The Scottish Tories are urging parents and teachers to “rise up against the bog-standard comprehensive” and work towards gold-standard schools.
The party announced a series of new policies aimed at raising standards in Scotland’s state schools, including radical plans to hand head teachers full control over budgets and recruitment, and more say over what is taught and how.
Party leader Ruth Davidson highlighted that many school leaders report frustration with the system and the lack of autonomy they have, and that many parents felt the need to move catchment area or pay fees to secure a better start in life for their children.
Davidson announced: “Our aim is clear: we want state schools in Scotland to compete with the best in the world.”
Commenting on the new policies, which also include “buddying” system between the best and worst-performing schools to help spread best practice, the party’s Scottish Parliament candidate for Paisley, Paul Masterton, said: “Paisley has some fantastic state schools and teaching staff, but we also have pockets of low educational performance, particularly in poorer areas.
“Some schools in the town receive a huge number of placement requests from parents who believe they will give their children a better education than their local school.
“That should not be the case – every pupil in Paisley deserves to go to a gold-standard school.
“That’s what our policies target. Giving head teachers more control over all elements of their school will empower them to drive up standards, and we will allocate funding for the new Scottish Attainment Challenge directly to schools with a high proportion of pupils from socially deprived backgrounds.
“Increasing reading engagement could mitigate as much as 30% of the attainment gap, that’s why the drop in numeracy and literacy standards on the SNP’s watch is so damaging. We are committed to measures which will reverse this decline, including providing additional support for parents to make reading, writing and numeracy a central part of their children’s daily lives.
“A system which leaves 1 in 5 schools deemed “satisfactory” or worse, and which makes a pupil from an affluent background 7 times more likely to achieve 3As at Higher cannot be the limit of our ambitions.
“There is room for improvement, and as a parent I expect my local state school to provide not just a good education, but a great one.
Only the Scottish Conservatives have the vision and the drive to create a school system that meets the aspirations of all parents and children in Paisley, no matter their background.”
