End the focus on separation

Sir, - So Scotland’s standards of education have declined over the last decade and more.

In reading, Scots are now at 23rd in the Pisa rankings, whereas in 2006 they were at 11th and in 2000 at sixth.

This is lamentable for what used to be one of the best-educated populations in the world.

It may be that it owes something to the confusion being sown in young pupils’ minds by the imposition of faux Scots in the curriculum.

This invented language owes more to Stanley Baxter than it does to any living tongue.

Children are set tasks requiring them to read, spell and write in this language at an age when their real need is to consolidate their learning in standard English.

It is all intended to hammer home a spurious differentiation between Scotland and England that is part of the SNP’s strategy for winning Scots over to separation.

According to Professor Lindsay Paterson of Edinburgh University, the culprit for falling standards appears to be the much-vaunted Curriculum for Excellence.

In a damning interview, he referred to its “rather Mickey Mouse approach to cross curricular themes and lots of other projects that are rather beside the point at that age”.

Is this all simply a matter of incompetence, of a misplaced sense of innovation – or is it a cunning plan to dumb down education so that Scots are incapable of seeing the patent flaws in the SNP’s arguments for separation from the UK? Jill Stephenson. Glenlockhart Valley, Edinburgh.