Maths

When you add it all up...

Please give my podcast a listen! It’s completely free and is some of the best political analysis you will find. It features Kirsty Buchanan, a Special Adviser to Theresa May when she was Prime Minister; and Frankie Leach, an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader of the opposition. Let me know what you think!

This article first appeared in The Stornoway Gazette.

I have awoken with a jolt this morning. Rishi Sunak wants all pupils to study maths until they are 18. It’s an announcement he’s making as he sets out his priorities for leadership. He’ll have many: strikes, the NHS, the cost of living crisis. He doesn’t have long to deal with them - around 18 months at most. But maths until age 18, that’s the holy grail. I think not. 

There were similar mutterings stirring when I was in school which was - mercifully - before the SNP’s disastrous handling of Scottish education had filtered through properly to classrooms. A dedicated, hard working, enthusiastic and determined workforce has been slowly undermined by politics in Scotland leaving them jaded, trudging and frustrated. Ask any teacher, they’ll tell you for themselves. I admire and applaud and respect those who are training to be teachers and who learn the ways of education now. They are absolutely the future, so long as the politicians back off. 

The year started with quite another education revelation. From The Times: “John Swinney, the finance secretary, made plans to centralise education in 2007 if councils did not agree to deliver the SNP’s manifesto pledges. The coercive tactic, revealed in declassified cabinet papers, was described as “a throwback to the days of the Scottish Office under the Tories” by one constitutional expert.” This John Swinney is the same personification of wondrous education management as the one who oversaw our Covid generation’s exam results. Remember that one? The Education Secretary staggered his way round a U-turn of incompetence after thousands of pupils had their marks downgraded by the SQA, erasing teacher-estimated grades. Those from poorer backgrounds were hardest hit. Schools’ past performance was taken into account during the process. Then Mr Swinney, faced with an overwhelming amount of criticism from parents and teachers, saw the writing on the wall, deciphered its meaning, and changed his mind.  

This bastion of education management prowess belongs to the same government which, you’ll remember, set a defining mission to reduce the aforementioned attainment gap (presumably choosing to ignore the gap between the abilities of cabinet secretaries and the general population where the gulf is visible from Neptune). 

On this defining mission, the latest Scottish Government figures logging achievements in Curriculum for Excellence in primaries one, four and seven and S3 show a rather large swing and a miss. The curriculum breaks achievement down into four levels, across literacy, numeracy, listening and talking, and writing and reading, between the start of primary school and S3. In all of these indicators, the poverty-related gap for S3 pupils attaining the third level or better has widened since 2018-19 - the last available figures for secondary schools. The attainment gap remains higher than before Covid-19 in Scotland's primary schools on average.

This is Mr Swinney, who wanted to take control of education from councils to himself? What a thought. One might note that this SNP government is currently embracing stalemate with teachers - who should be paid six-figure salaries, working in schools that are palaces, with access to any and every resource they need to educate pupils effectively and efficiently - over their pay. Just how much of a priority is education for the SNP?

John Swinney of the SNP

While we consider centralisation, of course the SNP did centralise the police and fire services, which were previously accountable to local authority police boards, and, from The Times: “is planning to strip councils of social care to create its National Care Service. Councils are concerned about plans to centralise child social services into the National Care Service, insisting they are inextricably linked to education.”

Isn’t the determination to grab as much power over things as possible quite fascinating? And isn’t it something about which to be extremely cautious?

Does a Scottish Government strategy meeting sound like this? “Yes, we’ll have devolution, but it stops at the Scottish Parliament where we will showcase a smorgasbord of mediocre government secretaries to oversee the mismanagement of everything. Local authorities are the enemy so we will decimate councils, take control of key areas, plunder their budgets, but make them the fall-guys for the services which then start to fail.”

As we start 2023 and politics ramps up, I’m intrigued to see what becomes of the year ahead. Already we have hares running, and we should not be shy to set more. Education is fundamental to everything. Fix education and everything else automatically gets better too: crime rates go down, health outcomes are improved, tax revenues go up as pupils become graduates who become high-earners. Education should work for each individual pupil and be delivered by an army of exceptionally well-paid, highly-trained teachers and support staff. Pupils should be guided and advised, not forced to do algebra until they can bear it no more. 

Of course at a UK level, correspondents and pundits are determined that 2023 can’t see as much upheaval as last. Predictions are a fools’ game at the best of times. Mine? Nicola Sturgeon will not be Scotland’s First Minister by the time the year’s out. But then, I didn’t study maths until I was 18, so what do I know?