Meeting of the Parliament 04 March 2026 [Draft]
Presiding Officer,
“There is no doubt that Scottish education can rightly claim many distinguished achievements in its long history, for which we have been admired throughout the world. However, the Parliament should be in no doubt about the concern among today’s employers that in some areas we are failing to live up to that reputation, given our inability to produce a workforce that is adequately skilled to cope with the demands of the 21century.
In particular, it is deeply worrying that the CBI, in its recent manifesto for the elections, highlighted the fact that it is now commonplace for the Scottish business community to spend an unacceptably high percentage of its … training budget on what is, in effect, remedial education … rather than on new skills and on ensuring that Scotland is better able to compete on the international stage. The reality is that the basic levels of reading, writing and arithmetic of too many of our school leavers is … not good enough”.—[Official Report, 30 May 2007; c 214-5.]
All those words are a direct quote from my maiden speech in the Parliament on 30 May 2007. I genuinely regret that they are just as relevant today as they were back then. Despite a few improvements in some aspects of Scottish education, our schools overall are not doing nearly as well as they should be, for the reasons that have already been set out by previous speakers.
In that maiden speech, I went on to highlight what I felt should be done to improve matters. I have not really changed my views in the intervening time. Before I offer some final thoughts before standing down, I will repeat one comment that was made by Ian Hughes from the Construction Industry Training Board at the Finance and Public Administration Committee just yesterday. He noted the size of the vast pool of potential talent in our young people and how colleges are doing well to try to harness that. He then said that, from the employers’ point of view, there are not enough young people coming through schools and FE with the competency level that is needed, which often relates to poor attitude and poor discipline—not turning up on time, missing transport or asking to leave early without a valid excuse.
That, to me, is just as serious an issue as the concerns about attainment levels. It relates to something else that I mentioned in my maiden speech; namely, that we need to do far more to prevent too many of our young people from becoming disengaged at school, because that is when the poor discipline sets in.
In what is my last contribution to an education debate, I want to leave the Parliament with the following thoughts. Schools should be an opportunity for every single young person to reach their potential, whatever their abilities and whatever their background. Every single child is good at something, and it is the job of the school, in conjunction with the child and their parents, carers and guardians, to identify and nurture that capability. For many children, that might not be something that they find in the classroom, but something that they find in the field of extracurricular activity.
At the risk of repeating what I said at the time of the passing of my Schools (Residential Outdoor Education) (Scotland) Bill, why on earth do we not learn the lessons from what works well to motivate young people and deliver the best outcomes? If we learn those lessons, we will radically improve the levels of resilience, self-esteem and confidence, and, as a direct result, improve attainment, attendance and behaviour. If we do so, we will raise aspiration across the board and put an end to the mediocrity and negativity in the education system that too often affects the lives of our young people.