Meeting of the Parliament 17 January 2024
It might not last, but.
Actually, I have some serious issues to raise, some of which we raised this morning in the Education, Children and Young People Committee, and I want to extract a little from that.
We are eight years into a 10-year SNP education reform programme. The programme was a response to what was seen as a crisis at the time, which was about international performance and the poverty-related attainment gap. However, I think that the education secretary knows that very little has changed since then and that, in many cases, it has got worse. The latest PISA study shows that we have slipped further on international performance, and the poverty-related attainment gap is, bluntly, stuck although it was supposed to have been closed in just two years. I know that there is debate about whether it was to be substantially closed or closed completely, but we have not really made much progress in that time.
I accept that a lot has happened. The pandemic has had a significant impact, but young people today do not want excuses; they just want the decent education that they were promised, and they are not seeing that. Pam Duncan-Glancy is right with the list of problems that she has identified in relation to temporary teachers, additional support for learning, class contact time and behaviour. I will not rehearse all those issues. However, the evidence is that the education reforms that were set out in year 1 of the 10-year programme just have not worked. I believe that that is simply because the Government did not really know at that time what the cause of the decline was. It did not really understand what the problems were.
I make no apology for making a speech that focuses on what I think the problems are, because our job in this place is to try to make things better. Of course, I will celebrate the work that is done in schools and by teachers, but our job is to make things better, so let us focus on the things that we need to improve.
This morning, in the Education, Children and Young People Committee, I asked the cabinet secretary about the issue. She could come up with only one thing that was wrong with Scottish education, which was the transition from the broad general education into the senior phase. That is important, but we cannot really claim that that is the reason why we have had such poor poverty-related attainment gap and PISA figures over the time of the Government’s reform programme, whether they have gone up or down relative to the figures in other countries. We cannot really believe that that is the root cause, especially when PISA is for 15-year-olds, many of whom have not gone through the transition from the BGE to the senior phase.
When I asked Shirley-Anne Somerville, the cabinet secretary’s predecessor, what she thought the problem was, she cited the lack of regional improvement collaboratives. They were scrapped almost before they were established, so I do not think that we can say that they were the reason. We do not have a substitute explanation for what has gone wrong. As a result, we have had a rag-tag bunch of reforms that have little focus and little cohesion. I will make a few suggestions as to what the problem is.
The role of knowledge is important, and there was a dilution of knowledge and concepts even before curriculum for excellence accelerated it.
The systems of accountability within Education Scotland have also been weak. The agency does not have the heft to effectively challenge local and central Government to drive improvement. It did not even pick up on the decline in performance in the PISA figures and the poverty-related attainment gap.
Another factor is the lack of support for classroom materials. Curriculum for excellence turned teacher empowerment into teacher isolation. Teachers were left to create classroom content from woolly principles that were difficult to decipher.
There is also the issue of resources, which many others have talked about, as well as the BGE senior phase transition.
That is my analysis of what has gone wrong with Scottish education. The Government needs to be able simply to set out what the problems are, even if it does not agree with me. If it cannot do that, it cannot fix them and we will end up with an incoherent set of random changes.
We have a debate coming up soon in which we will be able to explore what the solutions are. I will make an equally constructive contribution to that. However, we need to get a focus on what the problems are before we move forward.