Meeting of the Parliament 29 March 2017
Like Liz Smith, I have carefully studied Mr Swinney’s speech last week, in which he declared that
“the status quo is not an option”
in our schools. I agree. The status quo in our schools is too few teachers, too few support staff and class sizes that are far too big, and that cannot go on. The status quo in our school system is also two Government bodies—Education Scotland and the SQA—that are, at best, failing to deliver and, at worst, dysfunctional.
The cabinet secretary said that his governance review included Education Scotland and the SQA in its scope. That is absolutely true, although Tavish Scott is right that it is quite hard to find them in there. Let us look at what some of the respondents to the governance review had to say about them. The Educational Institute of Scotland said this about Education Scotland:
“The EIS has concerns ... over the increasingly politicised role of Education Scotland ... With the role of the Inspectorate having been brought closer to Government, questions remain about the independence of the inspection process and its relationship to government policy, and concerns have emerged more recently regarding the capacity of Education Scotland to provide sound, evidence-based advice to inform government policy.”
That is pretty damning. It is reflected too in the submission from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which says,
“There is concern that Education Scotland’s role has become increasingly politicised, with the implication that it prioritises the needs of Government over those of schools and teachers”,
and,
“where Education Scotland carries out the development work and has responsibility for evaluating those developments ... Its independence as an evaluator needs to be questioned”.
That too is fairly damning but, as Tavish Scott pointed out, we can look to what Education Scotland itself says in its role as the schools inspectorate. In Bill Maxwell’s valedictory report this week, he points out that school provision for pupils is very variable, that 23 per cent of secondaries and 26 per cent of primaries have “important weaknesses”, or strengths that only just outweigh weaknesses. That is hardly a glowing report. As Mr Scott pointed out, it is a report on Bill Maxwell himself, because, as chief inspector, he reports on Education Scotland, of which he is, of course, the chief executive. I fear that he rather damns himself by his own faint praise. We must ask ourselves on what he bases his assessment, because at the weekend we also discovered that, last year, only one in 18 schools was inspected. One element of Education Scotland’s responsibility seems to be disappearing.
As for the SQA, the Education and Skills Committee has received strong evidence from teachers that they no longer trust our exam body. In one submission, the committee was told:
“I am afraid that my current experience of the SQA is almost entirely negative ... Documentation is highly complex, repetitive and difficult to access”.
There have been failures by the SQA in maths, geography and computer studies exams, to name but a few. The cabinet secretary spoke of the decluttering of assessments but, at the moment, the SQA is making rather a hash of the change that has come about because of his decision to remove the unit assessments from national 4 and national 5. Let us not forget, either, the SQA’s decision to push the cost of appeals on to schools and local authorities, which has led to a massive drop in the number of pupils who can benefit from appeals or re-marks. That is affecting pupils in the state sector disproportionately and unfairly.
It seems clear that reform is needed. With Education Scotland, the reform that is needed is obvious: it is the splitting of functions. With the SQA, the required reform is perhaps less clear, but the organisation has certainly suffered a loss of experienced staff, and there are questions to be answered about the balance of its income-generating work and the work that it does for the Scottish exam system. We need a review of the SQA, and we need the certainty of knowing that reform will take place.
Although I acknowledge that the Government’s amendment takes seriously the issues that the Liberal Democrats have raised, it is not enough to say that reform will be given “serious consideration”. The Parliament must commit itself to actual reform—Education Scotland must be split and things must be changed at the SQA to make it work—and that is why we will support the Liberal Democrat motion this evening.