How to put Scotland at the top of the class

FOR years, pupils have racked their brains trying to explain the value of a Scottish Higher to English employers or university admissions tutors. Is it the same as half an A-level? No, more like three-fifths. Two GCSEs? No. Well, what, then?

Soon, this dilemma may be a distant memory. The English A-level has been made so easy that a government-commissioned report has called for its abolition. The Scottish Higher may now be the last universally-respected school qualification in Britain.

This presents Scotland with an opportunity - and a warning. Dismayed parents, in England and abroad, may look north of the Border for alternatives. But the problem is a result of what happens when politicians have control over education.

The rise and fall of the A-level is a tragedy laden in implication. Monday’s report from Mike Tomlinson, former chief schools inspector, found A-levels so easy that employers now no longer take the exam seriously. It has lost its value. So many pupils emerge with A-grades (one-in-five English students now mysteriously come out with top marks) that employers are finding it "increasingly difficult to distinguish between top-class candidates". The credibility has been exhausted.

And it was drained by politicians. Instead of improving state education, exams have been made easier - essentially falsifying the results of the education process to make the system (and ministers) look better. And in doing so, the credibility of the A-level has been tipped over the edge.

As a result, Mr Tomlinson - who conducted the report - recommends replacing the GCSEs and A-levels with a kind of English baccalaureate - dubbed the "Tomlinson Diploma". Already, it has a Mickey Mouse cachet.

This matters because Scots compete with English students - for jobs, and university places on both sides of the Border. The more devalued the A-level becomes, the greater the advantage Scots students have. Unfair, perhaps, but this is the realpolitik of the issue.

Next, England’s parents will be asking searching questions about their own education system. Do they want their children to be experimented on with the Tomlinson Diploma? Will it be so politically correct that it fails to distinguish between the bright and the dim?

No-one knows. And if the A-level is retained, what’s the point in a system considered worthless by its auditors if A, B and C grades are replaced with A, A+ and A++? Isn’t education too important for this kind of nonsense?

So, go north. Scotland’s universities have long been educating some of England’s finest minds - our schools could start the same trick. England is used to the idea of sixth-form colleges (which pupils normally switch to at the age of 16) - why not have some in Scotland?

Scotland, where the Higher system is intact, needs some blue-sky thinking - if nothing else, to save an endangered and neglected species: the Scottish teacher. In ten years’ time, some 116,000 teaching jobs will have been axed across Scotland. That’s an official figure, but not one you ever hear quoted because no-one will face the real problem facing our schools: we are running out of kids to teach.

This year, Scotland’s national school roll will decline by 13,200 - places that will never be restored, because fewer Scots are having children. The exodus of pupils is enough to empty 66 entire schools this year, 73 next year and 85 the year after. Mass school closures have not yet kicked in - but they will. No country can keep losing pupils at this rate without consequences. When budgets are tighter, they’ll be for the chop - and closures will be a nationwide epidemic.

And then, the protests will make today’s furore over hospital-unit closures seem like a picnic. Parents will join hands around threatened schools. It’s a political nightmare, due to unveil at about the same time as Jack McConnell goes for re-election.

Scotland’s teaching unions have their heads in the sand. The Educational Institute of Scotland naively assumes ministers will just see class sizes whittle down to nothing, protecting schools and jobs.

Scotland’s education industry - the largest employer in many parts of the country - is being managed into permanent decline under the current system. Anyone who does care about its future needs an alternative.

To save education, it needs to be liberated from political control. This seems an unusual concept, but these are unusual times - politicians are to blame for the crisis in English A-level and for the impending cull of teachers. This should be considered an emergency, because Scotland is endowed with world-class teachers - and has been since the Middle Ages, when our literacy was taught to the masses decades before it was in England. It’s a historic product. The old lament - "Where would England be if she didn’t have Scotland to think for her?" is a direct compliment to a country which has invested in education for centuries. This is the reputation now at risk.

Some time ago, Sweden faced the same problem. Its population was under pressure, and schools were closing - so, in 1994, it took a revolutionary step. It let teachers run the system, and the prospects were transformed. This was the voucher system. A price is put on pupils: the government pays a fixed fee to any school which takes on a pupil. And any two teachers could set up a school. Education became a contract between the teachers and the parents.

THIS is the future for Scotland. We have excellent teachers and C-grade politicians, so we should leave the professionals in charge. When this happened in Sweden, the threat of decline was reversed: schools sprang up in rural communities, class sizes shrank. Entrepreneurialism was unleashed.

This would rid Scotland of its biggest social scourge - sink schools, where the children of working-class families are sent. This is a political decision: the money is already there to buy a far better system. In Glasgow, for example, it costs 4,800 a year to educate a child at secondary school: Hutcheson’s Grammar School charges 6,500 a year. The difference is 30 a week - something any working-class parent would pay, given the chance.

Scotland’s poor are being denied the best education for political reasons, not financial ones. Sink schools (and the lives they condemn) are a direct product of the political prejudices of our MSPs.

Given the choice, no parent would send their child to a place where drop-out rates are high and drug abuse prevalent. Given the freedom, the best schools would expand. But under Scottish Labour’s system, only the rich are given the choice - the best state schools are reserved for parents who can afford a house in the catchment area.

Yet the voucher system in Sweden - the most left-wing country in Europe - is considered a right-wing plot by Scottish Labour, which refers to teacher power as "market forces".

In the strange political inversion which is Scottish politics, it is the Conservatives who are now calling for the Swedish system. It should have been Labour. The problem is that, now that the Tories want it, everyone else will attack it. This would compound the tragedy. Scottish schools, if allowed to act by themselves, could organise into offering six-form education for not only England’s "fee refugees" but the refugees from the discredited A-levels.

Scotland’s schools could become as much of an international magnet for young talent as its universities. And young blood is exactly what a depopulating country needs.

By liberalising the education system, ministers can revitalise it. It requires political courage - but, if that fails, it requires a mental image of the protests which will be triggered when the schools start to close in the run-up to a Holyrood election.

The A-level disaster illustrates that Scotland is blessed with a Higher system that has stood the test of time. We have a choice: liberalise Scottish schools with the voucher system - or close our eyes, and leave our education system to its perpetual decline.