(c) madrascollegearchive.org.uk
27th January 2017
‘SCHOOLS have been accused of promoting a culture of elitism based on how talented pupils are at sport. An MSP also suggested PE teachers had been complicit in fuelling such an elitist classroom culture in the past.’ (Herald, 27.1.17)
This comes from Alex Cole-Hamilton Lib-Dem MSP. It’s just an anecdotal comment from one MSP who claims ‘teachers had backed his view.’ He doesn’t have any actual research or report to quote from, of course. He even uses memories of his own school days (1970s?) as if they were in some way contemporary evidence.
‘Speaking about his schooling, Mr Cole-Hamilton said it was “normal” for pupils to be “sifted into those who could play [sport] and those who couldn’t”. ‘
Cole-Hamilton went to Madras College in St Andrews. It is a state-funded school but I suspect a very different kind of place from my old school, Grangemouth High, where we learned Latin in 1963 by the light of BP flare stacks. Nearly all of us lived in schemes. Two thirds of Madras pupils are bussed in from the affluent areas around St Andrews. I recall nothing of the ‘sifting’ he refers to. Indeed being good at sport meant little then. We were ‘sifted’, in those pre-comprehensive days, according to academic performance only. My fourth and final child is in Year 6 at an Ayr comprehensive. Academic performance there trumps sport abilities 10 nil!
Cole-Hamilton’s comments came in the context of a wider debate of bullying in the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities Committee. Cole-Hamilton’s comments were rejected by Sport Scotland, the Scottish Catholic Education Service, HM Inspectorate of Education, and the Educational Institute of Scotland but, hey, what do they know? Cole-Hamilton has spoken to ‘teachers’ and remembers practice when he was at school.
This is not my first foray against the Cole-Hamilton’s. His dad made the headlines with similar anecdotal rumours about bad practice in Scottish schools back in December. It was the same level of tosh. You can read my review at:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15051789.Schools_accused_of_elitism_based_on_sporting_prowess/
Talking-up Scotland 
John, To be fair to Cole-Hamilton; at schools such as Madras, the sporting “jocks” truly are set-up by the PE department to be something special – it’s a rugby thing.
Back in the late-1950s and early-1960s, when I was going through Cumnock Academy, an old-style Scottish Six-Year Senior Secondary, in Area Number Five, the mining part of Ayrshire, where junior football ruled; the rugby players who had their colours (white braid round the plain navy-blue blazers the rest of us wore) were set-up to think of themselves as being superior, by our PE tacher, a former Scotland rugby cap. The same attitudes held firm at the other Ayrshire Senior Secondaries – Ayr Academy, Marr College, Irvine Royal Academy, Kilmarnock Academy and Ardrossan Academy.
From what I have seen, these attitudes remain in those state schools – such as Madras – that are in the SRU’s Schools Conferences, but no longer apply elsewhere. Indeed, I have heard PE teachers in state schools complain that sport now comes some way behind the sciences, maths and music in the litany of preferred subjects.
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Thanks Socrates. All true but weren’t he and the Herod saying it was a universal problem?
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I remember such sifting when I was at school in the 1980s. But it was in another county. Does that count?
I certainly don’t remember such sifting when I went through school (in this country) in the early 1990s nor does my mother (retired teacher) talk of such things into the late 90s/early noughties. There you go, my anecdote trumps his! Sheesh…
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Thanks one more piece of evidence and more trumping/trumpeting
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