Meeting of the Parliament 25 June 2025
I want to go back to human rights. Articles 28 and 29 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child give our young people the right to an education and indicate what that education should cover. In a sense, I am following on from the previous speech by talking about what our young people are feeling and what they are experiencing. I note, with the greatest respect to the youngest and the oldest members of the Parliament, that the reality is that the school experiences that children and young people are having at the moment are so different from the school experiences that we had. Likening our experience to theirs does them a disservice.
The debate allows me the opportunity to mention a report by the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland called “This is our lives, it matters a lot.” A lot of the quotes in it relate specifically to the challenges that examination poses. The commissioner’s concluding assessment states:
“The pressure, anxiety, and stress that exams are placing on children and young people is not only reducing their ability to access their right to education ... but also affecting their right to the highest attainable standard of health ... This has been long recognised, including during the National Conversation on Education in 2023.”
I raise those points because of where we are. We are discussing the Education (Scotland) Bill, which provided the one opportunity during this parliamentary session to make a difference. It could have made a difference to the children who are coming to the end of their first year at school, to the children who are looking at this summer holiday as the step before they start school, to those who are transitioning to high school and to those who are transitioning from the end of their broad general education and moving into whatever assessment formula we decide to throw at them in a few years. However, there are also many children who are finishing education tomorrow or on Friday. What will they look back on? When they have their own children, will they look back at the difference that the bill made to their lives?
This is where I have a challenge with the procedures that we have undertaken during the bill’s passage. I thank the cabinet secretary for a lot of the discussion that there has been, but I humbly offer some advice: there is a difference between cross-party support that results in enough votes to get amendments agreed to and cross-chamber support, which is what Scotland wants and is clamouring for.
I raise those two points because the proposed Promise bill will be coming this way. I hope that every member in the chamber learns lessons about how the Parliament can work with the Government in relation to the way in which amendments are dealt with, the way in which assurances are given and the way in which all that can play out, as we have seen over the past two days of stage 3.
I take the opportunity to thank the cabinet secretary in relation to the amendments regarding child safety. I thank her for our discussions before stage 3 regarding the challenge that exists between our local authorities and the independent organisation that judges and monitors teachers, because we need to get that right.
I recognise that time is short, but it would be wrong for me to conclude without complimenting my newest colleague on a phenomenal first speech. He painted us something that I will leave as a challenge for everyone in the chamber: the concept of an education bus. Is the bill a simple repaint job when we had the opportunity to rebuild a vehicle that could take our children and young people into the future? Has there just been a change of steering wheel when what we needed was a navigator who knew where they wanted to go, knew why they wanted to go there and, perhaps most importantly, could take not just the Parliament but the rest of Scotland with them?
20:45