Education focus: A lot still to learn

The Great Scottish Education System: Case Study No 2. A student visits a local firm which requires young talented graduates. He begins picking at his jumper, and, having loosened a piece of thread, begins flossing his teeth with it in front of the firm's managing director. The Great Scottish Education System: Case Study No 3. A group of girls visit an IT firm which supplies the oil and gas industry in the north-east. After inquiries, it turns out none of them actually want to work there. It isn't "glamorous". Instead, they want to "do hair and nails".

Depressingly, all of the above examples are true. Worse, all of them come from the same source. Jeanette Forbes, director of the PCL group in Aberdeen, a successful business providing IT services to offshore, marine and commercial businesses, is close to despair about the products of the local schools and universities walking through her doors.

"I find it immensely frustrating," she says. "You want to see that spark that says 'I am going to go for it'. In business, you must have people who can work under their own initiative otherwise how else are they going to get on? But, increasingly, you constantly have to say to new recruits, 'OK, do this, do this.'?"

She goes on: "I am looking at them and thinking, 'They are potential employees'. Then I'm asking myself, 'What?'?"? This week, as we head towards the Holyrood elections on 5 May, Scotland on Sunday turns its attention to the country's education system, with a debate tomorrow with the parties' four main spokespeople.

Looking at the statistics, there is something strange going on across the country. The table published here shows that, in terms of performance, the country is doing relatively well. Data from PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) on results in reading, maths and science shows that the country is above England and Ireland. What's more, Scotland is pushing out qualifications at a heady rate. Only London and the south- east of England produce more degrees and secondary qualifications per head of population across the UK.

But the headline statistics hide a less rosy picture. Studies show that at S4 the bottom 20 per cent of pupils are now so far behind the rest, their results are three times worse than the average scores. An OECD report in 2007 concluded that few other countries can match Scotland for the gaping hole between the best pupils and the worst. This had little to do with the quality of the school, the report noted: "Who you are in Scotland is far more important than what school you attend."

Across Scotland, the last decade has seen an explosion in shiny new primary and secondary schools, all incredibly popular with parents and pupils. Might they represent the system perfectly: good to look at, but hopeless on the inside?

The problems appear broadly to be two-fold. First, as noted above, the system is allowing far too many children, mostly from poorer homes, to fall irreparably behind. A Literacy Commission, brought together by Labour last year, has found that 18.5 per cent of children in Scotland leave primary school without being functionally literate - equivalent to 13,000 children a year.

There also appears to be a major problem of pupils simply losing interest as they hit their teens. "Many (pupils] find it difficult to comprehend its relevance," the OECD noted, of upper secondary. The result is that, last year, around 36,000 16 to 19-year-olds were in the "Neet" category - not in education, employment or training - well above the European average.

Second, say business leaders, even among those graduates and the well-qualified, there are problems. Bluntly, too many lack basic common sense. Colin Borland, spokesman for the Federation of Small Businesses in Scotland notes: "You are also seeing graduates coming out of our universities who can't write to an acceptable level and don't have soft skills so they don't know how to sell or how to run a meeting or how to organise things. People may be very well qualified but they are not very well educated in terms of the right skills."

So what to do? Go right back to the beginning, say some. Last week, former Labour MSP Susan Deacon published a report into children's early years and offered some blunt home truths - literally. "The fact is that many of the things which matter to a child cannot be bought, legislated for nor provided by the State. Much relies on what we do in our homes," she said. Problems like poor literacy, she noted, weren't so much to do with bad teaching as bad parenting in a child's first years.

This isn't necessarily about poverty, note the experts. Colin Mair, director of the Improvement Service, notes: "It's not all kids from deprived backgrounds who do badly. You look at Chinese kids in Scotland, they are doing very well. That is because they and their families see education as a route to advancement." Not enough Scots children and families see education as the way to get on in life.

Deacon's solution, outlined last week, was a new generation of children and family centres around the country to nurture parents and get children off on the right path. Is it that easy though? Mair goes on: "How do you get parents who place no value on education to place a value on education? There are families who are maybe more concerned with how you understand the benefits system than understanding geometry."

The OECD report said Scotland's notoriously conservative education system needs to be shaken up so that it caters for all backgrounds: "Uniformity is not the way to offer the best opportunities to students with different backgrounds, talents, abilities and aspirations."

Meanwhile more needs to be done to improve the alarming deficiencies in the academic standards of teachers themselves. A report by inspectors earlier this year concluded that many teachers did not have a proper grasp of the subjects they were supposed to be teaching. Even doing relatively well by European standards is not nearly enough. Education experts are looking aghast at the growing gap between knowledge of science in schools in Shanghai, for example, and the UK.

Previous studies have warned that, by 2020, the country needs to double its attainment standards if it is going to remain a world leader in skills. In Further and Higher Education, the challenge is clear. More funding for universities is required not simply to maintain parity with the UK, but to maintain status in the global division one. This is the context within which the narrow debate this weekend on keeping Scotland "tuition fee free" should be seen.

A growing pupil underclass; graduates who don't have a clue how to behave; and an inward-looking educational system fast losing ground to knowledge-hungry India and China. The debate begins this week. There is plenty more to discuss.

'Voters' voices' by Richard Bath

IT'S not difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and Paddy Whitby when the subject of education rears its head. "The whole system is geared towards mediocrity, towards everyone getting a prize," says the father of two from Edinburgh. "Head teachers are bureaucrats whose role is to ensure that as many students as possible get five GCSEs or Standard Grades, so the most intelligent pupils are not pushed and those at the other end of the spectrum are quietly encouraged to leave. The system is characterised by dreadful complacency, by a belief that the client isn't the child but the local education authority."

Whitby illustrates his point with a stream of examples involving his two children, 16-year-old Tilda and Wilf, who's studying for his Highers at the highly rated St Thomas of Aquin's high school, before hopefully going off to study law at Leeds or Aberdeen. There was the time a former head teacher told pupils that studying three sciences "is not a good idea" (presumably not interested in turning out any vets, doctors or natural scientists); or when Wilf reached Level E in maths at the start of P7 at St Mary's Primary School and spent the next year "consolidating" ("which means doing nothing") rather than progressing further.

Few things get parents riled like the education of their offspring, and that particularly goes for well-informed parents like Whitby, who despairs at the anti-intellectualism, an obsession with health and safety, and an acceptance of variable teaching standards.

"There are some excellent teachers. I can think of one in particular who is a saintly soul, who works every hour God sends to give the kids in her care the best chance in life," says Whitby, "but many teachers just don't care. There are good teachers, okay teachers and dire teachers, but there should only be good teachers."

It is a common theme amongst Scottish parents considering who to vote for in the Holyrood election in May. "Schools should get back to concentrating on teaching the three Rs," says Fiona Riddell, a mother from the Ayrshire village of Skelmorlie who has two sons, Ian, 14, at high-achieving Largs Academy, and Andrew, 11, at Skelmorlie Primary. "But we need to have the best possible teachers – at the moment we're not careful enough about who we recruit into teaching, we don't train them well enough and we're not sufficiently ruthless with teachers who aren't good enough."

Speaking to parents throws up some surprises – for example, scepticism about the SNP's pledge to restrict some class sizes to 18. Riddell thought it was "never realistic", adding that "how well the class learns depends more on its composition and teacher than the number of pupils." Wilf Whitby agrees: "I was in a class of 32 for maths and 25 in English and it wasn't a problem, perhaps because we were setted (in classes based on ability], which means I was in with other pupils who wanted to do well."

One area where there is a lack of consensus is on the key election issue of tuition fees. While most parents I spoke to rejected up-front fees, our straw poll was split evenly between those who believe graduates should shoulder the financial burden of their higher education, and those for whom even a retrospective graduate tax is anathema.

Eily Craig, from Ayr, will study international relations and politics at Manchester University next year and says her worry is the debt left by the likes of rent and food rather than the 3,000-a-year fees. "If you go to university and benefit by getting a better job then it's fair for you to pay for that," she says. "Why should someone who didn't go to university subsidise me?"

Wilf, who also favours a graduate tax, says that its introduction would nevertheless deter many of his friends from going to university. Wilf's decision to pursue a vocational degree means he should earn well over the 21,000 threshold for paying graduate tax, but he understands why friends without a similarly defined career structure might be more ambivalent. Eily simply wouldn't have gone to an English university if the annual fees were 9,000. She has friends who want to get into Oxbridge but, if they fail, couldn't contemplate studying elsewhere in England. "Higher education is now a financial consideration: will your degree pay for itself?" she says.

That point is echoed by 17-year-old Ingrid Allan from Edinburgh's Royal High School, who is fresh from a march to protest the spectre of fees. "All university should be free," she says flatly. "Paying won't put me off but a lot of my friends will walk away. I'm surprised at how apathetic many people my age are being about this – they may not have to pay, but their younger siblings will."

Party pledges

Scottish National Party

• Expand childcare in a decade-long mission to equal the best provision in Europe.

• Improve support for our youngest children, with increased nursery provision and lower class sizes.

• Improve school education by completing delivery of the new curriculum and delivering the new school buildings programme.

• Close the university funding gap without the need for tuition fees.

• Deliver 25,000 new apprenticeship places each year and funding for 50,000 college bursaries.

Scottish Labour

• Support nurture classes in the early years, giving vulnerable children added attention.

• 1,000 extra teachers to tackle literacy and numeracy problems.

• Foster closer co-operation between schools, colleges and employers in providing vocational training with more funding.

• An apprenticeship for all school leavers who want one, plus a guaranteed job for 18 to 24-year-olds for six months.

• Guarantee of no tuition fees, backdated or otherwise, for all students.

Scottish Tories

• Reform of school management, giving more power to heads, and plans to allow charities and parents to set up non-fee-paying, non-selective schools.

• Greater emphasis on teaching the three 'Rs', on discipline and extracurricular activity. Piloting 'Second Chance Centres' for pupils who are repeatedly excluded.

• Ask graduates to pay a tuition fee for the cost of university after they start earning a certain amount.

• More funds for further education colleges to provide HE courses.

Scottish Lib Dems

• Invest in early years and in children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

• Three-year degrees for courses that don't justify four.

• More power to head teachers, supporting good leadership in the system.

• More spending on colleges and universities, with cash coming from the public purse.

• A stronger role for local colleges to deliver skills, training and investment shaped around the needs of the area.