Meeting of the Parliament 31 May 2023
I welcome positive destinations, but, under the definition that the Government uses, positive destinations can mean just about anything. The information is tracked only for so many months after young people leave school. I am afraid that that leaves a lot to be desired. That is my honest response to John Swinney’s intervention. Much needs to be improved.
I will go back to the report. As has been referred to, there is a
“groundswell of current support for educational improvement”
which cannot be
“lost, ignored or side-lined.”
That is from paragraph 9.3 of the report. Professors Campbell and Harris, the independent facilitators, conclude:
“now it is time for action, most critically ... time for the right action.”
Will the cabinet secretary set herself apart from her predecessors? Will she take the action that parents, teachers and school leaders are begging for and reform Scotland’s education system? We all know that the business of Government is the business of tough choices. The cabinet secretary will not be able to please everyone, because doing the right things often results in at least temporary unpopularity. However, if Jenny Gilruth makes the right decisions for Scottish educational reform and she meets resistance, I can assure her that members on the Conservative benches will support her. I hope that future events will show that we are fortunate to have a former teacher as the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills. I know that she will empathise with the concerns that are writ large in the report about teacher recruitment and retention, which should have been fixed a long time ago. The report highlights the job insecurity that too many teachers experience. How can teachers, particularly those who are newly qualified, plan their future when they are stuck on temporary contracts?
The report goes on. Paragraph 6.1.22 says that there were concerns about
“exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and burnout affecting people’s capacity to do their work and negatively impacting their personal lives”.
That is what we were talking about last week when we called on the Government to provide extra support to teachers in the form of a national helpline. Employee helplines are very common in businesses and other organisations—that is something that can be put in place now to provide teachers with an outlet, because we need to rebuild teacher morale. Comments from teachers and pupil support assistants speak of a profession that has been underappreciated for far too long. That is why the Scottish Conservatives call for a new deal for teachers—the report backs up what we are talking about. We want to see reduced contact hours for teachers so that they can plan and prepare lessons; teachers being paid for extracurricular activities; competitive salaries being offered for specialist subject teachers; cuts to excessive bureaucracy in order to let teachers teach; opportunities for teacher sabbaticals in order to help them to develop professionally; and new pathways into teaching in order to attract the best talent.
Beyond those proposals, there are three specific issues, which I hope I have time to mention, that we need to openly and calmly debate. The first of those is the autonomy of headteachers. I have always felt that it is far better to trust them to run the schools and the school populations that they know in the communities that they know than to leave decisions in the hands of national, regional or local authority managers. There must be accountability and we need to give careful thought to how that can be best achieved. Headteachers should have the freedom to innovate and lead according to the needs of the pupils who are in their care.