This damning schools report makes a mockery of Sturgeon’s so-called priority
IN the tradition of stern schoolmasters of old, Scotland’s chief inspector of education was yesterday not so much angry as disappointed.
Dr Bill Maxwell’s report, covering 2012–16, diplomatically talked of ‘challenges and opportunities’ facing the sector, rather than problems.
Euphemisms and jargon, some of it impenetrable, litter the 60-page extended report card and the overall tone of the glossy publication is deceptively upbeat.
Closer reading, however, lays bare damning statistics and a welter of evidence that some of the SNP’s ‘flagship’ school reforms aren’t working — or have been largely ignored.
More prominent is the candid warning that Scottish education ‘does not yet provide all children and young people with consistently high-quality learning experiences’.
Dr Maxwell, chief executive of the Education Scotland quango, warns: ‘Unless this variability is addressed we will not achieve the national ambition of excellence and equity for all learners.’
Even more candidly, Dr Maxwell told me that in a decade’s time, the ‘attainment gap’ between the best and worst-performing schools will still be there — albeit, in his view, it will be greatly reduced.
He found that the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) — long trumpeted by the SNP as a panacea for educational ills — hasn’t bedded in and seems to be something of an irrelevance for many staff.
There are still ‘too many instances’, Dr Maxwell notes, where the ‘rationale for the curriculum is not clearly defined or understood well enough by staff’.
One of the key ideas behind the CfE — prioritising literacy and numeracy in all subject areas — has been effectively ignored by many teachers.
No doubt they were baffled by the complexities of a curriculum that has spawned endless reams of opaque guidelines.
Dr Maxwell concedes that in some cases, science teachers, for example, may feel they have enough to be getting on with, conveying the laws of physics to their pupils, without simultaneously coaching them on how to spell.
But we know from a recent international study that only one in 17 teenagers in Scotland is classed as a ‘top performer’ on reading skills, and that Scots pupils are outperformed on literacy by their peers in Slovenia and Vietnam.
The picture that emerges in Dr Maxwell’s report, for all of its circumlocution, is not a positive one for Nicola Sturgeon.
Remember, she has staked her personal reputation on fixing state education and closing the stubborn attainment gap — the one her own chief inspector of schools admits will still be with us in a decade’s time.
In some respects, his verdict could hardly be more damaging: the foundations for the CfE were laid back in 2004 and yet Dr Maxwell implies that its implementation is at an embryonic stage.
His report reveals that the system is blighted by teacher shortages, budgetary constraints, a postcode lottery of attainment — with wildly variable results even within schools, never mind between them.
Only three months ago, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), covering the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, science and maths, revealed that Scotland had plunged down global education rankings.
The major survey of 15-year-olds showed Scotland’s performance, compared with the rest of the developed world, had fallen sharply under the SNP.
The education inspectorate reports on standards in schools ‘without fear or favour’, Dr Maxwell assured me yesterday.
But yet it is inescapably part of Education Scotland, the curriculum advisory quango — and the entire apparatus is headed by Dr Maxwell.
No wonder there is deep unease about this set-up among politicians who are demanding a radical overhaul: after all, this looks suspiciously like a system that is marking its own homework.
Worse than that, there is every indication that it has been asleep at the wheel — as we reported yesterday, only one in 18 schools was inspected last year, compared with a quarter of those in England.
Questions are also being asked about the inspectorate’s workforce — there are only 44 full-time inspectors, each covering 59 schools.
Perhaps this helps to explain the absence of dire warnings over falling standards from education inspectors ahead of that appalling PISA report.
The failure of Education Scotland and other bodies to speak up allowed Education Secretary John Swinney to assert after the publication of the PISA report that ministers had had no warning of educational failure until 2015.
That said, Mr Swinney’s claim stretched credulity in any event, as alarm bells had sounded for years in many other quarters.
Since the PISA report was published in December, it is telling that the very term ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ is rarely used in official publications — and in a recent edition of the BBC’s Question Time, Mr Swinney studiously avoided any reference to it.
Back in 2006, under the former Labour-led regime at Holyrood, Dr Maxwell’s predecessor Graham Donaldson said children were leaving school ill-equipped for life because of ‘deep seated’ flaws in the comprehensive system.
Yet Mr Swinney admitted last week that ‘change is needed’ in state education, as if he had only just woken up to it, and condemned ‘worrying’ resistance to reform in the sector.
Not surprisingly, what Dr Maxwell doesn’t mention in his report is that Education Scotland was derided by MSPs in 2012 for its ‘flimsy’ performance on CfE implementation.
It didn’t help that in the same year, it emerged the organisation had lavished more than £10million on travel, consultants, conferences and ‘external advisers’.
For Miss Sturgeon, the fact that some hard truths about Scottish education have been revealed by one of her own senior bureaucrats will make the findings of yesterday’s report all the harder to bear.
The reality is that a failure of oversight and a series of missed warnings allowed state education to founder for many years.
Is it really any surprise that the problems (or ‘challenges and opportunities’) Dr Maxwell has identified happened in the run-up to the independence referendum in 2014, and over the subsequent two years?
In August 2015, Miss Sturgeon declared: ‘Let me be clear. 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?’
Yet quite how Miss Sturgeon and Mr Swinney hope to be believed when they claim education remains at the top of their to-do list — while also forging ahead with a doomed bid for a second independence poll — is anyone’s guess.
What is beyond doubt is that the First Minister’s neck is indeed on the line, and ultimately the judgment of parents is likely to be even more devastating than Dr Maxwell’s.
