Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 February 2021
It is very telling that, minus the reference to the pandemic, this debate is one that Opposition parties have had several times in recent years. With that in mind, I remind members of the considerable volume of evidence that the Education and Skills Committee took between 2016 and 2017, through which it became very clear that many teachers had serious issues with the education agencies—principally Education Scotland and the SQA.
That evidence was presented at the same time as John Swinney made it abundantly clear, when responding to a poor inspection report about the education being delivered in one local authority, that when it came to improving standards in Scottish schools,
“the status quo is not an option”.
I whole-heartedly agreed with him then, and if he repeated that now, I would agree with him again.
I agreed with John Swinney then for two reasons. First, standards in our schools were not as good as they should be, which was clearly shown by several of the indices for basic literacy and numeracy. Secondly, too many teachers were telling us that their trust in Education Scotland and the SQA had diminished. That is not a helpful situation at any time, but it was especially unhelpful during the major curriculum reform of CFE, which, incidentally, John Swinney acknowledged was a bit of a “mystery tour”, and it is certainly unhelpful during a pandemic, when the pressures are even greater.
I do not think that, at the time, John Swinney felt that the committee evidence was as balanced as he would have liked it to be. Nonetheless, he promised an education bill, which, at the time, Nicola Sturgeon said would be the
“most radical change to how schools are run”—[Official Report, 5 September 2017; c 13.]
since devolution. It was lauded not only as a flagship bill, but as a promise to change the status quo.
I can recall conversations with the cabinet secretary in which he seemed utterly determined to improve standards—I believed him on that—and during which he offered to engage with the education spokesmen in each party about what we would like to see. I have here the submission that I made to him at the time, and it is abundantly clear that one of the recommendations to the Scottish Government was that it should reform the education agencies, starting with the decoupling of the policy and inspectorate roles of Education Scotland, on the basis that it should not be judge and jury.
As we know, the education bill was shelved in June 2018, for the reason that the necessary changes could be made without legislative reform—despite the fact that very little data was available to make that judgment. How Mr Swinney must now rue the ditching of that bill, because it seems highly likely that the current OECD report will reveal some things that the Scottish Government does not like—otherwise, why would the Government hold it back?
The Opposition parties are quite right to challenge the Scottish Government about the delay, given how thorough and helpful the previous OECD report was in highlighting the problems that have to be addressed. This time, it is absolutely essential that there is some meaningful action.
The confusion over the lines of accountability is, of course, at the centre of the whole issue. The Education and Skills Committee highlighted that very strongly in its report in 2017 and recommended that it be addressed without delay. To be fair to the cabinet secretary, he was quick to say at the time that the buck stops with him on education policy. However, the trouble is that teachers on the ground do not see it that way just now. They see continued confusion, obfuscation and a lack of transparency at the heart of Government and education agencies, resulting in on-going mistrust.
I distinctly remember telling John Swinney in 2016 that the problems that schools had encountered were caused not by teachers or by pupils but by civil servants and education agencies, with the result that education had become too much of a political football. No one would like to have been in John Swinney’s shoes during the pandemic—he has had an incredibly difficult job—but the pandemic must not be used as an excuse for what is wrong with the governance of Scottish education. There were clear signs of problems many years ago, and nothing has been done to counter them.
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