Read between the lines to see schools' failings

I FELT like a real party-pooper last week. The Cabinet Secretary for Education, Fiona Hyslop, had a bit of paper showing Scottish education topping a study of educational attainment in similar EU countries, done by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Surely an announcement to create whoopee on all sides of the debating chamber at Holyrood, rather than the question I put to her about the credibility gap opened up by the OECD investigation?

You judge. Should I have gone with the flow and bathed in the warm approval of Scottish educational standards? Or was I right to ask the minister to explain the OECD findings within the context of employers consistently complaining that school-leavers can't spell, read poorly and are innumerate without calculators? Or what about the universities and colleges that run catch-up classes in basic three Rs. Or the Army courses for would-be squaddies who leave school without an adequate standard of attainment in the basics to allow them to read training manuals, or spot the expensive small print in financial agreements for car loans, etc?

In my own defence, I'll cite the public information campaign that's been running on TV for some months now. This Scottish Government advert was decided on and promoted by Jack McConnell's Executive before the election, and has been used by the current crew in St Andrew's House since the election, to encourage the nearly one-in-four adult Scots who experience difficulty in reading and writing.

If the latter is a better indicator of the quality of our education, then we're in trouble. Tomorrow's world, for us, isn't about manufacturing those clever gadgets that were only seen in the TV programme of that name. It's about being ahead of the game in new technologies, like the life sciences. It's about exporting our ideas and methods for managing and eliminating illnesses and diseases. Between them, India and China can probably make just about all the consumer goods we want . . . at much lower costs. So it's our national brain-power, as opposed to brawn, that'll bring home the bacon in the future.

So I hope Fiona Hyslop institutes a proper assessment of standards of attainment in Scotland's educational structures. Instead of heaving a sigh of relief that our continental partners and rivals don't score as well as we do in the numeracy department, the Education Minister should admit that the evidence does not add up, and instead compare the scholastic achievements of today's school-leavers with the standards in the three Rs, and technical problem solving, achieved by their grandparents.

Learning to read, write and count is much more likely to empower a young person to gain a job than anything else, so if I were the Education Secretary, I'd look at our exam system, and junk everything except Highers and a new Scottish Leaving Certificate that would tell everyone that pupils A and B had proved themselves competent or skilled in whatever they studied. Their grades in their chosen subjects would indicate what they should do on leaving school.

The OECD report has given this Government some elbow room to make the changes that will help teachers regain the position of respect they once held before indiscipline made teaching much more difficult. When I niggled the Education Secretary about the low morale this causes in a teaching workforce, she chose to believe the OECD's assessment that everything is tickety-boo in the staff rooms of Scotland's schools, instead of commenting that she intended to enquire into the reasons for the recent introduction of a telephone helpline for over-stressed teachers.

But I'm intrigued by her promised "audit" of the Scots language. Maybe my fears will prove unfounded and we'll find that a cohesive alternative grammar and vocabulary is spoken and written in even one tiny corner of Scotland. But maybe we'll find that Scots is a spoken means of communication that has many pronunciations, most of which are understood by Scots from the different regions of Scotland because the common thread of the written English language acts as a stronger example of the connectivity amongst European languages provided by Latin.

However, my scepticism on the status of Scots is balanced by approval for this minister's attitude to teaching Scottish history. Self-respect is impossible without self-knowledge. Self-confidence rests on both, so our potential is conditioned by what we are, what we were and what we might have been had events, or the choices open to us, been different.

But I think that the Education Secretary will have to provide a lot of in-service training and teaching of teachers who weren't taught Scotland's history.


My vote's for Capital City Supplement

Tonight's the night. MSPs will have their first chance to vote on Finance Minister John Swinney's first Budget. Everybody's looking for something for their constituency, or region or pet policy areas. The Labour Party wants to restore "ring-fencing". It's fair to say that MSPs don't mirror the views of their colleagues in local councils, because "ring-fencing" allows Holyrood to call the shots on how local councils spend their money.

Me? Wherever possible, I'd prefer local people to determine local priorities.

But my priority is to establish the principle of a Capital City Supplement to make sure Edinburgh councillors and council tax payers don't have to choose between spending on services for Edinburgh alone, and prioritising the Capital's role as the gateway to Scotland and the provider of facilities and services that benefit all Scotland.