Meeting of the Parliament 28 June 2017
My party will be supporting the motion in the name of John Swinney, for the simple reason that it adopts the line of argument that the Scottish Conservatives have long held about why the status quo in school governance is no longer a credible option. However, I make it clear that we do not believe that the proposed reforms go far enough to make good what is wrong in Scottish schools, which is why I have lodged an amendment to the motion.
Despite the reluctance within some ranks of the educational establishment, John Swinney knows only too well that change is now essential. That is because the evidence is incontrovertible. The persistent and long-term literacy and numeracy problems for far too many of our young people, the fundamental weaknesses in the delivery of the curriculum for excellence, and too few teachers to serve the best interests of our young people—felt most acutely in some subject areas and by those who have additional support needs—are the three main areas of concern. Two of those are systemic, which is why no one can possibly argue that all is well with Scottish education.
Before we get told that this is the fault of negative media coverage, let us examine the facts and go back to the cabinet secretary’s point about the OECD’s comprehensive review of Scottish schools. The OECD liked many of the attitudes in and the general ethos of Scottish schools, but it also said that we were far removed from being able to deliver on our potential. We know all about the PISA scores and the literacy and numeracy problems, and we know that Scotland’s poorer children are two to three years behind children from more affluent backgrounds. We also know that there are too few teachers and about the difficulties of encouraging people to come into teacher training, and we know about the delivery problem with the curriculum for excellence.
That is precisely why the review of governance is so important. It offers the opportunity to change where real power lies when it comes to decision making. For far too long, there have been too many obstacles in the way of teachers who want to get on with the job that they are trained to do and of heads who want more autonomy as a means to deliver much better results for their schools. On too many occasions, they have felt trapped by myriad directives—some from national Government, some from local government and some from the education agencies—not always with the same message. Those have prevented headteachers from having freedom to take decisions in their own school; they have constrained choice and diversity; and they have led to a culture of conformity—all of which, I believe, are a large part of what has gone wrong. The principle of equity, to which we all aspire, is not the same—and should not be interpreted as being the same—as uniformity of provision.