Our pupils are paying price of SNP’s failings

THE default response of the SNP to bad news is spin and platitudes – and yesterday there was no exception, as John Swinney claimed that education figures showed his Government was on the ‘right track’.

But the truth behind this distortion is that Scotland has plummeted down international rankings.

For a nation with a proud heritage of invention and discovery, it is shameful that we are now graded just 29th in the developed world on science.

On maths, the picture is similarly bleak, with Scotland falling from 17th place to 31st between 2006 and 2018.

Can we really be on the ‘right track’ if Scottish pupils are outperformed by their peers in Latvia, Slovenia and Estonia?

Granted, progress has been made on reading skills, but the increase largely makes up for lost ground – since 2000, we have fallen from sixth to 15th position.

As Professor Lindsay Paterson argues powerfully on this page, there is a dearth of meaningful evidence about the quality of Scottish education. He points out that because the SNP has withdrawn from international studies, ‘we have no reliable way of knowing what’s happening’ in between the three-yearly PISA reports.

Why would Nicola Sturgeon, who has claimed repeatedly that educational improvement is her main goal, seek to limit opportunities for outside evaluation?

The data published yesterday suggests one compelling reason: under the SNP’s stewardship, there has been a marked slide in classroom standards, fuelled by the Nationalists’ botched curricular reforms.

Among the most damning conclusions in yesterday’s statistics was the finding that no real headway has been made in closing the ‘attainment gap’ between the best and worst-performing schools.

This is despite millions of pounds being invested in schemes such as the flagship £120million Pupil Equity Fund, which was intended to help schools raise attainment.

But it is now coming under the scrutiny of the Audit Scotland public spending watchdog after it emerged cash had been used to make up for budget cuts.

Miss Sturgeon once said she wanted to ‘make sure our schools are once again among the best in the world’. She asked: ‘If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of your people, then what are you prepared to?’ Next week, Miss Sturgeon will face a day of reckoning as parents pass judgment on her woeful track record. Now they know beyond doubt that her hubristic promises to turn around state education remain unfulfilled – and thousands of children face paying a heavy price for her failure.