This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

When I’m investigating Scottish education, there’s no doubt that my professional background is a big help: whether I’m dealing with the ins and outs of CfE (Curriculum for Excellence), discussing safeguarding procedures, digging through official data, or tackling various other tasks, the knowledge and experience I gained from more than a decade of teaching really makes a difference.

Now, you might think (or like to think) that this is all far less important when dealing with official press releases from public bodies, because formal statements from taxpayer-funded bodies – up to and including the Scottish Government – are a different matter, right?

After all, these aren’t technical documents designed for education professionals, or complex statistical publications – they’re designed to read by non-specialist journalists and members of the public to ensure that everyone is properly informed, so you shouldn’t need any special expertise to be able to get your head around them.

But all too often this isn’t the case, and two different releases in the last few days can help me to show you why.

First up is the announcement that teacher strikes have been averted, which was posted to the government’s website on Friday, March 13.

Here’s the story: the SNP promised to give teachers more preparation and planning time in its 2021 manifesto, won the election, and then failed to deliver. Teacher numbers did not rise quickly enough to make the policy possible, and councils argued that insufficient funding had been provided. After years of being fobbed off, teachers finally lost patience and voted to strike.

Within hours that move was entirely vindicated as a panicked Scottish Government started promising to throw money at the problem to find a solution.

It was all a bit of a shambles rooted in yet another SNP education failure, but if you read the government press release, you’ll see all of this framed as a ‘Landmark deal for teachers’.

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The publication confirms that the reduction in contact time will be phased in, and states that the government has “committed to meeting the full cost” of implementing the policy – with a £40m sweetener thrown in for good measure.

But to begin to grasp the whole story, you need to get your head around a very important paragraph:

“A multi-year budget line from 2027-28 onwards will cover the full implementation costs. This will be based on modelling to be developed jointly with COSLA and refined using up-to-date demographic forecasting, census data, and pay and non-pay cost data.”

What that actually means is that more work is needed to figure out how to actually deliver this policy (“modelling to be delivered jointly with COSLA”), so the government doesn’t actually know how much it will cost – despite agreeing, in writing, to cover the bill.

And once you realise that, the whole picture starts to become clearer. The government doesn’t know what this will cost because it hasn’t yet worked out how many teachers will be needed across the entirety of the sector, or exactly what the changes are going to look like in secondary schools, where implementation is massively more complex than in primaries or special schools.

"The government doesn’t know what this will cost because it hasn’t yet worked out how many teachers will be needed across the entirety of the sector," says James McEnaney (Image: Taylor Flowe on Unsplash)

To make matters worse, that future agreement depends upon the conclusion of detailed analysis that should have been carried out before the SNP made a manifesto commitment five years ago; the fact that it won’t be happening until after the next election should be setting alarm bells ringing.

So when you know enough of the background, and understand how schools work, you realise that this ‘landmark deal’ isn’t really anything of the sort – it is more like an agreement to hopefully come to a future agreement, and a successful outcome depends upon the Scottish Government deciding that this time it is going to keep its promises.

A few days after the announcement about contact time, the government (quietly) published the latest evaluation of something called the Attainment Scotland Fund. The report was accompanied by a triumphant statement and ministerial comment, again published on the government website, which was titled: Improving outcomes for young people.

The second paragraph immediately caught my eye:

“The Attainment Scotland Fund (ASF) has helped narrow the poverty related attainment gap for primary and secondary literacy and numeracy to record lows, the latest evaluation report shows. The gap in young people leaving school and going onto a positive destination after school has reduced by almost two-thirds since 2009-10.”

Technically, these claims are correct, but they require enormous caveats.

On the first point, our national literacy and numeracy data is questionable at best and, because of a political decision made by the SNP, doesn’t even go back a full 10 years. This is important context for the “record lows” suggestion.

As for ‘positive destinations’, this data is crude at best and utterly meaningless at worst, but even if we leave that to one side, a quick look at the data shows that improvements actually slowed down after the ASF was set up.

But even that isn’t everything, because the real story is in the data that the government press release left out. You see, there is another way to measure the attainment gap, which involves looking at the qualifications pupils leave school with. This is arguably the most important metric, because it will have a far bigger impact on a young person’s life than whether or not they hit a reading target by the end of Primary 7.

Why would the government leave this part out? That’s easy – because when you look at school leaver qualifications going back to 2015/16 (the year in which the SNP promised to “eliminate” the attainment gap) we see that the situation has in fact gotten worse, not better.

So having spent nearly £2bn, the SNP has in fact managed to widen the critical attainment gaps in Scottish education – but, just like on teacher contact time, you’d never learn the full truth from reading the official lines.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s actually a problem.

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