Meeting of the Parliament 02 February 2016
I, too, welcome the passage of the bill and support what it wants to achieve. As I have said, the Scottish Government is to be commended for putting educational attainment at the top of the political agenda. The bill sends a strong message nationally and locally and allows us to voice our concerns about inequality.
The fact that the bill places a statutory duty on local authorities to close the attainment gap keeps us focused on the prize. The bill also ensures that local authorities will have a chief education officer, similar to the situation in social work departments. I used to be a council member and can see how local authorities are merging departments to the point where children’s services and social work are in the same department. That is all well and good, but it is good to have a chief education officer who can make the arguments at management level in the local authority. That keeps the focus on education.
The £100 million attainment fund is quite rightly targeted on primary schools that serve our most deprived communities. The point of the attainment fund is to improve attainment overall. To do that, we must be open to innovation and new practice, and local authorities must work together—now, there’s an idea—and share best practice. That addresses some of the issues that Opposition members raised.
Education authorities need to have a long, hard look at themselves with regard to how they conduct their business and share best practice. During some of the evidence sessions, I asked COSLA and local authority representatives what they thought of various ideas for delivering education and gave them a couple of my own, but they had never looked at anything other than what they themselves were doing. They have to look at themselves and ensure that they are up for the challenge, because we live in extremely challenging times.
The provisions on the national improvement framework are obviously an important part of the bill. They will ensure that we have the opportunity to direct the right resource to the right place and the right child at the right time. Education Scotland said that the attainment advisers in all 32 local authorities should have the power to ensure that that happens.
I believe that the bill sends us in the right direction as we deal with the many challenges in closing the educational attainment gap, and that if we continue the debate and move forward we can ensure that we make that difference.
17:35