Meeting of the Parliament 29 March 2017
Last night, when I discussed the topic of the motion with my wife, who is a primary school teacher of 15 years’ experience, she gave me an insight into the mild disdain with which Education Scotland is viewed by educationists at every level in the primary and secondary education sectors. The amassing of 20,000 pages of guidance is a source of derision in itself. Each iteration of the guidance forms the basis of a game of spot the difference in classrooms and staffrooms around the country. Each one is examined and digested by senior management teams at every level in our education sector before heads are scratched as teaching staff grapple with what revelation in the new guidance is different from the previous version. The strength of feeling in that regard was evidenced in last week’s evidence to the Education and Skills Committee.
The policy function of Education Scotland belies the Government’s attempts to centralise, to control and to avoid external scrutiny of the conduct of education in this country. “Leave us alone,” has been the clarion call of teachers and unions at every education hustings that I have been to in my political career. They say, “Allow the curriculum to bed in and let us get on with on it,” but like a hyperactive lab technician, the Government—in tandem with Education Scotland—has sought to tweak and prod at the curriculum in the desperate hope that the next intervention might be the one to stem the slump in our programme for international student assessment scores and our widening attainment gap.