No one could envy the multiple challenges faced by Scotland’s new education secretary, Jenny Gilruth. Apart from the lingering effects of Covid - when schools were closed, online lessons intermittent and social inequalities magnified - there is also the legacy of years of pent-up policy failures despite the rhetoric of good intentions.
So here are 10 tasks that Ms Gilruth might like to consider (this is a short version of a blog post for the Reform Scotland think tank). Making a significant start on them would signal an administration that is serious about effective policy.
1. Find ways of reintroducing intellectual rigour into the school curriculum
The starkest task. Scottish school attainment has been declining for a decade and a half. Government ministers have been reluctant to admit this. But if we use the most reliable measures available - from the regular Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) reports - the dismaying trends are inescapable.
2. Place the standards of the national assessments on a more consistently rigorous basis. This will require a thorough revision of syllabuses and of modes of assessment
Ms Gilruth’s advisers will nevertheless tell her that the proportion of all students passing Highers (and the other Scottish Qualifications [SQA] assessments) is rising, even though pass rates for individual subjects are stagnating or falling. When set alongside declining Pisa scores, the only reasonable inference is that the assessments are generally becoming easier, encouraging more students to be presented for them.
3. Ensure that the Hayward review of assessment recommends the best kinds of exams as well as the most valid kinds of assessed coursework
Yet the Hayward review’s interim report seems interested only in reducing the role of exams and the extent to which assessment is externally set by the SQA, rather than internally decided by the school. These are important debates but miss the main point, which is that assessment ought to be an assessment of knowledge.
Knowledge is often caricatured as a list of facts. It is not: more important than the facts is the framework of understanding in which they can be embedded. Assessments ought to test that kind of understanding.
4. Keep the promise on laptops, despite budget cuts
Closing what is usually called the poverty-related attainment gap was described by Nicola Sturgeon as her defining mission. Again, Pisa studies provide the only valid yardstick, and the conclusions are not encouraging.
To reduce inequality, the Scottish government can build on policies already in place. The Scottish child payments have a real chance of reducing poverty; the same is true of free school meals. But some of the approach to poverty has to be more specifically about education. The SNP promised in its 2021 manifesto to provide laptops to every school pupil. The digital inequalities revealed by Covid disruption show that fulfilling that promise ought to be central to education policy.
5. Reinstate the requirement for a broad curriculum up to age 16, and encourage and evaluate experiments in reinstating the place of knowledge at the heart of the curriculum
Students have an increasingly restricted choice of subjects available in the middle years of secondary school.
The new curriculum - which has been in place for over a decade now - is in general fragmented and insufficiently stimulating. It was introduced to make learning more enjoyable, focus on skills and encourage students to make links between subjects. These are admirable aims, but not if they neglect rigour and knowledge (in the sense of understanding).
Schools that want to explore better ways forward should be encouraged to do so, through, for example, networks across the country where innovative schools can share experiences independently of government, local authorities and inspectors. These experiments must then be properly evaluated so that the whole system can learn from them.
6. Expand Foundation Apprenticeships, and bring far more employers on board as partners in their provision
For students who are not likely to go on to higher education, one of the better policies of the present Scottish government has been Foundation Apprenticeships. The most glaring problem is that this initiative is tiny: from a small start in 2016 with a few hundred students, take-up grew to 3,500 in 2019, falling back to 3,000 in the Covid-struck 2020.
7. Reverse cuts to part-time further education, again working closely with local employers
Funding has tried to push students into full-time courses of higher education in the colleges, and away from part-time courses of the kind that can only be run with local employers. This is a massive loss of opportunity that has a particular impact on students in the most socially disadvantaged families.
8. Significantly expand routes by which graduates from college diplomas can transfer to universities to complete a degree
The whole Scottish political class thinks that the jewel in the crown of Scottish educational policy is nominally “free” university undergraduate education for Scottish students. When pushed to defend this, they will claim that it reduces inequality of access. In her resignation speech, Nicola Sturgeon cited as one of her successes the rise in university entrance by people from the most deprived neighbourhoods.
Yet, Scottish students from deprived neighbourhoods are still notably less likely to get to university than similar students in England.
One way of resolving this is to strengthen the paths from colleges to universities, so-called “articulation”. Good work is already being done in this respect, but much more is needed.
9. Remove cap on university places
A baleful consequence of the no-fees policy is a cap on the number of university places for Scottish students (in order to ensure that demand does not overwhelm the government budget for this). As the number of Scottish school leavers who pass enough Highers to enter university has expanded, their opportunity to do so has been restricted by this deliberate government policy.
10. Reinstate surveys of progress through education system, and confirm decision to rejoin international surveys
The final task is to gather better evidence. The statistical evidence about students’ experience of Scottish school education is poorer now that at any time in the past three-quarters of a century. In particular, decisions by governments before and after the SNP won power in 2007 have lost four important sources, such as the Scottish Survey of Achievement, which was a survey of attainment in literacy, numeracy and science at various stages in primary school and early secondary.
It has emerged this week that Scotland would be rejoining international surveys such as Timss and Pirls, a belated decision that is very much to be welcomed. But the decade and a half of their absence can never be recovered.
Lindsay Paterson is an emeritus professor of education policy at the University of Edinburgh. This is a shortened version of a piece published for the Reform Scotland think tank today
