Contribution
My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have made valuable contributions to this debate. With all due respect, it is of great concern that the Scottish National Party has allowed educational standards to slip for way too long, thereby damaging the prospects of a generation of young Scots. The aim of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition is to do everything we can to reverse this downtrend. While this reform might be a step in the right direction towards a common goal of better education for Scotland, many questions need answering.
The previous Conservative Government understood that, to achieve educational excellence, a country needs a goal-oriented and data-driven plan. From our first day in office, we reorganised authorities and implemented new measures that reflected this belief. In doing so, we demonstrated exactly what is possible and can be achieved with a Conservative outlook on education. From when we took office until the last PISA assessment in 2022, England jumped from 27th to 11th in the world in mathematics and from 25th to 13th in reading, in addition to improvements in science. It is deeply regrettable that this was not replicated in our devolved nations. Nowhere is this more evident than in Scotland, where educational standards have continued to slip across the board, more so than anywhere else in the UK.
Scottish children now sit 32nd in the world in mathematics and science; worse, the unnecessary decline has hit hardest those who desperately want a better education. Since 2015, the Scottish National Party has said that closing the attainment gap is its priority. Why, then, have we seen the opposite: an increase in the gap between the proportion of school leavers from the most and the least deprived areas who have one pass or more in National 5s, which now sits at 22.7%? At the Highers level, that gap now sits at 38.4%—an increase from 36.9% in 2023. This appears to be a postcode lottery, which is totally unfair by anyone’s reckoning.
A key element of this detrimental outcome is driven by a qualifications body that does not achieve the purpose it exists to serve. The Scottish Qualifications Authority has been described as misaligned with the wider school curriculum. Schools aim for breadth but are forced to narrow their scope due to an increased focus on exams in later years. Unfortunately, the SQA has lost the confidence of teachers—this was confirmed by Andrea Bradley, who heads Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, and who welcomed the introduction of a new qualification service—as well as that of parents and children. As was highlighted so well by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, in 2020, the SQA overlooked the professional judgment of teachers, issuing grades to 125,000 students through an algorithm. The result was that young people from the most deprived backgrounds had their grades downgraded.
It is crystal-clear that change is needed. A qualifications board that has the trust of neither teachers, parents nor students is not fit for purpose; that is why the announcement of a new qualifications body seems welcome. Looking past the announcement, though, it appears to be the same engine under a slightly different bonnet. In fact, I am particularly pleased to confirm to your Lordships that I am not able to put it better than the Scottish Labour Party, which is rightly on the record as saying that this is nothing more than a “superficial rebrand”.
The primary issue with the SQA was that it both awarded and accredited qualifications. Its remit was to issue qualifications and, at the same time, to set the standards to which those qualifications would have to adhere. It was self-referential and accountable to no one but itself. Its success was judged on how well it wanted itself to do. Various education experts have surmised that it had become its own policeman; it was marking its own homework. I am sure that noble Lords would agree that that is no way to run a qualifications authority.
It appears that the SNP has now brought forward the same failed strategy with the new Qualifications Scotland—another body that fulfils the same awarding and accreditation functions. No one wishes to see a repeat of the 2020 fiasco. Why should parents, students and teachers believe that this new body will have their best interests at heart? It is of course challenging for any noble Lord to answer for the SNP’s failings, and it serves no purpose to regret this Motion formally, but devolved Governments must take responsibility for educating children seriously. They cannot simply rebrand failing organisations, cross their fingers and hope that the outcome will be different a second time around.
His Majesty’s loyal Opposition are sceptical of this change. We wholeheartedly agree with our colleagues in the Scottish Conservative Party and other education experts that the SQA’s functions should have been separated. However, if that is not going to happen, our mission must be to have a relentless focus on bettering education for Scottish children through whatever means possible; we will retain a laser focus on that.