Theoretically, the very notion that parental income determines your chances of future success should shock anyone who believes in the centrist liberal ideology of meritocracy. All the more so in Scotland, where the democratic intellect and “lad o’ pairts” myths shape our national amour propre.
education
With Covid having struck everyone from the Windsors to Donald Trump, a myth emerged that it does not discriminate on grounds of class. But on almost every metric this is false. Pandemic-related school absences have thus been highest in Scotland’s poorest communities.
Source Direct: School’s out for summer
“if the exams are cancelled again this school year, what changes would have to be made? Because there’s no way that a system like the one we saw last year can be re-implemented.”
Fin Laing: The failures of 2020 provide an opportunity to reform our broken exam system
“Already by the start of September, students are arriving at Scottish campuses for the most extraordinary academic year in living memory.”
Analysis: After the school grades fiasco – what’s next for Scottish education?
“Unionism remains instrumentally powerful through the state, and some committed unionists must be beginning to ask why that power isn’t being deployed.”
Analysis: The school grades debacle ‘Groundhog day’ is yet more evidence of Union atrophy
The official economic data for the first half of 2020 is out, and according to the ONS there is only one country in Europe that Britain has not had a deeper recession than in the first half of the year. Spain. Apart from Belgium, the two countries which have the worst deaths per million from […]
No time for fiddling while Rome burns
“People will see straight through an expansion of university education with large numbers of working class students frozen out, not by their grades, but now solely by their inability to afford higher education.”
Analysis: What does Swinney’s retreat mean for the future of Scottish education?
Common Weal communications officer Becki Menzies looks at the SQA grading debacle through her own experience of going to a school in a deprived area. She argues that this should be a wake-up call. If my fifth year exams results had been marked by the same SQA methodology as this year, I’d probably not the […]
Becki Menzies: I would have been one of those kids let down by the SQA system – it’s time for change
Education Secretary John Swinney has created the expectation of a major reversal on the SQA pupil grading system when he speaks to the parliament on Tuesday. “These are unprecedented times and as we have said throughout this pandemic, we will not get everything right first time,” he said yesterday. Politicians willing to admit to mistakes […]
How the Education Secretary can save his job
“Given the choice between being ‘credible’ and being fair, a choice was made that strengthened inequality and erected roadblocks to social mobility for the poorest and most disadvantaged. In a just world, it would be the SQA and the Scottish Government that bore the consequences of that decision. In this one, that price will be paid by the nation’s youth”