Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No99

Themes: why learn history, and the media on school readiness

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There was a very good article in the Herald this week on the past and future of Scottish education. Lindsay Paterson, Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at Edinburgh University, talked to journalist Neil McKay about the sources of the historic strengths of the Scottish system and its current weaknesses.

Paterson is convinced that we are producing ‘less literate, less numerate people than society used to’. ‘What we expect by the end of primary school is weaker than what was expected in the past’, he said. Since the introduction of the new Curriculum for Excellence in 2010, successive governments seem to have decided that the way to close the attainment gap between poor and middle-class children is to demand less from all pupils. Paterson says that we have watered down teaching, made syllabuses less difficult, engaged less with difficult ideas’. He thinks we should compare our system with that of England, where the top 10% of students are performing considerably better than their counterparts in Scotland. He also believes in scrapping Education Scotland and undertaking a serious review of teacher training, and that we should demand more of children, not less.

Paterson says the start of the decline in Scottish education began in the 1980s, when we adopted attitudes that placed ‘skills above knowledge’ and abandoned the idea of civilisation and culture because they were seen as ideas that benefit the rich and powerful rather than wider humanity. For Paterson, the Curriculum for Excellence came at the end of three decades in which the broad purpose of education was overshadowed by the postmodern ideology of academics coupled with business-orientated Thatcherism. These two sets of ideas, from the left and the right, have undermined our appreciation of the real value of education, namely the creation of a society of literate, numerate and articulate citizens.

Last week’s news was dominated by the scandal of grooming gangs, of predominantly Pakistani origin, and the call for a public inquiry to discover why police, social workers and local authorities looked the other way in the face of the ongoing abuse of white working-class girls.

The sense that those in authority failed, or were at least highly reluctant, to raise the issue in public or take appropriate action, for fear of being branded a racist or accused of stoking racial hatred, is important. This mindset is widespread in local government, as we reported in Newsletter No92 regarding the case of Councillor Audrey Dempsey, who was labelled a racist when she tried to raise the issue of violence in schools.

The complicity of the authorities in the gangs’ activities is symptomatic of a wider problem from which we suffer in Scotland. The problem is the failure to speak up in public when you see something going wrong, for fear of causing offence or generating discord.

As parents of schoolchildren, we rightly feel that we should protect children from disputes, anger and disruption. We hope that schools are places where everyone tries to get along and where personal behaviour is exemplary. We look at the American school board system and recoil from the political controversies associated with the US system. However, it is probably time to recognise that we will not see change in the education system unless we make our concerns public.

Over the next two months, we will be developing a website which should allow our readers to share more material that shows where we are going wrong, and what we are doing right, in schools, universities and teacher training colleges. We want to run a section called I-Spy, in which readers post pictures (or videos) of things that concern them about life in education. If you have any content that we can use on the new website, please send it to info@sue.scot.

Penny Lewis, Editor

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Parent and Supporters Group

SUE’s online Parent and Supporters Group meetings are held monthly. Anyone wanting to attend should email SUE’s Parent and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot.

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Why should children learn about the past?

Nicholas Tate is a historian who taught at the former Moray House College of Education in Edinburgh for 15 years, worked on the development of the old Standard Grade and Scottish history syllabuses, and edited the History Teaching Review, the Scottish Association of the Teachers of History journal. He has been Chief Adviser on Curriculum and Assessment to both Conservative and Labour Secretaries of State for Education in England, a member of the French Minister of National Education’s Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de l’École, and Director-General of the International School of Geneva.

This article is in two parts; the first looks at why it is important for children to learn about the past, and the second will look at the challenges facing history teachers.

The French historian Marc Bloch said that ‘misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past’. Learning about history is important because it helps us make sense of the world we inhabit: our own lives, the events of the day, people’s beliefs and attitudes, the environment in which we live. The way we view past events and societies changes over time as we look at things from new perspectives, but history is a truth-seeking subject and, despite contemporary voices to the contrary, studying it helps us to distinguish between true and false accounts of the past. History (as a subject) is one of the great ‘languages of human understanding’, alongside philosophy, the sciences, mathematics and the arts. It deserves a central place in any school curriculum committed to transmitting what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been thought and known’.

Learning about the past also furnishes our minds with what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called ‘a storehouse of all the virtues, vices and predicaments known to mankind’. History, Oakeshott thought, was the theoretical means of understanding human action, more important than the social sciences. It helps us understand the present by making comparisons with the past, seeing how things are similar or different and thus putting the present in a new perspective and as a result opening up new possibilities for the future.

Knowledge of the past is also important for a sense of identity. We are not just isolated individuals but members of communities: families, local, regional and national communities. Knowing where we have come from and how what we are today has been shaped by past events can give us a feeling of the place we have in the social and political world, and a sense of belonging, and it can be a source of affection and pride. Nations, in particular, are held together by a common story, and that story comes inevitably from the past. When in the past we were ruled by autocratic monarchies and hereditary aristocracies, one of the main ways the small elite in charge was educated for its leadership role was by learning about the past. Now that we have become democracies (of sorts), it is even more important that those ultimately in charge – the people – have the same understanding of what has gone before, not least so that we can keep in check the new elites who rule our lives in ways that at times can be just as oppressive as the monarchs of old.

Learning about the past should give us the vocabulary without which thinking and talking about our current world can be very difficult. Many years ago, when teaching history and training history teachers at what was then Moray House College of Education, I wrote a number of history textbooks for 14- to 16-year-olds. One of them – a book on world history 1917–1989 – included a glossary of 175 words used in the book, terms such as ‘republicanism’, ‘constitutional monarchy’, ‘feudalism’, ‘parliamentary sovereignty’, ‘boycott’, ‘nationalism’. Without a study of history, many of these would be unlikely to figure in the curriculum. All are crucial for the development of the knowledge that the left-leaning Democrat-voting US educationist E. D. Hirsch has said to be essential for what he calls ‘political literacy’.

Along with what Hirsch also calls ‘cultural literacy’ – knowledge of the inherited facts and customs that distinguish a nation and its culture – ‘political literacy’, he argues, is especially important for those pupils who pick up very little of this at home. These include children from all social classes and groups, but especially those from families only recently established in the UK or living in ethnic or religious communities not well integrated within the wider society. Depriving such children of the political and cultural literacy that a study of the country’s mainstream past might give them is blocking those very avenues for advancement that progressive educationists and politicians claim their vision of a more ‘inclusive’ curriculum is designed to bring about.

Finally, one of the major benefits of the kind of history teaching that has developed over the past 50 or so years is to get pupils into the habit of asking ‘how do we know that these statements about the past are true ones?’ Getting them to look at the sources on which our knowledge of the past is based both illustrates how history gets written and establishes the habit of checking assertions against evidence, which is one of the most important skills we need to develop so that we can use sensibly the mass of information with which we are bombarded daily. Sometimes, this kind of school history has squeezed the time available for the even more important business of giving pupils a sense of the overall chronology of previous ages and of a nation’s past, but it is crucial that it remains part of any history curriculum.

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Opinion

I’m highly sceptical of news stories about pupils who are not toilet trained

Rachael Hobbs is a parent and an educator. If you disagree with Rachael, please comment below or send us a letter.

This week, the question of ‘school readiness’ is in the headlines; among others BBC News was looking at the toilet training of kids. I’m looking into the data from just one Welsh survey conducted by a consultancy called Kindred and I’m sceptical. I stand by my position that the issue is being distorted, and the headlines are simply not true. My view, based on my own experience across primaries, is that most kids starting school are toilet trained.

Teachers and teaching assistants are not really diverting time to deal with accidents. It is usually children with additional support needs (ASN) who may have special arrangements. The Welsh survey that appeared in the news fails to distinguish these ASN children, even though it says that it does.

When you see the general questions asked to teachers about toilet training, they are along the lines of ‘Is there at least one child in your class with toileting “mishaps”’. This is the root of the distortion, because the headline reads that many children are not toilet trained starting school, when the data refers to one child per class.

Also, ‘accidents’ are very different to not being toilet trained; accidents can happen to any child starting school; and usually only a few in my experience, and this improves quickly after a term of structure.

Basically, the headlines and the data don’t match, and the media bandwagon that follows form this lie is an attack on parents – 99.9999% of whom, in my view, always ensure and take pride in their children being ready for school.

I think we should hold the ‘findings’ from charities with caution. In the BBC report on TV, it subtly also changed its declaration in a sentence about kids not being toilet trained at NURSERY, not school age (Not many children are toilet trained by 3 years; three is an acceptable and average age to begin toilet training).

Teachers respond to these surveys with a slight sense of martyrdom, which means they go along with the framing of this discussion. The toilet-training myth seems to feed their frustration with kids starting school and being unable to focus; that is a different topic though.

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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.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/snp-could-take-more-century-34315809 Ben Borland, The SNP could take more than a CENTURY to close the attainment gap in Scottish schools. Despite Jenny Gilruth boasting of ‘significant progress’, the Lib Dems say it could take up to 113 years to close the gap in literacy between the richest and poorest students. 15/12/24

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14227939/Six-10-pupils-S4-fail-key-mathematics-exam.html Graham Grant, Six in 10 pupils in S4 fail key mathematics exam. National 5 marks in essential STEM subjects getting worse under the SNP. 27/12/24

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/more-than-180000-scots-pupils-missing-a-day-of-school-every-fortnight-4930650 Alistair Grant, More than 180,000 Scots pupils missing a day of school every fortnight. 06/01/25

https://archive.is/BPrYq Nick Gibb, Bridget Phillipson is committing educational vandalism. The Government’s policy is driven by ideological hostility to academies and a failure to learn lessons from the best performing countries. 06/01/25

https://conservativehome.com/2025/01/10/miriam-cates-the-classical-schools-network-can-help-protect-excellence-from-the-phillipson-reaction/ Miriam Cates, The Classical Schools Network can help protect excellence from the Phillipson Reaction. 10/01/25

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24850384.scottish-school-curriculum-accused-harming-pupils-permanently/?action=add_comment Neil Mackay, Scottish school curriculum accused of ‘permanently’ harming pupils. 12/01/25

https://thecritic.co.uk/we-need-higher-standards-for-academic-writing/ Ian Pace, We need higher standards for academic writing. Confused thinking and confusing prose has led to a reversible decline. 09/01/25

https://archive.is/fwtgG Hadley Freeman, Yes, I’m easily distracted. No, I don’t have ADHD. Middle-aged people like to have a label to blame. But life’s not that simple. 12/01/25

Reading: Liberal Education and the National Curriculum

Toby Marshall, Reading: Liberal Education and the National Curriculum. 10/01/25

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