Hansard

The record continues in the same groove. I would have more respect for the member’s position if we worked together to use the powers that we have now to make a real difference for people instead of putting that off until some point in the future.

We need to create the opportunities to recalibrate our economy in the long term by making the best investment that any Government can make—investment in our people. Members do not need to take my word for it. A very famous economist, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, proposed three solutions to inequality in his book “The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them”. Surprise, surprise, the third solution is education.

Education is much more than a social policy; it should be part of any Government’s strategy for long-term economic development. However, despite the SNP having had full control over education for nearly a decade, its track record on it, especially in attainment, is a national scandal.

I welcome the cabinet secretary’s tone and comments in her lecture last night, in which she admitted that the Scottish Government should be doing much better in education. We will work with her to improve education in Scotland. However, it was the First Minister herself who said that

“a party that is ... in its second term of office cannot avoid taking responsibility for its own failings.”—[Official Report, 12 December 2001; c 4711.]

In educational attainment, the failings are severe, and we are failing our young people as a consequence. The number of young people in Scotland who are gaining national 3 to 5 qualifications dropped by 20 per cent in a year. That is more than 100,000 fewer young people getting the grades that they need to get on in life. Under the SNP, we have seen literacy levels in primary and secondary schools fall at every stage surveyed. The ministers are shaking their heads, but I did not make that up. Those are facts from surveys that have been undertaken—they are the Government’s own figures. Under the SNP, the proportion of pupils who are performing well or very well in reading fell between 2012 and 2014.

Those declines in performance can be seen at every stage surveyed—primary 4, primary 7 and the second year of high school. However, at every stage, pupils from the most well-off backgrounds are performing to a higher level than pupils in the middle and from the most deprived backgrounds. That should be a concern to us all.

To put that into context, the proportion of second year high school pupils from the poorest backgrounds performing well or very well in numeracy is a mere 25 per cent. That should shame us all.

Let me be clear about what that means. Under this SNP Government, Scotland’s children, especially those from the most deprived backgrounds, are not getting even the most basic skills. Our children’s ability to read, to write and to count has all gone backwards under the SNP. It is, without question, a national scandal. We cannot simply pay lip service and just say how bad the situation is and that the Scottish Government must take action, because this matters not just to those individuals but to the future state of our economy.

The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning said that she planned to take stock after six months on the job. Although I welcome that, let me say as gently as I can that her Government has been in power for eight years, so taking stock after six months is not enough. All those failures, all that regression and all that denied opportunity has been taking place on the SNP’s watch.

A general pattern emerges when this Government is held to account on its record. It is our responsibility in this chamber to hold it to account, but I recall that opponents are often accused of talking down Scotland. Indeed, those who work in a service under scrutiny are used as a human shield. Let me be clear: when I point out the problems in education that we have in this country I am not blaming teachers or students; I am not even blaming parents. I lay the blame squarely at the door of this SNP Government.

Today, teacher numbers are at a 10-year low, with more than 4,000 fewer teachers in Scotland’s classrooms since the SNP came to power. Its 2007 manifesto promise to cut class sizes has been completely abandoned. Therefore, it is little wonder that we have gone backwards.

Closing the attainment gap in education will have a long-term benefit to our economy. Low attainers are more likely to be unemployed, working part-time and earning less. Those earnings are substantially less—they are more than £20 a week less for men and £40 a week less for women. Scottish Labour considers that closing the attainment gap should be Scotland’s number 1 priority, because that would be good for individuals and for our economy, too.

We want to see overall attainment rise. That should be the Government’s ambition, especially in the areas of literacy and numeracy where we have so far failed so badly. Our proposal is to close the attainment gap with £25 million a year of extra investment in our education system, which is £125 million over the parliamentary session. We would use that extra investment to double the number of teaching assistants and to employ 200 literacy teachers, and to focus their work in the communities with the 20 secondary schools and their associated primary schools where working-class kids have been most left behind by the SNP Government.

We are committed to raising the performance of the 20 per cent lowest-achieving pupils where they study. We will support the parents of those children to ensure that they have the reading and writing skills that they need to support their children. Those are the choices that we would make.