Hansard

John Swinney made it abundantly clear last week, in responding to a poor inspection report on Argyll and Bute Council, that when it comes to improving standards in Scottish schools,

“the status quo is not an option.”

We whole-heartedly agree with him not just on new measures to reform school governance and tackle the attainment gap, such as standardised testing, but on reforming the education agencies that are in charge of our schools, the justification for which has been an important focus for the Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee.

John Swinney made an interesting speech on 2 June 2016, not long after he became Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, when he described teachers as experiencing a “mystery tour” with regard to the curriculum for excellence. Again, he was right, but let us deal with exactly what that has meant for teachers, why it has happened and, most important, what should be done about it.

In doing so, I refer to the compelling evidence that is out there. There is the formal evidence that the Education and Skills Committee heard over several weeks. I know that John Swinney does not think that that evidence was particularly balanced, but it must be considered in the context of other evidence that we took in private, the evidence in the OECD report, the evidence from Education Scotland’s report this week and the surveys that the teaching unions and professional associations have undertaken, which, taken together, speaks on behalf of many teachers and headteachers across Scotland.

What is alarming—I hope that it is the reason for John Swinney’s recent comments—is that the principal education agencies, which are the SQA and Education Scotland, have allowed the current situation to develop over the past decade, despite all the warnings from the profession. It was a bit rich of Education Scotland to tell us earlier this week that urgent improvement to raise standards is required in five areas, given that the problems in at least four of the areas—and perhaps all five of them—have been created by the education agencies themselves. The problems have been created not by teachers or headteachers but by the very people who are employed by the Scottish Government to oversee the curriculum and the qualifications system.

It is exactly that failure that so frustrates teachers—just as they were frustrated by the accrual of 20,000 sheets of curriculum for excellence guidance, which Tavish Scott mentioned. Let us be clear: the curriculum for excellence was the first major reform of Scottish education to be driven and implemented by civil servants and the education agencies and not by teachers on the ground.

The committee made sharp criticism of Education Scotland; I will pick out three of the most serious concerns. The committee asked why the lines of accountability for decision making are unclear; we asked why there is an absence of a good base of data to assess the progress that has been made with curriculum for excellence; and we were concerned about the conflict of interest in Education Scotland’s role as developer of the curriculum and independent evaluator of its inspection, which I think has no comparable model in other countries.

When those points were put to Education Scotland, what did the committee get in return? We got a 10-page document in which there is no real acknowledgement of the problems or, more important, recommendations for change. Instead, we got sentences such as

“This cycle of improvement is acknowledged widely as the Scottish approach to improvement”—

I do not know what that means—and commitments to have

“a mythbusters campaign via social media”.

That is something that we have to address. We got an outline of the theoretical structures in Education Scotland, but we did not get an outline of what happens in practice, and we got an extraordinary defence of Education Scotland’s role as both judge and jury when it said that

“This status safeguards the independence of its inspection and review function”.

No—it does not, and I am sure that Johann Lamont will outline her exchanges with Education Scotland, which prove exactly why not.

At the time of the merger of Learning and Teaching Scotland and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education—which, incidentally, was not voted on in committee or Parliament—some believed that it was partly a cost-cutting exercise. It seems that, as there are fewer inspections and fewer inspectors—many of whom were seconded last year to help in local authorities—that is a large part of the truth. It cannot be right that the cycle of school inspections is getting ever longer, notwithstanding the changes to inspection.

When the SQA was represented at committee in November last year, it faced strong criticism from teachers and some of the teachers professional associations that the exam structure was weak and not sufficiently well articulated with coursework and, in some cases, prelims. Concerns were expressed about some exams not being sufficiently rigorous, about grade-related criteria, about grade boundaries—especially the disparity across different subjects at advanced higher level—and about marking and the transparency of requests for marking reviews. All of us as MSPs have heard parents of exam candidates raise those issues. We heard concerns about whether the national 4 and national 5 exams are properly structured to meet the needs of a diverse range of pupils and about whether that qualification network is, in some ways, undermining subject choice.

To sum up, with hindsight, it is very clear indeed that Education Scotland and the SQA, via the management board, have not delivered sufficiently well alongside each other. We therefore have a problem with the implementation of curriculum for excellence, which we all agree is the right theme. On that basis, I support the motion in Tavish Scott’s name.