The controversial decision to reject a key recommendation on reform of national education bodies in Scotland has been defended by education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville
The Scottish government last week confirmed that it planned to ignore a recommendation on replacement of the Scottish Qualifications Authority, made in the Muir report published in March, which advised splitting the SQA’s twin responsibilities of both awarding and regulating qualifications.
In a parliamentary debate on “the state of Scottish education” yesterday, Ms Somerville insisted there was “an important reason for that decision”, and rejected suggestions from opposition politicians that she had made a “scarcely believable” choice to retain the status quo.
Ms Somerville said: “Although I saw [Professor] Ken Muir’s point and where he was coming from, we must recognise that, in effect, his recommendation would have meant accreditation being moved within government to be delivered by civil servants. Accreditation must be independent of government. When we looked at the detail of the recommendation, we saw that some of that independence would have been lost.”
She added: “Therefore, as we move forward on this, my challenge to everyone in the chamber is this: how can we make this more independent of government? How can we take on the challenge that Ken Muir gave us? Unfortunately - and I say this respectfully - we will have to do it in a different way, because, if accreditation had been moved with regard to the new agency, as was recommended in the initial report, we would have lost that independence.”
The government committed in 2021 to reforming the SQA as well as inspection and curriculum body Education Scotland. The decision came after the publication of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review of Curriculum for Excellence, and amid mounting anger among teachers and pupils about the bodies’ performances during the Covid pandemic.
During yesterday’s debate, Labour education spokesperson Michael Marra said: “Ken Muir was absolutely clear in his report, which we all said that we would honour, that public faith in the qualifications agency was of the utmost importance and that people must have confidence in the process and in the outcomes and the certificates that should be a passport to a better life.”
He added: “Ken Muir’s key recommendation to rebuild confidence was to separate regulation and accreditation from the awarding body.
“Therefore, the cabinet secretary’s reaction, which she has laid out further today, is scarcely believable. Under pressure from the managers who are calling the shots, she bends to their will and refuses to take the key decision; instead, she backs the status quo and more of the same.”
Mr Marra also said that the reform process “cannot be a cosmetic fix” with “new logos being put on the business cards above the same old names”, adding: “We cannot allow the new qualifications body to mark its own homework. The change must be real, and it could not be more needed.”
He said that the government “does not have a vision or a purpose for education in Scotland”, so it was “little wonder” that the reform of national education bodies was “collapsing into the rebranding exercise that we always suspected it would be”.
Mr Marra added: “That process is being run by the managers of Education Scotland and the inspectorate and, of course, the SQA.”
Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie said: “The SNP is keeping the SQA and Education Scotland in all but name - they will now even share the same offices.”
He added: “We must create new national, independent education bodies, which have the trust of teachers because they are led by teachers, following the recommendations of the Muir review.”
Former Conservative education spokesperson Liz Smith said the government had “shown an extraordinary unwillingness to properly reform the education agencies”.
She added: “No one can argue that Education Scotland and the SQA have had a happy history in recent times. Indeed, when I was on previous education committees for a substantial number of years, hardly a parliamentary term went past without committee members’ attention being drawn to significant problems in the agencies that meant that teachers felt remote from and frustrated by those agencies.
“That can never be a blueprint for a successful education system.”
The Scottish Greens’ education spokesperson Ross Greer, whose party is in government with the SNP, was asked by Labour MSP and former primary teacher Martin Whitfield whether he agreed that “the new SQA is going to mark its own homework”.
Mr Greer said: “I have not seen any suggestions that that accreditation function should sit in an entirely independent body somewhere else.
“If both of those functions are going to be set within the same body - the qualifications agency that has greater independence from government - we need to look at how we create silos or separation between those two functions so that they are both sufficiently separate from government but also from each other. We have that opportunity through the reform process.”
Meanwhile, Conservative education spokesperson Stephen Kerr raised concerns that reform-delivery bodies were well populated by people from the government, Education Scotland and the SQA, but had few teachers involved.
He accused Ms Somerville of being “afraid of new voices and new thinking in education reform”.
