Dunces! School chiefs spell Argyll wrong... in report on literacy

THEY receive millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash every year to promote the highest standards.

But education chiefs were forced to issue a correction after wrongly referring to ‘Argyle and Bute’ – in a report criticising literacy levels at a school.

Yesterday, Education Scotland sent out a press release following an inspection and review at Achahoish Primary School.

It raised concerns over literacy levels at the school, as well as numeracy.

However, the quango, which is responsible for Scotland’s school curriculum, stated three times in the release that the school is in ‘Argyle and Bute’.

Within minutes, bosses were forced to re-issue the email with a correction stating the primary school was in Argyll and Bute.

They said the mistake was down to ‘regrettable human error’.

Scottish Conservative education spokesman Jamie Greene said: ‘When an SNP government agency can’t even spell council names correctly, you know there’s a problem. It seems the Nationalists’ dreadful stewardship of Scotland’s education system is now impacting on their own quangos.’

The Education Scotland report praised Achahoish Primary School pupils for having a ‘positive attitude to learning’.

It also said the headteacher and her staff had developed a ‘positive learning environment across the school’. However, the report urged the school to ‘improve children’s progress and attainment in literacy and English and numeracy and mathematics’.

A spokesman for the quango said: ‘Education Scotland is aware of the spelling mistake for Argyll and Bute in our own press release for Achahoish Primary School.

This was a regrettable human error and was corrected. The report itself published on our website is correct.’

In 2014, the Scottish Qualifications Authority was criticised after misspelling the name of then Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont on a Modern Studies exam paper, turning her into ‘Joann’. Candidates sitting the Intermediate 2 exam were told to stop and write in the missing ‘h’ on the exam paper before proceeding.

The gaffe came on day one of the flagship exams as part of the SNP’s introduction of its Curriculum for Excellence.

In 2017, a total of 17 Gaelic road signs had to be replaced because of mistakes.

Words were either misspelled or badly translated, leading to a string of corrections at a cost of £1,725. In 2018, schools had to be given advice on how to disable a glitch that allowed pupils to use a spell-checking function – during online spelling tests.

Teachers had discovered that some primary school pupils, who were familiar with traditional computer spell-checkers, were using it in the Scottish National Standardised Assessments.

At the time, the Scottish Government said the issue had affected only a ‘small number’ of questions, and the problem was with browser or device settings on some computers.

‘Regrettable human error’