The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-15221, in the name of Angela Constance, on the Education (Scotland) Bill.
17:04
I am pleased to open the stage 3 debate on the Education (Scotland) Bill. I thank members for their contributions this afternoon, and I thank the Finance Committee, the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee and particularly the Education and Culture Committee for their consideration and scrutiny of the bill as it progressed through the parliamentary process.
The Education (Scotland) Bill is a wide-ranging bill containing measures that are important to key aspects of Scottish education. It forms part of the work that the Government is undertaking to ensure that excellence and equity are embedded throughout our education system. I acknowledge that the bill began life as a much smaller bill that focused primarily on Gaelic-medium education and extending children’s rights in the additional support for learning framework. One of my first acts as Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning was to ensure that the bill was developed to reflect better, and to provide for, the Government’s commitment to raising attainment for all and closing the attainment gap.
At the bill’s introduction and at stage 1, I made it clear that I wanted to make the bill as strong and effective as possible. In order to do that, we listened to the views of members, to the relevant committees in particular and to those who gave evidence throughout the parliamentary process. Accordingly, we lodged a range of amendments at stage 2 to strengthen existing provisions and to introduce important new ones to provide a necessary statutory underpinning to key policy developments from the programme for government. We have made further refinements this afternoon, at stage 3, and I am confident that the bill that is before us today in this final stage will achieve its purpose and will elicit the support of the whole Parliament.
The common thread in the bill’s provisions is the focus on creating an education system that is wholly centred and focused on children’s interests and needs—especially children who have particular interests and needs. The bill places a strong duty on education authorities and ministers to address inequalities of outcome, and it makes explicit the link between those inequalities and socioeconomic disadvantage. That marks a significant milestone for education in this country, in that we are now utterly focused on there being duties on national and local government to act to reduce the impact of inequality and poverty on children’s learning experiences. However, the creation of a new statutory duty is a new stage in a journey to success that will be completed only by effective actions to close the attainment gap.
The bill also anchors in legislation the national improvement framework, which was published on 6 January. It sets out parameters for the framework and how it might be reviewed, the duties on national and local government to provide plans, requirements for regular reporting and—crucially—a requirement for education authorities to publish annual equal opportunities statements. That further ensures a relentless focus on the need to deliver equity for all children in education.
I am acutely aware of the importance of headteachers to the success of our education system, which is why school leadership is one of the six drivers of improvement that are set out in the national improvement framework. The bill includes measures to ensure that every child in Scotland has the right to be educated in a school with a headteacher who has the appropriate knowledge and skills to help them to succeed and to allow the school to flourish.
The Government believes that it is right that the bill protects the number of learning hours that each child should receive. However, a national entitlement should still be flexible enough to meet individual children’s needs and to accommodate varying circumstances, so it is important that we consult fully to reach agreement on what the national entitlement should be.
The bill provides a consistent approach around our collective actions to help to remove barriers to education, to reduce inequality gaps, to raise attainment and to improve children’s health and wellbeing through the provision of school clothing grants. To create further consistency, the bill makes the provision of a free school lunch equally applicable to young children who receive their entitlement to early learning and childcare at partner providers.
The bill also provides a regulation-making power to enable the provision of meals other than a lunch. Our more vulnerable two, three and four-year-olds could receive a breakfast or tea instead of a lunch, if that better suits the time of their session.
True to its roots, the bill also introduces new measures to promote and support Gaelic-medium education. It introduces a right for parents to request the provision of Gaelic-medium primary education in their local area and a presumption that an authority must respond positively to that request unless it would be unreasonable to do so.
Importantly, the bill enhances the rights of children with additional support needs. We have grasped the opportunity that the bill affords to put children’s needs, interests and rights at the heart of our education system.
Although the bill provides an overarching framework, it does not set the detail in stone. Its measures provide scope and opportunity to build consensus and collaboration with teachers, schools, local authorities, Education Scotland, parents, and children and young people, so that we can develop the secondary legislation and guidance that will ensure that we get the detail right on how things will work in practice.
I firmly believe that the bill will help to move Scotland forward in our ambition to embed excellence and equity in education, and in our determination to create a world-class system in which every child has the chance to succeed. I look forward to the debate and urge members to pass the Education (Scotland) Bill.
I move,
That the Parliament agrees that the Education (Scotland) Bill be passed.
17:11
We come to the chamber today to debate the Education (Scotland) Bill in its final form and, in all likelihood, to pass the bill at decision time tonight. I have said it before and I will say again: the first step towards solving a problem is recognising that there is a problem. I welcome the fact that the Government is acting now, almost nine years after it took office.
Any attempt to close the attainment gap is welcome, but we believe that the legislation could be so much more ambitious. However, where the Government has shown some ambition, there are serious questions about the practicalities of delivery and the intent behind it, given the ever-reducing budgets of the education departments in our local councils.
We have set out areas in which we feel the bill could have been improved: there should be a specific focus on looked-after children, we should review the resources that are available to support closing the attainment gap when new powers on taxation become available, we should re-enter internationally renowned benchmarking, and we should set targets on reducing the literacy attainment gap. As I said during the debates on amendments, the Government owes a particular duty of care to children in care because they are our children. The Government should be judged by how it supports the most vulnerable people in our society, and they do not come much more vulnerable than young people in care. The system is failing those children but, on the face of it, the bill does nothing to address that.
We have consistently called for the Government to adopt our fair start fund by using the new powers that are coming to Parliament to raise to 50p the rate of income tax on people who earn more than £150,000. Rory Mair, the previous chief executive of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities said:
“why are we keeping tax the same and making public service cuts? That’s the very definition of an austerity budget.”
That is a description of the austerity budget that the Government will deliver tomorrow. We feel that the Government should have made a commitment to increase the level of taxes that are paid by the wealthiest people in our country to support those who need it most. Our fair start fund would target resources over and above what the Government has allocated to the attainment Scotland fund and would, crucially, follow the child.
We welcome the Government’s ambition to close the attainment gap, but there is still a big question mark over how it will be achieved. The attainment fund should be used to close the gap, but thousands of pupils across the country are missing out on support. Under the plans, more than 1,500 schools in Scotland will get no extra support to close the gap between the richest and the rest. With £500 million of cuts to local services, including our schools, coming in the Government’s budget, there is a real risk that pupils who are already at a disadvantage will get left even further behind.
Figures from the Improvement Service have shown that the average spend per primary school pupil in 2010-11 was £5,214, but that has now dropped to £4,653 in 2015-16, which is a £561 drop. In the light of the further cuts to local government budgets, it is hard to see how education departments will be able to make real inroads into tackling educational inequality.
As regards international testing, with the introduction of the national improvement framework and the additional data from testing, we felt that the data could have been collected and constructed in a way that aligned with international benchmarks in the studies that we mentioned in amendment 39—the trends in international mathematics and science study, or TIMSS, and the progress in international reading literacy study, or PIRLS. That would have allowed us to compare ourselves with leading education providers in other countries. Given what the cabinet secretary said previously about not wanting to restrict the number of studies, it will be interesting to see exactly in what wide range of international studies the Government now decides to participate.
The Government could also have been more ambitious in the bill in relation to closing the attainment gap. We suggested a target of 95 per cent of children hitting targets for literacy by 2025 to reduce the attainment gap. Just now, 12 per cent of pupils are not reading well by the time they finish primary school. Our target would have built on existing goals and clearly demonstrated the Government’s ambition to close the gap.
The national improvement framework was brought into the bill at a late stage. It could probably take up a debate on its own but I will touch on it briefly. The framework sets out what the Government feels are the key drivers of improvement: school leadership, teacher professionalism, parental engagement, assessment of children’s progress, school improvement and performance information.
It is difficult to disagree with the Government’s conclusions, but I cannot help but wonder whether that document was drafted in a bubble—a bubble that ignores the reality of deep cuts to education budgets by this Government, which ignores the concerns of the teaching profession over workload and which ignores the question that has been asked repeatedly about how the Government will prevent national test data from being used to compile crude national league tables.
I agree with the section in the framework on parental involvement, which is about improving
“the offer available to parents and families to help their children to progress in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing.”
Where it falls apart is where it goes on to talk about schools working in partnership with community learning professionals to achieve that. Councils up and down the country are considering wiping out entire community learning and development departments just to keep schools open.
We will support the bill at decision time because anything that raises the issue of the attainment gap and at least starts to describe the problem is better than nothing at all, but we feel that the Government could have been so much bolder, so much braver and so much more ambitious when it comes to making sure that every child in Scotland has an equal chance in life.
Before I call Mary Scanlon, I will just warn the open-debate speakers that they have three minutes each. Mary Scanlon has up to five minutes.
17:18
Thank you, Presiding Officer. First, I have to say that in terms of developing, consulting on and passing the bill, the Scottish Government has fallen far short of what may be considered best practice in any democratic institution. Despite that experience, we will support the bill.
I put on the record my thanks to Stewart Maxwell. It is not an easy job to convene the Education and Culture Committee but he did it fairly, in a measured and thorough way. I thank him for allowing me and other members time to speak to amendments where previous consultation on the whole issue simply did not exist.
The Gaelic entitlement that was promised in the Scottish National Party manifesto became an administrative process by which to consider parents’ requests for their children to learn Gaelic. Having raised those issues at stage 1, I am delighted and pleased that the minister has now responded with a presumption in favour of Gaelic. With about eight weeks to go before I retire, I think that I can take the credit for making sure that the SNP manifesto has been implemented in this Parliament.
I hope that the measures that we will pass today will lead to more people learning Gaelic and I hope that they will lead to more investment in the language. However, any outcome will not be based on us sitting here patting ourselves on the back and saying, “Haven’t we done a good job on Gaelic?” The bill will be a success only if we work in partnership with local authorities to ensure that what we pass today is implemented. We would be arrogant to think otherwise.
We are told that the cost of a full assessment will be £25,000. We have heard from councils that, if that is the case, they will have to stop providing music tuition, because the money has to come from somewhere. Later this week, we will look at the budget. The bill will create additional costs for local authorities, when there is talk all around of cuts of £500 million to the same local authorities. Therefore, we have to be realistic and honest. Whatever we do, we have to work in partnership and with respect for the organisations and institutions that we expect to implement our legislation.
The bill has given me an insight into the joint working between the Scottish Government and COSLA and individual local authorities. It is funny that we never hear about the historic concordat these days. Highland Council is proud of its excellent working relationship with the Scottish Government. I read all the local papers and I can confirm that it is very rare to hear Highland Council criticising the Government on the record. That was until, suddenly, with four days’ notice, the council was told that all primary 1 to 3 children would have a 25-hour week. We are told that people were queuing up to see Angela Constance, but none of them was a councillor and certainly none of them was known to Highland Council, which is a very good council with an excellent academic record. There was no consultation and no evidence base to state that the measure will benefit a child’s learning or attainment.
So rapid have the changes been to the bill that a new supplementary financial memorandum had to be issued. That financial memorandum
“does not form part of the Bill and has not been endorsed by the Parliament”,
and, of course, it has never been seen by the Finance Committee. The document states:
“Some of the new provisions will place new responsibilities and costs on local government.”
It continues:
“It is not therefore possible at this stage to say ... where all costs will fall.”
Can members understand why councillors and councils are worried?
The original estimated cost of the bill for this year was £187,000, but it is now £2.5 million. The original cost for 2020 was £0.5 million but, following stage 2, it is now £12 million, which is up 24 times on the original. There is very little indication of who will pay, where the money will come from and what the opportunity cost is.
Given that Highland Council has estimated that it will need 30 new teachers, I presume that the £4.8 million that is identified in the new financial memorandum will be used to find those teachers.
You must close, please.
Finally, I want to say that I am delighted that we now have standardised assessment. I hope that no child will be left behind. I hope that it will be a diagnostic tool to identify development needs and that support will be given to each child as and when it is needed.
We move to the open debate, with speeches of up to three minutes, please.
17:23
I am proud of the Government’s record on education. The recent report on Scotland’s schools by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development review group shows that there is plenty to be positive about. However, the report also underlines a number of challenges, and we must be open about where we can do better. The First Minister has been clear in setting out the Government’s twin priorities of closing the attainment gap and improving educational outcomes for all of Scotland’s children. The Education (Scotland) Bill contains a range of measures that move us closer to achieving those goals.
The drive to tackle the attainment gap is at the heart of the debate, and the introduction of the national improvement framework has been the focus of much discussion. The proposed use of standardised assessments has certainly been one of the more contentious parts of the bill, but the Government has consulted widely on the matter, including over 5,000 teachers, parents, children, academics and other stakeholders in its discussions. The minister has worked hard to address concerns about the proposals, and I welcome assurances that teacher judgment will continue to take priority.
It is worth noting that the OECD expert group singled out the national improvement framework proposals for praise. Its report said:
“Scotland has the opportunity to lead the world in developing an innovative national assessment, evaluation and improvement framework that is consistent with what is known about promoting student, professional, school and system learning.”
Part 2 of the bill covers the provision of Gaelic-medium education. I have been contacted about the issue by a number of Gaelic and non-Gaelic speakers. I was interested to read the letter from Bruce Robertson, the interim chief executive officer of Bòrd na Gàidhlig, praising the cross-party work of the Parliament on Gaelic education and urging all members to get behind the bill.
Mr Robertson has been clear that, in developing the statutory guidance on the presumption in favour of Gaelic-medium education, Bòrd na Gàidhlig will work to strike the right balance between prioritising the needs of learners and taking reasonable account of local circumstances. My view is that, whenever possible, people who wish to learn and teach through Gaelic-medium education should be given the opportunity to do so. Therefore, I welcome the provisions in the bill that strengthen support on that.
The amendments on school clothing grants that the Scottish Government introduced are also worth highlighting. The Child Poverty Action Group and others are to be applauded for bringing attention to the inconsistency in school clothing grants across the country. The provisions in the bill are designed to end the existing postcode lottery, thereby removing an important barrier to education and helping hard-pressed families. I would welcome further detail from the minister on what the Government plans to do to guarantee a minimum school clothing grant for disadvantaged children.
I thank everyone who contributed to the work of the Education and Culture Committee during the passage of the bill. I have not been able to cover the whole bill in a speech of three minutes but, throughout the process, the input and help of those who contributed have been welcome. Their input has been invaluable in making a number of improvements to the draft legislation, and I look forward to the bill moving us another step closer towards ensuring a truly world-class education system for Scotland’s children.
17:26
We can make no greater investment than ensuring that our children get the best start in life. We all want Scotland to have a world-class education system to be proud of and we all aspire to a Scotland in which every child has the opportunity to fulfil their true potential. We all know, too, that we will achieve a fairer, more progressive Scotland only if we ensure that life is fairer, better and more equal for every child.
It can never be right that a child’s postcode has more influence on their achievements in life than talent, effort and hard work. Therefore, I am pleased that, across the chamber, there is real recognition of the need to put closing the attainment gap at the centre of all that we do. However, the bill is a missed opportunity to be much bolder about tackling the inequality that undermines the opportunities of too many children throughout Scotland.
Ambitious goals are all well and good, but they must be backed up by concrete policies to end the cycle of disadvantage. Such a policy is Scottish Labour’s fair start fund, which would provide investment to support poorer children in every school and in every community. In my constituency, it would mean an extra £1 million a year on top of the Government’s attainment challenge fund going direct to schools to support measures to tackle the gap.
Our aspirations must be backed up with clear targets, too, so that we can really measure progress and ensure that schools and education authorities are able to recognise success. That is highlighted in the excellent briefing for the debate from the Child Poverty Action Group.
I am disappointed that the Scottish Government opposes Scottish Labour’s proposal to set a target of halving the attainment gap within a decade and that it opposed all our amendments to the bill. However, I am happy that the Education (Scotland) Bill starts to tackle the issue on the school week that I raised during the stage 1 debate and in our debate on the amendments. Every parent or carer in Scotland should have the right to expect a minimum number of hours of learning per week for their child when they send them to school. I hope that that change and the Government’s willingness to act will ensure that all children, wherever they live in Scotland, have an equal right to at least 25 hours teaching time a week during term.
Although parents across Scotland should no longer face cuts to the school week as councils are forced into desperate measures, the reality is that our goal of closing the gap will be threatened by the huge cuts to council budgets. In Fife Council, 45 per cent of the budget is spent on education. Local authorities throughout Scotland have said that the additional cuts that John Swinney has announced could have devastating consequences for local budgets for schools and nurseries. We cannot close the gap between the richest and the rest in our classrooms if we cut the budgets for our schools, nurseries and early years programmes.
I hope that the Scottish Government will think again, consider Labour’s policies and act now to protect education budgets. Let us use the powers of our Scottish Parliament to ensure that our children do not pay the price of austerity.
17:29
Like others, I thank everyone who helped the committee in our gathering of evidence. It was more of a challenge than usual, partly because of the eclectic mix of issues that are contained in the bill, and partly because of the chaotic approach that the Government took to consultation, which appeared to be on-going as we considered the bill with regard to General Teaching Council for Scotland registration in independent schools, the statutory requirement for a chief education officer and a range of other issues in relation to which it was clear that prior consultation had not taken place.
The most egregious of those issues, as Mary Scanlon identified, concerned the mandatory minimum number of teaching hours. No evidence was provided for that proposal. It came out of left field at the 11th hour. Earlier, I heard the cabinet secretary tell us about the problems that had been building up, but she was before the committee in November and at that stage she gave no hint that the issue was even at the back of her mind. Whatever the merits of the proposal—we are prepared to have a debate about that—the lack of evidence for it and the problems that Mary Scanlon noted would be caused by such a provision in certain parts of the country suggest that this is no way to run a railway. In a Parliament with no revising chamber, it is important that committees get early sight of Government proposals.
I want to touch on a couple of key aspects of the bill. I warmly welcome the extension of rights in relation to provisions around additional support for learning and I thank the minister for his engagement on those issues. I realise that we have reached an honest disagreement in terms of our approach to the issue. It is regrettable that we have not been able to adopt the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991 and the presumption of capacity at the age of 12, which is embedded in practice and, over two decades, has been demonstrated to work. Nevertheless, I welcome the provisions in the bill and hope that we can find a way of making them work effectively in practice.
I agree with the Government that we must attach a priority to tackling inequality. Time will tell whether the requirements in the bill lead simply to further reporting of activity rather than more effective activity on the ground, including partnership working. It is regrettable that the attainment fund is targeted using an area basis rather than being focused on the needs of individual pupils. I cannot see how that squares with the commitment to close the attainment gap completely. I think that a pupil premium that is targeted on the needs of individual children, wherever they live, is a far more effective approach.
The obsession with national primary school testing will come to be regretted. As the emeritus professor of education at the University of Strathclyde said, it is difficult to see national standardised testing as anything other than “a retrograde step”, out of sync with the vision of curriculum for excellence.
There are elements of the bill that are worthy. I am still reeling from the rare experience of having a successful amendment, although I think that some of the Scottish Government claims about the impact might be slightly hyperbolic. In the context of the £500 million-worth of cuts to council budgets, the impact that the move will have on education and wider children’s services is yet to be seen.
We will continue to oppose the proposals for national primary school testing, but I confirm that the Liberal Democrats will support the bill at decision time.
17:33
I, too, welcome the passage of the bill and support what it wants to achieve. As I have said, the Scottish Government is to be commended for putting educational attainment at the top of the political agenda. The bill sends a strong message nationally and locally and allows us to voice our concerns about inequality.
The fact that the bill places a statutory duty on local authorities to close the attainment gap keeps us focused on the prize. The bill also ensures that local authorities will have a chief education officer, similar to the situation in social work departments. I used to be a council member and can see how local authorities are merging departments to the point where children’s services and social work are in the same department. That is all well and good, but it is good to have a chief education officer who can make the arguments at management level in the local authority. That keeps the focus on education.
The £100 million attainment fund is quite rightly targeted on primary schools that serve our most deprived communities. The point of the attainment fund is to improve attainment overall. To do that, we must be open to innovation and new practice, and local authorities must work together—now, there’s an idea—and share best practice. That addresses some of the issues that Opposition members raised.
Education authorities need to have a long, hard look at themselves with regard to how they conduct their business and share best practice. During some of the evidence sessions, I asked COSLA and local authority representatives what they thought of various ideas for delivering education and gave them a couple of my own, but they had never looked at anything other than what they themselves were doing. They have to look at themselves and ensure that they are up for the challenge, because we live in extremely challenging times.
The provisions on the national improvement framework are obviously an important part of the bill. They will ensure that we have the opportunity to direct the right resource to the right place and the right child at the right time. Education Scotland said that the attainment advisers in all 32 local authorities should have the power to ensure that that happens.
I believe that the bill sends us in the right direction as we deal with the many challenges in closing the educational attainment gap, and that if we continue the debate and move forward we can ensure that we make that difference.
17:35
Some aspects of the legislation are okay as far as they go; with some, it is for the best that they do not go further; and with others, it is a pity that the legislation lacks ambition. The most important point, however, is that successful legislation is more than just a bill. Without better management and funding, whatever the legislation is supposed to achieve for Scottish education is likely to be overwhelmed by the devastation that is being wrought by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Constitution and Economy’s attack on the local authorities that deliver education.
It may suit SNP members to pass the buck, as they often do, but it is wrong to blame councils when the SNP Government expects them to operate with two hands tied behind their backs—underfunded on the one hand, and hamstrung by undeliverable commitments on the other. That is why Labour sought a review of progress on the aims of the bill—specifically, a look at whether extra resources will be required—and it is deeply disappointing that the SNP did not support that.
Although league tables for schools do not accurately reflect their relative merits and can have undesirable consequences, the same is not true for international comparisons. If we are to collect data, it should be in a form that enables us to benchmark the performance of our education system as a whole against other countries’ systems.
On the Government’s performance in education, if the Government is confident of its ability to tackle the attainment gap, why is it reluctant to set a target of halving the gap? Reducing the attainment gap should mean ensuring that no one is left behind or underperforms because they are disadvantaged. That means extra help for disadvantaged groups, such as looked-after children. It is disappointing that Labour’s proposals were not taken on board.
The Government’s unwillingness to listen is a barrier to progress, as is shown by its reluctance to accept and address concerns from outside the chamber. I note in particular the briefing from several bodies, including the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which argued that, although it extends rights for 12 to 15-year-olds, the bill would also create barriers to the exercise of those rights. We heard from Liam McArthur about the difficulties that that would cause, and it is a pity that his amendments fell.
I will support the bill, but I have misgivings about its content and about the SNP’s commitment and ability to deliver better education, so my vote will not be a ringing endorsement.
17:38
The Scottish Green Party welcomes the introduction of a duty on ministers to reduce inequalities of outcome, although we would have preferred a focus on increasing teacher numbers and reducing class sizes. We are, however, concerned about the potential outcomes of the duty on local authorities to follow the national improvement framework when it comes to the assessment of children’s progress.
The cabinet secretary clearly understands that we need a broad approach to reducing the attainment gap—one that requires work within, between and beyond schools—but we already have a wealth of data at local authority level and we are more than capable of working together to meet any data needs. Although we welcome the cabinet secretary’s efforts to provide assurance on the potential risks of reintroducing standardised testing, we remain concerned that, in practice, it will be difficult to prevent test data from coming out in a way that allows league tables to be constructed. We will support the general principles of the bill, but we believe that testing should remain an internal tool for use by professionals. Although teachers will, quite properly, decide when tests are carried out, the risk of the reappearance of national league tables remains.
I ask the cabinet secretary to describe what the Government will do with the new evidence that it has not been able to do so far or is unable to do at present.
We now move to closing speeches. Liz Smith has up to four minutes.
17:40
You keep changing the amount of time, Presiding Officer.
Mark Griffin made a very interesting point when he opened for the Labour Party. When we look at a bill, we have to ask what it is for, what it is trying to do and what problems it is trying to address. The Education (Scotland) Bill, which we will support at decision time, is a little mixed in terms of success.
There have been several problems with the bill. Some relate to language and a lack of clarity in the drafting in various sections and in some parts of the policy memorandum, where different terminology has been used in different places, although the intention has been that the meaning should be the same..
It is also absolutely clear that there has been a lack of consultation on several key aspects of the bill, which has taken away from some of the very good intentions that span it.
I will deal a little bit with testing. As I said when we looked at the amendments earlier, we are very firm in our commitment to the process of testing, because we think that there has to be consistency and an ensured standard that is understandable and acceptable to parents and teachers and which allows us to draw down the important data that we need to measure a particular child’s progress.
The bill is not about having more testing. I think that some of our recent debate has clouded the actual intentions with regard to testing, and I believe firmly that the intention is to have a mixture of diagnostic testing and some of the normative, formative testing that already happens in schools. At the moment, we do not have the consistency that we need to address whether our educational standards are improving. As Mark Griffin said, that is a very important aspect of raising attainment across the board and trying to narrow the attainment gap. Nobody is in any doubt about that, but the terminology that describes how we go about achieving that in some parts of the bill is difficult.
There is no doubt that there are great pressures on local authorities. My colleague Mary Scanlon spoke about the Gaelic community. The bill does some great things, but at the end of the day it is very difficult for some local authorities to hire Gaelic teachers, who are absolutely essential if we are to provide Gaelic-medium education.
We have spoken quite a lot about additional support needs. That is a crucial issue, too, but it is wound up in complexity—sometimes, it is a legal complexity—and that has made the bill difficult.
The intentions behind the bill are very good. It is a pity that it is a mixed bill: it tries to do an awful lot of catch-up in areas where post-legislative scrutiny has perhaps not been particularly good, and we have used it as a catch-all for some very important issues.
There are lots of good intentions behind the bill, which is why we support it, but there are some key lessons for the Scottish Government on how it should approach the bill. Two of the most important are that it should ensure, first, that the stakeholders—those who will deliver—are properly and fully consulted, and, secondly, that we have great clarity of language about what we are trying to do.
17:44
Let me start by congratulating the cabinet secretary on getting the Education (Scotland) Bill to this stage and on its imminent approval—I believe—by the Parliament this evening. That is an achievement for any minister, and we will be supporting her in the vote tonight. That is because there are a good number of things in the bill that we certainly support, some of which have not had much of a mention.
We support the creation of a chief education officer; the headteacher qualification, which the cabinet secretary spoke about today and which is an important step forward in improving the professional standards of our teaching profession; and GTCS registration for all teachers in the independent sector as well as the state sector. We also support the measures on Gaelic-medium education, which happily were strengthened at stage 2, and the learning hours duty, which—as Liam McArthur pointed out—we did, in a form, bring in at stage 2.
I could not help but be a little amused when the cabinet secretary said that she had been made aware of the learning hours issue recently when she was in the Highlands. I have been aware of it since around 2010, when her colleague Derek Mackay was running Renfrewshire Council and tried to make exactly the sort of change that would have been outlawed under the provisions as they were originally drafted. Ever since then, I have felt that we should introduce such a duty. It may be new to the bill, but the concept itself is not new.
If I am being honest, the bill would, if it had stayed as it was, have been worthy but hardly earth-shattering. It became a much more important piece of legislation when it became primarily about closing the attainment gap with the introduction of the national performance improvement framework. We have already debated today the process by which that happened and some of the curious elements of it. At first the framework was not there, and then it was there in name but we did not know what it actually was.
It is worrying that it is still unclear—I think that Liz Smith used the word “cloudy”—as to what the framework will do, particularly in terms of testing. I have said that we accept the assurances that the cabinet secretary and the First Minister have given about national testing. I hope that the cabinet secretary understands that we, and teachers and parents, are taking a lot on trust in this area. I hope that I am right to do that, and that Liam McArthur is proved to be wrong and the Government does not reintroduce high-stakes testing.
The bill could have been much stronger. It is the type of legislation that is often criticised; I do not have the exact quote from Keir Bloomer—I think that Mr McArthur used it earlier in the debate—about
“pious thinking masquerading as legislation”,
but there are bad examples of that. The accusation could be made about our legislation on climate change and patients’ rights, for instance, that we are legislating for something that is terribly worthy but we do not really know how we are going to deliver it.
We have pressed the Government to show some confidence in its own legislation and the purpose behind it. That is why we wanted to ensure Scotland’s re-entry in the TIMSS and PIRLS global comparisons. If we believe that we are working towards a world-class education system, we should not be afraid to judge it against the rest of the world. That is why we wanted to set a modest target for the attainment gap in a decade, which the cabinet secretary resisted again today. I do not understand why. I am sure that I heard the First Minister talk about closing the attainment gap in a decade, and the target that we wanted to set was extremely modest by her standards. The danger is that people might conclude that she is not serious about what the bill sets out to do.
The greatest criticism of that type of legislation is that it legislates for an end but fails to will the means to achieve that end. That is why we have tried, at stage 2 and again today, to strengthen the bill by building in assurances that the means will be forthcoming. The Scottish Government sets obligations on others in the bill but dodges some of those obligations itself.
The cabinet secretary claimed a strong track record in investing in our children’s futures, but we know that that is not really true. The attainment fund is worth only £25 million in a budget of £4.5 billion, and 1,500 schools for children from poorer families get no help. The claim is not true in general either. The cabinet secretary cannot claim a track record of investing in children’s futures if she has cut 4,500 teachers and is cutting half a billion pounds from local authorities.
We support the bill and its purpose, but it could be so much stronger if it came with the commitments to make everything actually happen. We will pass the bill tonight, but tomorrow, when the budget comes to the chamber, we can show that we actually have the will to make it happen.
17:49
I have been a minister for five years and, as chance would have it, this is my first piece of legislation. I am quite sure that, when I get home tonight, my eight-year-old will be somewhat disappointed that the bill does not include provisions that ban singing practice, dancing with girls or homework.
Over the weeks and the months, we have all had a wide-ranging debate on many matters that have a direct impact on Scottish education. We have discussed at length the importance of leadership at all levels. I commend the bill for its introduction of the qualification for headship. The chief education officers’ posts are important, but we must have quality leadership at all levels and registered teachers in all our schools.
The bill has a number of practical measures to improve access to education. I assure Ms Hilton that, as a Government, we will continue to work with the Child Poverty Action Group. The bill certainly responds to many of the issues that it has raised with us. We will also continue to seek improvements where we can.
I am proud that we will introduce regulations to ensure a consistency of school clothing grants, that we are extending the free school meal entitlement to children in early years settings with private providers, and that we are ensuring a national entitlement of a school week in primary school based on 25 hours a week, reflecting the curriculum for excellence.
Curriculum for excellence was built on the basis of a primary school week of 25 hours. Where there are well-made exceptions that are in the interests of children, they will, of course, be reflected in the regulations and how we go forth.
I take on board some of the criticisms in and around the lack of consultation. I am sure that members will understand and accept that, sometimes, a decision has to be made. On balance, I would rather be criticised for the action that I have taken rather than the action that I have not taken.
At the heart of the bill is the national improvement framework. It is the next stage of curriculum for excellence. In its recent report, the OECD was very supportive of our approach, and it has laid down the challenge to us that we have the opportunity to be world leaders in developing an integrated assessment and evaluation framework.
We have debated standardised assessment at length. There is an opportunity here, given that 30 out of 32 local authorities do some form of standardised assessment. It is important to recognise—I say this directly to Mr McArthur and to Alison Johnstone—that we have been clear, given the length of consultation and our reflection with parents, teachers, representative bodies and educational experts, that we have absolutely no desire to introduce an assessment window. The Government is not proposing or introducing an assessment window in any shape or form. The decisions about when to assess children should be taken by teachers. Our Scottish standardised assessment will bolster professional teacher judgment and in no way replace it.
To pick up on Iain Gray’s point, we will publish for the first time the proportion of children reaching curriculum for excellence levels. That information will, of course, be informed by the Scottish standardised assessment tool, as well as the other tools that teachers use daily.
In essence, we must ensure that we have the right information at the right time for each and every child, so that our system can act to improve the outcomes and achievements of our children. We will of course have to measure progress; this Government is not shying away from that. We have to step up to the challenge that the OECD set us by ensuring that we develop the right measurements that reflect the breadth of the curriculum and how we are trying to equip our children for an ever-changing world.
The First Minister has made it clear that within a decade we want to be within touching distance of closing the attainment gap. Nothing else is good enough.
You need to close, cabinet secretary.
There is often a debate about outcomes in education. It is important that we talk about outcomes and how they vary depending on a child’s background or where they live. According to Audit Scotland, that is not always about the money that we spend, but it is important to recognise that councils plan a 3.3 per cent increase in cash terms in 2015-16. It is important to recognise that revenue spending on schools and revenue spending per pupil have increased under this SNP Government.
We heard a lot about Labour’s plans today and no doubt we will hear more tomorrow. However, as the Labour leader conceded on the radio this morning, there is no guarantee that the extra revenue that Labour proposes to raise will be spent on education. So here we are: another blunt instrument from Labour—
You need to close, cabinet secretary.
By and large, over the weeks and months we have had a constructive debate about the Education (Scotland) Bill, which is very much a new stage of our journey to ensure that every child has every chance to succeed. I commend the bill to the Parliament.
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Education (Scotland) Bill: Stage 3