Why education is key to the Scottish independence argument

We believe that Scotland can be better – more prosperity, less poverty, more empowered, less disenfranchised. That hope cuts across party allegiance and ideological lines.

Often the constitutional debate focuses on the economy. But I believe there is one policy area that should be closer to the heart of every independence supporter. Education.

It is what shapes our young people today and equips them to contribute for decades to come. It will enable them to play a role in shaping our economy. It gives them knowledge and teaches them to be responsible citizens. It should endow them with aspiration, confidence and self-belief. Those are the ingredients to be a successful independent country.

And in the independence movement, we are internationalists. In the same way as we want our economy to outperform similarly sized, advanced economies, so we should also want our young people to be equipped to compete with their peers in other countries.

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We want our education system to be the best in the world. Education Scotland says it aims “to equip young people with knowledge, confidence and skills, giving them a competitive edge in a global job market.” We want to see successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens – with an international perspective.

Our young people must thrive and prosper relative to their peers in countries around the world. Lower poverty, a thriving economy, and leading the way on true equality relies fully and completely on a good education system. Education is surely every politician’s most weighty responsibility to invest in the next generation. But for those of us who want to build a better Scotland, an independent Scotland, it is even more imperative.

Our people are everything. They are far more significant than our natural resources and national wealth. They are the fabric from which everything else is cut.

And we are in turn shaped by our early experiences, especially our education.

We need to view our education system through three lenses – the past effects of Covid, the present comparison with international standards and the future improvements delivered by our teachers and pupils, with support from the Scottish Government.

Most pupils in the north got at least one “snow day” this week.

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Our white Christmas was only about 25 days late, but the volume of snowfall more than compensated – at least in the eyes of the children!

I had moments of deja vu, working from home while children were off school. It took me right back to 2020 and 2021, when lockdown left many of us working from home and supporting our young people through months of uncertainty. The UK Covid-19 Inquiry is in Scotland too, considering how the pandemic was managed north of the Border.

Listening to the evidence and considering those months, I was struck by the enormous toll on our children and young people. Some of that was raised in a Scottish Parliament debate on education this week. There was widespread understanding and agreement on the need to manage infections through lockdown, but that will shape our young people’s memories of school for years to come.

Our young people are unimaginably resilient, and even more so after two years of uncertainty, disruption and constant change. Most people accept that it has had at least some impact on schools, especially in terms of behaviour, attendance and academic results.

I was heartened to hear the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Jenny Gilruth (above), talk about the Government’s aspiration to disrupt this trajectory and drive improvements across school education.

The impact of Covid-19 is precisely why the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, published at the end of last year, were labelled “the Covid edition” by the OECD.

AS it says itself, it is the first large-scale study to consider how the pandemic affected student performance and well-being. It has been much debated and discussed, used by some as a stick to hit the Scottish Government. Education is a bigger issue than any of us, and much too important to be used purely to kick the government of the day.

If PISA results clearly don’t tell us everything, but they do tell us something about how our young people’s education compares with other young people elsewhere in the world. I’ve always rejected a so-called golden age in Scottish education.

Any politician or commentator using such a phrase is presumably referring to their education – and that in itself might be all the evidence we need to assume the golden age never existed.

Our standard of comparison shouldn’t be the past, but the future. It shouldn’t be ourselves, it should be the rest of the world. And the PISA results suggest we need to renew our focus and our aims to compete internationally.

The Cabinet Secretary said in Parliament that a knee-jerk political response to PISA is not going to help our young people. She’s right. That didn’t stop the debate in the Parliament this week descending into precisely that. Thankfully, I don’t think our young people were listening.

Instead, the Education Secretary said that Scotland is at an educational juncture. That’s true. And the Scottish Government is focusing on precisely what matters – getting back to the basics – reading, writing and counting. You wouldn’t guess that from the coverage, but having looked into the Education Secretary’s comprehensive plan for improvement, I am more optimistic.

The Scottish Government has set out a plan to improve our curriculum in a planned and systematic way, so it remains relevant and ambitious, built around high-quality teaching and learning.

The Education Secretary has told Parliament she intends to start the programme of curriculum improvement this year, focusing on curriculum content, the role of knowledge, and the transitions between primary and secondary school. She has set out ambitious objectives for improvement, improving attainment in literacy and numeracy, whilst also reducing the attainment gap.

Maths is the central focus for improvement, and the first area to focus on. The Education Secretary confirmed she would bring in a maths specialist, with a full-scale update to the maths curriculum. Critically she said that this would be tested with teachers. Not forgetting English and literacy, she promised a thematic inspection of literacy and English to inform the work required to update the curriculum.

All that aside, to help young people to learn we have to remove the poverty-related hurdles that stand in their way and prove to be the biggest inhibitors. The attainment gap is measured by educational outcomes, but we know that it is non-educational issues that are denying our young people equal opportunities – poverty, trauma, hunger, family instability, and homelessness.

There is no fix to the attainment gap without comprehensive support to families, households and economic interventions that relieve financial hardship. That burden cannot fall to teachers alone.

We cannot expect teachers to shoulder the responsibility for fixing all of society’s woes.

That requires a much better integration of services to support our young people and families more generally, to allow teachers to be free to teach and to free our young people to learn.

There have been a lot of reviews on education but the key is delivery and action.

If anybody can do that, it is Jenny Gilruth, with the right team, in collaboration with Scotland’s excellent teachers.

As a former teacher herself, who did an excellent job as transport secretary, she has the experience of education and operational delivery. Her success will be Scotland’s success – so it’s all the more imperative we do everything we can to ensure her plan works.