Meeting of the Parliament 27 January 2016
Our aim is to have an excellent and equitable education system in which every young person throughout the country is able to achieve their full potential regardless of their family circumstances or the background that they were born into. I feel that I have said that or something very similar to it on numerous occasions in our debates. That is because the debate on the issue is very important. We all may disagree on how we will get to our goal, but we all know that the issue is one of the most important. The First Minister in particular is to be commended on ensuring that it is a major issue.
The £100 million attainment Scotland fund is rightly targeted at the primary schools that serve our most deprived communities in Scotland. We have allowed parts of our communities to fail in education for far too long; we have done that over years or decades. I have mentioned before and take no pride in mentioning again that there is an east-west divide in my constituency. One area is an area of deprivation and another is obviously an aspiring area in which people are doing a lot better financially. That makes a difference in young people’s attainment and what they do in education.
With the national improvement framework and the attainment advisers, we have the opportunity to ensure that we systematically get the resource to the right child at the right time. The attainment adviser’s job will be to ensure that they get that resource. When Education Scotland came to the Education and Culture Committee, it mentioned that, if extra funding or resource was needed, the attainment adviser would be able to find ways to do things nationally and work with other local authorities in the area.