Meeting of the Parliament 12 January 2016
I simply say that to come here and say that one is supporting school education while taking £0.5 billion from local government cannot be an honest approach either to politics or to budgeting.
In summary, the OECD report says that we are above average but that the world is catching up. It says that
“there are declining relative and absolute achievement levels on international data”
and that performance in literacy and numeracy is declining. As I said last week, the Government might be satisfied with damnation by such faint praise, but it is not good enough for Scotland.
Once, we could claim to have a world-leading education in reality and not just as an aspiration. Our system has been a world leader through history, going right back to the world’s first education act of Parliament, which in the 17th century provided for a school in every parish. In the 20th century, Scotland led the way in the creation of comprehensive schools that serve the whole community. Breadth of curriculum, flexibility, equity and high attainment have always been the principles on which we have, in the past, led the world. We have to nurture those values anew in the 21st century.
That is why the pernicious attainment gap matters so much. The OECD report tells us that the gap is increasing, as measured by literacy and numeracy standards. It acknowledges Government initiatives to address that, but it also tells us that there is no strategy to be seen and warns of the danger of what it calls a “scattergun approach.” It is right, because no framework of any kind will close the attainment gap; at best, it will just describe it. In our view, the dangers of the national improvement framework are wildly overstated in the Liberal Democrat amendment. However, the framework will at best only give us information on which we must act or it will be of little value.
The Scottish Government’s attainment challenge fund is simply underresourced and badly targeted. The First Minister reannounced bits of it again yesterday in another new and apparently random initiative. The attainment fund has been announced a couple of million pounds at a time and has been salami sliced into a plethora of projects that are giving every appearance of being made up as they go along. In truth, it looks less like a focused strategy to close the attainment gap and more like a convenient instrument to fill the First Minister’s media grid.
I have talked before about Cochrane Castle and St David’s schools in Johnstone—two schools that share one building in their community. One, however, gets attainment funding but the other does not. Last week I was in Kilmarnock, in East Ayrshire, where a child at one end of a street goes to one school and a child at the other end goes to another. One child will get attainment fund support in their school but the other will not. It makes no sense.
Labour’s fair start funding proposal would fix that. Indeed, East Ayrshire would receive more than £2 million instead of a few thousand pounds for half a dozen primaries. In my constituency of East Lothian, schools would share almost £900,000, instead of not a penny. Nurseries would benefit from our proposal, too. We know—and the OECD report tells us—that the attainment gap is already established by age five.
The attainment gap persists. At the weekend, we saw new figures regarding the attainment gap in senior school. The gap between those from poorer families who achieved three highers or more and those from the richest families who did so grew yet again last year. The OECD report has nothing to say on that, because it only reviewed primary 1 to secondary 3. Today, however, we have placed in the Scottish Parliament information centre an important submission that the OECD received from education expert Jim Scott on the impact of the new national level 3, 4 and 5 exams. Dr Scott showed last year that the new qualifications have narrowed the curriculum and reduced attainment. Ministers dismissed his concerns. Analysis of the second year of the new exams shows that that trend has continued. The teachers whom the education secretary purports to respect so much gave similar warnings and have had to ballot for industrial action just to get a hearing.
Dr Scott showed that, overall, level 3 to 5 enrolment has dropped by 17 per cent compared to standard grade enrolment, and attainment has dropped by 24 per cent. In French and German the drop is almost 50 per cent and in Gaelic it is 60 per cent. At level 5—which was credit level—pass rates have dropped from the low 90s to below 80 per cent.