Thread by @rcolvile

I wrote my Sunday Times column yesterday about the problems Boris Johnson will have paying for education catch-up. No such problems in Scotland - because they've only put in £20m, or 1/155th of the amount. What's going on? A quick thread (1/?) thetimes.co.uk/article/plucki…

The Johnson govt put £1.7bn into extra tuition last year, and £1.4bn this. The Scottish govt claims to have already spent £400m on 'education recovery'. On the face of it, given population size, this makes Scotland slightly more generous in terms of catch-up funding. Right?

Wrong! The £400m was spent primarily on ventilation in classrooms, to help children go back to school safely. Which is good! We all know the virus doesn’t like fresh air. But it’s stopping the slide, not repairing the damage glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/19212491.…

Also, even with all that ventilation, Scottish schools were also way slower than English to get pupils back into classrooms - meaning more educational damage.
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla…

They also appear, as Magnus Linklater sets out in this powerful piece, to have been far worse at providing support during lockdown. During the first wave, more than half of Scottish students received NO CONTACT FROM TEACHERS AT ALL (my angry caps).
thetimes.co.uk/article/we-mus…

See this heartbreaking quote. As Linklater says, he doesn't know if this is typical - but that's partly he can't find any evidence 'of what concrete steps the government has taken to check on the performance of individual schools'.

Oh, and Scotland also seems to have done worse than England at handing out laptops etc.
news.stv.tv/politics/table…. And remarkably, they managed to match or even outdo England in terms of screwing up exams, too scotsman.com/news/opinion/c…

Last week, @cpsthinktank (which I run) and @PublicFirst_PF (which I don’t) teamed up for a study on education catch-up in England.

We found that the damage is very real, and concentrated among the most disadvantaged pupils. Given all of the above, the situation is likely to be just as bad in Scotland, or worse.

But here’s the weird thing. The SNP’s main initiative so far has been a “national summer of play”. There are two problems with this. The first is that just £20m is being spent on it, which isn’t so much a government programme as a rounding error. thetimes.co.uk/article/pupils…

(Given that there are just under 800,000 school pupils in Scotland, this comes to £25 a head. Not so much a summer of play as a summer of a play, maybe just about stretching to a snack in the interval.)
gov.scot/news/enhanced-…

But what was striking was that the announcement was explicitly contrasted by “education experts and advisers to the Scottish government” (and unions) with the blunt, brutal, “simplistic” approach taken by Sir Kevan Collins in England (ie tutoring and 30 mins extra in school)

It was classic SNP fare: we are nice and clever, they are nasty and wrong. In fact the entire policy seemed to be based on Being Nicer Than England, not what parents/pupils actually want and need.

Our report included extensive polling and focus groups, as well as studies of the data. We found that parents were overwhelmingly concerned that their children had fallen behind in core academic subjects, especially maths.

The emerging evidence also suggests that this is where the worst impacts have been. (The one thing kids hadn’t lost out on during the pandemic, as every parent knows, was time spent running around in parks…)

In fact, when we tested multiple options for catch-up with parents, all pro-academic interventions were popular (in particular tutoring, but also longer terms and Collins’s 30-minute extension to the school day, with academic focus).

What was NOT popular in any way at all, either in focus groups or polling, was the idea of ‘giving them a fun summer’ (potentially with longer holidays, which some have called for).

Now, it may be that Scottish parents are utterly different from English parents - since education is devolved, we only polled in England.

Or it may be that the SNP has chosen the wrong policy, given it an abysmally pitiful amount of money, and then wrapped the whole thing in a tasty wrapper of anti-Englishness. That Scottish children have been let down during the pandemic, and are being let down still.

And the sad truth is that this is entirely of a piece with the entire course of Scottish education in recent years. It’s behind a paywall, but this from Alex Massie is an utterly devastating run-through of the failures of the system. thetimes.co.uk/article/alex-m…

Highlights include the 'Curriculum for Excellence' fiasco, and the decision to withdraw Scotland from international league tables so that the public wouldn't notice how badly the country's pupils were doing.

Now, in the original announcement of the “summer of play” there was a hint of further funding that might actually address the problems parents actually care about - “key areas such as literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing”.

But given the SNP’s track record in this area, it’s hard to see things improving. (Ends.)

(Forgot to link to our report, which is here. As I said, England-only, but it's hard to see why Scottish parents/pupils should be significantly different. cps.org.uk/research/lost-…)