Peter Jones: School report: could do much better

EDUCATION, it is arguable, is at the heart of Scotland's identity. And that, also arguably, is a problem. It means that whenever change is proposed, debate about that change gravitates away from what ought to be the focus - whether the change will be good or bad for education - and morphs into a wider controversy about whether the future of the nation is at stake.

So it is likely to be with the looming row over teachers' pay and conditions. A leaked version of one submission to the body reviewing pay and conditions, from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) which represents teachers' employers, has been described as "madness" by a teaching trades union leader. Behind the outrage, you can already hear strike action sabres being rattled.

Hold on. This is just one submission among many to a review body which has not yet reported and whose eventual recommendations may or may not be accepted by the Scottish Government. There is a long way to go before any decisions are even close.

Before we get there, we need to clearly understand the real, rather than imaginary, issues at stake. No-one, I presume, will disagree that what we want from our taxpayer-funded schooling system is that it should be the best education system we can possibly get, producing well-educated young people equipped with all the skills they need to choose how they spend their adult lives, whether that is through higher or further education or by going directly into work.

But, do we have such an education system? The evidence is that we don't. Whether you do comparative studies of examination results between Scotland and elsewhere, look at the results of standardised testing carried out across numbers of countries, or listen to what employers say about the abilities of school-leaver recruits, you are forced to the conclusion that Scottish education is not the best we could have.

Money is not the problem. While there are some additional costs caused by providing schooling to a population which, in rural areas, is scattered across wide geographical areas, these costs do not add up to the extra that is spent in Scotland per pupil compared to England. Scotland also, does not have anything like the extra costs caused by the ethnic and linguistic diversity south of the border.

Indeed, if money had been the problem, then it should have been solved by the additional resources poured into education by government following the McCrone review ten years ago which gave teachers a 23 per cent pay rise over three years, a pay leap which has been maintained in the subsequent seven years.But as numerous studies have said, for example by public spending watchdog Audit Scotland, that apart from buying a period of no strike action, any benefits of the pay and conditions deal to education standards have been hard to detect. Even teachers themselves have admitted that.

In a survey of 1,400 primary and secondary teachers conducted by Audit Scotland in 2006, teachers were asked what the McCrone deal had meant for them. The vast majority said that it was about getting better pay and shorter working hours. Only 1 per cent mentioned how it had changed quality in teaching, brought changes in pupils' learning experiences or reduced class sizes.

The conclusion seems inescapable. The McCrone package was meant to improve Scottish education. Jack McConnell, the education minister who authorised it and then became first minister, maintained that "it did not take a genius" to work out that a happier better-paid workforce in schools would improve classroom standards.

I'm not a genius, but I get a very different conclusion: that the McCrone package has manifestly failed to improve classroom standards.

This appears to be pretty much the conclusion that COSLA has reached which I presume to be the verdict of the 32 council directors of education and their political masters. Their remedy also follows the same logic - teachers' pay and working conditions needs to be re-examined.

The question here is: to what end? It is glaringly obvious that councils are under huge financial pressure and need to make spending cuts. It does not take a genius to work out that if you manage to make teachers work longer hours, then you can employ fewer teachers and save money.

Hence the outrage from the teaching trade unions. Any attempt to make teachers do re-training work during the lengthy school holidays instead of during the school week or to make them work longer than 35 hours a week will be stoutly resisted.

Well, let's remember that they are trade unions. Their job is not to improve educational standards, but to get better pay and conditions for the members who pay the union officials' wages.

The unions should know, however, that most taxpayers, including those who work in other parts of the public sector, have had to get along with reduced pay and longer hours in order to keep a job, few of which enjoy anything like the protected status of being a teacher.Because of that, it is more than likely that the unions will play the card which is not available to others, that education is special - being an essential part of what makes up Scottish character and identity and what makes the Scots different from the English. In these times of apparent Nationalist hegemony, it is a highly potent card.

But we should be sceptical of, in particular, any claims from the unions that cuts in the workforce, or longer hours, will mean education standards will fall. If rising teacher numbers, rising pay and shorter hours did not produce rising educational standards, why should the reverse be true?

When the review does report, it would be good if the debate were to be focused on the particular objective of raising education standards. This may be a forlorn hope. All the players are under extreme pressure to defend positions which are incompatible with that goal - councils and their budgets, unions and their members' interests, government and its spending plus its political support base.

Against these powerful groups, I fear that the interests of parents, children and taxpayers, whom all of these groups would claim to be serving, will get lost.

But if the review, under Professor Gerry McCormac, principal of Stirling University, can come up with something which has educational improvement as its over-riding goal, there is a chance, just a chance, that we might get something that serves the nation rather better than at present.