Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No4
Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No4
Newsletter Themes: Nicola’s terrible legacy, access to higher education, and parent power in the USA
Following the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, the media has given coverage to the failings of the Scottish education system. At SUE we want to seize this opportunity to push for more public discussion on education and policy. If you want to participate in that debate, why not organise a public meeting in your school or local area? SUE members would be happy to come along and speak.
In this week’s newsletter two articles look at the legacy of Nicola’s term as First Minister: Stuart Waiton reflects on the shift in schools’ attitudes towards parents in the wake of the Scottish government’s attempt to introduce the Named Person scheme and Carlton Brick discusses the underfunding of the higher education sector.
The final article, by Nancy McDermott, an author and parent activist in the USA, explains how the culture in American schools has shifted since the COVID pandemic and the election of Joe Biden. Nancy is speaking at a special SUE live event on Thursday 2 March at 7 p.m. Book tickets here.
Sturgeon’s legacy: Undermining parents
Stuart Waiton is Chair of the Scottish Union for Education
When accounting for Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy, one aspect that should not be forgotten is that she was a pioneer in the criminalisation and monitoring of parents. Remember the Named Person scheme? It was a major plank of policy until it was blocked by the No To Named Persons (NO2NP) campaign in 2016, but many people know nothing about it.
The SNP has come to rely on the promotion of Scottish independence as a way to win elections with an electorate who, in my opinion, are often understandably disillusioned with politics. Once elected, however, it is back to business as usual, and members of the party that claims to be all about the people go back to their committee rooms and their professional friends to devise new laws and practices that demonstrate a deep distrust of this electorate in general and parents in particular.
The Named Person scheme was already on the statute books as part of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 when Sturgeon took over the leadership of the SNP. As part of the Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) framework, this new initiative was to create a Named Person or a state guardian for every child in Scotland. The Named Person was to be a key professional who dealt with children. Initially this would be a health visitor, then a nursery leader, then the headteacher of a school and so on, until adulthood.
What was key to this development was not only the Named Person but that every professional who had any dealings with children was to be trained as a safe guarder, a person who would watch out for any problems of childhood ‘wellbeing’, and to then record this concern on a database that other professionals could access.
The importance of this new policy cannot be underestimated, because it moved Scottish society away from an approach based on welfare, that focused on intervening in families only when there is a serious risk to a child, to one that opened the door to a more intensive state surveillance of households. Lynne Wrennal argued that ‘The term “Child at risk” used to mean, at risk of abuse or neglect, but it has now been redefined to mean, a child at risk of not meeting the government’s objectives for children’ (Wrennall, 2010 , p. 310).
Use of Named Persons was to be a systematic approach to gathering data on children and families, all to protect the ‘wellbeing’ of children. One problem with this was that the definition of wellbeing was so broad as to encompass almost anything – one leaflet produced at the time even suggested that not consulting with a child about the decoration of his or her bedroom could be considered a wellbeing concern.
The obvious danger was that rather than discovering the small number of children who needed serious help, the net was widened to such a degree as to incorporate almost every child and every parent in the framework of safeguarding. What this scheme did was to cement an approach to all families based on the prism of risk and abuse. Coupled with the modern belief that all children are profoundly vulnerable, this focus meant that the scope for professional intervention was extensive and extraordinary.
Thankfully, the NO2NP campaign (the Christian Institute funded a legal challenge to the scheme, and key individuals such as Maggie Mellon, Lesley Scott and Alison Preuss campaigned to highlight the dangers of the policy) stopped the data-sharing dimension of the initiative. However, the motivation behind the act and the spirit in which it was introduced remains to this day.
Supported by the Greens, the Scottish government’s next step was to criminalise parents who smack their children. Hard smacking was already illegal in Scotland, so this new law was created to stop the lightest of smacks. You don’t have to be a fan of smacking to think that arresting loving parents who lightly smack a child’s hand or bottom is wrong, and I joined the Be Reasonable campaign to prevent this law.
All sorts of reasons and justifications are given for laws such as this. The legal campaigners talk about evidence of trauma and abuse from receiving a smack, any smack, no matter how hard or soft or how frequent.
In the process, parents are represented as abusers of their own children. But when you argue with these campaigners there is something else going on: a type of moralising based on a distrust of – or even a contempt for – ordinary people, often by middle-class professionals who have become the new safety snobs of our time.
How many parents will be arrested under this new law is yet to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the authority and autonomy of families is being undermined and that we are creating a society where loving parents must look over their shoulders and may come to view professionals and teachers with suspicion and fear.
Nicola Sturgeon was a master at presenting herself as the woman of the people. She was also highly adept at presenting a ‘progressive’, caring image of modern politics. But make no mistake, this caring approach is part of a new brand of authoritarianism that aims to protect all from all, and to monitor parents in a manner that threatens family life. Indeed, part of the ruling against the Named Person in the UK Supreme Court stated that:
‘The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world’.
Whatever your view of independence, we should all be clear that when it comes to ordinary people who are attempting to raise their children as best as they can, for Sturgeon the idea of their being able to do so independently could not be countenanced. Trust in parents was replaced by a belief that an army of professionals was needed to watch over our children in a manner more suited to a totalitarian regime.
A two-tier university system
Carlton Brick is a sociology lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland
During her resignation speech, Nicola Sturgeon admitted that she had become a divisive figure in Scottish politics. Many commentators have pointed to a long legacy of policy and manifesto failures. The crisis in the NHS, growing economic inequality, and record numbers of drug deaths have all dogged Sturgeon’s tenure as First Minister. However, one ‘success’ she has been keen to trumpet is the SNP’s commitment to Scottish higher education, and in particular widening student participation and free tuition fees.
Since 2008 the Scottish government has provided free tuition for Scottish-domiciled and EU students attending Scottish universities. However, despite being a celebrated cornerstone of government policy, Scotland’s higher education sector is in crisis and faces an unprecedented financial meltdown. Scottish students pay the heaviest price of all.
The current Scottish government has overseen a period of marked underfunding in the higher education sector. Far from widening participation, the Scottish government’s no tuition fees policy, together with continual disinvestment, has created a two-tier system of provision which treats Scottish students as second-class citizens and actively penalises Scottish universities for recruiting them. Under the SNP’s watch, the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) has reduced its grant to the sector by 7% between 2014–15 and 2017–18, a whopping £91 million. Audit Scotland suggests that when considering reductions over the past seven years, in real terms Government funding to the Scottish university sector has been reduced by 12%. Even these figures do not take into account the fact that government strategic funding has also been cut by 46% in real terms between 2014–15 and 2017–18, representing an additional cut of £32 million within the sector.
These cuts have been exacerbated by government limits on ‘free’ places via the imposition of a ‘cap’ to prevent universities relying on government funding under the ‘no fees’ regime. This cap requires Scottish universities to limit the number of Scottish students that they can recruit to their undergraduate degrees and was introduced to keep government funding of free places to a minimum. The government imposes financial penalties on those universities that do not adhere to the cap.
As a result, more than half of Scottish universities are now in financial deficit. There are, of course, some notable exceptions; financial surpluses are disproportionately concentrated in three of Scotland’s elite universities (Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews). Those in deficit, such as the University of the West of Scotland (UWS), are the very institutions now dependent on recruiting Scottish students. For the academic year 2017–18, UWS had an operating deficit of £3.3 million, a 3% increase on its deficit for the previous academic year. Eighty per cent of full-time UWS undergraduates are drawn from some of Scotland’s most deprived areas.
Government funding accounts for 56% of Scotland’s non-elite universities’ income – the most significant proportion of this being the SFC ‘funding’ of Scottish residents and EU places.
In 2015 Audit Scotland reported that only one-fifth of applicants who attended the elite Edinburgh and St Andrews universities came from Scotland. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service reports that for 2018–19 the number of Scottish students attending Scottish universities has declined by 4% compared with 2017–18. This has been a protracted trend. Since 2010 the proportion of offers to Scottish students from Scottish universities has fallen. Apparently one in five Scottish students did not receive an offer from a Scottish university in 2015. In contrast, offer rates to the rest of the UK (RUK) and international students have increased on average by 11% between 2010 and 2015.
Under the current funding regime, Scottish universities are forced to increase income by targeting RUK and international students. It will come as no surprise that the income from RUK students has increased by £68 million (66%) since 2014–15. Over the same period, income from international students has increased by £148 million (31%) since 2014–15. The elite Scottish universities have benefited most from this market, accounting for 66% of the overall increase in fee income across the whole sector from the same undergraduate market.
So many Scottish students end up either in clearing or at those very universities whose lack of access to RUK and international markets exacerbates the already widening inequalities caused by government policy. It is testament to the faux nature of the SNP’s apparent egalitarianism that those universities most affected by the funding gap are those same institutions trying to widen participation within Scotland. UWS is the sector leader in widening participation in Scotland, with 80% of its Scottish undergraduate full-time intake drawn from Scotland’s most economically deprived areas. This is not that surprising given that its campuses are situated in some of the poorest areas in Scotland; its Paisley campus is a stone’s throw from Ferguslie Park, one of the most deprived regions in Europe. Sixty per cent of UWS income is generated through SFC grants for student places – the second highest in Scotland. Only 18% of Edinburgh income, and 15% of St Andrews income, comes from SFC grants.
Government-funded places have become the single largest source of income for most Scottish universities. Scottish government–funded fees for Scottish and EU students are notoriously inadequate. At £1820 per academic year, they pale in comparison with the average fees Scottish universities can now charge undergraduates from RUK (£9250) and international students (£10,000 to £26,000) per year. The recruitment cap and the enormous income discrepancy between fees implicitly discriminates against those Scottish students the policy purports to be helping, because it both limits the numbers who can get into university and effectively limits the universities they can attend.
Recent developments suggest things are only going to get worse for the majority of those in non-compulsory education in Scotland. The move to wholesale online delivery during the COVID pandemic and the sectors reluctance to engage positively with the consequences of Brexit are impacting negatively across the sector.
Owing to the fragile character of the international student market, Scotland’s elite universities are now turning their attention to a pool of Scottish students they would otherwise largely ignore. Institutions such as Glasgow University are now recruiting Scottish students using ‘widening participation’ criteria. This academic year, Edinburgh University chose to only accept students from deprived backgrounds onto its law course.
This shift has also seen a notable redefinition of the concept social mobility. Increasingly, the sectors definition of ‘widening participation’ has become less about students from economic and socially deprived backgrounds and much more about students who take ‘non-traditional’ pathways into university education, i.e. via further education colleges rather than straight from school.
Speaking to colleagues in further education, they tell of real recruitment problems as intake numbers have decreased dramatically this year. Similarly, the programmes I teach at UWS have taken a significant hit. As institutions such as Glasgow University reintegrate themselves within the ‘domestic’ Scottish student market, this will only serve to deepen the crisis across the sector.
The Scottish government’s commitment to free tuition requires urgent review because university teaching and research have become subordinate to chasing income from markets that the vast majority of Scottish universities cannot access. Scotland higher education leaders need to step up to the plate; although many university chancellors, vice-chancellors and principals will privately acknowledge the gravity of problem, they seem less inclined to do so in public, instead pointing the finger at Brexit and the COVID pandemic. Such arguments are little more than an apology for SNP policy. Universities Scotland, the representative body of Scotland’s 19 universities, has openly acknowledged that the current funding arrangements are woefully inadequate yet do little to oppose the SNP’s policies on fees and funding.
Scottish universities should be allowed to compete for students as equals with other UK universities, and Scottish-domiciled students should no longer be considered the second-class citizens in the two-tier system of education that government has created. Scottish policy punishes its own young people, and especially those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Far from the success she claims it to be, Sturgeon’s legacy in this area has been an unmitigated disaster and will have long-term consequences.
Parent Power in the USA
Nancy McDermott is author of The Problem with Parenting: how raising children is changing across America (Praeger, 2020)
When in August 2019 The New York Times, launched the 1619 Project, an attempt to reimagine the history of the United States as a cynical exercise in the perpetuation of slavery and white power, many Americans were aghast. It was not just the arrogance of the paper that was disturbing but the fact that the project’s centerpiece was a slickly produced curriculum for K-12 schools (kindergarten to 12th grade schooling). This was probably the first time that parents began to suspect that something was going on in their children’s schools. Until then most Americans believed that social justice activism and critical race theory (CRT) was an issue in colleges, not at the local elementary school. Teaching impressionable children that the colour of their skin is more important than the content of their character is contrary to many Americans’ core beliefs. No doubt many parents breathed a sigh of relief when their local schools declined to adopt the 1619 curriculum. What they discovered when the COVID pandemic kept their children at home, was that CRT was already taught in the classroom and it had been for decades. Over the next two years, parents increasingly found themselves as odds with their children’s schools and with state and national authorities.
First, the pandemic left families scrambling to adjust to working from home while trying to keep their children engaged in remote learning. Then the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 marked another turning point. What began as universal horror at a brutal murder by Minneapolis police soon turned into something else; Americans watched in bewilderment as a vast array of institution from state legislatures to the Boy Scouts of America used Floyd’s murder as a prompt to focus their attention on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Corporations donated millions to Black Lives Matter and vowed to atone for their real or imagined complicity in white supremacy.
Cities such as New York and Chicago, which had been strictly enforcing COVID closures and social distancing, turned a blind eye to large demonstrations. Police stood by as rioters looted and burned shops and businesses. Perhaps the most shocking thing for parents was the response of their children’s schools, who dedicated themselves to making children ‘do the work’.
Students were forced to engage in CRT exercises that separated students into oppressors or the oppressed based on their skin colour. Across the country, parents watched over their children’s shoulders as schools began presenting every subject through a ‘race lens’. Oregon’s Education Department toolkit for teachers declared that focusing on ‘the right answer’ in a maths class is an example of ‘white supremacy culture’. A Californian elementary school forced nine-year-olds to deconstruct their racial identities and to rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege’. One New York City principal explained the school’s mission to create ‘white traitors’ who would advocate for ‘white abolition’.
When Joe Biden was elected President in November 2020, gender too became an issue. From the moment he arrived in the White House, he began issuing executive orders and directing government agencies to find ways to promote gender ideology ‘in the classroom, on the playing field, at work, in our military, in our housing and healthcare systems’ (New York Post, 22/02/23). Children as young as five were told that their parents might have got their sex wrong, that they might be a boy or a girl, both or neither. Schools encouraged students to declare their pronouns (even before they learned to read) and to share their gender identity. When parents objected, school districts denied that they were doing anything out of the ordinary.
When it comes to juggling their jobs and their kid’s schedules, parents in the US are well organised, but political organisation does not come naturally. Although national organisations such as Parents Defending Education, Parents Unite (mostly private schools), Moms for Liberty and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) have sprung up, this parents’ ‘movement’ is extremely local. Parents tend to organise around a particular school district or individual school and are responding to whatever issue feels the most urgent: masks, vaccine mandates, CRT or gender ideology.
Some have voted with their feet, leaving the public schools, enrolling their kids in charter schools, home schooling them, or moving to a state such as Florida that protects parents’ rights. All this makes it very difficult to get out in front of the issues and make real headway. In contrast, the proponents of CRT and gender ideology in schools are highly organised, powerful, and effective. To understand what parents are up against, it is worth looking at the state of Virginia, which some consider the ‘epicenter’ of the parents’ rights movement.
Virginia is one of the two states bordering on the nation’s capital in Washington DC and is home to some of the nation’s most powerful government agencies including the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon as well as countless defence contractors, policy thinktanks, foundations, and NGOs. Although a historically conservative state, the Washington DC suburbs in the northern part of the state have grown progressively more liberal.
Voting patterns have shifted so that the Democratic Party dominates northern Virginia, and the Republicans control the rest of the state. Until 2019 local elections were regarded as an afterthought; few people followed them and even fewer voted in them.
In 2019 Democratic governor Ralph Northam became embroiled in a scandal over a photograph from his 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook. It showed two men, one in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The governor claimed not to be either one of the men but sheepishly admitted to darkening his skin to look like Michael Jackson in a dance competition. There were protests and calls for his resignation, but instead of resigning he engaged in some political horse trading with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Overnight he went from being a middle-of-the road politician to a progressive champion, passing laws to tighten gun laws, to abolish the death penalty, and to legalese marijuana. More significantly for parents, he appointed woke educators to important posts in the state’s Education Department.
Around the same time, Democrat activists with the backing of the local party machine gained a foothold on local school boards.
Once upon a time, these organisations were bipartisan, peopled by parents or other civic-minded locals.
By the 2019 election, candidates had only the shallowest connection with the local area. In Fairfax County, 10 of the 12 existing school board members didn’t even have children in the local schools. Eventually, even the two candidates with kids in the schools (Republicans) were ousted by candidates who made up for their lack of local knowledge with progressive credentials (they were LBGTQIA+ activists, environmentalists and ‘anti-racists’).
Once they were elected, they began working hand-in-glove with Northam appointees to the Education Department to remake K-12 education by shifting the focus from education to identity and social justice. The same happened across all seven school districts in Northern Virginia.
In all the counties, Loudoun stood out because it aggressively pursued a woke agenda, introducing children to CRT and gender identity ideology over the heads of parents. School board meetings became national news, with scenes of pitched battled between parents and school board members over ideology, closures and mask mandates. One of the most enduring images came when Scott Smith, father of a high-school student, was wrestled to the ground by police and arrested. Smith was angry that school officials had remained silent about the rape of his daughter in the girls’ toilet by a ‘gender-fluid’ teenaged boy wearing a skirt. It later emerged that school officials knew of the assault but chose to move the boy to another school because publicity might derail their efforts to enact a new transgender bathroom policy. The boy promptly assaulted a second girl.
The fallout from this dispute and others led to a stunning upset in the election of Virginia’s governor (November 2021) when voters chose Republican Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe, Democrat and former governor. McAuliffe made the mistake of responding to parents attempts to remove sexually explicit books from the school library by opining, ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’. Parents were not impressed. Youngkin, who believes in ‘parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions with regards to their child’s upbringing and care’, won a resounding victory.
However, if parents thought the tide was turning, they were soon disappointed. Even with the most powerful elected official on their side, the state department of education, school boards and teachers’ unions continued to defy parents’ wishes. When the governor issued an executive order leaving the decision of whether to mask up to parents, all seven school districts in northern Virginia schools refused to comply until they forced to do so when a new state law was passed. In December, parents learned that several districts had withheld notifications of National Merit Awards (for outstanding academic achievement) for two years in the name of ‘equal outcomes’.
When Governor Youngkin nominated Suparna Dutta, a Fairfax County parent who cofounded the parents’ group, to the Virginia Board of Education, Democrats blocked her appointment. Just last week, Virginia’s largest teachers’ union, the Virginia Education Association, distributed a Black Lives Matter toolkit to help teach students ‘principles’ including ‘transgender affirming’, ‘queer affirming’, ‘restorative justice’, and ‘globalism’.
If the experience of the past few years shows us anything, it is that woke indoctrination in schools is like a hydra. Just when parents think they have defeated a policy or exposed an unfair practice, new initiatives appear. The irony is that outside of the rarefied world of America’s elite, there is little support for what schools are doing. Parents gaining support in high places is a good start. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has acted decisively to curb the teaching of gender ideology in K-12 schools and is experimenting with ways to crack down on DEI bureaucrats without impacting academic freedom in higher education. But that on its own is not enough. Taking back education will take collaboration between like-minded teachers, parents and students who are tired of being taught what to think. Leadership is the most difficult challenge.
By taking over the Democratic Party, progressive activists benefit from a national reach, political influence, and deep pockets. Republicans aspire to be the party of parents but tend towards illiberal solutions, such as banning CRT, that are unlikely to work and are, more importantly, alien to America’s democratic ideals.
At a time when cynicism about politics is at its worst, these ideals of democracy, equality, freedom, and the political legacies of Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr, provide hope. These traditions, when coupled with our deep commitment to new generations, make it possible to transform our fight from individual resistance into a movement of citizens to restore this birthright to our children and all who come after them.
Nancy is speaking at a special SUE live event on Thursday 2 March at 7 p.m. Book tickets here.
News Round-up
https://lnkd.in/ezizgAkb Harley Richardson on the philosophical roots of education for the under-7’s. 21/02/2023
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-metoo-fallout-is-wrecking-the-lives-of-schoolboys-lkblpkw35 Sian Griffiths, Why MeToo fallout is wrecking the lives of schoolboys. ‘Ahead of a new TV drama about consent, experts say an “excessive” crackdown leads to pupils being shunned or expelled.’ 05/02/23
https://unherd.com/2023/02/scotland-turns-on-gender-ideology/ Freddie Sayers, Scotland turns on gender ideology. ‘Our polling reveals Scottish voters are the most trans-skeptical.’ 10/02/23
https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/naomi-cunningham-gwyneth-king-fights-an-army-of-straw-women-and-wins Naomi Cunningham, Gwyneth King fights an army of straw (wo)men and wins. ‘In her piece on media coverage of the Scottish government’s proposed gender-recognition reform (1 February 2023), Gwyneth King criticises those who have pointed out that women’s organisations which signed a statement in support of the Scottish government’s policy are recipients of substantial financial support from the Scottish government.’ 08/02/23
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0732118X2300003X Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews, ‘Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis’. April 23
https://unherd.com/2023/02/nicola-sturgeon-is-rewriting-history/ Kathleen Stock, Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history. ‘She purged reason from the gender debate.’ 17/02/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/23268235.anti-terf-misogyny-contaminated-snp/ Kevin McKenna piece contextualising the SNP’s legislature programme and its illiberalism. 23/01/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23298832.letting-scotlands-children-discipline/ Herald view, We are letting Scotland's children down on discipline. 04/02/23
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4729575-gender-ideology-in-schools Carolyn Brown, ‘Gender Ideology & the Gender Recognition Reform Bill: A Perfect Scottish Storm: What Parents Need to Know’. 27/01/23
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