Stop experimenting with education

Calton thoroughly agrees with the idea of promoting Scottish studies in schools, if only to educate the likes of the caller to Radio Scotland this morning who thought that nothing of any note happened in Scotland before the Parliamentary Union! However the real priority has to be making sure that our young people leave school with the right skills to enable them to find a job. It is particularly depressing that a significant percentage of employers find that school leavers lack basic literacy and numeracy. They also seem to lack the soft skills so essential to enable them to fit into the workplace such as teamwork, problem-solving and communication. Calton hopes that the Curriculum for Excellence lives up to its name because we cannot afford to fail yet another generation of children by playing around with their education. It's time politicians realised that our schools are not laboratories for their political experiments.