The progress on Scottish education reform – all a waste?

For years now, the Scottish Government has been promising to reform Scottish education – especially the examination and certification system used for students in the final three years of secondary school.

The main catalyst for this was the utterly disastrous handling of exams during the pandemic, but in truth the concerns had been bubbling away for a long time.

We put kids through a huge amount of exams in this country – more so than pretty much anywhere else – to no discernible benefit, wasting a huge amount of teaching time along the way.

That exam cycle then poisons the curriculum not just for students in the exam years, but also for those in the early stages of secondary school. In fact, some would argue that the rot it spreads goes even deeper, all the way down to primary education.

Our approach also clearly disadvantages a whole host of young people whose only crime is that they’re not quite the sort of person that our old and outdated system was built for, perhaps because they have additional support needs, or specific disabilities, or come from a deprived background.

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None of this matters to some people who like things just the way they are, but in recent years more and more people have started to wonder if there might just be a better approach.

On top of all that, we also have education bodies that have never really been remotely fit for purpose and that have failed us again and again. The SQA is the most obvious example of this, but ask any teacher you know about Education Scotland and, assuming they’re not seconded there, you’re likely to get a response that falls somewhere between dismissive and utterly brutal.

These concerns, by the way, aren’t just the preserve of a few right-on progressives – this is the sort of stuff that organisations like the OECD keep bringing up.

In that context, the SNP decided to pursue reform. Real reform – or so they said.

Some of us were pretty sceptical from the start. The first thing that happened was an announcement that the SQA would be scrapped, but that was made to distract from an OECD report that, if people had read it, would have been devastating for the SNP.

Then we started to get reviews, but they happened in the wrong order: the government started out by looking at the structures of organisational bodies, ended with a review of qualifications, and in the middle ran a token exercise that was erroneously titled a ‘national discussion’.

I remember being asked what I thought of it well before I joined The Herald, and responding that the government’s approach was pretty much exactly what I would be doing if I wanted to look like I was reforming things while actually working to prevent change as much as possible.

I was desperate for the government to prove me wrong – but they haven’t.

Yesterday, the Education Committee at Holyrood held an evidence session for the proposed Education Bill that will rebrand the SQA into Qualifications Scotland (with all the same people still in place, despite their endless failures) and, in theory, create an independent inspection system. The Bill has already been heavily criticised in many of the consultation responses the government received, and that theme continued in front of the committee.

Long story short – it doesn’t go far enough, and it doesn’t live up to the promises that were made.

And then today Jenny Gilruth stood up in parliament to reject some of the key recommendations of the Hayward review which the government commissioned to look at fundamental reforms of the exam and qualifications system used in schools.

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She also kicked as many cans as she could as far down the road as possible, and in doing so left a strong impression that the real problem isn’t a lack of ambition from the education sector, or a shortage of options for change – but rather the major, and perhaps now even crippling, limits of this government’s competence.

More and more, this looks like a government that is now limping towards an election that it expects – maybe even hopes – to lose.

It seems that the last few years of work on reform have largely been wasted, and that the same will probably turn out to be true of the months between now and the next Holyrood vote.