Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No115

Themes: the public and private self, and why skills education is not education

May 01, 2025

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I almost feel sorry for Nicola Sturgeon, a woman who appeared untouchable just a few years ago but who now finds her legacy in tatters, helped largely by her obsessive adoption of transgender ideology. Sturgeon remains defiant about her role in promoting transgenderism, and her refusal to take responsibility for its impact is being described by many as a form of ‘cowardice’.

I always assumed that the now infamous former First Minister was positioning herself to run the UN or some other global organisation that doesn’t have to deal with ordinary people and their concerns. We’ll have to wait and see how that pans out. It’s still possible, not least of all because such organisations have no democratic accountability and as a result can continue to operate on another planet from the rest of us.

Last week the producer and writer Malcolm Clark kindly joined us in conversation to discuss the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that, under the Equality Act, means the terms woman and man refer to a person’s biological sex, not how they might ‘identify’. Interestingly, he noted how – as a kid attending a basic comprehensive school in Ayrshire – he had been particularly captured by his Classics education, which was then part and parcel of his school life.

The point about this for me – and I appreciate that not everyone thinks learning Greek or Latin is necessary or even useful – is that when I hear that someone had Classics in their school, I’m pretty confident that this is a school that takes education, real education, seriously.

Even just learning about the Greeks and about the foundations of modern philosophy, science and democracy, including some of the core foundations of what came to be understood as civilisation, should in my opinion be a basic aspect of a knowledge-based education. In this regard, we have an article in this week’s Substack that looks again at the work of Alex Standish and usefully explains what is wrong with the current obsession with ‘skills’ in schools – something that both lacks a grounding in knowledge and is, more often than not, pretty low level and useless in terms of developing the genuine skills needed in the workplace. No surprise that this borderline useless form of education came hand in hand with the increasingly aloof ‘global’ elites.

It is worth considering the idea of civilisation and civilisational values a little, because it allows us to look at some of the diminished and degraded aspects of transgender ideology and their potential impact.

Civilisation developed, in part, with the expanding sense of borders and boundaries. We often think of borders and boundaries as limiting, and as being non-progressive. In reality, drawing borders and boundaries has helped civilisation to create progress.

For example, privacy and the separation of public and private life allow us to be truly human, and whether we think about it or not, the privacy we experience and expect in our home life is profoundly significant for us all.

Like so many civilisational values, we take our privacy and our private lives for granted, without recognising how relatively modern it is, and how it provides the space to think and to ‘be ourselves’ among people we trust in a way that provides us with the safety needed for moments of comfort and of solitude and reflection.

Of course, part of the development of the private self came with the flip side of the public world, which allows a segway onto a topic few of us thought would be a political controversy – that of public toilets!

You may have heard about the latest ruling in Scotland regarding toilets in schools. If you haven’t, check out the link here. This is an often-heard story of parents who raised concerns with their school and were dismissed. Their concerns related to transgender ideology being pushed onto kids and a concern about the lack of single-sex toilets.

The parents in question were helped by For Women Scotland and had also received support from SUE’s Kate Deeming, and they won, at least on the matter of single-sex toilets.

This, of course, comes on the back of the Supreme Court ruling, and now schools will have to protect the privacy of girls and boys when they use bathrooms and toilets.

It is worth noting that one of the reasons the parents felt able to keep pushing this issue was because they took their child out of the school. This is a serious problem and one that SUE is highly aware of, because many – perhaps most – parents are not in a position to remove their children from school, and it is very difficult and unpleasant to challenge the school and teachers at your child’s school. This is one of the reasons that SUE exists, because we have the capacity to act on behalf of parents and to give support to those who are concerned about what is being taught there.

As our editor, Penny Lewis, has noted, the very idea of public toilets as we know them really only emerged with the ‘invention’ of the modern public world, particularly in Victorian Britain, where previously private activities were now needing public facilities. Of course, at the time, there was no need for a law about single-sex spaces, because this was obvious, but in reality most toilets were for men, who were far more part of public life.

We can see the importance of both the private self and the public self in the history of public toilets – conveniences where you ‘spent a penny’ in private, often in underground lavatories. Here, the civilised Victorians provided a hidden convenience, while massively improving sanitation and the expected standards of public behaviour. Meanwhile, women, who were seen as largely private, were forcing themselves into the public realm and fought for their own toilets, helped by a variety of groups and further helped when women joined the workforce on mass during the First World War.

You didn’t need an ideology for the idea that men and women needed separate spaces, and while part of the separation of the sexes was grounded in cultural norms that are far more flexible today, there is still a desire by the vast majority of people for single-sex facilities. This is a boundary that we implicitly understand is more civilised because even with progress towards equality between women and men, society is still made up of two sexes – two sexes that at times want their privacy respected.

This, of course, begs the question of what this means for not just single-sex spaces but for transgender ideology in general, and in particular in schools. Bearing in mind that around 70 percent of children wanting to transition are girls, we need to recognise that arguments about the misogyny of transgender rights activists, and the push for women’s rights, only go so far when addressing this question.

What we need now is to push the question of separate sexes, because as it stands, schools are misleading children by denying the scientific reality of there being only two sexes. If we recognise that there are two sexes in terms of the provision of single spaces, we should also recognise the reality of two sexes in society and in education.

When schools teach that you can be ‘born in the wrong body’ and that sex is no longer relevant when considering your ‘gender’, they are undermining their educational commitment to teaching facts. Men and women are real, and transgenderism is an ideology that denies this reality.

In essence, schools are losing a sense of their public function, which is educational. This is partly because the very idea of education, as Rachael Hobbs explains below, has been confused and diluted. As a result, schools have lost their sense of purpose; indeed, they have lost their bounded sense, which helps to explain why they increasingly step over the boundary between public and private, both in the way they dismiss parents and see it as their role to push ‘correct’ values onto children, and in their increasing sense of mission when dealing with the private lives and ‘identities’ of kids.

As we have noted before, this has the dual and depressing result of degrading the public educational role of schools, and in the process, fails to draw adolescents out of their self-absorption.

Part of growing up, of maturing, is to recognise who you are and what you are. We get a sense of this both in our private world and in our public interactions and activities. In terms of capabilities, this is often a changing and developing process. But in terms of your biological reality, no matter how many drugs you take or pieces of your body you operate on, no human has or will ever escape their bounded biological self.

It has become a civilised necessity to make sure that this message gets into schools, and now is the time to make it happen. So, ask your local school whether they teach that there are two sexes? If the answer they give to this factual question is ‘No’, then get in touch and we will see what we can do: info@sue.scot

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Book review

Part 2: Alex Standish, The False Promise of Global Education: Why Education Needs Boundaries (Continuum, 2012)

Reviewed by parent and educator Rachael Hobbs.

Alex Standish is Associate Professor of Geography Education at University College London Institute of Education, and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

His research is based on knowledge in the curriculum, curriculum design, and how social progress is related to education. He is an adviser to the Department for Education, the Mayor’s Office, Cambridge Examinations, and several schools with regards to the curriculum.

In a previous Substack, we reviewed Alex Standish’s book The False Promise of Global Education: Why Education Needs Boundaries, which examines the loss of knowledge-rich schooling within the USA and the UK. We noted three new key developments in education.

Failure to recognise the inherent value of subject knowledge had led to its demotion by those who focus on ‘global education’.
This focus on global education helped to create a space for non-governmental organisations and ‘globally’ minded political interest groups to influence the curriculum.
Children are subsequently encouraged to adopt abstract ‘global’ values at odds with their national heritage, within an empty theme of ‘diversity’.

We look now at Standish’s analysis of how ‘global education’ also brought with it a flawed concept of skills training in schools, and how this also represents a decline in the quality of children’s education.

The case for ‘skills’

The emphasis on skills in schools has been influenced by an economic and ideological endeavour since the 1970s, in the USA and UK. A dominant belief by leaders and strategists was that ‘traditional’ education was not providing pupils with ‘relevant’ skills for their everyday lives or a ‘globalised’ employment market.

The idea of skills teaching centred on ‘employability’ for a changing job market, but also meant teaching children personal/emotional skills that are linked to a global ethics theme that encourages pupils to see themselves as ‘global citizens’. Both these strands reflect, for Standish, a deeper rejection by leaders of the traditional national framework underpinning academia, due to growing ‘disenchantment with the intellectual and cultural legacy of nations’ (p. 72).

Economic justification for teaching ‘skills’ was based on concern that national economies had changed. Developed countries were no longer operating with a large manufacturing sector as their industrial base, and it was believed that an emerging ‘global’ jobs market had changed the skills needed by employees, requiring greater abilities related to ‘high-skilled’ work (p. 101).

Standish highlights that ‘Countries such as the US and England are discussed in terms of a post-industrial economy in which knowledge rather than labour is the key to success.’ (p. 101).

This view was echoed by leaders, business and educational institutions. The UK Royal Society of Arts, for example, stated, ‘We are still educating people for a world that is disappearing’ and that ‘the education system of the future must equip individuals to meet the challenges that will face them in managing their lives and their work.’ (p. 99).

This was matched in the USA, with similar denigration of the traditional curriculum, for example by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, who claimed there was, ‘a gap between the knowledge and skills presently being taught in schools and those that are needed in the twenty-first century.’ (p. 99).

Standish highlights the influence of business leaders, citing Bill Gates’s address to the nation’s governors in the USA, where he declared, ‘Our high schools were designed to meet the needs of another age’ (p. 45); this led to business management practices in America being introduced into city schools. Standish explains how the skills orthodoxy has diminished the importance of learning about the past and the value of subject-based disciplines. He explains that when these ‘educators’ talk about the need for learning to be ‘directly related’ to the lives and goals of children, ‘What Gates and others mean is that schools should be teaching only knowledge and skills that will be used by people in their everyday lives.’ (p. 45).

Refuting the case for skills

Standish challenges the economic and ideological rationale for skills teaching. The notion of a global economy was not a new phenomenon, due to the legacy of imperialism and the international division of labour: ‘Capitalist economic relations have always been deterritorialized, and economies have been internationally integrated, to a greater or lesser extent, since the mid-nineteenth century.’ (p. 102).

Standish explores how changes have centred more on increasingly liberalised trading and global investment, resulting in outsourcing of lower skilled jobs to cheaper labour markets in developing countries (p. 102). In the USA and UK, traditional manufacturing jobs have been replaced by the services industry, sales, the technical industry, administration, managerial professions, and support staff roles including care and teaching. Decline has taken place within ‘middle-level’ professional or clerical jobs, while both low- and high-skilled job opportunities expanded, even if their form had changed (p. 103).

Standish acknowledges that increased integration of economies prompts some need for young people to have a broader skillset than in the past (p. 103). When we examine modern ‘skills’. however, they do not fulfil this. He equally refutes ideological ‘global skills’, which teach ‘personal or emotional’ skills, above all because they have no disciplinary expertise.

Standish highlights the entirely presumptive view of policy makers that children will not be motivated by learning disciplinary-strong topics including learning about the past, and attributes this to their own loss of faith in these domains: ‘It seems that the turn toward the future is better understood as a product of the uncertainty its advocates hold toward society’s accumulated wisdom, rather than a response to some different needs of the present generation.’ (p. 104).

How ‘skills’ de-skilled vocational qualifications

From the 1970s, ‘skills’ policy began to change vocational training. In England, prime minister James Callaghan, in 1976, made a speech about creating closer links between industry and education. This he argued, was necessary because of a ‘skills gap’ and due to the growth of youth unemployment.

Standish cites the creation of the Manpower Services Commission, tasked to ‘re-skill’ the young. A key aspect of this was the Youth Training Scheme, which placed young people on work placements. Standish finds that, from here, ‘skills’ moved beyond their original association with specific occupations or abilities of the skilled manual worker (p. 105). The Scheme included 103 ‘transferable skills’, including communication, reasoning, survival, problem solving, social and life skills: ‘Lacking either a theoretical foundation or an attachment to specific technical tasks, these schemes appeared to have more to do with generating compliant workers with “desirable values, attitudes, behaviours, and dispositions” than enhancing their skills.’ (p. 105).

Standish assesses skills training during the 1980s via the introduction of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) from the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, providing training for 85% of occupations. Critically, content was determined by industry heads or government rather than skilled professionals (p. 105). NVQs, Standish explains, differed from the curriculum and apprenticeship schemes by being ‘outcome based’ rather than knowledge based (i.e. the ability to perform a task rather than to have an understanding of it), as they were designed to help students who might struggle with theoretical learning.

Standish highlights that they were unpopular in their focus on trivial skills at the expense of knowledge, and most were not taken up. Only 42 of 794 were pursued, the most commonly selected reflecting the former City & Guilds–style craft awards (p. 105). General NVQs were later introduced, which included Business, Leisure, Health and Tourism, but Standish points out that these were more abstract and therefore academic, and they became integrated within secondary schools.

Despite success in a number of vocational programmes, a review at the same time found that up to 350,000 16- to 19-year-olds gained little from the post-16 education system. Pupils were studying low-level vocational awards that ‘currently have little or no apparent labour market value’ (p. 106). Standish looks, for example, at the ‘Certificate in Preparation for Working Life’, which included ‘Personal Awareness, Healthy Lifestyles for Work–Life Balance, Relationships and the Differences Between People, Applying for Jobs, Economic and Financial Aspects of Life, and Hazard Identification at Home, on the Roads and at Work’.

As he says, ‘While it is no bad thing for pupils to learn how to apply for a job, the National Qualifications Framework designates this course as equivalent to academic GCSEs.’ (p. 107). Standish argues that ‘skills’ training within the vocations framework represented ‘the failure to offer pupils either challenging academic study or genuine training for a career’ (p. 107).

Skills became extended to schools as leaders wished to create ‘parity of esteem’ between vocational and academic qualifications (p. 107). Standish deems, with irony, that ‘The New Labour government and some business leaders thought more highly of their skills curriculum than they did of subject knowledge. Thus, it was only a matter of time before “key skills” were introduced into the academic curriculum so that no child would be without them.’ (p. 107).

Skills in school divorced from knowledge

Academic and vocational training, once distinct from one another, were now merged in schools via the assumption that all pupils require new skills.

For Standish, skills teaching has little, if any, link to a specific field of expertise and increasingly serve another purpose: ‘Skills have come to be treated as important in their own right, and consequently are increasingly divorced from knowledge. Today, only a minority still defend the intrinsic value of subject knowledge, while most argue that education must be tied to some instrumental purpose: the economy, citizenship, identity, inclusion, or social mobility, and proceed to identify the requisite skills that should be taught.’ (p. 99).

Skills teaching in lessons takes many forms, such as problem solving, team working, collaboration/cooperation, and looking at global/political topics which have no link to a disciplinary base or specialist context. Disciplinary knowledge is being lost in the process.

As a result, leaders have failed to understand that subject knowledge is (or was) the purpose of education. And bewilderingly, ‘knowledge-based skills’, as they are often termed, are merely generic ‘skills’ devoid from a knowledge base, as seen below in a common set of examples.

Global skills in US and English curricula (p. 100)

Learning Skills

Personal, Social, and Emotional Skills
Self-direction
Communication
Critical thinking
Foreign languages
Information and media skills
Teamwork and collaboration
Technology skills
Cross-cultural understanding
Problem solving
Leadership
Creativity
Responsibility to and respect for others
Productivity and accountability
Empathy
Flexibility and adaptability
Social responsibility and citizenship
Learning to learn
Global awareness
Systems thinking
Health awareness
Making judgements, decisions
Financial management
Reasoning
Working independently

These are not ‘skills’ but attitudes, and they have nothing to do with acquiring subject knowledge – where real skills come from. The table also reveals ‘an impoverished view of skills’ (p. 100), where vocational and academic learning have both become poorer as a result: ‘Personal and social skills are treated as valid ends of education, and in doing so education becomes less challenging, less intellectual, less interesting, and ultimately less meaningful.’ (p. 124).

Standish argues: ‘A curriculum focused on generic “skills”, or competencies as divorced from knowledge, offers neither an education nor training for jobs. Instead, children are asked to fulfil mundane tasks and activities or receive instruction in how to manage their personal lives and psychological well-being. This is neither education nor training.’ (p. 33).

He states further: ‘In England, the expansion of competence-based vocational qualifications in schools has wrested responsibility for qualifications and accreditation away from the communities of professionals who are best-placed to train young adults, and placed it in the hands of government and quasigovernmental bodies.’ (p. 174).

Standish also warns that skills teaching erodes the boundary between disciplines, through ‘cross-disciplinary’ lessons. While there is nothing wrong with instances where we draw on separate disciplines to understand where they interject, mastery of each subject must be acquired first. He cites Professor Johan Muller: ‘We learn higher-order modelling skills in specific discourses first. Genericity consists in generalising the skill to analogous situations.’ (p. 174).

The instrumentalising of education

Standish highlights that the economic or ideological skills rationale for the curriculum is not educational. He proposes that meeting the needs of employers and young people requires that schooling first has rigorous academic and vocational paths for pupils, with distinct separation between them.

As a result, education is being used for another purpose – in this case, economic, or to prescribe ‘global’ values. In doing so, it loses its ‘special status’. Professor of Social Research Ralph Fevre describes such a process as ‘Demoralization: the hollowing out of a social institution’s moral purpose and replacing it with a rationale derived from a different social activity.’ (p. 4).

Standish counters the assumption that children today need a different kind of education: ‘The primary aim of schools is academic education, not training. Knowledge of excellent literature, history, biology, or music is not rendered less valuable because of economic restructuring. [...] A cynic might argue that the “knowledge economy” thesis acts as an apology for cramming kids into courses and programmes that are often unnecessary, unwanted, and in some instances worthless, and so keep them out of the labour market.’ (p. 104).

The skills movement, for Standish, reflects diminished expectations of pupils and their abilities and a subsequent lowering of standards. This is a terrible and baseless indictment of the young by our leaders. The skills endeavour is diverting pupils from genuine education.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html Paul Tough, Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? With diagnoses at a record high, some experts have begun to question our assumptions about the condition — and how to treat it. 13/04/25

https://archive.is/2025.04.19-174328/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14627625/PETER-HITCHENS-Women-bossy-judges-power-elected-MPs.html Peter Hitchens, Cheer the trans verdict if you wish – but the Blairite court behind it shouldn’t even exist. 19/04/25

https://archive.is/2025.04.22-111946/https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/25106394.faculty-demands-apology-chapman-court-attack/ Andrew Learmouth, Faculty demands apology from Chapman over court attack 22/04/25