A very short post this one, for all readers, free included. If you would like to join those who receive my subscriber newsletter you can upgrade here.
It’s not often that you’ll see such a clear cut result from contrasting experiments in public policy within the same polity. Indeed, I’ve written this barely able to contain my anger.
The new PISA results on educational standards are out and they show England surging ahead with outstanding results.
As The Times reports this morning:
“English pupils are among the top-performing groups worldwide for reading, mathematics and science — but in Scotland and Wales they have got worse, international data shows. Results from the OECD’s latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) report placed the nation alongside Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Estonia at the top of global education rankings.”
This is fantastic news - at least for pupils and citizens in England, where it shows that all the hysterical doom and gloom about the country’s prospects is way overdone.
But in Scotland and Wales the results are deeply troubling. The slide and inability to match their neighbours in England should prompt painful reflection from policymakers and apologies to those pupils who were let down by decades of failure to reform and improve schooling. It should prompt reflection and apologies. It won’t though, because anyone who has tracked the issue closely, particularly in Scotland, will know that advocates of the unreformed status quo specialise in displaying a stubborn resistance to evidence or reality.
It is a tragedy that was avoidable and it has very little to do with money. Public spending is higher in Scotland. It is instead about bad ideas and a lack of openness to fresh thinking.
In the 1980s, the Thatcher government began a process of improvements in schools in England under my old friend Kenneth Baker. In 1988 the national curriculum was introduced. The aim was to raise standards and opportunity, to sharpen teaching and give a better education. The teaching unions (almost always wrong) howled in protest, but in the 1990s the reforms accelerated. Greater autonomy was granted to schools.
This was a cross-party process and one of the great examples of longterm policymaking that improves life chances. Tony Blair’s administrations did fantastic work expanding the reforms and giving schools more autonomy. Michael Gove, as education secretary in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, supercharged the raising of standards.
While not every single aspect of it worked and the results are not universally better across the board everywhere, the surveys are clear. Millions of pupils in England have received a much better education and a shot at a better life.
In Scotland and Wales almost none of it happened. When Michael Forsyth (now Lord Forsyth and Lord Speaker) attempted reforms to boost standards in Scotland in the early 1990s it was as though he had announced a full scale English military invasion of Scotland. The main teaching union went ballistic and the Scottish political establishment said Scotland had no need of “English” improvements, because we are naturally superior and more enlightened and so on and so on.
While it is true that Scotland had a long and noble history of universal education, by the 1980s it was disappearing down the pan as international competition intensified. I arrived at a Scottish comprehensive school in 1985 just after the end of a long teachers strike and saw the effects.
A generation of Scottish politicians on the left and in the centre refused to acknowledge there was a problem. When devolution was introduced it got even worse, because although devolution is presented as being dynamic (local control!) it was in Scotland’s case in the late 1990s a small c conservative process designed to protect the devolved class - politicians, policymakers, those in the public services such as the NHS and schools, and their media cheerleaders - from difficult choices. All while giving those involved a soothing, sanctimonious feeling of alleged superiority over a supposedly more aggressive England. Indeed, for complex reasons probably connected to religious history and Scotland’s huge imperial success that we now wish away, our problem has become glaring. Public Scotland is afflicted by a moral superiority complex that prevents genuine improvements to policy and people’s lives.
In the NHS, Scotland’s service does not even have a functioning app handling requests and appointments. In England there has been one for years and it works very well. NHS England offered it to NHS Scotland but we can’t have that. No, we’ll design our own tartan one which will be better because it is Scottish. Only it is years late and there is little sign of it matching England’s app any time this side of 2030.
Just another example of what Scotland’s ruling class does to Scotland in the name of the myth of Scottish superiority.
And now, almost forty years later, here we are. In cities such as Edinburgh and the more affluent parts of Scotland, parents opt out and go private when they can afford it or they play catchment bingo, moving into expensive areas where the local comprehensives are better run. Competition to get into the catchment area for Jordanhill (the best performing school, long run uniquely in Scotland outside local authority control, could there be a connection?) is so intense it makes the battle of Bannockburn look like a tea party.
Back in the distant days when I was an education reporter, a political editor and then a newspaper editor in Edinburgh, this (the PISA results) is the kind of story that speeded me to work fuelled by nicotine and caffeine. It seemed obvious to me and a small group of other commentators and pontificators that Scotland was making a terrible mistake in refusing to improve its schools and that the price would be paid by pupils robbed of opportunity.
Millions of trees were chopped down and turned into newspapers to carry the opinions of those of us saying there had to be change, higher standards, greater autonomy and innovation, and not a word of it made the slightest difference.
So, this is a great day for English education with PISA scores to be proud of. In Scotland it is evidence of a tragic waste of human capital and potential.