Meeting of the Parliament 23 May 2018
The need to ensure that Scotland’s schools provide an inclusive learning environment that enables all young people to excel is an obvious point of consensus, and subject choice cuts to the heart of the issue. How can we expect young people from more deprived communities in particular to succeed if they are not given the same opportunity as other pupils to choose the subjects that they want or need to do?
Of course, attainment will be lower if pupils are restricted to subjects in which they have less interest. Restricted choice can have a lifelong impact, whether we are talking about missed opportunities to develop an interest from an early age or knock-on effects on careers and future study choices.
A benefit of the Scottish education system is meant to be that our senior phase provides for a wide education and does not shoehorn pupils into doing three subjects, as happens with A levels down south. However, if subject choice is restricted, a diverse education is not being offered and young people are not being given the same opportunities to develop their own interests.
If we are to tackle the poverty-related attainment gap, we must ensure that all pupils have a good choice of subjects at all levels, including national 4 and 5, higher and advanced higher. However, we are not doing that. In Glasgow, for example, pupils from the most deprived communities are, on average, offered six fewer higher subjects than pupils from the least deprived communities are offered. That is not just an immediate inequality; it has profound long-term effects.
Some parts of Scotland face far greater difficulties when it comes to subject choice. Across our rural and island communities it is simply not possible for individual schools to have in the building the same breadth of expertise as a school in a more densely populated area. That should not prevent the full breadth of subjects being offered to young people in rural and island communities, but the reality is that it does.
Distance learning through the internet and teleconferencing can enable pupils to learn subjects that are not physically available in their schools. Such options are already used across Scotland, though not consistently and with unnecessary barriers remaining. For example, different approaches to timetabling in local authorities can create difficulties.
We need to grapple with the difference between granting autonomy to individual schools and headteachers and the co-ordination that is required, particularly across rural communities. Such barriers need to be addressed.
However, for the most part, it is teacher shortages that have had a severe impact on subject choice in particular communities and with particular subjects. We have debated the causes of those shortages on a number of occasions, including through the Education and Skills Committee’s inquiry process. We know that issues of workload, conditions and pay have had major impacts on recruitment and retention, especially in subject areas in which people with the relevant qualifications have clear alternative employment opportunities in the private sector.
We know that austerity cuts are at the core of much of what is happening. Real-terms spending on education has dropped by £335 million since 2007—a drop of about 6.5 per cent. Many local councils sought to protect education spending after their budgets were squeezed, but that quickly became close to impossible when the squeeze started more than a decade ago.
The Scottish Government likes to highlight the attainment challenge fund and the pupil equity fund as investments in education. Although all new money going into education is welcome—as we discussed with the cabinet secretary this morning—in many cases the money is being used simply to plug gaps that have been left by core budget cuts. Funding is annual and there are the restrictions on how it is spent, so it is obviously not solving the issue of subject choice when restrictions are caused by staffing shortages. Funding needs to go to core council education budgets so that we can begin to resolve the problems with subject choice restrictions.
We can see the impact of the past decade’s budget decisions on teachers. There are 3,500 fewer teachers today than there were in 2007. That is not difficult to understand when we realise that teachers’ wages are 20 per cent lower in real terms than they were 10 years ago. All the fast-track schemes that we can think of will not solve that problem: a genuinely restorative pay rise is required. The Educational Institute of Scotland has launched its campaign for a restorative rise, starting at 10 per cent this year. I sincerely hope that the Government takes that pay claim seriously in negotiations. Although it would not solve all the problems that affect subject choice, as Liz Smith and Iain Gray laid out, it would go a long way towards addressing some of the major underlying issues.