Meeting of the Parliament 12 December 2023
I thank the member for his questions. He touched on a number of points, and I welcome the tone with which he responded to my statement.
It is important that we learn not just from the plethora of different data sets that we have published today but from the PISA data that we published last week to help support the improvements that we need to see. We need to be pragmatic because the ACEL data gives us a bit of a different picture to the PISA outcomes; it is predicated on teacher judgment, and I trust Scotland’s teachers to tell us where our young people are in terms of their progress.
That said, the member has raised issues about teacher numbers. The point that I made my statement is that the Government has provided additionality for additional teachers in the system, but a number of our local authorities have not delivered on that. It was ring fenced for a reason but, as I set out previously, we will listen to any mitigating circumstances that local authorities want to set out. This afternoon, we have written directly to local authorities to hear what those concerns might be, and I expect to hear from them at the start of next week.
More broadly, the member touched on teacher contracts. During recent exchanges in the chamber, I have set out the approach that I have taken, working with the strategic board for teacher education. Last week, I met the member’s colleague, Alexander Burnett, who is not in the chamber today, to talk about some of the challenges that he faces in his area of Scotland. I recognise that there are rural challenges and particular subject challenges, too. We need to ensure that the system better meets the needs of our rural areas.
Of course, it is worth saying that the Government provides the preference waiver scheme, from which I myself benefited some years ago, to help incentivise our probationers to go to other parts of the country. However—and this is anecdotal—we have seen since the pandemic that our probationers or those who are in their student year are currently less likely to tick the box than they might have been prior to the pandemic. We need to look again at whether the system is working and helps to ensure that we have a spread of probationers to more rural parts of Scotland and in different subject areas.
The member has talked about the challenge in relation to additional support needs, which is one of the key findings from the data today. We should be mindful that additional support needs will be greater in certain schools and lesser in others, depending on the cohort. Yesterday, I was at a school in East Lothian where the ASN cohort was much higher than average, at around 47 per cent. According to the snapshot, the national picture is around 40 per cent, but some schools have greater needs and others have fewer.
During my visit, I asked teachers whether they thought that mainstream education was not working. That was not their response—they thought that it was working. We need to look again at how we can resource that need and support it.
It is worth while pointing out that we have a record number of additional learning support assistants in our schools. We supported that with £830 million in 2021-22, and we have ring fenced additional funding of £15 million every year to respond to the individual needs of children and young people. That will help to maintain our record levels of investment in those staff.
More broadly, I should say that, in all that I have set out today, our having a close working relationship with COSLA will be key to driving the improvements that we need. That is why the Verity house agreement is so important. We need to work with COSLA to ensure that, at a local level, we do not see that variance in the support that is provided.