What have we learned about Scottish education over the past year?

To all the parents, pupils, teachers, lecturers, support staff, and education journalists – we made it! As I type these words, the academic year is over, and I’m just a few hours away from finding out how many pastel de nata are appropriate in a single sitting.

So before I go, let’s have a look back over the past year and a tentative glimpse towards the next one.

First of all, a recap of some of our biggest stories.

Almost as soon as the exam results came out in August, a scandal began to emerge.

History teachers got in touch with The Herald to accuse the SQA, the country’s perennially crisis-hit exam board, of “moving the goalposts” when it came to the marking of Higher History exams.

SQA officials insisted there was nothing to the reports, and then quietly launched an investigation that turned out to be run by a member of SQA staff, and which subsequently exonerated other SQA staff of any wrongdoing. Everyone was, as you can imagine, shocked by the entirely unforeseeable outcome.

The matter was raised in parliament, sparked some incredible education committee sessions, and ultimately rumbled on for months with no real resolution ever achieved. The students involved will probably never know if they were treated fairly, but that’s just their tough luck I guess?

The Herald also dedicated a lot of time and attention to the (ongoing) saga of plans for a new school on the Isle of Mull. Long story short, the council wants to build a new school in Tobermory, but that means that kids from the south of the island will continue to be shipped off to a boarding hostel in Oban once they leave primary school. As a result, many islanders have demanded a different approach.

Instead of a single nursery, primary and secondary school in the north of the island, they want the high school split off and located somewhere central so that everyone on Mull can access it.

A long and increasingly bitter fight now looks likely to end up in the courts. Campaigners on Mull have raised a petition for a judicial review of the council’s decisions, and a crowdfunder to finance the move raised more than £70k in a few days. There’s a huge amount of anger on the island directed towards the council, who are kidding themselves if they think otherwise, and it’s not difficult to understand why. We’ve probably got a long way still to go with this issue, and will keep you updated.

In between those two big stories, we also ran a major special on Additional Support Needs (ASN) in Scottish education. More than 40% of school pupils now have some form of registered extra need, and this presents major challenges to a school system that many will tell you is close to breaking point as a result of cuts and mismanagement.

We ran more than twenty articles looking at a whole range of ways in which the ASN crisis (and it is a crisis) is manifesting, including some heartbreaking stories from families desperately trying to make sure that their children’s needs are met.

Incidentally, one of the things that came up was the fact that Scotland only has one specialist ASN college. A couple of weeks ago I went to the first ever graduation ceremony for that amazing institution, and not a single member of the Scottish Government bothered to turn up. Make of that what you will.

Another of our specials focused on universities, especially the financial situation that they face. It proved to be especially timely, because a few months later details started to emerge of some major funding issues at institutions across the country, and as I sit writing this, the former head of Dundee University has just been absolutely mauled by the parliament’s education committee.

As we come to the end of the year, there are three very current stories that I think reflect both where we’ve been for the past year and, sadly, where we’re going.

Earlier today, a rural primary school that was about to celebrate its 150th birthday was mothballed by Scottish Borders Council, with the process around that decision marred by accusations that families had been ignored and government guidelines flouted. For more on that sort of thing, you can look at developments in Dumfries and Galloway and Aberdeenshire.

Also today, councillors in Glasgow are deciding whether to remove every single librarian from the city’s secondary schools and replace them with (far cheaper and less qualified) library assistants. This is a result of a previous budget vote in which SNP and Green councillors, amongst other things, backed a £100k cut to these services that officials are now tasked with delivering.

And of course we’re reporting on the successful passage of the government’s Education Bill, which turns the SQA in an apparently new body called Qualifications Scotland –  which just so happens to have all the same powers as its predecessor. Critics (who include teachers, MSPs and the government’s own expert) have been, well, extremely critical, and you can’t really blame them, because it looks for all the world like a rebrand is being dressed up a reform.

So, what next?

Well exam results will be out in August, so we’ll get the usual blood-letting around that, and we’ll find out if the SNP has kept its promise to get teacher numbers back up to the levels seen in 2023. It’s not impossible that they’ll pull it off, but it’s a long way from certain.

But don’t worry, because after that we’ll get an election campaign, and that will help to calm things down, right?

Right?!