MRS Thatcher once famously said that ''there is no such thing as society, only individuals'' and today Elizabeth Smith, Scotland's Conservative education spokesperson, rehearses that view with her criticisms of target-setting in Edinburgh schools (June 2).
International research demonstrates there are two key indicators which help predict the likely performance of any child at school - socio-economic background and the academic achievement of a child's parents: if parents have achieved higher education qualifications themselves then they are more rather than less likely to encourage their children to aspire to higher academic success.
So the Scottish Office set about devising a system which could assess a school's whole pupil population against these two measurements and against which similar schools could be compared. In comparing like school with like school it should be possible, therefore, to judge what value schools add to their pupils' performance and to encourage schools to aspire to the best already being achieved in their peer group.
In other words, children are not, in future, to be left to swing in the wind as individuals but rather their progress will be complemented by the quantifiable extra support their school can provide. The success of a school will therefore be judged on how much added value it brings to its pupils - not by crude league-table comparisons.
The Government's Standards Committee ultimately took the view that the limited information held nationally on parental qualifications is presently too unreliable to be a valid measurement of a school's characteristics.
This does not mean, though, that parental qualifications don't matter and that is why the City of Edinburgh will be bringing to our Parents' Consultative Committee pilot proposals on the impact of reliable evidence on parental qualifications to a school's present performance targets and in this way reassure schools about the validity of their targets.
Now, I know this is complicated and from a political party which saw beauty in the searing simplicity of a crude league-table which measured apples with oranges and was trusted by no-one its knee-jerk reaction is illuminating.
Basically, it would suit opponents of the new targets system to cower behind the protection of a wholly discredited crude league table - that way individual children would make it or not and no-one would be held accountable except the child himself - and if he comes from a well-off home with a mum who is a ''high-flying first-class Wrangler with the Cambridge Tripos'' then no-one would be at all surprised if he succeeded but no-one would know, either, if his school could have helped him to do even better.
Seriously raising standards requires delving below the headlines to recognise that a child learns as a member of society and his individual achievement is seriously affected by that experience!
Councillor Elizabeth Maginnis,
Convener, Education Committee,
City of Edinburgh Council,
High Street, Edinburgh.
June 2.
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