Talking Scotland down?

Posted in: Comment, News and Updates

I see that Teach the Future has set out its policy asks for Scotland.  They broadly mirror the three English ones, but there's an additional ask of “Increased priority for sustainability in school inspections and publicly influencing educational rankings”.   As NAEE notes, the campaign in Scotland will be fronted by Scottish Youth Climate Strike and NUS Scotland.  They will be writing to the First Minister to request a meeting, although I guess they might be fobbed off with her deputy.

I've seen their carefully-worded documentation which spells out all the policy initiatives in Scotland to support, ESD / LSD / EE / LFS / EFS / CCE / ETC and the SDGs.  This is a much longer list for Scotland than it is for England (or perhaps even Wales) because there has been what seems to be genuine commitment from the Scottish government to get schools taking the issues seriously.

The problem that Teach the Future might have lies in the necessity of their being (carefully) critical of the progress made (ie, the lack of it).  They have to do this because that's the reality on the ground.  It's as if the expedition to scale the heights of Ben Nevis has got stuck in the foothills.  Mind you, in England, we're still looking for maps.

The problem Teach the Future has is that in über-nationalist circles, to criticise a Scottish government policy is to criticise Scotland, and leads to accusations of "talking Scotland down".  My fingers are crossed.

Posted in: Comment, News and Updates

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