Is the coronavirus like the plague?” That was a question an enquiring young mind put to me a year ago. “Why, no - not at all,” I assured the four children I was taking to school, chuckling inwardly at the gross mismatch between the historical reference point and the actuality of late February 2020.

But, a year on, the invocation of a seismic event that changed the course of human history does not feel quite as absurd any more. As I write, I’ve just found out that two of that gang of four are facing another spell of remote learning - their return to school buildings last week did not last long before yet another interruption - while the eldest in the group may back not be inside classrooms full time for many weeks to come.

At the start of this week came yet another call for action in education that, not so long ago, would have seemed radical; now - so accustomed have we become to drastic interventions, such as the cancellation of exams and the mass migration to remote learning - it seems like a fairly pragmatic proposal. This was the idea, floated by the EIS teaching union before a meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee, that S4 qualifications should simply not be awarded this year, other than to those in that year who are leaving school in the summer.

Whatever your feelings about that particular proposal, it’s getting late in the day to be knocking around new ideas. It’s hard to escape the feeling that, a year into this crisis, the response of Scottish education remains far too haphazard and piecemeal. It all came to something of a head this week, when MSPs on the Education and Skills Committee waded through a litany of no-holds-barred complaints about the record of education bodies and policymakers in the past year.

Covid has exposed frustrations about how education is run

We had the office of the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, for example, stating that, in the handling of disadvantaged students’ Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) grades in 2020, there had been “systemic incompatibility with international human rights law”.

The NASUWT union, meanwhile, was warning that considerable workload concerns pre-pandemic had been “exacerbated by the extraordinary pressures that Covid-19 and the Scottish government’s response has placed on schools and the staff who work in them”, and that a lack of opportunities to work on practical skills in secondary school equated to “asking pupils to take a driving test without taking any lessons, then telling them they have failed”.

The Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, among its myriad concerns, criticised local authorities that “paid lip service to decreasing the stress of teachers working at home with family and the pressures faced”, with teachers who had childcare responsibilities working “often over weekends and into the small hours”.

You could cherry-pick from all manner of concerns, but the examples above encompass two constant themes: a widespread sense of disorganisation at a national level and an expectation that schools would compensate for such shortcomings.

We should take care not to be overly gloomy, as there are countless outstanding examples out there of how educators have innovated in the midst of this crisis. But those shouldn’t obscure the clear frustrations with how education is organised at a national level - frustrations heightened by the pandemic. It’s only just over a fortnight, of course, since MSPs voted for “substantial reform” of SQA and Education Scotland, having deemed them not fit for purpose.

The tail end of the 2019-20 academic year was suddenly consumed by Covid, and the ensuing few months were always going to be fraught and frantic. There was time to prepare for 2020-21, however. If, ultimately, the view is that the pandemic did not merely disrupt the education system but expose fundamental deficiencies, the momentum for reform may be unstoppable.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 5 March 2021 issue under the headline “Policymakers’ failures may make clamour for reform unstoppable”