Possible move to Scotland from England but should we be concerned about education?

[Wouldliketomove]

Hello Everyone,

As the title says, DH and I are carefully researching a possible move to Scotland for our family (two toddlers currently) but I am constantly reading worrying things about education in Scotland. I'm aware there are also soon to be significant changes, which complicates things further and introduces more unknowns.

Can anyone with experience either as teachers or parents offer a perspective on education in Scotland at the moment please or any further insight into what is to come? I have tried to read what is widely available.

Thanks very much in advance

i have read that too. My DCs went to one of my areas “rough” schools and I have been very surprised they don’t seem to have the fights breaking out that were a feature of my
school. One of my DC’s wants to be a teacher and I keep telling theM about the violence.

I have many criticisms of the Scottish education system, however my ds is currently studying a science subject at Oxbridge and was perfectly well prepared for this by his Scottish education at a state school. He did AH biology, chemistry, physics and maths.
From his experience and discussion with friends, AH maths is much harder than A level maths and more comparable to A level further maths. The AH course content for the science subjects is different but not easier than A level and he was in no way disadvantaged in comparison to his English/Welsh/NI peers. And Advanced Highers attract more UCAS points than A-Levels at equivalent grades.
English and Scottish qualifications are different and comparing them is fairly meaningless. The better measure of Scotland’s problems is its declining standards across measures such as those in the pisa report.

It's relevant to the quality of education. Children in Italy are not a different species. If they can achieve this, then why can't children in Scotland achieve something similar? Why aren't they being given the chance to? Why is a dumbed-down education being forced on them? Why aren't our children reading Pride and Prejudice when Italian teenagers are?

It's also worth bearing in mind that we live in a global economy. Our children may well find themselves competing with people from elsewhere in Europe, from Asia, etc.
If Scotland did manage to get into the EU, either through being part of the UK or being independent, then the border would be open to any European who fancied the nice scenery, so there would be direct competition for jobs.

I have good reason for not trusting that broadbrush UCAS approach (and as you know, Oxbridge don't deal in UCAS points). I have heard that maths in Scotland is higher level than English, music etc, which are hugely dumbed down.
A poster upthread had the opposite experience of your DS - their nephew from Scotland did maths and sciences, and compared the Scottish exams with the English ones, as their English daughter was doing the same subjects at school and they both then did the same subject at university in England. Their view was that Scotland was behind, and the Scottish boy apparently really struggled at university in England and had to re-sit some exams.

You should let this go now.

@Scrumptiouslyy you keep going on about Alevel is a 2 year course and Higher and Advanced Higher are a 1 year course.

However for a teenager to sit the Advanced Higher they have to have studied for an passed Higher so the Advanced Higher is an extention of the Higher so it basically is a 2 year course.

Its like when people go to college they can sit an HNC over one year and then complete the HND the next year. The HND is basically a 2 year course but you have an HNC after completing the first year.

I don’t understand your focus on Italy and literature. The country’s Pisa score for reading is far below Scotland. When I looked it was below for Science too, 1 point above for Maths but according to Pisa the average Italian reader is well below their Scottish peer.

You’ve been told by a poster their DC wasn’t behind other students at in their STEM oxbridge
degree, my DC’s friend has found the same in their Arts Oxbridge degree.

I hate the rout learning of Nat 5s and the obsession with the marking scheme but there are lots of shit things about the English system too and there will be stuff every country gets wrong, even Italy (there must been going by it’s
Pisa scores).

Do you think Scottish education is as good as ever, despite the plunging PISA scores?

@PollysKenwood Simply that I knew a teenager from Italy for a couple of years, and was astonished by what she told me about her (state) school, which was doing work that was aeons above Scotland (and aeons, though fewer of them, above England). I mean, her class actually had lessons on French history, taught in French by a Frenchwoman. And they had read literature in English that was way above what my same age DC did in English lessons in Scotland. On top of Latin and Greek (whether you think those are worth learning or not), and obviously vast amounts of difficult Italian literature. She clearly worked very hard and there were lots of tests, but she absolutely loved it.
I don't care too much about their Pisa test results, if that's what they're doing as teenagers.
Learning for the love of learning, discovering literature and history, training your mind, stretching yourself to your fullest potential, teachers having genuinely high expectations of you. It's all a million miles away from the Scottish education system. My DC is perfectly bright, and they were basically told, at 15, that they weren't expected to be able to read to the end of even one book in the course of their English Higher (maybe your children were expected to read one whole book, but I'm guessing it wasn't a lot more than that). And they were constantly given the message that Nat 5s and Highers were really tough exams, etc. Being given that constant "it's all very hard and I don't know if you can manage it" message really demoralised my DC. I don't think it was focused on them - it was the general message that children are given here. I've heard the same about primary school. They do practically nothing, but are told that they're working terribly hard and mustn't overstretch themselves. We have Ukrainian friends and it drives the mum mad. The DC comes home at 3 o'clock and says the teacher says he's been working very hard and he needs to rest after school. As far as she can tell, he's actually doing close to nothing at school. Scottish primary is obviously miles behind Ukrainian primary.

This has happened to my DD in England too TBF

Every pupil who has arrived from Scotland, to our school in England, is behind. The SNP are failing this generation and are ignoring how awful things are.

England has Pupil Referral Units for the most disruptive students. In Scotland, there is nothing similar. Schools are expected to cope.

This isn’t my experience at all. My DCs went to a very diverse school, lots of second generation immigrant kids with parents who have a strong focus on education, lots of hard work and high expectations. I’ve never heard a teacher talking about things been hard, they occasionally said that the level of work required was a “step up” but nothing to say that was unachievable. In my DCs higher year, several kids wanted to take 6 Highers or an advanced higher and the school just helped make it happen. Your DC’s school sounds really depressing and I’m not surprised you have such a negative view. However, I think it’s odd in turn to generalise about the wonders of the Italian system based on one person. My DC’s school sounds vastly superior to yours but as you know that doesn’t make my DCs’ experience universal.

My DCs school has a counselling area whwre kids can go for time out. It’s a school that works hard on social exclusion, there’s an awareness of quite high levels of poverty across the catchment and the set up feels as if it is underpinned by an expectation that support may need to be provided by the school. DH used to chair the parent council and he was impressed by the head.

That's a fair point, @PollysKenwood . Your school sounds good - unusually good. Good leadership and aspirational parents can certainly make a significant difference. However, you don't get a school like the Italian one that's a complete one-off. Schools have to work within the system, including the exam system. Similarly, however great your Scottish school is, I doubt it's teaching French history in French, or reading Chaucer, Shakespeare and a dozen other great works of literature with children every year. It's doing the best it can within the system.

Well, the English system took my brother’s DC who was in the gifted and talented stream at primary school and said they couldn’t help when they were crippled with anxiety during A levels until they had a breakdown. I’ve just deleted a long message as it was essentially a “compare and contrast” between my DC1 and DB’s child (similar ages) and they are in such different positions right now that I felt a bit shitty doing it. I don’t think school has left my brother’s DC with a love of learning.

I’m sorry if you feel your DC who went through the Scottish system has been disadvantaged relative to the one in the English system but, while I have plenty of issues with Scottish education, my own DC’s experience seems to have produced two confident and well rounded DCs so I can see there are positives.

DC1 is a voracious reader so perhaps they’ll find their own way to Chaucer one day though
I was educated here when the “envy of the world” chat still abounded and John Donne in SYS English was as close as it got. I absolutely hate poetry though so another one failed to be inspired.

I don't think there's any chance of us seeing gifted and talented streams in Scottish primary schools! I don't think they're actually "streams", though, just a list of children who are deemed to be gifted at certain things.

You see I really hate the whole ‘pupil support’ staff etc that are foisted on schools with the expectation that schools should be expected to deal with all of society’s issues. I want my child’s teacher to educate them to the best of their abilities, that’s what they’re trained to do. If a child isn’t coping for whatever reason remove them from the school and get them proper, professional help. Instead we have teachers expected to be teachers - and social workers, and psychologists, and counsellors and they perform lots of roles in a half assed fashion and nothing well.

I have a child that goes to mainstream private (Only way to get away from the constant violence inflicted on them in state school) and they raise confident, rounded kids by removing any child who is disrespectful to another fellow pupil or teacher. There’s no violence, very little counselling, just teaching with some learning support for the SEN kids. We would go so near to having this system in mainstream Scottish schools if only we got rid of the damaging ‘inclusion’ policy and removed violent children and those that weren’t coping for other reasons to other schools. It would benefit the vast majority of pupils so much. But yeh the SNP claims there’s no issue so we’re going to go on failing our kids by giving them a second rate education.

My DC’s school doesn’t have teachers as the main support staff in the way described above, that expectation isn’t loaded on the teachers, that’s the point - they go elsewhere in the school and other people have that role. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of classroom distribution. DC1 was told by a teacher they used to chat with how happy they were to be working at the school and of how well this was dealt with.

Can we at least agree that there is a huge disparity in the difficulty of Nat5s? My DD and her friends were given the option to do an extra Nat 5 in Apps of Maths. They literally did zero revision, barely looked at a passed paper and all got As! Yet proper Nat 5 Maths was tricky and required hours of study. And now similarly 'literacy and communication' courses are being rolled out as an easier alternative to English. It feels like a completely cynical attempt to pass pupils through the system and be able to claim attainment is being raised.

Application of Maths isn’t supposed to be viewed as the same level. My understanding is that normally kids aren’t expected to do both, that isn’t viewed as of additional value. My friend’s DC did both only because she had been doing another subject and hated it so friend stepped in and it was agreed with the school (not my DC’s school) that the other subject would be dropped and App of Maths sat instead - this was after prelims in S4 so not long before sitting Nat 5 and yes, for her it was an easy A. DC1 has a uni friend whose school have a default option of doing Nat 5 PE rather than just the “core” PE my DC’s did so most sit 9 Nat 5s.

I sat O Grade Maths and O Grade Arithmetic. My friend wasn’t great at Maths so only sat Arithmetic.

So why do they still call it a Nat 5 then, if it’s not the same value as maths? Surely that’s devaluing maths?

Some kids moving from Scotland to England can end up skipping a year because of the differences in school start age. So they are bound to be behind.

If I was a teen at school, I wouldn’t want to be learning about French history in French, I’d want to be learning the language and how I can use it.

and reading Chaucer and Shakespeare isn’t for everyone, we are moving with the times, this is modern day, so books, poetry etc moves with the times.

listening to some of the stories on here I’m just glad my children went to the high school , in our catchment, supportive staff, encouraging staff and staff who listen to the children making their learning interesting and exciting.

both mine did well throughout school , university and both have amazing jobs.

To study a language thoroughly I would expect to have read books about it and learning the history is just another way of building up French vocabulary while learning about the culture. We didn’t study Shakespeare in my Scottish school as many moons ago as it was deemed that people going to my school were too thick for it so we did sunset song instead (which was terrible!). Shame they’re still making the same judgements. Shakespeare is such an important part of our culture - so many English phrases, sayings etc come from Shakespeare and I was taught nothing about it. You can get through Nat 5, higher and advanced higher without studying Shakespeare at all!