Q: Who can solve education crisis? A: Pushy parents
NICOLA Sturgeon is right. Let me repeat that because I don’t say it very often. Nicola Sturgeon is right – in one very particular and important aspect: she is right to latch on to the failures in Scottish education. For far too long, we have basked in the glow of our own smugness, foolishly deluded into thinking our education system is the best in the world.
Well, by focusing on the shocking educational failures of those from the poorest backgrounds, Ms Sturgeon has shone a bright and ugly light onto that conceit.
But that is as far as her success in this area has gone.
Why? Because the First Minister, like the rest of the political establishment, won’t have a proper debate about what is really going on in our schools.
In England they are getting exercised about grammar schools – something that would never be on the cards in Scotland.
Now, no one is arguing for the establishment of grammar schools here but, at least in England, they recognise that selection on financial grounds already takes place as parents move house to get into the catchments of the best schools.
But in Scotland? No one seems willing to acknowledge that the same thing goes on here.
ICAN show you streets in Edinburgh where the house prices vary by more than £100,000 on either side of the road, depending on whether homes are in one high school catchment or another. Not only that, but the process is self perpetuating. If a school starts to do well, it gets a good reputation so more parents buy their way into the area. These are usually the socalled ‘pushy parents’ who have already worked hard with their children through primary, so these youngsters are ideally placed to do well at high school, helping it to do even better.
The school then gets better and better results, house prices shoot up and on it goes.
This is the way it works in Scotland and everybody who has a child of school age knows it.
Indeed, the only people who don’t seem to want to talk about this issue or think about ways of tackling it are our politicians.
Ms Sturgeon has said more about the gap in achievement LAST week, MSPs took on the journalists at cricket. Played in glorious sunshine, the setting was utterly wonderful and the atmosphere fantastic. But as for the result, I can honestly say I have no idea. When the match finished I was in A&E, having taken the unwise decision to get too close to a walloping drive from the leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. So, if you didn’t know it before, my advice is this: don’t mess with Ruth Davidson. between those from well-off and deprived areas than any minister in any administration since devolution and that’s great.
But unless she starts to acknowledge that this is being perpetuated by the totally reasonable desires of many parents to get their children into the best schools, then she will find it hard to bring about real change.
So what is the answer? Well, we NATIONALIST MP George Kerevan headed over the pond during the summer for what he thought would be a well-earned rest in the States, away from politics. But that was before the SNP’s American outpost got to him and he found himself could start by championing the achievements of the best schools and encouraging them to do even better. That may seem perverse when we are trying to narrow the gap between the best and worst but it actually might work.
That is because there is sometimes the misguided assumption that the ‘attainment gap’ is simply the result of those at the bottom getting worse and worse.
But perhaps it is because the standards in all schools are rising, with those at the top rising faster than all the others.
If that is the case, we shouldn’t worry that we have a strata of secondaries producing academic excellence to rival anywhere in the world, we should welcome it.
We could actually use our top schools as role models and harness what they are doing to improve standards elsewhere.
WE could group schools into small clusters, with one topperforming school mentoring and sharing staff and ideas with others struggling to cope. We could also loosen council shackles, giving headteachers more control and more money to spend. And – whisper it because, as a Tory idea, it is hated by the SNP – perhaps we could embrace the idea of academies and free schools able to react to the conditions in their own area. Perhaps it is time to accept that inequalities will exist as long as families can move house to pick the best school for their children. A real debate about these issues might also end the denigration of so-called ‘pushy parents’ – those willing to put pressure on teachers to improve standards.
I would argue that there should be more of them. If this were the case, then maybe they would help drive up attainment across the board.
That one change might do more to improve education than any top-down diktat from politicians or bureaucrats ever could. roped into functions and events for almost the entirety of his time away. But George really should have realised: when you are working for the independence cause, then there is no such thing as a holiday.