Hansard

I am pleased to open the debate on behalf of Scottish Labour. As I have said in the Parliament before, education is a great leveller and can determine a person’s life chances—however, so, too, can poverty, which is why no mission is more important than tackling it. Thirty thousand more children live in poverty now than when the Scottish National Party came to power in 2007. On that, it is fair to say, we are moving in the wrong direction.

Across Scotland, in schools, colleges and universities, staff are working every day to do what they can to reduce household costs, boost family incomes and support children on lower incomes to learn, thrive and achieve their potential. The cabinet secretary has spoken fondly of some great examples this afternoon. However, for too many still, the cost of going to school adds pressure that already-stretched family budgets cannot bear. Where there are costs for uniforms, food, resources, clubs and trips, barriers can be created and opportunities stifled.

Staff in schools, colleges and universities feel compelled to do all that they can to mitigate the poverty that they see. A poll for the Educational Institute of Scotland has found that more than two thirds of teachers use their own money to buy classroom supplies and help their pupils. However, teachers, school staff and education in general cannot act alone—nor should they be expected to do so. That is why our amendment highlights broader aspects.

One such example that I do not think we can avoid mentioning today is housing and the housing emergency. This morning, new homelessness figures revealed that the number of children living in temporary accommodation in Scotland has hit record levels—up by 14 per cent in two years to 10,360. That is a national scandal. It means nothing to say that the Government’s mission is to end child poverty or to declare a housing emergency if it will not take the wide-ranging action that is needed to deal with them.

Not only does that scandal leave children without a safe or secure home and living in poverty, but it hampers their education and their life chances. Staff see the impact of that in class every day. A recent NASUWT survey found that 70 per cent of teachers said that more pupils than ever are lacking energy and concentration, and 62 per cent reported that more pupils are coming to school hungry.

I am sad to say that we see that in the education outcomes, too. The attainment gap between the most and least deprived areas of Scotland is once again widening in all areas, and, for highers, it is the widest that it has ever been. For care-experienced young people and disabled young people, it is unacceptably wide.

It is a tragedy that children’s potential is being held back by their being in poverty or by their background, and the Government must take broader and further action to address that. That is why it is really disappointing that some of the things that the Scottish National Party said that it would do have not come to pass. It made promises to children that were incredibly important to their life chances, including the promise to roll out free school meals to primary 6 and primary 7 pupils.

In local authorities across the country, as I have said, there are great examples of initiatives that help to address child poverty. In our job, we have the privilege of seeing many of those initiatives at first hand. Some councils, for example, are removing the need for young people to collect documentation or pay for a passport photo when applying for their national entitlement card, which allows them to access free bus travel. Instead of families having to pay for the required proof, councils are using school records to verify young people’s details, which simplifies and poverty-proofs application processes. The Government could look at rolling out that initiative across the country, and it could work with Young Scot to consider other ways to increase uptake and reduce costs for families.

The Government must also heed the calls of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, as mentioned in our amendment, and improve data collection on child poverty levels. Again, there are examples that the Government could draw on. A child poverty index has been created using data from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and data on those entitled to clothing grants, free school meals and the education maintenance allowance to provide granular detail on rates of child poverty in catchment areas. That index is informing the targeting of breakfast club provision. Rolling that out across the country could be a huge help.

Despite strong action in some areas, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has—rightly—warned that, without appropriate policy development and resources for service delivery to support local authorities,

“we are at risk of not making enough progress towards”

our child poverty targets in Scotland.

I turn to another area of education that I believe is not only mitigating the impacts of poverty but is the real route to addressing poverty in the long term: colleges. This morning, at the Education, Children and Young People Committee, we heard incredibly powerful testimony of students’ experience of poverty and about the great work that colleges in Scotland are doing to address that. Some are providing free food, help with transport and childcare and lots more.

As engines of skills, colleges have the potential to give people the tools that they need to get good work and to stay out of poverty in the longer term. However, as we also heard at the committee, the Government has created an impossible landscape for colleges, with the impact of a real-terms cut to the sector meaning that it could be very difficult for them to continue to provide such comprehensive support.

Scotland’s children and young people deserve more than that. We need them to have a Government that will tackle poverty at its roots, look at the breadth of issues and policy levers that are available to it and use them. That is what we see with action such as the Labour Government’s new deal for working people, which delivers a real living wage for more than 200,000 of the lowest-paid Scots, or affordable public transport, housing support, ending problem debt and providing help and support for families across Scotland. That would change the direction of poverty in Scotland, and Scottish Labour is ready to deliver it.

I move amendment S6M-16330.3, to leave out from “, which is” to end and insert:

“; commends Scotland’s teachers and schools for their work; notes that the poverty-related attainment gap has not improved in P1 and is the widest it has ever been at Higher level; further notes that the Scottish Government’s failure to plan for the school workforce has meant that teachers are often overworked and children are unsupported; expresses its disappointment at what it sees as the Scottish National Party’s broken promise of rolling out free school meals to all P6 and P7 pupils; believes that education should set young people on the path to opportunities for their future and can help lift people out of poverty; understands that ‘Scotland’s colleges play a particularly important role in supporting learners from more deprived communities to access learning’, as described by Audit Scotland, but that the ‘financial health of the sector has deteriorated since 2021-22’; welcomes that 100,000 people in Scotland have already received a pay rise thanks to the UK Labour administration’s New Deal for Working People; acknowledges recent analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on the extent of child poverty in Scotland, which observed deficiencies in the key data used to calculate poverty rates and found that ‘we will need to go further to reach the 2030-31 targets’, and calls on the Scottish Government to work with the UK Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that accurate data is available for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and other organisations to accurately assess the extent of child poverty in Scotland and the impact of policy interventions on it.”