There’s a Youth Jobs Crisis in Scotland. Again.

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Ross Newton | Twitter

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Covid is just the latest blow to young peoples’ prospects. What’s now needed is imagination from Governments at all levels so Scotland really can be the best place to grow up in. 

Ross Newton writes about what we can do to deliver more opportunities for young Scots ahead of a report  by Our Scottish Future on youth unemployment.

Young people are facing a jobs crisis. The sky is blue. Water is wet. For young people of my generation, it was  ever thus.

For while the pandemic has highlighted serious inequalities, caused some, exacerbated others and thrown petrol on the pyres of change , these pyres have been burning constantly over the last few years, sometimes smouldering, other times with blazing ferocity. We are, right now, approaching the latter.

There is a dangerous laissez faire attitude to the crisis facing young people today; an acceptance that our life chances have suffered due to the pandemic, but a peculiar sense of it all being rather temporary and that things will inevitably “right” themselves when the pandemic blows over. This couldn’t be more wrong, and despite their big words it unfortunately seems to be the default position of our political class.

“Covid has changed the world” is the reassuring political battle cry. And it has, from the mundane mask wearing to the sci-fi idea of a society working and socialising exclusively online. But no sooner have those words left the mouths of politicians are they back arguing about the old certainties. (As I write, a row over Scottish independence is on the front pages). Or possibly even worse, they discuss how to mitigate the change that has been ushered in. Resisting change is akin to trying to keep the tide out. We need to begin understanding and shaping it, because it will bring opportunities as well as serious challenges. The job market facing young people today, and the next generation, will be unlike any in human history.

Education must change to prepare young Scots for a changed world.

The sudden switch to remote working – previously mooted as impossible – seems here to stay in some format. This has obvious benefits that many workers have rightly enjoyed and taken advantage of. However, it also has serious advantages for businesses who can dispense with expensive costs such as offices. The logical next step is for businesses to cut costs even further and in this globalised, interconnected world where offices are redundant, that means employees can be anywhere in the world. A business hiring two similarly qualified people for a remote job has every chance of picking the employee who doesn’t require a pension and has less pesky working rights. To put it simply, the labour market for anyone with a job that can now be done remotely has just increased exponentially, almost overnight. A report by Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change has estimated that as a consequence of this, 5.9 million British jobs are at risk, or 18% of the UK’s workforce. These are middle class, professional jobs that young people will be training for in colleges and universities right now. For people such as myself, who have been fortunate enough to work through the pandemic, we may soon find that the promotion we were aiming for goes to someone better qualified in France, and our job to someone in Malaysia. That change is here, now. Blair’s report likens this coming impact to the loss of manufacturing work in the 1980s. Something that happened before I was born, but the effects of which are still felt today. Government needs to begin figuring out how to address this and how it will impact young people’s future aspirations, which is why an urgent holistic approach is required.

It is not just the offshoring of previous “safe” careers that young people need to contend with. In the years to come as the tech revolution fully begins to kick in, we will see the loss of traditional jobs such as taxi drivers, lorry drivers and delivery drivers as autonomous vehicles and drones reach maturity. However, looming over the horizon there will also be another; the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). This will enable many current jobs to be automated. To contend with this, Scottish education has to be reimagined, to empower and prepare young people for the world they are going to enter. This means a focus on STEM subjects but also on art and creativity. The currencies of the future will be creativity, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, these intrinsically human skills that cannot be replicated by mere machines. Indeed, young people are increasingly creative, often creating social media videos in minutes with new technology that would have taken hours in previous years. They create their own businesses in seconds and make money through social media websites that didn’t even exist when they were born. Schools need to augment their teaching with computers and technology, not treat them as a Covid aberration. I look back to learning French in high school. A teacher who clearly didn’t want to be there, armed with tatty old textbooks filled with the bored doodles of previous generations and a tape (yes a tape in 2012) that instructed us in the most monotone Scottish voice possible. I can think of no reason why schools today shouldn’t be utilising language learning apps with their immersive technology or even now entering a partnership with French schools that allow pupils to Zoom and speak to each other. I know what I would have preferred.

Where is the Government backing for decent skills and jobs?

In the here and now urgent government action is required to combat youth unemployment. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that 80% of jobs lost belonged to the under-35s. Young people were also more likely to be furloughed as they work in sectors that were shuttered, such as hospitality. There are also important regional variations, with the claimant count in Aberdeen soaring 112% in a year for 18-24 year olds. This is completely unsustainable and it illustrates how a smart, targeted approach is required. The crisis facing young people should be the primary concern of everyone as we are the next generation of taxpayers who will fund public services and support an ageing population. If the young suffer, eventually the rest of society will too.

However, the Scottish Government’s Youth Guarantee is failing young Scots. Loaded with ambition, it is clunky, misfiring and anonymous. It is too slow to address problems that need faced today and it is bogged down with bureaucracy. It needs to be more agile and targeted, dispensing with any ideology, cutting through red tape and working to secure the buy in of the private sector. To have any chance of success the Youth Guarantee has to span the full spectrum of the public and private sector, but unfortunately it seems that government hasn’t done enough to engage. Too much talk and not enough getting shit done. To a young person who is out of work, scrolling through Indeed and seeking the skills and confidence to re-enter the job market after a long, dark year, hearing government ministers talk about a “Youth Guarantee” must seem like a bad joke. The only thing it has guaranteed is its anonymity amongst those who need it most.

We can’t just limply accept we’re going to be worse off than our parents.

However young people have to rise to this challenge. We are the most online generation ever. We have access to an incredible amount of information and we need to become better at holding our politicians to account and challenging them to deliver for us. For too long young people have been seen as irrelevant, as parties race to secure everyone else’s vote, safe in the knowledge that young people won’t bother to vote, or will vote for a particular party regardless of record. I hope and believe that is changing, but participation alone isn’t enough. We have to let politicians know that we are engaged, watching and prepared to use the power of the ballot box to register our discontent when action fails to match the rhetoric. But that also requires a change in mentality on our part. We are in serious danger of limply accepting that we will be the first generation to be worse off than our parents, that home ownership is a dream for many and that retirement seems like a quaint idea from a bygone age. We can’t allow ourselves to accept this, we need to expect and demand so much more. Not tomorrow, not a year from now, but today.

Change is coming. In some ways it’s already here lurking unnoticed. If our politicians can work together, making it their national mission to tackle the myriad of challenges but also the wealth of opportunities facing young people now and in the future, then young people in Scotland can be at the forefront of new technologies, ideas and industries. We need serious investment in training and co-operation between governments of all colours and the public and private sectors to tackle unemployment today, re-skill for the future and deliver the opportunities that young people deserve. Good, secure, well paid jobs with a good work-life balance needs to be a reality, not a fantasy. Anything less and government will have failed young people. It really is time to make Scotland the best country to grow up in.

Transforming Scottish Education Needs More Than Structural Reform

Gordon Hector | Twitter

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Yesterday the OECD published the long-awaited review of Scotland’s education system. It’s politely-written but damning, and as a result the Scottish Qualifications Authority is going to be axed and inspection split out of Education Scotland. 

On one level, it’s refreshing to see a respected organisation say there are problems, and the Scottish Government say: yep, ok, we will respond. It’s a huge vindication of anyone who raised their head above the parapet over the past few years.

The OECD are the unoffficial high nabobs of neoliberalism, too – so their blessing gives cover to do things that might otherwise be politically impossible.

But there’s a niggle.

It's Not Just Hardware - Changing the Software of a System is What Matters

The lesson of almost every public service reform, ever, is that designing structures is often the easy bit. It’s the policy lever that lies most firmly in a politician’s grasp, and it broadcasts action and purpose. Politically, it buys you 5 years: 1 year to design a structure, 2 years to implement it, 2 years to spend saying ‘well, it’s early days for our new structure.’

It’s not the same thing as actually improving services, though.

Clearly the hardware of a system matters. Creating an independent inspectorate and a revamped qualifications body was already the consensus position of pretty much everyone bar the Scottish Government.

But it’s often software that really makes the difference: the more ephemeral workings of leadership, staffing, culture change, and long-term funding patterns. These things are as influential, or more, as structures. The joke in the NHS is that it doesn’t need a Chief Executive Officer, but a Chief Anthropologist. Something similar holds true in most public services. It’s partly how Scottish education got into such a mess – ministers failing to appreciate that introducing a new curriculum was always going to be shaped more by organisational behaviour than policy. A process, not an event, you could say.

The risk is that we fall back into press-a-button reform. We could now spend the next 5 years executing a big structural change, while other important things go unchallenged.

Time to Face Up to the Failed Reality of Curriculum for Excellence

Top of the rest of the to-do list is teacher recruitment and retention – arguably the single most important thing government needs to preserve bandwidth to do. Some bright civil servant needs to have that as their one and only job, with a lot of cash to help them, and kept well away from redrawing the SQA while they concentrate.

But politically, the big risk is that while we merrily rearrange the quangos, CfE itself chunters on as before, chewing up every child in its path. The line will go that while the SQA and Education Scotland are being rewired, it would be daft to start tinkering with the curriculum too. And that is where the Scottish Government is already going: its headline was ‘OECD school review backs curriculum’.

CfE, in this version, has been redeemed.

Except the OECD were not asked to review CfE itself – but its implementation. All of Scotland’s parties have carefully maintained this distinction over time: the SNP because it’s largely their curriculum, Labour and Lib Dem because it began on their watch, and Greens and Tories through a combination of genuine commitment to the original thinking and concern that they will look too radical in proposing changes. All have managed to find a way of saying the concept of CfE is fine, it’s the implementation that’s the problem. Collectively, we have grown wary of changing reality, lest we upset our ideas.

Try this formula the next time your child gets a terrible report at school, because Scotland’s politicians have grown very comfortable with it.

Scotland Can Do Both

So yes, the OECD have indeed given their blessing to the idea of CfE and endorsed its international reputation: they have also given a massive kicking to its reality. Given they suggest changes to the vision, design, implementation, accountability for and implementation of CfE, the idea is just about all that’s left.

So as we embark on a series of changes to the agency landscape, it’s just as important to sort out the core problems with the curriculum which the OECD picks up: its lack of clarity, its baffling documentation and processes, its lack of a clear role for knowledge in learning.

The politics of education cannot now coalesce around changing the SQA and Education Scotland, while completely neglecting CfE. We can do both. We have to.

Otherwise, in 5 years time, we will just have to invite the OECD back again, and ask why nothing changed. Next time, they might not be so polite.

Gordon Hector is a policy consultant and former Director of Policy and Strategy for the Scottish Conservatives.

 

We Don’t Need This Education

Coll Mccail, young Scottish Activist, on a purple background

Coll Mccail | Twitter

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In 2020, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) designed an algorithm that punished working-class young people on account of nothing but their postcodes. In one foul swoop, the SQA threatened the future of a generation. As a result, no one had particularly high hopes for what was to come this year. Surely though, it couldn’t be any worse? 

It could, and it was. 

In December 2020, Higher and Advanced Higher exams were cancelled. Given the provisional plan, prior to this decision, for awarding grades was marred with inconsistencies, this was a relief. But any hope brought by the cancellation of exams was quickly extinguished. 

It Looks Like an Exam, It's an Exam.

The truth is that exams were cancelled in name alone. For thousands of pupils, the last few months have consisted of little but formal assessments conducted in exam halls and under timed conditions. In a normal year, you would sit one exam for each of your subjects. This year, with most teachers having only May and June to gather robust enough evidence to fit the SQA’s requirements, pupils have had to sit multiple timed assessments per subject. 

By now, every pupil is familiar with the ambiguity and equivocation of the SQA’s many, immensely unhelpful statements. One such announcement said that: “opportunities for evidence gathering should not be solely based on one-off, high-stakes scenarios”. This meant the SQA would only accept a grade if the evidence, gathered under timed conditions, has been produced more than once. This meaningless platitude had very real consequences for students who had to sit assessments again, even after achieving their desired grade. Pupils once more bore the brunt of the SQA’s ineptitude. The situation was made yet worse by the fact many pupils were not granted study leave and so were expected to attend lessons during their assessment diet. The consequence of this system was that amidst a global pandemic, after more than a year of lockdown in which our social lives have been controlled by law, rather than focusing on making up for lost time, students were tied to their desks. Having managed anxiety through lockdown, the mental health of Scotland’s young people was put under unnecessary pressure. 

Beware What You Say on Tik-Tok: The SQA is Watching.

Do you think that’s bad? It gets much worse. The SQA sent the same assessment papers to every school in Scotland, but without guidance on when to sit them. As is to be expected,  schools sat the same exams at different times and, consequently, papers were shared on social media. It’s stunning that a national body with the resources of the SQA did not foresee this. Rather than acknowledging their mistake, the SQA has promised to punish those who share papers and those who benefit from these leaks. Using TikTok is now a dangerous task for Scottish pupils. 

The one thing you can say about exams in a normal year is that they are consistent, everyone sits the same paper at the same time. This year, the certification model does not even pretend to provide the pretence of fairness. Different schools are putting forward different evidence. Different schools have different assessment diets, some over a much shorter period than others. Pupils at some schools have the chance to sit assessments again to improve their grades whilst others can only dream of this opportunity. The limitless negligence and disregard for pupils begs the question: do they care? 

Much like most of the student population, I have no great love for the exam system. In fact, I have no great love for the whole education system. We’re not learning anymore, we’re remembering facts to regurgitate. We’re pitting pupils against one another and instilling competition when we should be building cooperation. We control creative freedom by imposing boundaries on subjects meant to produce pupils prepared to think outside of them. Our schools aren’t hubs where young people develop a passion for learning but factories where the morals of capitalism and the mottos of individual success are instilled. Academic success is waved in front of pupils as a passport to material gain so students leave school aiming to make money. We’re breeding consumers. My scathing criticism makes it all the more surprising that if in May someone were to have offered me a normal exam diet, I’d have bitten their hand off. Perhaps it’s not surprising, perhaps it simply makes clear the extent to which our institutions have failed us.

What About Catching Up With Each Other?

Few things make this hypothesis clearer than the proposed ‘catch-up’ plans. The idea of ‘catch-up’ is based on a myth I’ve tried to articulate, that most schools actually teach students something besides how to sit an exam. Our system is designed so that knowledge learnt one year is not required the next. In National 5 History, you’ll learn about World War One. In Higher, you’ll learn about the French Revolution. To pass an exam, you need to know facts about your area of study. But this year is over. Students don’t need to catch up on facts that they won’t need next year. Yes, primary school catchup is necessary and perhaps secondary school maths and English, but when our education system is reduced to the ability to memorise knowledge, it most definitely is not. Let’s at least allow students to see their friends before we heap more pressure on them.

Young People Are Going to Change the System.

Policymakers are out of touch with young people. To be honest, I’m yet to be convinced they have ever been in touch with young people. The sorry state of education is a symptom of something far worse. It’s a symptom of a disease which we’re told was cured long ago, adults making decisions on behalf of young people. We’re sold tokenism and ‘tick-box participation, they expect us to believe we’re heard and our opinions listened to. But what I’ve tried to prove is that young people’s welfare is far from the concerns of government or SQA bureaucrats. It’s been an extraordinary 15 months, but these extraordinary failings point to something worse than incompetence, they point to systemic neglect of young people’s interests in order to prop up an archaic and failing system. 

The flipside is this: young people are alive to this reality. We know it and we’re working to change it.

Coll Mccail is a 17 year old activist and writer, based in Biggar. 

If you are a young person whose education has been impacted by COVID, or frontline teacher in Scotland, we would be delighted to provide a platform for your views – we want to know what our education system can and should be doing to support young people through their schooling. Please email us at info@wecan.scot

Scottish Education’s ‘Foundation Myth’ and the Uncomfortable Truths We Must Confront

Melvyn Roffe on a purple geometric background

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The high quality and democratic values of Scottish education form part of the “foundation myth” of the modern Scottish state. The Parliament of Scotland legislated for free school education long before most comparable jurisdictions, and Scotland’s ancient universities were not only amongst the first in Europe, but established a tradition of scholarship to rival any of their peers. It was no accident that Edinburgh became a seat of the European Enlightenment, or that Scotland has provided the world with generations of scrupulous accountants, ambitious engineers, humane medics and principled jurists from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

But as in all foundation myths, historical fact is easily effaced by retrospective wish fulfilment. Although later commentators praised the Scottish school system between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution for turning those from humble backgrounds into “lads o’ pairts”, Professor Tom Devine has questioned whether literacy amongst the rural population, in particular, was any greater in Scotland than elsewhere.

Still worse, foundation myths have a habit of finding present-day forms which frustrate rational analysis of contemporary issues. Alex Salmond’s hubristic standing stone on the campus of Heriot-Watt University discouraged anyone from asking too loudly whether free undergraduate education for all was necessarily the best way to widen participation in Higher Education.

In the end it took the decline in the scores of Scottish children taking the OECD PISA tests to burst the bubble of educational self-congratulation. In truth, not only do the PISA tests provide only a crude measure and are probably “gamed” by some countries that take part, but Scottish children unarguably did well in some of them. However, as Professor Lindsay Paterson has pointed out, Scotland, having abandoned any objective test of its own children’s performance, had been unable itself to evaluate the impact of the Curriculum for Excellence. The PISA tests at least provide some yardstick.

Yet the problems should already have been evident to those who could see past the myth. Read an essay produced by a candidate for many SQA Higher qualifications and ask whether encouraging young people to write formulaic answers to predictable questions is the best way to engage their minds or enrich their souls. Consider the yawning gap between the Government’s lofty ambitions for Computing Science in schools and the actual supply of teachers qualified to teach the subject, or between its rhetoric about modern languages and the catastrophic collapse in numbers acquiring a National Qualification in any of them. Ask why Economics (a discipline born of the Scottish Enlightenment) has all but disappeared from Scottish state schools. Count the number of high school classrooms where teachers are preparing pupils for up to three different levels of qualification at the same time. More tellingly still, track the numbers of young people who tragically still emerge from their years of compulsory education with little to show but a sense of being failed by a system whose single job was to secure their success.

So, it is wrong to blame the Curriculum for Excellence alone for the PISA test shock. On the contrary, CfE owes a great deal to some of the most successful curriculums in the world, notably the International Baccalaureate. The IB enjoys widespread credibility and growing popularity around the globe and has a breadth and vision which sits well with Scotland’s Enlightenment image of itself.

But the differences between the IB and the Scottish education system are also instructive. The IB provides three programmes from primary age upwards which share common themes and approaches and which integrate coherent systems of assessment. This contrasts cruelly with a Scottish curriculum that initially promises breadth and independent thought, but which degenerates into some of the most narrow and transactional forms of assessment known to mankind as soon as the Senior Phase heaves into view.

Perhaps most tellingly, the IB is based in Geneva and is able to develop free from the influence of any government. Although the International Baccalaureate Organisation employs its fair share of education bureaucrats, the credibility of what it does is in the hands of schools, teachers and even the odd academic educationalist. It doesn’t always get things right, but it thrives on their research, good practice, innovation and debate.

In Scotland, however, it is literally more than teachers’ jobs are worth to debate educational ideas in public. Although supposedly “empowered”, Headteachers are often instructed what they must or must not do. Otherwise independent organisations compete to become “trusted partners” of government and too often end up as apologists for policy failure. Even Her Majesty’s Inspectorate enjoys a symbiotic relationship with Her Majesty’s Scottish Ministers. 

Occasionally, something different nevertheless happens. Take Newlands Junior College as an example. Although derided from the outset as the plaything of Jim McColl, one of Scotland’s richest men, it enabled expert teachers to develop an alternative model of education which for five years demonstrated that the system need not fail those who find engagement with school difficult. But the mere achievements of young people were insufficient to preserve it from being swamped by the tides of organisational orthodoxy and political pusillanimity. 

In this context, it is difficult to see how the Curriculum for Excellence or any curriculum with an ambition to be a tool for teachers and schools rather than a top-down set of directions could ever have succeeded. There is much talk at the moment of the need for Curriculum for Excellence 2.0, but no revision of the curriculum will succeed without there also being space for Professional Autonomy 1.0.

It is not a myth that Scotland is a nation where education has deep roots, where learning matters and the achievement of young people is about more than simply improving their individual economic success. But Scotland is also a country where education is failing too many and where the levers to improve the situation are in the hands of too few of those who could do something about it.

Melvyn Roffe has been Principal of George Watson’s College since August 2014, having previously been an English teacher, a Deputy Head in Wales and served as head of two state boarding schools in England.

If you are a frontline teacher in Scotland, we would be delighted to provide a platform for your views – we want to know what our education system can and should be doing to support young people through their schooling. Please email us at info@wecan.scot

Education Ha Ha: A Look at Curriculum for Excellence

Martin Whitfield | Twitter | Facebook

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In what, now seems the dark distant past, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was launched. Its ambition was to create a coordinated curriculum for young people from 3 years to 18. CfE sought to be transformative, holistic and child centred, a curriculum that could change young people’s lives. The ideals founded and exemplified in the nomenclature, successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. 

CfE replaced the old 5 to 14 Curriculum, where pupil’s ability was identified by a letter. Achieve Level C by P7 and move on to High School. A curriculum that resulted in formatted lessons in maths and language, frequently repeated year on year with little change or development. A curriculum driven by textbooks and end of unit tests.

The new curriculum was conceived in the early 2000s and based on a national conversation and a major report published in 2004. The new curriculum was introduced into schools between 2010 and 2011. At the time the CfE was met with a hope and concern in almost equal measures by professionals, parents and pupils alike. Concerns were raised over the vague outcomes, the lack of clarity in lesson content and how a pupil would achieve a Level, now described as 1, 2, 3 rather than A, B, C,

It offered the potential for a sea change in education, a hope of re-establishing Scottish education as world leading. The change was based on a strong pedagogical foundation and was an active attempt to upset the status quo. A status quo that had been arrived at from inertia of a large system and a vested interest by those at the centre. CfE offered to trust pupils and teacher’s professional judgment. What could possibly go wrong?

The potential of the curriculum was soon dashed on the rocks of centralised government. The need to assess pupils and teachers, to control the results, reduced education back to review by tick box. It is fashionable to blame the lack of resources and there is no doubt that year on year real cuts have damaged education, but responsibility also lies with the higher echelons of control, the SQA, HMI and the Scottish Government and their failure to trust. The need for control crushed the opportunity for change and improvement.

What should have been an open border curriculum has year on year become a tighter and tighter controlled hard border of lessons that must be taught, hours spent doing PE, clear evidence of the teaching of Scottish History and perhaps the greatest failing – the lost opportunity to properly develop the senior phase.

The desire to retain a linear curriculum driven by age and stage replaced the mantra of successful learner as an individual. In 2016 the HMI published in a statement for practitioners “Do not track and record progress against individual Es and O’s.” (Experiences and Outcomes.) Was this taken up? No, tracking is an event that still occurs in most Primary Schools! One of several examples where Local Authority education department behaviour is driven by the need to get schools through the next inspection rather than the needs of the individual pupil.

So where does that leave the CfE in 2021? The Covid pandemic has shone an unflattering light on the senior phase of Scotland’s education system. Last academic year saw the use of an algorithm that penalised the pupil, irrespective of their ability but entirely dependent on their school’s past performance. Only after a national outcry was it replaced by teacher judgment based what the pupil could achieve. This year, no algorithm but a tsunami of exams re-labelled assessments crash down on pupils from Nat 5 upwards.  A grade based on teacher judgment but only as evidenced by these or similar assessments. No scope to reflect the possible achievement of a pupil if they had not endured the nightmare of the last year.

In Primary education – concentration on Health and Wellbeing on pupils return to the classroom but not at the expense of Language and Maths. Room for Art, Music and other Expressive arts pushed out. Areas that most contribute to the wellbeing of individuals.

Can CfE recover? Confidence is all but gone in the label, teachers feel undervalued …again, pupils feel stressed and not listened to… again, parents feel lost … again and society unsure whether to trust the system.

CfE was an opportunity to restructure Scottish education, to empower pupils and teachers to invest in their learning, to create successful learners and confident individuals. Based on sound pedagogy a chance to unleash the futures potential. 

Curriculum for Excellence has become almost a bad phrase. Perhaps it is time to redraft the future. To decide whether we want a centrally driven education system, founded on the use of tick box exercises to reflect a young person’s achievement or whether we want to embrace again confident individuals, successful learners so that in future we have responsible citizens and more than effective contributors but society leaders. The problem may not be with the name but whether the centre will trust those in the system.

Martin lives in Prestonpans with his wife and two sons. After a career as a solicitor, he retrained as a teacher and worked at Prestonpans Primary School from 2007 until his election to the House of Commons in June 2017. He was elected as one of the MSPs for South Scotland on 6 May 2021.

Let’s Give Scotland’s Children the Summer Holiday They Deserve

Kate, a secondary school teacher in Scotland, on a light grey and light purple background

Kate Cuddihy

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One of the quieter events in Scotland this year has been the incorporation of the United Nations Convention of the Right of the Child (UNCRC) into Scots Law.

This landmark moment was a significant development in Scotland as Article 31 of the Convention gives young people the right to rest, play and to have the chance to join a wide range of activities. The Scottish Government has also stated that a children’s rights approach is embedded in their Covid recovery programme .    

To celebrate this, let’s give Scotland’s children the summer holiday they deserve, a summer of fun, and urge the Scottish Government to issue every under-18 in Scotland a set of vouchers to enjoy their summer:  a book token, a cinema token, a tourist attraction token, a toy token and a leisure centre token. Each worth £10. However, this is not solely about celebration.  

Narratives surrounding the role of Scotland’s young people in covid recovery has been constructed in terms of “catching-up”.  But, catching up with what? This vague notion has generated strong opinions and it has become synonymous with schools. Even then, the parameters of what to “catch up” on are vague.  

Teachers, such as myself, have a vested interest in the centrality of young people to Scotland’s covid recovery. Rest assured, students (supported by their schools, teachers, peers and parents/carers) are indeed peddling furiously to “catch up” in school.  Senior students are catching up by completing a series of assessments to meet the standards laid out by the SQA.  BGE students are catching up by not only reviewing lockdown learning but laying the foundations for their learning next year. As are their primary school peers.  Through their continued hard work Scotland’s young people will catch-up at school. To use that terrible assembly cliché “it is a marathon, not a sprint!” 

There is another type of catching up. Classroom teaching’s return has also meant the return of real-life conversation with students.  Conversations establishing our young people as social individuals, consumers of culture and active people. They love doing “stuff” and the pandemic has forced them to miss out on the incredible social, cultural and sporting opportunities offered in Scotland.  Perhaps, the notion of “catching up” needs to be widened and let Scotland’s young people catch up on their cultural, social and sporting lives.

The well documented impact of lockdowns on the mental health and wellbeing of our young people shows that worries over school-work alongside feelings of loneliness and, in the case of pre-school children, a lack of communication with others from outside their households are potentially detrimental to their future.

A Scottish Government report in September 2020 into the impact on the mental health of children emphasised the need to support socialisation, cope with anxieties created by the pandemic and the importance of outdoor play in particular for younger children’s mental wellbeing. The report continues to say that routine and structure helped to support young people .  

During term-time the schools are able to provide this structure to support wellbeing and mental health.  However, the most organised parent or carer will tell you, filling six weeks of a summer holiday is a huge undertaking. A helping hand in the form of holiday vouchers would play a small part in providing that essential structure needed to support good mental health and wellbeing.   

The pandemic’s financial impact cannot be ignored. Pay has fallen in real terms for some and this has most affected the lowest paid.  A reduced income and travel restrictions, means that Summer 2021 will be the summer of the staycation. While some may welcome the need to not travel it creates a daunting financial prospect for many. 

A quick survey of my Advanced Higher students’ idea of a good day out revealed that a cinema trip would cost £5 – £8, Foxlake would be £17.06 and East Links Family Park £7.50 – £15.  Each. My more traditional (and rejected) suggestions of a swim session and a trip to Edinburgh Castle would cost £3 and £9.30 respectively. After factoring in transport and treats it all adds up: summer is expensive.  With some extra support families would be able to provide structure to their children’s summer without the financial worry. 

Underlying this voucher scheme is a belief that our young people deserve a break -they’ve missed out on nearly 18 months of being allowed to be children. Let’s celebrate their new-found rights and provide them with the means to do so. 

Kate Cuddihy is a secondary school teacher in East Lothian, and has an interest in children’s rights. 

The Fallacy of the COVID Catch Up

Two young people sitting at a table studying

Evie Robertson | Twitter

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As with last year, young people across Scotland are once again in uproar over official attempts to manage their education. Reports at the weekend revealed the stories of desperate pupils stressed out by a glut of assessments which are being undertaken in exam conditions, with little time to prepare. When it comes to the disruption caused, it seems the pandemic is having the hardest impact on the youngest. 

As they seek to redress this situation, educational leaders and politicians in Scotland have spoken of their desire to help pupils “catch up” (meanwhile, today in England, UK Ministers have promised £1.4bn for tutoring sessions for those who have “fallen behind” with the consideration of additional 30 minutes added to each school day). But while funding has been commendably high at around £200 per pupil, little focus has been placed on the extent to which this ‘catch up’ narrative is doing more harm than good for pupils themselves. Along with the chaos over the assessments, “catching up” –has also included stringent catch up programmes for younger years. Uncertainty and pressure for students has been coupled by unparalleled stress for teachers and assistants…magnified by the different systems being used between institutions. Clearly, we did not heed the warning given by Dr Dan O’Hare in February, about the danger of focusing too heavily on the notion of catch up, which, he stated, ‘heaps huge pressure, and reinforces the idea that children have ‘one shot’ at their education… putting themselves under more pressure to perform academically, in a challenging and unprecedented time.’

To delve further into this ‘post lockdown’ catch up crisis, ScotlandCan orchestrated a panel discussion with five children aged between 12-17 years, facilitated by representatives from the Participation team at ‘Children in Scotland’.

Tired of adults speaking for the children themselves, we asked them what exactly they thought about the way their education has been handled throughout COVID and changes they would like to see as we emerge from this crisis. 

The issue of catch up was a recurring theme. The children themselves felt that whilst there needed to be some focus on ‘missed opportunities’ particularly within practical subjects such as the sciences, the idea of catch up itself has been over-emphasised. Coll aged 17, stated ‘the government has over-estimated the progress children make in 3 months in general’ highlighting ‘education in secondary means you get taught content for the exam, which you then cram… it’s not as if we have a holistic learning educational experience’. Nina, aged 16, questioned the need for urgent catch up now in the non-exam years, stating ‘why can’t we allow extra time to go over next year, and focus now on moving forward without having to think about catching up,’ whilst Liam, aged 12, emphasised COVID study support should be seen as optional for all. 

Looking forward, there was broad consensus on the need to readjust learning back within the classroom and take key learnings from the blended learning approach used throughout the last two years. In particular – and one perhaps even more critical given current assessment pressures – was an acknowledgement that our education system across Scotland requires recalibrating, to create a system based around actual de facto learning, versus regurgitating content and stringent standards we require being caught up to. On this, Ishan, aged 15, highlighted that a fairer system is required to benefit all learning types, and that ‘we cannot just work to exams – even if this is the system that was used by older generations’. 

Post lockdown clearly should be seen as an opportunity – a chance to move away from an education system largely based on ‘one size fits all’ and look towards injecting greater agency, flexibility and choice for our children. Under COVID, students have had to take greater responsibility for their own learning – and we should therefore respect and offer them greater choice and control going forward. 

Where to start? Undoing the fallacy of catch up has to be the first priority, and the notion that failing to meet an arbitrary set standard due to unprecedented circumstances requires lengthy additional study. We should be changing the bar, rather than increasing the pressure. Additional support should be tailored, and available to all, whilst ensuring those with particular needs – both educational, social and psychological – receive adequate support. And we should seek to offer greater choice in how students learn – from the ongoing use of technology, to the reconsideration of the value placed on examinations versus general learning and assessment. 

If anything, speaking to these children showed this author their resilience. Across two years where they have had to adapt heavily, miss vital social opportunities, and deal with a situation challenging to most adults, the children have persevered – with integrity not seen perhaps since the war generation. We have to give them more credit, offer more support and flexibility, and change this notion of educational catch up into educational recalibration for the future of Scotland.

We Can – And Need to – Grip the Scandal of Child Poverty

Prof Adam Tomkins on a purple geometric background
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It was reported this month that child poverty has risen in every council area in Scotland since 2015. The biggest rise is in Glasgow, where one in three children lives in poverty. 

This cannot be blamed on Covid. Child poverty was rising in every local authority area in Scotland even before the pandemic struck. 

Along with the drugs crisis and the mental health crisis that we never talk about, tackling child poverty should be right at the top of the Scottish Government’s social policy agenda. 

Yet, such minimal debate about child poverty that we have at all in Scotland, focuses only on the symptoms of poverty and not on its underlying causes. There is no mystery about what those causes are. Family breakdown, unemployment, addiction, and poor educational attainment drive families into poverty and keep them there. 

All of these areas of policy fall within the devolved competence of the Scottish Government. 

Scottish Ministers are fond of saying that, in a country as wealthy as ours, there is nothing inevitable about poverty. It is the product not of destiny, but of the policy choices we as a country make. They are right about that. Different policy choices, made here in Scotland, would make a material difference to child poverty in our country. 

But, rather than making those different choices, we have instead a blizzard of next to useless papers, documents, plans, and commissions. We have a Fairer Scotland Action Plan (2016); a Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017; a Child Poverty Delivery Plan (2018); two Annual Progress Reports (2019 and 2020) and a Poverty and Inequality Commission with—you guessed it!—a Strategic Plan (2020). 

Read it and weep for the sheer bone-headed pointlessness of it all. The amount of civil service time and resource that is wasted on this production of glossy feel-good picturesque guff is shameful—and, meanwhile, child poverty grinds on, rising in every single council area in the country. 

As ever in Scotland, the issue is stuck in a deep rut of constitutional paralysis and finger-pointing. SNP ministers point to Universal Credit (which is reserved to Westminster) and to the fact that most powers over welfare and social security remain in the UK Government’s hands. They conveniently ignore two truths. First that the Scottish Parliament has the power to top-up any reserved benefit. And, second, that Holyrood also has the power to create any new benefit it wishes in a devolved area (and family policy has been devolved in full since 1999). 

But this tired old argument about powers fundamentally misses the point. Child poverty is not going to be solved by benefits alone. Benefits put cash into otherwise empty pockets—they are an essential safety net—but even the most generous benefits system in the world will never address the underlying factors that drive families into poverty in the first place. Benefits tackle the symptoms of poverty, not its causes. 

And this is what is missing in Scotland—an honest debate about how to grip poverty’s underlying drivers. For we are never going to push poverty down unless we understand it not through the prism of benefits, but through the prisms of education, work, childcare and housing. The attainment gap is not only a consequence of poverty—it is one of the key reasons why families remain in poverty, unable to escape. Families who feel they have no choice but to abandon work because of the inflexibility of childcare are families who experience, every day, our failure to understand that employment support and flexible childcare are policies critical for an effective anti-poverty strategy. And failures to meet (even modest) social housebuilding targets are failures that contribute directly to the deepening and widening of child poverty in Scotland. When the number of children in temporary accommodation in Scotland is the highest on record, is it any wonder that child poverty is on the rise throughout our country?

All of this—every single aspect of it—falls squarely within the devolved competence of the Scottish Ministers. 

That is why a politics that focuses on schools and skills and jobs and housing is the politics we need. Because a politics that focuses on these things will be a politics that tackles child poverty at cause. Extending free school meals will tackle child poverty. Recruiting teachers will tackle child poverty. A national tutoring programme will tackle child poverty. Innovating in teaching excellence will tackle child poverty. Investing in skills training will tackle child poverty. Revolutionising our decrepit apprenticeships schemes will tackle child poverty. Building affordable homes will tackle child poverty. 

And the converse is also true. Not doing these things, because you are too busy appointing commissions and writing strategic plans and publishing glossy brochures on why you’ve missed another target, whilst sitting back and idly pointing the finger at Westminster, will do nothing but condemn yet another generation of Scotland’s children to the grinding misery of a life trapped in the endless cycle of poverty.