Scottish education has turned into a bun fight - at least at the political level.
Either the SNP has been presiding over “13 years of failure” and an “education crisis” - the claim of the new Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw - or the government is running “a high performing-system” that is “improving”, as claimed by education secretary John Swinney and first minister Nicola Sturgeon.
But it is the former, not the latter, narrative that is currently winning the day.
Background: Education record targeted by opposition MSPs
Related: Swinney hits out at ‘overblown’ attacks on education
International adviser: Teachers spending too long teaching
Report: Teaching time way above average in Scotland
Last week, in a bid to make a dent in the negative stories tsunami, Swinney made a speech at an Edinburgh secondary where he hit out at the media for its “overblown and overhyped” coverage of education, and at his political opponents for failing to look at the whole picture and acknowledge the system’s “successes”.
As evidence, he trotted off the positive destination statistics - and the reasons why we should treat them with caution has been highlighted by Tes Scotland in the past. However, some other figures are well worth noting: almost 30 per cent of pupils are achieving at least five Higher-level passes, up from just 20 per cent in 2009; just over 85 per cent of pupils are achieving at least one National 5 qualification, up from 71 per cent in 2007; the number of students gaining at least one Higher level qualification has increased from less than half in 2007 to more than 60 per cent.
But Swinney was keen to not be seen as complacent and said he was not “claiming that everything is wonderful in education”. In particular, he said there was a need to “invest further in teacher professionalism...to ensure that we have confident educators in every school and setting who will take the initiative and create the approaches, the interventions, the connections and the collaborations to make real and sustainable change happen”.
This is unlikely to be the top priority for teachers but identifying teacher professionalism as what’s lacking - as opposed to what is propping the system up - is a theme for Swinney. Speaking at the Scottish Learning Festival last year, he said that work to increase the professional “confidence and autonomy” of teachers needed to “intensify” in Scotland.
Essentially, what the education secretary is saying is that teachers need to up their game - but if he wants teachers to do more, he has to take something out.
Last year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published figures that showed the amount of time Scottish teachers spent teaching is far above the international average.
In Finland - the country Mr Swinney has said he is keen to emulate in terms of professional empowerment - teachers spent less than 600 hours per year in front of classes, while Scottish teachers spent in excess of 800 hours per year in front of classes.
One of his own panel of international experts, Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator now based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, told Tes Scotland in September: “You cannot seriously exercise teacher leadership or agency if teachers don’t have time for that. It can’t just happen - it has to be done - and it can only be done if there is the room and space and time for doing it.”
So, when Mr Swinney says he is going to invest in teacher professionalism will it be like the £12 million for additional support needs assistants, which is seen more as a sticking plaster than a solution to the struggle teachers have meeting pupils’ needs, or is he going to do it properly? Because if he doesn’t listen to his own international adviser, it seems likely he is going to have to keep on listening to Jackson Carlaw.
