Need to chat about Scottish education stuff

[BoffinMum]

I have just realised how little I know about the Scottish education system and I am supposed to be writing something about it for work. There don't seem to be as many reports and article published about it as the English system, which makes it harder to know what people actually in schools are really thinking and what the mood music is. AuldAlliance reckoned I ought to post something on here and see what the Scottish Mumsnet massive had to say about things, which seems a quite brilliant idea. So anyone around to help answer a few questions?

Dh and I got given a tour of the secondary that we were planning on doing a placing request to, when ds was in P6

We then went back with ds and 2 of his classmates who were also submitting placing requests, so that they could get a feel for the school as they'd missed out on the first transition days.

But they have at most 30 placing requests and the majority of them don't bother to look around in advance.

I'm an EYP who works nursery/P1.

We have a lot more paperwork and In depth observations. I take photos on the iPad then have to upload it to the journal and ask the child about their picture.

In P1, it's very fast paced but cursive handwriting seems to be quite prevalent now instead of the jolly phonics way. CBeebies has some fab literacy games we can play.

We also have class sets of iPads. Class set laptops and every teacher has a laptop and iPad in my school. EYP's have iPads.

My son is in his final few weeks of S2. He has followed a different curriculum than Dd who is sitting her Nat5's. The school had hoped to continue early presentation like the did with standard grades and then 2 year highers in s4/5.

We had a tour of our catchment primary :)

The way things had worked when we moved to the area, both my DSs (as they are only 13 months apart) ended up with a nursery place at a different school as they were the only one with two places available in the same session. Consequently as DS1 had already done his Pre Pre school year in a different town before we moved, then this nursery for Pre school, we were a bit unsure whether to put in a request for him to stay there for his school place. However we had a perfectly decent primary school that we could see from our house. Anyway, the HT invited us round to have a chat and gave us a tour :)

Trouble - that's surely not typical?!

Both ds' primary and secondary are proud of their diversity: from FSM recipients/Roma/asylum seekers/food bank users to millionaires' kids. From kids who don't have a single book in the house (if they have a home at all ) to kids of university lecturers/consultants/CEOs.

DSs primary school would have been unlikely to have any parents with a degree prior to the new estate being built, the school being expanded and the school roll changing. Now it is generally half and half but there isn't much inbetween.

Well possibly with the exception of myself and DH (DH now has two degrees though) we were both from rough council areas with non professional parents. However we have worked hard, have a nice "exec" house and DSs are more middle class than we could ever have imagined!

But it remains that if the new estate had never been built then the school would be unlikely to have a parent with a degree.

Not sure about the proportions, but ds' primary school was probably about 10-20% kids with parents with degrees. Maybe a wee bit higher - but I probably have a slightly biased view, given that I wasn't able to mix much with other parents as I worked ft, so only really got to know a few of the other parents, plus those that lived close to us (so in the "big" hooses, not the flats).

I know it does have a very high proportion of FSMs plus was over 60% ethnic minorities and a high proportion of EAL.

My own parents were both graduates (dad a doctor, mum a teacher), as am I, while dh is a (sort of ") 1st generation graduate (his mum was a primary school teacher who did her primary teaching qualification and then became a head teacher).

I'm comfortably middle class, which is how I've always categorised myself, whereas dh sees himself as "working class made good" probably explains our different attitudes to debt

The boys ex primary is not very ethnically diverse though DS2 in particular would find and bring home any nationality he could - my house was sometimes like the league of nations.

He still does the same at high school. I know whenever I meet any of his friends parents at least one of them will be of foreign extraction. His current friendship group consists of a french boy, a half russian boy, a half south african boy and a half japanese boy. It's not that ethnically diverse either, he just likes people who are a bit different I think.

The CfE takes its philosophy from Vygotsky. It was built from the 4 capacities (they are back apparently) which, in turn, came from the inscription on the mace at the Scottish Parliament. The driver for curriculum reform came from 'The Big Conversation' in the early 2000s.

We had the 4 capacities for years. Then, in a panic, a large green folder of E and Os was produced. There had been one academic year where they were in draft form.

I think it may work if classes were around 12-16 pupils. They are not.

The Scottish Surveys of Literacy and Numeracy do seem to show falls in attainment.

It does seem like we are following Wales. They did go on to abandon this type of curriculum.

but almost every child in her class has a stable home life and parents who are desperate to for them to achieve

This is the key I think. At one point in DS2s class he was the only child who lived with both his mum and dad. . One boy's parents got back together again so he wasn't the only one for long but still...

I am not saying single parents can't provide a stable home life and a willingness for their children to succeed though. A few of the children had exactly that, lovely kids with a dedicated parent and usually interested hands on grandparents too. Others clearly had a loving family who just didn't have ambition for their kids as they had none for themselves either. Others were just "poor bairns" :( Parenting seemed to consist of shoving them out the door with a pound for the shop and expecting them to take themselves to school.

I agree that many immigrants will have come here with degrees (my own father already had a degree before he arrived here to study medicine) but in many cases in my locality, these are 2nd generation EAL/ESL speakers . The mothers in particular are not well educated. Ds' old primary school was piloting Maths sessions for them when ds left (not sure what happened with that initiative).

So it's a mix of poor white kids and poor Asian kids. The parents of the Arabic, Russian, Polish kids may well have degrees - but they were a very small proportion.

No Roma at ds' primary but quite a few at his secondary.

One of the things the Primary School Parent Council sponsored was access to a book exchange/cheap books as so many of the kids had no books at home

No you didn't trouble but I thought I had :)

My dc's go to a very mixed catchment primary school. It is a good school and does well for the majority of the pupils. It does seem to play to the lowest common denominator though and doesn't push the brightest at all. There is a massive disparity in schools which is clear to see. When it comes to secondary schools there are some which are definitely not delivering results. In some ways, it seems to be very like England in that the right catchment will get way better results.

Is it fair to say that it is a very divided society then, in educational terms, with haves and have nots basically being replicated down the generations?

Has this got any geographical side to it? How do deprived kids get on in school on the islands, for example, as opposed to central Glasgow/Aberdeen on large estates?

Stargirl, your post was particularly useful as I trotted over to the Government website and checked the stats. There is indeed a post CfE problem, it seems.

As a new arrival to scotland I think there is a generational entrenchment of opportunity. Kids going to school in the west end of glasgow for example are likely to have a double advantage of educated committed parents and a generally aspirational environment. Kids in poorer parts may not have that advantage. There is much less geographical mobility here than elsewhere I have lived in the UK so it is harder to break the cycle. Also, parents who went to private school tend to send their own kids private (which is relatively affordable at least in Glasgow) so there is a whole layer of affluent kids which never engage in the state sector. More so than in London ime, where only the very well off can afford to pay for housing and school fees. My DP is unusual in that he is from a very rough area but did well at school. But his parents would probably be categorized as lower middle class and provided a very stable family - although he never tires of telling me that he grew up on a council estate.

"Has this got any geographical side to it? How do deprived kids get on in school on the islands, for example, as opposed to central Glasgow/Aberdeen on large estates?"

Rural schools are very different to city centre schools, school results are very much linked to catchment areas...if you look at the top performing schools in Scotland they're very much as you'd expect them to be if you were sorting them by how middle class the areas are.

Rural schools are much more mixed because they have huge catchment areas. I went to a school with a forty mile catchment area, not including the children from islands who came and stayed in a hostel either through the week or the term depending on where they were from.

So what you then have is very much a proper comprehensive school, there isn't another school parents can send children to if they're not happy with that one, not like in cities and you can't just move a few miles to be in a different catchment area.

That makes me wonder whether standards are higher in Islands schools because they are fully comprehensive, as opposed to more urban areas where the population divides according to class. If so, that would tell us something very important about the comprehensive idea and whether it works in practice (which it does in Finland etc)

Ds' secondary (as was his primary) is very mixed demographically (inner city Glasgow). From leafy inner city suburbs to sink estates. It's actually proud of its diversity.

Somewhere you can find "league" tables which incorporate the demographic element (ds' school does very well in that ). When I'm back on a PC/have more time, I'll try to find them.

But there is still a strong degree of post code success. Some of it is perception and some of it is justified. I've had big arguments on MN about whether any Glasgow state schools (with the exception of Jordanhill which is an anomaly in Scottish education) can achieve good results for their pupils.

Some things don't change: my dad was told 40-50 years ago that he was "ruining" his kids' education for the sake of political dogma by his medical colleagues by insisting on sending them to a state school.

For those of you in the Glasgow area, these "awful" schools were Bearsden Primary and Bearsden Academy