SNP had a chance to guide our children … but it was botched

AMID the election chaos in the U.S. and the pandemic, you might have missed a report on the state of Scottish education.

They come up every now and again, of course, and it’s normally not great news, unless you happen to be listening to John Swinney.

His response to past criticism of the way his government runs schools has been to suggest his opponents are simply too ‘gloomy’.

But what are we to make of the findings of a panel of experts, chaired by one of the key architects of the SNP’s education reforms?

Keir Bloomer made the extraordinary statement last week that schools are better off without Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) guidance.

The former council education director was one of those who came up with the original version, but now argues the finished product has been poorly implemented.

In reality, the CfE was a Frankenstein’s Monster, patched up by many alleged experts with touchy-feely ideas about how knowledge is old hat.

It was then sent staggering into schools, and teachers were given reams of guidelines on what it all meant, but no one really understood them.

One of the repercussions was subject rationing, an unintended consequence of the shake-up that could have been easily avoided.

Children now get a substandard syllabus and less choice because of a host of misbegotten and woolly ideals from ‘progressive’ educationalists.

An early proposal was to axe history lessons, which sparked a backlash against the then Labour Education Minister Peter Peacock.

Undeterred, the SNP took up the baton after winning power in 2007, and was in charge of rolling out the CfE in schools, but it wasn’t long. before disaster beckoned.

Theory was allowed to supplant years of accumulated experience about what actually works in the classroom, and what employers might want.

Responding to an external review of the CfE, the submission by Mr Bloomer’s commission said the ‘truth is that the schools which perform best at the moment are those which have largely ignored the 20,000 pages of guidance’ related to the curriculum.

Last year a major global study found Scottish pupils lag behind those in Latvia, Slovenia and Estonia in maths – and are outperformed by children in England.

After those statistics were published, Mr Swinney said we were on ‘the right track’ , though he didn’t say what lay at the end of it.

His boss said early on in her tenure, back when at least some of us were prepared to believe her, that improving schools was her top priority.

Yet the changes that were introduced appear to have been a backward step, ripping up good practice for the sake of being able to point to shiny new reforms that promised a great deal but delivered very little.

The report by Mr Bloomer’s commission said replacing Standard Grades with National exams meant some ‘valuable features’ of the old system were lost.

It made clear that ‘no clear rationale was offered’, and that ‘some valuable features of Standard Grade have been lost with no obvious compensating gain’.

So the old set-up, or at least parts of it, might have been worth hanging onto, but instead the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

Naturally, ministers maintain ‘children and young people have more options in their education, and that their wider achievements and skills are recognised alongside qualifications’ under the CfE.

Education was thrown into turmoil, along with everything else, back in March, when schools were shut and exams cancelled.

A Scottish Qualifications Authority algorithm went haywire and downgraded thousands of children’s exam results, before a hasty U-turn.

As Mr Bloomer notes, the credibility of our examinations have taken a knock, and the net result is a lot of pupils may be under-equipped for the university courses they’re now embarking on (trapped in their flats or halls, and forbidden in most cases from returning to the family home due to Covid rules).

(Swinney: attacks the Press and ‘gloomy’ critics but defends the SNP Curriculum)

Other countries managed to hold exams despite the virus, but in Scotland they didn’t take place, while next year’s National 5s have been cancelled – and there’s no solid guarantee that Highers will go ahead.

That seems premature defeatism – maybe even a little too ‘gloomy’ – and meanwhile there’s real concern about what kids are actually learning.

Dozens of subjects have seen coursework scrapped, in many cases after pupils had more or less finished it, with practical tasks in science among those to be dropped.

The idea was to make it easier for teachers to catch up on lost time and make sure social distancing was respected at all times.

But the starting-point for these changes appears to have been one of fatalism rather than pragmatism, and as a result children may be getting a raw deal.

The rhetoric trotted out at Nicola Sturgeon’s daily coronavirus briefings was that this year was unique for the exam cohort affected, which turned out to be nonsense.

Home education over lockdown ranged between non-existent to haphazard, with private schools doing a better job of it than a lot of their state counterparts.

Kids were denied the hardware they needed and lots of them didn’t turn up to online lessons, prompting a new phenomenon of digital, as opposed to actual, truancy.

The disruption continues today, with more than 20,000 pupils across Scotland self-isolating, or sick with Covid symptoms, and supposedly they’re all learning from home, if they’re well enough.

It’s not clear that this is working, not least because teachers are having to look after the pupils who are in class while also preparing lessons for those who can’t come in.

Ministers can’t be blamed for this, as it’s a preferable to have schools open with many children off than all of them shut down again.

But it’s very much their fault if ‘blended learning’ – the combination of home and school study – isn’t really viable on the ground.

We know beyond any doubt that from now on any failure in Scottish education will be attributed to the legacy of Covid, and in some cases that will be true.

But it will also be a useful excuse for ministerial incompetence for years to come, and it’ll become trickier to disentangle virus-related issues from those that were already there.

It’s in the interests of those running state education to confuse those different factors as much as possible as a method of blame-dodging: their specialist – and perhaps only – skill.

The default posture of the SNP – burying its head in the sand – is woefully insufficient when it comes to ensuring children are adequately educated.

Nor should we buy another idea Mr Swinney is keen on, that it’s all down to the Press being too negative, a tactic that deserves to be consigned to the past along with its greatest exponent, Donald Trump.

Don’t let them fob you off when the election comes round: they had a chance to give children a better future, and – shamefully – they botched it.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on November 10, 2020.