If William Hogarth were living in 21st-century Scotland, he would have no shortage of subject matter, not least of which would be the education system in the land of David Hume and Adam Smith. Commentators have been bemoaning the fact that their society is “beyond satire” since Juvenal was in short togas. But when I look back at a quarter of a century of writing about Scottish education and of cajoling offspring to read the whole question, finish dissertations and put PE kit in the wash, it is in the form of a series of vignettes with the trajectory of a handcart on the road to hell: education à la mode, if you will.
Scotland has good schools, excellent teachers and enough concerned parents willing to cough up for private tutors to ensure a contingent of educated teenagers is disgorged into universities and the workforce every year. But reports from the chalkface are disturbing.
Last week the Commission on School Reform, an independent panel of educationalists established by the think tank Reform Scotland, reported that absenteeism was rife. Twelve per cent of pupils are absent an average of at least one day a week and almost a third miss a day a fortnight, rising to 40 per cent in the vital years of S4, S5 and S6.
According to Lindsay Paterson, a commission member and emeritus professor of education policy at the University of Edinburgh, absenteeism is “wiping out 40 years of progress”. Scotland is “quite substantially worse than England” in this regard.
Attendance is a legal necessity. That it cannot be enforced speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the educational establishment. Given that most parents rely on school for basic childcare to allow them to work, why do so many children opt out?
Advertisement
Violence, bullying and sexual assault are endemic in Scotland’s schools. Pastoral care and adult supervision are at best lax and at worst non-existent. Some schools are zoo-like in their approach to children.
Toilets can be locked during the school day and only open at break or lunchtime when pupils may have to choose between queueing for food or queueing for the loo. Even when the toilets are accessible, some pupils fear using them because they are not safe and there is no one to police them. One school in Wales has tackled this issue by removing the doors from all individual cubicles.
Violence is escalating in Scotland’s schools. A Sunday Times investigation last year found 2,500 incidents of physical intervention had occurred in the previous three years involving children as young as five. Pupils can enter P1 non-verbal and not toilet-trained. Some routinely bite staff. Teachers are constrained by what they can do to enforce discipline and the children know this.
The education watchdog Ofsted has said that nine out of ten schoolgirls have received unsolicited pornographic images. Police figures for England and Wales show one child is raped in school every day and three sexual assaults among primary pupils are reported to officers daily. There is no reason to believe the situation is different in Scotland.
Bullying and coercive control is endemic. Teachers and head teachers are ill-equipped to tackle this. If there is a Scottish school that has a handle on this problem, it is hiding its light under bushel. About four UK schoolchildren a week take their own lives.
Advertisement
These then are some factors that teachers and pupils face before they even try to learn or to teach. And it is not just in the most deprived or worst-performing schools. Williamwood High, a jewel in East Renfrewshire’s educational crown, was forced to overturn its locked toilet policy after complaints.
In 2021 the Legatum Institute Centre for National Prosperity reported that Scotland was the poorest-performing region in the UK in terms of education. Teachers report that after the pandemic, pupils in S2 and S3 have the knowledge and understanding expected of pupils in P5.
An investigation into Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that Scottish education was “too political”. The most invidious transgression of the SNP government has been that when data shows an outcome at odds with the pre-set deliverable, the data source is shut down. As a result we no longer measure ourselves in meaningful ways in a global context.
Remarkably, there are still graduates who want to go into teaching. They are treated with utter cynicism by the education authorities. Many complete their training only to struggle to get places on a council’s supply list, let alone a full-time job. While the system haemorrhages this fresh blood, teachers who are not fit for purpose have jobs for life. Bad teachers are almost impossible to sack.
Not every pupil can achieve straight As and no one expects this. But every pupil can and should reach their potential. The formula for a good education is as immutable as geometry. Great teachers with rigorous standards, compassion, excellent resources, the ability to inspire and who treat pupils as individuals produce first-rate students.
Advertisement
It starts with people: teachers and pupils and the contact and contract between them. However, they have been sidelined by process, bureaucracy, self-serving unions and cynical quangos; Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualification Authority with your combined £100 million-plus budgets, I am looking at you.
The regression in educational standards will have far-reaching negative consequences for current pupils and for Scotland and that is before the current industrial action bites. Education in Scotland is no longer fit for purpose.
