Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2025
I am glad that the Labour Party has given us the opportunity to debate the situation in Scotland’s schools, although, frankly, I am depressed and disappointed by its motion. Teachers, support staff and their students all face huge challenges, and Labour had an opportunity to lay out potential solutions to those challenges in its motion. However, the motion does not do that—it represents a wasted opportunity.
The Scottish Greens recognise the challenges in our classrooms, and we have solutions to those challenges. I will start with the issue of teacher workload. Although teaching is a very well-paid profession, there are huge recruitment and retention challenges in the secondary sector. The most common reason that is cited by teachers who are considering leaving the profession is the crushing workload. Much of that workload does not even improve the quality of teaching and learning. It is bureaucratic and entirely unnecessary. A vast system of data collection has been established by national and local government, with the burden falling on overworked classroom teachers.
Let us take the example of standardised tests. The Scottish Greens oppose Scottish national standardised assessments entirely. We believe that they are rooted in a mistrust of teachers, and that the anxiety that they generate is simply not worth the limited data that is collected. In session 5, Parliament voted to scrap them in primary 1 entirely, but the Scottish Government ignored that and went on with them. They cost at least £5 million per year, which is hard to justify when education budgets are so squeezed.
Even if we accept the premise of SNSAs, the mission creep around them has created significant extra workload for teachers. Schools and councils have added their own reporting requirements on top of the core system. Teachers spend more and more of their week generating reports to feed the system, rather than focusing on the quality of their teaching and the needs of their pupils. SNSAs are just one example of the huge variety of data collection demands that are placed on teachers across the country. That is one area in which reform could be delivered quickly and save rather than cost money.
Green MSPs submitted a report to the cabinet secretary two years ago. Based on focus groups with teachers and headteachers from across the country, it laid out examples of unnecessary and inconsistent data collection. We strongly urge the Scottish Government to use that report as the starting point of a discussion with COSLA about how to reduce and standardise data collection in our schools.
Our report also highlighted how the RAG—red, amber, green—system creates an incentive for schools to focus on the amber students, where most of the measurable improvement gains are to be had, effectively acting as a disincentive to support pupils who are struggling and flagged as red. A system that revolves around blunt metrics is one that no longer sees our young people as individuals. That is the opposite of what the curriculum for excellence was supposed to have delivered.
We would also like the 2015 report on tackling bureaucracy to be dusted down and implemented. Many of those issues are not new; we did not need to reinvent the wheel to tackle them. However, we need to trust teachers. That level of trust requires safeguards—not more form filling and reporting but giving teachers the time and space for proper peer review and support.
There are huge strengths in our education system. We should not create a doom loop of political and media commentary. Raising the challenges and putting pressure on both levels of government to solve them is essential. That requires solutions. Our school staff and students deserve nothing less.
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