WHO'S laughing now that there's proof of the number of Scots pupils who leave school without having learned the three Rs to the standard needed to compete for work and wages in tomorrow's world?
Tens of thousands of 14 year olds in Scotland – many in Lothians schools – fall short of the minimum standards in reading, writing and maths, set for pupils about to start on their Standard Grades.
It's an issue tailor-made for tit-for-tat co
nfrontations in Holyrood, though it's far too serious to be the subject of a sterile name-calling campaign amongst the political parties.
There are different ways to interpret whether recruiting a specific number, or enhancing the duties of new recruits, comes closer to achieving the quality of policing required, presumably the reason for the SNP's daft manifesto commitment to recruit 1000 police.
There's only one way to work out whether a pupil has passed a maths test – either the sums add up or they don't. In writing, if the teacher can't read the scrawl and the pupil can't construct a sentence, that's an F for Failed, try again.
If the pupil can't manage anything more challenging than the picture captions in Hello and OK!, how are they going to read the small print in credit agreements, or instruction leaflets for children's medicines?
It would be a mistake to think that when Lochgelly still produced straps, tawses or belts of the finest quality leather, 14 year olds leaving school in Scotland to work in factories, garages, engineering shops, or carpet factories, shops and the building trades, wrote grammatically perfect English, in copperplate, and never made mistakes in tallying up customers' bills, but they didn't make mistakes all that often, or they would have been out of a job and their employer would have been out of business.
Employers have been complaining for at least ten years that standards in the three Rs have been falling. Politicians in all parties have treated their complaints as being the usual hard luck stories, unrepresentative of the better, more widely, educated young people leaving school at 16 and over. Anyone who challenged this new orthodoxy was classified as 'old fogey', so lots of people didn't stick to the evidence of their own eyes and ears.
The economic slump has jolted us out of our complacency. We're probably in the mood to face up to reality and admit the old-style measurements of attainment in the basic tools for learning, or for just getting through the system, failed fewer children than our present arrangements.
The Scottish Government has said testing in the basics will be done before pupils leave school. The intention is right, but the timing is wrong. Children should be tested before they leave primary school.
Ideally, I'd guess that around ten would be the best time, so that any catching up can be done before they go to secondary. Testing at 11+ would be feasible. Oops, does that remind you of anything?
Such is the Pavlovian response of the free-thinkers of the liberated, baby-boomer generation that testing in primary schools has been rejected because of the alleged danger of its being used by unscrupulous secondary headteachers to grade, or stream, or set pupils according to the marks they achieve in their reading, writing and maths tests.
I personally have no objection to pupils being "set" in subject classes, but if only the three Rs are tested, it wouldn't be possible to put pupils in classes according to their ability until they had completed the first year curriculum.
The challenge lies in determining the best way to run "catch-up" classes for pupils who don't make the grade. Socially, they're likely to be less embarrassed if they're able to do this before they leave primary, whether through intensive group or individual teaching and learning support during school hours, after school, or summer school.
It'll cost money, but it's investment in future economic performance. It might also be money well spent in reducing the waste of resources, involved in excluding a hundred pupils per week from Scotland's schools.
Lesser of two evilsNews for politics pop pickers. PFI/PPP has broken into the Top Ten Topics in Holyrood. This means of paying for schools like the five urgently needed in Edinburgh and Portobello was devised by the last Conservative government for ideological reasons, given a makeover by Labour to keep government spending off the books and inside the "convergence" rate set for joining the euro.
Both criteria are now kaput, like private investment, so let's build with public money.
It'll mean borrowing, and we've already burdened our children with debt, but it'll still be cheaper than PFI/PPP.
