While Nicola struts and postures over Brexit, a generation of pupils have their education wrecked
IT was nearly five years ago that Nicola Sturgeon made a surprising admission: Scotland was already ‘to all intents and purposes’ an independent nation.
When it comes to running our ‘schools, hospitals, police and much else besides’, she pointed out, ministers are entirely unconstrained by the shackles of Whitehall.
The then Deputy First Minister also made the bold claim that ‘in those areas, we have been able to do things differently — differently, and better for Scotland’.
The obligatory pitch for full independence followed, as she said it would give us the power to protect Scotland from policies that ‘offend our sense of decency and social cohesion’.
Those comments, at a Glasgow University lecture in 2012, are eyebrow-raising because of the frank concession that in a host of key areas Scotland has run its own affairs since 1999.
How many times since then has the SNP sought to demonise Westminster for its own failings?
But her words back in 2012 were also plainly claptrap: we have indeed ‘been able to do things differently’ but not always for the better, as our ailing NHS and chaotic single police force amply demonstrate.
Being able to forge our own path does not necessarily mean that we have taken that opportunity, of course, or done so effectively, and devolution for successive governments has been a series of missed opportunities.
There has been much scope since the creation of the Scottish parliament for a bold rethink of public services.
But instead there has been a persistent intellectual gridlock at Holyrood, resulting in the perpetuation of a failed status quo.
Nowhere is this more plainly evidenced than in the state education sector, which Miss Sturgeon has repeatedly said is her top priority.
Yet since the start of the year Miss Sturgeon hasn’t made any meaningful statement about fixing our schools, instead choosing to focus relentlessly on Brexit.
A search of newspaper archives for this month shows roughly 120 stories referencing the First Minister and schools, and more than 10 times as many — about 1,500 — featuring her name and ‘Brexit’.
Scottish Tory analysis earlier this month also revealed the SNP has spent more than four times longer debating Brexit than education.
And yet pupils attending the most successful state schools are 50 times as likely to achieve five Highers as those at their poorest-performing counterparts.
So much for Miss Sturgeon’s hollow boasts of Scotland’s innate sense of ‘decency and social cohesion’…
‘To all intents and purposes’, the Scottish Government has had the best part of a generation to sort out these problems.
For the last decade the SNP has been in charge, but only appears to have woken up to them in 2014 when Miss Sturgeon was appointed First Minister.
Since then, only lip service has been paid to the need for courageous change: a consultation proposing a shake-up of the way schools are run; more tests; funding for schools in poorer areas.
Anything more structurally daring that would challenge the failed model of comprehensives controlled by local authorities has been ruled out to avoid upsetting the teaching unions with their in-built resistance to reform.
Newlands Junior College in Glasgow is an example of precisely the kind of lateral thinking required in a stagnating system that seeks to impose universal ‘solutions’ on a diverse range of pupils with multiple needs and differing abilities.
The brainchild of entrepreneur and philanthropist Jim McColl, the college supports 14–16 year-olds who are not learning well in the mainstream education sector and instead gives them a chance to develop and learn new skills.
Yet its creation was the result of a long and wearying fight which Mr McColl described back in 2012 as akin to ‘wading through treacle’, adding, with some understatement: ‘It’s difficult dealing with the public sector.’
The response of government, both locally and nationally, to an idea that — if replicated elsewhere — could re-energise education and indeed the economy in the longer term has been disgracefully slothful.
It is all the more unforgivable in the context of Miss Sturgeon’s claim that she is ‘not ideological’ about education and ‘if something can be proven to work, we should try it’.
Problems abound and multiply: teacher shortages are forcing some schools to consider sending pupils home — surely the greatest possible abdication of responsibility — while nearly one in four new teachers leaves after their first year in the jobs.
More than 100 schools are without a head or deputy and in primary schools 91 senior posts are vacant.
Last month a former headteachers’ leader, Carole Ford, said parents in Scotland should move to Estonia to get a decent education for their children after damning statistics showed pupils are outperformed by their peers in former Soviet Bloc nations.
Academics and business chiefs have condemned the SNP’s ‘Mickey Mouse’ Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) as the main reason for Scotland’s tumble down global education league tables in a range of core skills.
More than one in four children are failing to achieve expected levels of literacy and numeracy by the end of primary school.
A study of education funding by Holyrood researchers last year found that spending per pupil has been slashed by £540 since 2010.
More than 100,000 pupils are being taught in crumbling schools: Scottish Government figures show 102,526 pupils in ‘poor’ quality school buildings in 2016, up from 98,387 in 2015.
Last year 17 Edinburgh schools built had to be shut down amid fears over their safety, causing logistical turmoil.
Yet all of them had been given the best possible rating for the condition of their buildings in a Scottish Government report only four months previously.
Average primary class sizes have risen to 23.5 from 23.4 in the past year and for P1 to P3 it remains at 23.3 — despite an SNP pledge of 18 or fewer in those years.
Last year, a survey found about 70 per cent of teachers, parents and pupils had lost faith in the Scottish Qualification Authority (SQA), the national exams agency.
Submissions from teachers suggested the exam marking system was ‘close to collapse’ and accused the SQA of failing to communicate properly with school staff.
The Education Scotland quango has been criticised for its ‘flimsy’ performance on introducing the CfE and for its increasingly politicised role in the education system.
It is in charge of inspecting schools and implementing the curriculum, limiting the impartiality needed to sound the alarm over falling standards.
Education Secretary John Swinney made the outrageous claim last month that the SNP was only alerted to major problems in Scotland’s schools in 2015.
This was despite a mountain of evidence over much of the last decade and beyond about the shameful ‘attainment gap’ between the best and worst-performing schools.
When key institutions such as the SQA are openly derided; when curricular reforms are proved to have abysmally failed; when our pupils are outperformed by the Slovenians and when the very fabric of our schools is in a state of terminal decline, it is clear that Scotland is in the grip of an educational crisis.
Miss Sturgeon, as leader and formerly a senior member of the longest-serving government in the history of Scottish devolution, can no longer pretend she only noticed all of these problems on becoming First Minister in 2014.
She has staked her personal reputation on turning around the tanker of educational failure — and now it threatens to crush her credibility, and the hopes of a generation of children languishing in ramshackle, crowded classrooms.
