Meeting of the Parliament 24 May 2023
I would really like to make some progress. I am now seven minutes in and have a number of other points that I would like to make—apologies.
That group includes representatives from COSLA and teaching associations, parents and carers, and it is jointly chaired by COSLA. We do not need another working group at this point; we need a call to action. Indeed, the chair of the National Parent Forum of Scotland told BBC Radio Scotland this morning that we need a wider community approach. We cannot expect schools to solve all those problems on their own.
The Government amendment proposes to convene a summit on behaviour in our schools, bringing together parents and carers, local councils, our teacher professional associations, young people and wider partners.
We need to trust our teachers, and we need to support them, and we have heard that point made in the debate today. That is why our councils, who have a statutory responsibility to deliver education, have a key role to play.
We should not tolerate a blame culture in our schools, as I discussed recently at the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association’s annual conference. If a member of staff is struggling with a challenging class, as Mr Kerr alluded to, they should not be made to feel that they are the problem; they should be supported.
Last week I addressed Parliament on our behaviour in Scottish schools research, which is currently under way. That research is critically important in building our understanding of exactly what is happening in our classrooms, including what underlying factors might be affecting behaviour.
This is the fifth wave of behaviour in Scottish schools research since 2006, and Stephen Kerr is quite right to say that the last one was in 2016. It should have been carried out in 2020, but, because of the pandemic, it was not. Since I have been in post, I have asked whether it is possible to have the information earlier. It is not, because of the way in which the data is gathered, but in the interim I accept the challenge to Government that we need to act.
The Government is already providing more than £2 million to support the delivery of a wide range of violence prevention activities in schools and communities. When incidents occur in schools, we accept that there should be an appropriate and consistent method of recording them. If members have not already appraised themselves of the inspection that Her Majesty’s inspector of education carried out in 2019, in relation to bullying, I ask them to please do so, because it shows a mixed picture in relation to how such incidents are recorded in schools. I suspect that there would be a similarly mixed picture on the recording of violent incidents in schools and more challenging behaviour generally. We need to address that at the summit.
I accept that the Opposition has gathered freedom of information data from individual local councils, but there are some challenges with that—for example, not all local authorities provided data in response to the request. I am also aware that councils use a variety of different approaches to gathering data on violent incidents—as I alluded to. We need to be mindful that the robust data that we gather from BISSR will give us a more accurate picture of the national approach.
Presiding Officer, I am conscious of the time.