The idea of “cutting through” is to the fore just now, in the run-up to the general election. Candidates and their parties are constantly trying to infiltrate the public consciousness, to reach the people who aren’t political anoraks.
That’s why you hear the same soundbites crowbarred into interviews and speeches over and over again, and why every day each party will focus on a different policy and bludgeon everyone they meet with it. They are living in eternal hope that something, anything, will resonate - that it will cut through to Joe and Jane Public.
The problem is, sometimes the stuff that cuts through is unplanned and unwanted. Think of Gordon Brown being caught on mic dismissing a heckler as a “bigoted woman” or Theresa May fumbling her way through a poke of chips in a botched attempt to show her common touch. People who work in education, similarly, often despair at what cuts through in the reporting of their sector.
I started writing this piece at the annual gathering of secondary heads in St Andrews, where several told me that they just don’t recognise the emerging narrative of calamity around Scottish education. That narrative gained extra traction earlier this month amid all the attention given to an analysis of Scottish Qualifications Authority data by the University of Dundee’s Jim Scott, himself a former secondary head. He found, for example, that attainment in levels 3-5 among S4 pupils had dropped sharply since the introduction of Curriculum for Excellence.
That really did cut through: after one broadcast journalist tweeted about it, he was - at the time of writing - retweeted 544 times. A few days later, however, a group of University of Stirling researchers published a separate analysis that carried some positive messages about attainment and some criticism of Professor Scott’s approach. The same journalist said that, in the interest of fairness, he was tweeting a link to their article. At the last check, however, that had been retweeted only 24 times.
The point here is not about the relative value of the two analyses - it is that only one of them cut through. Many people working in education will have been aware of, and had their own view of, both; those with only a passing knowledge of Scottish education were far more likely only to have heard about Professor Scott’s analysis.
When something cuts through, however fairly or unfairly, the narrative is notoriously hard to change. The death knell for Ed Miliband’s hopes of ever becoming prime minister, you could argue, came when his clumsy bid to scoff a bacon sandwich went viral, imprinting an image of wide-eyed gormlessness on the public consciousness.
Now, a narrative of unremitting failure in Scottish education is cutting through, which Professor Scott’s analysis served to reinforce. Whether or not that is fair, there is now a popular belief that the trajectory is sharply downward, and no number of nuanced rejoinders is likely to undo that any time soon. Educators, then, will have to get used to it, however unfair it feels.
Education has, of course, been increasingly politicised since Nicola Sturgeon staked her reputation on it upon becoming first minister in 2014. And when an issue is politicised, it is painted in broad brushstrokes by politicians on all sides: simplified narratives of both success and failure battle it out for supremacy. Meanwhile, the people at the middle - who work in whatever sector is in the politicians’ crosshairs - frequently despair at the poverty of debate and selective use of evidence.
All educators can do is keep grafting away to create their own local successes. The narratives perpetuated by politicians and the media are not the only ones that resonate - pupils and families served well by individual schools and teachers will extol their virtues for decades to come.
This article originally appeared in the 22 November 2019 issue under the headline “Education risks becoming like Miliband’s fateful bacon butty”
