capacity for curriculum renewal: insights from Scotland

This article examines Scotland’s twenty-year curriculum reform journey by applying strategic state governance and strategy-as-practice perspectives. Drawing on commissioned evaluations and research studies spanning 2004-2025, it analyses how teachers were positioned as curriculum makers across successive collaborative initiatives. The findings reveal persistent tensions between rhetorical positioning of teachers as strategic practitioners and the contextual conditions needed to enable meaningful agency. The analysis demonstrates how curriculum renewal depends on alignment between governance principles, resource allocation, and professional capacity - insights relevant to comparable reform contexts within the UK and internationally.