Make Scottish Education Roar Again

 Lindsay Paterson, Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at Edinburgh University.

This insight piece is an excellent deep dive into what ails the Scottish state education sector. It is a shocking and sobering tour de force by journalist Neil Mackay of The Herald based on his extensive interview with Lindsay Paterson, Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at Edinburgh University. The article was published in The Herald on 12 January 2025. The link to the story on The Herald website is here.

TO understand the state of Scottish education we need a history lesson. After all, we’re told Scotland once had the greatest education system in the world. If so, when? And why? And what’s changed between that golden age and now?

Providing the answers is Professor Lindsay Paterson, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Scottish education.

He is professor emeritus of education policy at Edinburgh University, and an expert on issues like the role education plays in Scottish society, the history of Scottish education, the effects of educational reform, and what impact education has on civic values and social mobility. He has been an adviser to Holyrood’s education committee and government departments.

To get a handle on how Scotland came to be seen as the world’s smartest small nation – and the subsequent decline in education standards – Paterson says we must wind the clock back hundreds of years.

“The ultimate historical reason for the claim that Scottish education was the best in the world is the Protestant Reformation with its aim in 1560 of a school in every parish.”

That ambition became a reality by 1692. Those reformers wanted a population able to read the Bible without “relying on priests”. Despite Scotland’s then “highly-gendered society”, girls were included.

Now click forward to the Scottish Enlightenment, which reached its high watermark in the mid-1700s. “One of the reasons the Scottish Enlightenment was so powerful and so remarkably successful for such a small country was that there was an educated population.”

Many ordinary Scots were able to read the works of thinkers like David Hume.

Then, in 1872, the state became the primary provider of education rather than the church. Legislation was passed “not for parish schools but publicly-financed schools in every parish. There’s no doubt Scottish levels of basic literacy and numeracy were there with the best educated parts of Europe, at the time Prussia and Scandinavian countries”.

A strong education system made Scotland central to the British Empire. We had, says Paterson, a larger population of educated people compared to the rest of Britain and Europe. That meant we could take full advantage of the Industrial Revolution.

“If you’ve got people who are literate and numerate you attract what we’d nowadays call inward investment. Scotland overproduced people with advanced education – meaning beyond the basics, at a level we’d recognise as a higher in the upper levels of secondary education,” he says. “Nevertheless it was in comparison to most of the rest of the world a remarkably high level of education and enabled people to go into all sorts of leadership positions throughout the empire.

“Scotland produced an educated leadership class for the British Empire. That’s one reason why it’s completely false to suggest Scotland wasn’t fully engaged with empire.”

Elite

Scotland also had “more university places per head of population than most parts of Europe in the mid-19th century. So it was a well-provided system for elite education”.

So, how did we get from there to here – where Scottish education is now more pitied than admired?

We need to remember that back in those halcyon days, while most were educated in basic literacy and numeracy, “only 15% of the population go much beyond that. Essentially, the entire story from 1872 to the present day is about bridging that gap – avoiding social, cultural and intellectual exclusion. The story of the last 150 years is one of democratisation – but, of course, many problems came with that”.

Trying to bring about an equal level of education for all is “utterly admirable, but in exchange for that we diluted the quality of what we expect pupils to do to reach the various benchmarks within the system”.

As an example, Paterson says that the level of basic numeracy and literacy in the late-19th and early-20th century was “far ahead of what we expect now. What we expect of somebody with a higher grade pass now is an enormous amount less than what was expected for the tiny number of people who did Highers in the first, fifth and even eighth decade of the 20th century”.

He says: “The standards of the curriculum have steadily weakened as part of this otherwise admirable attempt to extend educational opportunity to everyone. That’s the major challenge: how do you combine rigorous standards with genuinely equal opportunities for everyone? Scotland hasn’t adequately answered that challenge.”

Paterson adds: “We know from various social surveys, stretching back to the 1980s, that the average citizen has a level of numeracy and literacy roughly around what we expect people to have at the end of primary school.

“We’re producing less literate, less numerate people than society used to… What we expect by the end of primary school is weaker than what was expected in the past.”

Perhaps the real golden age came in the “immediate aftermath of the Second World War when standards were probably at the highest point they’ve ever been”. Women were key to this success. From the 1920s, women entered the workforce en masse. Scotland’s world-class education system had produced a cadre of highly intelligent middle-class women who could now get jobs. Teaching – and nursing – became their go-to careers.

In later generations, Paterson says, they would have become doctors or professors. As teachers, they went through highly competitive selection and rigorous academic training.

Schools were staffed by “the most intelligent women Scottish education has ever recruited”. Come the 1950s, these women were at the top of their game as the “leadership class in primary schools. That’s one reason this is the point at which the average literacy and numeracy level of the population was at its highest”.

Grammars

THE next big change came in 1965 with comprehensive education when academic selection ended. The purpose was “to give all children” access to the best education, which had previously been the reserve of the middle classes. This was Harold Wilson’s promise of “a grammar school education for everyone”.

The system ticked along nicely. “If you look at the syllabuses in the 1970s and 1980s, you find they were basically teaching the same things they would have been teaching in selective academic schools but now to a much more diverse student population. That’s one reason why during the period of comprehensive reform Scotland retained the reputation for still having high standards.”

However, it “gradually became eroded”. And the acid? The ideas that had become fashionable among academics in “London, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam”. These are sometimes referred to as the “post-modernists” and include thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu, “the world’s most cited sociologist”.

Bourdieu believed the principle problem facing education wasn’t “the structures of exclusion”, like “selection and poor funding” which hampered attainment for children from low-income families, but “rather what was taught in the curriculum”.

Paterson summarises the philosophy of Bourdieu – one of the most influential thinkers on education since the 1980s – as “the belief that requiring everyone to study a traditional curriculum is imposing ‘symbolic violence’ on students who aren’t part of the traditional elites, especially the working-class, and anyone who isn’t a member of a white ethnic group. By traditional curriculum, he meant the mainstream of European culture”.

Paterson adds: “Like all small cultures, Scotland has always been open to erosion from ideas from elsewhere. In most respects, that’s good – we should always be open to ideas. But if we’re going to accept ideas it should be on the basis of evidence.”

Bourdieu’s ideas “permeated through the universities. They gradually came to change the way teachers are taught. It came to pervade civil servants, quangos and those who manage the education system”.

The coming of the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was the crescendo. Paterson is a fierce critic of CfE, which, he says, is underpinned by a belief that “we should stop trying to pass on the great ideas of human achievement”.

Paterson adds: “Instead of requiring students to study the great novels, we get them to read contemporary novels that deal mainly with the kinds of experience that the children already have. Thus you don’t study, say, Othello, William Faulkner, or James Baldwin, but rather a novel about contemporary racism.

“Of course, if the latter is good literature it should be studied, but not to the exclusion of the great writers of the past, because the past always has something to teach us. Any other belief is arrogance. It’s arrogant to think we know better than the generations of thinkers who came before us.

“Instead of requiring students to study the complexity of Scotland’s role in the British Empire, we get them to study selected aspects which reduce colonialism to a simple binary of oppressors and oppressed. Of course, we would want them to understand there was oppression, but we would want them to understand the complexity of the engagement between Britain and the world as well.

“For example, we’d want them to understand why the great American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass – who himself had been enslaved – admired Christianity, Scotland and the Scottish Enlightenment.

“Instead of requiring students of a modern language to use that language to engage with the cultures of the countries where that language is spoken, we get them to write mini essays about their holidays in these countries. That’s solipsism.

“Instead of encouraging students to engage with the difficult rigour of proper science, we get them to speculate about the moral and political questions raised by controversial scientific topics. Of course the latter matter. But engaging with these controversies requires a sound understanding of science first.”

Maths

WHEN it comes to mathematics, Paterson says: “It’s now possible to pass Higher maths without every having internalised the idea of rigorous mathematical proof. Mathematical proof is the essence of mathematics. If we don’t have the idea of logically deductive proof, of the kind that’s been around since Euclid, then we no longer have mathematics – we have something else. We have numeracy.

“The concept of mathematical proof used to be an unavoidable component of Higher mathematics. It no longer is. It’s no longer core to the syllabus. You can get into primary school teaching now without ever having studied proper mathematics. There’s a real reduction in rigour.”

He adds: “The point of education should be to force people out of themselves – to force them to engage with ideas they’re unfamiliar with, that they’d never previously thought of, that they might even find alienating at first. The point of education isn’t to confirm people in their existing ways of thinking, but to shake them out of these ways.”

Paterson finds the removal of the classic Scottish novel Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon from the list of set texts particularly egregious. “By any measure Sunset Song isn’t only one of the supreme Scottish achievements of the last 100 years, it’s one of the supreme achievements of European literature. It’s up there with the Brontës, Hardy and Dickens.”

Teaching Scottish literature without Sunset Song is as “absurd” as teaching Irish literature without WB Yeats. “You can go through an entire six years of Scottish secondary school and never come across Shakespeare. There’s a loss of historical cultural awareness. I doubt many schools even mention Walter Scott to their students.”

Paterson continued: “There is, of course, further pressure on the syllabus to include people on the grounds of political considerations of who they are, their identity, rather than what they write. That’s where there’s real dumbing down, undoubtedly.

“If we stop having literature defined by aesthetic criteria, by the cultural complexity of the text – if we start defining it by the political categories into which we might slot the author – then we’ve stopped treating it as literature. It removes an important historical dimension, and the understanding of aesthetic language, which is absolutely at the heart of the study of literature.”

Paterson makes clear he’s not “politically conservative”, rather he wants to conserve culture.

“If people aren’t educated, where do they get their ideas from in a way that’s based on evidence?” Paterson asks. “It’s as important to preserve human culture as it is to preserve the natural world.”

We study Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People “not just because he’s a good dramatist, but because he gives us insights into the concept of political populism which are as pertinent now as when Ibsen was writing. The study of literature is the study of society and the moral basis of society”.

 Thatcher

ALONG with the post-modern take on education, which began embedding itself in the 1980s, came Margaret Thatcher’s “utterly utilitarian approach” opposing the notion of “studying for its own sake”. Thatcher promoted a “relentlessly vocational approach to learning”.

So the attack on education came from both “so-called progressives” like Bourdieu, and right-wing Thatcherites. “It’s the great irony of the last 40 years.”

The changes these two camps wrought were “an assault” on working-class children. Middle-class children would always be able to access, for instance, the works of Shakespeare through trips to the theatre paid for by their parents, but for working-class children that option may not exist.

“The best literature from whatever culture, by whatever sex or race, is what should be the defining criteria for insertion into the syllabus,” says Paterson.

He makes clear he’s not targeting teachers. “Many teachers are doing a marvellous job resisting this stuff,” he says. “But there’s a limit to what they can do.”

The social and political consequences of declining education standards are stark. “If scientists make rigorous claims – about nuclear power, vaccines or GM food – and these are rejected by populist politicians, the average citizen with the kind of inadequate rigorous training I’ve described finds it very difficult to make up their mind because they’ve no absolute criteria by which to say ‘Donald Trump is talking rubbish whereas the chief medical officer is talking good scientific sense’.”

Eventually, after the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, the path began to be laid for the CfE. The work began under Jack McConnell’s Labour administration and was completed under Alex Salmond’s SNP government. Both parties share responsibility for what followed, Paterson feels, although the CfE also had “uncritical support” from Greens, LibDems and Conservatives. “The entire spectrum of Scottish politics is responsible for this,” he says.

The CfE has been devised, and is now run by Education Scotland and what Paterson calls “its predecessors in the network of quangos which are the true governing class of Scottish education”.

The CfE was officially implemented in 2010. Education Scotland was created in 2011 when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education in Scotland, and Learning and Teaching Scotland, were merged. Learning and Teaching Scotland itself arose from a merger of the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum and the Scottish Council for Educational Technology in 2000.

Paterson adds: “Research has shown repeatedly that the people and organisations which shape these debates are no wider socially than the pre-devolution Scottish Office.” He refers to a “cosy consensus” among “networks of professionals, activists, quangos … and academics like myself, we’re guilty too”.

To close the attainment gap – the issue Nicola Sturgeon told voters to judge her on – then we must tackle “structural inequality”, says Paterson. “What you don’t do is water down what you’re teaching. Syllabuses have become less difficult. There’s less engagement with difficult ideas. So passing a Higher in 1975 or 1925 is a different proposition to what passing a Higher means today. The last 50 years have seen a greater easing of standards than the previous 50 years.”

Stress

ONE of the great ironies of the shift to the CfE was that it was predicated on the notion that “there was too much assessment, the system was too stressful for young people, and there was too much central imposition of curricular requirements on teachers”.

Yet today “people still complain about too much assessment and central prescription, and young people are even more stressed now than they were. The one thing that has undoubtedly changed is the move away from the central prescription of things like reading Dickens to a lot of rather vague waffle. That’s part of the problem teachers face”.

Paterson says “we went from detailed specifications, for example, of what would be in the mathematics syllabus for primary schools to one that’s really quite meaningless. It’s still the case on paper that every single teacher could decide to teach maths in a different way with different subject matter – and even more so with history or English”.

The idea prevailed that education should be “relevant to children’s lives”, but Paterson insists “some of the most relevant learning is irrelevant to your life”. How relevant, after all, is a Shakespeare sonnet? But how bereft a person’s cultural life without having ever read one?

“The greatest exponent of the view that education must be relevant was Thatcher – so those who say education should be immediately relevant to children’s lives are Thatcherites.”

The coming of the CfE “was the tipping point, but by no means the starting point”. The CfE “drew on ideas that had been slowly developing for two decades”. After the CfE arrived, it “became entrenched and couldn’t be reversed”.

So how does Paterson grade Scottish education today? “It’s not disastrous. It’s middling, average, if you look at international measures.”

However, a system that’s just “okay” today will be “less than okay in about five to 10 years. We’re on a downward trajectory. If we could stop that just now we can muddle through being mediocre for the next 20 years perhaps. But that’s not aspirational. Big powers can get by being average – America, China, France, Germany. Small countries must be innovative, that’s how Scotland flourished through the centuries”.

We should “contrast ourself” with Singapore or Estonia – two small nations with world-beating education systems, Paterson says.

Scotland’s “average performance is about average for developed countries. But our performance at the top end – the top 10% – is way below other countries, and in particular way below England”, a much better comparator than Estonia or Singapore.

England

EDUCATIONAL inequality in England and Scotland is “broadly similar, but what’s happened in England is that all points on the social spectrum – according to the economic circumstances of children’s backgrounds – have risen in attainment. However, the attainment level has risen most among the more affluent students. As a consequence of that, attainment at the top end – the top 10% – is far ahead of the Scottish top 10%”.

Paterson adds: “Socio-economic inequality is greater in Scottish education than in English education, in terms of attainment in reading, mathematics and science.”

He goes on: “In other words, England is producing more high flyers.” Paterson fears this means English pupils will become tomorrow’s leaders and entrepreneurs, leaving Scotland behind.

And what about the lowest level of attainment in Scotland compared to England? “It’s no better. Some say ‘we pay the price of not encouraging high flyers because we pay attention to the slowest learners’. Well, we’re not actually. The slowest learners in England aren’t doing any worse than in Scotland. Scotland isn’t catering any better for the slowest learners than England, but it’s catering worse for the highest learners.

“If inequality was greater in England than Scotland because low attainers were doing worse, that would be a bad mark against the English system, but that’s not what’s happening.”

How do we fix this? Paterson says the solutions must be from “the bottom up”. It’s teachers who know how to teach. “They’ve struggled with the Curriculum for Excellence for 15 years and they know what to do – they’ve lots of ideas.”

One of the CfE’s principles is “devolved autonomy”, so let teachers “go their own way”. Politicians imposing another curriculum isn’t a fix. “Listening to the wisdom of teachers is the only way forward.”

Then let teachers draw on the very best thinking from universities, so the thoughts of academics like Professor John Curtice shape modern studies classes, for example.

Also, synch up primary and secondary schools more efficiently. “Because of the vagueness of the Curriculum for Excellence, secondary schools don’t know what primary schools are producing, and primaries don’t have enough acquaintance with what’s being done in secondaries. So better partnership is desirable.

“Move specialist secondary teachers into taking some classes in the senior years of primary, and move some primary teachers into student support in secondaries. Leadership should come from the classroom, not from politicians or local authorities.”

Future

IS Paterson hopeful education will improve? “Yes”, he says, as long as we don’t “shut down debate. We’re seeing a slow realisation at the apex of the system – the quangos – that things must change fundamentally”. He does, though, suspect change will be slow.

However, that’s not much help to the children who have already experienced the CfE over the last 15 years.

“Each child has only one opportunity. All the children in that time have been let down by this wholly inadequate curriculum. They’ll never get the chance again. They’ve been permanently harmed.”

Those most harmed are the poorest children, as middle-class pupils have parents who “can afford to give them opportunities the schools deny them. The children of parents who can’t afford it, who struggle to feed their children and have no time because they’re juggling three part-time jobs to pay the rent, they’re never going to get those opportunities at home. That’s no criticism of the parents, it’s just they aren’t in the position to help. These children have been let down by schools and their opportunities will never be recovered.”

Paterson adds that “harm” to children will continue in coming years until “we reach a degree of sanity again”.

Scotland’s politicians “must be bolder”. They need “to challenge, not sit in cosy rooms and go along with the cosy consensus”. Paterson does, though, believe the current Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth, a former teacher, is at least starting to “ask questions in a way none of her predecessors have done”.

She has, for example, effectively rejected a “move towards the abolition of exams” in favour of continual assessment, another idea which Paterson says would again only assist middle-class pupils who have the resources and support at home to submit successful essays and projects.

Gilruth also appears to support the notion that “the Curriculum for Excellence is too obsessed with skills”. Skills are important, but we need knowledge too, he adds.

Paterson’s most stinging criticism is reserved for the governing organisation Education Scotland. While the SQA “has its faults”, it’s still staffed by “real experts who know what they’re doing, they know about assessment. Internationally, they’re quite highly respected. The problem doesn’t lie with the SQA”.

However, when it comes to Education Scotland, “I’d abolish it overnight. It’s a complete waste of time and money. All its resources should be pushed to local authorities to create new posts of curriculum advisers who work closely with schools”.

He adds: “Education Scotland hasn’t produced a single worthwhile idea in its entire history. It’s completely out of touch. The stuff they produce is utterly useless.

“They’ve no engagement with any of these kinds of debates, or the history of Scottish education, or the legitimate cultural goals of a curriculum.”

And if education doesn’t change? Paterson points out that it’s long been accepted that “mass democracy” requires “mass education”. He adds: “There will be an increasingly large minority who won’t be adequately informed to be democratic citizens. That’s deplorable.”

It creates a risk of growing populism through the collapse of rational debate.

Additionally, though, cultural and intellectual inequality will become as stark as economic inequality as the children of the affluent will get access to opportunities out of reach for the children of the poor.

“The gap in intellectual accomplishment and cultural understanding between the children of the rich and the poor will become wider. To me, that seems the greatest injustice of all.”

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