Scotland's teachers and pupils are crying out for education reform

The reality, however, is that before a single lesson is taught, wealthier pupils in Scotland are far more likely to achieve academically than their working-class peers.

Eight years ago, during a speech in Wester Hailes, Nicola Sturgeon announced that she “aimed to close the attainment gap completely”. Today, following this year’s exam results, the gap at Higher is 16%, wider than it was in both 2017 and 2018.

Harking back to the great minds produced by our ancient universities, in 2015 the former first minister argued that education “goes to the heart of who we are as a nation”.

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Unfortunately for the Scottish Government, its record is somewhat out of step with the romanticised history of Scotland’s vaunted schooling achievements.

In fact, the SNP’s inability to renew “Scotland’s proud educational traditions’’ tells a different story entirely. It offers a revealing insight into how their brand of liberal nationalism comprehensively fails to address class-based issues.

If social class is viewed as peripheral to the idea of nationhood, it follows that the driving motive of any educational reform must shift from eliminating poverty to reasserting Scotland’s historic reputation.

While these things are not necessarily mutually exclusive, time and again young Scots have borne the consequences of an approach that substitutes reality for rhetoric.

Earlier this month, for example, David Linden MP (below) made the demonstrably false claim on BBC Radio 4 that the SNP had “closed the attainment gap by two-thirds”.

This is but one of the challenges facing Holyrood as schools start back. In Further Education, Scottish colleges crippled by underfunding are cutting back on course provision and threatening staff with compulsory redundancy.

In Glasgow, at the close of last year, EIS-FELA members at Scotland’s largest college took indefinite strike action over up to 100 proposed job losses.

During the 2022/23 session, multiple school days were lost to strike action as teachers walked out over derisory, below-inflation pay offers. Only this week the EIS warned teachers are “in desperation” over a shortage of employment opportunities.

Last year, only 20% of newly qualified primary teachers had a job the September after becoming fully qualified – a 58% drop since 2017. Having been offered a pay “rise” of just 5.5%, non-teaching school staff represented by GMB Scotland have announced two days of strike action across 10 council areas this September.

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Each of these disputes contrast sharply with the rose-tinted portrayals of Scottish education’s halcyon days. When Nicola Sturgeon asked to be “judged on” the issue of education in 2015, it is unlikely she expected the first teachers’ strike over pay in four decades, let alone a protest by striking teachers outside her Glasgow constituency office.

True to form, the Scottish Government has displayed an incapacity to alleviate the issues created by more than a decade of austerity in education. Doing so would require a radical break with how the SNP govern. Holyrood would have to act rather than administrate, to intervene rather than manage. Since 2014, avoiding upsetting the apple cart has trumped all other priorities with few exceptions. In their attempts to offer up a civic, united Scotland, the SNP have put policy decisions that present bumps in the road out to pasture amid a slew of consultations, working groups and reports.

By relegating class in favour of promoting the national interest, the Scottish Government has built tepid consensus where conflict is necessary.

Whether it be the impact of perpetual examination on students’ mental health, the public money wasted on the exorbitant salaries of fat-cat college principals or delays to the roll-out of free school meals, the time to confront injustice in education is long overdue.

The SNP, however, will resist this confrontation as best they can.

As a secondary school student, I gave evidence to Holyrood’s Education and Skills committee in 2021. After the chaos of the previous year’s exams, there was almost unanimity in the (virtual) room over the need to make change. What followed was the announcement that the Scottish Qualifications Authority was to be scrapped, only to be rebranded as the unreconstructed “Qualifications Scotland” in 2024.

While pupils condemned their experience of exams as an “absolute nightmare”, the SNP could barely muster the imagination to alter an acronym, let alone the education system. Next year, exams will once again take their pre-Covid form as the protests of pupils and their teachers are buried in a mountain of bureaucracy.

This is the result of neutralising class interest. Taking serious action toward narrowing the attainment gap, for example, requires a scale of redistributive intervention that risks exposing cracks in our supposedly unified national interest. Consequently, this course of action is disqualified. The return to pre-Covid style assessment highlights that in dealing with questions of class, civic Scottish nationalism defaults to individualism. The idea of rising with your class removed, one must rise out of it instead.

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Meanwhile, appeals to the centrality of education in Scottish identity are made to compensate for today’s collapsing standards and widening inequality.

In this, however, the SNP are not alone. Keir Starmer has junked Labour’s commitment to abolish tuition fees south of the Border and will not commit to supporting universal free school meals. The ambitions of our political class continue to fall woefully short of the change our moment demands.

In 1908, John Maclean, the Glasgow school teacher and Red Clydesider, called for “the nation’s best education for our children”.

As politicians across these islands fail to make the case for the radical reform of education, it seems we must take up the fighting Dominie’s demand once more.