Meeting of the Parliament 17 February 2026 [Draft]
The courts will have to judge whether the Government has overstepped the mark in the legislation, given the contradictory UNCRC and European human rights protocols that will now be in place. We will see who brings that forward.
It is important that we look at what this means for teaching professionals. The debate has seemed very bureaucratic as we have gone through the amendments this afternoon, but we have heard about the bureaucratic burden that teachers and schools already face and the concerns that that will raise in the wider school community.
I was lucky enough to attend Auchtergaven primary school in Bankfoot in Perthshire, which is in the First Minister’s constituency. At that school, we saw a valuable relationship with the Church of Scotland minister and his wife, who contributed so much to the school, from school Christmas plays to the work in the school halls. Fundamentally, the Church of Scotland was making a positive contribution to our school life. This bill now sits uneasily around where religious organisations can make contributions to education, and whether it would be much easier to remove that completely in case there are future challenges. I do not know whether that is what the Government necessarily wanted the bill to point to, but local authorities will probably want to start providing guidance from the Government, which we have not had an opportunity to see. Those are real concerns.