Meeting of the Parliament 29 March 2017
Not when that is exactly the intervention that our teachers are asking for.
The most recent example of the Government’s tendency has been the advent of national testing, which has been rejected roundly by teachers across the board, who feel that they will once again be forced to teach to the test.
Across the board, educationists agree that the inspection of our schools should be entirely disaggregated from the guidance-generating machinery of Education Scotland. How else can the inspection regime offer that all-important role as the independent critical friend to the stewardship of education in this country? In effect, what is happening right now is that the Scottish Government and Education Scotland are marking their own homework, and that has to stop.
Furthermore, if we are truly to reverse the worrying decline in education standards in this country, we must reform not just Education Scotland but the Scottish Qualifications Authority. All of us will remember the anxiety and stress that we endured when we sat life-qualifying exams in our teens, so we can only imagine the terror of the young people who sat last year’s higher geography exam, which teachers described as the worst ever and as nothing like the specimen. It came hot on the heels of the worst higher maths exam in living memory just a couple of years previously. The most important thing about this is the impact on schools in deprived communities, where young people’s resilience when sitting these very traumatic life-qualifying exams can take a real knock if the first question on the paper is on something that they have never been taught.
The repetition of such a situation, which has a clear and demonstrable impact on the mental health and wellbeing of young people at what is a critical crossroads in their lives, should serve as proof, if any were needed, that the structures and governance of our qualifications system are in dire need of reform. Indeed, we saw that most recently in the roll-out of the unpopular national testing that I mentioned earlier.