Meeting of the Parliament 25 February 2015
I welcome the fact that we all recognise the importance of science education and how it can equip our young people with knowledge and skills to contribute to our society and, as Liz Smith has said, to our economy. However, improving science, technology, engineering and mathematics education is a key priority of the curriculum for excellence, enabling new and exciting opportunities to make school science education stimulating and exciting for all pupils.
That brings me to a discussion that I had towards the end of last year with the head of the engineering and technology school at the University of the West of Scotland. As many members will know, the UWS campus in Paisley was a technical college, and engineering is the very heart and soul of the university, or it should be. He mentioned during that discussion that the problem that university staff had was encouraging people but that, once they had explained the career path and how young people could move on in life with the potential that a technology degree would give them, it was not so difficult to recruit. They had to find different ways to recruit and interest young people, particularly into engineering and technology.
That is something that also came up during the evidence that we heard recently from the learned societies group. The witnesses mentioned computer science at one point, but the problem is that there are not many young people who want to teach computer science, although they do want to get in a car, bus or train to Dundee to make the next computer game and become involved in that industry. That is part of the issue that we are dealing with: how can we make those same young people want to teach as a future career?
In terms of the evidence that we took from the learned societies group, we had the situation that the report that it did last year involved only 2 per cent of Scottish primary schools and 13 per cent of secondary schools. It is important to bring that up: as the witnesses were from the learned societies group and had a scientific background, they knew that the report was not evidence-based to the extent that they could say confidently that everything in it was right. The Government is therefore quite right to bring up—