Hansard

Our education agencies play a vital role in ensuring that pupils get a strong education. Their performance has a real impact. As members are aware, the Education and Skills Committee has recently been scrutinising quite substantially the performance of the SQA and Education Scotland. We have listened to teachers, parents, other experts and the agencies themselves. Only this morning, we discussed the response of the agencies to our report and, quite rightly, it has been a pretty dismal experience. It is clear that improvement urgently needs to be made and that neither Education Scotland nor the SQA is willing fully to acknowledge the problems.

What we heard from teachers were significant concerns about the way in which those agencies function. It is clear that they do not feel that they can raise their concerns openly with either agency. Trust in the SQA, in particular, has completely broken down. Based on the evidence received by the committee, it is disappointing that the Government’s education governance review has not focused more closely on the role that the education agencies play—although I heard the cabinet secretary’s comments in that regard earlier.

From the evidence that we gathered, we felt that there was a serious cause for concern about the SQA: there has been a breakdown in trust with teachers, there have been errors in exam papers and the approach to feedback was akin to a defensive corporate public relations exercise. In fact, I believe that, from a freedom of information request made by Iain Gray, we found that defensive corporate PR was exactly what was going on.

We have heard of a geography exam being described by teachers as the “worst ever”, a computer science exam that contained errors from back to front—which I had to pursue through this Parliament—and a maths exam said by students to be “impossible”. Teachers have reported excessively high workloads created by huge amounts of complex and inconsistent documentation over which neither Education Scotland nor the SQA has kept sufficient control. One physics teacher cited 81 pages of guidance, spread across five different documents, available through different parts of the glow website. Guidance has been updated several times already, for courses that have been running for only a few years. We cannot say that that is an acceptable situation for our teachers.

The SQA’s response to the committee’s report has been far from adequate. I described it this morning as defensive, filled with platitudes and simply restating its structures and processes—as other members have already mentioned—but not addressing the concerns that our committee raised. It has committed itself to further engagement with teachers and to reviewing some of its working practices, but has not yet substantively addressed the causes of many of the problems. Far more needs to be done to repair the trust between the SQA and teachers.

As Tavish Scott’s motion highlights, concerns have also been raised repeatedly about the dual role of Education Scotland in both developing CFE and inspecting its implementation in schools. A majority of the teachers who responded to the committee told us that they felt that inspections added either little or nothing to their school’s performance—that inspections do not grasp the realities of the school, as measures are taken simply to improve appearances for inspections. That is like the story about the Queen believing that everywhere smells of fresh paint.

That stands in pretty stark contrast to Education Scotland’s own review, which stated that headteachers overwhelmingly value inspections—which was the point that I made in my intervention to Gillian Martin’s speech. It appears that the further from the classroom you are, the more you value the inspections. That is not good enough.

It is concerning that Education Scotland’s primary response to those concerns was to launch a media campaign, in its words

“to correct any misconceptions about inspections”.

We need to ensure that school inspections have the confidence of all teachers in the classroom—not just headteachers. I believe that there is a strong case to split the functions of Education Scotland and that that should be further explored, for the reasons that Tavish Scott outlined.

I have no interest in last-minute theatrics in this debate. The Greens will support the Government’s amendment because we believe that Tavish Scott’s proposal should be explored further, but that we should not yet make an absolute commitment to it. We will hold the Government to its commitment to consider the proposal seriously, because solving the real education issues in Scotland cannot be kicked into the long grass. We will not allow the Government to do that.