The United Kingdom may be a lot less united than it has been in the past, now that a nationalist government has been installed in the Scottish Parliament. It will take some time before we can be sure of just how great the constitutional impact of a minority SNP administration in Holyrood will be. However, we can be sure that the divergence of public sector philosophy between Scotland and England will continue.
The Labour-led coalitions that have run Scotland since devolution in 1999 resisted the market-based reforms to the NHS and the education system, often to the intense irritation of UK ministers. There is no internal market for health, no competition between hospitals and the traditional “collaboration” between GP and consultant in Scotland has been retained.
Scotland’s answer to modernisation has been to abolish student fees and introduce free personal care for the elderly, as recommended by the Sutherland Report but rejected by Tony Blair. The Scottish Executive has also introduced free eye and dental checks, free universal bus travel for pensioners and free central heating. In Scotland, it is good to be old, and it’s not bad to be young, since there is a more generous nursery provision than in England.
There are no foundation schools in Scotland. Nor are there specialist schools, beacon schools, city academies or any of the 57 varieties of state education that Tony Blair tried to introduce in England. Scotland stuck with what he called the “bog standard comprehensive”, and seems reasonably happy with it. On the OECD PISA tables – the international benchmark for educational excellence – Scotland scores well in maths, science and reading, higher certainly than England.
There are a number of reasons for this relatively high performance: a tradition of egalitarian education that goes back to the Presbyterian kirk schools; the very small numbers of parents (half the proportion of England) who opt for private education; higher education spending per head and the absence of race divisions in urban schools. The non-white minority ethnic population in Scotland is tiny, consequently there are not the same ethnic tensions that arise in inner London boroughs.
The Scottish system remains far from perfect. There are problems with the first two years of secondary, when too many boys lose academic focus. And the Scottish Executive intends to raise the school leaving age to 18 to reduce the numbers of so-called ‘NEETs’ - the 14% of school leavers who are not in education, employment or training. However, the solution to these problems is not being sought through creating diversity of provision. The ‘schools of ambition’ programme introduced by the recently defeated Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition, sought only to bring some underachieving schools up to standard. There was no attempt to use academic specialisation as a way of ending one size- fits-all provision.
Nor has the modernisation agenda been more successful in the Scottish NHS. In the early years of the century, the Scottish press campaigned vigorously for the introduction of private health clinics to reduce waiting times. But the Scottish Executive avoided wholesale privatisation or the introduction of market-based provision. Indeed, its main action was to buy out the biggest private hospital in Scotland, HCI Clydebank, in 2002 to develop as a centre for elective surgery.
The Health Minister, Andy Kerr, allowed only minimal involvement by the private sector – £70 million over three years – in the Scottish Executive’s waiting list initiative, justifying this on the grounds that there simply wasn’t the capacity in the primordial Scottish private health service to make any significant difference to the size of waiting lists.
