While ‘the learner’ is a term that has become familiar over the last few years in Scottish education, its origins lie in the discourse of developmentalism that emerged after the Second World War. Prior to 2004, the common term for referring to children in school was ‘pupil’, a word that has been studiously avoided in favour of ‘learner’ in the series of documents that support the introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland. This change in nomenclature signifies an alteration in the relations between children and young people, their teachers and the curriculum. The paper begins by exploring the history of ‘the learner’ as a concept. Tracing the movement of the term across different contexts the paper highlights how different discourses concerning education and change have coalesced to create ‘the learner’ as a compendium encompassing disparate strands of meaning. The second section examines how ‘the learner’ has been interpreted in six years of policy making in Scotland. The examination reveals some of the tensions and discontinuities that the move from pupil to learner can entail. The concluding section considers the implications of the case for the realization of aspirations originally expressed in the notion of ‘the successful learner’.