I end this small run of blog posts with the question posed by Professor Brian Boyd at the beginning of our evening: Do we want to close the achievement gap? We know we can close the gap. It's been done or almost been done before in Scottish education, but the answers have been ignored as they pass us by. The simple clue is this: poverty is single biggest predictor of achievement, and according to research (Hammonds sic, reference required), aged 10, a child living in poverty is 60% less likely to get to university. Boyd borrowed from his own mother's report card to ask us what kind of education we desire. Is it the academic success at all costs route, or is there another option we need to value as much, if not more? His mother's report card, one that prevented her from becoming a secondary school pupil in Glasgow, is filled with G and FG, until the last point: Character and conduct - excellent. What kind of pupils do we want to develop in Scotland? What do we value in our assessment system? Opening up opportunity for all is a tough game to play when the examination system rewards only certain types of behaviour, few of them related to what the Curriculum for Excellence says we stand for. In his own small community in East Kilbride, three secondary schools enter a period of meltdown as the local rag sets about creating its own local league table of performance, with those three 'teams' in competition for the top spot (or at least not the bottom one). Therefore, we must stop basing "the gap" largely on attainment. First of all, Boyd would like us to remove the traditional, and non-sensical academic/vocational divide. Is the law or medicine degree we value not vocational? (Are all General Practitioners not Plumbers, as Dr Murray on the panel suggests?) What grades did Boyd's mother get? Pick the correct answer from the following options: A. good grades B. mediocre grades C. not enough information D. bad grades
D

Trisha dreamed of being a Playboy Bunny since the days she still had buck-teeth and fried egg boobs. She blu-tacked page threes above her bed-head and had me snap topless Polaroids till they littered the floor. She told me to imagine she had 36DDs and peroxide blonde hair. I used to wish like hell that she wasn't my cousin. When she was fifteen Trisha started putting out for the boys in the Kwik-Save car park for a tenner a time. She said she was an entrepreneur, not a prostitute. She started going steady with a kid called Keith. He was a fryer in the fish and chip shop. He had a future and a Ford Cortina. She got a job waitressing and she worked all the hours she could. Keith couldn't handle me and Trisha being as close as we were. Especially the time he caught Trisha bending over me in nothing but a frilly market stall thong while I worked the angles best I could to get a dangle-shot. Next night he took her in the car park woods and doped her up to the eyeballs. He took out a bottle of India ink and told her he would etch the love-heart she'd always wanted. Instead, he safety-pinned the word 'inbred' into her arse. Trisha's step-dad tracked the spits of blood and found her sobbing in the bathroom of their long-stay static. It didn't take him long to slap out the truth. He went straight round to Keith's place with a crow-bar and did enough damage to make sure he'd need more than laser treatment to put things right. Keith wasn't rolling in spare change so Trisha's step-dad took the Cortina as payment in lieu of her getting herself fixed up. Trisha got me to stash the Cortina up the lane at the back of Boyes' farm. Weekend nights, I drove her out to the dual carriageway truck-stop where she found a faster way to make her fortune in the fogged-up cabs. Who slapped the truth out of Trisha? Pick the correct answer from the following options: A. Keith B. not enough information C. The person telling the story D. Trisha's step-dad
D

(Q).
SEOUL North Korea's recent threat to pull out of the upcoming nuclear summit with the U.S. has added new urgency to South Korean President Moon Jae-in's visit to Washington next Tuesday. President Moon has played a key role in facilitating the meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump scheduled to be held in Singapore June 12. At the recent inter-Korean summit Moon got Kim to affirm a broad commitment to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons and that opened the door for Trump and Kim to negotiate a more detailed agreement to end North Korea's nuclear program. However, uncompromising positions recently voiced by U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton demanding the North's unilateral disarmament, and by North Korea in response canceling further talks with the South and threatening to pull out of the U.S.-North Korea summit, have put the prospects for continued diplomatic progress in jeopardy. President Trump has tried to reassure the North Korean leadership that a nuclear deal would not weaken the Kim government, but would bolster it. "He'd be in his country, he'd be running his country. His country would be very rich." Trump said Thursday while meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in the White House. President Moon, who will meet with Trump in Washington on Tuesday, has said he will try to moderate differences between the U.S. and North Korea over how to achieve denuclearization, while also giving the Kim government the security guarantees and sanctions relief it wants. But the convergence of interests that have brought Moon, Trump and Kim to all agree to give diplomacy a chance seems to be diverging over how to bridge the gap between the U.S. demand for complete denuclearization prior to offering any concessions, and the North's insistence on a step by step process that would ease sanctions early on for incremental measures, such as giving up some nuclear material and allowing in outside inspectors. President Moon probably believe that: Pick the correct answer from the following options: A. friendship with Kim Jung Un will undercut Un's critics B. friendship with Kim Jung Un will be good for South Korea C. not enough information D. Trump will keep his promises
(A).
B