Hansard

Every council in the country has laboured under the strain of the £1.5 billion of cuts that local government has suffered in the past few years.

Mr Swinney sometimes likes to accuse us of being to blame for the shortage and of talking teachers down, but I am a teacher to trade and members will not catch me talking teachers down. I know that a fully trained professional teaching force has always been the greatest strength of our schools, and I know that, despite the cuts, our teachers deliver remarkable success and inspire our children every day of the week. We should thank them, but if we keep cutting their number, those thanks are worthless.

We pay teachers less than similar countries do; we provide them with less preparation time, fewer support staff and fewer resources than other countries do; we put them in front of bigger classes than pretty well every other country in the developed world; and then we wonder why we cannot recruit enough of them. Thanking teachers means nothing unless we listen to their concerns.

The Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee has done just that. It has listened to teachers, who told it that they had lost confidence in the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Education Scotland and that reductions in additional support staff were making life difficult. However, the education secretary rubbished the committee’s work. He said that it was not a proper sample, and then he told the committee that the valid view was what teachers told him when he visited schools. I am reminded of the old chestnut about the Queen thinking that the world permanently smells of fresh paint.

Now we hear that the cabinet secretary has delayed his governance reforms, but, again, he is not listening. The responses to the review tell him that its proposed reforms miss the point. The Educational Institute of Scotland, which represents teachers, said:

“The greatest barrier is and has been the imposition of austerity driven budgets and the underfunding of the Scottish Education system over the past period.”

It is not just teachers; a group of parents from Aberdeen said:

“Local council budgets have been reduced year on year for a considerable number of years. Teacher shortages impact the ability to deliver excellence and equity for all”.

Dundee City Council, which is run by the SNP, said:

“The real barriers have been imposed on councils over recent years following a series of past and present reductions to the budget.”

The Royal Society for Edinburgh summed it up neatly when it said:

“it is not clear how the proposed governance changes will lead to improved educational experiences and outcomes”.

Is not the real reason why the Government has delayed its great reforms that the responses are telling it that they are the wrong ones and that what we actually need in our schools is more resources, more teachers and more time?

There is also little or no support for the plans to centralise school budgets. Mr Swinney sometimes asks me whether we support anything that he does. Well, we do: we support the equity fund to close the attainment gap. Why would we not support that? From the moment the attainment fund was introduced, we said that it should be bigger and that it should follow pupils to whichever school they attend. We even argued that entitlement to free school meals is the best proxy for poverty and that funds should go direct to headteachers. The Government clearly agreed, because that is what it has done.

However, we cannot ignore the fact that that £120 million is set against cuts of £170 million to councils’ core budgets, nor can we ignore the fact that the devolution of that £120 million of funding is set against the removal of core school budgets from local control and their being set centrally by a formula. In other words, £120 million has been devolved and £4 billion has been centralised. To paraphrase the First Minister, only in the world of the SNP can that be called decentralisation and not centralisation.

There is a primary school in my constituency with more than 1,000 pupils—it is one of the biggest in the country—while others just down the road have fewer than 20. The idea that some algorithm at Victoria Quay will know enough about those schools and the communities that they serve to make a rational decision on their budgets is ridiculous. To remove local control of their budgets does not serve the interests of the parents, the schools or the teachers any more than it serves their interests to cut teacher numbers, reduce support staff and increase class sizes.

Our schools need reform, but we need reforms that take teachers and parents with us. We have tried to maintain an open mind on the education secretary’s core reform of national standardised assessments, but he has failed to take teachers with him. That is why the vast majority of councils are saying that they are going to use those assessments on top of what they did before, which will increase workload and testing. It is also why we have seen the league tables that we were promised we would not see—and the defence that the Scottish Government publishes not the league tables but just the numbers, which someone can then put in order, is just ridiculous.

Our schools need reform. The new exams need to be reformed because they are narrowing the curriculum and reducing attainment. Local charging for exam re-marks needs to be reformed—indeed, it should end. The senior phase needs reform backed by a comprehensive career guidance system, and achievement could be universally acknowledged, maybe through a Scottish graduation certificate. Every school should have a counselling service available to it, and a breakfast club, and there should be more collaboration between schools and within and across education authorities.

The SQA certainly needs to be reformed, refocused and resourced; the inspectorate should be independent again; and Education Scotland should serve teachers and not ministers. If it was regionalised, perhaps it could provide the strengthened “middle” that the OECD has suggested that we need. Above all, our schools need more teachers with more support, more time and more resources to do the job that they do so well. That is the core reform, and failure to deliver it is the defining characteristic of the SNP’s decade in charge of education.

The cabinet secretary should not delay his reform programme. He should ditch it now and start to invest properly in schools. That is what parents, teachers and SNP councillors tell him, too.

I move,

That the Parliament notes the evidence submitted to the Education and Skills Committee that many teachers have lost confidence in Education Scotland and the SQA; notes Scottish Government figures, which show falling numbers of teachers and support staff; is disappointed in the results of the OECD’s PISA worldwide survey, which show a decline in reading, maths and science scores in Scotland in both absolute and relative terms; notes a number of significant responses to the Scottish Government review of the governance of schools, which question its thrust and direction, and believes that its stewardship of education is failing teachers, parents and pupils.