Meeting of the Parliament 08 March 2017
To tell the truth, when it comes to cutting the school week, what I remember best is the massive public meeting in Renfrewshire when the council there was run by the SNP. I attended to support the parents who were fighting that.
Curriculum for excellence is about setting our sights higher and freeing our teachers to teach, inspire and innovate to the maximum. The education secretary occasionally asks me whether we still support curriculum for excellence. We do, and it is exactly because we support it that it pains us to see the mess that this Government has made of its implementation. The decade of CFE implementation has been a decade of cuts to school budgets. We now have more than 4,000 fewer teachers, more than 1,000 fewer support staff and class sizes that are increasing steadily.
Yesterday, the education secretary said that spending on schools increased last year. It did, but the same figures show that school budgets are still hundreds of millions of pounds lower in real terms than they were in 2007, when the SNP came to power. One swallow doth not a summer make, nor does one year undo a decade of cuts. In any case, the Government has achieved the remarkable feat of losing thousands of teachers’ jobs and creating a teacher shortage at the same time. As the education secretary said earlier, he has increased the number of teacher training places, but universities struggle to fill them.