Charles Bannerman: Cut the jargon and tell us how education will improve for our children
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Charles Bannerman asks how education for our children will improve.
Highland Council’s bottom Scottish ranking for P1, P4 and P7 pupils’ attainment in literacy and numeracy is alarming and wide ranging, but the problem runs far deeper than that.
Only 49 per cent of Highland pupils reach a literacy benchmark that 67 per cent achieve nationwide, while the numeracy figures are 60 per cent and 75 per cent. These differentials are huge.
So what’s Highland Council going to do about it? Well, based on something I spotted earlier this month, the omens don’t look good.
Shortly before these statistics went public, I saw a newspaper report which made my blood run cold, as it always did during my teaching career when the latest grotesque, jargon-ridden bandwagon rolled along.
Highland Council say headteachers are apparently going to get “collaborative engagement sessions” so they can “raise attainment in Highland schools”.
“Collaborative engagement sessions.” Impressive! I wonder if these will also involve “sharing”, “reaching out” and “cascading” – or are they simply going to hold a meeting? Or worse still, further excruciating and utterly pointless in-service training days, which are dreaded by teachers as much as they are hated by parents.
The council clearly also delved deep into its thesaurus of pseudo-educational gibberish and declared that: “Staff will be offered standardised quality assurance training to ensure associated school groups and officers have a shared understanding in regard to professional judgements against benchmarks and aims.”
Look folks, you’re bottom of the league, and spouting obscure nonsense like this does nothing to inspire confidence.
What we need, immediately, is a clear, claptrap-free statement and commitment from Highland Council about how they intend to address the alarming revelation that Highland kids are performing way below the Scottish norm. No ifs, no buts, no self-indulgent pretension. Just tell us in clear language, without hiding behind meaningless educational platitudes, how you’re going to sort this. And then do it.
And please forget the universal Covid cop-out. These statistics are partly relative, so they show how badly Highland pupils performed compared with everyone else. Covid has been everywhere, and don’t concoct some excuse about rural education being worse affected by it.
At least no one seems to be blaming the teachers who have done a sterling job against huge odds throughout the pandemic. Teachers are battling against one imposition after another, including a constant stream of nutty educational notions, so mustn’t be made to carry the can.
The problem is council-wide so the buck stops with Highland Council who, among other things, should perhaps look at their hand-to-mouth provision of senior educational management just before the 2020/21 period of this report. This culminated in three months during summer 2020 when Highland education was being run by someone trousering nearly £1000-a-day.
The low points of my own 37 years of teaching always came when these bandwagons, including the hapless Curriculum for Excellence and all of them some kind of alleged panacea, persistently rolled through the system. No one ever apologised when they eventually crashed and burned, so another set of Emperor’s New Clothes is the last thing we need here.
Highland Council has to forget about the smoke and mirrors of fancy jargon and flash bandwagons, and get a grip of the realities of educating our kids in the basics.
