Scotland's Schrödinger's Schools – both succeeding and failing?

The Herald Scotland

12-06-2025

Ms Duncan-Glancy said that the proportion of school leavers in positive destinations has gone down, that more pupils than ever before are leaving school without qualifications, that fewer are leaving having secured at least one qualification at levels five and six (the latter of which includes Highers), that the attainment gap in relation to passing those qualifications has increased, that the number of Modern Apprenticeship starts has declined, and that youth unemployment has increased.
Earlier this week in the Scottish Parliament, two politicians clashed over the state of Scottish education. During a meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee, Labour's Pam Duncan-Glancy asserted that things are getting worse for the country's school pupils, asking education secretary Jenny Gilruth to explain why education is 'declining' and opportunities 'narrowing.' Ms Gilruth, as you would expect, rejected this framing and claimed that we are in fact seeing progress and improvement across the system.
Lessons to Learn | Did the Scottish Government mislead me or are they just incompetent?
It's not like there's a shortage of available information: the 'school education statistics' of the Scottish Government's website has more than twenty different datasets covering areas like school leaver destinations, literacy and numeracy levels, teacher numbers, pupil exclusions, the state of school buildings, parental engagement and much more.
But that's easily solved, right? If we just stick to the facts then we'll be able to figure exactly what's going on, won't we?
And with an election not too far away, it'll only get worse.
Sometimes these distinctions are strictly political. It suits the Scottish Government , and supporters of the SNP , to believe that things are good and getting better, just as it suits opposition parties and their backers to tell you that the opposite is true. Education is inherently political, but the way in which education is treated within Scotland's awful, insular, and claustrophobic political culture, with it all-too-often reduced to petty point-scoring by politicians, is a significant problem.
Depending on who you listen to, the Scottish education system can be a huge and ever-improving success, a catastrophic failure in continuous decline, and pretty much everything else in between.
It all sounds pretty damning.
But Ms Gilruth responded that more pupils than ever are reaching expected levels in literacy and numeracy, that the attainment gap for literacy has fallen to the lowest level recorded, that this is also true for secondary school numeracy, that the percentage of leavers going to positive destinations is at the second-highest level on record, and that we have seen improvements in exam results during the post-pandemic period.
And here's the thing: almost all of those claims are demonstrably true, as shown by our fact-check article on the matter – in fact, the only egregiously incorrect assertion was the one about exam results, which is definitely not correct.
This would appear to suggest that, at least according to the cited statistics, both Pam Duncan-Glancy and Jenny Gilruth are mostly correct: things are getting worse, and they're also getting better.
Scotland has apparently managed to build Schrödinger's Schools, which are both succeeding and failing at exactly the same time.
This mess is partly explained by the fact that too much of our information is of limited use, and some is effectively meaningless, which leaves us constantly operating in a frustrating fog.
To make matters worse, most politicians and commentators clearly aren't able (or willing) to properly understand what that data is even supposed to be showing them, because they've never managed (or in some cases even tried) to wrap their heads around the nuances that underpin it.
But beyond all of that, the exchange between Ms Gilruth and Ms Duncan-Glancy was a stark reminder that cherry-picking statistics in the service of a political back-and-forth is a huge waste of everyone's time that makes it near impossible to have proper, grown-up conversations about a matter of the utmost importance. Sign up for a weekly expert insight into Scottish education.
If side A wants to be able to 'prove' that things are going wrong then they won't have any trouble finding a few bits of information to back that up, and when side B wants to 'prove' the exact opposite, that won't be a problem for them either. They'll very often even be able to use the exact same spreadsheets to do it, either by concentrating on a different section to the one their opponent is looking at, or sometimes just by choosing a different detail from the very same page.
That suits politicians, researchers, speech writers, press officers, special advisers and more than a few columnists just fine, because it keeps them all looking busy without actually having to do much serious work.