Children are paying price for Sturgeon’s hubris over education
By Graham Grant
FEW modern politicians have the courage – or perhaps the hubris – to stake their personal reputation on the fulfilment of a pledge.
So Nicola Sturgeon went against the grain when she said she wanted to be judged on reform of Scotland’s failing state school system.
Back in August 2015, she said: ‘If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of your people, then what are you prepared to?’
In April of that year, she said she was ‘very, very serious about my determination to make sure our schools are once again among the best in the world’.
Since then a raft of evidence has shown a lack of progress and indeed a deterioration of classroom standards – exposing as hollow Miss Sturgeon’s promises of radical change.
Teachers warn of spiralling indiscipline, crippling staff shortages and soaring bureaucracy as they threaten to stage industrial action in an increasingly bitter row over pay.
Plans to help close the ‘attainment gap’ between the best and worst-performing schools have foundered amid claims that funding aimed at educational improvement has been squandered.
Primary school classes are among the most crowded in the developed world, exceeding those in Estonia, Mexico, Slovenia, Slovakia and Latvia, despite repeated SNP pledges to curb them.
Meanwhile research earlier this year showed many school-leavers have the reading age of 13-year-olds as the classroom literacy crisis deepens.
When the new state school term begins for most pupils next week, Miss Sturgeon’s record on educational reform will come under renewed scrutiny.
As pupils receive their exam results today, we deliver a report card examining the gap between the First Minister’s rhetoric since she vowed to turn around the tanker of educational failure – and the reality at the chalkface:
CLAIM: Miss Sturgeon said in January 2016 that her ‘personal determination’ was to ‘see and demonstrate progress on both excellence and equity by the end of next summer’.
REALITY: In March 2017 the then HM Chief Inspector of Education Dr Bill Maxwell said Scottish education ‘does not yet provide all children and young people with consistently high-quality learning experiences’.
He also said the ambition of ‘excellence and equity’ had not been realised and would not be until widespread variations in pupil performance had been tackled – a process that could take more than a decade.
CLAIM: The First Minister launched a £120million ‘Pupil Equity Fund (PEF)’ which she said would make ‘additional money… available to headteachers to address some of the specific issues that might be affecting attainment in their schools’.
REALITY: A Times Education Supplement Scotland probe in October 2017 found one 13-class primary school spent PEF cash on higher salaries, with ten teachers now on ‘management-level pay’.
Elsewhere PEF cash has been used to fund an artificial turf playing surface and to send pupils and their parents on a weekend trip away – while unions warn the cash is ‘shoring up what had been lost’ in budget cuts.
CLAIM: Back in 2016, Miss Sturgeon said a system of standardised national testing in primary schools ‘will allow us over the next few years to set clear, specific and meaningful milestones on the road to closing the attainment gap’.
REALITY: The system’s credibility was undermined when it emerged P7 children were able to bypass computer-based spelling tests simply by clicking on their mouse.
CLAIM: The Scottish Government claims the ‘vast majority of pupils in our schools are well-behaved and a credit to Scotland’.
REALITY: Research by the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA) shows nearly one in five secondary school teachers has been assaulted by pupils – and the union warns pupil discipline has never been worse.
The SSTA has warned that verbal abuse is becoming the norm, affecting seven out of ten staff members.
Its recent survey of 1,079 members also highlighted concerns that many teachers do not receive adequate support after incidents of violence or abuse.
CLAIM: Education Secretary John Swinney claimed Scotland was ‘very much at the low end of the spectrum internationally’ in terms of teacher shortages.
REALITY: Official figures last year revealed there were more than 800 teacher vacancies across the country – and some headteachers have had to beg parents for help to find staff.
Pupils in secondary schools are to be taught maths by teachers who do not have a degree in the subject, amid the growing recruitment crisis.
The EIS teaching union said the move could create a ‘two-tier system’ because some teachers would have degrees in the subjects they were delivering, while others would not.
Meanwhile more than 1,000 teachers have taken early retirement in the last three years, with unions claiming many are ‘desperate’ to escape growing workloads and plunging morale.
CLAIM: In August 2015, Miss Sturgeon said: ‘The introduction of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) has been a major step forward – and one which is attracting international attention.’
REALITY: In December 2016, global rankings showed Scottish pupils were lagging behind their peers in former Soviet nations on reading, maths and science skills – and experts blame the CfE.
A detailed study earlier this year by Professor Jim Scott, who helped design the curriculum, found a majority of Scotland’s secondary schools are now only teaching their S4 pupils six subjects instead of the traditional ‘gold standard’ of eight.
CLAIM: In February 2015, Miss Sturgeon announced the formation of a new commission on ‘widening access’ to increase the number of pupils from deprived areas on university campuses.
REALITY: In February 2018, the Higher Education Statistics Agency revealed Scotland continues to have the lowest percentage of state school pupils going to university in the UK.
Scottish Funding Council figures last year showed that top universities recruit fewer than one in 12 undergraduates from the poorest areas.
CLAIM: The First Minister said in 2015 that the ‘best teachers are a fundamental part of improving attainment and achievement for children and young people’.
REALITY: In January this year, the Scottish Government’s own figures showed nearly one in four new primary school teachers are not ‘confident’ in their ability to teach numeracy.
Almost a fifth of primary probation teachers – 19 per cent – were not confident teaching literacy.
CLAIM: The Scottish Government says: ‘Teacher numbers are increasing – there are more primary teachers than at any time since 2007 and the ratio of pupils to teachers is at its lowest since 2013.’
REALITY: The number of Scots children being taught in primary classes of more than 30 pupils has risen, and some schools have even had to breach a legal cap on the number of pupils in a primary one class.
CLAIMS: Mr Swinney wants to introduce a ‘headteachers’ charter’, giving individual school chiefs more control of classroom budgets, hiring staff and curriculum content.
REALITY: The probable surge in bureaucracy and the threat of litigation for heads found to have contravened the terms of the charter has sparked a backlash from staff, trade unions and councils, with 88 per cent of headteachers opposed to legislating for the move, according to the EIS.
There are now claims that the initiative may be scrapped after pressure from local authorities.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on August 7, 2018.
