Torcuil Crichton
Constitutional battle has locked Scotland into a downward spiral
IF YOU had to summarise why the Scottish Parliament and all 129 MSPs therein exist, then it would be to improve the chances of the next generation.
In answer to that “You were given just one job to do” charge sheet, the place ought to be shut down, switched off, rebooted and started all over again.
News that the writing ability of Scotland’s secondary pupils has fallen so much that just half of S2 pupils are at the expected level for their age is more than shaming. It is a gut-wrenching failure of our politics.
Closing the education gap between rich and poor was going to be Nicola Sturgeon’s No1 priority, the issue on which she would be judged. Ambition like that should be hailed but it needs matching by a laser focus every day, for years.
Attention has been elsewhere and education standards in Scottish schools are slip-sliding away.
The decline has been on the SNP’s watch. They have to own the failure, although blaming a single politician is pointless. If the kids fail, we have all failed.
Parents cannot be completely absolved. Unless a home habit of reading and homework is ingrained from an early age, the fight against the cry for “screen time” is close on impossible.
But parents pay teachers to formally educate children and politicians to set a direction.
From the patrician wave of Mike Russell to the bungling hands of Angela Constance, the governing party have left people short-changed.
John Swinney has to mop up and then build again from a lower base.
Nor is it all the SNP’s fault. Every party expressed support in 2010 for the Curriculum for Excellence agenda to broaden education.
Decline has been perceptible since then and respected experts, including
Professor Lindsay Paterson, have repeatedly called for the policy to be dumped and for schools to refocus on the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy.
That time is now, as even student teachers are complaining they are not adequately trained to teach maths to P7s.
Swinney appears to favour a top-down approach to reform, taking control of education away from local authorities, but tiptoeing around vested interests.
My fear, which induces that sick feeling, is that education, along with everything else, simply cannot be improved by Holyrood. There is a systemic failure in Scottish politics.
If the SNP came up with the best education policy in the world tomorrow, it would still be decried by Conservatives and Labour.
To concede to progress in one field would be to have it coupled to the advancement of another agenda, namely independence.
They wouldn’t do it in pig-headed opposition to minimum alcohol pricing and the trenches have deepened since.
What the “shameful” education statistics show is how the constitutional battle has locked Scotland into a downward spiral, killed off consensus and, as a consequence, blighted the education of a generation.
That may be a counsel of despair but failing in education is an indictment of us all.