(Image: PA)
You may have noticed that Scottish schools are facing a pretty troubling array of problems right now.
There are concerns about literacy and numeracy standards, the use of temporary buildings, the failure to recruit enough teachers, the worsening ASN crisis, increased violence in classrooms, and plenty more besides. Later this week, The Herald will be exploring a whole new set of concerns about courses in secondary schools.
Make no mistake: Scotland’s schools are struggling, and things seem to be getting worse instead of better.
But don’t worry, because the SNP government has its eye on the ball, and thinks that a key solution to these huge injustices, one worth pursuing as their major post-election education priority, is a giving away “free” school bags (plus a few bits of stationery) to all P1 pupils.
The bags are not going to be targeted at those who are really struggling – if you’re making hundreds of millions of pound per year, but send your child to a state school, you too will benefit from the latest SNP giveaway.
If this particular policy quacks like the worst kind of cynical political gimmickry, there’s probably a good reason for that, and yet members of the government – the same highly-paid people telling us that money is incredibly tight, and that thousands of public sector job cuts are necessary - really do seem to think that the plan should have been greeted with huge fanfare.
Instead, opposition parties have slated the policy, and that's perfectly fair.
It's one thing for a party to be a bit out of touch after 20 years in power, but this an astonishingly clear example.
Up until now, the SNP had also refused to tell us what this latest wheeze was going to cost, because why bother being straight about the price of something when you’re going to be using other people’s money to pay for it?
Thanks to a government press release, we now know that we’re looking at shelling out £1.35m per year in exchange for around 47,000 school bags.
That, as you may already have worked out, means a net cost of nearly £30 per bag, which is plainly absurd.
Quite how the SNP has managed to make sourcing school bags so expensive isn’t entirely clear, in no small part because several FOI requests have already been refused.
The government has already announced that the bags would be made of recycled materials, and that they would be “assembled” in Scotland, but it looks very much as if this means that an Edinburgh-based PR firm is going to be putting some pencils and crayons into a school bag manufactured elsewhere, and then charging for the privilege.
Which Edinburgh-based PR firm? Well, the same one that got the baby boxes contract. It seems that the government just went straight to them, claiming that this “provided the most efficient and cost-effective route to delivery in time for the start of the 2027 school year while meeting all relevant public procurement requirements.”
You read that right: spending £30 per head on school bags is now, apparently, “cost-effective.”
The longer this farce continues, the clearer it becomes that this was yet another campaign slogan that hadn’t been properly thought through, and which is now going to cost all of us money that could, and should, be going elsewhere.
And that’s not all, because part of the government’s own commentary on this should be prompting some serious questions about Scotland’s latest education secretary.
In the press release sent out to journalists, Màiri McAllan said that the bags will “help give all children the same start at primary school.”
If Ms McAllan actually believes it then she is quite simply miles out of her depth.
Imagine you are the parent of a new primary 1 pupil, and that you have been desperately struggling to get by. You are having to choose between heating and eating, perhaps missing meals yourself so that your child doesn’t go hungry. You’d love to give them access to all the same experiences as those from the wealthier parts of the country take for granted, but you just can’t afford it.
And then along comes the Scottish Government, expecting you to believe that handing over a school bag for which they have been seriously over-charged is somehow going to level the playing field.
It’s not just a stupid claim – it’s also completely tone deaf and suggests that our government is led by people with little to no serious grasp of the problems they claim to be tackling on our behalf.
But then again, actually solving problems is difficult, and throwing taxpayers’ money at a gimmick is far easier, so maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised.