Tony Blair famously pronounced that his government’s top priorities on coming to power in 1997 were “education, education, education” - a welcome mantra that brought additional resources into schools and kept them in the headlines for many years. Sir Michael Barber has written about how education ministers and officials had to make regular presentations on schools’ progress to the prime minister.

Now Nicola Sturgeon has made education the top policy priority for her government in Scotland and has bolstered this by moving the deputy first minister, John Swinney, from finance to education.

Ms Sturgeon’s aim for education is less generalised and therefore represents a bigger ambition than that of her English counterpart two decades earlier. She has nailed her colours to the mast of reducing the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and others, an aim that presents Mr Swinney and Scottish schools with an enormous challenge over the next four years.

As in England, the attainment gap in Scotland is large and it grows substantially during the school years. It won’t be an easy task to reduce it. I have had a couple of visits to Scotland recently to share with them the lessons I learned as national pupil premium champion in England and was impressed with the determination from Scottish government officials, Education Scotland and senior school staff to make a difference for disadvantaged young people.

According to a recent study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation by Dr Edward Sosu, of the University of Strathclyde, there is a 13-month gap in vocabulary by the age of 5 between disadvantaged children in Scotland and their peers, a gap that widens at age 8 and again at 11, with only half as many disadvantaged 13 year olds doing well at numeracy as their better-off counterparts.

On leaving school, disadvantaged young people in Scotland are 30 per cent less likely to go into higher education, and more likely to be unemployed or earn less - a depressingly familiar picture to those of us in England and Wales who worry about low social mobility.

At a timely conference on closing the gap put on by School Leaders Scotland (SLS) on 1 June, Mr Swinney made an impressive first speech in his new role. His agenda is rightly focused on excellence and equity - raising attainment and closing the gap. His government (and he was the finance minister at the time) has put £750 million into a Scottish Attainment Challenge, focused on raising attainment of disadvantaged students and closing the gap in primary schools.

The aims of the National Improvement Framework, of which the Attainment Challenge is a part, are not confined to these two targets. Two other priorities should help to ensure that the focus of the Challenge does not narrow the curriculum to the testing subjects, as has happened in some schools in England. These other priorities are an improvement in young people’s health and wellbeing, and an improvement in sustained school leaver destinations.

Empowering school leaders

In setting out his early priorities, Mr Swinney told the SLS conference that he wanted to strengthen school leadership, the role of parents and the use of data. Empowering school leaders will not mean structural change towards quasi-independent state schools, as it has in England. Scotland is rightly proud of its comprehensive community schools, which educate 97 per cent of the secondary school population. It will, however, mean changing the role of the traditionally powerful local education authorities. There are 32 of these which, for a population of 5 million, is a ludicrously high number and they make decisions that would routinely be taken by school leaders in England. Thus, a good proportion of the £750 million Scottish Attainment Challenge funding is being spent on an attainment adviser in each local authority to work with primary schools on closing the gap.

Increasing the involvement of parents in the education of their children can only be beneficial to schools trying to close the gap and a stronger focus on data, with national standardised assessments at key points in each child’s schooling, will enable schools to monitor the progress of pupils more closely.

Scotland has taken a very different approach to the curriculum compared with the government in London. With the additional flexibility in its Curriculum for Excellence, schools will be able to match the curriculum to the needs of the student much better than schools in England, where accountability measures are pushing all towards an academic curriculum that will prepare young people for a world that has long passed. With greater flexibility, there is more chance that educationally disadvantaged learners will be able to overcome the barriers that they have faced - an important factor in narrowing the gap. 

Another big difference between Scotland and England is vividly illustrated by the length of time that Curriculum for Excellence has been in the planning stage - a stark comparison with the rushed and frequent changes to which schools south of the border are subjected by governments of all colours. This is consistent with the Scottish government’s collegiate approach to education change, engaging all partners throughout the development of new policies.

Nor is the Scottish school system beset by debates about - and frequent changes in - school structures. This degree of stability in the system comes at a price, however, in that local authorities have retained too much power. Every country needs a middle tier, but the most successful countries have given heads and teachers greater management and pedagogical freedom.

The most successful education jurisdictions in the world are almost invariably small. Singapore, Finland, Hong Kong, South Korea, Ontario and Alberta in Canada are of comparable population size to Scotland. If they can go from “good to great”, as management guru Jim Collins put it, so can Scotland.

If Scotland can strike a better balance between the responsibilities of local authorities and those of headteachers and, in particular, give more funding and autonomy to heads to decide on the policies that best meet the needs of their disadvantaged learners, then there is every chance that the first minister and her education cabinet secretary will be able to face the electorate in four years’ time with the attainment gap closing and a strong case to be given another term of office to finish the job.

John Dunford is chair of Whole Education, a former secondary head, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and national pupil premium champion. He tweets as @johndunford

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