SNP must abandon fantasy education policies and break nationalist taboo about learning from England

Education Secretary Mairi McAllan, pictured meeting students as they receive their exam results at Broughton High School last month, must change course if all pupils are to have a chance of fulfilling their potential (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

According to Education Secretary Mairi McAllan, the latest international PISA figures show the “real strengths” of Scottish education and demonstrate it is “competitive by international standards”. And some may be content to believe this.

However, by “competitive”, she appears to mean little more than above average – where once Scotland was world-leading – in a grim down-sizing of our ambitions. This is also one of the growing number of occasions when nationalists will hope to avoid comparisons with England, an increasingly hard-to-ignore educational success story, right on our doorstep.

Scotland’s performance in both maths and reading fell, while rising in science. However, writing in The Scotsman, the leading expert Professor Lindsay Paterson suggested the latter result was a predictable bounce-back caused by children returning to science classes following the Covid lockdown hiatus – with parents able to help their children in maths and reading but less so in science.

READ MORE: 'Wake up call': PISA figures show Scots pupils a year behind their English peers

‘The importance of knowledge’

England’s performance was a “stand-out achievement globally”, Professor Paterson said, offering this fairly simple explanation: “Under governments of various political hues, England has come to stress the importance of knowledge that is structured into subjects – mathematics, English, the sciences, the social subjects, etc.

“High-quality research has shown that all sound learning requires knowledge of this kind... Scotland has neglected all this, in the interests of promoting skills and enjoyment. But skills depend totally on knowledge, whether they are the skills of a surgeon or the skills of an electrician. Enjoyment is desirable in learning, but is not enough. Some learning is unavoidably tedious...”

His lesson for Scotland? Again, a simple one: “Copy England.”

Some may find it difficult to understand why a leading educationalist feels the need to tell the people in charge of Scottish education that “learning requires knowledge”, yet this is where we are.

READ MORE: Fewer than two in five Scottish pupils are passing maths, English and STEM subjects

Life in the real world

McAllan and the SNP appear to prefer to live in a fantasy land where ‘school is fun’ – if you ignore the violence, ill-discipline and bad language of out-of-control pupils and the record numbers of teachers leaving the profession for reasons including sleep disorders, anxiety and depression.

Some cynics may suggest dreaming of fantasy lands is the nationalists’ main pre-occupation. If so, they need to snap out of it quickly because, unfortunately, the real world is not as forgiving as they might imagine.

As Professor Paterson pointed out, there has been a global fall in reading skills. This has been attributed, in another sign of its harmful effects, to social media, with understandable declines in the TikTok generation’s concentration spans making it harder to comprehend long, complicated texts. Some older people may have noticed a similar effect as a result of their social media use.

This raises the somewhat terrifying prospect of a country in which standards are allowed to slide because too few people are actually paying attention to cause enough of a row about it.

If Scotland is to buck this trend, as England is doing, we need our political leaders to accept there is a problem, stop making excuses, listen to teachers and experts, and change course. Scotland seems eager to learn from Scandinavian countries on various issues and it should not be taboo to learn from our nearest neighbour.

The brightest children will probably always do well. It is others – those who have the potential to secure a place at university or college, an apprenticeship or a job but need a good education in order to do so – who are being let down.

This is galling enough. But if they are missing out on life-changing opportunities because of nothing more than nationalist pride which prevents ministers from reproducing England’s success? That would be truly unconscionable.