Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 September 2020
I know that the Tory motion is designed to wind up the SNP—it seems to have worked with Mr Swinney—but it points to an inconvenient truth for SNP members, because all the evidence shows that they have consistently prioritised the pursuit of independence over education.
Since 2007, we have had not just an actual referendum and a white paper on independence, but countless discussion documents, draft bills, bills, consultation papers, commissions, consultations on draft bills and more white papers, and now here we are with the machinery of government putting its shoulder to the wheel of yet another draft referendum bill.
Meanwhile, those same years have seen broken promises on teacher numbers, class sizes, student debt and closing the attainment gap. Cuts in teacher numbers, cuts in support staff, cuts in additional support specialists, rising class sizes, falling literacy and numeracy rates compared with those in other countries and in previous years, falling higher pass rates year on year, and pupils routinely being taught in classes of two, three, or even four different levels.
Those years have also seen an attainment gap that stubbornly refuses to close, except through Mr Swinney’s ever more convoluted ways of trying to measure it. What is more, not only has the Government failed on the attainment gap, but it is failing on the causes of the attainment gap.
Mr Swinney is correct that it is poverty that underlies that attainment gap. There is no doubt that success in education is the best route out of poverty. If there is a magic key to unlock greater opportunity and a better life, it is education. Equity in education means that we must provide every additional support that we can to the pupils who face the greatest barriers to educational success, to help them overcome those barriers and achieve.
However—in this Mr Swinney is right, too—schools cannot by themselves rid society of poverty. If we are to eliminate the systemic poverty-related attainment gap, we must eradicate poverty itself. That is why I will move the amendment in my name.
I say that the Government is failing because the evidence shows that by the age of three, children from higher-income families already outperform those from low-income households, and by the age of five, there is a 10-month gap in problem-solving development and a 13-month gap in vocabulary. In the struggle between poverty and education, education is running to catch up from the word go.
One in four children in Scotland lives in poverty and faces those barriers to educational success, and there are 50,000 more of them than there were just five years ago. Much of that is, indeed, to do with welfare reforms and austerity programmes driven by Conservative Governments in Westminster, but the Scottish Government’s poverty commissioner has repeatedly told the Government that it is failing those children, too. We see the consequences in their mental and physical health and in the attainment gap.