Support Talking-up Scotland's work to counter the lies and get you the facts, daily, at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/checkout/help-talking-up-scotland-tell-truth-about-scotland/payment/nBQxjVzq/details 

Professor John Robertson OBA, for nearly 40 years a schoolteacher, a teacher education lecturer, Associate Dean for Quality Assurance, research methods lecturer, PhD supervisor and Faculty Research Ethics Chair

I don’t know what the former first minister has said about this exactly but the media exploitation of it stinks.

I’m in danger, not for the first time, of being called a ‘heid-the-ba‘ after posting the details of my long experience in education above. You should just be relieved, I didn’t add my 6 postgraduate qualies!

I worked hard for all that. I’ve thought hard and long for all that and, so, I’m going to say I know so much more about the long complex history and various meanings of education in Scotland and beyond, than any of the eejits in the media.

Here’s what we really need to be saying about the achievements of the SNP in government resulting from their long steady commitment to funding and staffing schools at a level far above that in the rest of the UK and a collegiate style in working with teachers, which together has enable teachers and students to progress these last 18 years in ways less likely in, again, other parts.

In my 50 years researching and thinking, talking with colleagues across school and higher education, I’ve never met anyone of substance who thinks we should be worrying about or trying to do anything about narrowing the class-based gap.

Only in Albania and Maoist China were the gaps narrowed, reversed even, by only allowing the poor to get an education and sending children of the middle classes and the rich to work in the fields and factories.

It’s a kind of madness but opposition parties and their media pals subscribe to it happily

We, IN education, all think that unless you’re going to, like those mad dictatorships, segregate on the basis of class, any enhancement of school education will inevitably and enthusiastically be exploited by ambitious middle class kids and their parents. The disadvantaged WILL do better but so will the more advantaged and the gap will still be largely the same.

What you can and should do is worker harder to improve the attainment within the disadvantaged group and, hey, what do you think has been happening there, these last 10 to 15 years, but totally ignored by critics?

Using data from Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations, No. 5: 2023 Edition published in February 2023:

In 2009/10 only 27.2% had achieved at Level 6 (Higher and above) and only 4.7% at Level 7 (Advanced Higher), of those in the most disadvantaged 20% had achieved at this level, but by 2021/22, the figures were 46.6% and 10.3%, almost and more than doubling in only 12 years. Remember also, that 20% means nearly 3 000 pupils every year.

Over the same period 28.8% of those in the most advantaged 20% had achieved at level 7 and by 2021/22, the figure was 38.8%, a smaller in percentage but larger in actual numbers,  increase.

So, despite the major improvement among those from the most deprived 20%, there had also been a significant improvement among the least deprived 20%.

The attainment gap is a largely artificial and mostly political idea with no meaning for those it describes. What really matters is the massive improvement in the life chances of those in the most disadvantaged 20%. It’s not enough, of course, but this fact relates to the real experience of thousands rather than that of the media and opposition party opportunism.

There have been similar improvements in attainment for the other three groups between the most and the least disadvantaged. The gaps between them and the least disadvantaged are narrower and, of course, of no interest to the media.

Source: https://www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-attainment-initial-leaver-destinations-no-5-2023-edition/documents/