Do do do do do you remember?

This is a post from the Facebook page of Neil Findlay MSP today: 

<<Parents please consider this -

The SNP have been in power for 10 years. In that time Scotland has fallen in worldwide rankings from 10th to 19th in Science, 9th to 24th in Maths and 11th to 23 for reading. At the same time Councils have lost 80,000 jobs and have suffered massive budget cuts from the Scottish Government. 

This means fewer classroom assistants, less resources in schools and fewer staff to support education. This is a scandal and more will come with the Scottish budget next week.

I would urge parents to put pressure on your MSPs to argue and if necessary vote against a budget that cuts essential public services like education further.
Let me be absolutely clear I will not be supporting a budget that cuts education, health, social care and council budgets. These are the services that civilise our society, give our children a future and help us when we are sick or old. We should be using the powers of the Scottish Parliament to end the cuts.>>

Neil is a Labour MSP. 

Last week, my hairdresser offered me her copy of the S*n. I turned it down, saying: You shouldn't be buying that paper, Stacey. You're putting more money into the hands of Rupert Murdoch. Remember what that paper did to the families of Hillsborough. She had no idea what I was talking about. Didn't know who Murdoch was or what happened at Hillsborough. So I told her. 

I've started saying to people: eventually all us boring old farts will be dead and there will be nobody left to remind you young people (even if you're fed up listening to us) what actually happened in our recent social history. That means people will start to accept the era of Margaret Thatcher as a good thing, will not question the blackening of the names of unions like the miners' (including but not exclusively Orgreave), the awful treatment of the Hillsborough victims who were blamed by police and politicians - and many other injustices experienced by the working class in the last 50 years. 

Where Scottish education is concerned, let's go back a wee bit. I was first a secondary teacher, then a curriculum development officer in one local authority and then a Quality Improvement Officer in another. My arrival in my last job coincided with the big push for the implementation of 5-14. That was in 1996. Her Majesty's Inspectors made it very clear they wanted 5-14 in place as soon as possible - implementation was too slow but all would be well once it was in place. 5-14 covered all aspects of the primary curriculum but only Maths, Reading and Writing in the secondary curriculum. Wanna guess what was tested when tests were introduced, against the wishes of teachers (and their unions) who did not want to allow tests to dominate the work of the classroom? And that's just what happened. Kids were either 'working towards' a level or 'ready for a test' in Maths, Reading and Writing. Primary staff could neglect the rest of the curriculum just to get this testing done. Local authority staff pored over test results. People were paid good money to specialise in analysing school by school and class by class what was going wrong (never what was being done well). People in schools - especially head teachers - were held accountable for 'poor' test results. 

So who allowed this to happen? After devolution, the Labour Party was in control of the Scottish Parliament from 1998 to 2006. The Labour Party was in control of most local authorities. 

The PISA international tests were introduced in 2000. From the very beginning, the Scottish results began to slide. If you want a reason for the decline, you can look at quite a few things: 

- the rise of far east societies (China, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea) as economic powerhouses with a narrow focus on what I would call vocational subjects (Maths and Science)

- the dead hand of 5-14 which stifled a lot of imaginative teachers and creative young people

- the end of 'ring-fencing' of education budgets in local authorities (demanded by the - Labour - authorities themselves) which starved schools of cash

- constant budget cuts imposed by the Tories in Westminster (which controls the Scottish budget) since 2008 - they call it 'austerity' and it will go down as a disaster which the LibDems colluded in, so that the Scottish block grant is now down by about 15% on where it was in 2008 - and if the Labour Party was still in power, it would be passing on the cuts just as the SNP are now 

There isn't a miracle on offer here, folks. Neil isn't saying: here's what the SNP are doing wrong and here's what they should be doing instead. Here's what Labour will do. That's Labour's tragedy in Scotland right there. 

Here, I want to state my credentials: Govan born, father a shipyard worker, mother a factory worker, educated at a comprehensive school and then at two Glasgow universities, third person in the extended family to go on to higher education, member of the EIS till they sold us out, member of the Labour Party (ditto), Green Party member. I wasn't planning to write this tonight. I've been out volunteering today and I'm knackered. But I'm annoyed that Neil thinks he can skate over what actually happened back in the day. 

I have no faith in the SNP. They are quite good at PR but short on principles. But I have even less confidence in Scottish Labour, and Neil's piece is why.