If the SNP won’t change education then parents should

The SNP needs a little help with its promise to prioritise the younger generation’s future writes Brian Monteith

Imagine if in the eighties Margaret Thatcher had said in her election pitch that her number one priority was to cut unemployment – and then her government presided over its steep and painful rise.

She would not have lasted a single term rather than be elected to three on the trot.

Thatcher was always careful to make promises she believed in and was committed to delivering, hence she talked about reforming the economy and creating the opportunity for the private sector to create real and lasting jobs. Ultimately the economy turned her way, productivity improved and after the initial rise in unemployment the new jobs began to outnumber the redundancies. It is thanks to her initial reforms, particularly the emasculation of trade union privileges, that we now have what is being referred to as contemporary full employment.

Imagine also if in the late nineties Tony Blair had said in his first election “education, education, education” and then proceeded to completely ignore the issue to concentrate instead on reform of the Lords or preparing Britain for the adoption of the new Euro currency. He could never have gone on to win three terms in a row.

Blair was, like Thatcher, careful to make promises he was confident he could keep, even if he was not fully committed to them himself. And so it was that he delivered some of the most sweeping educational reforms that empowered individual schools and their headteachers, allowed schools to specialise in particular subjects and break away from local authority control. It is thanks to his initial reforms, especially the expansion of foundation schools, that England not only caught up with Scottish education but overtook it and has left it behind in the only thing that really matters, the level of pupil ability as measured by attainment.

Those in Scotland’s own current education debate that cannot recognise this inconvenient truth and are unwilling to learn from it are part of the problem and cannot offer the solution.

Imagine then a First Minster of Scotland who said in an election campaign that, “improving Scotland’s education system should be the number one priority of the next Scottish government” and went even further by accepting “if reelected as First Minister I will ask to be judged on my success in achieving this”. Could any leader of a party be so brazen, so insincere and so deceitful as to play the electorate by telling it what they wanted to hear but not care a jot and always be focussed on another priority?

Could our Scottish broadcast media be so compliant that it would not hold such a politician to account? Would Thatcher and Blair have got away with stating that education was their “number one priority” only to focus on personal constitutional hobby-horses? Yet that is precisely what our First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has thus far managed to do without being held to account or subject to justifiable media outrage.

Like any country, our children are our most valuable asset. Their potential is not only what offers them and their families a bright future, it is also what can preserve all that is good about our past, our society now and provide for the older generations that have made great sacrifices for their opportunities.

That after nearly ten years of the SNP managing Scotland’s education one in five pupils leaves primary