A country that taught the world how to read

This is not just another bad spreadsheet. Scotland built its name on schooling. The Education Act 1696 required a school in every parish, generations before England created a national system. Adam Smith wrote that those parish schools had taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account. For centuries Scotland had four universities — St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh — when England had two. The Enlightenment that followed, from Hume to Smith, was not an accident. It grew out of a country that treated knowledge as a public duty.

That is why trailing England is so embarrassing. The old boast was that a Scottish education was a passport. Under the SNP, in power since 2007, that boast has been spent. Curriculum for Excellence was rolled out on their watch. Nicola Sturgeon called education her number one priority. John Swinney ran the portfolio. Scotland then left the other major international surveys, TIMSS and PIRLS, and asked the public to trust its own mark book instead. PISA is what remains, and it shows a pioneer sliding toward the middle of the pack: reading down 38 points since 2000, maths at a record low, and 15-year-olds a year behind England in science.

The chart the SNP do not want on the six o’clock news

Compare Scotland with England and with the OECD average. The pattern is the same in every subject. England is ahead. Scotland is closer to the international middle than to the country next door.

The sample was 3,066 pupils in 115 Scottish schools. The movement since 2022 is small enough that statisticians do not call it a new collapse. That is not a defence. It means the SNP have stabilised Scotland near the bottom of its own record. Keir Bloomer, chair of the Commission on School Reform, called this the poorest set of Scottish PISA results since the tests began in 2000. On the long view, he is right.

The same survey asked head teachers whether shortages were getting in the way of teaching. In Scotland, 50.9 per cent of pupils were in schools where a lack of teaching staff hindered instruction “to some extent or a lot,” against 39.0 per cent across the OECD. For support staff the figure was 64.3 per cent, against 38.5 per cent. The Scottish Government notes that the head-teacher questionnaire missed the OECD’s usual response-rate standard. Even with that caveat, the picture is of a system running short of the people who actually teach children.

Malcolm Offord: A national emergency

Reform pressed the point as soon as the numbers landed. On 8 September, Helen McDade asked the First Minister why Scotland now trails England, and the United Kingdom as a whole, in every core subject, and why more than half of pupils are in schools where staff shortages are hindering learning. She asked when he would publish a plan to turn it around.

Two days later, at First Minister’s Questions, Malcolm Offord put the charge on the record. Falling so far behind England, he said, is a national emergency.

He also asked the question parents will recognise. After years of abandoned gadgets and broken targets, is a free school bag the only gimmick left?

The SNP response: accept the scores, change the subject

The SNP did not deny the PISA numbers. They tried to bury them under a different report card.

On the morning of publication, Swinney told Parliament the new results showed “essentially a stable position.” He pointed to a curriculum improvement cycle launched after the 2022 scores, and to teacher-judgement data for 2024–25: 90 per cent of S3 pupils at third level or better in literacy, 91 per cent in numeracy, both described as the highest ever. He added that 2026 National 5 and Higher pass rates were up on last year and on 2019, with Advanced Highers up on last year. PISA, he said, is a sample. Teachers and the Government were “focused on ensuring” improvement.

Education Secretary Màiri McAllan struck the same note. Scotland was “competitive by international standards,” above the OECD average on four measures out of five, and had “stabilised its international performance.” She said she was “clear-eyed” about the results, then added that they also “indicate success.” The Government’s answer is the Curriculum Improvement Cycle, to be rolled out with the teaching profession by August 2028 — three years after another weak international test, and eighteen years after Curriculum for Excellence was introduced.

At FMQs, Swinney went further. He accepted the PISA assessments, then called them “one part of the dataset.” He listed positive destinations, record university entry from deprived backgrounds, higher National 5 passes and a slight narrowing of the exam attainment gap. Then came the line that will follow this government around:

Proud. After the worst maths and reading scores Scotland has posted. After a year’s gap with England in science. After a generation told that this was the defining mission of SNP government.

Offord recorded his own verdict after the exchange. Watch it here.

Marking your own homework

Swinney wants the public to prefer Curriculum for Excellence judgements and exam pass rates to an independent international test. Parents should notice who marks those papers. ACEL is teacher judgement against the SNP’s own curriculum. Even on that measure, 25 per cent of Primary 7 pupils in 2024–25 did not reach the expected Second Level in literacy. Offord had already told Parliament, in the programme-for-government debate, that one in four children leaving primary school in 2025 failed to reach the literacy needed for high school. The official table matches him: P7 literacy was 75 per cent.

Exam passes can rise while the skills PISA tests get weaker. That is not a mystery. It is what happens when a government controls the qualifications and then quotes them against a test it does not mark. Scotland used to sit TIMSS and PIRLS as well. It left them. PISA is the international yardstick that remains, and it is the one the SNP now ask the country to look past.

Education is not a reserved excuse. Schools, the curriculum, teacher numbers and the quangos around them are Holyrood’s business. The published Reform programme for Scotland is to shut those quangos and return powers to elected ministers, including the abolition of Education Scotland. That is not a new curriculum written in a press release. It is the first step toward a system in which someone can be sacked when standards fall.

Scotland once exported teachers, engineers and ideas. It now exports excuses. A government that is proud of a year’s gap with England has run out of them.

What Reform would do

Schools are Holyrood’s job. Reform’s published Scottish manifesto does not offer another school bag. It offers a different system: knowledge in the classroom, tests the country can trust, and a path from school into work.

Reform will reboot Curriculum for Excellence around a knowledge-based core, restore rigorous exams as the main form of assessment, and bring back standardised testing. It will re-introduce the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy and re-join the international surveys the SNP walked away from. If Scotland is slipping, parents should see it in public, not in a minister’s preferred dataset.

Responsibility comes back to people with names. Education Scotland will be abolished and education returned to ministers answerable to Holyrood. Head teachers get their budgets and their staff recruitment back. Secondary schools can apply for the self-governance model used by Jordanhill. Phones come out of the classroom. Exclusion is restored as a tool, because neither pupils nor teachers are helped by sitting through disruption. Special-needs provision will be reformed because the SNP’s inclusion policy has not delivered.

The same chapter points that education at work. Rather than sending half of school-leavers to university by default, Reform will fund technical colleges and trades around Scotland’s ten clusters of excellence. A First Job Passport is meant to move every young person from school into college, an apprenticeship, vocational training or a job. Every penny of the Apprenticeship Levy is to go into apprenticeships linked to colleges. An Adult Re-Skilling Taskforce is to get out-of-work adults into those same sectors. Welfare savings go first to back-to-work and apprenticeships. That is how a country that once taught the world starts producing welders, technicians and readers again, not another strategy document.

Teachers are part of that. The manifesto’s first-year income-tax cut is illustrated as more than £2,000 extra take-home for a teacher with five years’ service, with larger savings for chartered and head teachers, without a new pay deal. Keep more of what you earn, and the job is worth staying in. A Westminster Reform government has a separate apprentice wage-credit for small firms. Holyrood cannot pass that. It can still stop treating a good trade as second best.