Sturgeon fails to be frank on education failures in new book

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

Over the past ten years, when I've been speaking about the state of Scottish education, or analysing the latest data on attainment or teacher numbers or classroom behaviour, lots of people have asked me variations of a simple question: how did we get here?
Very often I have responded with the following explanation:
Basically, Nicola Sturgeon was under pressure on education, and she went on a wee field trip to England, where people told her about a thing called the London Challenge. She listened, didn't understand, then came back up the road and decided we'd do the same things in Scotland.
This, I should stress, was an obviously oversimplified explanation that I used to get a laugh from whatever room it was in, followed by a more detailed critique of the policy development process and the political implications. It was meant to be a joke.
But it turns out that my depiction wasn't the caricature I thought it was – it seems instead to have been an exercise in unexpected realism.
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Keep up to date with our coverage on Nicola Sturgeon's memoir
On page 255 of her new book, the former First Minister briefly deigns to address education issues when she tells us about visiting London in February 2015. This short visit to a single school, she explains, was 'instrumental' in the development of a policy direction that, by the end of the current parliament, will have wasted a full decade of potential progress at a cost of £1.75 billion of public money.
Education pops up again a little later in the book during a section about getting 'Back on Track'.
We are told about the decision to abandon a flagship Education Bill 'in favour of a non-statutory approach' to handing headteachers more autonomy. This was, allegedly, done because it would allow faster and more successful change, all without giving the opposition the chance to 'frustrate the legislation'.
The reality from that time was that the government's own consultation on the Bill showed that there was little if any support for the changes the government wanted to impose. The decision to pull the Bill was, quite plainly, about avoiding a political humiliation.
This thread, where everything would have been fine if it weren't for bad actors trying to stop her (because of course she couldn't possibly have just been wrong) continues when she discusses her decision to force standardised testing on schools.
Read more Lessons to Learn:
Once again, the reality is quite different from her presentation. As I proved at the time, the policy was based on almost no written evidence whatsoever – I fought a year-long FOI battle to force Sturgeon's government to release what material they had, and then discovered that it amounted to four unsolicited emails.
What's more, although Sturgeon tries to present this policy as something that the other parties opposed, the truth is that both the Tories and Labour had been demanding the introduction of standardised testing, albeit for political reasons.
When the policy was announced it was met with widespread opposition and condemnation from teachers and education experts – people who knew a lot more than Nicola Sturgeon and her circle of political advisers.
Later, she frames the introduction of standardised testing as having been influenced by her 'sympathy' for the view that 'we had moved away from a rote approach'.
The problem, if we're going to be speaking frankly, is that Nicola Sturgeon is a career politician who was a lawyer for five minutes in her twenties, so her views on the correct pedagogical approaches for literacy and numeracy are worth precisely nothing.
And yet they set the direction of travel for the education policy of an entire nation.
Unsurprisingly, the former First Minister declines to mention the specific and measurable targets for 'closing the attainment gap' that were included in the 2017 Programme for Government, which she says was the strongest of her period in office.
There's a good reason for that: her government never, at any stage, even came close to achieving them.
The closest that Sturgeon's book comes to offering an honest assessment of her education record is when she writes that her underlying problem was 'one of diagnosis' – even that isn't really true, because it still gives her too much credit. She didn't know enough to make any sort of diagnosis, and still doesn't seem to understand that fundamental point.
At the launch of the book she went a little further, admitting that she didn't grasp the complexity of the issues she was tackling.
But that's a cop out as well.
Here's the truth: she had no idea what she was doing, and didn't even know enough to be able to recognise the things she didn't know, but dragged us along regardless.
Acting from a position of ignorance, she pursued policies that have not only failed but have also been major contributors to the enormous problems currently facing schools, teachers, and pupils in this country.
There are exceptions to these failures, the most notable of which is her decision to back the campaign for LGBT-inclusive education in Scottish schools. There are various other SNP politicians who might have been leader other than her, and without needing to name names I think we all know that many of them would have behaved very differently. Scotland became the first country on earth to introduce inclusive education and, as I have told her in person, Nicola Sturgeon should be proud of her role in that.
But on the whole, and certainly with respect to the 'attainment gap', Nicola Sturgeon failed when it came to education.
And now she has also failed to be frank about those failures.
Having made this the central pillar of so much of her time and office, and promising that she would be judged on her record, Nicola Sturgeon's reflections on education are incredibly brief and a long way from honest.
But what did you expect from a politician's memoir?