Hansard

Education must be at the heart of the recovery. It is a great liberal cause. School closures and remote learning were never going to be easy, but teachers, pupils and parents have worked flat out to make it work, as best they can. It has been a time of great disruption and worry, and it will take time for education to bounce back.

I want to focus on what children and young people really need. We should be making every hour that is spent in school count for more. More resources are needed in every classroom, cuts to additional support must be reversed and more supported study is needed to help children to work through problems and to consolidate understanding.

If primary 1 children are not ready to start school in August, they should be guaranteed nursery funding, not a £4,500 bill that forces parents to make a decision that is not in the best interests of the child.

This is not about making children sit at desks for longer—it is about the quality of the experience. However, it is clear that Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority cannot be trusted with the critical job of helping the education system to bounce back. Those Scottish Government agencies have let down hard-working teachers, pupils and parents. Members would be hard pressed to find many of them thanking their lucky stars for the help of Education Scotland and the SQA over the past year.

We should remember that, despite months of warnings, the SQA and John Swinney teamed up to create an exam system that crushed ambitions. They concocted an algorithm that penalised pupils from the poorest backgrounds. Teachers were cut out of that process by the SQA and told that their pupil assessments could not be trusted.

We all remember Education Scotland before the pandemic generating 20,000 pages of guidance on curriculum for excellence. It was impossible to navigate. However, during the pandemic, it has gone to the other end of the scale. For long periods, it was totally absent when people needed it most. The Government will say that remote learning was unprecedented—it was. That is when Education Scotland should have been leading with the support that schools required, but it let people down in the first lockdown and has not been much better in the second lockdown.

The job of education recovery is too important to entrust to organisations that were on borrowed time before the pandemic struck. As my motion recalls, both organisations narrowly escaped reform back in 2017.

As members examined forensically in the debate on 29 March 2017, Education Scotland is responsible for what happens in the classroom and for inspecting its implementation. That is a fundamental conflict of interests that did not work then, and certainly does not work now. I want to re-establish the independence of the inspectorate. On the SQA, most importantly we highlighted the total breakdown in trust between it and teachers. That has only become worse.

On that day in 2017, Scottish National Party and Green votes allowed the organisations to drift towards the pandemic without reform. Our definitive call for their overhaul was watered down, then sunk without trace by John Swinney. His amendment today tries to do exactly the same again. Therefore, I am pleased that the Greens are on board, so we can make progress. I thank the Greens for their support today.

The balance in education must change. Out should go centralised bureaucracies, with their token teachers on committees. In must come an education system that is overseen by people with current and direct teaching experience—the teachers who have been bursting with good ideas throughout the pandemic, and who have worked incredibly hard for their pupils. Let us get those experts back in charge.

Last spring, Parliament unanimously backed an independent review by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to get to the bottom of diminishing subject choice and why the education performances of other countries are overtaking ours. I suspect that other members will agree that we probably would not have voted for the review, had the Scottish Government laid bare its true plans. It has the first draft and has timetabled in months in which to “provide comments”. As Keir Bloomer, the architect of curriculum for excellence, told the Sunday Post:

“That is less than objective.”

The OECD review is being advised and shaped by a Scottish practitioners forum. That sounds sensible until we discover that Education Scotland and the SQA dominate that small group—the very bodies whose performance and policies are under the microscope. They are not independent and they are not practitioners, so what on earth are they doing on an advisory practitioners forum? Scottish Liberal Democrats’ freedom of information request found documents stating that the group would be

“considering preliminary findings and supporting development of the report.”

The Government should end the meddling and publish the report now, so that people can judge the First Minister on her stated number 1 priority of education, and we can finally get on with helping Scottish education to bounce back.

I move,

That the Parliament believes that the support, services and decision-making provided by Education Scotland and the SQA have not met the expectations or requirements of hardworking teachers, pupils or parents throughout the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; recalls that serious concerns existed about the performance and structure of these organisations for years before the pandemic struck, including those expressed by Parliament in its resolution on the debate on motion S5M-04920 on 29 March 2017; considers that there is compelling evidence that neither body is fit for purpose and that they have lost the confidence of teachers, pupils and parents, and therefore calls for substantial reform as part of the recovery of education, with Education Scotland separated into independent inspection and policy functions and the SQA to be grounded in the teaching profession and made more accountable, and expresses concern about the reported involvement of both organisations and the Scottish Government in the ongoing OECD review.