Meeting of the Parliament 27 January 2016
I rise to move the amendment in my name and, in truth, not in any great opposition to the motion from the Liberal Democrats because—Liam McArthur alluded to this—our proposals bear significant similarities.
However, in developing our proposal we consulted rather more than a thesaurus to find a different name for it. One thing that we consulted was the research and analysis that have been done on the pupil premium. I argue that the proposal that we are putting forward today—as we have already done on a number of occasions—is a more focused and detailed proposal. It is closer, in fact, to what has been introduced in Wales, where changes were made to the pupil premium precisely in order to address some of the flaws that had been identified with it. Perhaps the most significant flaw was that, although Ofsted, as Mr McArthur said, found evidence of effectiveness, it also found evidence of headteachers banking the pupil premium as part of their overall budget and not using it in any way to help to close the attainment gap. Our proposal—I will come to this later—tries to avoid that possibility.
Where we very much agree with Mr McArthur is on the weaknesses of the approach of the SNP Government. We have argued previously, and continue to argue, that the attainment fund, although welcome, is inadequate in that it does not have enough funds and is wrongly targeted. The minister rather gave the game away when he said that he will continue to consider how it is targeted. Since the fund has been announced, the Government has shown every sign that it is making it up as it goes along when it comes to targeting.
In the past I have given examples of some of the worst results of that approach. Mr McArthur referred to one: the two schools in Johnstone—Cochrane Castle and St David’s—which are on one campus with one entrance, one gym hall and one dinner hall. Pupils come from exactly the same streets, but one of the schools gets attainment funding while the other does not. In fact, the one that gets no attainment funding is the one that has more pupils from poorer parts of that community.
We see the same thing elsewhere. In Kilmarnock in East Ayrshire I have seen a street that is divided by a catchment area boundary, so that children from the same street go to two different schools. In one of those schools the children will benefit from attainment challenge funding and in the other they will not.
Earlier this week, I was in the Scottish Borders, where only two schools get attainment challenge funding. Both are in Hawick, which means that no schools in Galashiels, where I was visiting, benefit at all. I have also—and not surprisingly—previously highlighted the example of my constituency, where not a single school benefits from attainment challenge funding.
That is why we have proposed an alternative called fair start funding, in which £1,000 follows every child who is entitled to a free school meal to primary school. That approach would benefit pretty much every primary school in the country, but it would also mean that—as in Wales—the headteacher would have to use the resources in connection with a suite of agreed evidence-based interventions that we know will make a difference.