The continuing SNP education banjax.

[WingnutSOS]

This makes me angry, and sad.

PISA results for 2025 show Scottish (and Welsh) pupils are more than a year behind their English peers for maths and science. Also behind on reading. (20 points is equivalent of a year of schooling).

The SNP should hang their heads in shame.

Scottish education used to be the gold standard across the world. Now thanks to the SNP, Scottish pupils are more than a year behind English pupils when it comes to maths and science, and well behind on reading.

The SNP likes to claim they are stronger for Scotland but this is the reality of 20 years of SNP rule.

A dumbed down race to the bottom - attainment gap closing, but not by elevating those at the bottom 😳

Curriculum for excellence my arse.

What do the asterisk against the numbers refer to?

Well of course but the education minister was promoted to deputy first minister.

It is interesting that the SNP keep being elected when their performance across a range of metrics is poor. Do you think Scottish voters don't know or don't care?

@tanstaafl not sure, here are the OECD scores over past few rounds of PISA testing

They have a core of about a third of voters that are so focused on independence that they will ignore any poor performance from the SNP. The rest of the vote is split between different parties so the SNP keep winning.

@2026Mummy as ever mediocrity is rewarded within the SNP ranks.

@JimBobsWife think it speaks to a deep rooted tendency to back your tribe (football, religion, politics) rather than speak out against them…

Jenny Gilruth was a dire education minister and will make a dire finance minister. Utterly clueless. And yet the SNP have somehow managed to find an even more vacuous and inept idiot to replace her. It’s like kids with dressing up boxes these SNP ministers. People with no discernible skills, surrounded by people with no discernible skills doing nothing but ‘reviews’ because they don’t know how to work out what action to take, and if they did work out a plan have no skills to carry through that plan.

They need to do 2 thinks - and rapidly:

1. ditch the CfE. Immediately. No one is learning any knowledge anymore. It’s soft skills which are utterly useless without the vital underpinning of the knowledge.
2. Remove violent and disruptive pupils from mainstream. Now. Immediately. It’s doing real damage to the learning and well being of teachers and schools who are just trying to get on with teaching / learning. Change benefits back to what you get in England and this will free up a few £bn. Charge students for tuition and that’s another £bn. Pay teachers what the get in England and that’s loads more money freed up.

And then you have enough to give Scottish kids what they deserve - a high quality, rigourous education in a safe and friendly environment.

So many Scottish voters are informant little bigots who loathe the ‘colonialist’ English. So many people are so thick they actually think England takes more money from Scotland that Scotland takes from England. That’s the mentality we’re talking about here. Thick little bigots.

Tricky one. It seems that despite doing all sorts of wrong, they can do no wrong; "Scottish National" in the name is enough to get a vote.

Also, the batshit Greens with their mad councillors/parliamentary candidates are getting elected. Again, I think "Green" makes people think they are a Good Thing and don't trouble themselves too much about what or who they are actually voting for.

(I used to vote for both of these parties but wouldn't touch either with a bargepole in their current state.)

The Indy supporters vote SNP regardless of the fact that there are no legal routes to Indy open just now at all. None whatsoever. But the supporter fall for all of the ‘Swinneys secret plan for Indy’ nonsense because they are totally and utterly incapable of thinking. To get Indy the Indy supporters would have to win an Indy ref. To get an Indy ref granted by Westminster the Indy parties would have to have long standing majority support. They’d have to prove Scotland is desperate for Indy, and that’s simply not there.

The route to Indy is get the Scottish government showing how much better run Scotland is than rUK and gain votes that way. It should show that we don’t need the Barnett formula, that we can successfully stand on our own two feet and run world class services for our extremely high tax and attract lots of world class companies. It’s failing so badly on these things it’s laughable!

Could be worse OP.

you could live in Wales….
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y52yq0nypo

Wales changed their curriculum at the same time as Scotland with the changes instigated by the same guy who did CfE apparently. With the same dire consequences.

https://frasernelson.substack.com/p/the-vandalisation-of-scottish-education

@tanstaafl reassuring 🤦‍♀️

Would have to agree with this, the amount of people I spoke to who still voted conservative after all the Boris scandals and Covid mismanagement was utterly bizarre.

Think more of us should be floating voters to be honest.

Gove was right. His improvements in education in England are still showing through.

But worry not Scotland and Wales! Labour is wrecking English state school education, so in a few years we’ll all be cosy at the foot of the table together.

@JimBobsWife

“We see the soft bigotry of low expectations, inflicted on a nation by itself.”

sadly v true.

According to some guy on Twitter, BBC Scotland are avoiding all the experts pointing out the flaws and gaming that means PISA school surveys shouldn’t be trusted. And the BBC is ignoring the OECD who apparently say that ‘Scotland is better than England at social and emotional scores’,

I mean with this level of “nothing to see here” on social media, is nothing ever up for scrutiny with these folk?

“Only put in their top schools” FFS.

It’s so painful! Do they think we’re thick enough to believe this? Do they??? If they ran the country well Indy would be on the horizon but no. Instead we get a stubborn refusal to see the problems, let alone start to address them, so the enshittification of scottish public services goes on and on.

Incredibly predictable and incredibly depressing. There's been no accountability for anything the SNP has done wrong (no internal investigation of the murrell scandal, the ferries, the failed bottle scheme, the disaster of the named person scheme, the self id nonsense and all the money spent on defending the rights of male criminals to be in female jails) so it's unsurprising that they are refusing to see the clear problems of their education policies and are trying to deny the evidence in front of them. It's par for the course with the SNP tbh. I once voted SNP (to my shame now) and was an indy yes voter in 2014 but once I saw how badly they governed then I was out. Lots of people though are so partisan that they won't ever stop voting for them. So this all continues.

There are discrepancies between the sampling in both countries to be fair.

Less than 1% of English pupils are tested but 5% of Scottish ones are, that’s a massive gap for statistical purposes.

Don’t know the participation rates this year but in the 2022 cycle only 67% of English schools took part compared to 96% of Scottish schools, the effect of this was that many of the English schools sampled actually volunteered to be replacements, as higher performing schools are more likely to volunteer (self-selection bias) it could lead to skewed results.

For what it’s worth I don’t like PISA as a comparison as there are too many socioeconomic factors which vary between countries that are considered equal, such as a rural school in Colombia being used as a an equivalent data point as one in Buckinghamshire.

Not saying for a second that our education system couldn’t be improved just think that this is a measure that shouldn’t be taken as gospel and used as guidance only.

@Meeplemakeglasgow you got me thinking! So - as my stats knowledge is limited to say the least… - I AI’d this and got this info….

That’s very impressive AI’ing.

I find that people who try to cast doubt on PISA do so simply because the results don’t suit their politics or their professional investment and attachment. It is as reliable as research in that field can be.

@WingnutSOS @DenizenOfAisleOfShame

The issue with AI is that it is trained to give you a layman’s explanation for complex data questions without looking into the additional factors.

The ‘bowl of soup’ analogy is quite famous and is used to explain to early stats students how to use economical polling.

However where this analogy fails in this case is that it assumes that each nation’s education system is homogenous, where in reality each nation is deeply segregated by socioeconomic status, region, funding and ethnicity/culture.

This is where earlier I pointed out that rural schools in Colombia and Buckinghamshire aren’t the same, a closer example may be that a deprived inner city school in London which has a high rate of Chinese and Indian students (who are the demographics that have the highest educational achievement in the uk) would be deemed the same as a deprived school in Dundee attended mostly by white working class kids (who are the lowest achieving group in the UK).

So in basic terms the ‘soup’ hasn’t been stirred in the same way because the ingredients are different.

This paired with sampling only 0.8% of a huge population means sampling is far more vulnerable to unmeasured local variations than sampling 13.8% of a smaller, more uniform population.

In my last post I mentioned non-participation and selection bias, with only 0.8% responding Even a small drop introduces a huge level of selection bias favouring higher achieving schools.

Know I’ve got a habit of droning on about data but there are several other factors why the methodology can’t really give a like for like comparison, don’t mind typing it up if you’re really interested?

As I say though it isn’t useless, as an indicator of what we achieved compared to past performance it is actually very good.

Clearly we have declined and it shows that action needs to be taken.

That is what we should be taking away from the data, but as you have pointed out due to political agendas many people just want to point out how we are better or worse than our neighbour when really the benchmark we should be looking at is our own past performance.