Hansard

We all want Scotland to have an education system to be proud of. We want a Scotland in which every child in every community can achieve their true potential at school and in life. Nothing is more important than ensuring that every child gets a fair start. Today, the SNP Government is keen to highlight the positive aspects of the OECD report, but the fact remains that the achievement gap between the most and least deprived children is continuing to grow under the SNP’s watch and that, so far, its solutions have fallen well behind what is needed to end the inequality in our classrooms.

We must use this Parliament’s powers to change people’s lives, to reshape our country and to transform life chances so that opportunity and success at school, at work and in life are determined by hard work, effort and talent, and not by who someone’s parents are or how much they earn.

Iain Gray talked about the attainment fund that the Scottish Government has set up. In my Dunfermline constituency, two schools are benefiting from the fund, yet in every nursery, primary and secondary school in my constituency there are children and families from poorer backgrounds who need extra support. One of the schools in my constituency that is receiving attainment fund support is Inzievar primary school in Oakley, which shares a campus with Holy Name primary school. They use the same gym hall, assembly hall, library and playground, yet Holy Name gets no funding to close the attainment gap.

That is why our amendment calls once again for us to be more ambitious and to use the powers that are coming to Holyrood to invest more in the children who are being left behind. We need to ensure that every child from a poorer family gets a fair start in life through a fair start fund that is based on need and not on what school children go to. We need to make support available not just to schools but to nurseries, too. Across Scotland, we are asking people to take a fresh look at Scottish Labour. Maybe the cabinet secretary will take a fresh look at our plans to give every child a fair start at nursery and school.

The Liberal Democrat amendment mentions the importance of pre-school provision in improving outcomes for children from more deprived backgrounds. That is important, too, because we know that the attainment gap begins well before children start school. By the age of three, 15 per cent of children already have speech and language difficulties, with children from the most deprived areas being more than twice as likely to have issues. By the same age, children from deprived backgrounds are already nine months behind on average development and readiness for school, and on starting school there is already a 14 per cent development gap between the most and least advantaged children and a 16 per cent gap in vocabulary.

All the evidence shows that children who start school with those early development difficulties are much more likely to fall behind other children in their attainment at every stage of the education system, so it is vital that we get it right for every child in the early years, yet in December 2015, as Liam McArthur said, just 7.3 per cent of two-year-olds were registered for early learning and childcare. That is well short of the 27 per cent that was promised. There is also evidence that many children across Scotland are missing out not just on the free childcare for two-year-olds but on the free places that are available for three and four-year-olds.

The SNP will go into the election in May promising parents a doubling of pre-school hours, yet it is still unable to deliver the hours that were promised in policies that are already in place, never mind saying how the 30 hours will be delivered or paid for.

Research by the fair funding for our kids campaign has found that as many as one in five children is missing out on their free place, and the doubling of free hours could make the situation even worse by reducing the number of spaces available in council nurseries by as much as 40 per cent. That falls into line with what the commission for childcare reform said in the summer, when it found that many parents across Scotland are unable to access the 600 hours and concluded that the focus on delivering the policy was

“at the expense of broader childcare provision”.

Given the fact that only 15 per cent of councils in Scotland have enough capacity to meet the childcare needs of working parents, parents across Scotland who want to work and make a better life for their families need much more than a promise of free hours. We need a radical overhaul of childcare so that it is affordable, flexible and available for children of all ages where and when parents need it.

In its briefing for today’s debate, Save the Children highlights its excellent “Read on. Get on.” campaign, which has Scottish Labour’s support. It is unacceptable that Scotland’s poorest children are already struggling with language and literacy when they start school, and that many of the same children leave primary school unable to read well. There must be much more emphasis in the national framework on the importance of pre-school intervention in closing the language gap and ensuring that every single child has the support that they need to meet key milestones in early language and literacy before they start primary school.

We cannot look at education policy in isolation, and members from across the chamber have already referred to the budget cuts that will hit our councils. Certainly, those cuts will not help us in our mission to close the gap. Cuts to council budgets will hit our schools, early years services and measures that are being taken to close the gap. In Fife, where the council already had a £21 million budget shortfall to make up in the coming financial year, the additional cuts that were announced in the budget before Christmas mean that the council will need to make a further £17 million of savings.

In the chamber, we have quite rightly heard many attacks on the Tory austerity agenda and its impact on Scotland. Right now, in the communities that I represent in Fife and in communities right across Scotland, the austerity agenda is not being imposed just by the Tories; it is being imposed by Holyrood, too. Our children and young people should not be paying the price of cuts, and they should certainly not be paying the price of austerity. Cuts to our schools, cuts to our colleges, cuts to our universities and cuts to our youth work services are not a route to educational success.

I see that I am running out of time. If the Government is serious about making our education system world class once again, action is needed now to protect our education budgets and to give our councils a fair funding deal.