Education failing

In the face of damning evidence of the falling standards in the fundamentals of reading, maths and science across Scottish education reflected in the recent Pisa figures, some desperate to defend the SNP’S record sought comfort in quoting criticism of Pisa’s narrow approach to analysing results.

Yet just a few days later, as the Scottish Government reveal their own broader-based analysis of the impact of the Curriculum for Excellence, the picture appears just as bleak (“Quarter of P7 pupils fail to meet literacy and numeracy standards”, 14 December).

News that the proportion of pupils in primary schools achieving the required levels of numeracy, reading and writing are falling as they progress through from P1 to P7 is very troubling, as is the confirmation that the attainment gap between children in more deprived areas and the rest of pupils is widening.

There are improvements as children move into secondary, and there are some wide differences in different parts if the country.

No party would find these issues easy to overcome, but the SNP leadership seem unwilling to accept responsibility for the declines that have occurred on their watch, and as a result seem just as determined not to listen to the concerns of teachers and parents, ploughing on with an approach to the curriculum that in practice is failing our children.

Mr Swinney is reported as suggesting parents “consider the school level information that is now available and discuss it with their child’s school”.

I suspect many working in those schools will feel their hands are tied by a combination of lack of resources and the “we-know-best” attitude of those issuing the latest dictates from on high about how they should do their job.

KEITH HOWELL West Linton, Peeblesshire

Leaving aside the fact that the decline of Scottish education has been appalling during the SNP’S ten years in government, the fact is that the decline started in the 1960s when the traditional and proven successful methods of teaching arithmetic and English grammar were phased out.

Today we have people in their sixties, probably including English teachers and head teachers, who don’t know how to parse a sentence, struggle to know which verb governs which noun, don’t know a pronoun from a conjunction and have never heard the word pluperfect.

We have journalists and authors who regularly start sentences with the words “and” and “but” which, being conjunctions, should never be used to start a sentence and which was a grammatical sin in my schooldays in the 1940s and 1950s for which marks would have been deducted.

In arithmetic and maths, which are often wrongly taken to be the same thing, the situation is as dire.

I had lunch with three friends a few months ago and the bill came to £77.50p. We told the waitress, a charming young person in her early twenties, to round it up to £85. She couldn’t do it without her calculator.

I don’t blame the teachers, as they are the products of a flawed system, and who themselves were taught by at least one generation of products of the same system, but it is certain that unless the trend is reversed we are on the path to a continuing downward spiral. Starting with English and foreign languages we should recruit teachers from abroad who have studied English, as they will have been taught the grammar and syntax of the language which our teachers have not, or at least not to anything like the same standard.

No amount of money is going to change standards if the basic teaching knowledge is missing. As they say, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

DONALD LEWIS Pine Cottage, Beech Hill, Gifford