Meeting of the Parliament 02 February 2016
You keep changing the amount of time, Presiding Officer.
Mark Griffin made a very interesting point when he opened for the Labour Party. When we look at a bill, we have to ask what it is for, what it is trying to do and what problems it is trying to address. The Education (Scotland) Bill, which we will support at decision time, is a little mixed in terms of success.
There have been several problems with the bill. Some relate to language and a lack of clarity in the drafting in various sections and in some parts of the policy memorandum, where different terminology has been used in different places, although the intention has been that the meaning should be the same..
It is also absolutely clear that there has been a lack of consultation on several key aspects of the bill, which has taken away from some of the very good intentions that span it.
I will deal a little bit with testing. As I said when we looked at the amendments earlier, we are very firm in our commitment to the process of testing, because we think that there has to be consistency and an ensured standard that is understandable and acceptable to parents and teachers and which allows us to draw down the important data that we need to measure a particular child’s progress.
The bill is not about having more testing. I think that some of our recent debate has clouded the actual intentions with regard to testing, and I believe firmly that the intention is to have a mixture of diagnostic testing and some of the normative, formative testing that already happens in schools. At the moment, we do not have the consistency that we need to address whether our educational standards are improving. As Mark Griffin said, that is a very important aspect of raising attainment across the board and trying to narrow the attainment gap. Nobody is in any doubt about that, but the terminology that describes how we go about achieving that in some parts of the bill is difficult.
There is no doubt that there are great pressures on local authorities. My colleague Mary Scanlon spoke about the Gaelic community. The bill does some great things, but at the end of the day it is very difficult for some local authorities to hire Gaelic teachers, who are absolutely essential if we are to provide Gaelic-medium education.
We have spoken quite a lot about additional support needs. That is a crucial issue, too, but it is wound up in complexity—sometimes, it is a legal complexity—and that has made the bill difficult.
The intentions behind the bill are very good. It is a pity that it is a mixed bill: it tries to do an awful lot of catch-up in areas where post-legislative scrutiny has perhaps not been particularly good, and we have used it as a catch-all for some very important issues.
There are lots of good intentions behind the bill, which is why we support it, but there are some key lessons for the Scottish Government on how it should approach the bill. Two of the most important are that it should ensure, first, that the stakeholders—those who will deliver—are properly and fully consulted, and, secondly, that we have great clarity of language about what we are trying to do.
17:44