Russell to the rescue

Scotland's new Education Secretary may revive discussions too long stymied by scraps over class sizes and teacher numbers

By David Lee

Populist political theatre has become Alex Salmond’s trademark, and Scotland’s First Minister appeared as ebullient as ever on St Andrew’s Day. The Scottish National Party had turned Scotland’s national day into a public sector holiday, so when better for Mr Salmond to make a pronouncement on an independence referendum?

In public, all eyes were on the big constitutional question; whether the SNP had got its tactics right and if it had any hope of winning parliamentary support for a referendum bill. Yet, behind the scenes, Mr Salmond was exercised with a more immediate problem:how to save the skin of his Education Secretary Fiona Hyslop.

The Liberal Democrats had announced their intention to call a no-confidence motion in Ms Hyslop, long seen as Mr Salmond’s weakest link. Regular criticism of the way she managed her brief came to a head in the week before St Andrew’s Day when new figures showed that class sizes were still not falling, despite an SNP pledge to deliver an average of 18 pupils in Primary 1-3 before the end of the parliamentary term in 2011.

The same batch of statistics showed falling teacher numbers. Ms Hyslop was on the rack, and chose to come out fighting. She laid the blame squarely at the door of local authorities, claiming the concordat between central and local government allowed councils enough flexibility to make classes smaller and employ more teachers if they wished.

She went further, saying the government might even consider taking powers away from local authorities and running education centrally.

This inflamed the situation. One of the reasons Scottish education policy has failed to follow the radicalism of England is the fierce protection of local schools by councils and teaching unions – and a deep-seated fear of structural change. Predictably, the barricades were manned and the battle-lines drawn.

Ms Hyslop had been sacrificed by her boss. Mr Salmond realised his traditional response to a vote of no-confidence - to threaten the mass resignation of his Cabinet if the vote went ahead - might not work this time.

The opposition smelt blood, and not just that of Ms Hyslop. The day after she had been removed from her post in a job swap with Culture Minister Mike Russell, Mr Salmond was on the rack himself.

A leaked minute showed the civil service had warned the First Minister the pledge to reduce class sizes to an average 18 in P1-3 could not be done in the promised timescale.

Mr Salmond’s weak defence - that Ms Hyslop had not passed on the civil service advice - left him further exposed. Things got worse as other statistics showed that one million Scots (one in five) had problems with literacy, and a report from the Council of Economic Advisers - set up by the SNP - argued smaller class sizes were not in themselves significant in delivering better pupil attainment.

Most people in Scottish education took this as self-evident; many had despaired of the constant preoccupation with class sizes, both from the SNP government, and the opposition who took delight in the promised drop in numbers failing to materialise.

The knockabout disputes over class sizes and teacher numbers that dominated the latter stages of Fiona Hyslop’s tenure masked a much broader problem; the lack of radical thinking in Scottish education.

This was best illustrated last month when it emerged that one Scottish council was looking at introducing school trusts. Although East Lothian’s proposal was far more modest than the foundation and trust school scheme in England, the main parties reacted in horror. Some seemed to view it as heresy.

Despite the Labour’s enthusiastic support for foundation and trust schools in England, Iain Gray, the party’s leader in the Scottish Parliament, said that the idea was out of step with the public mood. Initially, Ms Hyslop and her advisers also rejected any move towards trusts, before deciding that the plan to group clusters of schools in clearly-defined communities, and give them greater control over budgets and decision-making, might not be such a bad idea after all. Her preference was to describe the plan as “community-based management of schools” and avoid the word trust if at all possible.

Two days after the school trusts story broke, Eric Wilkinson, professor of education at the University of Glasgow, argued that the reaction to the story showed that Scottish education was stuck in a “mudpool” and had got into a “spiral of decline”.

The time to start arresting this spiral might have come. Mike Russell has already expressed an interest in looking at school trusts, while some of his previous writings on education have been used to suggest that a more radical approach lies ahead.

During his time out of frontline politics (as recently as 2007), Mr Russell expressed support for the school voucher system and said that parents, children and students should be treated as consumers. He even espoused the benefits of academic selection.

But there is huge reluctance among many in his own party for radical change, while his main priority is to rebuild the fractured relationship with councils.

Yet Mr Russell and Mr Salmond know that the status quo is no longer an option. Tedious exchanges over class sizes and teacher numbers have stymied any serious debate on the delivery of education, but if anyone can break the logjam, Mike Russell can.

He might have been appointed to the education brief for political expediency but, ironically, one of Alex Salmond’s darkest weeks could well usher in a brighter new era of radical thinking in Scottish education. Most observers would agree this is long overdue.

9 December 2009

David Lee. Former Senior Assistant Editor of The Scotsman,