Meeting of the Parliament 15 May 2019
It is worth going back to what the First Minister said, when she started in office, about education being a priority. Key interventions were mentioned in her first-person piece in the Daily Record in May 2015 and in a speech, to which Tavish Scott referred, given at Wester Hailes education centre in August that year. The Daily Record piece was where the First Minister said:
“I have a sacred responsibility ... to make sure every young person in our land gets the same chance I had”.
She also said there that
“making sure the Scottish education system becomes, genuinely, one of the best in the world will be a driving and defining priority of my Government.”
In her speech at the WHEC, she told us that she wanted to close the attainment gap completely. We are therefore entitled to ask, four years later, how that is going.
In the Daily Record, the First Minister made much of the fact that fewer young people were leaving school with no qualifications at all. However, four years on, that trend has reversed and now more young people leave school with nothing at all. The numbers are small, but they matter just as much as the numbers of those who get five highers. I know that the Government will say that the young people move on to positive destinations, but as long as those include exploitative zero-hours work, that is not an acceptable answer.
Meanwhile, the evidence shows that the curriculum in our schools is narrowing, with some subjects in danger of disappearing altogether. I do not know whether the First Minister studied French, German or art in S4; she might have, but today’s pupils are very much in danger of not having the same opportunities that she had. As for those who go on to highers, yes, more of them are achieving five highers, but teachers and educationalists tell us that most of that progress came before the new national exams were introduced and that choices are now narrowing at higher level too, pass rates are falling and there is a significant decline, to which Mr Scott referred, in the numbers of those gaining highers in critical subjects like modern languages or science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects.
Back in 2015, the First Minister promised to invest in teacher numbers, announced funding to close the attainment gap and said that she was going to track progress with new standardised tests. However, four years later, there are still 3,000 fewer teachers than we had 12 years ago. Mr Scott is right that the increase that we have seen of around 1,000 teachers has been funded through attainment money and that most of those jobs are temporary contracts.
As for the standardised tests, what a shambles those have been. The education secretary tells us that they are not meant to provide national data at all, while teachers tell us that they provide no useful information to them. Meanwhile, the Government has abolished the measures of attainment that we had, which means that educationalists now tell us that we have no way of measuring attainment in core skills such as literacy and numeracy. After four years, therefore, the Government has left us with no way to judge it on its sacred responsibility, has failed to restore teacher numbers and is presiding over a narrowing of the curriculum that is seeing the number of young people with no qualifications on the rise.
Our amendment points to the core problem, which has not been addressed: since 2010-11, spending per primary pupil has fallen by £427 and in secondary it has fallen by £265 per pupil. We must be clear that our teachers are doing a great job and that our pupils do us proud. However, they do that in the face of less money, fewer teachers, bigger classes and multilevel teaching; in the context of unwanted and unnecessary reforms; and, above all, in the face of cuts to core budgets. The additional funding that was designed to close the attainment gap now has to be used to fill funding gaps instead of narrowing the attainment gap.
Our schools are certainly not failing, but that is despite and not because of this Government’s education policy, which certainly is failing.
I move amendment S5M-17280.1, after “retention,” to insert:
“and budget decisions, especially with regard to the funding of local government,”.
16:10Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.
- S5M-17280.1 Education Motion