I am tempted to quote Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. I am sorry; Dr Allan’s Gaelic is much better than mine. If I read the evidence correctly, staff were very concerned that there would be some sort of gap in the learning process, because we know that if there is not a continuous flow of study in a language that greatly impedes the learner’s ability to build up expertise. The idea that people will leave it alone for fourth year and then come back to it is death to learning most languages. It is a disgrace even to propose it. French and German are the greatest losers, although Gaelic is, worryingly, pretty much in the same ball park. The number of people studying those languages has dropped by between 50 per cent and 60 per cent since 2013. That is unbelievable, and it is a serious issue.
Given that we may all be hurled, volens nolens, into the maw of Brexit, we need people who can go into the world and speak for us. That is not just a nice idea; it is an essential. Perish the very idea that, as another unintended consequence of CFE, we allow modern languages, apart from Spanish, to just fizzle away. Those of you who have a long history in education will know that the 1947 report from the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland recommended that “children of lesser ability”—the council’s words, not mine—should be made to learn Spanish because it was easy. Those were its words. I have to say that there is some truth in that, because Spanish learning is holding up, but against that I place the hideously difficult Chinese, which is, despite the tones and all the rest, also holding up. Ease is not the only factor.
However, the truth is that if someone does six qualifications, necessarily doing English and maths and doing either two social subjects and a science, two sciences and a social subject or—God help us—three sciences, that leaves only one column. I am sorry, but that is not a curriculum. It might be a manifestation of an English curriculum at the upper stages, but it is not even remotely a Scottish curriculum. We have a real problem in that we have lost the mechanism for breadth in the middle of the secondary schooling process. The Scottish Association of Geography Teachers is a bit revisionist in suggesting that we should go back to two, two, two, but it is an interesting thought, because it would cure a lot of the problems—although not at a stroke, because we would have to do a lot of work to sort out the mess that has been made. I do not know how we will revive the subjects that are dying.
One of my two subjects—computing—is in pretty much the same ball park. I listened with—I choose my words carefully—abject horror to a representative of Education Scotland in early April, who suggested that, if a school could not get a computing teacher, it should take pupils to a local company that drives drones around the place, where they could have a really meaningful experience. Well, hell yeah—it would be a meaningful experience, but it would not be education. I will be worried if we start to lose that. I was a teacher of the information superhighway—in the white heat of technology, computing was going to solve all the problems. I work in a university in which several of us did that and we are all looking at the situation and thinking, “You’ve got to be joking!” We have spent tens of millions of pounds and we are allowing our international lead in gaming technology and all sorts of things just to dwindle away.
We probably have five problems. We have a modern languages problem, an ICT problem and a STEM problem because of a drop that was caused by structural changes in Scottish education. Despite Keir Bloomer’s not having got a lot of answers, I know how many schools are doing six columns: roughly half of Scotland’s schools are. We have a problem with STEM subjects because, whether we like it or not, they suffer in a six-column environment. Instead of the 16 to 17 per cent drop in those taking STEM subjects that we should have had, there was a drop of 25 to 27 per cent.
There are also problems in the arts and the technologies, as several of us have said, because they are competing with one another for part of the last space: it is extremely difficult to give them all curricular bandwidth unless the columns are ramped up to seven or eight.
I am not proposing that we go back to eight columns—I am not sure how many children have used their eighth qualification—but we need to do something to stop the narrowing.