AS good as the SNP Government might seek to portray itself in its public rhetoric, time and again it falls short in delivering on its grand plans and promises. So while the First Minister acclaims education as her first priority, Scottish children are returning to schools that at the start of the new term are struggling with hundreds of unfilled teacher vacancies. In the equally critical area of our health service, we have daily reports of shortages of staff, the latest being in the key area of radiology ("Warning issued over ‘red alert’ radiologists shortage", The Herald, August 15).

Effective manpower planning is a crucial responsibility of those overseeing our public services. Self-evidently the SNP is failing us in this regard and after eleven years in power have no one else to blame.

Meanwhile, in the detail of policy implementation things are no better, as the laudable aim to overcome the attainment gap in education has got bogged down in a battle over testing of P1 pupils ("Parents are urged: Withdraw P1 children from tests", The Herald, August 15),. Eventually the Education Secretary will have to perform another of his by now well-practised pirouettes on this, in the face of parent, teacher and children's charities opposition to a policy that common sense says was flawed from the outset.

The SNP wants to earn our trust on its main ambition of independence, but will not succeed on the evidence of what it is doing to our education and health services.

Keith Howell,

White Moss, West Linton, Peeblesshire.

HARDLY a week goes by these days without some new staffing crisis being identified in NHS Scotland and this week its the turn of the radiologists to highlight serious shortages of qualified staff making the service a postcode gamble in Scotland.

It seems that the SNP administration has failed to grasp the scale of the actual workload now presenting to NHS Scotland as the true cost of extended longevity is taking its toll on our over-stretched medical services.

Until Nicola Sturgeon undertakes to provide proper and adequate funding of NHS Scotland we will continue to struggle and fail to provide an adequate essential service.

Dennis Forbes Grattan,

3 Mugiemoss Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen.

HAVING been watching those who administer NHS Scotland and their political, string-pulling masters flogging the dead horse of the nursing and medical staff actually charged with delivering the end product (health care), I cannot but wonder when, if ever, those people will be held as directly and personally responsible for their decisions that are allowing the horse to die, as any medical or nursing staff member is held for their errors.

Health care administrators and their political handlers are paid from the taxes raised from the people that depend on their professional decision making to keep the cart horse delivering, and are clearly failing in that task. Is the committee system so effective at diffusing that responsibility that there is no personal accountability above the level of the coalface of health care delivery?

Doug Neilson,

65 Queen Elizabeth Drive,

Charlottetown,

Prince Edward Island, Canada.

YOUR recent coverage of the perceived need to test five-year-old pupils rather begs the question why the roll-out was required at all.

The Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) paper Building the Curriculum 5 – a framework for assessment, page 26 states: “The range and variety of assessment approaches should take account of the relevance of contexts to pupils’ prior experiences, interests and aspirations and should link across learning where possible”.

John Swinney, our Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills seems very quiet on why the Scottish Government persists with the contentious view that our primary teaching staff do not have the trained skills to evaluate the feedback from such a variety of approaches to assessment, but need a test, on how well their pupils are progressing.

The Scottish Government is fond of political comparisons with other countries and yet in such nations as Finland and Sweden, pupils do not even start school until they are older than in Scotland (usually around six or seven). It is difficult to imagine where the valid empirical evidence comes from to justify testing five-year-olds who will be within a wide range of developmental stages.

I suspect that the hidden agenda of the SNP Government is the same for a five-year-old as it is for secondary school leavers. Facilitated learning to meet a young person's interests, individual needs, aspirations and expectations is not the prime directive for all. Passing exams and getting certificated in some form is.

Bill Brown.

46 Breadie Drive, Milngavie.

RECENT devastating letters, blogs and articles (but no TV news programmes) on the Scottish education system point to policies, philosophies, societal changes and parental failings which date well before the SNP Government. Depending on your viewpoint, they either did well to slow inevitable further decline or engineered a wilful dismantlement of all that remained of one of the world's best primary, secondary and tertiary education systems.

Shockingly, limp reactions to exam results show no party has the policies or horsepower to pull us out of this nosedive, only criticism and virtue signalling demands for more money.

I agree with calls for an independent review of Scottish education, its funding, principles, governance, curriculum, discipline and practical delivery. Those who designed the current system should be barred from the process and those who delivered and benefited from "the good old days" – many of them still working – tasked with updating what worked then to fit the modern world of inclusion, attainment and diversity, minus the ridiculous, unworkable excesses we now hear of.

All parties must accept the recommendations and build them into their policies and manifestos so we can vote for the parties we rate best qualified to transform education according to the "check list".

Holyrood has become a cosy club of like-minded politicians, researchers and bureaucrats who coalesce around received wisdoms on man-made global warming, immigration, and various forms of equality. It's time the recommendations of a brutally honest review of education was added to that list.

Allan Sutherland,

1 Willow Row, Stonehaven.