I loathe the Scottish Government

[Dineasair]

I loathe the Scottish Government. I want to see the SNP/Green Party coalition roast in hell! They can take any MSP who voted for the Gender Reform Bill or the Hate Crime Laws with them. Is it now a hate crime for a Scottish Woman to say that?

Care to offer more detail on what misinformation has been posted?

It's just a lack of joined up thinking from the Scottish government. Universities in Scotland are competing on a global market for students and staff. So if you're a mid-career lecturer/academic/researcher your salary is around £40k, the very top of the grade is £70k. If you're in the position of making a career move you have the choice of any uni in the world if you're good at what you do.

What do you choose - somewhere like Manchester or Exeter which has more funding, or Glasgow? Add to that, when you're earning more than £29k in Scotland you pay more tax than in other parts of the UK. The Scottish government don't seem to get this - the fact that labour is mobile and that it is a perfectly valid choice to NOT want to work in Scotland and instead want to work in Wales, England or overseas.

Also that picture - universities in Scotland don't have mortarboards.

I know someone who was given an unconditional offer for Newcastle University with 4As and a B at Higher this year. I was surprised it was unconditional.

My DB’s children in England had to sit 30 separate exams for their GCSEs which he thought was madness.

I was at uni in Scotland before UK tuition fees were introduced. Most of my school year applied to Scottish universities anyway. It was just
more straightforward. Everyone knew you’d have to concentrate properly on CYS to go to England, there wasn’t much discussion about it, everyone knew the option was there if you wanted to do it that way.

My DB’s children in England had to sit 30 separate exams for their GCSEs which he thought was madness.

My DC sitting 8 Nat 5s last year sat 2 exams for most subjects. They also sat listening and speaking exams, drama performance exams etc. So for 8 subjects probably had more than 20 examined sessions. The main difference with GCSEs was they sat two papers on the same subject the same day with half an hour/hour between them rather than sitting them on different days.

Mine too but for them the exams on the same day felt like was one exam with two papers and a short break, a 30 exam experience.

I did think the Nat 5 French oral was nonsense. That was done much earlier and my DC essentially just came out with a spiel they’d written and learned off by heart. I don’t know if it was possible to do that in 1988 and I missed a trick but I remember my French aural as being an actual conversation.

NOT a 30 exam experience

Pros and cons to having both exams on the same day. It does enable you to focus revision on that subject then set it aside, but if you had a bad night’s sleep/incubating a cold it is your whole subject knocked. And as you are meant to know your subject, mixing it with other subject exams does perhaps require more embedded knowledge (though from a candidates perspective might not seem so good). On the otherhand, Scottish Schools don’t face the same degree of problems with clashing exams meaning students need to be isolated over lunch to take the exam after other students have sat them.

Totally agree with your assessment of French Oral, though the same seemed to apply to so many of their exams; learning pre-written passages by heart and regurgitating them.

My DS got 95% in his Nat 5 French exam and couldn't speak a word of French (I should know as I studied French at uni).

He learned his oral by rote and had great dictionary skills for the reading and writing. The only few marks he lost were in the listening paper.

You're the same age as me - I did two modern language O grades in 1988 and the oral portion was a story board thing, you were given a set of 6 or 8 little pictures telling a story. So one we did was a family packing up to go on holiday, putting things in suitcases, putting things in the car, arriving at the airport, then dad realises he's forgotten his passport and has to go back home, final picture was them all boarding the flight.

From memory you got maybe 5-10 minutes to prepare what you were going to say, then the teacher would start the recording device and you'd all speak at the same time into a tape machine. It was a real test as you had no idea what the story was going to be. Also open to misinterpretation, my friend thought that the pic of the dad clutching his jacket with a shocked expression meant he was having a heart attack....

But yeah, totally different to what my DS did when he did Nat 5 French which was all pre-prepared, learned off by heart and regurgitated during the exam.

I don’t remember doing that at all! Oh dear, literally nothing about that coming back. Am off to lie down.

I sat Maths, Arithmetic, French, German, Biology, History and Latin at Ordinary Grade. I didn't sit O Grade English exam as school said there was no point as I was bound to pass it at Higher.

I sat Higher English, French, German, History, Biology and Maths in 5th year and CSYS English, French and History in 6th year.

I know someone who was given an unconditional offer for Newcastle University with 4As and a B at Higher this year. I was surprised it was unconditional.

I got an unconditional for Newcastle with AAABB - but it was 33 years ago!

Yes I do know that.

Quite why our beloved SG thought £1820 was enough to cover tuition fees I’ll never know. No wonder the universities are struggling.
Unless of course the grand plan all along was to restrict places and dumb down the population. They’re already doing a great job of that with the school curriculum.
One of my DCs has already left Scotland to escape the tax situation and had no plans to return. The other is making use of their free tuition and then will also be off elsewhere to work. As single young people the world is their oyster but Scotland isn’t.

Sadly I agree with this. Tax differences between Scotland & England are an in built brain drain right now. I was very much in favour of devolution previously, but in recent years I think the Scot Gov have actively harmed Scotland compared to England.

Hard agree with you both

https://www.thetimes.com/article/15333ed2-559c-42b7-ba25-2f47ba7a3e4a?shareToken=8b4f41bbcc6e34d7ec03df47db224952

Scathing…and spot on.

First paragraph nails it : "The blame lies with a cabinet which gambled on the country being too stupid to spot the incompetence."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg5vxe3v5eo
I can’t actually get over this and I think it demonstrates how fcked up the whole Scottish government is. So the SNP pull out a vote winning bribe to extend free school meals (yes cheap ultra processed crap with the nutritional value of cardboard) and are now saying …no can too…too expensive. You would think the opposition parties would be saying…”quite right…ridiculous policy…stop feeding our kids pigswill. But no…they are saying it should go ahead because the SNP promised it. Now…I’m all for pointing out the hypocrisy and incompetence of the SNPs policies, vote winning gimmicks and bribes that have frankly horrific consequences but I don’t need the opposition trying to force through a bad policy just to make a point that the SNP have done a u-turn and can’t be trusted. All parties are playing on the public’s heartstrings about how we need to protect the poor kids…meanwhile happily filling said kids (most of whom do not even need it) with crap which will lead to obesity and poor nutrition. Child poverty is of course an issue but it cannot be tackled with a half arsed policy like this. There is zero thought to unintended consequences in government policy making…wasting money on treating symptoms rather than trying to find solutions to address the root causes.

First paragraph nails it : "The blame lies with a cabinet which gambled on the country being too stupid to spot the incompetence."

I'm not convinced the cabinet is even aware of their own incompetence.

Free school meals was always a ridiculous policy. Those on low incomes already were (and continue to be) entitled to free school meals all the way through school.

I'm not buying the argument that we have to pay for all kids to have free meals to avoid 'shame and stigma' - you could do that by having a personal lunch swipe card which all kids get - if they are entitled to FSM it's always valid, for anyone else their parents have to load with money to pay. So no one except the admin office & you knows if your parent paid or if you were on FSM.

Surely cards are how a lot of schools manage lunches anyway? Mine does.

The meals are shocking in quality and I'm really frustrated that they normalise having a desert after basically every lunch. How can Public Health Scotland be comfortable with kids getting custart covered slices of cake nearly daily!?!

Any suggestions whom to contact, re: the health angle especially. MSPs or councillors?

I went to a pool couple of weeks ago, nearly all the kids were fat, to put it bluntly.