The SNP’s education ‘stitch-up’

For anyone who assumes the SNP government’s secrecy and obstruction is limited to inquiries into itself and its past leaders, the fate of a major report into Scottish education is an instructive tale.

Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), introduced in 2010, was the SNP’s grand idea for better learning in Scottish schools. Its ‘progressive’, ‘child-centred’ philosophy was contentious among teachers but was eagerly bought into by educationalists, educrats and teachers’ unions. Dissenters were generally caricatured as stuffy old reactionaries who wanted children bolted down in rows, facing a blackboard, as an authoritarian dominie catechised them in the rote memorising of formulae, dates and rules.

Needless to say, the caricatures turned out to have a point. Scottish pupils perform worse in maths than pupils in Czechia, Estonia and Slovenia. In 2019, almost 40 per cent of those from the poorest backgrounds left primary school without meeting basic literacy benchmarks and almost one-third failed to achieve the same in mathematics.