Holyrood View - The current approach to education should be ditched
I had to clear up a false claim arising in response to Lloyd Melville in the debating chamber of Holyrood this last week, writes Liam Kerr MSP.
This is an important one, because what is said and done on this topic could affect people's lives.
In March, Angus Council asked the Scottish Government if it could use one strand of housing fund cash to help pay for the Raac victims of Monifieth.
The Scottish Government didn’t respond until the last week of the Angus summer holidays. I got that info within an hour.
However, Lloyd later served up an SNP Minister a ‘softball’ question, where the government is provided a question (and some suspect the answer) in advance by a member, many believe simply for the purpose of clipping it on social media.
Apparently, they said, the council hadn’t done anything since March. Not true, says I. Here’s the timeline and you only answered two weeks ago.
Raac has been awful for every council to try to pick through. Angus officials have now got the OK from central government to use this money. What’s worse for Lloyd, the response of neighbouring Dundee City Council, run by the SNP, has been infinitely worse. But Raac isn’t a competition — and I don’t want the people of Milton Street used as fodder for social media.
The educator AS Neill, one of Forfar’s most famous sons, was perhaps the greatest innovator in children’s learning of the early 20th Century, inspiring schools to move away from inflexible Victorian teaching.
Because of his work and that of his generation, Scotland became esteemed for its education, and for decades schools sent teachers here to study under dominies and department heads. That has not been the case for many years. And Neill would have been aghast to see Scotland recording its worst results for reading and maths in the PISA international comparison of 91 countries’ education systems.
Notably, standards have tumbled under the leadership of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP. John Swinney was Sturgeon’s education secretary and together they monumentally failed a generation of young Scots. When it comes to education, the SNP's record is one of failure and they must finally ditch their approach.