Like a football club desperately sacking managers, seeking a saviour, the Scottish Government is reforming education again. This time it’s a Centre for Excellence in Teaching. Although Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth failed to notify anyone in the education sector about it, nevertheless she has assured everyone that it would be “co-designed,” and there would be brilliant collaboration.

Of course, this particular announcement may end up being just an announcement, just as impactful as the many other initiatives – lasting about a fortnight before being quietly ditched. As negotiable as, say, improving the A9, checking expenses, or building ferries.

There’s little faith in this government. As education professionals, we would love a government that was serious about education, one which valued teacher agency, collaboration, practice development and quality research.

Professor Mark Priestley counsels: “There is little point in developing excellent teachers if we continue to constrain them in hierarchical systems with limited time to develop their practice and with limited access to conceptual resources about education.”

Indeed, the big picture is of a system under strain, where people have struggled to adapt to new and challenging circumstances.

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And the Educational Institute for Scotland’s Anne Keenan has further words of realism to impart about such an initiative’s futility. “It will not address the impact of rampant and increasing poverty or of the chronic under-resourcing of ASN (additional support needs) provision on children and young people in our schools." Ain’t that the truth?

Instead of Government embracing the challenging reality of Scotland’s schools in 2023, it spews out complacency, hubris and nationalism.

And bluster: Scotland will be “a world-leader…in new approaches…at the forefront.” Instead of enabling effective education, it simply imagines its own cavalcade of reforms, like the mole seeing cake where stands a tree. It is delusional.

We just want an education system that does what it says on the tin. No matter how much we big ourselves up rhetorically, too many wheels have already come off.

I hardly need to refer to the depressing PISA measurements’ verdict on Scottish pupils’ abilities in Reading, Mathematics and Science. Nor to the ludicrous nationalism of the Curriculum since 2012. Nor to the downgrading of valuable knowledge in order to prioritise skills. Nor even to the plethora of rebrandings, restructurings, and specious ‘reforms’ foisted on our schools. The fact is that, for years, valuable evidence has been ignored in the name of dogma.

And the situation has been increasingly, unprecedentedly, difficult, from long before Covid. Particularly for children and young people from less affluent homes. Take pupil absence. The Commission on School Reform reports that 32% of our secondary pupils miss a day’s schooling every fortnight.

Chairman Keir Bloomer has pointed to the damaging effects on relationships and the loss of time in the learning environment. “It is impossible for a child to reach their full potential with this level of absence, and we must collectively grasp this problem before more damage is done.”

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And there’s also a population existing in limbo, in a nether world. As schools avoid exclusions, neither the mainstream classroom nor stretched Pupil Support Departments can meet their needs. Their anxieties, and social, emotional and behavioural difficulties demand appropriate provision – which isn’t there.

Then there is the shortage of teachers. Everyone has recognised the problem, except the Scottish Government. As Andrea Bradley of the EIS puts it: “It's about funding… we are still recovering from a pandemic, this is a time where we need to see more teachers employed permanently in our education system, not fewer. We shouldn't have teachers sitting at home when we have 34% of children and young people in our schools now with additional support needs.”

This context is hardly ideal for another of the government’s allegedly transformative projects: the new Qualifications Agency, lumbering into being like a dissolute behemoth. The demands this may bring are even less achievable than the aforementioned Centre for Excellence. In particular the desire, within the post-Hayward scenarios, to introduce greater modularisation, project learning, and increased interdisciplinary learning – not to mention the design and implementation of a Scottish Diploma of Achievement – is likely to become quite an undertaking.

To put it in concrete terms, schools, indeed all education centres, are likely to stretch their teachers quite thinly in order to facilitate the huge flexibility demanded in this new world. If work-ready and higher-education-ready young people are to be created by a process of navigation across terrain barely imagined, let alone mapped, then a Scottish Government whose spending needs exceed its available resources by somewhere north of £1 billion hardly seems a sturdy enough vehicle.

And then there’s the debilitated state of many young people. It used to be that everyone demanded transferable skills, especially digital, in our young workforce-to-be. Revealingly, the contemporary default for the ‘Next Gen’ educational model was a 2016 OECD Report, Innovating Education and Educating for Innovation – the power of Digital Technologies and Skills. How dated is that notion?

The desperate need, right now, in our children and young people isn’t so much digital skills, many of which are being imbued by sheer osmosis and ubiquity – but the basics of literacy, numeracy, and the accumulation of actual knowledge.

Furthermore, and significantly, there are major concerns over the ability to deal with and express emotions, values, appreciation, enthusiasms, motivations, and attitudes. Even at the basic level, receiving information, showing empathy, too many young people struggle.

Last year’s major UNICEF report suggested that the twin contagions of the iphone and Covid have led to major deficits in socialisation and concentration – essentially in human capital. In countries like our own where educational attainment and inequality were already serious problems, the dire harvest of those PISA numbers was inevitable.

Covid simply gave pre-existing problems a wee push, as Professor Lindsay Paterson has pointed out. We need major cultural and structural changes – not more shallow policy announcements.

Dr Michael Gregson is a teacher of English at Inverness Royal Academy