Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2024
That is a very interesting point, and I am grateful for the intervention. As I suggested earlier, there are significant challenges facing the Scottish education system. I do not think that it would be right in a debate such as this for me to go into what I believe some of those are, but it is the responsibility of the Parliament to address those challenges by setting them out clearly and trying to work in a cross-party way to find the solutions. I agree that, where success such as we see at Dunoon grammar school is apparent, it absolutely deserves to be celebrated and aired in order that lessons can be learned.
We heard about some of the school’s successes earlier. One of the results was that the school won the T4 Education world’s best school prize for community collaboration in 2022. There are only five prize categories, and they are open worldwide. To put it in context, the year that Dunoon grammar school won that prize, the runners-up were from India and Brazil. It is truly incredible.
We have heard about some of the key factors that led to that success, and we will no doubt hear about them further. They can be summarised as truly collaborative partnerships in the community, an outward-looking approach and a focus on how sectors can learn from one another and apply that learning. From the report, from what we will hear in the debate and from the various commentaries that I have looked at when researching my remarks, one thing is clear: at the heart of all this is the headteacher, David Mitchell, who joins us in the public gallery, and who has driven that approach. He has even been described—rightly, it seems—as a “local hero”, although, of course, many others have also contributed to the school’s success. Jenni Minto mentioned two others in her intervention earlier.
I will close with the words of Gillian Hunt, as they embody what we are discussing today. Writing for Reform Scotland last year, in “Making effective collaboration in Scotland a reality”, she said:
“I challenge the new First Minister and their Education Secretary to refocus attention on education, and to ensuring that all of our children and young people succeed. I urge them to recognise the need to create a new system, an ecosystem and to actively promote and support the contribution of third sector organisations to this ecosystem.”
That seems to me to be inarguable, and I look forward very much to hearing the cabinet secretary’s response to that challenge later this evening.
17:14