Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No75
Newsletter Themes: why education is not an issue in the election, and a summary of political parties’ views on education
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Why is education not an election issue in Scotland?
Stuart Waiton is Chair of SUE.
The fact that education is a devolved issue, and therefore arguably more of an issue for Holyrood rather than Westminster elections, is one of the more understandable reasons why it has not become a key talking point in the run up to 4 July. However, one would have thought that parties vying against the SNP for votes would use the fact that education standards in Scotland are in freefall and suffering from a ‘dire downward trend’.
After all, it’s not as if the education of the next generation of children is unimportant, or that the £116 billion spent on it across the UK is insignificant. The idea that all aspiring children must go to university has become an established norm over the past few decades, and half a million enrol every year. Indeed, it would be hard to find a single politician who, when asked, does not celebrate the importance of education, but as Peter Lampl noted recently, across the UK, it has ‘fallen off a cliff in terms of its political saliency’.
In the fifties and sixties, education became a significant issue, not least because it was seen as a key tool with which to help create a more egalitarian society. Creating a comprehensive school system, it was argued, would overcome the discrimination faced by working-class children. The Labour Party’s 1964 election manifesto promised ‘a revolution in our educational system’, and there were heated parliamentary debates over the subsequent years about how best to develop education in the UK. By 1966, with another election on the horizon, the Labour manifesto included a section entitled Educational Opportunities for All, with talk of ‘giving the highest possible standards to all children’. This was a time, Derek Gillard argues, when ‘it seems fair to suggest that the word which best sums up education in the UK in the 1960s is optimism’.
If we jump forward to what came to be called New Labour, in the 1990s and 2000s, we find another apparent rebirth in the political interest in education and a seemingly similar concern with egalitarian outcomes in the talk about the need for ‘inclusion’. Launching Labour’s education manifesto, Tony Blair explained that his party’s ‘top priority was, is and always will be education, education, education. To overcome decades of neglect and make Britain a learning society, developing the talents and raising the ambitions of all our young people’.
There is a certain irony that despite the shouting of the word ‘education’ within this new slogan, actual education, the thing that most of us think about when we hear the word, was in fact undermined by what was to come. This is of significance for Scotland as well as the UK generally, because in 2010 the Curriculum for Excellence was launched, a curriculum that reflected much of the Blairite approach, and one that was described by Professor Lindsay Paterson as having a curiously Orwellian name because it was neither a curriculum nor about excellence.
Paterson has been a shining light in Scotland when it comes to explaining what is going wrong. Key to his concerns is the understanding that education as a knowledge- and subject-based discipline is being lost, as a consequence of having been undermined by ‘progressives’.
Frank Furedi, in his book Wasted: Why education isn’t educating, explains that the progressive approach to education has long roots dating back to the nineteenth century, but that the problems in education have become exacerbated in recent years as it has come to be used for almost anything and everything other than education.
For decades, he notes, politicians, rather than recognising the importance of knowledge as a thing in itself and understanding the need to pass from the past to the present generation the best that has been thought and said, have been looking to education to solve all sorts of adult/political problems. As a result, education comes to be not about education but about the economy, or about multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion and emotional awareness.
In Scotland, Paterson notes that ‘There is no recognition in the curriculum [in Scotland] of a canon of necessary ideas or practices – no acknowledgement of any kind of theoretical framework that might give coherence to each curricular subject’.
Examining the Blair years, Emily Hill identified aspects of the changing nature of education, where schools, having lost their ethos of a knowledge-based education, increasingly became places preoccupied with the private and personal lives and outlooks of young people via the new Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning scheme (SEAL). Attitudes around racism and the environment now needed to be taught and incorporated into a whole school approach, one that turned teachers into joint ‘learners’, all on a journey to focus on the ‘whole child’. In the process, progressives looked to education as a means by which to enlighten not only children but also their parents, as Blair explained, for example, when he argued that ‘on climate change, it is parents who should listen to children’ (Furedi 2009, p. 112).
Teachers were now expected to act as a cross between a therapist and a bureaucrat, as league tables, targets and tick boxes became the mechanism through which a school’s success was judged. Additionally, schools and universities became places where the idea of education was again transformed through a preoccupation with ‘types of learning’ and what was called ‘learning to learn’. New faddish ‘techniques of learning’ flooded into schools and universities, and consultants lined their pockets by providing the latest programme that promised to ‘transform education’.
Out went the focus on knowledge, subjects, and an understanding of culture and of ‘being cultured’, and in came what Tom Bennett (2013) calls ‘voodoo teaching’. There is no evidence, he notes – literally none – that demonstrates that trying to teach different ways of learning (visual learning, auditory learning, tactile [hands-on] learning) has any effect at all. Likewise, he notes that the idea that we should teach children how to learn to learn (literally learning about the process of learning rather than actually being taught and therefore learning actual stuff – knowledge, facts, ideas and theories) is based on a complete lack of evidence of the effectiveness of such an approach. Worse than this absence of evidence, he argues, is the fact that the very idea of ‘learning to learn’ has no coherence whatsoever. Different advocates of this approach have contradictory explanations of what it means, and there is no clear definition of what it is. Regardless, it is everywhere in education, and new ‘experts’ replace the old, with their own definitions and ideas, none of which have improved educational outcomes.
And, of course, we have the problem that education is being politicised in completely the wrong way. Rather than there being a discussion and debate among politicians about the ideals of education and how best to achieve them, we find that politics has entered the classroom, and trainee teachers in Scotland are likely to find that one of the few textbooks they are expected to read is dedicated to social justice and promises to ‘help teachers [...] bring about constructive change’.
Here we find not only a problem of political indoctrination in schools but also the fact that built into the social justice ethos (one that has been adopted by education authorities and ‘experts’) is an implicit, and sometimes explicit, condemnation of almost all forms of knowledge because they are understood to carry within them the prejudices and ‘power’ of the past – of ‘whiteness’ and ‘heteronormativity’. No surprise then to find philosophy courses developing in universities that reject the need to teach the best that has been thought and said in the form of the work of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates – founding fathers of Western philosophy – because they are ‘dead white men’. Or that exams themselves have come to be seen by some social justice activist academics as racist because they are apparently built on ‘colonial practice’ and ‘linguistic imperialism’.
These may be extreme examples, but they are extremes of a continuum of an approach to education that fetishises the ideas of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. Once established (and they are very much established in Scottish education), this politicisation of diversity has the effect of creating a climate of intolerance – antithetical to that of an open, enlightened and liberal education system – one in which open debate and discussion is stamped down on (as expelled schoolboy Murray Allan found to his cost when arguing that there are only two genders [or sexes]).
Once embedded, this ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ form of education results in the creation of educational dogmas; in this environment, certain ideas must be adopted, and those who question these ideas or ideologies are shunned, condemned and silenced with talk of how their viewpoints are a form of violence against ‘vulnerable groups’. This is illustrated by a Tweet this month, from a school in Edinburgh, that portrays concerns about the promotion of transgender ideology within the Pride celebrations as obstructing efforts to save the lives of ‘queer kids’.
It is important to note here that the landmark Cass Review found rates of suicidality in gender-questioning young people to be similar to those in non–trans-identifying young people referred to child and adolescent mental health services, and that ‘the evidence does not adequately support the claim that gender-affirming treatment reduces suicide risk’ (p. 187). Further information is available here.
Tragically, and perhaps explaining the key reason that there is no debate about education, especially in Scotland, we find that all the political parties endorsed the Curriculum for Excellence. Some Conservative MSPs insist that they are different and believe in the need for a knowledge-based approach, but as Paterson notes, ‘The SNP, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens may now argue vociferously over whether the curriculum is a beacon of progressive ideas or an under-funded shambles, but they are all responsible for its existing at all’. Additionally, he notes:
The consensus extends also to every vested interest in Scottish education. The teacher trade unions have signed up to it so enthusiastically that they have been represented on its management board. The local authorities, responsible for managing public-sector schools, offered no dissent. The universities officially accepted the ideas uncritically, with their teacher-education faculties notably enthusiastic.
The reality is that there is no political discussion about education because the ‘progressive’, ‘inclusive’, ‘diverse’, ‘learning to learn’, voodoo education has been all but accepted by our entire political class.
References
Furedi F. 2010. Wasted: Why education isn’t educating. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Bennett T. 2013. Teacher Proof: Why research in education doesn’t always mean what it claims, and what you can do about it. London: Routledge.
Don’t Divide Us – online event
A fine state we’re in – General election 2024 – what’s on offer?
Friday, June 28 · 8:30 - 9:45pm CEST
Tickets free but must register in advance.
What the mainstream political parties are saying – and not saying – about education
Julie Sandilands is SUE’s education correspondent. She is an English and business teacher who worked in several secondary schools in Fife until 2017.
Julie Sandilands has summarised (With commentary and criticism of the SNP - criticism that could be levelled at many of the other political parties whose polices we simply list here) what the mainstream political parties are saying, or rather, not saying, about education. Here we find many technical ideas, as well as, for some, a further endorsement of the politicisation of education. The Reform Party and Alba are not listed here, and they do arguably, at the very least, offer a critique of some of the indoctrination taking place in schools.
The Scottish Nationalist Party: just more of the same madness ... and then some more!
Funding
Raise the school starting age to six years by increasing early learning and childcare provision and replace learning time for foundational skills and knowledge with play-based learning, which means that children could be even further behind at all phases, and result in one less school year for pupils who leave at 16.
Continue to spend shedloads (tens of millions) of taxpayers’ money on advisory panels, committees, taskforces and activist organisations to advise on all aspects of education.
Creation of a Centre of Teaching Excellence to complement the Curriculum for Excellence, which operates really well in the SNP parallel universe now that the definition of ‘excellence’ has been established in said universe.
Continue to declare progress in closing the attainment gap despite not publishing any robust evidence, relying instead on internal decision-making processes.
Curriculum
Decolonise the curriculum and rewrite history, biology, etc. whenever necessary to ensure continuation of indoctrination and the unequivocal acceptance from both staff and students of current narrative.
Embed critical race theory, gender ideology, sexual orientation, the hate monster and environment alarmism into every aspect of the curriculum, sacrificing valuable teaching time to academic or vocational subject delivery while at the same time increasing confusion, dissatisfaction and poor mental health.
Publish (imminently) decisions on changes to the curriculum and the assessment framework following the Hayward Review, which could result in fewer formal examinations in all phases of the Curriculum for Excellence, including senior phase, while maintaining that the changes will improve standards and outcomes.
Initial teacher education
Continue to radicalise and indoctrinate the teaching profession through initial teacher education and headship qualification.
Managing students with one or more additional support need
Continue to ignore concerns over the rising number of pupils with an additional support need (ASN), and the recording and reporting processes for ASNs, as well as the associated real impacts on standards, final destinations and teacher numbers.
School ethos and expectations
Create an independent inspectorate with success indicators based on new ideologies requiring that schools and education be repurposed for social engineering, as dictated by activist minority groups funded by the Scottish government.
Continue to radicalise and indoctrinate staff, who actually trained as teachers, to climb aboard the SNP battleship and become virtue-signalling culture warriors.
Continue to ignore rising absence rates and levels of violence leading to teachers leaving the profession in droves. Note that at the final Teacher Panel meeting in March 2023, before it was disbanded, the first item on the agenda was ‘behaviour/violence in schools and its effect on staff workload and mental health’. However, ‘the panel noted and discussed the negative sway of certain social media influencers (e.g. Andrew Tate) which are likely to be driving challenges with behaviour in schools’, not the absence of personal responsibility or a robust behaviour management policy. Therefore, any criticism to this blind-eye approach should be treated as a ‘hate crime’, blamed on Andrew Tate, and reported to Police Scotland.
Scottish Labour’s Education Recovery Plan
Funding
Enhance digital training for staff and will offer digital devices to all pupils in Scotland.
Will restore teacher numbers, increasing them by 3000 over the course of the parliament, with a proportionate increase in support staff, and ensure that resourcing provided to schools to tackle the attainment gap, such as Attainment Scotland Funding, truly funds evidence-based interventions.
Introduce a programme of personal tutoring which is open to pupils of all ages and financed with funding provided in addition to existing education budgets. It will be led and resourced nationally, with delivery by local authorities.
Will end all public sector support for fee-paying private schools, implementing the recommendations made by the Barclay Review to end their charitable status for rates relief.
Curriculum
Will scrap Scottish National Standardised Assessments for all age groups: P1, P4, P7 and S3.
A comprehensive review of the Curriculum for Excellence, including broad general education and the senior phase. A key part of this review must be the inclusion and expansion of vocational education in school settings.
Will establish catch-up clubs during the summer holidays, with free meals.
Will also guarantee that every primary and secondary school pupil has at least one week away at an outdoor centre, as well as increasing support for outdoor skills training.
Will strengthen life skills education, including the ‘Unions into Schools’ programme, emotional learning, and cooperative models, and enable the climate change emergency to be addressed in the curriculum.
Every pupil in Scotland should have a Personal Comeback Plan (PCP) based on an individual needs assessment, with resources directed at those most at risk of long-term disengagement due to lockdown.
Initial teacher education
Implement a guaranteed completion opportunity for probationary teachers to ensure they can gain registration and refresh our workforce.
Managing students with one or more additional support need
ASN pupils should also receive a PCP; there is an urgent need for further ASN resources across the country. PCPs should be combined with a mental health assessment for every pupil and support for counselling as part of our broader strategy to improve mental health services.
Will increase ASN staffing, with more support staff and at least 1000 additional specialist teachers available across Scotland’s schools.
The Scottish government and each education authority should have an inclusion strategy in line with the UN Committee’s advice on the Rights of People with Disabilities.
School ethos and expectations
Nothing as yet.
Scottish Conservatives’ Restore Scotland’s Schools
Funding
Would deliver 3000 more teaching places. This would help overworked teachers and improve subject choice while also reducing class sizes.
Would want to establish a Rural Teacher Fund to attract great teachers to live and work in rural areas of Scotland.
Allocate £1 billion of attainment funding directly to schools to help close the gap between richer and poorer pupils.
Set up a £35 million national tutoring programme to provide one-to-one or small-group tuition for children who need the most help to catch up after the pandemic.
Curriculum
Would introduce a dedicated STEM teacher in every primary school.
Return Scotland’s traditional and strong exam system.
Would bring in a subject guarantee so that all pupils have the opportunity to take at least seven subjects in S4.
Would ensure pupils are taught basic life skills such as personal finance, how to buy or rent a home, and how utilities operate, and ensure that every child is given one-to-one careers advice.
Ensure that all young people between 12 and 16 years of age have the opportunity to experience at least one week of residential outdoor education.
Replace the current school leaving age of 16 with a new skills-participation age of 18 and introduce paid internships for every S4 pupils so that there is a focus on long-term employability.
Initial teacher education
Nothing as yet.
Managing students with one or more additional support need
Nothing as yet.
School ethos and expectations
Establish a new school inspector, independent of government, to improve school standards.
Scottish Liberal Democrats’ Fair Deal for Education
Funding
Increase per-pupil school and college funding above the rate of inflation every year and extend free school meals to all children in poverty.
Offer families the right to defer entry into P1 and have it replaced with funded early learning and childcare this August, removing the £4500 price tag that hangs over parents in many areas.
Will pay a new ‘teacher premium’ supplement for schools in disadvantaged areas, and agree new, optional, three-year packages for probationer teachers to help local authorities get staff to take up posts in particular geographical areas.
Will reward them with a fresh review of working conditions, non-contact time, routes to promotion, and pay to attract and retain the best recruits to the profession. This is equivalent to a second McCrone commission that we hope will match in its impact its forebear of 20 years ago.
Curriculum
Play-based education until age 7 to give our children a flying start, based on the Nordic model, and ask the inspectorate to assess how well we respond to the needs of children with English as a second language, and make them eligible for Pupil Equity Funding.
Fully implement the recommendations of the LGBTI Inclusive Education Working Group, underpinned by new statutory guidance on the conduct of relationships, sexual health and parenthood education for schools, with a guarantee that every school pupil has at least one week away at an outdoor centre.
An immediate term-time expansion of outdoor learning and increased provision of residential outdoor education to engage children and boost mental health through experiences that can prove life-changing, and increase understanding of the climate emergency.
Increase the capacity of schools to teach about the climate emergency by increasing the support given in initial teacher training and providing additional subject-specific materials.
Integrate civil and citizenship education into the current curriculum, including financial education, and teaching about relationships and diversity, and make sure that we learn the lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement by changing the way we teach history to include a wider perspective on empire, slavery, and Scottish and British involvement in them.
Initial teacher education
Nothing as yet.
Managing students with one or more additional support need
Put a dedicated, qualified mental health professional in every school so all children and parents can access support. We’ve already taken steps to achieve this, with Munira Wilson MP submitting her Schools’ Mental Health Bill in January.
Tackle the crisis in special educational needs provision by giving additional funding to local authorities, reducing the amount schools pay towards a child’s Education Health and Care Plan.
School ethos and expectations
Nothing as yet.
Scottish Greens’ Our Common Future
Funding
We will introduce statutory guidance on school uniforms which prioritises cost reduction, ensures overall spending limits, and prohibits exclusivity agreements with suppliers.
We will recruit 5500 additional permanent teachers, an increase of 10%, and reduce class sizes to a maximum of 20 pupils and lower teachers’ class contact time to 20 hours per week to ensure that they have the time to prepare high-quality lessons.
Ensure that schools have resources available to support the creation of independent Pupil Unions so that young people can have their voices heard in education.
Deliver free school meals all year round for all pupils, and introduce universal breakfast clubs. All schools will be supported to provide a free breakfast to those who want or need it, and every school has an assigned family income advisor.
Curriculum
Integrate climate education throughout both phases of the Curriculum for Excellence. Ensure that teachers are properly supported through both initial teacher education and continuing professional development to deliver this and give learning for sustainability greater prominence in inspections.
Teach the past, including the empire and slavery, so that we can engage with it in a meaningful way and do what we can to right past wrongs.
Build on our success in winning key improvements to Personal and Social Education, guaranteeing every pupil a PSE curriculum which covers topics such as consent-based sex education, LGBT+ inclusivity, and mental health, and ensure young people know their rights at work, the role of trade unions and how to self-organise.
Introduce a National 5 on Natural History, drawing on the recently developed Natural History GCSE course.
Review the role of indicators and measures within Curriculum for Excellence, with a view towards removing those which do not contribute to the delivery of quality education.
Initial teacher education
Nothing as yet.
Managing students with one or more additional support need
Nothing as yet.
School ethos and expectations
Nothing as yet.
Just Answer the Question
In the run up to the election, groups are organising to ask some core questions to politicians. Here we see a survey about issues related to recording 'hate' incidents, encouraging open discussions on transgender ideology, and about the promotion of the idea that Britain is 'structurally racist'. If this is of interest and you think that candidates should be asked these questions, visit the web page Just Answer the Question.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://substack.com/home/post/p-145544455?source=queue Andrew Doyle, Hate crime statistics are not to be trusted. Contrary to the claims of activists, the UK is one of the most tolerant countries in the world. 11/06/24
https://www.afaf.org.uk/after-cass-the-lessons-for-higher-education/ Robert Laverick and Georgia Testa After Cass: the lessons for higher education. Higher education should champion academic freedom and equality, not Stonewall. 11/06/24
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24381273.teachers-overwhelmingly-back-strike-action-job-cuts/ James McEnaney, Teachers 'overwhelmingly' back strike action over job cuts. 11/06/24
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24380794.council-refuses-publish-details-primary-teacher-cuts/ James McEnaney, Council unable to publish details of primary teacher cuts. 12/06/24
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13509575/university-exams-attacked-colonialist-enforcing-proper-English.html Julie Henry, Now university exams are attacked for being 'colonialist' and enforcing proper English by senior academic Dr Zahid Pranjol in extraordinary article. 08/06/24
Joanna Williams, The Crisis of Socialisation. Children today learn that neither their parents nor their teachers have the authority to impose their will, there are few commonly held values and most behavioural expectations are negotiable. 14/06/24
https://archive.is/ZoJDm Neil Mackay, SNP accused of bias against Scotland's poorest college kids. 16/06/24
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1911809/liverpool-university-woke-diversity-row Ciaran McGrath, Woke row as university orders lecturers to ‘problematise’ being white and heterosexual. 16/06/24
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Enjoyed the reading the summaries of all the political parties, the SNP rundown was equally insane/hilarious - until I read the lib-dems - still nothing could prepare me for the delusional ideas from the lunatics at the green party. They should be all be sectioned!