How do we improve pupil results in Scottish education?
FROM NOW UNTIL THE GENERAL ELECTION THE SUNDAY HERALD IS OPENING UP ITS PAGES TO ALL POLITICAL PARTIES STANDING IN SCOTLAND SO THEY CAN PUT THEIR CASE TO YOU, OUR READERS, ON THE BIG ISSUES WHICH WILL DECIDE THE VOTE.THIS WEEK, THE PARTIESDEBATE EDUCATION
Carol Monaghan, SNP candidate in Glasgow North West
THE SNP has put forward substantial proposals to help reform and improve our education system.
Because, while there are some real success stories in Scottish education, recent surveys have made the case for that reform clearer than ever
The successes should not be overlooked and are testament to the hard work of both teachers and pupils.
Curriculum for Excellence has received heavyweight international endorsement from the OECD. And we have seen record exam passes and record numbers of school-leavers heading to positive destinations at the end of their school careers. At the same time, key areas have been identified where we need to improve and we will work incredibly hard in government to ensure that this happens.
We are providing teachers and schools with the tools they need to improve literacy and numeracy – and our National Improvement Framework will help continue the progress we are making. We are providing more resources, creating the Pupil Equity Fund and the Scottish Attainment Challenge, which is benefiting from an additional £750 million to directly tackle the poverty-related attainment gap.And the Pupil Equity Fund is benefiting from £120m of funding directly to head teachers with this additional money helping drive up standards in schools. We are also working hard to increase our teacher workforce and investing in early years.
This, coupled with policies such as the Daily Mile and free school meals, can have a real, positive impact on the lives and education of our young people. We have more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university than ever before. This has been achieved through hard-working teachers instilling aspiration in our young people which is then backed up financially by the Educational Maintenance Allowance, an allowance which has been scrapped for disadvantaged students south of the Border.
John Swinney has written to every teacher in Scotland giving clear instructions on reducing workload, ensuring bureaucracy is minimised and our teaching professionals are freed up to teach.
Scottish Labour education spokesman Iain Gray
EDUCATION is the single most important economic investment a government can make. We need to give our people the skills they need to com- pete for the jobs of the future. Yet under the SNP, Scottish schools have missed out on more than £1 billion of investment, we have 4,000 fewer teachers, 1,000 fewer support staff, and literacy and numeracy rates have declined.
John Swinney is trying to use recent poor results in literacy, numeracy and science to justify his “reforms”. This is a wrong-headed attempt to centralise schools, and has been rejected by teachers, parents and educationalists.
The reform our schools need is to have enough teachers, with enough support, enough time and enough resources to do the job they love.
Labour would use the powers over income tax to invest in education. That means more investment in our classrooms, nurseries, and increased bursaries for the poorest students in further and higher education.
We would reform our schools, starting by scrapping unfair charges for exam appeals that the SNP Government introduced. Exam appeals can be the difference between a young person going on to college or university and all the opportunities that brings. It simply isn’t fair to have any form of financial barrier to that.
Young people from working-class backgrounds find it harder to go on to university and when they do get there they rack up the highest levels of debt.
Those who would use college as a route out of poverty see the ladder drawn up with 150,000 fewer college places under the SNP.
Labour believes that where you come from should not impact on your future. We would reverse the SNP cuts to education and ensure the next generation get the opportunities they deserve.
Scottish Tory education spokeswoman Liz Smith
THE greatest gift we give to any child is the ability to read, write and count so significant focus should be laid upon the teaching of basic literacy and numeracy from the earliest years and on ensuring our teachers are well trained to deliver these skills. We need more teachers, including those who have specialisms in additional support needs, and we need to encourage more routes into the teaching profession, some of them supported by bursaries in key subjects.
The Curriculum for Excellence is confusing. While there is general support for its principles, it has lost its way because the balance between teaching skills and core knowledge has swung far too much in favour of the former and because few people understand what standards are expected at each age level. Teachers have been swamped by endless paperwork
instead of being able to get on with the job they are trained to do. We need much more emphasis on core knowledge and traditional subjects, most especially between P6 and S2 where there is the greatest concern about falling standards.
Thirdly, we need to push power down to teachers. The education systems which achieve the best results are those which set teachers free from top-down interference and which encourage diversity and choice.
The one-size-fits-all system in Scotland has not worked and that needs to change. If there are charities, groups of parents and educational organisations who are capable of running schools they should be allowed to do so.
Standards in Scotland’s schools are slipping. The Scottish Conservatives believe we can change that but only if we place the right emphasis on the features which used to make us the envy of the world.
Ross Greer, Scottish Greens external affairs and education
spokesman
The major issue facing Scottish education is budget cuts. The Scottish Government cannot pass the buck and blame councils after they have handed them years of reduced budgets. This has an acute impact on those with additional support needs, totalling one in four young people, with over 500 ASN (additional support needs) teachers and hundreds of support staff cut since 2010.
In addition, meeting additional support needs is challenged by inconsistent and sometimes inadequate teacher training. At some universities modules on additional needs are optional and/or addressed late on. This leaves many newly-qualified teachers forced to learn on the job, having entered the classroom without the training or the specialist staff support they need.
For young people with ASN, it has become a postcode lottery of where their teacher was trained and whether or not the specialist staff have been cut. This has an affect not just on them but on all young people in the class as overstretched and under-equipped teachers try their best to support them.
It is right that we include as many young people in mainstream education as possible but when the resources aren’t there it’s an isolating, damaging experience.
Earlier this year, Green MSPs won an extra £160 million for councils over what the SNP proposed. This prevented further cuts to education but it must only be the start. We need to reverse almost a decade of cuts and get the staff back into classrooms. Governance reviews won’t change things, getting the staff back will.
Scottish Liberal Democrat education spokesman Tavish
Scott
AFTER a decade of educational mismanagement , Scotland’s schools need clarity, support and the resources to deliver for pupils and parents.
“The SNP have cut teacher numbers across Scotland, reduced the money for local education budgets and utterly mismanaged the implementation of a complete change in how we teach in Scotland’s schools. The results are clear.
Scotland has slipped down the international education rankings and recently recorded its worst-ever performance in reading, maths and science. Fewer than half of S2 pupils can now write to the standard they should. That is totally unacceptable.
That is why we have proposed real investment in education.
This would go to early years provision, schools, teachers and badly-needed ASN (additional support needs) assistants. By investing now for the long term Scottish education can change for the better.
Our method is the Pupil Premium introduced by Liberal Democrats elsewhere in the UK.
After years of disparaging an educational approach that works, SNP ministers finally agreed to implement it in Scotland. However, we are already years behind other parts of the UK.
We need to let teachers teach by cutting bureaucracy and stopping the reintroduction of Thatcherite standardised testing. This rigid system is misguided and makes teaching to the test inevitable. It will not help schools and teachers already burdened with bureaucracy, increasing class sizes, and cuts to education budgets.
Liberal Democrats want every child and young person to have the best start in life. Investing in education is at the heart of building the high-wage, high-skill economy we want to see across Scotland.
David Coburn MEP and leader of Ukip Scotland
UKIP believes that every Scottish child should receive the best possible education and training tailored to their skills, providing them with the qualifications and abilities they will need in the marketplace.
We believe commerce should be taught in schools to enable and encourage pupils to set up their own businesses and have a career as a self-employed entrepreneur.
Under the SNP, 180,000 working-class college places have been lost in a blind attempt to reach a 50 per cent degree target. Ukip believes that not all jobs require a degree and that many jobs actually require more “hands-on” technical learning.
Many vocations such as nursing have been forced down the degree route to the detriment of the nurses as well as to the patients.
Ukip wants a proper balance of educational institutions with high-quality universities alongside high-quality further education colleges such as apprenticeships, technical schools, grammar schools and vocational training.
Ukip would review the curriculum to ensure that it is producing the future workforce Scotland needs. It is necessary to end political correctness in schools and introduce a specific Act aimed at banning damaging political propaganda being passed off as fact. Indoctrination of young minds is wrong.
What we must give them is the desire and capacity to think freely for themselves. Scottish school pupils should be taught to think and not what to think.
Teachers have been swamped by endless paperwork instead of being able to get on with the job they are trained to do