Emigrate to get a better schooling, education expert tells Scots parents
PARENTS in Scotland should move to Estonia to get a decent education for their children, a former headteachers’ leader has said.
Carole Ford, ex-president of School Leaders Scotland, representing secondary heads and deputies, said parents currently move to ‘leafy suburbs’ to get a better standard of schooling.
But after damning statistics last week showing Scottish pupils are outperformed by their peers in former Soviet Bloc nations, including Estonia, she concluded parents’ ‘best bet’ is to move overseas.
Academics and business chiefs condemned the SNP’s ‘Mickey Mouse’ Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) as the main reason for Scotland’s tumble down global education league tables in a range of core skills.
Mrs Ford said: ‘From a world-class system we have steadily declined under an SNP Government to barely average in reading, mathematics and science.
‘Predictably, the usual suspects like Finland and Norway have outperformed Scotland on every statistic – but now others, such as Slovenia, have overtaken us too.
‘No longer is there any point in moving to the leafy suburbs for a better education. Your best bet is to move to Estonia.’
Her comments came as a leading academic said traditional teaching methods should be reintroduced. Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, said CfE must be held responsible for the decline.
Education Secretary John Swinney has defended CfE, insisting it was praised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The organisation published damning education statistics last week, showing Scots pupils were lagging behind their
‘A steady decline under the SNP’
peers in many countries in science, reading and maths.
Professor Paterson claimed Mr Swinney was ‘selective in his quotation’ from the OECD evaluation of CfE, which he said had concluded that there was not enough data for an ‘objective’ assessment.
He said the latest tranche of statistics provides the ‘closest we are ever going to get’ to an evaluation of CfE – and it shows that ‘in every respect Scots education is declining according to these measures’.
He added: ‘The glaring thing that changed in Scotland and not, for example, changed in England, where there has been no such decline, has been CfE. If CfE is not the explanation of decline, the onus is on the Scottish Government to explain it. I can’t think of one.’
Professor Paterson said Scotland ‘has to face up to the possibility that we are not asking enough of our 15-year-olds’ and ‘we should be challenging them more, as they do in other countries, including some parts of the rest of the UK’.
He said that CfE was based on teaching ‘real-life skills as opposed to allegedly arid academic knowledge’.
He added: ‘The whole point about the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study [which contained the figures] is it assesses pupils’ real-life skills and it is clear that their real-life skills are not doing particularly well.
‘Maybe CfE has got the whole thing wrong. Maybe the best way of preparing children for real life is to teach them traditional academic skills - ways of thinking, concepts, the subjects human beings have evolved over centuries.
‘Maybe that’s the way to engage with real life, not a rather “Mickey Mouse” approach to cross-curricular themes and all sorts of other projects that actually are kind of beside the point at that age.’
Mr Swinney has claimed that the first sign of educational problems came in spring last year, when the OECD published its evaluation of CfE.
But critics said there had been an accumulation of evidence about failure in schools over the past decade, which successive administrations – including the SNP – had ignored.
Keith Topping, professor emeritus of education at Dundee University, said there was a need for urgent action to ensure CfE was a success. He added: ‘I don’t think it’s a lost cause, but the clock is ticking.’
The national debate that led to CfE took place in 2002. Professor Topping said: ‘You can’t expect any curricular initiative to have a shelf life of longer than 20 years. If you don’t get it right in the next five years, forget it. We have had ten years of systemic incompetence and every child in Scotland deserves better. With no change to SNP policies, the outlook is grim.’
Keir Bloomer, a former education director and one of the architects of CfE, believes the principle behind the curriculum is sound but that its implementation has been ‘actively damaging’.
He said: ‘There is a critical and urgent need to examine how Scottish education is run.’
Last week’s PISA data showed only one in 17 pupils in Scotland were classed as ‘top performers’ in reading skills.
Just 6 per cent are rated among the most able compared with an average 8 per cent for OECD countries – and 10 per cent in England.
David Watt, executive director of the Institute of Directors in Scotland, said: ‘Employers want basic literacy skills and there are some scary statistics around that. Without them, you are unemployable’
Mr Swinney said: ‘If anyone was in doubt about the need for the reforms we have introduced and the improvements on which we are consulting, this week’s PISA results should dispel that doubt.
‘Our reforms are based on the 2015 review of education in Scotland, commissioned by the Scottish Government and carried out by the OECD, the same body which runs the PISA assessments.
‘The OECD’s review report said was “an important reform” and the right approach for Scotland. We are taking further steps to secure the benefits of this new approach in all parts of the country.’