‘It’s worse in Greece’ is of no comfort to Scottish schools short of teachers

IN the dystopian classic 1984, giant ‘telescreens’ project the face of Big Brother – and endless propaganda footage detailing the state’s successes.

This came to mind last week when I watched John Swinney delivering his keynote speech at the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow.

I sat in a room, with other observers, as the Education Secretary spoke on a projector screen, after a rather eerie Soviet-style promotional video.

It showed children happily at work in a classroom with captions that spelt out myriad SNP triumphs.

Mr Swinney himself was in a neighbouring hall – presumably it was standing room only, hence the ‘overspill’ room.

But the speech only heightened my feeling that I had stepped into an alternate universe – one where Scottish state schools weren’t in the midst of crisis.

The Education Secretary made a bullish defence of the SNP’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), which has lost the confidence of many education experts, teachers and parents, and brushed off concerns about widespread teacher shortages.

He claimed not to recognise the bleak picture painted of state schools ‘in the newspapers’.

Mr Swinney also re-stated the SNP’s commitment to closing the ‘attainment gap’ between the best and worst-performing schools, which he said had ‘bedevilled’ education all of his adult life.

The final flourish was a promise not to do anything else for now – there were no big announcements.

This is either dangerous complacency or a lucky break for a demoralised teaching workforce living in fear of more ‘reform’.

Vacancies

Either way, psychologists would have diagnosed a case of advanced ‘denial’ from the minister once nicknamed ‘Honest John’ – a moniker that may need some revision after his stint running our schools is over.

Take his dismissal of teacher shortages – there were nearly 700 vacancies across Scotland when term started after summer. Schools, including one in his own constituency, have been forced to plead for parental assistance to recruit maths teachers.

After his speech, I asked Mr Swinney if he feared we may see more of these desperate cries for help. His response was that ‘Scotland’s position in terms of teacher shortages is very much at the low end of the spectrum internationally’ – the problem was worse elsewhere.

But imagine if your child attended a school where there weren’t any maths teachers – would you console yourself with the thought that ‘Oh well, at least it’s not as bad as the situation in Greece’?

Nicola Sturgeon made Mr Swinney her education supremo when she vowed to tackle the poor performance of the state sector after becoming First Minister in 2014 – her deputy was bound to be a safe pair of hands for her number one priority.

The central mission since then has been a relentless focus (in between agitating for the end of Brexit, and of the UK, of course), on that attainment gap, which the SNP and many others attribute to poverty.

But Mr Swinney revealed last week that in fact the Scottish Government is only just starting to consult on the yardsticks that will be used to measure that gap – really more of a chasm in many areas.

You might have thought exam results would be a good starting-point, given that some schools in deprived areas of Glasgow have a zero per cent Higher pass rate, while for others just beyond the council boundary in East Renfrewshire, it soars beyond 50 per cent.

But the CfE – which, among other gems, teaches children how to claim benefits – is all about shifting the focus away from such trivialities as exam performance.

More cynically, the last thing Miss Sturgeon wants is to pick a yardstick that would ultimately leave her a hostage to fortune.

Earlier this month, education expert Professor Lindsay Paterson said the CfE could end up as a disaster due to ‘dumbing down’ and may even exacerbate inequality among pupils.

Last week, Mr Swinney tried to blame Labour for the CfE (its genesis dates back to the days of the Labour/Lib Dem coalition more than a decade ago – but it was implemented under the SNP).

I asked the Education Secretary why it had taken the SNP so long to get round to sorting out this problem.

In response, he insisted that ‘our work has been focused on trying to maximise the potential of young people within education’.

The more honest answer might have been to acknowledge that much of the past decade has been wasted on the party’s constitutional obsession.

After all, the Scottish Government’s notorious White Paper, setting out a blueprint for independence, said splitting up the UK would give Holyrood control over vital economic levers to combat poverty, which would in turn address the attainment gap.

The SNP now has control over a raft of welfare and tax powers – but with little clear idea of how to use them.

Spin

Robbed of the familiar defence that no true reform can take place without independence, the SNP is reliant instead on its timehonoured tactic of spin. The trouble is, no one is buying it any more.

Among those who can’t be fooled are the teachers on the front line, the ones who don’t accept the intellectual paralysis of the union barons and their resistance to reform.

They have borne the brunt of the SNP’s changes, so little wonder that four in ten are thinking of quitting in the next 18 months because of stress.

A stark report by Bath Spa University this month said the working conditions of Scotland’s teachers are ‘extremely poor’, with concerns over demands placed on educational staff, poor support from management, bad behaviour from pupils and parents and ‘constant changes’ to the curriculum.

One of the biggest problems is that children with acute ‘additional support needs’, including behavioural issues, are being educated in mainstream classes – known as ‘social inclusion’.

Some pupils can be highly disruptive and indeed abusive, turning classrooms and playgrounds into war zones, meaning the well-behaved majority lose out.

But all too often it is deemed politically incorrect to exclude those making trouble or to educate them separately, which would be costly.

Yet the official narrative is that social inclusion isn’t fuelling indiscipline – directly contradicting the experience of most teachers I have ever spoken to.

Mr Swinney also left out of his speech the fact that MSPs have raised concerns over trainee teachers’ poor grasp of the ‘three Rs’.

He didn’t mention that Scottish pupils are lagging behind their peers in former Soviet nations on reading, maths and science skills.

Sadly, Mr Swinney also failed to talk about the fact that more than one in four children are failing to achieve expected levels of literacy and numeracy by the end of primary school.

With time running out to provide evidence, however flimsy, that Miss Sturgeon has made some progress on education in the past three years, the SNP spin machine is back in overdrive.

As usual, political survival is ranked far higher than the future of our children – so you can expect to hear much more of Honest John’s ‘doublethink’.