Sturgeon asked to be judged on education: The truth is she’s failed

IT was as trite as it was juvenile, but as the Government published its strategic defence review Scotland’s First Minister declared: ‘Today the UK Government will announce a massive increase in its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

‘By contrast @scotgov will incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots law.’

It is but pure tokenism: meaningless, virtue-signalling gesture politics – born, perhaps, of political desperation, for recent weeks have been ghastly for Nicola Sturgeon, from all the fallout over Alex Salmond to a succession of polls showing clear and increasing support for the Union itself.

But the ooh-look-at-me tweet does deliciously invite attention to the SNP administration’s achievements, or otherwise, in the education of Scotland’s boys and girls.

This the First Minister might be expected to welcome. ‘From the earliest years until adulthood,’ she insisted in April 2016 and ten days out from the last Scottish parliament election, ‘improving Scotland’s education system should be the number one priority of the next Scottish Government.’

But we know what really happened. Nicola Sturgeon and her ministers spent the next three years banging on about independence and Brexit. They have spent most of the last desperately trying to ensure a Scottish parliament inquiry into the Salmond debacle is impeded as much as possible.

Mortifying

As for education, John Swinney ignominiously abandoned important school reforms, front and centre of that 2016 manifesto, the moment the EIS arched its back and hissed – and, month upon month, what is actually going on in our schools (when they have been allowed to open) has been an ongoing embarrassment for the Nationalists.

All the more mortifying when, within living memory, Scotland had one of the best education systems in the world – and the social mobility it created.

From the Reformation, John Knox pressed for free schools in every parish. All classes came quickly to prize universal literacy. With David Stow, two centuries ago, we invented the first effective teacher training.

There was particular Scottish emphasis not just on a broad-based curriculum – at a time when English public schoolboys were taught little more than Greek and Latin – but on the equal schooling of boys and girls, and together.

It was from this order that my father – raised in poverty, and whose parents had quit school at 14, was by the age of 24 a minister ordained and a professor of theology before he was 40 – swept through grammar school, university and divinity college without having to pay a penny.

And it was from this order, and from all ranks and classes, that Scotland became famous for its scholarship, its inventors, pioneers in medicine and engineering, science and technology and literature.

Now we are self-evidently going backwards, our schools disgorging children who can barely read, write and count.

The Programme for International Student Assessment has shown decline since 2000. On one recent PISA survey, our youngsters’ grasp of mathematics and science was demonstrably poorer. We trailed England and Northern Ireland – and England trumped us on literacy too.

But PISA is just about the only impartial measure left. The Scottish Government has done its utmost to pull out of every international programme that would demonstrate its mounting classroom failure. Educationists such as Keir Bloomer, chairman of Scotland’s Commission on School Reform, grew in 2019 especially concerned because, thanks to some cynical SNP choices, ‘much less is known about how Scottish education is performing today than at any time since the 1950s’.

In 2016 – that year the First Minister asked to be judged on education – the SNP Government pulled Scotland out of TIMSS, the longest-running and large-scale assessment of mathematics and science education in the world.

Scotland, too, ceased to participate in PIRLS, an international measure of fourth grade reading ability. And the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy has likewise been abandoned.

There is today, as Bloomer points out, ‘no way of knowing whether the Government is making progress with its policies or not. The evidence simply isn’t there…’

There has also, since 2014, been a sustained decline in Highers results. It may have been no accident that the Nationalists chose not to hold public examinations last year; that they have ruled them out for this year – and, unattributably and off the record, some Scottish Government figures are thinking aloud about never holding exams again.

The problem is not money.

Sturgeon’s administration has been fire-hosing schools with the stuff. Indeed, for every £100 spent on education in England, the Nationalists are spending £118, focused especially on disadvantaged schools in deprived areas – and it is just remarkable what money cannot buy.

Tens of millions of pounds from what ministers are pleased to call Pupil Equity Funding (PEF) has been flung at head teachers – to boost the literacy, numeracy, health and well-being of pupils from poorer backgrounds.

Deprived

But such endeavours to reduce the ‘attainment gap’ have not produced evident fruit. According to 2018 analysis of the official figures by the Scottish Conservatives, attainment levels of pupils from the most deprived backgrounds actually declined in 105 out of 216 schools, compared with 2016-17.

Among a hundred secondary schools – each of which had won attainment funding of at least £98,000 – 51 reported improved performance; 44 a decline. Of the 151 where we have full data for youngsters from the most deprived and the most affluent homes, the gap widened in half.

An EIS survey found only just over one in four teachers believe that PEF is making any difference. And almost a third think it is having no impact on the attainment of the poorest children.

Sturgeon loves to preen as a progressive; a reformer; a radical. But the real revolutionaries on this island – as far as education goes – were Tony Blair and Michael Gove.

They first allowed England’s state secondaries to apply for independent status. Most now have. ‘The idea was to pass power from politicians to teachers,’ wrote one Scotsschooled London commentator. ‘What they have achieved has been amazing.

‘England is now ranked 14th in the world for reading: maths and science are similarly impressive. Combine this progress with England’s university reforms – tuition fees allowed a vast expansion of places – and the gap is huge. A bright child from a disadvantaged area is 63 per cent more likely to go to university than their Scottish counterpart...’

We could argue till the cows come home about the roots of our mounting Caledonian failure. The weakening of the primary curriculum, which into the Seventies focused overwhelmingly on reading, writing and arithmetic.

Or the focus since the early Eighties on engineering a system that ensured every child left school with some sort of paper qualification. The curmudgeonly might of the EIS and other teachers’ unions; or how, with little attention, the SNP has stripped money and resources from further education colleges, blighting many young working class lives.

But the day will come when this humbug administration will have nowhere left to hide.