My Independent Think Tank

I love stuff like this.

I've been looking at the Reform Scotland education think tank: it appears to be self-appointed. It's a charity but then lots of things in the UK are registered charities, like private schools. I'd love to know where RS's cash comes from but that doesn't appear on their website.

It claims to be trying to achieve:
• Better and more accountable government
• Greater devolution within a federal UK
• Shared prosperity based on a dynamic economy
• Stronger local communities
• Modern, high quality infrastructure
• Effective and responsive public services

The only things that I've noticed being reported in the press are their education reports. The Herald loves them. Well, the reports all predict doom and gloom and blame the Scottish Government so the Herald is bound to love them. There are other documents on their website but none that matter to me, frankly. If their other reports resemble their education reports, RS has no more credibility in educational terms than the lollipop lady outside our local primary school. And I'd go so far as to suggest RS is a lot less useful to the community.

There are 17 people involved in RS, as staff or trustees or on their advisory board. 5 of the 17 are women, which is a fairly unrepresentative sample of public life in Scotland. There are quite a few finance people and lawyers involved in RS, but there only seems to be one person involved in their education 'commission', a retired director of education from Clackmannanshire, where I believe he was in charge of 3 secondary schools, 3 nurseries, 1 special school and 18 primaries. This is not exactly representative of Scottish education in gender terms either, given that well over 50% of education personnel in Scotland are female.

So I am going to suggest that those of us who care about Scottish education, especially Scottish state education, and above all about keeping state education out of the grasping hands of private enterprise, should set up our own wee think tanks. We don't need to do research (RS doesn't). We just need to have opinions. We can manage that. We can give ourselves titles.

I'm going to be a Director of Policy in my think tank. I'm going to advocate radical approaches to Scottish state education:
- we're going to rescue Scottish education from the dead hand of HMIe, with a final realisation that testing and examining are just two minor facets of a successful education system
- we're going to study what's done in other countries to motivate poor learners in order to close the attainment gap between them and their more successful peers
- we're going to rescue the teaching profession from Curriculum for Excellence
- and we're going to refuse to publish any more school league tables or PISA findings until PISA and other agencies starts comparing like with like across education systems.

That should keep my think tank busy for about 10 years. By that time, my great nieces and nephews will be just about through secondary education. Successfully, I hope.

I look forward to reading other people's ideas for think tanks. Just not RS's.