Lessons need to be learned

SCOTLAND had the world's first literate and numerate population. Our educational system was once unrivalled. This is hard to reconcile with the failure of our current educational system. At Linn, we recruit from around the world as fewer and fewer Scottish applicants have the necessary skills and qualifications.

With my colleagues, I support schools and educational institutions across the UK. However, we have observed a steady decline in educational standards over the years.

We use objective recruitment criteria at Linn and so for many years we have tested applicants' behavioural characteristics and their learning abilities.

Behavioural testing goes back more than 80 years. The learning ability tests that we use have been developed for more than 40 years. They have been used extensively and rigorously tested and validated by Britain's armed forces.

These tests make an accurate assessment of preferred working behaviour and this allows us to deploy employees in a role that suits them best and reduces recruitment failure or unsatisfactory performance and avoidable stress.

The learning ability tests we use distinguish between the professional and academic qualifications and CV claims of an applicant and their intellectual horsepower and learning ability.

Our recent experience is disconcerting. The value of current academic qualifications is, quite rightly, becoming subject to a great deal of criticism, but we also find a growing gap between the educational achievements of the Scottish candidates we interview and their raw potential.

In fact, we at Linn see under-achievement on a massive and ever increasing scale. We also know that financial pressures and shortages of skilled teaching staff are resulting in streaming measures being used by schools to reduce the number of students who will be put forward for the hard and essential core subjects that form the basis of any comprehensive education.

At the age of 13, fewer students are being streamed to prepare for 'O' Grades and subsequent Higher Grades in subjects such as maths and physics. In some schools, only 15 per cent of the children are being streamed to give them the opportunity to study maths to 'O' Grade and then Higher levels.

Meaningless league tables, the desire to bend measures, fiddle pass rates, save money and, above all, to look good put the system and the teaching profession before the educational needs of our children.

More and more students are being deprived of the chance of a sound education and, as a consequence, the new workforce is becoming less employable.

Given our falling birth rate, high rates of emigration of qualified Scots and the ever- increasing importance to our economy of new, educated, young blood, this is a multiple whammy to our future prospects.

It is unbelievable that in Britain no serious attempt is made to assess or profile children's behaviour and their abilities, that this is not constantly monitored throughout their educational development and that no useful or material objective career advice is available to our young people at any stage in their studies up to and including university.

Even post-graduate students are handled in the same ad hoc, cavalier and unstructured way.

Political dogma always takes precedence over the duty of care that the system has to our youth and, indeed, society at large.

Even more horrifying is the poor performance that even the rigged league tables reveal.

We have two factories in Glasgow, one near one of Scotland's best-performing state schools and another close to one of the country's worst- performing state schools.

At the better school, only 75 per cent of students get some 'O' Grade passes and only 50 per cent secure a significant number of Highers and they are mostly in soft subjects that don't adequately serve the career prospects of the students involved or address our economic needs. At the poorer performing school, the comparative figures are 7 per cent for 'O' Grades and 5 per cent for Highers.

Astonishingly, despite the system, a small number of students still have the drive, determination and the parental support to continue all the way through the school and succeed.

These figures are representative of what is going on across Scotland. Only children who go to private schools stand a good chance of having a good educational grounding and a solid basis for a good career.

Even the best schools in the public sector have too little to be proud of and public sector performance overall is dire when not catastrophic.

Lest anyone imagines that the students in the poorer school have any less potential than those at the better school, our objective testing makes it clear that, if anything, the opposite is the case.

A recent recruitment drive astonished us by revealing that seven applicants from the poorer school who had little or no qualifications at any level were, when tested, in the top 20 per cent of the population in terms of learning ability.

These shocking facts are not news to the politicians, bureaucrats and professionals who are responsible. But rather than deal with the real issues, they pursue their own, self-centred, political agenda and so are destroying not only the economic prospects of our children but also of our whole society. Future generations will curse their memory.

• Ivor Tiefenbrun, MBE, is the founder of Linn Products, the Scottish-based manufacturer of sound and vision systems. He is also the visiting professor of design manufacture and engineering management at Strathclyde University