One million Scots have been left functionally illiterate, according to the Literacy Commission. Scottish local authorities have declared war on the Scottish Government. Hundreds of teachers are lounging around watching daytime TV because there aren’t any jobs for them, while universities are axing teacher training, which means that there may not be enough teachers in future to meet the SNP’s manifesto pledge on class sizes. Incredibly, there’s a surplus of teachers, and a shortage at the same time.
Parents who want little Johnny to get into that nice bourgeois state school down the road are furious because the government wants to cap class sizes there.
Parents on Scotland’s estates see that teaching classes of 30 is more like crowd control than education. You wonder why they don’t just switch them around – send the rowdies to good schools with large classes and send the middle-class kids to duff schools with small classes. Problem solved
Mind you, we now know that the SNP’s pledge to cut class sizes was one of those “pretendy” policies, like the first-time buyers’ grant and abolishing student debt, that no-one was supposed to take seriously.
I mean does anyone actually read manifestos these days? Well, civil servants do, and they told Fiona Hyslop, the former education secretary, that the class size pledge was toast. Only she didn’t tell Alex Salmond – according to the SNP – which is why she is now on the naughty step and Alex is very, very cross.
So at the last count teachers, civil servants, parents, students, universities, local authorities and one million illiterate Scots are all up in arms at the same time. And into this seething cauldron of angst walks the cultured and charming Michael Russell – writer, film-maker, arts critic – a man who was surely born to be an arts minister. He even gets profiles in the arts pages of The Spectator magazine.
At the Edinburgh Festival this year Mike Russell, then culture minister, staged his own one-man show during which he recited lines from his favourite poets, such as TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, which sounds like good briefing material for his new post.
But to add to his woes, nasty hacks like me are now reciting lines from Russell’s own writings, from his wilderness years: ideas about privatising schools, hospitals ditching social democracy and introducing flat taxes. These are in a book that Russell co-wrote three years ago called Grasping The Thistle, surely set to become a standard text for his many detractors. Alas, poor Mike, I knew him well.
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