Pure jealousy
The SNP attack on independent schools will be as counterproductive as the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) and smacks of total hypocrisy. It is designed to placate the hard left Greens, and will tackle neither standards in education nor social inequality. At the moment, many families in Scotland make a conscious choice between sending their children to an independent school or paying inflated house prices to move into the catchment area of a “good” school. There is no difference in principle here; you pay your money and you take your choice.
Similarly, large numbers of parents pay for multiple tutors for their children as they approach SQA examinations. As a mathematics teacher, particularly as the co-author of the most frequently used Higher mathematics textbook, I have lost count of the requests I receive for tutoring. If the freedom to send a child to an independent school is considered to be unfair, then so are inflated house prices and private tutoring.
The reasons most parents choose private education are to access academic excellence and the more traditional, effective teaching techniques, and to escape the possibility of poor classroom behaviour from fellow pupils. Exactly the same reasons for moving into an expensive catchment area.
Addressing the routine classroom indiscipline which dogs the life of many teachers, and the pupils who are keen to learn, would calm many parents’ fears.
When I attended state school in the 1960s many of us routinely sat six Highers in 5th year and four CSYS (the equivalent of Advanced Higher) subjects in 6th year. This remains commonplace in the independent sector but virtually unheard of in the state sector. True excellence does not mean obtaining the minimum requirement for a course; it means achieving at the highest level of which one is capable.
If the rates hike for independent schools results in reduced numbers attending, this will directly impact those struggling the most to pay the fees. It will cost the Scottish Government significantly more when these pupils enrol at their local state school. So this is not a money raising exercise. This is a “chip on the shoulder” attack on the schools which routinely highlight the fact that our current education system is not working.
When the state sector returns to the level of academic excellence it once enjoyed, the existence of an independent sector would be of concern to no one. The government should listen to teachers on how to improve our schools, not to the Greens on how to undermine them. CAROLE FORD Former president School Leaders Scotland Terregles Avenue, Glasgow It is interesting that some who voted SNP are, at last, starting to realise exactly what sort of people they are. Rod Grant, headmaster of Clifton Hall School has admitted that he voted SNP at the last election. I could have told him what that party is like and how it seeks to control everything in Scotland in the totalitarian way the Supreme Court mentioned in its ruling on the Named Person legislation.
Mr Grant now says that the SNP has changed to “a party that is infatuated with control, dislikes dissent and is fixated on every element of society toeing the line”(your report, 17 December). I disagree about any change, but better late than never that he has come to that realisation.
We need to persuade all the other well-meaning people who have voted Scottish Nationalist hitherto that the SNP’S controlling instinct is not acceptable in a free, democratic society.
ANDREW HN GRAY Craiglea Drive, Edinburgh