More data on the performance of Scotland’s schools, more depressing news. It’s becoming increasingly hard to remember a time when Scottish education was a source of national pride.
The latest indication of the decline came with this week’s exam results. The number of pupils achieving an A, B or C grade at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher dropped. The attainment gap – the measure of educational performance between children living in the most and least deprived areas, so favoured by Nicola Sturgeon – rose on last year and on pre-pandemic levels.
Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth has said the results are “not good enough”, and she is of course right. Generations of children have been let down by a Holyrood parliament that has spectacularly failed to get to grips with school reform. A series of education ministers has done nothing to right this wrong. It is difficult to feel anything other than despair.
Repentance must necessarily begin with acknowledging there is a problem, and here Gilruth is at least an improvement on her predecessors. She was similarly frank when the Pisa results emerged late last year, showing Scotland declining – including against England – across key metrics in basic subjects when compared to many other countries.
But beyond this, the next step is to do something about it, and it’s here we seem to run into difficulty. The Scottish political class had been allergic to entertaining the kinds of reforms that might make real change. The answer isn’t more money – which might make a difference around the edges, but only that. It is to understand that the system is not set up to maximise the performance of the brightest, or to get the best out of pupils whatever their level of capability. The main approach so far under this government has been to rename and recast the education bodies, which may or may not amount to changing the plaques on the doors. Something more fundamental is required.
The Curriculum for Excellence has been a misfire from the start and must be rethought. There are severe problems with attendance, and with discipline. Schools are still too tightly in the grip of local authorities instead of being open to the innovative instincts of headteachers. The teaching profession is demoralised, frustrated and confused by what central government expects of it. The problems are now so wide and so deep that they will take a generation to fix.
This is not just a matter for the SNP, though they currently hold the ball. Gilruth, a former teacher with a teacher’s analysis of the situation, shows promise. But 17 years into nationalist government, is she really in a position to turn things around? Would her bosses even allow her to begin that process? After all, First Minister John Swinney is a former education secretary himself, and wasn’t a particularly brave or good one. Until now, SNP policy has amounted to little more than sitting around with the teaching unions, effectively singing Kumbaya and hoping for the best. Fall out with no one, keep the indy show on the road, and to hell with the kids.
If this is a generational, cross-party problem, then it requires generational, cross-party solutions. There has been much talk since Keir Starmer arrived in Downing Street of a reset between the governing parties north and south of the border. That accord seems to be holding for now, which is all to the good – the years of strife between the Conservatives and the Nats in the end served no one particularly well. Perhaps more importantly though, especially when it comes to education, is the new tone Swinney has tried to create at Holyrood, where he has sought to build better relations with the opposition party leaders and end what has amounted to more than a decade of standing battle.
Scottish Labour is thinking hard about the problems in our schools. Both their education spokesperson Pam Duncan-Glancy, but also leader Anas Sarwar, are engaging closely with the debates around this systemic failure. Michael Marra, the former education spokesperson, now at finance and operating as Sarwar’s chief policy enforcer across the board, has intelligent ideas about what’s needed.
If these politicians can collaborate, perhaps we can establish some concord on education policy. Because one of the advantages that the English system has achieved is a long series of governments with similar instincts about reform. From Ken Baker under Margaret Thatcher, through the New Labour era, the Cameron years, and even the last, fractured period of Conservative rule, there has been general agreement about the principles that should underlie school reform, and the broad systemic measures required to bring about improvement. It hasn’t always worked, but where it has – through the London challenge, and in academies in some of England’s most deprived areas – the results have at times been spectacular.
This is what Scotland needs if it is to address this generational challenge. Our MSPs – on this if nothing else – should put down their constitutional cudgels and work together to agree a long-term direction of travel for our schools. They must look with a clear, calm eye at why the measures adopted haven’t worked, have actually done damage, and change course. More autonomy for schools heads, a plan to reinstitute classroom discipline, a curriculum that prizes knowledge, and a willingness to tackle the forces of conservatism that have for so long held the whip hand – some of the measures are obvious, even if they will require political courage to deal with.
I don’t think voters would punish a united, national effort to tackle the failing of our schools, or a strategy that can be held to in its broad outlines by governments of differing parties over the years ahead. This, in a sense, could be Gilruth’s greatest achievement in the time leading up to the next Holyrood election in 2026. It would allow her to leave a legacy and be remembered as the point at which the story began to turn. Country first, party second? It’s a thought.
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