SNP's free schoolbags are a 'let them eat cake' approach to the crisis in Scotland's classrooms
The SNP’s election pledge to give free schoolbags to five-year-olds is a wholehearted avoidance of the real issues facing education
Well, bless my ageing soul, Mr Swinney has delivered an election pledge to give every state school pupil starting P1 a ‘schoolbag’ with necessary bits and pieces of school stuff in it. This will, when the next Scottish election comes round, no doubt join the list of Scottish Exceptionalist Things given away by the SNP.
The baby box still seems like a nice idea. I have some problems with it being given to the offspring of multi-millionaires but the SNP are very keen on universal benefits – think tuition fees and prescriptions, which they gladly hand out to rich people as well as all the people who get them for nothing south of the Border.
But this schoolbag – as a universal benefit – will prove to be a very costly affair, because schoolbags are different to baby boxes as the babies don’t walk around with them on their backs. Baby boxes, once delivered, are private things – you can dump whatever you don’t want and use the rest.
Tantrums and taste
However, the bags are going to be very visible indeed. I wonder exactly what percentage of children will be using them on day ten of the new term, as they are superseded by pink bags with capybaras on them full of capybara pencils and erasers in the shapes of pineapples or… capybaras.
I wonder how many five-years-olds will have tantrums shouting “I don’t want the SNP bag! I want my own one!” I mean, what’s this bag going to look like? A plain bag with a thistle on it...? Will they all be exactly the same in colour and design? Even five-year-olds have taste.
It all has the feel of a policy dreamt up (perhaps, on the back of the baby box) by an eager SNP intern who will, no doubt, be an eager SNP MSP in a decade (or in May). Maybe instead just give each primary school an extra bung of money ringfenced for stationery; more paper for displays, more pencils to give away, more Pritt sticks, ah Pritt sticks.
Let the teachers target the kids who need some kindness. Maybe help close the poverty-related attainment gap. But no, that wouldn’t be good propaganda. The SNP – looking after all of Scotland’s baiirrns.
Stressed-out teachers
My main problem with this misguided if sweet notion is its wholehearted avoidance of the issues actually facing the new intake of five-year-olds in August. We are about to have an election and it does seem as if, rather late in the day, some parties are pleasingly cottoning on to the actual state of our schools.
What is it five-year-olds are actually learning? Why are there 30 other children in the class? Why is there no one to help the struggling or sad or lonely child apart from the teacher, stressed and stretched, and a well-meaning but under-qualified classroom assistant. Why does big brother not go to school at all?
But these are all Hard Things, and an election is coming. As Marie Antoinette (possibly a distant relative of Jenny Gilruth) famously said: “There is no education. Let them carry bags.”
Cameron Wyllie is a retired headmaster. He writes a blog called A House in Joppa and hosts the podcast, Two Heads are Better than One, with Rod Grant
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