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?

I only learned tables up to 10 and that was in the late 60s/70s. I still don't know 11 and 12

Thanks Daniella. At least I can't put that at the door of CfE!

I did type Danyellas but I am still learning how to use my phone!

No problem Belle - serves me right for having such a silly spelling!

Sounds like a lot of time is being spent on whatever the latest trendy soft skill is...?

If they want to teach kids "grit/resilience" then why not make them sit down and learn their tables and do some pages of fractions instead of doing some cute project-based whatever?

The quickest way to learn resilience is to bloody well work hard and do the boring bits as well NOT JUST the fun bits. And best of all, at the end of the session you will also have improved your maths ability too. What's not to like?

Sounds to me the aim is purely to raise a generation who think they are free thinking nationalists who will vote for SNP and independence the second they turn 16.
SNP also seem to be full of vote winning polices, free Uni and free food for P1-3 but really the schools are cash strapped trying to afford these things.

I really hope SNP take a kicking at the next election. Problem is the alternatives are labour who aren't much better or Tory who'll destroy the NHS.

I work in early years. Children with additional needs are not being supported. The ones who desperately need to be in a special educational school are being put in to mainstream where they often get promised a one to one which never materialises. The child struggled, the staff struggle to devote time to all children.

With the change in nursery hours, many staff are lucky if they get an hour off the floor to get ejournals done, any reports needing done as well as any other paperwork being asked for.

It's not the job I went into and I don't always feel the children are getting our best work as we're struggling to get things done.

I told my mum at the weekend I wanted to ask NS where this so called money was going that she's ploughed into early years and education!

And there we have peterhouse down the thread demonstrating part of the problem. Not only do we have a government that refuses to take responsibility for areas that are 100% devolved, but we have a sizeable chunk of the population who are desperate for the SNP to not be held responsible. Because independence transcends all, and until that end goal is achieved then there can be no criticism of the SNP. Unless they start losing votes they will continue to focus on separation from the uk to the detriment of all of us.

Peter I don't give a shit about English education. What I care about is the shocking decline in Scottish kids attainment in just a few short years. Something is badly wrong and someone needs to take responsibility and do something about it.

I also think comparisons with England are meaningless - the education system there is totally different from the age they start, SATS testing, the age they move to secondary, the exams they sit - it's all different.

The SNP are responsible for this and I'm not seeing anyone stepping up, taking charge and saying what they're going to do to sort it out.

Agree with what Groovee said about support - I am all for inclusion wherever possible but there are some very disruptive children with serious emotional or behavioural issues in mainstream education and you have to wonder where you draw the line of the benefit for the disruptive child compared with the negatives for the rest of the 30 kids in the class.

Saw this on Twitter - is it any wonder that children can't speak/write/read English when this is the sort of stuff they're encouraged to produce in class?

On a related note - there is still SO much wasteful spending by the Council and SNP. I totally disagree with the blanket free meals for P1 to P3 policy. At my kids' school there are very few children on free meals, so it's just a freebie nobody needs. It would have been far, far better to set up breakfast clubs in deprived areas, or open school holidays lunch clubs. So much for SNP looking after the poorest. Also the Council pays for a lollipop man to be outside our school every morning from 8am to 9am. Fine - but nobody arrives until 8.30 at the very earliest and it's not even a busy road until 8.45am! Not a huge sum of money but multiply it by every day the school is open, and every school in Scotland.... such a waste of money!!

There will be children in the system who do well, that's in spite of rather than because of the system imo. My children go to a very academically successful school (on paper anyway) but the children in the main come from supportive backgrounds and those that aren't doing well get tutors. It's rife.

Teaching is a mixed bag, classes are too big, some subjects can't be taught as there are no teachers, therefore narrowing down the BGE.

Despite this my DS1 is doing very well academically and my DS2 is doing ok but not as well as he could be. Poor maths teaching for a couple of years has frightened him off. He was to get the same teacher again and I fought to have him moved. I feel sorry for the children who remained in the class but my priority is my own child in that circumstance. Turns out the new teacher wasn't much better. The best maths teaching he has had is from his brother.

DS1 has been promised addition support for his borderline aspergers since P5, he is now going into S6 and the promises are still being made with very little practical actions. He is bright and quiet (the main issue) and therefore flies under the radar. Schools weren't able to cut teacher numbers with their falling budget, so support staff were cut instead. The support work still needs done so this falls to the teachers instead.

I am really sad that the majority of our children are being failed and very angry with the party who say it's their priority but are doing nothing constructive and seem to think it's all someone else's fault.

But surely if there is a decline in standards across the UK then it is possible that there is a UK wide cause, for example cuts in education funding, or just general attitudes towards education?

If you want to fix a problem you need to look at all the causes. This has turned into an SNP bashing thread which of course was the motive for the thread in the first place which is looking at the issue too narrowly. What has gone wrong, and how should it be done differently?

The oecd report was looking at basic skills in England of 16 year olds and over and presumably from a few years ago. I remember it being reported at the time. It showed that average 60 year olds had better basic skills, presumably because that was what they focussed on then and these skills were hammered home with a lot of rote learning. I see this in my own family. It's of a different order to the sharp drop in standards in Scotland that can be seen between siblings of different ages in a family!

This drop over a few years in Scotland needs to be addressed without weaseling about looking for England to be doing worse.

The UK as a whole has gone up in the pisa rankings in science and reading and down one place in maths.

@its, this is hardly news. Last year there was another report on maths, previously there was another report on literacy and prior to that another one on maths. So, what you would say would be true if this was something out of the blue.
Since it is not something out of the blue, who do you suggest we turn our (out)rage to?
@tinfoil, as I said earlier on, at our school we have one Scottish week and I don't think it will make much difference either way. What you posted I would say has cute value, not much else.
Re: free school meals, I see that as a freebie as well, but perhaps it does help normalize school meals, as opposed to having a school bag full of junk. I don't know if it does work that way, but I hope so. In addition, the cost is much lower than what we used to pay. Lunch money is a nightmare to administer, so once you have taken into account all the teacher's time and the office staff's time, what goes towards the meal itself is very little. In other words, much of what we pay is wasted anyway.

@its, is the Pope catholic?

Free school meals was introduced after the policy was introduced in England and Wales - can you imagine the outcry if the policy was introduced south of the border, increased funding came to Scotland via the Barnett formula but wasn't introduced here? For what it's worth, I don't rate the school meals and wouldn't take them even if I had a P1-P3, but I think meals quality is a council issue. Our council seem very keen on spending money endlessly digging up the roads and paying for the festival.

Our school has got quite a lot of funding to help bridge the attainment gap. The headteacher is deciding how it is spent, not the government or the council.

Lollipop cover - councils decide on where people stand. Ours have done fairly regular surveys of frequent crossing points and at various points threaten to remove key crossing cover. Given the amount of traffic (busy city location) I'd be raging if ours got taken away. If you live in a quiet rural location and feel the cover is too much, why not take it up with the council?

Scottish content - I have previously ranted about this, but as time has gone on I've realised that my daughter for one year had a teacher who was a committed nationalist (flag in the classroom, gave the class her opinion of the Labour party at the time of the 2015 election, and really should have thought about what she put on facebook or tightened her security settings) - things are more balanced now, my son gets 'Scots week' but that's pretty much it for Scottish language. And they still do more than I would like of the Matthew Fitt translations, but I think they're a very contrived mix of dialects.

I do worry about education across the UK - it feels like there has been a lot of tinkering over the past 10 years and more, and I'm not sure how well this is being assessed - and how you assess which changes are working and which are making things worse. Our local high school has changed head and seems to have gone through quite a bad time with staff morale linked to leadership. In England, my nephew's school has become an academy and my sister is tearing her hair out over the decline in standards.

I know it's not a SNP bashing thread, but they could have made a start to fix it in the last year instead of trying for a second referendum.

It's bloody shambles!

Our school is supposed to be a good one. But there is no ability setting at all - on principle (would make the children not in the top set feel bad, I'm told). So my DD who is academic just does the same work as those who are struggling. She almost never gets any homework (just gone into s2). The school has a policy to consider a child to be succeeding if they feel that the child is working hard in class, regardless of the level of their work. They don't let either children or parents know if they are doing badly (in the sense of likely to do badly in public exams, not be allowed to do highers, etc). They are against testing. Children mustn't be allowed to feel that they are not doing well, to compare themselves with others, to become stressed, etc.
DD has friends at school in England and they are doing much more advanced work, have lots of homework, heavily ability set. They thrive on the challenge of working at the right level for them.
Why not compare with England? Like it or not, our children live in the same country, and may well want or need to compete for jobs with English children.
My sense is that standards and expectations here are low, there is too much emphasis on the children doing what they find fun and easy, too much emphasis on not letting children know that they may be performing badly in a subject (as against their peers or national average, say), a complacency that it doesn't matter if a particular child gets bad results, as some people are better suited to working in a factory, or whatever, and no interest in stretching brighter children. The SNP is putting a lot of money into narrowing the education gap between poor and better off. This is not working, and what is also not working is how bright children are dealt with.
At our school lots of parents use tutors, in my view because the school does not stretch the bright children, and because the less academic struggle, both due to the decision not to ability set.
I don't understand why some schools seem to offer such a limited range of advanced highers and even of highers/national 5s. Surely all secondaries should offer at least the key subjects (3 sciences, maths, english, history and geography, a language) at higher/national5 and at AH? That's what schools are for, isn't it? It's such a shame to see children have to choose from a very small list of what is considered convenient by the school, and change career plans accordingly. Apparently some don't even offer maths AH, or all 3 sciences. I know a school which only allows geography to S3 - that's a whole range of careers you can forget straight away.

"...This has turned into an SNP bashing thread ..."

@ItsAllGoingToBeFine - the SNP have been in charge in Scotland for 11 years - they need to take responsibility for the decline in standards over those years.

And they need to stop saying that education is their No1 priority, when independence is far more important to them than anything else.

I thought this was an interesting article:-

m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5910b2e9e4b046ea176aeddb

In general I am a fan of CfE and I have a 16 year old, a 14 year old and a 5 year old, so have seen the developments over the 10 years in question.

OTOH I would say that as all 3 of mine benefit from open ended differentiated learning partly because they have parents with plenty of time and the skill sets to support them. I think the communication of learning benchmarks to all parents could be improved.

I also think there are shortcomings in performance monitoring across schools. When my older 2 chose subjects and were set in s3 there were an awful lot of parents who complained because they were unaware that their DC were not at the expected standard.

Our secondary school is in the unusual position that the least deprived DC are outperformed by the 2 socio economic groups below them. The school leaver stats indicate a link to differential performance at the feeder primaries, but according to the primary stats the poorer performing richer students have a better primary. It looks like the primary tests are testing the wrong things or the tests are being manipulated.

wrt my 5 year old I think the rigour in covering the basics has improved since the CfE was introduced 10 years ago. There were instances of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater early on - we had to put extra effort into getting my DD2 reading and spelling and with number bonds and multiplication.

On AHs our council operates a consortium system because they wouldn't have enough students in some subjects to offer them at each school. They also have partnership courses with the local college. I agree there should be more consistency on subject choice and curriculum but I am not sure how this works in more rural areas?

But surely if there is a decline in standards across the UK then it is possible that there is a UK wide cause, for example cuts in education funding, or just general attitudes towards education? itisall

How can it be the fault of the rest of the UK? Education is devolved and always has been. The SNP have set budgets, selected Education Secretaries and run Education for 11 years.

Why end maximum class sizes for S1 and S2 of 20 in English and Maths if that seemed to be working (it was working)? Why allow ideologues to determine the shape of the curriculum and the exam system rather than using evidence based practice?

No one would take a drug that had not been rigorously tested and yet we are constantly, as teachers, being asked to take on "new" ways of teaching which are unproven and harmful (Brain Gym anyone?)

I had two children in P7 and P5 so can only comment on Primary.

My P7 child is Dyslexic. He repeated P1 (instead of being offered any help, he has other ASD issues too). I tried two local Primary schools. One was in a very depressed area, run by an expupil who bullied the children of the parents she had not liked when she was there. She was entirely unaccountable and barely in the school. She would 'pop in' three times a week for an hour or so in jeans, clutching a coffee, the rest of the time she 'worked from home'. At that school I was told my ds had no issues except he had 'a right English accent, like his parents'. (he has multiple dx of SEN). I took this to the top of the Council and they called SS on us for 'concerns re parental imagining of dx' and tried to us the Named Person legislation to call child protection concerns on us. We have multiple written reports by NHS professionals (some in England some in Scotland). We got a lawyer involved and they shut up. But I will never forget it. There was a whole culture of poor standards, coverup and intimidation of those who dared question it. I think this is happening in the SNP Govt right now (I also think it happens equally in Westmonster, but education has been devolved for over a decade now so the SNP must take some responsibility and the latest figures are deeply depressing).

The other local Primary we tried was run by a Head who was there 8am-6pm. But the School was run like a boot camp. It was in a very affluent area and despite the children often having private Maths/English/music/French lessons, standards were simply dire. When the School was inspected and found to be dire the local Council refused to answer questions at a meeting and told parents that they were responsible for 'talking the School down'. No accountability at all.

The local High School is considered the best in the County. Like many large High Schools, it helps if you are academic, or sporty, or good at drama/music. If you struggle, you are largely unsupported. But, I know of four families whose children have struggled (2 due to appalling bullying, 2 due to SEN). ALL of those kids are now in thier 3rd PLUS year of '4 hours a week tuition' delivered at the local primary school. No real attempt to get them back into mainstream education or provide for their educational needs. Staggering. It has cut its number of subjects offered at Higher, and cut them again. It has a name for not putting students forward for exams unless it is very sure they will pass them well.

I moved my kids to England 6m ago. The School is on it's 3rd Head since then. The Senco is dire. It is NOT what we had hoped for. But, by golly, is it better! There is a sense of standards, of pride in the School. The kids are constantly told to 'try harder', 'give 110%', 'you represent the School'. Regular challenging homework is given. There are educational trips. My 9 year old has 8 teachers across 8 subjects and simply LOVES it. I can see what is wrong with this system - endless pressure on kids, the horror that is SATS aged 10, etc, so I might not necessarily stay but it is certainly different.

The 'correct' path would be somewhere in between the rigidity and overtesting of the English system and the sloppy woolly muddle that is CforE. But the thought of returning to the Scottish system fills me with gloom.

Reading through this thread... aren't a lot of these (not anywhere near all, but there's quite a few) teaching/school level issues?

Not setting classes shouldn't mean the same work being produced by all children, themed scots weeks rather than using meaningful resources during the rest of the year is s school doing a box ticking exercise rather than actually trying to get something valuable, the lack of context for things like vikings should surely prompt the relevance to a local connection to be added in rather than stopping teaching that topic?

There's definitely an issue with lack of training and resources for pupils with ASNs.

I'm not teacher bashing btw, just wondering if the same issues in education apply to teacher education as well...