Meeting of the Parliament 17 May 2017
I am not on the Education and Skills Committee, but I am happy to take part in today’s debate, because I hold education as a whole, and our education system, in high regard.
I have visited schools during the 20 years or so in which I have been elected member, and schools have visited Parliament, council buildings and various other places where I have met them, and I have to say how impressed I am when I see young people nowadays. They are much more confident and have a much healthier relationship with their teachers than was the case when I was at school. The teachers whom I meet are enthusiastic and extremely capable. When I was at school, many of us lived in fear of our teachers and were regularly belted for various offences. As a result of that, we could certainly spell well and we knew the difference between gerunds and gerundives, but I am not quite so sure whether we turned out to be complete human beings. [Laughter.] You spotted it—well done. At that time, presenters on the BBC spoke using received pronunciation; regional accents were certainly not allowed.
We moved away from that approach to education and deliberately decided that we wanted better-rounded individuals. We say that we want confident individuals, successful learners, responsible citizens and effective contributors, but I am not sure that that was the case 50 years ago when I was at school. At that time, the “successful learners” aspect seemed to be somewhat overemphasised. It is true that I squirm a bit when I hear someone say, “I have went to the football game,” but does it actually matter, if that person is a good engineer with the potential to set up a successful business?
Please do not think that I am suggesting that literacy and numeracy are not important. They are. What I am suggesting is that we, as a society, want rounded individuals and that we need to be careful when we compare ourselves with other countries, because we might not be comparing like with like.
I think that the Government accepts the main thrust of the Conservative motion, and that there is room for improvement in teacher training, literacy, numeracy and other areas. However, we must be realistic about what we expect schools to do. Workload has been mentioned, and we expect our schools to deal with a variety of background problems with our children, including alcohol and drug abuse, poor diet, insufficient exercise, awareness of politics and Parliament, the environment and sectarianism. The list goes on.
Individual teachers may have gone into those issues in the past, but we expect a lot more nowadays from our teachers and schools. On the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Committee, we are looking at the gender pay gap and at how to encourage more girls to move into traditionally male areas of employment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects. The thinking is that we should get the schools to do that as well.
I could mention other things, but I am running out of time. I mentioned information technology to the cabinet secretary last week. I believe that Scotland is now leading in terms of the amount of time that young people spend on phones, tablets or whatever—at about two hours per day. Mr Swinney said that that could have an impact on literacy. When I was younger, we read a lot of books and that is where I got most of my ability with words, reading and writing. That is clearly not happening so much these days.
I am an accountant—I like numbers and I like counting things. I prefer numbers to words—numbers are definite. Surely, however, when it comes to educating our young people, we should value not only what we can measure: it cannot be about just the number of exam passes and the boxes that have been ticked. It should be about the value that is added to each life: where did people start from and what has the school added? That is hard to measure, but I think that it is really important.
16:46