Sturgeon rattled

First Minister tries to deflect attention from disastrous literacy figures

NICOLA Sturgeon has tried to put a gloss on Scotland’s faltering education system by claiming areas other than numeracy and literacy are doing well.

But critics yesterday insisted the cornerstones of schooling were being neglected.

The First Minister admitted that her government has to improve on education as she yesterday indicated SNP ministers are looking at a number of recommendations on how to boost schools.

Last week, Miss Sturgeon was accused of failing a generation of Scottish children after it emerged rates of illiteracy have soared since the SNP introduced its controversial curriculum.

Fewer than half of 13 and 14year-olds are performing well in writing, the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy found.

Despite Miss Sturgeon claiming that education is her top priority, performance in reading has also plummeted in the past four years.

Opponents accused the SNP leader of creating a ‘lost generation’ of children by putting her ‘obsession’ over independence ahead of education.

Speaking during a television interview, Miss Sturgeon said that ministers were taking on a number of recommendations made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which provides data and policy advice on education, health, social care, tax, employment and the economy.

Asked about education, she said: ‘I’ve been very open that this is not good enough. They’ve [OECD] made certain recommendations to us about how we improve the teaching of literacy and numeracy.

‘Right now we’ve got a new national improvement framework, we have an attainment challenge, we have an attainment fund putting significant extra resources into education.

‘But we have had some advice that we need to have more of a focus in our curriculum on literacy and numeracy and that’s exactly what we’re doing right now.’

However, asked if education in Scotland was going backwards, Miss Sturgeon said: ‘On literacy and numeracy we have a particular challenge, but on many other

‘A tacit admission of failure’

measures of Scottish education that is just not true.’

Meanwhile, former First Minister Alex Salmond told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: ‘Right now in Scotland we have 93 per cent of children going on to positive destinations, and the third lowest youth unemployment rate in Europe – something is going very well in Scottish education.’

Last night, Scottish Conservative education spokesman Liz Smith called on Miss Sturgeon to focus on children rather than another referendum bid.

She said the First Minister had made ‘a tacit admission’ of failure. ‘It is time for the SNP to put its obsession with independence to one side and get on with tackling its supposed top priority of improving education,’ she said.

The Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy published last week revealed performance in literacy has slumped across all three age groups studied – P4, P7 and S2 – since 2012. Its research involved 10,100 pupils and 4,600 teachers in 2,250 schools.

In S2, 16 per cent failed to achieve basic standards in 2016, compared with 7 per cent in 2012.

Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale said: ‘This was a bruising interview for Nicola Sturgeon, because she was faced with the reality of her own appalling record on education.’

Miss Dugdale, who yesterday visited Better World Books in Dunfermline, Fife, added: ‘We have seen nothing but declining education standards and growing class sizes. And now even Nicola Sturgeon isn’t denying that reality.

‘There’s a lost generation of Scottish children who are suffering as a result of the SNP’s obsession with another divisive independence referendum.’

She said Scotland had lost 4,000 teachers and 1,000 support staff since the SNP came to office in 2007.

THE Coatbridge of my childhood had four corners: the school, the church, the video store and the public library. Today, only the church survives and the status of religion being what it is, I wonder for how much longer that will be.

My school, St Ambrose High School, the educational pride of the Lanarkshire town, has since been demolished and rebuilt less than half a mile away.

The brutalist, hodge-podge of towers and squat blocks wasn’t much to look at but it was where I learned to love and to fear, to see the world for what it is and take every chance I could find in it. Six of my most formative years are now a railway station car park.

Ritz Video – which became Blockbuster, until that icon of 1990s entertainment went the way of the VHS tape – made me a movie buff and supplied my habit every Saturday, sometimes with Disney wholesomeness but more often with karatechop capers and scarier movies than I had any business watching at that age.

Across the street sat the Whifflet public library, hugging the corner of a rundown shopping precinct as though ashamed of its reduced circumstances. Its 2010 closure, in a merger dreamed up by a bureaucrat with fingers more used to punching calculators than turning pages, felt like a shutter pulled down on my childhood.

Revelations

Whifflet was no Boston Public Library or Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It was a tiny, one-level job with a poky enclave dedicated to children’s books and it was where I retreated every inevitably wet Saturday morning.

There, I met Tom Sawyer and his friend Huck, and Beatrix Potter’s mischievous Peter. The March sisters took me into their home and I tagged along with the Famous Five as they cracked mysteries.

When I was a little older and braver, RL Stine would coax me into a Hallowe’en horror but those weren’t the reason I slept with the light on. No, I wanted to see my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Yes... that was it...

Eventually I put away childish books but I never forgot the joy they brought me. Those quiet revelations that thrill the juvenile mind; the beginnings of understanding the mash of contradictions that is the world around you. Those books brought the breathless possibility of adulthood and a life beyond the tedium and regimen of school. (If only I knew.)

These memories came back to me last week after campaigning teacher James McEnaney uncovered the state of school libraries in Scotland. What he found made for dismal reading.

Using freedom of information laws, he discovered that 39 per cent of primary schools have no dedicated library – and 99 per cent have no librarian, full-time or part-time. Mr McEnaney found a better regime in secondary schools – more than 90 per cent have a library but there are concerns here, too, as one in six high schools has no dedicated librarian.

It comes after the latest Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy showed more decline in reading and writing attainment in our schools. The same report revealed that only 15 per cent of primary seven pupils visit a public library very often – the figure drops to one in ten for those in secondary two. The inevitable result is that only a third of primary sevens read fiction for pleasure and around one in five do the same when they get to the second year of high school.

Libraries are not sexy. They do not command front pages and TV news bulletins. But their decline is an emergency in the cultural life of our country and the educational futures of children.

Investment is crucial – school and public libraries are starved of resources. But investment isn’t always about money and poverty takes many forms. Less than 40 per cent of primary four pupils say someone at home reads with them often; the figure is just over a third for households where this ‘sometimes’ happens and a quarter where it never happens. Parents have a duty to introduce children to books and encourage their interest. No child should leave primary school unable to read but they shouldn’t go there in that condition either.

We could issue every pupil a Kindle full of the finest that children’s literature has to offer – and a smattering of the classics, too. Off they would go, tablet in hand, and return well-read and eager for more.

Discovery

But it doesn’t work like that in most cases and even when it does, there is an inescapable sense in which the child has missed out. Libraries are shared spaces that cannot be replicated with the swipe of a finger across pixels. They are places of discovery, a million eureka moments hiding between hardcovers. Libraries are designed to encourage promiscuity in readers, the act of scouring shelves for a favourite title routinely interrupted by the temptations of other books.

The idea of a physical place lined with rows of shelves, mapped by a curious and baffling numerical system, might seem quaint to young readers used to downloading titles to their smartphone.

While online book retailers have devised clever algorithms to recommend titles based on users’ reading habits, none have been able to replicate those first uncertain steps from the children’s section to the young adult shelves and later from there to crime or thrillers. Amazon sells us the books we want, libraries offer us the reading experience we deserve.

Matthew Arnold believed culture was ‘the great help out of our present difficulties’ and recommended the learning of ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’. That is the unspoken mission statement of a library. The habit, once lost, will be difficult to resurrect. If we let it die out we are not simply retiring a tradition, we are engaging in cultural vandalism and intergenerational theft.

In the next three weeks, you might get a knock at the door from an election candidate. Don’t ask them about independence or Brexit, they will have canned responses ready. Ask something that will throw them. Ask them about libraries.