Let's focus on what Scottish education does well

This year’s exam results are… meh. Yes, the attainment gap widened a little (17.2% this year, a return almost exactly to the pre-Covid 2019 number of 16.9%). Considering relative poverty is 24% pretty consistently in Scotland, what this tells you is... poverty is really hard to solve and schools are pretty static.

Oscar Wilde said: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” and this should be tattooed on every Scottish school door.

Scottish education is not perfect. But it tries. Even the OECD declared that “achievement levels spread relatively equally, Scottish students are ‘resilient’, migrant students do well, and gender gaps [are] not as wide as in many systems.”

Perhaps our staff, young people and society would be better if we focused more on what our schools do well; just look over the border to see what a bad education system looks like.

Yes, we need an industrial strategy which includes education. But we also need to resist these persistent murmurings about ending free education for our school leavers.

That ambition - education is a right, not a privilege - is a noble Scottish tradition and needs to be cherished. It must not be sacrificed to the market gods.

There are two sides to this. The first is that taking away free tuition is morally reprehensible, the second, it is economically illiterate. We need problem solvers; creative thinkers; global citizens capable of adapting to new skills and technologies while working independently and as part of teams. We do not need rote learning and fact acquisition. That way lies obsolescence, economic disaster and replacement by AI.

Whichever argument is more persuasive, morality or pragmatism, we should be spending big on education, not sowing class division.

James Scotland concluded: “Extensive devolution and equalisation has resulted in improved relations among teachers, inspectors, lecturers and administrators…[but] As the state's money runs short, however, the limits of democracy are edging into view.”

Ain’t that the truth.

Peter Newman, Tain.

READ MORE: From Sturgeon on, SNP has failed the big test on education

READ MORE: Universities must be free of Scottish Government shackles

• JILL Stephenson and Martin Redfern (Letters, August 8) fail to appreciate that high UK-wide poverty rates is the main reason for the attainment gap or that Westminster has control of the major economic levers required to address poverty.

However, there has been a record narrowing of the attainment gap in primary schools where literacy and numeracy improvements reach a new high. Also, well over 90 per cent of pupils in Scotland go on to positive destinations within nine months after the end of the school year.

The overall Higher pass rate for 2024 is 74.9% which is similar to 2019, the last pre-Covid year, and the figures for the most deprived areas have actually slightly improved compared to 2019. During the last four years of Labour control up to 2007, the overall Higher pass rate only reached 71.7% in their best year.

Scotland has the most educated people in Europe, half the population aged 25 to 64 have a university, college or vocational qualification and is four per cent above the UK average.

On subject choices, why would Scottish youngsters study French or German when we have been taken out of Europe against our will and, as for STEM subjects, Labour’s decision to cancel funding for Edinburgh University’s £800 million super computer is a massive blow for our ambition to become a leading centre for research, development and innovation.

Mary Thomas, Edinburgh.

A complicated question

I WAS a primary teacher and sometime union activist for 38 years. During that period, when every main political party had a role in government at some point, I had to read or listen to regular bouts of distortion, exaggeration, economy with the facts and, occasionally, downright lies regarding the state of Scottish education. Trust me, despite some of those involved in this assuring us that they were not having a go at teachers but rather criticising government incompetence, my colleagues and I took it personally.

Therefore I find it significant that Brian Wilson, with his experience of being Education Minister, chooses not to bash the current Scottish Government in his piece about closing the Attainment Gap ("If we care about closing attainment gaps, throw everything at early years", The Herald, August 8), but rather highlights some of the limitations that plagued him and, no doubt, his predecessors and successors in their attempts to effect positive change. Education is not like an unsuccessful racehorse that suddenly becomes a serial winner after a change of jockey. It’s complicated.

It would be nice if the occasional journalist resists the temptation for a juicy headline and acknowledges some more of the successes achieved and problems faced by Scottish schools (James McEnaney gets a B+ in this regard, but he is a member of a very small class) and also asks opposition politicians some awkward questions about what they would actually do were they to come to power. “We couldn’t do much worse” does not count and has never counted as a serious educational policy.

Robin Irvine, Helensburgh.

Teach basic home skills

I MUST agree with Brian Wilson about the merits of early intervention in children's lives to ensure that they have the basic skills to equip them to deal with the challenges of the future. He rightly points out that if the parents don't possess such fundamental knowledge themselves to pass on to their children, the cycle of ignorance will continue ad infinitum.

Like Brian Wilson, I was fortunate to learn in a school environment in Dunoon at a time when Scottish education had a positive reputation throughout the world and where there was time for pupils to be taught the basics of home-making and parental skills which could be passed on to their future children. Of course, the world has vastly changed since then but real poverty did exist in these post-war years and families got by and achieved success against the odds. It may be expensive but surely there is room for these basic skills to be passed on at schools to enable families to better cope with the unpredictable and challenging lives ahead of them.

Sadly, I don't think it will happen and the cycle of underachievement in life for some children will continue when it could have been otherwise.

Bob MacDougall, Kippen.

Parents have a big role to play in education (Image: PA)

Let's target Gross National Happiness

RECENT comment on these pages about the state of the UK reminded me about the poem “The Paradox of Our Age”, ascribed to (among others) His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Extracts include:

We have more degrees, but less sense

More knowledge, but less judgment

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values

We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often

We’ve become long on quantity, but short on quality

Tall men, and short character

Steep profits, and shallow relationships.

Can’t argue with any of that. For too long Westminster, under both Labour and the Tories, has prioritised growth, while ignoring the fact that the fruits of that growth go mainly to the upper echelons in society. Maybe we should take a lesson from Bhutan and target Gross National Happiness, with our country’s riches more fairly and more evenly distributed.

Doug Maughan, Dunblane.

Silence of the Kirk

RECENTLY senior figures in the Church of England have made some bold statements in relation to the suffering of the Palestinians.

For instance, on August 2 the Archbishop of Canterbury said in relation to the occupied territories on the West Bank: “Through annexing Palestinian land for illegal settlements, depriving Palestinians access to their own natural resources, and imposing a system of military rule that denies them safety and justice, the State of Israel has been denying the Palestinian people dignity, freedom and hope. It is clear that ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity."

The Very Rev Canon Richard Sewell, Dean of St George’s College, the Anglican pilgrimage centre in Jerusalem, said in the Church Times: “I will not waver in my support of the right of the State of Israel to exist; but the maintenance of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the blockade of Gaza, which seems to have become a more or less accepted part of the political terrain by Israel’s allies, are deep and intolerable scars on the Land and all its people, which simply cannot and must not stand."

In the meantime there is still no courageous declaration re Gaza and the West Bank from senior figures in the Church of Scotland, statements on its websites and within its General Assembly being insufficiently disseminated.

John Milne, Uddingston.