Scotland’s 700,000 pupils are tumbling out of school into the summer holidays. Joy for the children, relief for the teachers, a challenge for the parents and a time for reflection for the politicians.
Scottish education has had a difficult year. The teaching unions are saying their members are burnt out because of a shortage of support staff. A quarter of pupils are now reckoned to have additional support needs. There are discipline problems, absences are running at 10 per cent, attainment is slipping and the gap between pupils from poor areas and rich areas is widening.
The politicians this week have been having long discussions about reforming the exam and inspection system. The bill to replace the Scottish Qualifications Authority with “Qualifications Scotland” and to set up a separate School Inspectorate, was eventually passed by 69 votes to 47. Both Labour and the Conservatives condemned it as simply a re-branding exercise.
The education secretary, Jenny Gilruth, a former teacher herself, insisted that the new exams body would be more responsive to the needs of pupils, teachers and the wider economy. But the change was actually forced upon her by the exams scandal during the Covid epidemic in 2020 when some 124,000 student results were downgraded because some algorithm linked them the average results in their school area.
Ms Gilruth has also been forced to give local councils an extra £145m to restore teacher numbers after they fell 600 below the promised number, 54,000 (ie 13 teachers per pupil).
She has also been under pressure to do something about the rising number of violent incidents in schools. In Aberdeen, for instance, there were 928 violent incidents last year, an increase of 25 per cent on the year before. Several things are being blamed – the Covid lockdowns, social media, the reluctance to exclude troublesome pupils.
New official guidance has been issued on school discipline, saying there has to be consequences for bad behaviour, ranging from “reflective exercises” to restrictions on movement around the school. But exclusion should only be used as a last resort, it says. That exclusion could be for a number of days or could mean a transfer to another school or to a special class.
Then there is the long-running debate over the school curriculum. Scotland introduced a “progressive” Curriculum for Excellence in 2010, and it’s been controversial ever since. It has four laudable aims – to produce “better learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors”. Not surprisingly, no one quite knows what it means and Ms Gilruth has had to admit that perhaps it has placed too much emphasis on skills rather than knowledge and recently she’d had to back away from the idea of scrapping exams at the end of S4 before moving on to Highers.
It’s not all bad news. The overall attainment rate in Scotland’s schools is 90 per cent. The pass rate in Highers is 75 per cent. 95 per cent of pupils go on to “positive destinations” – further education or employment or training. It’s just that for some pupils, school is not a happy experience. Perhaps there needs to be more practical subjects and more “setting” in which pupils are graded for each subject separately. And, of course, a lot comes down to money.
How much are we prepared to pay for a good public education system? The Scottish government spends around £8bn on schools and child-care every year. That compares to £20bn on the NHS and social care. That seems to me out of balance but health spending is obviously the voters’ priority right now. The alternative is to increase government spending overall but that means the great taboo, tax rises.
I can’t say going to school was my favourite pastime as a boy. I was often, “creeping like a snail unwilling to school” as Shakespeare puts it. But a basic education and a love of learning is such a great start in life that we should all make the effort – pupils, teachers, parents, politicians and tax-payers. And then enjoy the summer holidays.
