Meeting of the Parliament 29 March 2017
Education should serve two functions: it should enrich the minds of students and prepare them for the modern workforce. My colleague Liz Smith said that recent evidence to the Education and Skills Committee had not made for happy reading. Having spent the past few days reading much of that evidence, I could not agree more. Not getting our agencies right has a knock-on effect on the output of our education system.
On Monday this week, I met DigitalEurope, which is the trade body that represents the technology sectors across Europe. I was told about the major problem of a shortage of suitably skilled graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which will have a knock-on effect on our ability to grow the digital economy in Scotland.
In light of the fact that there is already a shortage of computer science teachers in Scotland, a number of other things in the evidence to the Education and Skills Committee worried me. For example, the national 5 computing exam had coding errors in it, and STEM subjects and exams have become increasingly technical and have faced increased scrutiny. For example, some 20,000 people signed a petition to complain about the higher maths and national 5 maths exams, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh has expressed concern that the structure of secondary 4 compromised subject choice. That surely must compromise opportunity as well.
Any lack of confidence in the quality, fairness or even the delivery of our exam systems undermines the opportunities for those who are coming out of those systems. Exams are not just statistics, letters, scores and percentages; they should deliver skills and knowledge as well as qualifications. For example, DigitalEurope said that although there are certainly a lot of people coming out of the education system with technical skills, very few of them have business acumen to go with those skills. Coding and programming skills are not good enough on their own; people also need management, financial and legal skills and knowledge.
How can we expect employers to have confidence in our exam process when our teachers are questioning it? There is clear evidence to suggest that the relationship between teachers and the SQA is not working as well as it should. A number of people have raised concerns about the additional workload that the curriculum for excellence has placed on teachers. Janet Brown mentioned that at one committee meeting. The Scottish Secondary Teachers Association showed that 65 per cent of respondents to a survey did not believe that the guidance and support around the curriculum for excellence provide the support that is needed to build a world-class curriculum in Scotland.
There are overarching structural problems, too. Education Scotland is structured in a way that means that it is in charge of policy delivery, implementation and then assessing its own quality. As someone suggested earlier, it is not just the judge and jury, it is also the defendant. Is there a conflict of interest there? Lindsay Paterson, who is professor of education policy at the University of Edinburgh, seemed to suggest so, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh is concerned about that conflict. Keir Bloomer of Reform Scotland said that being responsible for both development and inspection has created
“a fundamental conflict of interest”.
Those people are the experts. Surely we must listen to them.
The Lib Dem motion calls for
“the inspection and policy functions of Education Scotland to be separated and for a reorganisation of the SQA”.
There is merit in that. If education is such a priority for the Government, I urge it to consider that proposal.
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