The Scottish Conservatives have called for MSPs to be given full access to government analysis of how education can be improved.
After some details of the analysis emerged today, the Tories tweeted: “The public, and especially parents, pupils and teachers, have a right to know exactly what is going on. We’ve written to John Swinney asking him to publish the full information so that there can be full parliamentary scrutiny.”
Background: Higher pass rate falls
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Analysis: Are disadvantaged pupils really offered fewer subjects?
International data: What does Pisa tell us about Scottish education?
The Times reported today that education secretary John Swinney had privately ordered officials to conduct in-depth analysis of pass rates at Higher.
The 2019 A-C attainment rate at Higher was 74.8 per cent, down from 76.8 per cent in 2018 and down 2.4 per cent drop since 2016.
Mr Swinney, the Scottish education secretary, last year described the decline as “annual variation” and repeatedly criticised opposition politicians for talking down Scottish education.
But The Times said that information obtained through a freedom of information request revealed that he had privately commissioned a “multi-agency analysis” of the pass rate to find out what had gone wrong.
The Higher results were released on 6 August. In the Scottish Parliament on 5 September, Mr Swinney criticised Conservative opponents for “scoffing” at the falling pass rate.
The documents have now shown that, two days earlier, he had chaired a meeting with executives from Education Scotland and council education chiefs to “undertake a fuller analysis of the 2019 SQA results”.
The officials were told to examine the results in order to “consider what they might suggest about the current health of the education system and also to identify what might be required to help more young people to be as successful as possible”.
Last week, Glasgow education director Maureen McKenna hit back at what she described as “all that guff about things in Scottish education being terrible”.
