What's going wrong with Scottish education??

[TinfoilHattie]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-39856284

Obviously very tempting to start another SNP bashing thread and I'm pretty clear that the blame for this lies at their door. It's shocking that performance is getting worst, not better and that less than half of S2s are performing well or very well in writing. It's all very well Swinney standing up and saying that it's not good enough but WHY is it not good enough and WHAT is he going to do about it?

Is it Curriculum for Excellence? Are the tests unrealistic? Funding? Changing expectations?

It's all very interesting for me as I have children in P4, P7 and S2 and those are the years which are tested. My kids are doing fine and I have no worries about them, but we're a family which values education and encourages reading. I do worry though about my daughter who spelled her new school as "Acadmay" and it wasn't corrected by the teacher.

So what's going wrong and how do we put it right?

the overall point is that educational basics such as literacy and numeracy have to be done well, everything else is gravy. What's concerning is that the (limited, of course open to question) measures we have do not point to improving standards in the basics. The SNP's response is (in part) to scrap the measures we have so that we lose ability to backwards compare standards.

Does that seem like a good idea to anyone? I'd say the same for any government wanting to scrap any long standing measure of how it is doing without very good reasons because, to me, it stinks a bit.

NS and her cronies may want to introduce the teaching of Gaelic in schools, but who do they think is going to teach it? We can't get teachers for supply/McCrone cover as it is so the likelihood of finding any who can speak Gaelic is minuscule.

We are currently teaching French to P1s in a very limited way, but there are plenty of staff who did French or German at school. I know nobody who speaks or is remotely interested in Gaelic.

What bugs me most is the conflation of correlation with causation with the Gaelic schools. They are getting great results, but put any group of middle class kids with switched on motivated parents in small classes with great facilities and they'll do well, whether they are bilingual or not.

I agree trixymalixy. I believe the class sizes are now rising in the Gaelic schools, but % of FSM and SEN are apparently tiny/non-existant.

'm absolutely all in favour of Gaelic being preserved in areas where it was spoken

Gaelic was spoken across most of Scotland at one stage...

No-one has suggested that teachers are trying to brainwash children / voted for independence. So why all the denials? We're talking about the content of the curriculum that teachers are required to teach.

Whether you call Scotland a country or a nation or whatever is not the point. Our children are growing up in the UK and may stay in the UK, for years or indefinitely. They need to know about the rest of the UK and they need to be able to compete with their peers from the rest of the UK. A job that is advertised in Edinburgh isn't allowed to discriminate in favour of Scottish people (however you define that, which is another question). And anyway employers want the best people they can get. Our children, even if they choose to stay in Scotland, will be competing with people who have been educated more rigorously, in England, at least for the good jobs. And they may well wish to work in England, where the competition will be even tougher. They need to be educated to a similar level. If they are not, their lives will be significantly affected.
NB apparently around half of jobs in Scotland are expected to disappear as robots are developed over the next couple of decades. The percentage is a bit better in England. Jobs will presumably become terrifyingly competitive. Brexit will also no doubt cost a good few jobs. Not a good time to wreck the Scottish education system.

Gaelic was never spoken where I come from and I hate how it is being continually pushed forward whilst neglecting my own Scottish heritage.

"will be competing with people who have been educated more rigorously, in England,"

Actually that as yet isn't an issue, England isn't doing so well either...they haven't dropped compared to other countries, but Scotland used to rank higher than England and now they're on the same level, more or less.

England was ahead of Scotland in the last international tables. But rather than just looking at the averages, if you have academic children I would compare how academic children in England do as against academic children in Scotland. I suspect that you would find a big difference there.

NB academic exams in Scotland are getting easier. Academic exams in England are getting considerably harder.

"England was ahead of Scotland in the last international tables."

There's single digits in the difference between their scores, they're ranked at the same level - average.

So English pupils outperforming Scottish ones isn't IMO a worry...yet, what's more concerning is that there's no real acknowledgement of the fact that Scotland is performing worse than it used to nevermind anything to resolve it...which could lead to that being a problem, just not yet.

Gaelic was spoken in the North West and in a smattering of other places it arrived in Scotland between 400 and 500 AD and started to fade by 1000 AD. About 1.1% of Scots speak it. Pointless Gaelic signs have been put up in Railway stations which are simplistic translations of the English names.
More people in Scotland speak Polish than Gaelic.

Worst things are happening with pupils who need additional support
www.eveningexpress.co.uk/pipe/news/scotland/msps-find-many-pupils-with-additional-support-needs-struggle-in-schools/

I personally find the pushing of Gaelic very irritating when it's combined with a real lack of support for EAL learners in mainstream.

As someone else pointed out- there are probably far more Poles in the Central Belt. Where is the drive to include that language?

Moreover, Gaelic schools are almost 100% white middle class children with suspiciously low rates of SEN. It was a well known secret that the Gaelic school was as close as you could get to a private education without needing to jeopardise your lefty credentials.

Agree with this. I know quite a few families whose children attend the Gaelic medium school here and only one has any Scottish heritage. None have any links to Gaelic or parts of Scotland where Gaelic is spoken. Many are from overseas and already bilingual. They've chosen it because it's a nice school - all very lefty, no rough kids like the catchment school, and a ticket into the city's top state high school where the secondary GM education is. The children and their families are all heavily focused on 'traditional' Scottish culture even outside school and are SNP voters. I can't accept there's no political nationalist element to it.

Is that really what the purpose of Gaelic medium schooling is?

"Gaelic was spoken in the North West and in a smattering of other places it arrived in Scotland between 400 and 500 AD and started to fade by 1000 AD."

Nope, what you're calling starting to fade was when it started to be only in the north west, it was in most of Scotland before that, that it was only ever spoken in certain parts of the country is something that's just been repeated often enough that people believe it.

I mean, a millenium ago isn't exactly recent history...

Is it hugely relevant to a child living somewhere it hasn't been spoken for that long? No not particularly, though there are some interesting crossovers in Scots grammar and vocabulary.

And yep ASNs should get more funding, more, well, everything before adding extras to a curriculum, but that's separate from whether Gaelic was spoken or not.

tabulah surely what's really concerning is that we won't be able to tell what's happening to standards in Scottish education going forward because new assessments are being created and older ones abandoned. We won't know whether Scotland's international performanance is worsening or not.

Does anyone know whether the SNP are contingent with any existing and long standing international or otherwise surveys or assessments? We hear they have taken Scottish students out of at least 2 surveys and are creating new assessments but I don't have a picture of which metrics will continue.

I have 2 issues with Glasgow's Gaelic schools. The first is that they are both in areas with by far the most significant Asian populations in Scotland. The second is that BBC Scotland and STV are both based in Glasgow and already effectively discriminate in favour of Gaelic speakers in their recruitment - this does not bode well for encouraging an unbiased media speaking for the whole of Scotland.

I am somewhat perplexed by the perception that they are achieving better results in core subjects. They have a very short track record with very small numbers. Their results are also flattered because if you are taught / speak Gaelic anyway then it is a "free" extra exam. They doubtless also benefit from "free" extras in music and drama given their cultural focus.

It is hard enough to get good Maths and Physics teachers at all, let alone Gaelic speaking ones, so I am unconvinced.

"surely what's really concerning is that we won't be able to tell what's happening to standards in Scottish education going forward"

That too...

"this does not bode well for encouraging an unbiased media speaking for the whole of Scotland."

In what way?

"Their results are also flattered because if you are taught / speak Gaelic anyway then it is a "free" extra exam."

They'll do Gaighlig, not the Gaelic learners exams, that's no more a free exam than English is for pupils taught in English.

Our primary make an attempt at modern language teaching, but don't do much. As I said way upthread, my daughter has had one teacher that was obviously politically biased, but others have been fine and this year my son has covered a variety of topics including Greece and Vikings. My daughter studied Scottish history in S1, in S2 this year she is studying the outbreak of WW1 and we have been having fascinating chats about the Balkans and international politics. Scots language at primary is about a week a year - the only Gaelic my son has had is saying hello and counting to 10, but as part of a block on language and culture from around the world.

What worries me about education is the time it takes to see whether something is working or not - my age group got very little grammar at school, and I see that playing out now - including in the standard of communications from school; my MIL (retired teacher) expressed concern about the way phonetics were taught decades ago; how long does it take to see what is working and what isn't? How do you isolate what is beneficial and what isn't? We can't just go back to what worked in the 1950s or whenever the glory days were supposed to be, because the world is totally different.

Their results are also flattered because if you are taught / speak Gaelic anyway then it is a "free" extra exam

This isn't exactly true. In 2 weeks my dd1 will sit Higher Gaidhlig. Not Gaelic. The native speakers exam is like doing a second English exam, not the experience you might remember of doing French, for example.

Prime example of the wooliness of CfE - my kids have been given "project" homework to do. The p4 has to give a 2 minute talk on a subject of his choosing, but was directed to talking about a place, or a person.

P7 child was told to complete a 5 page project on "anything". No guidance whatsoever, although the teacher said it would be good if they chose something they didn't know a lot about already. Much angst in our house while she tries to make sense of it and decide whether her project should be about Justin Bieber, Japan or fidget spinners.

On the settling thing - that can't be a national policy. Each school must do their own thing.

My kids have always been in grous for maths/language right from P1. Ok, at that stage they're not talking about top and bottom set, but it doesn't take long for kids to notice that the Circles are doing long division while the Squares are still adding numbers up to 10. When my eldest started in S1, the class was not set at all. After Christmas of S1 they were put into sets for Maths. At the start of S2 they were set for English. At Christmas of S2 they were set for Science. The classes they are placed in for theis S3 options will depend on ability as well as other factors.

When I was at school in the 1980s we were not set at all, for anything, for S1 and S2. Everyone worked to the pace of the slowest/least able. That's not something we should be wanting to go back to.

Our High School does mixed ability tinfoil except for maths. Its not uncommon in Scotland so I am told.

When I was in High School in the 80s we were set in S2, streaming I think it was called at the time.

My DSs did have sets in primary but they started on the 5-14 thingy and then moved into CfE. In High school they have been set in Maths in the latter part of S2 beg S3 based on whether they think they'd be going for Nat5 or Nat 4. There was no Nat4 class as such, just a couple of classes that that mixed abilities and the other 3 or 4 that were Nat 5 only. Nothing else streamed.

So it does seem that the streaming or not depends on the Head. I assumr that in very small schools this causes more of a problem - if you've only got 40 children in S1 you can't make 4 different sets.

But that doesn't explain why my kids' school is setting in Maths from Christmas in S1, other schools aren't streaming until the end of S2. Perhaps the government should, I dunno, do some research and issue some national guidance????