Meeting of the Parliament 19 January 2022
We do not often get a chance to debate education in this chamber, despite it, apparently, being a top priority for the Government five years ago, so I will broaden my remarks beyond the exams, although I will cover them, too. I want to cover the major issues, because we are at a crossroads for Scottish education. I feel sorry for Shirley-Anne Somerville because she has been landed with a job that her four predecessors flunked over the past 15 years.
The performance on education is on the slide in international terms. In the most recent programme for international student assessment study, Scotland received its worst-ever scores in maths and science. Scotland is worse than Hungary, Slovakia and, on some measures, Poland and Turkey. Heaven forfend—it is even worse than England.
While the SNP’s performance has been falling in international terms, the poverty-related attainment gap has grown. That is not quite true—it has narrowed marginally, but at the current rate of progress it will take decades to close. Closing it is the objective that has been set by the First Minister. Just narrowing it, at this rate, will let down thousands of pupils for decades.
The SNP’s response to the decline in international terms was to scrap the survey of literacy and numeracy and replace it with the already discredited, national census-based Scottish national standardised assessment testing system, which includes—this is unbelievable, but it is still in place—testing of five-year-olds. The SNP did not like the international comparisons, so it also withdrew from the trends in international mathematics and science study and the progress in international reading literacy study. Even Russia and Iran take part in those studies. Who would have thought that Scotland would be more secretive than Iran and Russia?
This is a short debate, but let me make some positive proposals at this important crossroads for Scottish education. The education secretary should improve the role of knowledge in the curriculum, especially in the broad general education. We should give teachers more support with materials that are created by expert teachers and bring back principal teachers.
We must reverse the dramatic decline in education support plans for pupils with additional support needs. We need to put teachers back in charge of the bodies that replace the SQA and Education Scotland, so we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. We need to reverse the growth in temporary teacher numbers by making more teachers permanent, by making the funding for them permanent.
We need to rejoin TIMSS and PIRLS, scrap the SNSAs and reintroduce a beefed-up SSLN, so that we can measure both locally and internationally without a system that teaches to the test.
We must also give pupils greater confidence and clarity that this year exams are on. As we heard at the Education, Children and Young People Committee this morning, the dithering—and it is dithering—about whether we should have scenario 2 in place should end. We should have it in place right now, so pupils can have greater certainty.