Meeting of the Parliament 11 September 2024
I declare an interest in that my eldest daughter is a teacher. She is head of guidance as well as being a physical education teacher.
When I came into Parliament, I led with the statement that I thought that education was the solution to our health and welfare problems, and I believe that even more now. In fact, as I have said in the chamber many times, I think that education should be the cornerstone of every portfolio. However, the biggest disappointment that I have experienced in this Parliament has been the Scottish Government’s failure to drive the changes in education and health that it could have made, given that those portfolios are entirely within the Scottish Government’s control. It could have been bold, taken its own path and delivered solutions to some of the country’s biggest issues, but it has seemed content to stumble along behind the crumbling excuse, “It’s not our fault.”
The Government’s usual fallback position is, “We need more money,” but here is the thing. If you invest in education, you are investing in health, justice, welfare and the economy—the economy that is required to pay for all the services that we need.
We need to define the issues we are trying to address. In education, those are poor physical and mental health, declining behavioural standards, declining attendance and the attainment gap, as well as hunger and malnutrition. Today, we are talking about free school meals for all primary school children. If we are tackling malnutrition and hunger for children coming into school, why are we not talking about free school breakfasts? Logic tells me that that is the meal that we should be targeting, although I am not against also having free school lunches for those children from the most deprived areas.
If we want the uptake of free school meals to improve and the queues outside the chip shop to go down, we need to offer pupils more reasons to be in school. I have put forward the idea of offering some kind of activity prior to the start of the school day that happens to have breakfast included and of offering extracurricular activities at lunchtime to keep children in school and active. Those initiatives would tackle all the issues that I previously highlighted and the costs associated with them.
The Scottish Government’s approach is one of crisis management rather than tackling the long-term needs of our educational environment. It has been funding increases in salary by cutting support staff and reneging on a manifesto promise of free school meals.