Meeting of the Parliament 06 March 2024 [Draft]
I apologise for arriving a wee bit late to the debate, Deputy Presiding Officer.
Two weeks ago, the EIS survey of nearly 800 of its members in Aberdeen found that almost half had reported daily violence and more than a third had been physically assaulted. Those incidents are a warning that something has gone badly wrong in education at the hands of a Government that once said that it was its priority.
Back in December, the cabinet secretary came to the chamber to speak on the issue, and, during that exchange, I believed that the Government had finally recognised the scale of the challenge and I hoped that that was a signal that it was ready to act.
I have since come to realise that that hope was misplaced, because, since then, we have seen scant action. Teachers, school staff and pupils continue to be distressed. No guidance has been issued on consequences, data collection or support from senior management for staff who are affected. Despite questions from across the chamber, we have little detail of the national action plan that the Government promised other than that it is expected in the spring. By that point, we will be nearing the end of another academic year, and a whole year will have been wasted since we first debated the issue in the chamber. Worst of all, the Government has cut education and local authority budgets, leaving teachers facing job losses, support staff without much-needed additional resource and pupils without mentor programmes that help them to improve their life chances.
Last week’s report should have been the final jolt into action that was needed. However, the cabinet secretary not only said that she had not read it but tried to pass the buck to the council. The situation in schools is not isolated to one area of Scotland. It is systemic, and I believe that the cabinet secretary knows that. This was a moment to show leadership, to wake up, to turn up and step up, and to give the generation of young people who are being failed the respect that they deserve. However, I am afraid that the Government turned away.
We have had three debates on the topic in the chamber, and not one of them has been led by the Government. Yet again, the answers have been left to the Opposition. I accept the cabinet secretary’s acknowledgment that the situation is difficult and will not be resolved overnight, but the hard reality is that, if the cabinet secretary does nothing, it will not be resolved at all. As a teacher who wrote in Tes at the weekend said, there will be no teachers or staff left to get it right for every child.
The stakes could not be higher. The future of our young people and their education is at risk. So, without the office of cabinet secretary or a civil service behind me, Scottish Labour has done the Government’s work again. We met pupils, parents, staff, teachers and unions. We listened and we showed leadership. We have made it clear that teachers must feel safe at work, that pupils must be able to go to school and feel safe to learn, and that parents must be able to leave their children at the school gate without worrying about their safety. We would take a zero-tolerance approach to violence and poor behaviour and to the impossible situation that the Government has created in schools, which leads to it.
Just as behaviour has consequences, so, too, do the Government’s cuts and actions. Its failure to deliver the promised non-contact time, to reduce class sizes, to end the burden of excessive workload and to implement the recommendations of the Morgan review have made things worse. The Government should start there. It should also gather national and anonymised data to create an inspection indicator for teacher wellbeing, so that we can properly understand the scale of the problem.