Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 September 2020
No, I did not. The truth is that those children are being failed by Mr Swinney’s Government and by the Conservative Government.
That is why the Government’s amendment, for all that there is much in it to agree with, is ultimately unsupportable. Dreadful though the United Kingdom Internal Market Bill is, to suggest that it is the most urgent threat to school education today is just daft, and to imply that the attainment gap and poverty are all completely to do with 13 months of Boris Johnson and nothing whatever to do with 13 years of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon really is a Herculean denial of reality and responsibility. [Interruption.]
If making education the top priority for Scotland’s Government was an imperative before the pandemic, how much more so is it now? Everyone knows that the attainment gap will have increased during lockdown—after all, we know that it increases over a normal summer closure, never mind a closure for months on end. We know that low-income families found home schooling more of a challenge and harder to engage with. We know, too, that the pandemic has increased poverty, and that it will increase it more as the economic consequences play through, furlough ends and those families who depend on low-paid and insecure part-time or zero-hours contracts get hit the hardest.
Therefore, we would think that every sinew of Government would be aimed at addressing poverty and providing additional support to those young people as they return to school, who face a mountain that is higher than ever, yet that is not what we have seen. An awards algorithm that institutionalised systemic inequality was signed off and defended to the hilt until pupils had to take to the streets in protest; schools have returned with no targeted support in place; and an equity audit to scope the problem will fade away into December—there is simply a long-term strategy, with no timescale at all for any consequent action.
Resources for closing the gap have increased by not a single penny. All that is there is what was there before the pandemic.