A wave of his wand made the bad marks just disappear
THERE’S nothing as scunnering as a burst ball. John Swinney turned up at Holyrood to apologise for the exams fiasco but before the opposition could get a kick in, he spiked the leather and brought the game to an abrupt end.
The Education Secretary’s coat was on the shoogliest of pegs after thousands of pupils, many from the most deprived areas, had their predicted grades slashed based on their school’s past performance.
Ranged against him were pupils, parents and teachers. Things were so bad, the Scottish Greens briefly forgot themselves and started acting like an opposition party.
Make no mistake, Swinney’s hide was on the line yesterday, but in an audacious reversal of his every statement last week, he saved his skin. A motion of no confidence proposed by Labour will now not pass.
This turnaround can be credited wholly to Swinney’s rank cynicism. He spent five days defending the exam moderation process, which was politically very stupid.
Then, with a wave of his ministerial wand, he reversed the entire process and made all those bad marks disappear. This was politically very smart.
The announcement came in a bravura turn at Holyrood. The infamous Swinney snarl had been tamed and replaced with a pout of contrition. The decibels were hushed and the terrace-worthy bawling reined in.
‘We set out to ensure that the system was fair,’ he intoned to MSPs. ‘We set out to ensure that it was credible. But we did not get it right for all young people.’
The Deputy First Minister added: ‘I am sorry, but sorry as I am I know an apology is not enough.’
The statement was still meticulously worded: Swinney spoke of ‘feelings in the minds of young people’ that they had been let down.
HE was careful to couch the matter in this language throughout, treating the row as one of image rather than substance. But that sleight of hand aside, he was careful to show appropriate levels of emoting.
His own feelings didn’t come into it. All that he had defended he now damned as unjust, the epiphany thanks to protests by the pupils affected. He was doing it for the kids, you see.
The backlash certainly did open his eyes, but not to the unfairness or ineptitude of the system and those administering it. What he saw in the demonstrations, parental frustration and teacher dissatisfaction was the fading light of his ministerial career.
‘These are exceptional times,’ he ventured, but under Swinney’s blunder-studded tenure, it was just another day of dysfunction in Scottish education.
The opposition have been left to flail at Swinney’s shadow as he slips back out of the limelight. The Scottish Tories’ Jamie Greene, steadily becoming an effective critic of Nationalist failure, was unsatisfied, calling Swinney’s statement ‘the longest resignation speech in history, minus the resignation’.
Labour’s Iain Gray also called for him to go, but this is unlikely to happen now.
Swinney’s critics wanted a fairer and more expedited appeals process; he skipped appeals altogether and just gave pupils their original marks back. This may end up
hurting Scottish school-leavers in the longer run, as universities elsewhere in the world view their results as an award based on political expediency rather than pupil performance.
That’s not John Swinney’s concern, though. He is in the business of survival and utterly ruthless in how he goes about it. But he’ll be back on the front page soon enough. A minister who puts the Government so firmly on the wrong side of public opinion, then takes five days to recognise that he’s done so, is the kind of minister a canny opposition would back to the hilt.
John Swinney can’t resign. He’s still got so much more to give.