Hugh Reilly: Poor show of stating the bleedin' obvious

IN THE land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king: in the constituency of Glasgow North East, a man with a Camp Cook Activity badge from his days in the Scouts is considered an intellectual.

Last week, a shocking report produced by the University and College Union showed a clear link between deprivation and educational attainment. Unfortunately, this jaw-dropping news was buried in TV headlines because, in a separate piece of rigorous scientific investigation, a team of American animal behaviourists found compelling evidence that bears do defecate in tree-filled environments.

More than a third of adults residing in the city's North East constituency have no educational qualifications. As a constituent and holder of eight O grades, six Highers, a BA, a PGCSE and a TEFL certificate, I feel a certain smugness when I pop round to the Spar store for my morning rolls and steak sliced sausage. It would be foolhardy, nay, unhealthy, however, to alert fellow constituents of my educational achievements. Local gangs of unemployed teenage street monkeys are genetically programmed to be suspicious of anyone wearing spectacles and not in regulation sportswear - in their eyes, displaying obvious signs of intelligence, such as possessing a library card or ostentatiously carrying a broadsheet newspaper are grounds for serious assault.

For the past 50 years, the Labour Party has controlled the city council and its education policies. One might have thought it would accept at least a smidgeon of responsibility for Glasgow having four of the worst ten constituencies in the UK with regard to educational qualifications. However, in a piece of perceptiveness not seen since the lookout of the Titanic laid the blame for the liner's sinking squarely on the shoulders of the iceberg, the constituency MP, Willie Bain, declared that the SNP government was culpable. Quoth Bain: "It is not rocket science. The SNP must stop cutting teachers and focus on creating training opportunities, jobs and apprenticeships instead of their obsession with independence." His absurd analysis may play well with the 35 per cent of his constituents who left the education system with nothing, but it leaves those of us who are literate in deep despair.

Being the gullible idiot that I am, I had hoped this type of immature mudslinging had been ditched by the Labour hierarchy in the wake of its landslide defeat at the polls, but apparently not. I don't wish to be pedantic but, erm, the SNP administration does not hire or fire a teacher. My elected representative should be aware that councils, not government, make decisions vis--vis teacher recruitment. There is also the ticklish problem of chronology. The SNP has been in power for only four years, yet the research looked at adults aged 16-60. Employing Mr Bain's logic, the catalyst for the ignorance found in North East Glasgow must have been Winnie Ewing's 1967 by-election victory in Hamilton.Glasgow City Council does a stalwart job in educating children in the most challenging of circumstances. Glasgow features prominently in every index of measuring deprivation. As poverty impacts on health, family relationships, crime rates and levels of drug and alcohol misuse, it would be naive to believe that such problems do not hinder a child's learning.

The picture may not be as gloomy as it appears. The constituency takes in areas such as Sighthill and the Red Road flats, housing ghettoes that are heavily populated with asylum seekers. Many of these refugees have arrived here with no recognised educational qualifications, something that would skew the constituency's results in a negative fashion.

It would not be the first time research material did not take a local circumstance into account. Some years ago, a study found that male life expectancy in Glasgow's East End was approximately 59 years but failed to note that many of the city's homeless units were based in that part of the city (presumably to prevent rioting and frenzied letter-writing campaigns in the leafy West End). Premature deaths of down-and-outs overdosing on drugs exaggerated the extent of any lifestyle issues in the East End.

The education gap between rich and poor parts of the country will exist so long as the problem of poverty is ignored.