End the canard of university education being seen as best option for all

I WAS delighted to read your article reporting the enlightened views of Sir Ian Wood on the proper purpose and values in secondary school education in Scotland (“Pressure to go to university is ‘damaging to pupils’ warns tycoon”, The Herald, June 14).

He points out that in the real world “many pupils who had a technical education earned higher salaries than those who went to university”.

The question must be considered how the present culture in Scottish education of what I consider is essentially a coterie promoting academic incest seems to have developed.

I suggest that the formation of comprehensive secondary schools in the second half of the 20th century left many establishments which had been senior secondary schools with a legacy of nostalgia for intellectual elitism which still dies hard.

Compounded with this background was the requirement that all teachers should be university graduates and hence have little probability of experience in, or hold parity of esteem for, alternative educational routes.

Additionally, as our society began to identify itself as “post-industrial” during the late 1970s so, in what I believe was an emerging panic, a university education gained unjustified ground as the safest pathway for all school leavers regardless of their eventual market value.

However, the role of the university-promoting Scottish Government in, by default, effectively marginalising the success of the majority of school leavers who wish to march to another tune cannot be ignored.

A solution to address the divisive attitude is for the Education Scotland School Inspectorate to be directed to be much bolder and more encouraging in the equitable reporting of all positive school leaver destinations as successes.

The most recent statistics in 2017 show that 40 per cent of Scottish senior leavers went to university. Let us hear more praise and tributes for the 60 per cent and not allow any pupil to leave school with a heavy heart.

Bill Brown,

46 Breadie Drive,

Milngavie.