Meeting of the Parliament 08 May 2024
I will start with an admission that much of what I am about to say is exactly the same as what I said last night, when we covered similar issues.
The Scottish Greens and I believe that colleges have a critical role to play in building a fairer, greener Scotland and in delivering on the key missions on which we all agree, whether that is the climate action that is required to hit net zero or tackling child poverty. Education is a social and individual good. It can be genuinely transformational, but we should not pretend that a good education will remove all the structural inequalities that people face in society. It is a key ingredient to a successful society, but by success, I am not just talking about gross domestic product or even average incomes, although the latter are clearly important. A successful society is one in which we are collectively able to meet everybody’s needs and to give every individual the opportunity of a happy, healthy life.
The ability of our colleges to play their role in that has been hugely held back by a decade of chronic problems in industrial relations, in particular. It is an example of class inequality in this country that those problems have gone on for so long with so little attention, whether from political figures or the media, compared with far less frequent industrial action in schools or in the university sector.
What would the Scottish Greens do differently? For a start, I will not join in with the hypocrisy of those members who voted against raising more money for public services via progressive taxation or who did not propose any other alternative savings options but are somehow demanding more money. We have just seen an example of one Labour member making a proposal to reallocate money and that being slapped down by the Labour front bench.
There are other options that we can take. For a start, on fair work conditionality, the Scottish Funding Council should absolutely make it a condition that, for colleges to receive funding, they should eliminate zero-hours contracts and implement pay ratios and other fair work conditions. That would demonstrate to the lowest-paid staff in particular that they were valued.