Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No119
Themes: have our kids turned racist? And why education needs to be about knowledge.
Michaela Community School Headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh
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Last week we noted that Edinburgh Zoo is continuing to train its staff with transgender ideology. Many who were members of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) have raised concerns about this and even started to withdraw their support. A draft letter has been written raising these concerns. If you would like to contact the Zoo and the RZSS about this, the letter is here.
We also raised concerns last week about the one-sided teaching of history in schools and the apparent obsession with racism and slavery. This week we find that according to one study, 99% of schools in the UK teach children about Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. One could see this as reasonable if this were a reflection of the thorough nature of British history being taught to kids, but when we find that only 11% of schools teach children about the Battle of Waterloo, we get a rather different sense of what is being taught and why.
To get a feel for how embedded the new obsession with race and skin colour is in the Scottish education system, we also found out from the Times last week that ‘anti-racist youth ambassadors’ have called for the ‘creation of an online system so that children can publicly hold their teachers “accountable” should they feel they are failing in their duty to deliver an “anti-racist curriculum”’. This, somewhat ironically, comes at a time when we don’t appear to have a clear curriculum of any description in Scotland, let alone a virtuous one determined by children.
The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) has already removed apparently racist and ‘hurtful’ words from Scottish exams. Words like ‘shanty town’, for example, must now be referred to as ‘informal housing settlements’. At a time when the economy is shaking, at least we can see the growth of the ‘anti-racist’ industry, one that is also calling for more black invigilators ‘due to fears that white staff make ethnic minority students feel uncomfortable’. But I guess we have the small mercy that this at least means that children are still expected to do exams – something that an increasing number of universities appear to be dropping. For our enlightened university boffins, it seems that regardless of colour, exams themselves are now seen as making all students too uncomfortable.
On top of all this, it was also reported last week, in the Scottish Daily Mail, that ‘bigotry incidents’ in schools have soared by 50 percent in the space of a year. It’s unclear where this figure has come from, but it raises a number of questions about whether this really reflects a sudden increase in racist kids, or if there may be some other explanation for this, not least the increasing push to record incidents that can be seen as race related.
I’m always wary of labelling children and their immature behaviour as racist, not least of all because within these figures you often find very young children, sometimes even nursery-aged children, being tarred with this label. However, regardless of what we call these incidents, it is possible that more children have called one another names with reference to a person’s skin colour, and this is possible, in part, because there are many more non-white children in Scotland now than there were just a few years ago. Within the space of 2 years, Dundee, for example, has gone from a city where there were almost no black African adults or children to one that is home to significant numbers.
Immigration is a hot topic at the moment, and to some extent it is less the number of immigrants that matters than the extent to which new arrivals are integrated into society and come to see themselves as Scottish and British. But this is the huge problem today, because they do not enter a society that has a sense of pride in what it is and where it has come from. Indeed, the very opposite is the case, and we are educating children, both black and white, that Britain is a racist society with little more than a shameful, racist past. The result, as even Keir Starmer appears to have realised, is that we are creating not a society, but a country made up of different and separate communities – ‘an island of strangers’, as he put it.
As the saying goes, a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet. Unfortunately, young black and white kids are less likely to end up as friends when they are being educated in such a one-sidedly negative way, and when the ‘anti-racist’ education they receive pushes the idea that we have two very different races: those who are white and assumed to be privileged and those who are black and are victims. In this respect, Scotland’s educational establishment risk creating an increasingly separatist state, where the potential for integration and assimilation is undermined by the very people who claim to be concerned about racism.
Like the training in transgender ideology in schools, the hyper-awareness of race, racism and the need to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum are helping to turn schools into places where social justice activism replaces the desperately needed knowledge education that children and society needs.
As the brilliant headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh notes, it looks like the Labour government is set to undermine key aspects of schooling in England. Meanwhile, we find that in the US there are similar concerns about the politicisation of the curriculum at the expense of real education. Like in Scotland, the US has seen reading levels collapse over the last 20 years. As a result, a group called Knowledge Matters has emerged to promote a knowledge-based curriculum, one that rejects ‘ideological approaches to education’ and focuses on how to ‘maximise learning’ – something that they believe must start with a focus on reading.
Here in Scotland, SUE hopes to emulate this group and to similarly push away the ideology in education and promote both knowledge and reading as the key to success. To that end we are delighted to print an article by Dr Gillian Evans, who has worked tirelessly to highlight the falling standards in reading in Scotland and who has some key proposals about how to turn this around.
Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE
Scotland and the USA: Two Systems, One Silent Surrender on Learning
Dr Gillian Evans – dyslexia science
Across the Atlantic, Dana Goldstein’s recent New York Times article, Has America Given Up on Children’s Learning? rang alarm bells about the state of US education. It described an education system that has lost its focus, sacrificed rigour, and become consumed by ideological debates rather than student achievement. But if Americans are quietly abandoning the cause of learning, Scotland has been leading the retreat in more subtle, deeply institutionalised ways – and for much longer.
At first glance, Scotland’s education system still enjoys a positive reputation, burnished by political claims of inclusion, equity and high aspirations. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon once famously promised to be ‘judged on education’. Yet under the surface lies a system hollowed out by vague curricular goals, a rejection of scientific evidence on literacy, and a deliberate dismantling of national accountability.
Central to Scotland’s decline is the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), a reform intended to modernise education by moving away from rote learning and towards developing ‘four capacities’, such as confidence and citizenship. But instead of empowering schools, it left them adrift. CfE is built not on a foundation of core knowledge but on abstract, non-measurable skills. There is no national curriculum content; each of Scotland’s 32 local authorities interprets the framework differently, resulting in inconsistency, fragmentation, and lowered academic expectations.
This weakness is most evident in how children are taught to read. Scotland was once a global leader in literacy research. The Clackmannanshire study, conducted by researchers Johnston and Watson, showed that Systematic Synthetic Phonics – explicitly teaching children how letters correspond to sounds – is the most effective method for early reading, especially for disadvantaged learners. England embraced this evidence in 2007, made phonics statutory, and saw measurable improvements in reading.
But Scotland, ironically, ignored its own findings. Instead, it promoted Active Literacy, a homegrown programme from North Lanarkshire Council rooted in whole-language ideology – the very approach now being dismantled in the US, thanks to investigative reporting by Emily Hanford. Active Literacy downplays phonics, encourages guessing from pictures or context, and aligns with what Goldstein’s article calls a broader trend: curriculum driven not by cognitive science but by teacher comfort and the commercial interests of publishing companies. The result is often that ineffective or poor-quality literacy packages end up being used in class – something that has resulted in parents taking court action against publishers in the US.
Worse still, Scotland has allowed early literacy instruction to be delayed until Primary 3, following pressure from the Play is the Way movement. Advocates for play-based learning are successfully pushing back against even mild assessment in Primary 1, including the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSAs). The result is a system where children with dyslexia, developmental language disorder, or other neurodevelopmental conditions miss the critical early window for intervention, by which point gaps have widened, confidence is eroded, and recovery becomes more difficult.
While children struggle to read, policy makers have also abandoned the tools to measure learning effectively. In 2018, the Scottish government introduced SNSAs – national assessments in literacy and numeracy – but they do not include reading-age data and cannot be compared across time or geography. Previously, councils used high-quality tools like the University of Durham’s Interactive Computerised Assessment System (InCAS), which did provide this data and allowed benchmarking against England. These tools were quietly dropped. Reading ability between Scottish and English children can no longer be compared – not because it doesn’t matter, but because doing so would expose uncomfortable truths.
In place of meaningful data, ministers now rely on ‘positive destinations’ to claim success; this is a catch-all term that includes everything from university to employment or short-term training. This metric tells us nothing about whether a young person can read, write, or think critically. Much like in the US, where Goldstein describes no national goals, no metrics and no transparency, Scotland has insulated itself from scrutiny by redefining what success means.
Even the way Scotland identifies and supports struggling learners reflects this deep avoidance of evidence. The system proudly claims to be ‘needs-led’ and insists that a diagnosis isn’t required for a child to get help. But in practice this has allowed local authorities to avoid identifying neurodevelopmental conditions altogether. Following the 2002 Currie Report, Scottish educational psychologists were told they no longer needed to diagnose conditions like dyslexia, autism or ADHD, shifting instead to a social model of disability, where the environment is always the problem. But without proper diagnosis, there’s no tailored support. Thousands of children are labelled with vague categories like ‘moderate learning difficulty’ and left without structured intervention.
In contrast, England’s SEND system, for all its complexity, does at least encourage formal identification. It gives families a route to secure the right support. Scotland’s system gives warm words about inclusion – but very little else.
The same pattern is visible in funding. Since 2015, the Scottish government has spent over £1 billion trying to close the poverty-related attainment gap. Yet the gap remains stubbornly wide. That’s because the funding model targeted deprivation, not learning needs. Children with learning difficulties but from better-off postcodes were left unsupported, while those with complex neurodevelopmental barriers were overlooked if their needs weren’t officially acknowledged.
Taken together, these decisions reflect a system that has drifted into ideological comfort and political defensiveness rather than confronting the hard realities of learning. The Scottish government abolished rigorous national assessments, rejected its own literacy science, denied the importance of diagnosis, and redefined educational success to avoid being held accountable.
In America, Goldstein describes a landscape where the collapse of bipartisan reform and the rise of culture wars have pushed learning off the national agenda. In Scotland, it’s been quieter but no less serious. What began as a progressive vision has become a bureaucratic mirage, where educational outcomes are obscured by inclusive rhetoric and children’s struggles are reframed as resilience.
If America has given up on children’s learning, Scotland has politely buried it beneath a mountain of policy language and professional preferences. Both countries are failing for the same reason: they have stopped asking what children are actually learning and what teaching methods work best to help them succeed.
It is time to stop judging education systems by their intentions and start judging them – unflinchingly – by what their children can do.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
Joanna Williams, There is no such thing as a trans toddler. The NHS keeps putting the delusions of trans activists above the welfare of children. 16/05/25
Joanna Williams, Do schoolchildren need to ‘advocate for Palestine’? By attempting to bring the ‘struggle’ into the classroom, the National Education Union is grossly overreaching. 20/05/25
https://archive.is/trxyb James McEnaney, SQA accused of 'slap in the face' to teachers. 22/05/25
https://archive.is/LXXQq Zachary Marsh, What is really being taught to our children in history lessons? 19/05/25
https://archive.is/KpvH0 Stephen Pollard, Bridget Phillipson is destroying Britain’s education system. 19/05/25
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/education/katharine-birbalsingh-strictest-headteacher-bridget-phillipson-education-b1229084.html Dylan Jones, Katharine Birbalsingh: 'Our education secretary? A patronising, cultural marxist’. Britain’s ‘strictest headteacher’ says it straight. At her Wembley school Dylan Jones meets a powerhouse waging a one-woman war against the Government’s education reforms. 22/05/25
https://archive.is/Doscn Izzy Lyons, Teachers going on strike over pupils acting like ‘feral cats’, Verbal abuse, offensive videos and a rise in homophobic and sexist comments are just some of the issues one school in Ipswich is having to deal with. 24/05/25
https://archive.is/UHrWh Zoe Strimpel, Five years after BLM, the woke revolution is still destroying the West. The ‘social justice’ spirit lives on in the eco movement, the trans movement and of course, most harmfully, in the ‘Palestine’ movement. 25/05/25
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