Is this a shambles which I see before me? Pupils sitting exams on Macbeth without any classroom teaching is just one example of a looming fiasco in Scottish schools…
EDUCATION is back to normal as Covid rapidly retreats and we can all get back to the world-class schooling we enjoyed pre-Covid.
Well, that’s the official line anyway, but parents know the reality is different — nearly 9,000 self-isolating kids are back to home learning (including my own).
Secondary schools didn’t fully re-open until about a month ago but now Covid is ripping through classrooms again, causing huge disruption.
We’re not alone in this — getting education back on track after the pandemic is a challenge facing most governments.
Indeed it’s probably the greatest problem any of them faces: they need to re-start the economy, but recovery won’t last without skilled school-leavers and graduates.
Short-term, we’re busking it — home learning isn’t as bad as it once was but nowhere near as good as it could be; in any event it’s not a long-term solution.
And exams have been ditched this year in favour of assessments that look a lot like, well, exams, except they’re not — not technically anyway.
Got that? Nor me, and yet this is what’s being foisted on thousands of under-equipped pupils, most of them stressed-out, and feeling like they’ve been conned.
In one case, a pupil reported having to sit a test, or exam, or whatever it is, on Macbeth — despite having been taught about it remotely, via a 90-page PowerPoint presentation.
Is this a shambles which I see before me? Clearly — and yet the official response is the familiar one — denial — even as we hurtle towards another potential exams fiasco.
Grades will be based on teacher judgment, supported by evidence of attainment, and the dysfunctional Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) has provided question papers that staff can use for the purpose.
Resourceful candidates are swapping questions on the TikTok video-sharing app, or other platforms, as the tests are all being undertaken at different times, making a further mockery of the entire doomed process.
That none of the highly-paid strategists at the top of the SQA saw this coming tells you all you need to know about an organisation that lost its way long ago.
Last year went swimmingly, of course, when an algorithm was used to assess pupil performance and downgraded thousands of results, before a handbrake U-turn by blundering John Swinney.
He was rewarded for his long record of failure last week with a frontbench role leading the Covid recovery — the kind of black irony that has become a Holyrood hallmark.
Wading into this mess is the latest recipient of the poisoned chalice of the education brief, former Social Security Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville.
But what hope is there of the new incumbent sorting out the SQA when, in her former role, she presided over the calamitous creation of a new benefits agency?
SNP ham-fistedness means control over some benefits will have to remain with the Department for Work and Pensions until the new body is able to manage them — in 2024.
This is the crew desperate to forge a brave new Scotland, remember, free from the shackles of the UK state — but frankly would you trust any of them with the tea round?
Bear in mind that well before Covid arrived on our shores education was in dire straits, and next month an OECD report is due to be published laying bare the extent of the failings of the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE).
This is the study ministers kept under wraps, insisting they weren’t allowed to publish it, meaning it couldn’t be released until after the election, conveniently.
The CfE was conceived by trendy educationalists who didn’t much rate learning about facts, and sold to gullible ministers in Holyrood’s first Labour/Lib Dem coalition.
The SNP took up the baton and with its talent for cack-handedness implemented the scheme — despite warnings from teachers that they weren’t prepared, and didn’t want it anyway.
One of the unforeseen and avoidable consequences was subject rationing, which meant children were saddled with a narrower range of learning.
Spin-doctors will earn their crust when the OECD findings finally drop (unredacted, you’d hope, but you never know…).
When a damning report was released on coronavirus in care homes being fuelled by the discharge of untested or Covid-positive hospital patients, ministers reached for the whitewash and insisted the link was tenuous, or false.
That was nonsense, but you can expect more of the same ‘re-packaging’ with the education report — after all, ministers have had long enough to cook up their excuses.
The new Education Secretary will also have to make sure there’s a credible plan for kids to appeal the results of their Covid assessments — there’s not much evidence of one at the moment.
A summer of discontent lies ahead — and it’s a post that requires a rhino’s hide to survive.
Mr Swinney is a Sturgeon loyalist who helped her navigate the Salmond scandal so was deemed untouchable despite his manifest deficiencies.
But he caved into the union barons who are largely responsible for the failings of a sclerotic state education system — geared more to their demands than the needs of the children and staff they’re meant to serve.
Until that roadblock to reform is cleared, Miss Somerville will face the same obstacles that dogged her predecessors (even before the SNP came to power).
Mind you, Miss Somerville has had experience of these run-ins — she also served as a Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science from 2011 to 2016.
Before elected office, the new education supremo, who has a public relations diploma, worked as a parliamentary researcher for a Nationalist MSP.
She has a politics and economics degree and is, of course, an advocate of independence — she was a director of the Yes Scotland campaign.
Steeped in party politics with minimal exposure to the world beyond the public sector, it seems unlikely that Miss Somerville will take on the unions.
And her recent history steering social security reform (or driving it into a wall, more accurately) doesn’t hold out much hope for a steady hand on the tiller.
What’s needed is something that’s unlikely to happen — an honest reckoning with parents, pupils, and teachers, about what’s gone wrong — and how to put it right.
As unfashionable as it’s become, maybe we should go back to teaching the ‘three Rs’, widening the subjects on offer in the senior years, and scrapping all the woolly stuff that has bedevilled the CfE since day one about turning kids into ‘effective contributors’.
Tribalism has no place in the debate, such as it is, and yet a promised Education Bill didn’t come to fruition in the last parliament because the SNP didn’t want to rely on Tory votes.
Until that recurring loop of failure and denial is broken, no change of personnel by a government with such a paucity of talent can hope to rescue our Covid-battered schools.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on May 25, 2021.
