When it comes to education, anyone can see that 2025 was yet another bruising year for the SNP and Scottish Government. A decade ago we were told to judge them on their record for improving schools, and the result of that type of analysis is now depressingly predictable: another year, another record of failure.
Even the apparent successes were questionable at best. You may, for example, have seen SNP members on social media claiming that literacy and numeracy rates are now at a ‘record’ high, which is just about true, but only because the party changed the measurement system to suit themselves a few years ago. Even then, progress has been spectacularly slow: less than half a percentage point per year taken out of the attainment gap, at a combined cost (so far) of approaching £2billion.
But however bad things got for government spin doctors and overpaid political advisers, it was even worse for those who actually had to get on with the real job of educating people.
Unfortunately, the coming months don’t look like getting any better.
The rebrand of the SQA is due to be completed, which means we get to pay for all the fresh paint while all the same people do all the same jobs, presumably with the same degree of competence that has been on display in recent years. But hey, they’ll get to do it with some new letterheads and email addresses, and that counts as change, right?
The reality is that hardly anyone actually believes that Qualifications Scotland is going to be a ‘new’ organisation, and I’ve even heard of current SQA staff openly telling people that nothing is really going to change.
Having promised so much and delivered almost nothing, the SNP will now be tied even more closely to whatever failures and scandals the exam board manages to create in the next few years (or even months). In fairness, the Greens should be on the hook for this too, but I expect they’ll continue to wriggle out of any accountability for their own contributions to the problems facing schools.
However, the most pressing concern right now is that teachers across the country are being balloted for industrial action over a remarkably blatant broken promise from the SNP.
In the run up to the last election, the party promised that it would reduce teachers’ class contact time by 90 minutes per week. Although it might seem a little counter-intuitive at first, giving teachers a little bit more time away from their pupils could enhance the quality of education that children are receiving, by ensuring that educators have the time they need to review progress, plan lessons, mark work, write reports, and a whole lot more. Contact time in Scotland is extremely high compared to high-performing countries, and reducing it is the right thing to do for pupils as well as teachers.
Cutting contact time would, quite obviously, require more staff, so this policy also comes with the added bonus of getting teacher numbers back to something like the levels the SNP inherited in 2007 – fully delivering the policy would actually have taken teacher numbers above the 2007 level for the very first time.
In order to achieve all of this, the government needed the latest teacher census to show that numbers had gone up from 53,412 to 55,400, an increase of 1,988 on last year’s figures, and nearly 5,000 more than when teacher numbers bottomed out about a decade ago.
The actual increase this year? 63. If you’re interested, that works out to fewer than 0.03 extra teachers per Scottish school.
The government has offered various weak excuses for all of this, but in the end it’s quite simple: the SNP chose to make an explicit pledge to teachers in the belief that doing so would benefit them politically, and has now completely, categorically and undeniably failed to deliver.
And bear in mind that this cynical promise came after years of tension and anger about the SNP’s attitude towards, and handling of, Scottish education.
Even installing a former teacher as education secretary didn’t turn things around, and you could reasonably argue that the lack of progress after her appointment actually managed to make things even worse, such had been the desperation to believe that things might finally improve now that someone with relevant experience was in post.
Feeling manipulated and disrespected by a party with a considerable track-record in that area, teaching unions opened ballots for industrial action. If they succeed, we face the prospect of closed schools and teachers on picket lines, and responsibility for all that disruption will lie squarely with John Swinney and Jenny Gilruth.
The chances of them actually accepting that responsibility, rather than trying to blame others for their own failures, are probably close to zero.
All of this brings us to the other issue that is going to affect Scottish education in the months to come: the campaign for the 2026 Holyrood election.
If you thought the sector was horribly politicised now, just wait a few weeks.
We’ll almost certainly hear calls for educational equality from a millionaire Labour leader who has spent more money sending his kid to an elitist private school than many of you earned in the last year.
We’ll also get a better insight into the minds of Reform candidates, and maybe some Tories, as they screech about ‘non-English speaking pupils’, because apparently a nine-year-old speaking Urdu is just an absolutely terrifying prospect.
The anti-trans crowd will, of course, also see school pupils as an opportunity. No surprise there.
Someone, somewhere, will confirm they’re not worth listening to when they are shown to have nothing to offer but empty-headed demands for a return to ‘common sense’.
There will be plenty of promises from – all sides – that are never going to be honoured.
And then when it’s all over, we’ll probably go right back to square one. Again.
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