Meeting of the Parliament 27 January 2016
I agree with Stewart Maxwell that a range of factors will be important in closing the attainment gap. Those factors include the school buildings and facilities in which young people are taught. That is why I welcome the partnerships that have been put in place and acknowledge the investment of the Scottish Government and local authorities in them. Last week, I visited a new school build in Glasgow where three primary schools are being pulled together into one. That shows that local authorities are doing innovative work to get new facilities in place. I ask the minister to agree to visit Inverkeithing high school in my constituency, whose building is in a dire state and in need of replacement. Although I welcomed the announcement last week about new buildings for some schools, I was disappointed that Inverkeithing high school was not one of those schools, because school buildings are important.
It would be wrong not to mention the massive pressure that education authorities are under up and down the country. I would probably not use the term “crisis” about education. I would prefer to acknowledge the hard work going on in schools in every community in Scotland by the teachers and all the other staff in schools, who are under immense pressure. We just need to talk to teachers locally to know the pressure that they are working under because of the difficulties that are being caused by the budget cuts that are taking place.
Although those budget cuts might not be affecting teacher numbers, we are seeing the number of classroom assistants being cut and continuing professional development being cut, which will have a massive impact. Fife Council is an example of a local authority that focused millions of pounds on raising attainment. A big part of that was about leadership, so there was a major investment programme in leadership in schools. There was also a major investment programme to ensure that teachers had the support to be able to do more to lift attainment and numeracy and literacy levels. If education authorities are making cuts in the areas that I mentioned, that will have a negative impact on attainment levels.
Another criticism that I have heard of the Government’s scheme, which is well intentioned, is that it tends to be just input based, with little regard to outputs, and to involve project after project. We find that more and more staff spend their time trying to write bids and write projects, but we need to move away from that.
Labour’s proposal on the fair start fund would allow us to target money at schools and do something about that.
Alasdair Allan talked about the OECD report. I would be the first to recognise that there are many positives in that report on the curriculum for excellence and the direction in which we are going, but I want to mention a few other points. For example, page 80 of the report says:
“Not all the findings can be described as positive. Education Scotland inspection reports, for instance, gave as many as one in five schools only a ‘satisfactory’ evaluation in inspections”.
That is quite staggering. Those schools were not good, very good or excellent; they were “satisfactory”. That cannot be satisfactory for the Parliament. That shows that there are areas in which a lot of work has to be done.
There is not enough time for me to draw attention to other parts of the report. It talks about the number of different projects and the danger that we will end up with little strategic direction and focus.