Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 03 June 2021
Five years ago, in a statement to the Parliament on her Government’s priorities following the 2016 election, the First Minister said:
“By the end of this session, through the action that we take to improve our most life-changing public services—education, health, social care and social security—we intend to ensure that many more people get the opportunities and the support that they need to fulfil their potential.”—[Official Report, 25 May 2016; c 2.]
The whole chamber could unite around those words; that ambition was shared by every member of the Parliament, no matter which party they belonged to. Five years on, they remain largely just that: words. They have not been backed by action and the ambitions of far too many young people have been left unfulfilled. [Interruption.] Not right now.
The events of recent days and the failure of the SNP Government to restore confidence in this year’s SQA assessment process show just how out of touch ministers have become. They have dug in and chosen to defend the SQA rather than stand up for young people, which makes it even harder than it already was to believe anything that they say about ensuring excellence and equality in our education system. The failure to call out the SQA’s incompetence and to admit that our qualifications agency is fundamentally broken shows a complete disregard for young people and their teachers, who have been so badly let down.
Asking pupils to gamble their grades on an appeal is wrong in the context of the chaos that we have seen; admitting that there is a need for some reform around the edges after all that we have seen and after the First Minister today told the Parliament that the organisation has her full confidence is not convincing.
When it refuses to listen or learn, it is little wonder that the SNP Government has the undistinguished record of being an Administration under which educational standards have stagnated at best but slipped back in many cases.