Exclusive:Scotland's schools 'should be taken' from SNP Government's hands and report to local councillors
Changes to Scotland’s education system are needed, a former teacher writes in Wealthy Nation, Healthy Nation.
Responsibility for Scotland’s educational success should be taken out of the hands of government and placed in the gift of town halls, it has been suggested.
A new analysis of the country’s ailing attainment standards pushes for a model that would see schools held publicly accountable and report to local councillors as though they were boards of governors.
A suite of measures are suggested to boost academic opportunities for young people, including reversing the anti-assessment climate, setting a core curriculum and founding a network of hubs to teach children who have disengaged with school.
The suggestions are presented by Tim Jones, a former teacher and playwright who is now a Scottish Conservative councillor for Edinburgh City Council.
His essay comes in a new book, Wealthy Nation, Healthy Nation, overseen by the former Scotland Office minister Malcolm Offord.
Scotland’s schools take part in the international PISA charts. The scores of Scottish 15-year-olds declined between 2018 and 2022, showing an 18-point drop in maths while reading fell by 11 points and science by seven.
Mr Jones writes: “It is important to note that it is the sheer scale in the drop and not the relative position in the league table that matters.”
The Tory councillor traces the decline to the mid-1990s when “the educational establishment took over and adopted the worst ideas of the 1960s and 1970s”. He said he believed the “progressive nationalisation” and centralisation of education in Scotland had been fatal to success and makes the case that a core curriculum should replace the current contentious Curriculum for Excellence model, with flexibility for schools to develop bespoke systems for their pupils.
Mr Jones says: “I have said in public several times that the Curriculum for Excellence should be scrapped. That was until I realised that there is no Curriculum for Excellence. There is no curriculum, at least, not in the traditional meaning of that word.”
He adds: “The choice now facing Scotland is either to allow schools full autonomy and follow the academies and independent models which exist in England: schools are responsible for the design and content of their curriculum or to implement a core curriculum, which allows schools a degree of autonomy to tailor the curriculum to their local context and more importantly to the individual needs of children.”
Mr Jones, who has taught in Holland, Kuwait and Italy as well as the UK, goes on to make the case that schools should each have a “Curriculum Director” who teaches 50 per cent of the time and spends the rest on developing the curriculum.
They should have a three-month sabbatical every three years to develop best practice and share knowledge with other schools. These roles would be paid for by abolishing Education Scotland.
The core curriculum would be assessed by an increase in standard testing, which become unpopular in the early 2000s due to concerns it put unnecessary pressure on pupils.
Nicola Sturgeon re-introduced standardised testing produced by the Australian Council for Education Research, but the full results of these are not published.
Mr Jones says: “These results should be published in full. Interestingly, Nicola Sturgeon wanted the results published, but backed off because of union opposition.”
On town hall scrutiny, he says: “I would go as far as to say that had councillors scrutinised attainment properly, the decline in standards could have been avoided. Elected members, therefore, who sit on the Education Committee need to act like a board of governors.”
Much of the efforts to close the education attainment gap - a key pledge of Ms Sturgeon as first minister - focused on the effects of poverty on young people’s success. However, Mr Jones controversially makes the argument attainment and poverty are two separate issues and “to conflate the two is a mistake”.
He says learning hubs should be set up in all areas of multiple deprivation, using local community centre for educating up to 50 children who have disengaged from school.
“They would be under the direct control of the local school and receive additional funding from a newly created Investment Fund,” he says.
Covering the current rise in violence in Scottish schools, Mr Jones says radical action must be taken to counter poor behaviour. He says the restorative justice approach taken by local council is “neither restorative nor just”.
Mr Jones adds: “It seems to me that the issue of discipline and the advice given to teachers is not the only area of education where there is self-evident lunacy.” It is vital also, he says, to re-engage parents in school discipline to ensure good pupil behaviour.
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "While we can always learn from elsewhere, and we do take on board evidence of what works in other countries, Scotland has a proud educational tradition with clear values and ethos. We have legislated to reform our systems and structures to enable school education to be sustainably supported and democratically accountable in the future."
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