Meeting of the Parliament 25 October 2018
Presiding Officer, there are a number of points in there and I will need to take time to deal with them.
First, I do believe that the will of the Parliament is important, and I am trying to address the will of the Parliament. In my statement today, I have set out how I intend to respect the will of the Parliament by addressing different components of the motion that Liz Smith herself lodged.
One element of that motion was a call to “reconsider the evidence”. I propose to reconsider the evidence by instituting an independent review—I am respecting the will of the Parliament to do that.
However, I must ensure—and I am the only person in this chamber who has this duty—that I do not act in a fashion that disrespects educational performance and the approaches that are put in place to support the needs of young people the length and breadth of the country. That is my duty as education secretary.
Liz Smith asked what evidence compelled me to believe that assessments of four and five-year-olds should be undertaken. The custom and practice of the 27 out of 32 local authorities in Scotland who had done exactly that for many, many years, without a word of objection, was part of what I believed to be important. There was also an important enhancement in the assessments that we put in place, which was the ability to support teachers the length and breadth of the country by providing advice on the achievement of consistent standards across the country, which was missing from the independent schemes that were being taken forward by individual local authorities.
Liz Smith mentioned my comments at my party conference. I described the Opposition parties as being guilty of political opportunism—I specifically described the Conservatives in that way. In the parliamentary debate, I set out precisely why I feel that there has been political opportunism, when I said that the Conservatives had tried to create the impression that at no stage had they ever supported P1 assessments, when in fact they had done so. That is why I said those things.
What I am trying to do today is to move us on from the political debate and to concentrate on the educational arguments. It is the duty of all members of the Parliament to focus on those questions.