Our exclusive report last week that Scottish schools face a major loss of education IT services owing to licensing changes by Microsoft caused quite a stir.
It prompted one of our readers to unfavourably compare the Scottish Government’s performance to that of its Welsh counterpart.
Today, however, one of our readers argues that there is much to be proud of in Scotland’s performance in education.
Stan Grodynski of Longniddry writes: "It is interesting that with the General Election over, Jill Stephenson (Letters, July 13) raises the subject of education in Wales in order to launch another attack on the SNP Scottish Government. The fact that the Scottish Government appears not to have selected her preferred software provider seems a rather thin excuse for such a foray, even for Ms Stephenson.
"Certainly, as in the rest of the UK, there are challenges in the classrooms of Scotland, especially post-pandemic, but most of the criticism of the Scottish Government in the mainstream media has been on the basis of PISA scores of 15-year-olds in three tested subjects, a very narrow perspective. Curriculum for Excellence, broadly supported across the political spectrum, was introduced by the SNP Scottish Government in 2010 'to fully prepare today's children for adult life in the 21st century', in other words to progress a more holistic approach to education, including skills development, rather than simply focusing on academic test results.
"The success of this approach, praised by the OECD (and now adopted by the Labour Government in Wales), is evident in the record number of 95.9% of students now reaching successful destinations within three months of leaving school. Another measure of education success, also not covered in the PISA report, is the number of tertiary education graduates, by which measure Scotland apparently has “the best educated population in Europe.
"With Ms Stephenson’s further criticism of the SNP Scottish Government for supposedly forfeiting EU funds to which access has not yet expired one wonders why, if the Union is so great for Scotland, she has to persistently resort to writing such partial and misleading letters?"
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