Sad reading for those who are in Scotland

[Arkadia]

I have just come across this:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-39856284

There is a similar article from last year regarding maths (and perhaps I find that one even MORE disconcerting).
Without getting too political, considering that

1. The SNP has been in power for the last 11 years (from memory)
2. the next Scottish parliament elections are due in 2021
3. The political discourse (if you can call it that) is only about the independence referendum,

it is unlikely that things will improve a great deal in the near to medium future.
Sad reading indeed!!

It is sad reading indeed. You cannot cut (freeze?) school budgets year on year and not expect a drop in attainment. At the school my DS attends, they have lost staff to balance the books. I wish there was proper funding in place.

It really is appalling - how the SNP can claim to be prioritising education with results like this I just don't know 🙁

It's not just primary ed, these figures go through to S4 of high school, honestly terrible..

Attainment

I assume people vote SNP for other reasons! They have taken their eye off a number of important issues but where nationalism is the main goal, is anyone surprised? It is a problem when a pressure group becomes a political party but really remains a pressure group.

Indeed, bojo,

In fairness Piston I don't believe it is a matter of cuts. In my school there are vacancies that cannot be filled and anyway I don't know what it was like before the cuts.
Also, I cannot be sure if the problem is the CfE as I don't know any different (or any better...) - even though some academics do think that the CfE is the root of all evil.

One thing for sure, though, if
^Pupils from the least deprived areas outperformed pupils from the most deprived in every category, and across all three age stages.
The size of the attainment gap was similar to the one recorded in 2012 - standing at 18 points in P4, 13 points in P7 and 16 points in S2 for reading.
And for writing, the size of the gap was 15 percentage points in P4, 20 in P7 and 18 in S2.^

and if

49% of S2 pupils performed very well or well in writing last year, compared with 55% in 2014 and 64% in 2012.

something has REALLY gone awry. I mean, the MAJORITY of S2 pupils are deemed to be writing neither "very well", nor "WELL"?
Dear, oh dear... SHAME on the governing party who has overseen such a decline.

Piston unlike England "Education spending by Scottish local authorities increased by 2.7% in real terms last year in spite of persistent teacher shortages and claims of under-resourcing, according to official annual statistics released by the Scottish Government"

Mrz
This isn't a competition with England! I'm fed up hearing , 'ah but, it's better than England' - it's so very small minded. and often entirely wrong
Scottish education is failing, that's what needs tackled.

Its not a competition with England, but since you brought the SNP into it, I dont believe for a second that Labour or the Tories in Scotland would be any different or indeed better for education than their counterparts in England have done for English education. On that basis that makes me satisfied with SNP's handling of education, giving the dire alternatives. Thats not saying there isnt room for improvement because clearly there is.

From the BBC article
*About a quarter of P4 pupils said that they seldom or never read together with someone at home, while just over a fifth said they did not play number or counting games.

And 29% said they never or rarely played word games.

Meanwhile, 40% of S2 pupils said they read "very often" using an electronic device such as mobile phone, tablet or e-reader, but only 22% said they regularly read fiction books and 14% said they frequently read non-fiction books. *

There's a huge part of the problem. I say this as someone who works in Scottish classrooms. The teacher's work really hard to encourage reading inside and outside the classroom, but there are so many pupils who behave like reading a paragraph is like reading War and Peace. Trying to get them to write anything is even harder. I've seen many pupils arriving at secondary school with reading ages of between 7-9 years old. This makes the rest of the curriculum inaccessible to them as they can't read the textbooks in any of the subjects and the only way to distract the teacher is to behave poorly. It's not all about the schools, the parents (in my opinion) are a huge part of the problem.

Ooops - rogue apostrophe in the final paragraph. My apologies.

Just,
the elections won't be on for another FOUR years. We shall see where we will be then, but since there has been no change in government in the past 10+ years and standers have been slipping, i shan't be holding my breadth.
Let's just hope that by then we will be able to talk about something more than a SINGLE issue...

What I do know though is that by the time 2021 comes (and if I am still alive...) my eldest will be at secondary school and she will be expected to do neither well nor very well in writing, nor will she be expected to perform well or very well in numeracy.
Thankfully she comes from what might be defined a "privileged" background, not because we are rich, but because we take an active interest in our daughters education, so with a bit of luck she will beat those odds, but what kind of government can support this kind of system and keep a straight face with the electorate?

Just,
the elections won't be on for another FOUR years. We shall see where we will be then, but since there has been no change in government in the past 10+ years and standers have been slipping, i shan't be holding my breadth.
Let's just hope that by then we will be able to talk about something more than a SINGLE issue...

What I do know though is that by the time 2021 comes (and if I am still alive...) my eldest will be at secondary school and she will be expected to do neither well nor very well in writing, nor will she be expected to perform well or very well in numeracy.
Thankfully she comes from what might be defined a "privileged" background, not because we are rich, but because we take an active interest in our daughters education, so with a bit of luck she will beat those odds, but what kind of government can support this kind of system and keep a straight face with the electorate?

Sorry for the numerous typos... :( :(
And sorry for the double post. Don't know how that happened...

Of course it does Bejazzled and it's no good blaming it purely on funding

This made for very grim reading. Sadly not surprising.

http://www.thelearningzoo.co.uk/2017/01/27/the-winner-takes-it-all/

And to top it all up, today's news seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed...
Can it get any sadder?

, but since you brought the SNP into it

I didn't "bring them into it" - they are 'it'. The figures quoted are theirs, they have been in power with devolved authority for education and it's budget for the full period covered by those figures .....

But don't let the facts affect your decision making.

mrz, if you keep reading the article you quoted, it states that
The figures also contrast somewhat with a report last week under the Local Government Benchmarking Framework, which showed a real terms fall in council spending over the past six years of 11%, including a 4% fall in education spending.

I have to say that there has been a lot of talk about spending cuts at my school, but what did happen in the end, i don't know. So far I would say very little that I can see.

Am I right in thinking that Scotland haven't embraced Synthetic Phonics in the way that England has, or at least is supposed to? In that the English National Curriculum at least has it as a legal requirement to be the only way to teach reading, whatever individual teachers, schools and local authorities actually do.

I was at a conference a few years ago when Anne Glennie from the Learning Zoo spoke about the way reading is taught in Scotland. I must admit to feeling worried about, and not really understanding why things are even worse for children across the border.

I'm not sad about it, I'm pretty furious!

There has been zero debate in the Scottish parliament about education. ZERO!

Yet independence has had hours and hours of debate.

Yet the SNP say Education is their priority?!

Radio 5 have been talking about it this morning. Alex Salmond just bamboozled the interviewer with other education stats and it got lost eventually but they gave the poor performance in education a good go. The trouble is that a single interviewer cannot have all the facts and figures to get back at him. I guess the Scots lap it up though in significant numbers. Unfortunately a single issue party continues to concentrate on the single issue. You get what you vote for.

Just started a thread on Scotsnet about this ;-)

Yes it's bloody appalling and yes the blame lies squarely at the feet of the SNP. I have three children going through education in Scotland and they are doing OK - but we encourage and support their education hugely and are interested and motivated parents. Not every child has that family backing.

I think there are two main problems : Curriculum for Excellence is too wooly. Schools and local authorities have been left to get on with it, they're all doing their own thing, there's no national standardised testing until National 5s and it's pretty obvious that the delivery of C for E is patchy.

Also the SNP obsession with the so-called "Scots language". (Which has never existed as one language across Scotland, it's a collection of slang and dialect bunged together and branded for political gain). Schools are clearly struggling to get childrne to the required standards of reading and writing in English, without shoving in a bit of Scots - it's all about encouraging Scottish people that they're SO different from the rest of the UK, they have their own language and everything.

That I know of, we have one "Scottish" week. I never really saw the use of it and I have always considered it a "fun" activity, albeit on the twee/cute side. I doubt it is going to make a difference either way.

Re: testing, it SHOULD make an appearance next year (I though it was going to be this year, but obviously not).

On the CfE, what was there before and in what way is it different from the CfE that we all enjoy these days? TBH, I asked a few times at the school to explain to me what it actually meant, but so far... no joy

I really don't think this is about funding.

Scottish schools could do with teaching reading properly (Annie Glennie's blog has already been mentioned upthread, it is EXCELLENT). And the CfE sounds awful, sorry. A load of fuzzy nonsense with no substance whatsoever.

gregashman.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/learning-lessons-from-the-failure-of-scotlands-curriculum-for-excellence/

It's a shame. Scotland used to be well known for the quality of its education system. Not any more.

May I ask why voters are not really concerned about this? Scotland will not be well placed educationally if it is independent but I suppose will still recruit from the EU. Perhaps this is why the SNP don't care that much. All of you who do care, there are options to make your voice heard!