NICOLA Sturgeon has insisted “fresh leadership” isn’t needed in Scottish education.
The First Minister was speaking the day after it was announced the permanent secretary in the UK’s Department for Education (DfE) was stepping down.
The DfE said the departure of Jonathan Slater (below) was necessary because “the Prime Minister has concluded that there is a need for fresh official leadership”.
Sturgeon said that in Scotland ministers had taken responsibility for the results fiasco, while in England she claimed that “civil servants have been left to carry the can”.
News of Slater’s departure comes after Sally Collier resigned from her role as head of England’s exams regulator Ofqual – with Education Secretary Gavin Williamson denying he forced her out.
Scotland suffered a similar crisis to that in England, with more than 124,000 results downgraded during a controversial moderation process, which was introduced after Covid-19 forced the scrapping of exams.
Protests forced both the First Minister and her deputy, the Education Secretary, John Swinney to apologise, with amended grades eventually being withdrawn and teacher estimates reinstated.
The episode led to a vote of no confidence being called in Holyrood in Swinney earlier this month.
The Education Secretary survived the vote after the Greens decided not to back it after the Education Secretary agreed to award the initial grades teachers had given to pupils.
Asked at her daily coronavirus briefing if there was a “need for fresh leadership in Scotland too” following the controversy, Sturgeon insisted: “No, I don’t think there is. I have stood here, I have taken responsibility for what we got wrong with the exams and apologised to young people and their parents and we put it right.
“That is the position. We took responsibility as ministers, I as First Minister, the Education Secretary, we chose not to do what has been done in England, where civil servants have been left to carry the can and ministers have tried to say it is not their responsibility.
“We didn’t do that. That is our decision and it is for other governments to take decisions of their own.”
Meanwhile, new research has found that the proportion of children who get severe Covid-19 is “rare”, and death is “vanishingly rare”.
In the largest study in the world examining children hospitalised with Covid-19, researchers examined the characteristics of youngsters admitted to hospital and those who have severe disease.
While the overall numbers were small, the team did find that new born babies under the age of one month, children aged 10 to 14, black children and children who are obese were more likely to need critical care.
They were able to identify a “cluster” of symptoms linked to the hyper-inflammatory response to Covid-19 seen in a small number of children – which are slightly different to those currently known in the medical community.
Six children died in the study, all of whom had “profound comorbidities”.
The new study, published in the British Medical Journal, examined data on children and young people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 across England, Wales and Scotland. There were 651 children admitted to hospital – and of these 42% had another medical condition.
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