Meeting of the Parliament 11 December 2025
I applaud Karen Adam on that point—or actually her father. People want access to their human rights, and this is their Parliament so they should be able to access everything that happens in here. We recognise Gaelic and BSL. To appallingly misquote a former MP of East Lothian, if we cannot come up with a system whereby the Parliament is accessible to everyone, what we are actually doing is closing the Parliament off to members of the Scottish community, which is wrong. I am very grateful for the member’s intervention.
I will turn back to education and the challenge that our BSL and deaf community suffers from. On a number of occasions, we have heard about the challenge—the numbers of teachers who are BSL qualified, or even BSL competent within that, and the support that is available. We have spoken about the need for a pipeline of interpreters and teachers.
I remember the 1+2 foreign language policy and the joy that I heard when Glasgow picked up BSL as one of the languages that it wanted to teach its children. I go back to Miles Briggs’s comment about watching children in a classroom learning BSL. The fun of being able to swear at the teacher, particularly a teacher who does not know BSL—even if it is just by using the alphabet—has amused a significant number of children who I had the pleasure of teaching. We have heard about the joy that young people have in discovering something new and being able to communicate with fellow young people, even if, on occasion, that can be quite mischievous.
The committee heard evidence about the increase in numbers and the fact that we need a work plan for how we are going to develop the pipeline of BSL interpreters and teachers. I know that the Scottish Government is starting work on that, and it would be interesting to hear how it sees that process being rolled out, above and beyond the challenge for young people in Scotland to speak other languages. Given that, along with Gaelic, BSL is a language of Scotland, they have a right to speak it. It is a significant community’s first language, and we need to address that.
We can deliver for this community, but it will require the Scottish Government to listen to the voices of BSL users, experts and the deaf community as a whole. It is also an obligation on the Parliament, and I will pick up the challenge that the Deputy First Minister was concerned that I would throw at her. It rests on the Parliament as a whole to create and drive the momentum for change that this community rightly demands—and which, frankly, Scotland deserves—in order to be a better place.