FLAWED APPROACH FAILS YOUNGSTERS ... AND THE COUNTRY
ANYONE watching or listening to the SNP’s latest lacklustre, visionless monologue on the state of Scotland’s education system could be forgiven for believing all is well. The bombastic tone and faux outrage that came to define John Swinney’s time in the education hot seat have gone, but they have not been replaced by anything better.
He made way for the more measured and technocratic style of Shirley-Ann Somerville – but the same flawed approach rooted in deep denial persists. And there can be no doubt it is shamefully failing the next generation and selling our country short.
While the SNP hides behind some international experts and ignores home truths, our hard-working teachers, pupils and their parents continue to pick up the slack and make the best of a system that works against them, rather than for them.
Despite setting out to parliament a pedestrian timetable for what looks set to be the biggest shake-up in education policy in a decade, there was no admission that this could be avoided if the SNP had actually delivered on their promises to make education its top priority. Nor was there any recognition that many of the issues being addressed were problems.
Instead, it sounded like this was a government making a few tweaks here and there.
The sad thing is that if the SNP were half as good at creating successful learners as it is at announcing new working groups and consultations, then Scotland would be leading the international pack. Instead, we are average at best in key comparisons.
Where once we stood tall, outperforming the other nations of our United Kingdom, we now lag behind Wales and Northern Ireland and instead find ourselves jostling for position with countries like Slovenia.
The level of denial is breath-taking. How any Nationalist can look at their 14 years of failure in education and claim to be proud is beyond me. Successive SNP ministers have allowed our once world-leading education system to be slowly dismantled on their watch. They have been the cheerleaders of this flawed approach, driving us away from the tried and tested methods and educational traditions that we all know work.
The SNP’s Curriculum for Excellence has misguided priorities. It has gone off track and is a bureaucratic mess, with teachers somehow expected to wade through thousands of pages of guidance.
WORST of all, the SNP abandoned our traditional knowledge-based curriculum. The strong Scottish exams system is the last hallmark of our historic, internationally renowned school system. Now the SNP is considering throwing away those proud traditions, too.
Sneaked in towards the end of a dull statement was the announcement the Government wants to bring about the end of exams as we know them – but of course there is no detail or strategic leadership when it comes to proposing an alternative. Instead, we get the start of another consultation.
Surely, it is time the SNP admitted its education experiment has been a mistake.
Rather than trying to be different for the sake of it, we should return to what works. We should be doing what Scottish education has historically been so good at and focusing more on knowledge-based teaching and learning – not radical reforms that only provide the SNP with a smokescreen to distract from its own dire report card.