SNP’s meddling in schools will only help close young minds
By Graham Grant
THE seeds of the SNP’s chaotic and inaccurately named Curriculum for Excellence were sown about 14 years ago.
Peter Peacock, an otherwise forgettable Labour schools minister, proposed the abolition of traditional history lessons as part of a planned modernisation drive.
History teachers rebelled after Mr Peacock said pupils become bored if forced to study subjects they disliked – while learning dates by rote was old-fashioned.
The TV historian Dr David Starkey branded him an ‘intellectual pigmy’, and the idea was promptly binned; but the row was a telling foretaste of the calamitous reforms to come.
Work continued on bringing in a trendy new Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), which aimed to promote ‘wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity’.
Amid all the jargon-filled gobbledegook, there wasn’t much mention of more pedestrian matters such as the ‘three Rs’.
The job of detailed planning and implementation fell to the SNP, which swallowed all of the CfE’s woolly platitudes when it came to power in 2007.
Despite Mr Peacock’s history U-turn, the idea of breaking down supposedly artificial barriers between subjects endured, and now, in 2019, the full repercussions of that hare-brained agenda are clear for all to see.
Some of the barriers may have come down, but so too has the number of subjects pupils are studying: nine out of ten Scottish secondary schools have admitted axing some of them.
Once it would have been common for pupils to study eight subjects at Standard Grade (candidates now sit Nationals), but in many schools it’s now only five or six – a dramatic curbing of choice which doesn’t appear to reflect much ‘wisdom’.
Professor Lindsay Paterson, an education expert at the University of Edinburgh, wrote at the weekend that ‘narrowing the curriculum is a tragedy because it closes the minds of young Scots’.
In 2012, Keir Bloomer, one of the architects of the CfE, said the changes, which had never been intended by the curriculum’s designers, would ‘severely limit the options for those who want to study three sciences or several languages’.
But MSPs on Holyrood’s education committee are only now probing the fallout from the curricular shake-up, and have found that across the board subjects have been slashed.
Acute teacher shortages have meant that scrapping some of them has been a necessity in any event, so that in retrospect the CfE was something of a Trojan horse for staffing cuts.
Figures last August showed there were some 670 teacher vacancies at primaries and secondaries across Scotland, leading to overcrowded classrooms.
The philosophical justification for subject rationing is harder to credit: the idea is that almost two-thirds of pupils leave school at the end of S6, by which time they will have added to the number of subjects studied.
That doesn’t stack up, of course: as Professor Paterson points out, ‘you can’t suddenly rise to the heights of, say, Higher German or Higher physics if you have not studied the basics of these subjects previously’.
Professor Jim Scott of Dundee University has warned that the ‘creeping movement’ towards six courses had already resulted in a ‘massive collapse’ in the number of youngsters studying modern languages, and would restrict their subsequent choice of Highers and Advanced Highers.
For those who leave school at the end of S4, well, tough luck; and yet it’s possible that some of them may have stayed on if they had discovered a subject they’d enjoyed earlier in their schooling.
As it is, they will finish their studies with narrower horizons, deprived of access to a rich store of human knowledge built up over centuries: a shameful and highly divisive form of enforced intellectual impoverishment.
How it fits into the SNP’s wider agenda of inclusivity is frankly anyone’s guess – but then it was always based on the flimsiest of foundations.
The cap on student numbers necessitated by the Nationalists’ policy of ‘free’ degrees, paid for by slashing bursaries for poorer students, means thousands of bright middle-class students miss out on a Scottish university place.
But the reduction in subjects at school level means higher education bosses are having to re-think (lower) entry requirements to dovetail them to the deficiencies of state education.
Parents who can afford private schools, which are unaffected by subject limitation, face another obstacle, as fees are bound to keep rising thanks to the SNP’s decision to remove their charitable relief from business rates – costing the sector £7million a year.
And the problems start early: Scottish Government figures for 2018 showed 25 per cent of primary pupils failed to achieve the CfE level for reading and numeracy; while in 2017, it was 23 per cent, suggesting the situation has deteriorated.
A quarter of P7 children are failing to achieve expected numeracy levels and only 73 per cent are reaching them in writing.
But perhaps unsurprisingly, ministers insist the data cannot not be compared with previous years, as it is ‘experimental’.
Those figures were published in December last year, when Nicola Sturgeon, who famously claimed that education is her top priority, tweeted that they showed ‘amidst all the Brexit chaos, the Scottish Government still gets on with the job’.
Well, at least the CfE is pragmatic about the choices students are likely to face in the outside world after their time in compulsory education has come to an end.
In 2014, it emerged that children were being tested on their knowledge of the benefits system, with candidates for National 5 maths exams, usually aged around 15, quizzed about state handouts.
The term-time exercise was undertaken on a computer and aimed at teaching the ‘practical application’ of mathematics in everyday life.
Your child might not be able to read, write and count properly – indeed may be functionally illiterate – but at least they will be well-prepared for a lifetime of dependency on the state.
Ministers remain locked in denial about the mess they have overseen, trotting out nonsense about ‘learner journeys’, and dismissing their critics as politically motivated.
Naturally, Education Secretary John Swinney has blamed the Press for negative stories about schools, and insisted that Scotland is ‘very much at the low end of the spectrum internationally’ in terms of teacher shortages.
It’s not much comfort if your child is denied a university place for not having the requisite number of qualifications to be told that the situation is worse in, for example, Greece.
But don’t forget that this is a government which shelved its flagship Education Bill because it would have needed Tory support to gain parliamentary approval – an unpalatable prospect for the tribal SNP.
It perceives all dissent as ideological: it believes that its detractors are not genuinely concerned about falling standards, they merely detest independence, which remains the core mission of the Nationalist project.
Back in August 2016, Miss Sturgeon said she was ‘determined every child must have the same opportunities and an equal chance to succeed’.
That pledge now lies in tatters – and a generation of pupils are losing out while Miss Sturgeon and her ministers bury their heads firmly in the sand.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on April 16, 2019.
