PARENTS ARE BEING LET DOWN – AND THE CHILDREN WILL SUFFER

FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced yesterday a new round of school closures. Parents again face the challenges of home education. For some families, the experience last year was positive, with children learning enthusiastically around the kitchen table or outdoors in the brightening spring weather.

But for most the story was a stressful mix of juggling adults’ work with children’s studying. There was competition for space, for laptops and for access to wifi in the house. For a large minority of families even these dilemmas were unaffordable luxuries. Food and heating had to take precedence over broadband.

So the question now i s whether Scottish education is better prepared to support families than it was then.

The main improvement may actually have nothing to do with government at all. Surveys of parents last year found that more than half of them were spending a couple of hours a day working with their children on their lessons.

This is a commitment as worthy of celebration as all the remarkable things people have done on their own initiative during the emergency. Many parents will have developed teaching skills they never knew they had.

The best schools and teachers helped too. They provided lessons for the children and advice for the parents. In many schools – local authority as well as independent – the commitment of teachers gave pupils proper lessons, even though for two or three hours less per day than normal.

All these parents and teachers will be able to do the same again, but with greater weariness and with a growing sense that they have been let down by the official agencies t hat ought t o be supporting them.

The most glaring failure is by the body responsible for the school exams. The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) has done nothing to prepare for what has now happened. When the school exams were cancelled, the SQA came up with what it calls ‘alternative arrangements’ for assessing pupils.

But these arrangements rely on schools running something close to normal exams, even though on different occasions and in smaller pieces. None of that can be done if schools are closed. And the SQA has no Plan B.

Almost as reprehensible is the failure on distance learning. The national body responsible for the school curriculum – Education Scotland – has had nine months to develop advice on electronic resources. It has produced nothing but flimsy bundles of links to websites where other organisations have done the work.

Education Scotland also likes to boast about what i t calls i ts ‘e-learning offer’. This is a hastily re-badged version of the Gaelic website eSgoil, which has been taken over by material in English.

Education Scotland claims that this provides live lessons for pupils at home, and the opportunity for interaction with expert teachers. In reality, it amounts to a few talks online and a brief opportunity to ask questions. That is no substitute for active online teaching.

The Scottish Government also prides itself on the laptops and broadband local authorities have provided for disadvantaged children. These are welcome, though doubts remain on how extensively they have been made available.

But the real problem is that technology is not enough. What really matters are proper lessons, teachers able to teach them, and parents able to support that learning at home.

So, faced with the new closures, parents need three things above all. They need active, regular engagement from the school. It’s not enough to issue a few worksheets every week, leaving children to get on with it. The best schools during the previous closure took in work regularly, and then marked it. But in Scotland about half of pupils said that they rarely had feedback. That will have to change.

Second, children need individual support. The National Tutoring Programme in England provides that. It is not perfect but it is better than the mini-lectures provided by eSgoil.

Above all, parents need advice that is far better than the patronising little homilies from Education Scotland. The First Minister, announcing school closures, said she would not ‘ insult the intelligence of parents’. Let’s treat them as partners in their children’s schooling, not merely providers of emergency child-minding this crisis has again imposed on them.