Tag: teaching

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England’s Pisa scores are based only on a tiny selective sample of higher achieving schools making Paul O’Kane’s sad desperate attempt to claim they are better than Scotland just another under-educated failure from Scottish Labour

johnrobertson834

Please Support Talking-up Scotland at:https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/support-talking-up-scotlandClick on the above.Or direct bank transfer at Sort Code 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 Name – JOHN ROBERTSON Paul O’Kane Labour MSP and former head boy, seems delighted to be suggesting that Scotland’s schools education system is worse than England’s, with the above, from those other head boys at the IFS. Paul and the lads at the IFS are clearly out of their depth here. There’s something important in the actual figures from the OECD, in this table: See the wee asterisk there? What does it mean? Notes: Values that are statistically significant are marked in … Continue reading England’s Pisa scores are based only on a tiny selective sample of higher achieving schools making Paul O’Kane’s sad desperate attempt to claim they are better than Scotland just another under-educated failure from Scottish Labour

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Scotland’s teachers biting the hand of the ‘best friend they could have’ and even Jack McConnell’s Labour think tank director says ‘Scotland’s teaching unions must be broken’

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Please Support Talking-up Scotland at:https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/support-talking-up-scotlandClick on the above.Or direct bank transfer at Sort Code 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 Name – JOHN ROBERTSON In the long-time Labour-supporting New Statesman, by the long-time critic of the SNP and Director of Lord Jack McConnell’s ‘Enlighten’ think tank, Chris Deerin writes: Scotland’s teaching unions must be broken The country’s education system needs radical reform.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 … Continue reading Scotland’s teachers biting the hand of the ‘best friend they could have’ and even Jack McConnell’s Labour think tank director says ‘Scotland’s teaching unions must be broken’

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Wrong! There are 6 505 fewer pupils yet 63 more teachers to keep Scotland’s pupil/teacher ratio the best by far in the UK

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Please Support Talking-up Scotland at:https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/support-talking-up-scotlandClick on the above.Or direct bank transfer at Sort Code 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 Name – JOHN ROBERTSON Rehashing a story from one of their December 2025 front pages, the Herald’s Garrett Stell (‘Originally from North Carolina’), has the above headline based on an apparent fall in teacher numbers from 2022 to 2025. I’m not going to check. It’s not important. Much more important, he doesn’t seem to know about the ratio between teacher and pupil numbers. I’ll resist the temptation to do my Appalachian accent. You’ll see above, in the official figures, that pupil numbers … Continue reading Wrong! There are 6 505 fewer pupils yet 63 more teachers to keep Scotland’s pupil/teacher ratio the best by far in the UK

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Labour Government promises to halve the attainment gap by 2062 [!] for all pupils while SNP Scotland has already achieved a new low, in 2024

johnrobertson834

Please Support Talking-up Scotland at:https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/support-talking-up-scotlandClick on the above.Or direct bank transfer at Sort Code 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 Name – JOHN ROBERTSON All over BBC UK [England] today, this message: The government says it plans to halve the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers in England by the time children born in this Parliament finish secondary school. It’s another one of those promises you might like to ask an 11 year-old to answer these questions: 2044 and 2062!? Meanwhile, from the Scottish Government’s Literacy and numeracy standards reach record high report in December 2024: The proportion of pupils achieving the … Continue reading Labour Government promises to halve the attainment gap by 2062 [!] for all pupils while SNP Scotland has already achieved a new low, in 2024

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Scotland’s schools narrow attainment gaps across the board and ‘most deprived’ 14/15 year-olds make major strides in literacy

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From Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) Levels, 2024-25 published on 9 December 2025: The statistics also provide information on the gap in attainment between pupils from the most and least deprived areas of Scotland: For literacy, there was an increase in the proportions of primary pupils (P1, P4, P7 combined) that achieved the expected level, from both the least deprived and most deprived areas with a larger increase in the most deprived areas. As a result, the gap reached its narrowest ever level of 19.4 percentage points. For primary numeracy, the gap narrowed to 16.6 percentage points, which was … Continue reading Scotland’s schools narrow attainment gaps across the board and ‘most deprived’ 14/15 year-olds make major strides in literacy

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Literacy and Numeracy at record highs in Scotland’s schools

johnrobertson834

Support Talking-up Scotland -In this election year in Scotland, the 90% pro-Union media and their sponsors in the opposition parties will do everything they can to undermine the pro-independence parties. Thought vastly outnumbered, we will do our very best to counter their lies and get you, every day, the true stories and the sources of evidence to prove them. Help us if you can at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-get-the-facts-for-you From the National Standardised Assessments for Scotland National Report for Academic Year 2024-2025, published today, we can see the one year results but no trends. This is a classic example of a task where … Continue reading Literacy and Numeracy at record highs in Scotland’s schools

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BBC Scotland desperately keen to headline their hoped for ‘closure of almost every school in Scotland’ and confront the minister but then keep quiet when the teachers clearly can’t be bothered to strike

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BBC Scotland, 15 January 2025 from first thing. This captured at 10am. The following day it remained the headline story in the BBC Scotland inserts in BBC Breakfast. One of the teaching unions, the NAS UWT, had already given up because not enough members had voted but the BBC team still seem hopeful today that they might get some bad news they can connect to the Scottish Government. It’s now an hour or so since the comedic EIS announcement: The EIS announced that its recent statutory industrial action ballot on teacher workload has become a victim of soon-to-be repealed elements of UK … Continue reading BBC Scotland desperately keen to headline their hoped for ‘closure of almost every school in Scotland’ and confront the minister but then keep quiet when the teachers clearly can’t be bothered to strike

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Factcheck – 70% pass rate in S4 mathematics – Someone who actually knows something about educational research scoffs at fake ‘commission’s education arm’

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Professor John Robertson OBA, , former schoolteacher, education lecturer, head of department, Associate Dean (Quality Assurance), Research Professor, research methods tutor, Masters and PhD supervisor, multiple peer-reviewed international research author, Faculty Research Ethics Chair I have more detail on the above ‘research’, front page this morning and 35th by this afternoon. The only story that has sunk faster is that on the Labour MSP and the paedophile. I’ve already clarified in my previous post why you should be wary of ‘The Commission on School Reform, the education arm of the independent think tank Enlighten.’ Who on earth do they think they are? … Continue reading Factcheck – 70% pass rate in S4 mathematics – Someone who actually knows something about educational research scoffs at fake ‘commission’s education arm’

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Scotsman ‘newspaper’ front pages incompetent, mendacious, self-important, sub-standard researchers to undermine Scottish schools

johnrobertson834

Professor John Robertson OBA, , former schoolteacher, education lecturer, head of department, Associate Dean (Quality Assurance), Research Professor, research methods tutor, Masters and PhD supervisor, multiple peer-reviewed international research author, Faculty Research Ethics Chair The above is on the front page of the Scotsman, based on a report by the far from ‘independent‘, pompously self-styled Commission on School Reform (neither royal nor government just invented) and fronted by the notorious Carole Ford with, as always, party-affiliation hidden, and at the end evidence of Pisa-data which no respectable published educationist will ever use. Note – I’ve put all my ‘stuff’ there … Continue reading Scotsman ‘newspaper’ front pages incompetent, mendacious, self-important, sub-standard researchers to undermine Scottish schools

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The Scotsman’s ‘top academic’ wheeled in to savage Scottish schools again is mere ‘bean counter’ with no experience of teaching in schools, teacher ‘training’, leadership or research into anything other than assessment data

johnrobertson834

Professor John Robertson OBA, retired Research Professor, Faculty Research Ethics Chair, Associate Dean for Quality Assurance in Education, Head of Department of Curriculum Studies (30 staff), Senior Lecturer in Educational Technology, Lecturer in Education, School Teacher (Primary), PhD, Master of Education Professor Lindsay Paterson is in the Scotsman again, as he often is, to cast doubt on the competence of Scottish teachers to assess their own pupils continuously as opposed to his preferred snapshot exam method. Once more he returns to the Pisa scores he loves to use to mark us down. He is, to my knowledge, the only serious … Continue reading The Scotsman’s ‘top academic’ wheeled in to savage Scottish schools again is mere ‘bean counter’ with no experience of teaching in schools, teacher ‘training’, leadership or research into anything other than assessment data