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?

There was this today in the independent.
www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/scotland-the-best-educated-country-in-europe-claims-ons-report-9497645.html?amp

i noticed DD made the reading leap when we bought a whole bunch of ORT from book people and M&S early reading books and read with her every night religiously. She was doing brilliantly, we got complacent and busy and now she seems to be struggling at the next level.

I'll hold my hands up and say again this summer I'll book my DD into tutoring, and again it'll be because of her maths work because it's another area where unless we do a lot at home, she never does enough at school to build her confidence. As we both work full-time & have another toddler, we feel tired and overwhelmed and we're bloody lucky because we can afford to pay for the tutoring.

I agree class sizes and staff funding have to be at the root of a lot of these issues, they just don't get the attention.

Maybe I've just been fortunate in the schools (both primary and secondary) that ds has gone to, but there doesn't seem to be a culture of tutoring at ds' secondary - yet it still manages to get good results.

It does do quite a lot of supported study sessions (not that ds went to any he didn't feel the need) and it apparently spent quite a lot on study sessions during the Spring Holiday. Parents of S4 & S5 pupils are informed of them all regularly via text message.

Don't get me wrong: we would have paid for extra tutoring for ds if we'd have thought it would've helped (and as part of the "middle class cohort" could've afforded it) but we never felt the need.

We'll see if we were right to be relaxed in August when he gets his Higher results!

@bump, not quite today, as it is date 2014. And anyway it is not really relevant to today's situation as:
^It says that nearly 45 per cent of people in Scotland aged between 25 and 64 have had some kind of tertiary education – including university degrees and further education — ahead of Ireland, Luxembourg and Finland, which were the only other countries to get more than 40 per cent.

“In terms of the proportion of the population going into higher and tertiary education, Scotland actually has just about the highest in the world,” ONS chief economic adviser Joe Grice told ITV News.^

yes presumably you didn't have end of year reports saying your dc weren't making good progress in maths, or perhaps you have more time to do these things at home. Arguing from anecdote I admit is never going to tell us much - my main concern that the SNP are making it harder for us to get any general sense of how Scottish education is doing, PISA, SSLN etc. now that is general and they should be held to account on why they're removing these measures.

You're right. Anecdote does not equal data.

The interim school report (based on the centralised supporting system) is crap - tells me that his behaviour is ok, he does his homework and his attitude is ok - but not what level he is working at . The school does its best to supplement it - but it involves a lot of extra work for teachers (and sure we'd prefer that they were spending their time teaching ). The end of year report is pretty good - although there is variation in quality of helpful insight amongst the teachers.

So much does seem to depend on the quality of the senior management team (and the ethos that they imbue amongst both the teachers and the pupils) of an individual school. I've been fortunate (not lucky as ds' secondary school is a placing request) .

For all that I have complained regularly on occasion about Glasgow City Council's education department, I have to give it credit for giving individual head teachers (at least at secondary level) lots of flexibility in how they implement CfE .

However, the downside of that flexibility is a postcode lottery, dependent on your local school.

Iirc, ds' school has spent a lot on its own baseline testing, so that it can assess where it needs to allocate extra resources. But what an individual school does doesn't help parents across Scotland know whether the current education policies are helping or hindering.

And with the exception of children coming in with special needs (whether that be recently arrived EAL speakers or SEN or whatever) where there might be an excuse secondary schools shouldn't be having to deal with pupils who have gone through 7 years of primary and still can't read or write.

Oh - and never did any work at home with ds as soon as he got beyond his Bif & Chip books

I do however wish he had let me help him more with his Nat 5 French (I have a French degree): I could have done so much more if I'd had more than 1 day to work on his spoken French (the day before his Oral)

well this we can completely agree on:

But what an individual school does doesn't help parents across Scotland know whether the current education policies are helping or hindering.

And this is really the question isn't it?

Feeling frustrated now we are nearing the end of the first year at secondary, and seeing how DD's friends back in England are so far ahead of her already, and really challenged and working hard. I feel that she has almost been on holiday for the last year, although I have been doing some work with her at home.
NB in England children now have to learn all the times tables really early. Forget when, but long before the end of primary.
I have other things I could do with spending my time on, but have decided to teach DD at least 2 and possibly 3 subjects at home. We will look into her doing correspondence courses so that it's not all down to me, and she can get some exam results out of it. That will ensure that she has at least some work that she can do at her own speed, and will reduce the problem of the narrow curriculum here, with 7 national 5s narrowing to 5 highers at 16. I'm also going to make sure that she reads a good book every week, and reads some newspaper articles too. And she's already started doing some online maths, as maths is not my strong point. We'll see how it goes, and cut back if the schoolwork eventually increases. Is anyone else doing correspondence courses?

7 national 5s? Our local only does 6. Friends at private schools do 8. I wish everyone had the chance to do 8 if they were able.

I suppose my confusion is that in my experience, CfE is working well. I have nothing but praise for both ds' primary and secondary schools. The quality of the work ds is doing at Higher is on a par with the work I did when I sat 6 Highers (albeit my memory is hazy as it was nearly 40 years ago ). In fact, I would struggle with both his Maths and Physics, despite getting As for them back in the day I can't do Applied Maths

There are issues with what the "model answers" should include in some subjects and "formulae" (even in English questions) that need to be learnt in order to interpret the exam questions correctly so that you put the right words in the answer - but that's always been the case (my mum was an English marker for years). So you might demonstrate understanding but still get zero or few marks because you've used the wrong examples.

What is it that other schools are doing "wrong"?

John Swinney needs to do work (I would hope he is already) on why it seems to be succeeding in some schools but not others.

I have heard that they may be reducing from 7 national 5s to 6. At least they are not currently spending 2 years on highers. The local private school does that. No doubt achieves good results, but even less challenging for the children?
I just want my DD to come out of school educated, and capable of really making something of university.
If Scotland gets a really bad reputation for its education, surely that will make it harder for our DCs to get jobs out of Scotland, and even in Scotland, if non-Scots are available.

I have heard that they may be reducing from 7 national 5s to 6. At least they are not currently spending 2 years on highers. The local private school does that. No doubt achieves good results, but even less challenging for the children?
I just want my DD to come out of school educated, and capable of really making something of university. And with a decent work ethic. I would love it if she actually felt stretched.
If Scotland gets a really bad reputation for its education, surely that will make it harder for our DCs to get jobs out of Scotland, and even in Scotland, if non-Scots are available.

well at least whistler Scotland won't be able to get a bad international rep as the SNP is withdrawing them from key international surveys!

Seriously, I'm worried about this too - I love Scotland but I'm not sure that my DC will want to do degrees in Scotland - what if RUK universities start devaluing highers? Or US universities.

We're probably not there yet but I wonder how exactly we'll be able to tell if measures are being scrapped. I guess when there is no positive outcome?

Ds' school still does 8 Nat 5s as the norm for academic kids (timetabled as such from the end of S2). He actually ended up with 8 Nat 5s and a Nat 4 (as he covered enough in "core" RME to get a Nat 4 in that).

They encourage 5 Highers in S5 for the academically able as that is what Unis are looking for (the number of exams done in a single diet) and over 25% achieve that

That's what I mean about lack of consistency though: Glasgow gave head teachers discretion over the number of Nat 5s that a school can present pupils for; some councils made a council-wide directive.

@pretty, the question, if you like, is whether you do well because of the CfE or despite the CfE. In other words, as you put it, what makes the difference is the system or the HT? For example, how come that at Dunblane Academy (or is it HS, can't remember now) they have such great results?
To me the situation in Glasgow is very odd... there are SS that score so BADLY that they don't even get a grade in the league tables for certain subjects (if I correctly remember, Govan is one of them) while others are right at the top (not counting the private schools). So if you are born in the ghetto, you are pretty much stuck there :(

Poverty is by far the greatest factor in educational inequality - thus the new funding to attempt to close the attainment gap. The difference between Dunblane and Govan is no surprise. The decline in results in Scotland over the period of the CfE should probably also be viewed partly through the prism of the impact of Austerity economics on the poorest.

"For example, how come that at Dunblane Academy (or is it HS, can't remember now) they have such great results?"

It's high school... and while it is a good school (I've been in it) honestly, they're doing nothing hugely remarkable...they do have minuscule amounts of pupils on FSMs though, it's not a Glasgow thing.

If you look at the top 50 schools for higher results, any that I'm familiar with are all in areas where that's going to be the case or have a wider more selective catchment (denominational for instance).

That I don't know Arkadia.

Ds' school has a very mixed demographic with a high proportion of SIMD1,2 & 3, so it's not succeeding because it is a "leafy" suburb (although small parts of it are).

Maybe it's because they see having to deal with 55 languages, although a challenge, as a benefit to the school and enriches it.

Nothing really changed in terms of teaching techniques at ds' primary school when CfE came in, as that was the way that they taught already anyway (again, partly to do with the many EAL pupils and how they integrated that into their teaching techniques).

@howabout,
The decline in results in Scotland over the period of the CfE should probably also be viewed partly through the prism of the impact of Austerity economics on the poorest.
I have to say I don't buy that at all. This to me is Labour/SNP rhetoric. After all Scotland is neither Greece or Spain or other southern European countries.
The reasons for the decline in school attainment for sure lie elsewhere (not sure where, though) and it is not something that can be solved by throwing money at it.

Our school has a good reputation (though I have a number of issues with it), and gets relatively good exam results. But if I've understood the data correctly most children still only get 3 highers. Doesn't seem like a very wide education?

Arkadia I am not saying that is the only or indeed the primary factor, but it may well be contributing. As I have previously stated I don't think CfE has been without implementation issues and I do think assessment and communication with parents regarding progress and expectations could and should improve.

DD3 just came home from school. She told me she had her reading and numbers ipad games session with her P1 teacher today. This is them measuring progress since baseline at start of P1 - so it is happening.

whistler I agree with pretty that 5 highers at one sitting is the benchmark for Uni entry. Most academic students will go on to do a combination of above A level equivalent Advanced highers and extra highers in 6th year. This is considerably broader than the English 3 A level norm. (I am old fashioned so find the notion of not doing higher English and Maths weird).

Even at our deprived local comp the number of pupils with 5 highers is around 40%. "Good" schools in areas like Dunblane have rates of 65% and above.

@how, that is interesting... I have just asked my DD2 and she said she has done something some time ago (but no numbers, only words). I wonder if it is the same thing. I also wonder if we are to be entrusted with the outcome... However, I thought they were starting next year.
I also wonder why we don't share these kind of tests with England. It would save a good amount of money to both...

Like Howabout, I too am old enough find not doing both Higher Maths and English unusual hence why ds had no choice over doing English Higher even though he's going to be doing Sciences

It's one of the changes that I am not happy with - but I don't think that that is to do with CfE but more to do with the widening of access to University I was going to say dumbing down but that wouldn't be fair on all the new courses

He's not unusual amongst his classmates in staying on for S6 and doing Advanced Highers and a crash Higher. So he'll be leaving school with 6 Highers plus some Advanced Highers.

It's also difficult to compare schools easily: for example some league tables count the number of Highers achieved over 2 years (and don't include Advanced Highers), others just measure the number of Highers sat in S5. Some take into account SIMD (and therefore "added value"), others don't.

Hence why some schools will be high up one league table and not so high on others.

It's the old thing of "Lies, damned lies & statistics"

....and the plural of anecdote not equalling data