‘Illiterate’ pupils handed A grades, warns teacher

PUPILS in Scotland’s schools are being let down by ‘risible standards’ which let pupils attain the highest grades in English while still ‘functionally illiterate’, according to a furious teacher.

They claim nobody is marked down for poor spelling, punctuation or grammar as long as their work ‘makes sense at first reading’.

Exams require ‘no rigour and real learning’ and a pass in English is considered ‘a right’. They say it can be achieved with the aid of ‘some doggerel or rehashed Wikipedia information’ and an A at National 5 or Higher level is within easy reach of those with ‘a basic facility for language’ and access to an artificial intelligence app.

The collapsing standards are the subject of a devastating critique by a teacher and exam marker, who has written an anonymous opinion piece for the Scottish Union for Education (SUE).

The blame has been levelled at the SNP government, education authorities and teachers who ‘live down to these low standards’.

The whistleblower wrote in SUE’s newsletter: ‘An English qualification is now considered a right, and since that’s what it is, then it would be churlish to deny it to our young people. The SNP has made it very difficult indeed to leave school without a pass.’

They added: ‘A basic facility with language, a teacher who understands the exam, and money to pay someone to write your folio (or an artificial intelligence app) and you can quite easily secure an A at National 5 or Higher.

‘The exams call for no rigour or real learning and, as such, the teaching of the course is superficial and formulaic. I don’t have the statistic to hand, but many students are leaving secondary school functionally illiterate – and some of them have an A in English.’

The teacher recalled the ‘exacting educational standards’ of the 50s and 60s, when pupils could be expected to study 203 poems over their senior school years. By comparison, pupils today may only study a single poem in a year.

Scottish Tory education spokesman Liam Kerr described the testimony as ‘eye-opening’. He said: ‘Nicola Sturgeon insisted that education was her government’s top priority, but that simply never turned out to be the case.

‘It should never be the case that pupils, especially those who achieved top grades, leave school without basic literacy skills.’

Lindsay Paterson, emeritus professor of education policy at the University of Edinburgh, said the decline ‘has happened under governments of all the main parties since the 1980s, responding to social pressure to expand education’.

He added: ‘The larger problem is that we no longer cater adequately for the most able pupils.’

The Scottish Government was approached for comment.

‘Many leaving school illiterate’