Meeting of the Parliament 18 May 2022
No, not just now.
The UK Government was way ahead. The evidence was there, and I was going on about it. I pleaded with the SNP Government to follow suit, but it was incapable of doing so. Meanwhile, the poverty-related attainment gap grew wider, and it is still growing, despite what the cabinet secretary said. The cabinet secretary’s complacency at this morning’s meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee was staggering. She was grasping at little statistics to try to prove that, somehow, the gap had closed before the dreaded pandemic came along and blew away all the progress. That is not the case—none of that happened. If we look at the numbers, we see that the gap was growing wider rather than narrowing.
Initially, we had concerns about the approach of having nine challenge authorities, and we wanted the money to go across the country. We were in favour of the money being targeted, as with the pupil premium in England, at pupils who needed it, wherever they were in the country. However, as the system has been set up, the structures developed, the staff employed and the best practice developed in those nine local authorities, it seems absolutely nuts to pull away the rug just when they are managing to make a little bit of progress. For the want of another phrase, we should be levelling up, not levelling down with the challenge funding for those authorities.
The approach is typical of the Government. We have short-term decisions after micromanagement after depressing narrative. That is what the Government is about. Rather than make closing the attainment gap its top priority and defining mission in the shorter term, it now talks about the longer term. It is a depressing story from the SNP and, I have to say, a depressing response from the education secretary. We need bold action and the funds to go with it if closing the attainment gap is to be our defining mission. However, I am afraid that we will not get that from the education secretary or the SNP Government.