Scottish state schools: It's time for a shake up

As VAT is a reserved tax, this will have an impact on Scottish education, a devolved issue, which is not the way devolution is supposed to work – we don’t even know if Sarwar was consulted.

The amount of additional tax raised by the policy would be microscopic and it’s unlikely to prove the death knell for any independent schools – the additional cost will simply be passed on to parents in higher fees.

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The party in Scotland has, so far, steered clear of discussing the issue but, no matter, it’s unlikely to trouble the traditional Labour hordes, if a few wealthy parents have to pay a bit more for Cameron and Georgia’s Latin lessons.

But many parents of school age children may wonder what the point of the policy is, if not to make the education system fairer. Perhaps it’s simply intended as a gesture to show that Labour is different from the current lot, whose cabinet meetings have often resembled an Eton school reunion.

To avoid a perception of gesture politics, Sarwar might see this as an opportunity for a wider review of the Scottish education system, recently described as ‘broken’ by the Glasgow independent school, Kelvinside Academy, in its advertising.

While some people may see this as an exaggerated claim, there is no doubt that the system has undergone a period of disappointing stagnation and, in some areas, decline during the SNP’s 16 years in government.

During her eight years in office, Nicola Sturgeon prioritised closing the poverty-related attainment gap in education.

While there has been a small closing of the gap among younger pupils – particularly in reading, writing, and listening and talking – in numeracy, it has widened.

For S3 pupils, the attainment gap has increased in various subjects, with a significant widening between the least and most deprived pupils.

In access to higher education, progress has been limited since 2013-14 and, according to Lindsay Paterson, a professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, even this modest narrowing of the gap is because those from more affluent areas are going backwards.

Unlike in England – where the state sector includes grammar schools, faith schools, academies, city technology colleges, free schools, foundation schools, and community schools – parents in Scotland are, by and large, restricted to sending their children to what New Labour used to disparagingly call the ‘bog standard comprehensive’.

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Independent schools provide one of the few opportunities for parents north of the border to exercise choice in how their children are educated.

In the state sector, they can also ‘choose’ one of a handful of high performing schools in areas where property prices are outwith the reach of around 95% of the population.

This use of financial power is private education in all but name, but many parents like to bask in the egalitarian glow of being able to tell their friends that their children are state educated.

While there is the fiction of the placing request, which theoretically allows parents in poorer areas to apply to one of these educational citadels, the reality is that demand is so high that even families who live in the area are not guaranteed a place.

The only other meaningful choice for parents in the state sector, is to send their children to denominational – which, in Scotland, means Catholic – schools.

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The existence of such schools in the state sector dates back more than 100 years, to the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act, when their control was passed from the local diocese.

While they are now under local authority control, the Catholic church retains a strong statutory influence, including over some areas of the curriculum and in the appointment of teaching staff.

There is no definitive evidence that all denominational schools perform better than their non-denominational counterparts, but they undoubtedly do in some areas, providing parents there with a notional choice.

While in 1918 such schools may have had exclusively Catholic rolls, this is no longer the case, not least because the Catholic population has declined and continues to decline.

Parents from other faiths, or no faith, often choose to send their children to denominational schools, either because they have a better academic record than their local non-denominational counterpart, or because they are perceived to have a positive ethos and good discipline.

As a result, many of these schools have significant, and in some cases majority, non-Catholic rolls as well as some non-Catholic teachers.

They provide a model of potential education improvement, not because they are Catholic, but because there is evidence that schools with an element of direct control as well as a sense of mission and direction, tend to perform better.

So why don’t we have more of them, controlled by other church and faith groups, as well as trusts, local communities, and foundations?

For many people, we are at a reset moment for Scottish education. In every other area of public administration, the direction of travel is towards greater choice and more local control, and yet the system remains a monolithic remnant of the early 20th century.

When Labour was last in power in 2007 the, by then, former Education Secretary Sam Galbraith suggested it was time to review the 1918 Act.

He said there should be a requirement that existing Catholic schools should only continue to receive state funds if support for them was demonstrated by a consultation process with local parents.

Perhaps it is time for Sarwar to take-up that challenge and to apply such a consultation across the board, giving parents at every state school a say in how they are funded and managed and, by extension, how their children are educated.