Primaries and secondaries are not being inspected nearly enough, Liz Smith says, even allowing for recent reform of the system and the use of inspectors to help implement Curriculum for Excellence (CfE).
Only 148 inspections will be carried out in 2015/16, compared with 491 in 2004/05, according to official statistics requested by Ms Smith. It equates to less than six per cent of Scotland’s total primary, secondary and special schools.
She said: “Inspections are a vital means of providing parents with the necessary information to make decisions about their children’s schooling.
“But last year we have seen a huge reduction on previous years. And even though the Scottish government says schools should be inspected with some regularity, it would take 19 years for them to get round every school once at this rate.
“That’s nothing like good enough, and means parents are not getting the data and information they need.”
She called for the re-establishment of an independent inspectorate to provide more transparency:
“Quite simply, the Scottish government should not be marking its own homework.”
However, education minister Angela Constance said the number of inspections undertaken by Education Scotland would inevitably vary each year: “Inspection is one strong driver of improvement but the national inspection programme is designed to recognise that local authorities retain primary responsibility for securing improvement in their schools.”
During implementation of CfE, inspectors were deployed to many schools across Scotland to offer intensive support activities, she said.
Under reforms stemming from the Crerar Review into scrutiny of public services, inspections were cut back and focused more on schools that were seen as under-performing.
An Education Scotland spokesman said the next phase of CfE would mean a stronger emphasis on evaluating what is working best and sharing those practices more effectively: “That will require us to once again increase the number of school inspections in the forthcoming years.”
However, Ms Smith said the promise was too vague and at odds with the SNP government’s stated priority of narrowing the attainment gap.
“This is surely a key issue when the whole educational debate is supposed to be focused on raising standards,” Ms Smith said.