The Scottish school system was once the jewel in the British educational crown. With good standards and low levels of social inequality, it was seen as the part of the UK where working-class kids could get ahead as a result of a high-quality comprehensive education.
The English system was a basket case by comparison, characterised by huge variations in school quality, poor outcomes and the occasional wacky education theory. In 1997, four in 10 English pupils started secondary school without sufficient levels of literacy.
A quarter of a century later, and the situation has flipped. The latest comparative data on outcomes for 15-year-olds across OECD countries, published last week, shows a Scottish school system in steep decline, blighted by rising levels of social inequality. The drop in standards is the equivalent of today’s teenagers missing around 16 months of maths teaching compared with those in 2012, 18 months of science, and eight months of reading. Scottish educationalist Lindsay Paterson describes the situation as “catastrophic”.
England’s performance on the other hand, with some caveats, held up relatively well, even with the impact of the pandemic, and it has moved up the international tables. The overall picture on child wellbeing in England is far from rosy: there is evidence that the attainment gap started to widen again just before the pandemic; England is doing badly on measures of child life satisfaction compared with other OECD countries; and new Unicef data last week put England at the bottom of the league table for increases in child poverty.
But there is little doubt that, educationally, England is performing significantly better than Scotland. The Scottish decline has happened on the watch of the self-styled “progressive” SNP, which pledged to make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up; relative English success has come despite a Tory government best known for channelling huge energy into a structural reform – the rollout of academies – that has had little impact on outcomes. It’s not resources: Scotland spends more per pupil than England. Or class sizes: Scotland has one teacher for every 16 primary and 12 secondary pupils, compared with 21 and 16 in England. What on earth is going on?
Some experts lay the blame squarely on Scotland’s curriculum reform. In 2010, the SNP, with the support of other parties, introduced the “Curriculum for Excellence”. It downgraded the status of knowledge and adopted a competence-based approach, emphasising the development of transferable skills and interdisciplinary learning.
This is in line with a growing movement in western education that discipline-based knowledge is becoming outdated in a world of Google and artificial intelligence, and that we would be better off focusing on skills children can one day apply to jobs that don’t even exist yet. It’s a theory with considerable traction. But the problem is that it is only that: a theory, based on zero evidence.
And it is one associated with declining educational standards where it has been adopted. “Scotland appears to be entering the same serious crisis of education as Sweden in the mid-1990s,” Tim Oates, of Cambridge Assessment, tells me. That’s significant, because Sweden, like Scotland, adopted a competency-based curriculum back then, paving the way for long-term decline in its international performance. Other places that have suffered falling standards and rising inequality after adopting a competency-based curriculum include France and the Canadian province of Quebec.
These kinds of curriculums are based on an entirely false but faddish dichotomy between knowledge and skills. As Daisy Christodolou sets out in her seminal book on knowledge in education, fact-based learning cannot be separated from understanding; being able to engage with facts is the key to conceptual understanding in disciplines such as maths, science and reading. Of course, we want the school system to produce independent learners with transferable skills; but that does not mean the best way to do this is to emulate real-world problems in schools.
Worst of all, this so-called “progressive” approach to education disadvantages poorer children the most, and this shows up in the Scottish data. Children with more affluent parents are more insulated because they tend to have richer home-learning environments and access to structured learning outside of school. Yet despite the Scottish experience, the Welsh government is in the process of launching a very similar set of curriculum reforms.
The comparison with England is instructive. There is much to criticise about English education policy in the past decade: distracting structural reform that has had no impact on standards; an increasingly urgent teacher recruitment crisis; the scarcity of provision for children with mental health, behavioural or additional learning needs. But when it comes to curriculum and standards, there has been a continuity of approach from the Labour years through this Conservative administration. To take the example of maths, there has been significant investment in effective models of teaching from the highest-performing systems in the world. The data shows that it is paying off, in line with the international evidence that high-quality, evidence-based curriculums are a very good and cost-effective way of improving education outcomes.
It is striking that the SNP was able to introduce this curriculum with little political opposition, but also little pushback from the Scottish educational establishment. Apart from the three-yearly Pisa study, there is a lack of data by which to hold politicians and civil servants accountable; Paterson in 2018 described Scottish education as “a data desert”. The Labour critique of the SNP is depressingly woolly and ungrounded in evidence-based reform that could make a difference for Scottish children.
The SNP has dismally failed Scottish children, especially those from poorer backgrounds. Declining standards have been known about for years but, instead of serious efforts to address them, the SNP has tried to mask them with spin – last week, it claimed the data shows Scotland is “maintaining its international standing” – and shiny but unrealised manifesto pledges such as giving every schoolchild a free laptop.
This is the rot of populism, wherever it is found. For the SNP, it comes in the form of independence and launching constitutional fights it can’t win with Westminster; for the Conservative party, it has been Brexit and blaming EU membership for the country’s wider economic woes. Picking a fight with a big, bad villain allows governing parties with terrible track records to avoid short-term accountability for their substantive failures. But politicians should be warned: voters eventually get wise to the playbook.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
