Class action; The Great Debate on Scottish education continues for

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jun 16, 2002 | by Douglas Fraser

Some school pupils want a longer school day, with more flexibility. Others want to learn at a distance and e-mail their homework to teachers. A leading Conservative wants to set up charitable trusts for council schools, to which former pupils could donate and help improve facilities. Parents want prompt cards to use at home for spelling practice. There are calls for more faith schools, which could be run by Muslims or Moonies.

And now, one of Scotland's schools ministers has come out with a raft of ideas designed to move the debate about Scotland's schools away from the (alleged) clock-watching tendencies of teachers; their pay scales and the notion, peddled last week, that if sex education at school doesn't seem to work, then you scrap it and leave parents to do the red-faced explaining.

Nicol Stephen, deputy minister in the education department with responsibility for seeing through schools reforms, wants to see the best of overseas education emulated, turning schools into all-day, all-week community centres where learning and health care starts for babies and adults keep coming back for lifelong learning, where business puts money and people into classrooms instead of merely whingeing about the lack of skills coming out and where the core curriculum is surrounded by green fields and excellent sports and arts facilities.

A long shot? Possibly. But the current Great Debate on education, convened by the Scottish Executive in March and running into the academic desert of next month, is intended to move thinking on to a longer-term and more optimistic plane than is normal for Scots. The problem is that it has lacked focus, and appears to have lacked much response despite all the advertising spend. A three-line whip has reportedly gone out to schools, especially in Labour-run council authorities, to make sure they come up with something. One who went to the resulting school meeting reported that it was merely one hobby- horse being aired, followed by another unrelated one, without much to join up the prejudices.

Although most debates start with a proposition, such as "this house believes that Scottish schools could do better", that's about as far as the Great Debate on Scottish education has gone. The proposition is uncontentious. Adverts have told us that our views count. But what has been less clear is which views are being sought. And for what?

With the debate running another month, as schools power down for the summer holidays, the Executive fears the lack of focus will lead to a lack of focused answers. The opportunity supposedly opened up by the new investment and flexibility following the McCrone staffroom pay and conditions deal may come to little if there is no direction about where to take schooling next. Children and schools minister Cathy Jamieson, catapulted into the job seven months ago, has been unhelpfully shy about pitching her own ideas. The most she has said is that she is interested by the idea of some pupils who want a longer and more flexible school day.

Perhaps the underlying problem is that we are unused to, or suspicious of, politicians admitting they don't know the answers and wanting to hear what real people think. The past three-plus years of devolution have led to what is being called "consultation fatigue", with the usual suspects from business, unions, pressure groups and the voluntary sector exhausted from the raft of ideas to which they are expected to respond. The Executive knows it is overdoing it, and acknowledges the criticism that the public feedback doesn't seem to make much difference anyway. This is the new approach to open-ended, blue-skies, ideas gathering.

The less charitable explanation from opposition politicians, such as the SNP's Mike Russell, is that Jamieson's debate is an admission that Labour and its Liberal Democrat coalition have run out of ideas, and this is a taxpayer-funded exercise in gathering the best of the public's thoughts for use in next year's manifestos. Not so, says LibDem Nicol Stephen, as Russell will be one of the MSPs on the education, culture and sport committee who will get to see all the responses - therefore allowing him to plunder the ideas bank for the SNP as well.

All are agreed that the one thing for which they can be grateful in this debate is that Scotland starts from a better position than England, where a sense of crisis, nurtured by politicians and vested interests over the past decade or so, has led to crisis measures. Scotland's strength is that its school system is built on a strong public consensus backing comprehensive schooling and the importance of schooling as the way to ensure opportunity for all - a notion pre- dating the New Labour rhetoric on the subject by more than four centuries.

One of the strong themes running through the debate so far is a desire to get away from a purely academic and economic notion of education's benefits, with fears that pupils are on a treadmill of training for assessments rather than learning skills of inquiry and broadening their interests.