What's wrong with Scottish education
OPINION: The problems in schools won't be solved by reforming an exams body.
Easy answers have a devilish habit of embedding themselves in received wisdom.
This is especially true in politics, where soundbites reign and straightforward victories are the currency of the trade. The easy answer in widest circulation at Holyrood is that shaking up or scrapping the Scottish Qualifications Authority will solve the problems that plague the exams system.
New education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville has announced the Scottish Government’s intention to reform the SQA along with Education Scotland, something opponents have long been calling for, including those who would scrap the exams body altogether. As it happens, I think there is something to the easy answer of dismantling the SQA and starting again but I worry that it has become a substitute for the kind of radical reform needed, like swishing some whisky around a bad tooth rather than making an appointment with the dentist.
The decay spreading in Scottish education is not caused by one hapless arms-length body but by a broader culture of ineffectual ministers, wrongheaded policies and misplaced mindsets about the purpose of education.
Somerville is the fifth SNP education secretary and if the first four are anything to go by, we probably shouldn’t get our hopes up. After a dismal run of Fiona Hyslop, Mike Russell and Angela Constance, John Swinney’s appointment in 2016 marked the first time a Nationalist heavy-hitter had been put in charge of the brief. That he proved a failure, too, was a greater disappointment because he seemed capable of getting things done.
Sceptical though we may be based on this record, fairness demands that we give Shirley-Anne Somerville, nicknamed SAS, a chance to see if she dares and wins. To prove herself, however, she will have to do more than promise reviews and reforms. She will need to deliver results. She must aim to be more than just another walk-on part in the SNP’s long-running failure of Scottish schoolchildren.
To do that, it will be vital that Somerville dispense with her government’s top-down, centralising ways that have done so much to alienate teachers and ultimately undermine learning. The centre isn’t always wrong but, generally speaking, a teacher in St Andrews knows her pupils and their abilities better than a bureaucrat in St Andrew’s House. For instance, I’m more open to standardised testing than others but only insofar as it is able to flag up problems early on and help teachers give pupils the support they need. The problem is that standardised everything seems to be the Scottish Government’s approach to education.
That is at the root of this year’s burgeoning exams scandal. After last year’s fiasco, and with formal exams cancelled again because of Covid-19, ministers promised to show more deference to teachers’ recommendations. That is what the Scottish Government claims to have done, yet they have been mightily sneaky about it.
As the education correspondent Emma Seith has pointed out, while in 2019/20 teachers could award provisional grades based on pupils’ ‘demonstrated and inferred attainment of the required skills, knowledge and understanding’, in 2020/21 they were instructed to base their projections on ‘a learner’s demonstrated attainment’. ‘Demonstrated attainment’ is, essentially, attainment as measured by checklist, whereas ‘inferred attainment’ involves teachers using their own judgement based on their experience of teaching each individual pupil. That is, classroom-based judgements actually count for less this year, and teachers have been left to run around gathering evidence like Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote while the local sheriff, or in this case the SQA, shakes a disapproving head at anything that doesn’t meet narrowly drawn criteria.
Teachers’ decision-making should be monitored and regulated like any other profession but if we are going to put trained staff in charge of young people’s education seven or eight hours a day, five days a week, perhaps we ought to trust their professional judgement, arrived at by observing their pupils over an academic year and backed up by many more years of experience. Yet experience shows that even very good teachers perform well only when the framework they operate in has the right outlook on what education is for and what responsibility it has to pupils and parents.
For all that these now routine rows over exams are the result of poor leadership, bad policy and flawed structures, they also reflect a misguided underlying philosophy in which the primary — certainly the noblest — end of education is to get the pupil to university. I belong to a generation, certainly as far as working-class youngsters are concerned, in which schools were under the total grip of this worldview. ‘Knuckle down and work hard,’ we were told, not because education was enriching in itself but so we could pass our Highers and apply to university. Careers, as described to us, were the result of at least four years in lecture halls and library stalls. They were not things for those who went their own way after S4.
Today, that might sound narrow-minded but we are talking about the late Nineties, not the Sixties or Seventies, and the thinking behind this approach was the height of educational fashion. It was considered regressive to say working-class boys who had already determined to be mechanics or plumbers or lorry drivers shouldn’t be made to stay in school and study literature, languages and history. In fact, the old class snobbery had simply been replaced by a new class snobbery in which attending university was a status marker as much as intellectual horizon-expansion or preparation for a profession. Higher education didn’t make you a better thinker or worker but a better citizen — a better person.
Scant thought was given to the impact of this ideology (for that is what it was and is) on pupils who struggled with academics. Boys, and it typically was boys, who dreamed of getting out of school as soon as possible were not encouraged in their enthusiasm for earning a wage. Teachers were no longer forbidding as they had once been and knew these pupils’ difficulties were not a matter of laziness or wickedness but, even if instructors were more supportive, there wasn’t much in the way of support they could give.
Teachers thought of pupils like me who wanted to go on to higher education as the ambitious ones (honestly, I just did what I was told back then), when they had a raft of teenagers in front of them with more immediate ambitions for employment and self-reliance. They just couldn’t see it because leaving school at the first opportunity was taken as an indicator of failure rather than aspiration.
Aim for the hallowed cloisters of Glasgow University and the school would help you get there; aim for the world of work or training at 16 and you were on your own. I remember boys in my year who were thus benignly written off and, while some have gone on to set up their own businesses or to successful careers around the world, I wonder how many more could have done the same if the education system hadn’t been rigged against them. I wonder, too, if I would be an accomplished tradie or in some other highly skilled line of work if I hadn’t been encouraged to view university as the only valid choice. It’s another example of how progressive, enlightened thinking can do as much harm as stuffy conservatism.
No doubt this generation of educators has its own assumptions and things might be better for ambitious teenagers but I suspect some of the old way of thinking remains. How else to explain the fate of foundation apprenticeships? Introduced in 2016, these allow pupils from S3 onwards to mix their academic schooling with work-based learning in everything from engineering and technology to catering and IT support. These can lead to modern apprenticeships, employment, further education — roughly half of those who complete foundation apprenticeships — or higher education, which accounts for almost one-quarter.
Foundation apprenticeships are the best education policy of the SNP era — admittedly not a competitive field — yet I can’t think of a policy less trumpeted by the government or the party. The 2021 SNP manifesto talked about Young Person’s Guarantee apprenticeships, modern apprenticeships, broadcasting apprenticeships and land-based education apprenticeships, but had not a word to say about foundation apprenticeships.
Yet these alternatives to holding pupils hostage in academic instruction that doesn’t suit their needs (and contributes to personal and disciplinary problems) are exactly the sort of bold policies we need more of in Scottish education. The priority in secondary schooling should not be forcing teenagers through a filter marked ‘university’, but supporting them to achieve what they, with the guidance of their parents, consider the best outcome for them. There’s an awful lot of talk of ‘child-centred learning’ in education theory but nowhere near enough in practice.
Shirley-Anne Somerville deserves a fair go, but nothing more than that. In education, as elsewhere in public policy, doing what is easy and doing what is needed seldom match up. Somerville needs to show she has the vision and the guts to do what is needed.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on June 7, 2021. Feature image by F1 Digitals from Pixabay.