Crisis in the classroom? We had no idea, claims Swinney...
‘Chose not to listen’
JOHN Swinney faced ridicule yesterday after claiming the SNP was only alerted to major problems in Scotland’s schools last year.
The Education Secretary made the extraordinary claim after devastating statistics showed Scots pupils lagging behind their peers in former Soviet bloc nations Estonia and Slovenia.
Mr Swinney said the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which produced the new study, had told the Scottish Government in spring last year to go back to the drawing board with its controversial curriculum.
Reforms were then initiated, including more cash to attempt to close the ‘attainment’ gap between the best and worstperforming schools.
Mr Swinney said the OECD report this week covered pupils’ performance last year, so was not a fair reflection of whether subsequent SNP changes have worked.
The row came as the Scottish Tories pointed out that ministers had boasted earlier this year they spend significantly more per head of population on education than elsewhere in the UK.
But despite this extra spending, Scotland is now lagging behind other parts of the UK in maths and reading.
Last night, Scottish Tory education spokesman Liz Smith said: ‘John Swinney is wrong to say that the first signs of trouble were in the spring of 2015.
‘If he cares to look back at the evidence submitted to previous education committees, he would recognise that problems were emerging far sooner than that. These were made clear to successive education secretaries – each of whom chose not to listen.’
Mr Swinney said the Scottish Government ‘had the first insight that educational performance was falling in 2015’, at which point it ‘took action to take forward the necessary measures to address those issues’.
He said an independent assessment of the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) by the OECD was carried out at the Scottish Government’s request in 2015 and concluded it had been ‘right for Scotland’ but ‘they also challenged us to undertake a further programme of reform’.
Mr Swinney repeated that the ‘first sign we saw of the decline in performance of Scottish education was spring of 2015 and that prompted the Scottish Government to take immediate action’.
But in June 2014, an Audit Scotland report found that since 2006, the year before the SNP came to power, performance in reading, science and maths has ‘remained static’ and there was a ‘considerable gap between Scotland and top-performing countries’.
Damningly, the attainment gap between the best and worst schools has grown between 2004 and 2013 in 19 of Scotland’s 32 council areas.
This came as councils’ spending on education fell by 5 per cent in real terms between 2010-11 and 2012-13, largely as a result of employing fewer staff.
There have been a slew of similar warnings over the years, including another OECD survey in 2013 which found Scotland was being outperformed by former Soviet bloc nations, even at that time. This week’s OECD survey – the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – found these problems have remained or worsened and Scotland had recorded its worst-ever performance in science, reading and maths among 15-year-olds.
Last night, Scottish Labour education spokesman Iain Gray said: ‘Under the SNP we are seeing 4,000 fewer teachers, an 18 per cent cut in support staff and now the worst education report since devolution. That is the result of a decade of SNP control.’
Commenting on the Scottish Government’s claims to have outspent the rest of the UK on education, Miss Smith said: ‘The SNP boasts about the extra cash it spends on education in Scotland, but the truth is under both the SNP and Labour before, parents and pupils aren’t getting bang for their buck.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘Nearly £5billion is invested annually in school education by the Scottish Government and local authorities. Total revenue spending on schools has risen under this Government by at least 4.8 per cent. We are also investing an additional £750million over the next five years to close the attainment gap.’
On Mr Swinney’s claim about the Government being alerted to problems last year, the spokesman said: ‘While PISA is only now being published, it dates from the period in which the Scottish Government’s own statistics on literacy and numeracy were published and prompted our current programme of reform.
‘Both sets of figures tell us the same thing – reform is essential.’
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