Figures don’t show what’s really going wrong in classes
THE first thing to say is that the data here isn’t in question – it has been lifted from official reports produced by either the OECD or the Scottish Government.
What is needed – what is always needed – is some context.
Take PISA, for example, which is certainly not without its problems.
Back in 2014, dozens of academics and educationalists from around the world signed an open letter criticising various aspects of the system, such as a focus on the “economic role of public schools” and the potential financial conflict of interest at the heart of the PISA model.
They also warned, entirely correctly, that the rankings have “caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, despite research showing that enduring changes in education practice take decades, not a few years, to come to fruition”.
In 2015, Pasi Sahlberg and Andy Hargreaves – both hugely respected educationalists – also weighed in on the issue.
They pointed out there are significant concerns about how PISA data is collected, processed and presented. They argued that “in educational and moral terms, the tower of PISA is not only leaning, but in danger of toppling over completely”.
So, although PISA has done good things for global education – not least by highlighting the folly of market-driven reforms or the importance of tackling inequality – it is a very long way from being perfectly reliable.
Kevin is right to say that the SSLN gives us a good picture of literacy and numeracy in Scotland but, once again, some caveats apply.
Firstly, the nature of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) means that assessing pupils who are performing “well or very well” is not an exact science, and those in the next category – who are, after all, “working within” the expected level – are not necessarily underperforming.
I am therefore not convinced that it is especially helpful to attempt to use SSLN data as an overall measurement of the attainment gap.
Another potential issue is that presenting the information in this graphic form might lead readers to believe that the performance of S2 pupils is particularly abysmal.
In reality, those pupils are being measured relative to benchmarks designed for S3 pupils so are, in effect, being assessed a year early.
It is also worth noting that the data for S2 writing is gathered and presented in a different way from that for reading, making it impossible to draw clear or simple conclusions based on this information alone.
As with PISA, however, these potential problems with some of the information don’t change the downward trends.
SSLN data certainly suggests that the gap between the most-deprived and leastdeprived children is, at best, not being closed.
It also raises real concerns, shared by teachers, about literacy and numeracy in schools.
We shouldn’t ignore this data but we shouldn’t allow it to suck us into panicked, knee-jerk reactions either.
Finally, it is important to understand that education does not exist in a vacuum.
It is not credible to dismiss broader social and economic factors when attempting to examine the problems in our schools.
This is especially relevant in Scotland because the switch to CfE – which makes much greater demands of teachers than the system it replaced – would have been a hugely ambitious and difficult project at the best of times, but we ended up trying to do it in the aftermath of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
To make matters worse, we then had to cope with a disastrous programme of austerity which made things much, much worse.
We already know the impact that poverty has on schooling – contrary to what most people tend to believe, schools are only able to influence a relatively small proportion of the factors affecting a child’s educational performance.
More than a quarter of kids in this country now live in relative poverty and 50,000 children in the country use food banks.
Families everywhere are struggling to cope with precarious and low-paid employment which puts everyone, especially children, under enormous strain.
Even with Scottish Government mitigation in areas like the bedroom tax, cuts to welfare and the application of punitive sanctions have done significant social damage.
All of this has, as ever, disproportionately affected those with the least.
The challenges associated with all of this were then magnified by problems with the design and implementation of CfE, plummeting teacher numbers and a culture of increasing accountability and bureaucracy.
Schools, teachers, parents and pupils were left in the middle of a perfect storm from which we are yet to emerge.
Ultimately, it’s only down to the incredible work of Scotland’s teachers that the situation isn’t far worse.
SNP education policy is without doubt a significant part of our problem but the big picture of Scottish education is about much more than just the failures of Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond’s governments.
None of this means that the data on this page is incorrect or even invalid.
But we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it is just one part of a very large and almost uniquely complex picture.