Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 26 May 2020
One of the steps that I have taken during the crisis is to discuss with local authorities the need to maintain contact with some of the most vulnerable young people in our society. There are two elements to that, the first being the children and young people who are in our child protection system. In the most recent data, more than 90 per cent of those young people had been contacted by local authority staff in the previous seven days. That picture has been broadly consistent throughout the pandemic, and I pay tribute to local authorities for the effectiveness of their contact with those young people.
The other element is the work that is under way in individual schools to maintain contact with young people. I have taken part in a number of events with schools over the past few weeks—remotely, I might add—and one of the points that we have been discussing is that schools have demonstrated over the course of the pandemic that they do not have to occupy buildings to retain their communities.
When schools have not been able to use their buildings and infrastructure, they have successfully reached out to maintain the school community through the connections that exist between staff, pupils and their families. I can provide the example of a school in my constituency with which I was in touch last week through a parent council discussion. The volume and quality of teacher-pupil engagement by that school was very high, indeed. In the course of the past seven days, I have also heard of similar examples from Christine Grahame’s constituency.
On a sustained basis, teachers are maintaining contact with pupils. It is harder to do so now, but, where there are good strong relationships between teachers and families, that is bearing fruit in the context of the current pandemic. Scottish education is the better for having that strength in its foundations.