When Jack Roberts* started studying English under the Curriculum For Excellence (CfE), the national curriculum for Scottish schools, his mother Anna, an accountant, was surprised. “They weren’t doing any of the things that looked to me to be relevant to the exam,” she says. “The pace they were learning at was really slow.”
The school, a secondary in the central belt with a good reputation, reassured Roberts her son was doing well. Jack was one of the first to sit the National 4 and 5 tests that replaced Standard Grades last year. But when he sat his National 5 English prelim, he failed.
“It meant we had virtually no time to do anything about it,” says Roberts. “It was a combination of the ineptitude of the teacher and a lack of feedback from the school. It meant he would not get to university.”
Roberts’s disillusionment with the system was compounded when the school decided to drop the number of National 5 exams a child could take. Jack’s year sat eight. Her younger son Fraser, who started S4 last week, was told he could take only six.
“I felt six was too restrictive,” she says. “Jack’s year had done eight. They had already decided that the year after Fraser would take seven.”
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The school told concerned parents that there was not enough time to change tack but invited Roberts to join a steering group on the issue.
“My feeling was they were just going through the motions but to my astonishment, the school had a change of heart and we were told they could do seven. It is the only time I’ve challenged the education system and been successful.”
Roberts, an articulate, middle-class mother unafraid to question the status quo, is underwhelmed by the quality of Scottish education. She is not alone. Last week, Nicola Sturgeon admitted that after eight years in charge of schools, the Scottish National party record on the attainment gap between the well-off and the poorest was “unacceptable”.
National testing, opposed by Scottish teaching unions, will be introduced at primary level and schools are set to benefit from a £100m fund aimed at driving up standards, she said.
“I want to be judged on this,” she said to educationalists last Tuesday. “If you are not, as first minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people, then on what are you prepared to? It really matters.”
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Sturgeon, who has travelled to London and New York to see how the attainment gap has been narrowed in schools there, is keen to draw a line under a summer of dire education news. As she was speaking on Tuesday, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service released figures showing that the rate at which school leavers from deprived areas attend university is twice as high in England as Scotland.
Free tertiary education has been a flagship SNP policy but just 9.7% of Scots from disadvantaged areas have been accepted by universities this year, compared with 17% in England, 15.5% in Wales and 13.9% in Northern Ireland.
Teacher numbers have fallen by 4,000 since the SNP took office. More than 60,000 primary pupils are being taught in classes of 30 or more, a rise of 9% in a year, despite a manifesto pledge to cut class sizes to 25. More than 108,000 primary pupils are being taught in composite classes with children of different ages and abilities.
Audit Scotland figures show that spending on schools fell by 5% in real terms in Scotland between 2010 and 2013, despite rising in England. Most damning has been the Scottish Survey of Literacy & Numeracy 2014, which found the literacy ability of Scottish children to be in decline at secondary and primary levels.
The percentage of S2 boys doing well or very well in writing is now 47%, down from 58% in 2012. There is a similar fall in standards for S2 girls, from 70% to 63%. There has been outcry over the lowering of the Higher mathematics pass mark to 34% and a drop off in numbers studying the fundamental sciences.
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Figures show a decline of 1,700 entries for physics, chemistry and maths Highers in 2015, a drop of 4%. In part this is because under the CfE, devised by Labour and introduced by the SNP, pupils are restricted to fewer subjects in the early years of secondary, reducing their options at Higher.
According to Carole Ford, a retired head teacher, former president of School Leaders Scotland and chair of the Scottish secondary mathematics group, the SNP’s record in education is “shocking”.
“It is actually a pretty difficult trick to pull off, to have a uniformly negative impact on both primary and secondary education, and simultaneously reduce the numbers studying the most crucial subjects in the curriculum, but the SNP has managed it,” she wrote in a letter to newspapers this week.
So what has gone wrong with an education system that once prided itself as the best in the world?
“THERE has been a very significant change in mood since Nicola Sturgeon took over as first minister,” says leading educationalist Keir Bloomer, a former director of education for Clackmannanshire. “What we have become used to for a good few years now is basically bluster and boasting and denial that anything could possibly be less than perfect in the Scottish education system. We’ve now had a fairly frank admission that that is not the case.”
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He points out that when the 2012 international comparisons of educational standards were published, Scotland and England performed almost identically. But what was seen as a dismal failure in England was portrayed as a triumph in Scotland.
Bloomer is in no doubt about the scale of the challenge when it comes to closing the attainment gap. “The government has two policies: Raising Attainment For All and the Scottish Attainment Challenge, which is about closing the gap. Most people are in favour of both, but if attainment overall goes up and you attempt to close the gap, then the people at bottom have got to improve at a hell of a lick.”
The problem is knowing when attainment has improved. Five years ago, to the consternation of academics, the SNP government withdrew Scotland from the two key international surveys into maths, science and reading achievement: the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).
The only global educational survey Scotland belongs to, the Programme For International Student Assessment (Pisa) run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, shows that while attainment in Scotland is improving, it is improving slowly and we are being overtaken by other nations.
If Sturgeon is to achieve her aim, she will have to find a way of accelerating the rate at which Scottish pupils’ attainment improves.
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Both Bloomer and Lindsay Paterson, professor of education at the University of Edinburgh, welcome the move to national testing at primary school level but are now calling on the Scottish government to reinstate the TIMSS and PIRLS international tests in Scottish schools. Both are in favour of more autonomy and experimentation at school level.
“The one international test we stayed with was Pisa, which does not test curriculum coverage but skills for life at age 15,” says Paterson. “This means that we have nothing to compare whether Scottish children are making more or less progress in relation to the curriculum here compared with similar children elsewhere. TIMSS and PIRLS cover a range of age groups in primary and secondary.”
With Scots increasingly competing for university places and jobs with young people from the European Union and further afield, insularity is no longer an option.
“We do have to have internal testing,” says Paterson. “We don’t have a good evidence base in Scotland, sadly. In London, where they have been successful in closing the attainment gap, the evidence base was crucial and the teachers felt empowered by it, despite what the Educational Institute of Scotland says.
“The reason you need international comparisons is to ensure we are not asking anything unreasonable or too difficult but also to ensure we are not being underambitious. It also allows us to benchmark our internal testing.”
Paterson believes that while Scotland is doing well on statistical indicators such as the number of pupils going on to university, some standards have fallen. “There is no doubt that the standard of the Highers has fallen,” he says. “Looking at the recent furore over the Higher maths paper, the questions that were in dispute didn’t seem to me to be anything out of the ordinary.
“The Scottish Qualifications Authority would say they do regular quality checks but what they are assessing has changed. They may carry out these ass-essments as well as they did in the past, but pupils are not being assessed at the same level.”
He points to a poem in the Higher English paper by Spike Milligan as evidence of what has been termed “dumbing into the middle”. “I think life has got better and more effective for people of middling ability but the problem is the top 20% are being less stretched,” he says. As a result, any closing of the attainment gap has been at the expense of the high achievers.
Ford believes at the heart of a decline in standards is CfE. She has been equally critical of the policies of the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition as she is of the SNP. “I retired early from teaching because of CfE,” she says. “As a head teacher I was expected to implement a lot of this and I simply wasn’t prepared to do it, so I left.”
The morale in secondary schools could not be lower, she says. Secondary teachers are frustrated because they cannot do the job they want to do. Children arriving from primary school are not ready to learn the secondary curriculum. “The knock-on effect is that lots of teachers have retired as early as they can,” says Ford.
“I went into teaching [because] I was passionate about giving opportunities to children. It was just breaking my heart to see how we were going to handicap people.”
Defending CfE, a Scottish government spokesman said: “Curriculum for Excellence allows teachers to use their professional skills and experience to determine what they teach. This ensures schools have the flexibility that they need to adapt the curriculum to suit pupils’ needs and circumstances in their area.
“Both the Raising Attainment for All programme and Scottish Attainment Challenge encourage and support schools and authorities to test new ideas and approaches to learning and ensure best-practice is identified and shared more widely.”
Roberts engaged an English tutor for Jack, who has gone on to gain five Highers at A and B level. What does she believe will make the biggest difference to attainment?
“People here don’t value education,” she says. “You look at the difference between the results here and abroad and the difference in countries such as China is that they really value education. We don’t. Until we do, nothing will change.”
*Some names have been changed to protect identities