Scottish education needs wholesale reform, starting with the restoration of discipline
Scottish education needs radical change to restore it to anything like its former glory
“Let me be clear – I want to be judged on this... It really matters.” In a speech at the Wester Hailes Education Centre in August 2015, Nicola Sturgeon spelled out the importance of improving education to her government in no uncertain terms.
The then First Minister declared her aim was to close the attainment gap between rich and poor students “completely” and that “every young person should have the same advantage that I had when I was growing up in Ayrshire”. It was well said.
However, ten years on, while this year’s results showed a slight improvement, there was still a 12.8 per cent difference in A-to-C grades at Higher between pupils from the most and least deprived areas of Scotland, and even bigger gaps at National 5 and Advanced Higher.
Slide down international rankings
After the results were released, Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth was asked if the SNP government was still committed to eradicating the attainment gap. “We absolutely are on a point of principle,” she said.
The problem is that, year after year after year, Scotland’s poorest students have been let down by such empty rhetoric and this country’s once-proud education system has also been sliding down the international Pisa rankings.
Meanwhile, teachers – the people on the frontline of efforts to improve the situation – appear increasingly demoralised by the conditions in which they are forced to work. The number of new teachers quitting the profession has hit a record level, with a total of 1,673 people leaving the teaching register within five years of joining it since 2018.
Appalling accounts of violence by a minority of pupils towards their classmates and teachers – which sometimes appears to go virtually unpunished – provide one reason why so many are leaving. At the very least, the safety of teachers in their workplace should be guaranteed.
The SNP has always talked a good game on education, but the end result of their ‘principles’ has been dismal. It’s time for them to accept that what they have been doing is not working and a wholesale and dramatic reform of education is now necessary. Scotland’s children deserve nothing less.
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