SNP must work to fix schools instead of dumbing down our universities
HERE’s a ‘trigger warning’ — so beloved of our universities these days — for middle-class parents.
Your child’s hopes of getting onto their chosen higher education course are about to diminish quite a lot.
Forget the fact that they’ve worked hard to pass exams — they were born into a relatively ‘well-off’ family, and that is a problem.
Of course, how you define ‘well-off’ is contentious: for the SNP, it seems anyone paying the higher rate of tax is more or less Andrew Carnegie.
Not content with penalising people for earning too much, the Nationalists now want to punish your children as well.
Their attention has turned to university admissions, and in particular the challenge of attracting more students from deprived backgrounds.
You might wonder whether this is a good idea, given the hash the SNP has made of turning around our failing state schools, but there is simply no ‘safe space’ from the juggernaut of SNP ‘reform’.
For years, principals have been hectored into doing more to recruit students from poorer areas, and have even been threatened with loss of funding if they fail to toe the line on ‘widening access’.
Now comes a landmark report spelling out how universities hope to achieve this aim.
In fact, it represents the moment when the bosses of our higher education sector finally caved in to political manipulation.
The key proposal is one that has been tried by some institutions, but which will now become a universal fixture of the system — lowering entrance criteria specifically for ‘disadvantaged’ students.
Some universities already publish the minimum entry grades acceptable, but now all will have to do so — alongside information about the ‘typical’ marks you will need if you are from a better-off family.
Middle-class students will be held to a higher standard because they are fortunate enough to have parents who value education, affording them benefits that were not available to their poorer counterparts.
The lazy stereotype is that someone from a leafy suburb, or a supposedly affluent family, hasn’t had to work particularly hard — it was all handed to them on a plate.
The fact that that their parents may have made financial sacrifices, perhaps to send their children to private school, is of no consequence.
But to get the grades good enough for university entrance, they didn’t just click their fingers — they studied hard.
Now their place is at risk because they don’t fit the right social profile. ‘Progressive’ politics at its best…
It is true that under the new system, poorer students will not be guaranteed entry if they get the minimum grades, particularly for intensely competitive courses such as medicine and law.
But the political pressure is so great — Nicola Sturgeon wants to double the proportion of undergraduates from the poorest households from 10 to 20 per cent — that admissions officers will doubtless strike off the names of some of those lucky ‘rich’ students from the list of applicants.
This could fuel the dropout rate — already the highest in the UK — as students who struggle to cope, and who in any case might not even be suited to university, abandon their studies.
‘Free’ higher education (about to be paid for by tax hikes) is the SNP’s proudest boast, but it was financed by slashing bursaries for poorer students — an irony the SNP is never keen to address.
It is now tied into a policy that may look good but is failing to deliver, thanks to Alex Salmond’s pledge — inscribed on a monument at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh — that the ‘rocks will melt with the sun’ before fees are abolished.
That promise allows the Nationalists to pose as the champion of the ‘lad o’pairts’, who emerges from a humble home to get to university.
But the ‘lad o’pairts’, a proud part of our heritage, is now a myth: Scottish universities have the lowest proportion of students from state schools and colleges in the UK.
The proposed solution is a sticking plaster of the crudest kind — a lowering of the bar, a dumbing down, an admission of defeat by a higher education establishment which, after years of intimidation by politicians, has lost its stomach for the fight.
The far more fundamental solution, which would allow pupils to be eligible for university study regardless of class or parental income, is to fix state schools, now supposedly the core mission of the SNP administration.
This is a cruel joke — the Nationalists took seven years to get round to looking at schools and when they did, they took a wrecking-ball to them, foisting a hated curriculum on a profession that is now in the grip of a full-scale morale crisis.
Those who have the courage to stay in unruly classrooms teaching Scots language to children, many of whom will emerge from primary school functionally illiterate, will shortly be rewarded with a tax hike.
Doubtless this will force many more of them to walk away from the chalkface — or more likely sprint.
Brexit is naturally blamed for those proposed tax increases, and indeed among the well-remunerated principals presiding over our universities, EU withdrawal is also something of a bogeyman.
But they know that the likely post-Brexit decline in EU students (whose places are paid for by the Scottish taxpayer) will free up space for Scots of all classes — if the SNP decides to continue funding them.
It may want to use the cash for another purpose — more baby boxes, perhaps.
Sir Anton Muscatelli, principal of the University of Glasgow, has called for ministers to consider offering free tuition to European students, even after the legal obligation to do so ends.
This would be a lost opportunity for young Scots, but stands a good chance of success.
The SNP, which used to rail against the huge bill for EU students, is now tactically Europhile to maximise the chances of another independence referendum.
Some critics believe that the new widening access strategy will fail, a belief they say is borne out by the available evidence.
Professor Lindsay Paterson, an education expert at the University of Edinburgh, which already has ‘contextualised admissions’ — judging an applicant on background and not just grades — admits that his institution’s record on widening access has been ‘poor’.
He also warns that the ways in which ‘social disadvantage’ is measured are ‘wholly inadequate’, and indeed ‘wholly unscientific’.
All in all, this is hardly a ringing early endorsement of the widening access reforms — and it comes from one of the country’s leading authorities on education.
In reality, ‘blind applications’, where the candidate’s postcode, family details and institution are kept secret, would be a great deal fairer.
Sweeping reform of state schools, beginning with an honest assessment of the appalling failures that have been allowed to take root, should be the bedrock of the new approach.
The social engineering proposed by the SNP, and the liberal elite running our campuses, is a blunt tool that is anti-aspirational — and risks fatally undermining the standing of our universities around the world.
