Homework by the ton if the SNP is to sort the crisis in education

In the 15 months since, the First Minister has largely speechified on independence and Brexit. Assorted measures were nevertheless announced in that speech, from baby boxes to millions directly entrusted to headteachers for an assault on the ‘attainment gap’.

That gap in academic performance between youngsters from pleasant middle-class areas and those from our bleakest schemes has long been evident. Worse, since 2010 and, after all, under an SnP administration, it has widened.

The literacy and numeracy of pupils has also declined and Scotland, too, educationally is dipping steadily in those remaining league tables from which the nationalists have not withdrawn us.

This week’s SQA results afford some respite. Final marks in life-defining examinations are broadly in line with last year and 28,700 applicants have won a place at a Scottish university.

More, the number of teenagers from the wealthiest 40 per cent of Scotland’s homes among them has dropped by 220, while the freshmen from the poorest have increased by 470.

Even here, though, there is controversy. Critics have seized upon the sustained decline in pupils sitting Highers in modern languages, social sciences and the arts and fear that the curriculum is significantly narrowing.

Universities have been instructed to set a lower bar for admission from Scotland’s tougher comprehensives and this positive discrimination raises an uncomfortable moral question: is it fair that a lad from, say, gritty Drumchapel, gets into Glasgow University on given Higher results when a boy from leafy newton Mearns with identical results is denied a place to make room for him?

Meanwhile, Education Secretary John Swinney has been advancing reform at such a glacial pace it feels like a demanding episode of Twin Peaks.

Yet an additional £750million has been disgorged to fight the attainment gap. School funding generally is to be reformed, new standardised systems of assessment established.

And, in a notable victory, Swinney last month won the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s approval for oneyear teacher training in his cherished STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths.

CERTAInLY some of Swinney’s proposed changes – for instance, reducing continuous assessment and, thus, teachers’ workload – have the whiff of appeasement, understandable now that the EIS is threatening strike action over pay.

But the SnP’s close focus on university admission raises the eyebrows. Is it really necessary that more than half of all Scottish school leavers prance into higher education?

Back in 1984, a bare 14 per cent of us did and the aspirational obsession with university – a dubious one, when people with first-class honours can end up pulling pints – is one our rulers ought to challenge.

We ought, too, to remind ourselves that free university tui- tion for the Scottish bourgeoisie (and, of course, their votes) has been bought at a high price – the evisceration of our further education colleges.

By January last year, they had 152,000 fewer students than when the SnP took power. Despite industry pleas, there is little vocational training.

And, by plumping for free university tuition, the Scottish Government ‘has chosen the option that is most beneficial to advantaged students, and least helpful for disadvantaged ones. It is populism for the middle classes. Maintaining free university tuition while cutting grants to students from lower earnings families equates to a £20million transfer to middle-class students at the expense of less advantaged ones,’ says policy analyst Lucy Hunter Blackburn.

Meanwhile, it has become most fashionable to sneer at middle-class parents for ‘playing the system’.

But every conscientious parent wants the best possible education for their child. And it often comes down to the agonising choice of sending him to a private school – the fees typically in five digits a year – or to buying a property within the prized catchment of one of the best state schools, such as Glasgow’s Jordanhill or Edinburgh’s Boroughmuir – with an added premium of £100,000 on a typical property.

Because in too many state schools there are incompetent teachers, there is appalling classroom indiscipline, there is no meaningful enforcement of uniform or standards.

It has often been said that Scotland used to have the best education system in the world. With one qualification to that – it was really only true if you were bright – we did have notable advantages. It was, until late Victorian times, far more accessible and democratic than in England.

MoST could afford to send their children to a ‘normal’ or Free Church school. Scots were great believers in educating girls. English schools majored languidly in the Classics. Scottish schools taught the three Rs – and well – but were also strong on mathematics, the natural sciences and technical subjects.

It is no coincidence that so many Scots, far above our proportion of the British population, have attained the highest public offices, that our little land has produced so many noted engineers, great inventions and medical advances.

Until the late 20th century, we offered probably the best teacher training in the world.

one wonders how much that is visibly now wrong in our schools – from the ill discipline and poor deportment of too many teachers to falling literacy and the flight from the fag of actually learning a new language – is down to very different teacher training practice from the early 1970s.

It is easy to blame the attainment gap on these days of austerity and poverty, but it cannot be the whole solution.

It is difficult not to wonder if the slump in primary standards – for instance – is because the last teachers themselves taught in primary schools that were traditional, ordered and excellent have all but retired.

There was nothing wrong in training pupils to write neatly, to chant tables, to rise when an adult entered the room.

And it is appropriate to open windows of imagination, to do basic history and geography and a little science – but the primary years are those when the essentials for learning, to read and write and count, are the central business.

nor should we be afraid to ‘stream’ and ‘set’ classes within secondary schools, or to encourage more schools – Jordanhill remains the only Scottish instance – to step away from local authority control and be run by boards of managers elected by the parents.

The problems in Scottish education are evident and legion. Its renovation requires courageous thinking and hard choices – not yet more oodles of public money, high summits and pretentious initiatives.

You can email John MacLeod at john.macleod@dailymail.co.uk