It’s time to end Scottish education’s decline - Alex Cole-Hamilton
Every couple of years, a big education report by the name of PISA comes to town.
The Programme for International Student Assessment looks at the educational performance of more than 760,000 15-year-olds from 91 countries, including those in the UK, China, Australia, Canada and the US.
Scotland has participated in every study since 2000, and the results for this year were not pretty.
They show that Scotland is significantly lagging behind England on every measurement of performance: reading, maths and science. We recorded our worst ever scores for both reading and maths.
It’s depressing how much our scores have declined over the past 20 years. From 524 points in maths in 2003, to just 467 points in 2025. We had a reading score of 526 at the start of the millennium, but that’s now down to 488. We were doing well in science in 2006, recording 515 points, but that’s nosedived to 491. Given that a loss of around 20 PISA points is the equivalent to losing one whole year of schooling, these are serious and material drops.
PISA, however, doesn’t just diagnose the symptoms of decline- it also points to some of the potential reasons behind it.
This year’s study, for example, revealed that half of pupils attended schools in Scotland where headteachers reported that a lack of teaching staff hindered instruction to some extent or a lot. This is directly linked to the mess that the SNP have made of teacher training, a crisis that my party have warned about time and again.
The fundamental problem in Scotland is that we are not recruiting enough teachers in the subjects we need, especially STEM. Instead, the Scottish Government are continuing to train far more primary teachers than schools need, with thousands of primary teachers either unemployed or languishing on short-term contacts for years on end.
The lack of any common sense in the SNP’s approach to teacher numbers is precisely why my party have called for the government to open up routes to make it much easier for primary school teachers to requalify and go and work in our secondary schools.
This year's PISA also reveals that two thirds of pupils attended schools in Scotland where headteachers reported that a lack of assisting staff hindered instruction to some extent or a lot. It’s a vindication of Scottish Liberal Democrat calls to recruit 2,000 more pupil support assistants and 370 additional speech and language therapists, helping schools with the unprecedented number of children needing extra help.
Once the best in the world, Scottish education just isn’t what it used to be, and this report makes for brutal reading.
Ultimately, the SNP have direct responsibility for education in Scotland. Indeed, they once asked to be judged for their record on it.
A lot of teachers I speak to are frustrated with endless guidance, with action plans layered upon action plans, that never seem to yield results or improvements. It’s time for SNP ministers to listen to the practical solutions we’re offering, because it’s those solutions that will help give every child the best start in life and get Scottish education back to its best.