2008 October 02

By Kate Smith

LET’S BID a fond adieu to the Standard Grade, cast aside by Scottish government education secretary Fiona Hyslop last week. Those seven, eight or nine exams and their predecessors, the O Grades, were entirely overrated and put great expectations on feckless youth. It might be the light at this time of year but I still have “taking O Grade/Standard Grade” nightmares. Trying to get through a locked door in the gym to take my French O Grade. It bears no Freudian analysis since in my case, it really happened. I had the wrong building.

What Standard Grades taught you at 15 was both how to sit exams and play with the Plasticine of knowledge. The importance of turning up at the right room even. Their noble purpose is, of course, much more serious than this – to give a good general foundation in all disciplines; arts, sciences, humanities and enables the selection of the Standard Grades big bruiser of a brother, the Higher Grade, on which futures were made or broken.

But without the marks counting towards final grades or university admittance, what O Grades and Standard Grades did, was allow you to fail without wrecking your life. Or to fail successfully. That getting it wrong is part of getting it right. They were useful life lessons.

The O Grade/Standard Grade curriculum was the introduction of the outside world to us all, in my case a 15-year-old who had never stepped a foot outside Scotland. The world in all its spectacular variegated exotic colours opened up to us, mapped out in pithy bite-sized summaries.

Taught to us in draughty prefab huts in the potholed concrete playground of an Edinburgh comprehensive in poverty zone Sighthill we covered the globe from end to end and glimpsed at the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, the militarism of Ancient Rome, the cooking pots of Skara Brae, inside the rim of volcanoes as well travelling through the millenniums in HG Wells’s Time Machine.

From my history O Grade (A band 1) I learned many things. Where France and Germany are. Names of first world war battles such as Neuve Chappelles and the terrible days of the Somme. Names that sounded so beautiful.

The mysterious black hand of Serbia and that the stunningly fateful coincidence of the licence plate of the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand (good name for a band maybe) was assassinated carried the date of armistice. 11-11-18. I’m not even sure that’s true now. From O Grade chemistry (C band 8) I learned the organic building blocks of all life and that, as a general rule, it’s best not drop potassium in your bath.

From physics (C band 8), what was in space and how to make a prisoner-of-war radio. From biology (A band 1), what the inside of a bull’s eye looks like, how trees work and theories that underpinned the bloody rules of the playground, Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection.

From art (not recommended for O Grade) I learned how to look from different perspectives and that I was terrible at pottery.

And painting and why Ian Trotter wasn’t allowed to use the scalpels. From maths (A band 1) I learned it was just a big set of calculations to measure spatial rhythms, just like music. Calculations I decided I couldn’t be bothered to actually learn although it all seemed quite interesting in a tepid sort of way.

From music (not recommended for O Grade) I listened to our teacher play music from adverts on his grand piano as he shouted out the names of the composers in his dignified educated Polish accent. Hamlet Cigars by JS Bach in his Orchestral Suite in D. Old Spice by Carl Orff in his beautiful work Carmina Burana. Hovis bread? That’s Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

Also in my auditory memory is the less melodic slightly hysterical scream by the rattled French assistant “ECOUTEZ ET REPETEZ’ as Adrian Harrison threw a chair at the closed window (French B band 3: 1 paper of 5 missed).

It was a fabulously ramshackle education.

The O Grade/Standard Grade gave you the chance to experiment and innovate with your new-found knowledge, relatively unpenalised, which Highers just didn’t.

My O Grade strategy consisted of smokescreening my sparse and disconnected facts with sweeping statements: “DH Lawrence was massively influenced by Shakespeare’s The Tempest” or “One can only wonder if Kaiser Wilhelm had not had a shrivelled arm, if world history would have taken a less tragic course”.

This strategy of preposterousness failed me in my Highers, where joined-up facts and insightful argument instead of incessant name-dropping and half-baked but enthusiastic analysis were needed “Mussolini was feckless but Hitler wasn’t”. (Higher History Fail compensatory O Grade at C).

The brief 11 months from Standard Grade to Highers was a journey that involved jumping several large leaps of learning style very quickly. Speed learning, really. This is the reason the sensible decision has been taken to call “time” on Standard Grades. The restructuring plan is to allow learners to start Highers early and have longer to study them, over 18 months, rather than the so-called “two-term dash” to Highers. Learners will also not make subject choices until S3, rather than the current S2. These plans will go out for discussion and may be implemented in five years.

So this is a requiem to the Standard Grade. As Hyslop rightly said, they have served Scotland well. It was my O Grades and the teachers who taught them that gave me a lifelong love of learning and a dangerous level of knowledge on many subjects. From the Aleutian indigenous people to zoology. Only last week I was thinking about the Tolpuddle martyrs. Bull’s eye

After the death of Khyra, poverty must be put at the top of the agenda

By Kate Smith

TEN SHORT WEEKS AGO THE BUDGET THAT WAS meant to help halve child poverty by 2010 was announced and, in the same space of time, a child was taken out of school and starved.

It is not clear at this stage whether Khyra Ishaq died as a result of neglect, abuse or a problem with her parents’ ability to care for her, but the death of the seven-year-old highlights the plight of children caught in poverty in the UK at the beginning of the 21st century.

More than 250,000 children in Scotland, or one in four, live in poverty. Of those, 90,000 live in severe poverty. In the UK those figures rise to 2.8 million and 1.5 million respectively.

It all started so well with New Labour. In 1997 then prime minister Tony Blair and his then chancellor, Gordon Brown, pledged to end child poverty by 2020, halving it by 2010. In the 1980s and 90s the number of children living in poverty doubled. While it has been reduced, that last Budget needed a commitment of £4 billion to meet that target in two years – money that was not forthcoming. There was, however a commitment of £1bn.

For a lone parent with two children, severe poverty means surviving on less than £8000 a year. We might not see shoeless children in winter any more, but families in severe poverty are living without electricity some days. Parents simply cannot afford to feed their children properly.

One of the major problems with government policy is that it focuses on getting people back to work as a means of alleviating poverty. But, in the current employment milieu, this is not always the snap-on solution it seems.

There is a new and growing class of working poor. Many children living in poverty are in families where a parent works but where salaries are not enough to pay the bills, resulting in fuel and food poverty, or where work is so casualised as to interrupt regular income and supplementary benefits.

The resort to debt to pay fuel bills and cover the patchy income and financial exclusion means accessing small loans at extortionate rates. And the cost of housing as a percentage to income is at a 17-year high.

The lack of living wage and in-work poverty is not just about having a low level of skills; low pay is also a by-product of racial and gender discrimination. More than a third of all ethnic minority groups live in poverty. Newly published research by the Fawcett Society shows the gender pay gap causes child poverty.

Many double-income families in Britain are struggling to make ends meet, so it is no surprise to hear from the Fawcett Society report that four in 10 children in poverty are in single-parent households. A further three out of 10 are in households where the father works full-time, but the mother is on low income or no income.

In addition, statistics show lone mothers are at double the risk of being in poverty as couples with children. UK mothers are at greater risk of poverty than in any other western European country. Part of the reason for this is the type of work women are faced with after motherhood. They move into low-paid work as cleaners, carers, temps, homeworkers or work in the “grey economy”, which does not keep them above the poverty line.

The state entitlement of 12.5 hours a week of pre-school care for three to four-year-olds is long enough to allow perhaps four hours’ employment spread over five days once travelling time is included.

Some policy solutions might be to make gender pay audits compulsory for all organisations and increase the number of hours mothers can work without losing their benefits from four to 16, as well as doubling the number of hours of state pre-school education.

There will be much comment about Khyra slipping through the system, as there was with Victoria Climbie, and while that may or may not prove to be true of the social work system, sadly child poverty in Britain is at this critical level. The impact of the state on Khyra’s life is not just about the interface of the family and the social work system, but is as much about the matrix of policies and services that shaped her chances.

It is about the political and economic culture of poverty and inequality in the UK today. And this is what the discussion needs to be about, rather than simply finger pointing at the social services.

The UK has the lowest levels of social mobility across the generations in the industrialised world. Children reproduce their parents’ earning brackets in more than 50% of cases, which is far higher than in other Western countries. Rather than alleviate the problem, badly framed and unreformed policies tend to create, recreate and perpetuate the conditions for poverty.

Yet well-framed policy backed with cash can mitigate against poverty. Not only anti-poverty policy, but the combined effect of all the policies, laws, tribunals and practices.

In this spirit, the Scottish government announced in January this year a wide-ranging discussion on tackling poverty, inequality and deprivation, the deadline of which has been extended until June 30. At its launch, cabinet secretary for health and wellbeing Nicola Sturgeon said the debate would go “to the heart of the kind of Scotland we want to build for the future”. The discussion document includes targets to create a wealthier and fairer Scotland.

The civilisation of a country is judged on how it treats its vulnerable people, the voiceless and its children. In light of Khyra Ishaq’s death we have to ask again about how the children in our society are faring. It is time to put ending child poverty at the top of the political agenda backed by financial commitment.

It grieves me more than I can tell you that Khyra Ishaq was a child of our time.