Hansard

Like colleagues, I am grateful to Tavish Scott for bringing a debate on education before Parliament this afternoon.

It is a continuing frustration for many of us that education is rarely something that we discuss on Government time, which means that Opposition parties must use our sparse opportunities to bring up one of the most important public policy issues in Scotland.

It is important not least because education is one of the many areas where the shameful levels of inequality in our society are on display. We all believe that every young person should be given the same opportunities to succeed, but we know that that is not the case in this country. Pupils from wealthier areas are more likely to succeed, both by academic measures and in wider life outcomes, than their counterparts from more deprived communities.

Many of the underlying reasons for that lie outwith our schools and at the feet of the United Kingdom Government. Child poverty is growing again, largely because of a cruel UK welfare system that is designed to punish rather than support. However, the Scottish Government is not powerless. It has the capacity to do something genuinely transformative.

As the Greens set out last year in our paper “Level the Playing Field: Education for All”, policies such as topping up child benefit by £5 per week or extending free bus travel to young people will have a huge impact on their educational outcomes. We know that from experience elsewhere. The Government wasted the first half of this parliamentary session on an education governance bill that was destined to go nowhere. Now that that has been indefinitely shelved, there is time to do something much more meaningful.

In Scotland today, there are about 3,000 fewer teachers than there were in 2007. The challenges of recruitment and retention are disproportionately felt by schools in our most deprived communities and, in large part, are driven by issues of pay and workload. I marched with the EIS in Glasgow when it brought close to 30,000 people on to the streets for its fair pay campaign. The Greens welcome the agreement that was reached between unions, councils and the Scottish Government.

However, pay and recruitment are not the only issues. Time and again, we are told of the huge issues that face young people with additional support needs and those who are trying to provide that support. The number of pupils with identified additional support needs has risen to one in four, while the number of ASN teachers and support staff has fallen by hundreds. Now the staff census is merging additional support needs and classroom assistants into one generalised category, which makes it near impossible to get an accurate picture of the number of specialist staff who support children with additional needs.

Children with those needs have statutory rights but, for young people, their parents and carers and for schools and local authorities, the framework can be difficult to navigate. Our Education and Skills Committee has taken evidence on local councils not fully understanding what is required of them or what options are available to them.

Co-ordinated support plans are critical and they are where much of the confusion lies. The plans set out clearly what support pupils with particularly profound needs should receive. Crucially, as the only statutory plan, they are backed by recourse to the Additional Support Needs Tribunal for Scotland. We are not short of testimonials from young people and parents who have gone through experiences that are nothing short of traumatic but who, for the lack of a CSP, have had little opportunity for recourse. Although the number of pupils identified with an additional need has increased to almost 200,000, the number of CSPs has dropped to just under 2,000. That means that only 1 per cent of young people with identified additional needs have a co-ordinated support plan.

Anecdotally, it seems that, when councils do understand CSPs, they are reluctant to use them, given the resource implications. Although the anecdotal evidence is substantial, we need quite urgently to get a picture of what is going on. We have called for that in the Parliament on a number of occasions, so we welcome the Government’s commitment to review the use of CSPs. We expect the review to establish why the number of plans has fallen at the same time as the number of young people with diagnosed additional needs has grown markedly. We expect the Government to immediately follow the review with action to rectify the problem.

Addressing CSPs alone will not fix every problem in the education system, but it is the right thing to do and we have asked for it, so the Greens will vote for the amendment. It is a step forward for the rights of some of our most vulnerable young people and I am glad that the debate has given us the opportunity to take that step. I hope that the Scottish Government will recognise the need and the demand for it to go much further.