Meeting of the Parliament 27 April 2017
As I said, we recognise the challenge in teacher recruitment. Scotland is not unique in that regard. Kezia Dugdale might not want to listen to this, but that is why in 2017-18 we are making resources available to train an additional 371 teachers, and it is why the General Teaching Council for Scotland has a number of initiatives under way to encourage people back into teaching and to encourage new people into teaching. Those are the actions that we are taking to tackle what is a problem and a challenge for many countries. Of course, we are doing that in conjunction with our national improvement framework, our attainment challenge and our attainment fund, which is putting extra resources into the hands of headteachers, because our commitment to raising attainment and closing the attainment gap is absolute. We will get on with the hard work of doing it, leaving Labour, as usual, carping from the sidelines.