Hansard

We come to the chamber today to debate the Education (Scotland) Bill in its final form and, in all likelihood, to pass the bill at decision time tonight. I have said it before and I will say again: the first step towards solving a problem is recognising that there is a problem. I welcome the fact that the Government is acting now, almost nine years after it took office.

Any attempt to close the attainment gap is welcome, but we believe that the legislation could be so much more ambitious. However, where the Government has shown some ambition, there are serious questions about the practicalities of delivery and the intent behind it, given the ever-reducing budgets of the education departments in our local councils.

We have set out areas in which we feel the bill could have been improved: there should be a specific focus on looked-after children, we should review the resources that are available to support closing the attainment gap when new powers on taxation become available, we should re-enter internationally renowned benchmarking, and we should set targets on reducing the literacy attainment gap. As I said during the debates on amendments, the Government owes a particular duty of care to children in care because they are our children. The Government should be judged by how it supports the most vulnerable people in our society, and they do not come much more vulnerable than young people in care. The system is failing those children but, on the face of it, the bill does nothing to address that.

We have consistently called for the Government to adopt our fair start fund by using the new powers that are coming to Parliament to raise to 50p the rate of income tax on people who earn more than £150,000. Rory Mair, the previous chief executive of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities said:

“why are we keeping tax the same and making public service cuts? That’s the very definition of an austerity budget.”

That is a description of the austerity budget that the Government will deliver tomorrow. We feel that the Government should have made a commitment to increase the level of taxes that are paid by the wealthiest people in our country to support those who need it most. Our fair start fund would target resources over and above what the Government has allocated to the attainment Scotland fund and would, crucially, follow the child.

We welcome the Government’s ambition to close the attainment gap, but there is still a big question mark over how it will be achieved. The attainment fund should be used to close the gap, but thousands of pupils across the country are missing out on support. Under the plans, more than 1,500 schools in Scotland will get no extra support to close the gap between the richest and the rest. With £500 million of cuts to local services, including our schools, coming in the Government’s budget, there is a real risk that pupils who are already at a disadvantage will get left even further behind.

Figures from the Improvement Service have shown that the average spend per primary school pupil in 2010-11 was £5,214, but that has now dropped to £4,653 in 2015-16, which is a £561 drop. In the light of the further cuts to local government budgets, it is hard to see how education departments will be able to make real inroads into tackling educational inequality.

As regards international testing, with the introduction of the national improvement framework and the additional data from testing, we felt that the data could have been collected and constructed in a way that aligned with international benchmarks in the studies that we mentioned in amendment 39—the trends in international mathematics and science study, or TIMSS, and the progress in international reading literacy study, or PIRLS. That would have allowed us to compare ourselves with leading education providers in other countries. Given what the cabinet secretary said previously about not wanting to restrict the number of studies, it will be interesting to see exactly in what wide range of international studies the Government now decides to participate.

The Government could also have been more ambitious in the bill in relation to closing the attainment gap. We suggested a target of 95 per cent of children hitting targets for literacy by 2025 to reduce the attainment gap. Just now, 12 per cent of pupils are not reading well by the time they finish primary school. Our target would have built on existing goals and clearly demonstrated the Government’s ambition to close the gap.

The national improvement framework was brought into the bill at a late stage. It could probably take up a debate on its own but I will touch on it briefly. The framework sets out what the Government feels are the key drivers of improvement: school leadership, teacher professionalism, parental engagement, assessment of children’s progress, school improvement and performance information.

It is difficult to disagree with the Government’s conclusions, but I cannot help but wonder whether that document was drafted in a bubble—a bubble that ignores the reality of deep cuts to education budgets by this Government, which ignores the concerns of the teaching profession over workload and which ignores the question that has been asked repeatedly about how the Government will prevent national test data from being used to compile crude national league tables.

I agree with the section in the framework on parental involvement, which is about improving

“the offer available to parents and families to help their children to progress in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing.”

Where it falls apart is where it goes on to talk about schools working in partnership with community learning professionals to achieve that. Councils up and down the country are considering wiping out entire community learning and development departments just to keep schools open.

We will support the bill at decision time because anything that raises the issue of the attainment gap and at least starts to describe the problem is better than nothing at all, but we feel that the Government could have been so much bolder, so much braver and so much more ambitious when it comes to making sure that every child in Scotland has an equal chance in life.