Scottish education: genuine partnership or pre-election fix?

It is safe to predict that education will remain high on the political agenda in the run-up to the 2026 Holyrood elections.

 In recent years, many aspects of educational provision have attracted criticism and all parties will be anxious to claim that their policy proposals will lead to improvements.  Among the topics that have featured in hostile press reports are these:

• the persistence of the attainment gap between youngsters from advantaged and disadvantaged social backgrounds;
• the recruitment and retention of teachers;
• teacher workload and staff morale;
• failure to make adequate provision for children with Additional Support Needs;
• pupil attendance and behaviour post-Covid;
• the adequacy of Curriculum for Excellence as a means of promoting higher standards.

 The Scottish Government has commissioned various reports to address these issues but its response to their recommendations has been slow and limited.

Here and now

Against this background, it is timely to ask what is currently happening.   Funding and resources are at the heart of many (but not all) of the problems, and here the relations between central and local government are critical.  Statutory responsibility for educational provision rests with Scotland’s 32 local authorities, but they have to operate within the fiscal, legislative and policy framework set by central government.  Sometimes it can seem that central government’s flagship policies (e.g., to eradicate child poverty) promise more than they can deliver, leaving local authorities struggling to meet unrealistic expectations.  Moreover, in a situation where local government staff find it hard simply to maintain existing services, there is little scope to engage in longer-term thinking or conceive of alternative approaches to managing their responsibilities.

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that local authorities are simply victims of the inadequate resources and inflated policy rhetoric of central government.  Earlier this year, the Audit Commission criticised  them for not adequately addressing the expectation gap between what communities need and what councils can reasonably provide. They were also castigated for insufficient transparency in reporting and a lack of effective transformation plans.  These points raise sensitive questions about the quality of leadership in some local authorities, including the relationship between elected members (councillors) and officials.  There is scope for a research project here, though it is by no means certain that it would have the cooperation of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA).  At national level, a similar enquiry into the quality of political leadership and the relationship between Cabinet Secretaries and senior civil servants might find it hard to negotiate the bureaucratic obstacles that would be put in its way.

Working together

The fact remains that central and local government have to find ways to work together. Recent developments in education provide an interesting insight into how political expediency can lead to a suspension of hostilities, even if only temporarily.    Mutual self-interest can be a powerful motivator.  Despite their disagreements, both parties want to convey the impression that their stewardship of the educational system can be defended.  Accordingly, an agreement between the Scottish Government and COSLA was reached at the end of 2024. It stated:

Scotland’s national and local government have reaffirmed their agreement to delivering improved outcomes for children and young people. [They] are committed to working together to restore teacher numbers to 2023 levels next year. [They] have also agreed to make meaningful progress towards reducing class contact time for teachers, in recognition of the asks made by teachers and teaching unions. Medium and long-term joint workforce planning will take into account the importance of responding to issues including different local needs . . . All these measures will contribute to and acknowledge the critical importance of delivering excellence and equity in education for all children in Scotland.

The agreement also announced that funding available to local government would increase to £186.5 million, with additional funding of £28 million from 2025-26 to develop the Additional Support for Learning workforce.

How were these good intentions to be taken forward?  It is one thing to issue a press release promising better things to come.  It is quite another to ensure that improvements actually happen on the ground.

The forum intended to achieve the shared objectives is an Education and Childcare Joint Assurance Board (ECAB) designed to improve attainment, attendance, relationships and behaviour.  Both the terms of reference of ECAB and its membership merit attention.  It is to be a ‘time-limited’ group chaired jointly by the Cabinet Secretary for Education (Jenny Gilruth) and the COSLA spokesperson for Children and Young People (Tony Buchanan, a councillor from East Renfrewshire). The first meeting took place in April 2025 and the minutes are publicly available (), though tabled papers are not. ECAB is responsible for developing its own work programme, meets every two months and will be reviewed after six months, leaving scope for it to be discontinued in advance of the election in May 2026.  

The terms of reference for ECAB require it ’to consider key national and local level data’, and set strategic priorities. These should include ‘a joint evidence-led education workforce strategy’ and ‘delivering improvements for the increasing number of children and young people identified as needing additional support for learning’. A long list of other responsibilities, including contributing to cross-departmental work on child poverty, engagement with the ongoing education reform programme, and taking account of international surveys of educational performance, feature in the terms of reference.  How all this is to be achieved in the time-frame set for ECAB is not clear.

Who’s in, who’s out?

What about the membership? Here a familiar pattern emerges, reminiscent of the early composition of the Education Reform Programme Board set up following the decision to replace the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Education Scotland.  This was heavily criticised for being dominated by civil servants and senior staff in the bodies that were to be replaced.  It was described by one critic as ‘insider dealing’.

 In the case of ECAB, all of the representatives can be regarded as part of the Scottish bureaucratic establishment.  Aside from the Cabinet Secretary and the COSLA political spokesperson, there are two LA Chief Executives representing the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), two representatives of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland (ADES), two representatives of Education Scotland, one COSLA official, and no fewer than five senior civil servants from Scottish Government. The numeral balance between central and local government is quite even – the SOLACE and ADES representatives can be included in the COSLA group, with only the Education Scotland duo resisting obvious classification: it is an Executive Agency of Scottish Government but it works closely with local authorities and is well placed to understand the challenges they face.  However, an earlier attempt to give more scope to schools and local authorities to develop their own initiatives, through Regional Improvement Collaboratives, had limited success and funding for the project has been discontinued.

Omissions from the membership of ECAB are significant.  The General Teaching Council for Scotland is not represented, an organisation that is in a good position to comment on teacher numbers, recruitment and retention.  Nor are any of the teachers’ professional organisations included, who would be able to give first-hand evidence on teacher workload, pupil attendance and behaviour, and the struggle to cope with the numbers of ASN children. There is certainly nobody representing the voice of ‘outsiders’, such as the various ‘think tanks’ which have produced a number of papers setting out alternative visions for Scottish education. The membership of ECAB is revealed as consisting mainly of the usual professional gatekeepers who enjoy narrative privilege, enabling them to put a positive spin on their own achievements. 

So far, the minutes of only one meeting have been published.  What do they reveal?  The agenda was framed around three papers prepared by the ECAB Secretariat (Scottish Government officials) – one on the group’s terms of reference, one on an outline workplan for 2025, and one on aligning national and local statistical data on various measures of attainment. The discussion on the third paper was illuminating and useful. Less helpful was a suggestion that ECAB should seek to align itself with five existing national bodies responsible for different aspects of educational policy.  Given the ‘time-limited’ nature of ECAB and its meetings every two months, this would be decidedly unrealistic.

 Scottish education already has too many bodies with overlapping remits, where members revisit the same issues without achieving very much.  They may have some attraction as arenas for elite professional networking, in which members assure each other they are doing a fine job, but as vehicles for real achievement their value is questionable.

Also rather concerning was a reference in the ECAB minutes to an Audit Scotland report on additional support for learning, which showed the dramatic rise in pupils in this category. The report drew attention to inconsistencies across the country and suggested that the Scottish Government and local councils need to fundamentally rethink the funding, staffing and assessment of this policy.  The figures given in the report were potentially embarrassing and ECAB agreed that a general statement noting the increase rather than specific figures should be included in its own documentation. This suggests a defensive attitude, rather than a willingness to engage with uncomfortable evidence.

Conclusion

Although ECAB represents only a small outpost in the confused landscape of Scottish education – one which is soon likely to be submerged in the incoming tide of next year’s election – it is nevertheless revealing. It illustrates the extent to which policy is now more about presentation than substance.  Central and local government are both keen to deflect attention from areas of provision where they are vulnerable to criticism.  Setting up yet another body with the usual inflated rhetoric, and peopled by ‘reliable’ figures from central casting, shows a lamentable failure to realise the extent to which there is now a loss of confidence and trust in those at the top.

The quality of political and professional leadership in Scottish education needs to be subject to forensic research enquiry.  As part of this, the role of senior civil servants in managing the process of policy development is worthy of close attention.  They use long-established bureaucratic practices not only to ‘protect’ government ministers, but also to maintain their own authority and keep critical outsiders at arm’s length.  It is a system that needs to be challenged much more robustly than it has been in the past.  The task will not be easy.

The Scottish educational establishment, over many decades, has been successful in resisting attempts to disturb its culture of complacency. Sadly, it may take a further decline in public confidence and trust before real change – as distinct from yet another exercise in public relations – can take place.