You can always rely on the EIS. The Educational Institute of Scotland, the country’s largest teaching union, has for decades been the main block to effective reform of the nation’s schools. Its instinctive belligerence and obstructionism are key reasons that educational performance among pupils is in decline. Change must be opposed for its own sake, regardless of intention, statistical evidence or international best practice.
True to form, as Scotland’s children prepare to sit their exams, the union has balloted its members on strike action. It said that 85 per cent of those who took part backed a walkout over an “excessive workload” for teachers. The irony is that the SNP government is about the best friend the EIS could have. It recently agreed to a 7.5 per cent pay rise, and has also announced plans for a four-day teaching week, with the possibility of later start times and longer breaks. Not enough. The terms and conditions of the profession must be further softened, or it’s one-out, all-out.
It’s possible to have sympathy with teachers who are struggling with ill-discipline, rising absence levels and a working day that is indeed strenuous, without having much if any respect for an organisation that permanently resists changes that have been shown to improve performance in most high-achieving countries. The EIS has Scotland’s children in its clammy, unyielding grip. It must, somehow, be broken.
With the Holyrood election now just nine weeks away, the union’s bosses have clearly identified their moment to put added pressure on the SNP’s reliably pliable ministers. The Nationalists do not like to pick fights with the public sector, which is to be treasured above all else. Scotland is nicer than England, remember, and anyway, those state-employee votes must be protected in order to be harvested at the next independence referendum.
It jars somewhat that this is about the first time our schools system has been mentioned in an election campaign that is now well underway. Politicians’ speeches are growing feistier and more brutish as the big vote draws near. The NHS, the cost of living, the SNP’s general record, Labour’s divisions, Reform’s harshness on immigration – all have featured prominently, and fair enough. Where, though, is the debate about education, which is surely the closest thing we have to a silver bullet that could make a difference to so many of society’s problems?
It’s true that, according to the polls, education is not among the voters’ top electoral priorities. It was probably 1997 (“education, education, education”) when the issue last occupied a front-rank place in such a contest. But that doesn’t make doing the right thing any less important, or the deep-seated challenges the sector faces any less intractable and urgent. And it’s not just schools – Scotland’s colleges and universities are also at crisis point, cutting courses and jobs in the face of deep, prolonged deficits. Employers, looking to recruit the workforce of the future, are wondering what the hell is going on.
Well, some of us care. This week, the Commission on School Reform (CSR), the education arm of the think tank Enlighten (of which I am director) published a manifesto for Holyrood 2026. If I do say so myself, it is packed with deep thought and smart ideas produced by its expert membership. This is not a matter of flashy headlines and cheap pledges. Behind the scenes, and across the parties, Scotland’s more serious politicians acknowledge the Commission is on the right track and that the progressive route of the past few decades has been a dead end. But few (aside from the Lib Dems, whose education spokesperson Willie Rennie is unusually brave and determined) have so far shown themselves willing to grasp the thistle.
What does the Commission propose? It makes a direct challenge to the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), the failed underpinning of modern Scottish primary and secondary education. This structure, which somehow manages to be both impossibly vague and overly bureaucratic, should be replaced with the kind of knowledge-based curriculum used by the world’s most successful education systems, including England’s.
As Keir Bloomer, the CSR’s chair, said, CfE “is now harming the long-term prospects of a generation of children.” He warned that “the place of knowledge in the curriculum has been devalued. Increasing research evidence about how learning takes place and the importance of knowledge and long-term memory has been neglected. We must be big enough and bold enough to admit when we have made a strategic mistake, and reverse it before any more damage is done.”
School and headteacher autonomy should be radically increased, particularly in relation to curriculum delivery, the management of bad behaviour, and the deployment of resources. Exams, rather than coursework which can be exploited by middle-class families and which allows teachers to in effect mark their own homework, should remain the major form of objective assessment. The unplanned and unaffordable explosion in Additional Support Needs should be subject to a review. And, given the rising level of indiscipline in classrooms that has followed the Covid pandemic, “we must assert the right of every young person to an education which is not disrupted by others, that dealing effectively and quickly with poor behaviour requires sanctions, and that parents are obliged to support schools in seeking to ensure acceptable behaviour by their children.”
Oh, and there should be a new Office for Scottish Education Data, given that the existing data tells us far too little about what works and what doesn’t in Scotland’s schools. We really don’t know much about what is going on, which of course suits the government.
At the heart of this manifesto lies the route to restoring a once proud and globally renowned education tradition to a world-class standard. If this isn’t worthy of debate in the heat of an election campaign, then what, really, is the point of the Scottish Parliament. And if the EIS hates it, which it will, so much the better.
[Further reading: Scottish independence is sneaking up on Westminster]
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