Judgment day for Sturgeon after years of failure in schools
IT was her burning mission, her top priority, the issue upon which she wanted to be judged.
No, not independence, but reform of the postcode lottery of Scottish education — and Nicola Sturgeon vowed to end it.
Last week — nearly seven years after she was appointed First Minister — we found out how her crusade was working out, in the SNP manifesto.
The subject wasn’t quite a footnote, but not far off it — it was on page 62 in a 76-page document, turning Miss Sturgeon’s driving objective into a bit of an afterthought.
It didn’t give much away either, casually mentioning that a further £1billion would be ploughed into closing the ‘attainment gap’ between the best and worst-performing schools.
With pupils returning to classrooms full-time this week — in many cases for the first time since December — you might have thought it was a topic that deserved more prominence.
But it’s not difficult to figure out why the SNP was keen to bury education in its blueprint for the next five years, a lengthy list of eye-wateringly expensive policies from free bicycles to a minimum income guarantee.
Watchdog Audit Scotland concluded last month that ‘progress on closing the gap has been limited and falls short of the Scottish Government’s aims’.
With impeccable timing, ministers responded by publishing a Referendum Bill the following day — an indication of where their true priorities lie.
Before the 2016 Holyrood election, Miss Sturgeon said her top priority would be to ‘substantially close the attainment gap’ by the end of the present parliament and to eliminate it within a decade.
Last week the First Minister conceded that ‘we haven’t done that yet’, saying the failure was linked to the pandemic — which had ‘upended almost every aspect of life here in Scotland’.
Things were going swimmingly before Covid, of course, although there were signs that her grand plans were coming off the rails back in 2019 — when alarm bells rang over her government’s flagship £120million fund to drive up attainment.
It emerged that some of the cash had been spent on teddy bears for pupils to ‘create a culture of positivity and openness’ (something Miss Sturgeon’s secretive regime could have done with).
There were also concerns that a portion of the money had been used to make up for budget cuts and to supplement teachers’ wages.
In 2015, Miss Sturgeon had said: ‘I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people, then what are you prepared to do? It really matters.’
It does, and yet out of the 63 Scottish Government Bills passed in the last parliament, none were aimed at fulfilling that long-held ambition to turn around the tanker of state schools’ failure.
Then there’s the long-awaited report into Scotland’s secondary education system — which is being kept under wraps, in keeping with Miss Sturgeon’s commitment to open and accessible government.
The independent review, led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was due to be published in February, but has been delayed until June due to the pandemic.
That means, conveniently, it will not be released until after next month’s Holyrood elections.
A majority of MSPs voted for the findings of the report to be made public and John Swinney, the Education Secretary, provided MSPs with a summary on the condition that they would not leak its findings.
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that the report is said to be less than a glowing appraisal of the SNP’s record.
Clearly leaks did happen and, among other findings, we’re told it concluded that the choice of subjects offered to S4 pupils is too narrow, while it also raises fundamental questions about the implementation of the shambolic Curriculum for Excellence (CfE).
The CfE was dreamed up by trendy educationalists who thought facts were a bit old-fashioned, and now we’re stuck with it.
Does anyone doubt that if the OECD report had been positive, it would have been wheeled out with some fanfare, given it cost nearly £400,000 to produce?
Instead Mr Swinney sat on it, blaming the OECD, while naturally the pandemic was responsible for the delayed publication.
Scapegoats are easy to come by, and — let’s face it — if it wasn’t coronavirus something else would be culpable — Brexit, maybe, or Boris Johnson.
Education has been the sole responsibility of the Scottish Government, or Executive as it was formerly called, since 1999, and for the last 14 years the SNP was in charge.
In a rare moment of candour, the SNP manifesto admits that £750million has been invested in closing the attainment gap (it doesn’t say how much was spent on teddy bears), which means we are ‘seeing steady, incremental gains in attainment across the broad general education’.
The ‘cancellation of exams because of Covid has raised real questions about whether our current system of school examination is properly capturing our young people’s success’ — indeed, exams ‘may be a barrier for some pupils’.
More dumbing down is on the cards, then, and you can bet the teaching unions won’t complain — they’re fed up with the demands of working towards examination.
It’s all part of a gradual surrender to reduced standards rightly described by Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross yesterday as a ‘dereliction of duty’, though it’s also a moral abdication.
The Tory manifesto promises a ‘subject guarantee’ to students — a commitment that everyone will be able to take at least seven subjects in S4.
How depressing that in 2021 this should have to be a pledge, rather than a criterion universally accepted as a gold standard.
Anything that upsets the union barons bitterly opposed to change is potentially a good idea — and this one probably fits the bill.
The woeful SNP schools quango Education Scotland combines a curriculum advisory function with inspections, meaning it’s far from impartial.
And it’s been asleep at the wheel — two in three schools have not been inspected for at least five years, including one in four that have not had an inspection for over ten years.
Mind you, it’s pretty good at spending your money, something of a requirement for all quangos — it hired five ‘strategic directors’ on combined salaries of up to £420,000.
It’s not hard to see what’s gone wrong — a botched curriculum was rolled out; lazy, empire-building inspectors weren’t paying attention; and government was focused on creating constitutional havoc when it should have been trying to fix schools.
An SNP victory seems inevitable, with the only real question whether it will get a majority, so it’s easy to feel fatalistic — as if your vote didn’t count.
But it does — and it’s time to get angry, because your kids’ futures are at stake.
As for Miss Sturgeon, she will get her wish — her neck is on the line, and judgment day looms.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on Tuesday, April 20.
