Schools
Good morning. The first item of business today is a debate on motion S3M-6580, in the name of Des McNulty, on schools. I advise the chamber that we have a little time in hand, but it is not excessive. If members could speak roughly to the guidelines that they have been given, we will finish on time. I call Ken Macintosh to speak to and move the motion. You have about 13 minutes, Mr Macintosh.
09:15
More nats, fewer teachers.
Members: Oh.
It seems to work as a slogan. Who would have thought that that would be the epitaph of the Scottish National Party Administration as it nears the end of its four-year term? Who would have thought that a party that was elected on the basis of such a comprehensive list of promises to improve Scottish education could fail to deliver on nearly every one? It is not just a case of more nats, fewer teachers; the SNP has failed on class sizes of 18, on free school meals for primary 1 to P3, on physical education, on school nurses, on school buildings, on student debt and on nursery education. Now, it is failing us on the curriculum for excellence, too. We need to look at why the SNP is falling down so badly on education. Given the fact that it is only a matter of weeks until the curriculum for excellence is introduced in our secondary schools, we must take a particular look at the new curriculum and what needs to be done to restore confidence in it among teachers and parents.
It is not simply a matter of the SNP failing to live up to its pre-election promises. I believe that, despite the SNP’s claims to be a social democratic party of the left, its lack of a clear, coherent, progressive ideology means that it has been unable to provide clear leadership and set a sense of direction and that it is failing to manage Scottish education effectively. Over the past three years, at a time of rising Government budgets in Scotland, the SNP has overseen the loss of 2,500 teaching posts. A similarly large number of classroom assistants have gone, and there have been cuts to school budgets throughout the country. When it had the funds, the Scottish Government failed to invest in the new curriculum, and now, as we enter a period of austerity, it is little wonder that parents and teachers are alarmed at the prospects for their children and pupils.
I do not believe that the SNP is a progressive party, despite its protestations to the contrary. Yes, the SNP spent much of its first eight years in the Scottish Parliament trying to shed its old tartan Tory image and reinvent itself as a party of the democratic centre. However, in practice, the policy choices that have been made by the SNP in government have given the game away. This afternoon, for example, there will be a debate on tackling poverty in Scotland, but none of the headline measures that have been introduced by the SNP Government is designed to tackle poverty—in fact, quite the reverse. Extending the provision of free school meals to the children of well-off parents is hardly the most progressive measure, and the same can be said of the SNP’s policy of extending the provision of free prescriptions. It has clearly been more important to the Scottish Government to freeze council tax and reduce business rates than to maintain teacher numbers. Populist, rather than progressive, is an appropriate term for most of those policies.
I do not doubt the left-wing credentials of many SNP back-benchers, but quite a few ministers—including, crucially, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning—and others seem to be more comfortable on the right. I do not believe that even Mr Russell would describe “Grasping the Thistle” as a socialist tract. I apologise to members on the Conservative front bench for repeating a joke that is doing the rounds. Who are the best-known Tories in Scotland? Fergus Ewing and Mike Russell. There is a contrast between the progressive claims of the SNP and the reality. For example, the Scottish Government supposedly refused to countenance the use of public-private partnerships to build new schools, but it is happy to spend millions to support merchant bankers in developing a similar private finance model through the Scottish Futures Trust.
At the most recent election, the SNP rebranded many Labour and Lib Dem policies as its own in what was effectively a populist outbidding process rather than a radical rethink. For example, over the previous 10 years, the Labour-Lib Dem Executive had driven down class sizes year on year. The SNP simply outbid us and produced the arbitrary figure of 18, which it has singularly failed to come close to achieving. As I have mentioned before, on school buildings, the SNP did not even bother to invent or develop its own position; it simply defined its policy in terms of Labour’s promise by pledging to match us brick for brick. On other policies, such as getting it right for every child and, supposedly, the curriculum for excellence, the SNP was happy to adopt our policies and follow them through. The difficulty, however, is that without any clear leadership or sense of purpose, the SNP appears to be dressed in ill-fitting clothes. Some of its policies have lost their way. Without any sense of ownership, drive or direction, it is little wonder that education policy, in particular, has got lost along the way and teachers have been left floundering.
The Minister for Skills and Lifelong Learning, Mr Brown, revealed at the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee recently that the long-awaited SNP school building programme will still leave 100,000 children occupying poor or inadequate schools. Not one school has been commissioned and built over the lifetime of the current Parliament; we have had merely a promise to rehouse 35,000 pupils at some point in the future, leaving 100,000 pupils to be educated in a second-class environment.
Not true.
I would be happy to take an intervention from the minister.
The list of excuses that have been provided by the Scottish Government for its inadequacies is growing almost as long as its list of unkept promises. The initial—and still, I believe, a favourite—hiding place for ministers was behind the concordat, with the finger of blame pointed firmly at local authorities for failing to deliver. The fact that many councils are SNP run seemed to be conveniently ignored. More recently, there have been attempts to pretend that the Scottish budget has been declining although it has, in fact, been increasing. The favourite excuse now is the harsh new spending environment, despite the fact that the Government is still working within the old spending review and despite the announcement that any cuts will be postponed until next year. The Scottish Government wants it both ways, as usual.
At the beginning of his speech, the member said that he thought that the SNP had failed to deliver on nearly every one of its education promises. I wonder whether he can enlighten me. I have tried to find the one that has been delivered on. Can he tell the Parliament what that is?
I thank Mr Rumbles for that intervention. I did the same thing, but I added the word “nearly” as a caveat. I wanted to let the minister off the hook in case he could find something for his speech this morning.
Do not worry, I will. [Interruption.]
Order.
One of the SNP’s specific policy commitments was to maintain the number of teacher posts. At the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee yesterday, the cabinet secretary tried to present an intriguing new excuse. Mr Russell suggested that the previous Labour-Lib Dem Executive had artificially and unsustainably inflated the number of teachers who were employed in Scotland, although he did not present any evidence to back up that theory. The SNP claims that although it may have lost 2,500 teaching posts that it promised to keep, in retrospect, they were not needed anyway. Even more confusing was the cabinet secretary’s explanation of how he apparently managed—in the middle of losing thousands of teaching jobs—to guarantee the employment of 100 additional teachers to implement the curriculum for excellence after agreeing with local authorities that extra money would be used for that special purpose. Without a hint of irony, Mr Russell insisted that that could not be called ring fencing in any way.
The excuses and the reasoning are becoming increasingly far fetched but, unfortunately for the cabinet secretary and his colleagues, few involved in Scottish education do not know where the responsibility lies. The parents from Renfrewshire who will visit the Parliament later this morning know who is responsible for cutting their school buses. When it comes to the curriculum for excellence, the minister’s own survey of teachers provides evidence of how badly the Scottish Government has got it wrong. Of the 15,000 teachers who responded to the survey, 72 per cent of secondary teachers were not at all confident about delivering a broad general education to S1 to S3 pupils. Furthermore, 70 per cent of secondary teachers were not at all confident that they would have sufficient information to implement certain elements of the curriculum for excellence, and 72 per cent of secondary teachers—including two out of every three secondary headteachers—were not at all confident that they had sufficient information to implement the new literacy and numeracy qualifications. A similar percentage of secondary teachers felt not at all confident that they had enough information to support and deliver the national 4 and 5 qualifications. That is damning material collected by the minister’s own officials. What on earth has the Scottish Government been doing all this time? The SNP has been in power for three and a half years and it is less than three weeks before the end of term, yet three quarters of our teachers are not prepared for the new curriculum.
Mr Macintosh has given us nine minutes of analysis of what Labour does not like about what the Government is doing. When will he give us Labour’s alternative programme?
What perfect timing. That is exactly what I am coming on to. If the SNP Government cannot deliver, I assure the SNP that it can step back and make way for a party that can deliver and which has shown that, in office, it will look after education.
It is perhaps important to remember why we are going down the curriculum for excellence route. [Interruption.]
Order.
It is important to restate the principles that underpin the development of the curriculum for excellence, which Mr Adam and some of his colleagues may have forgotten. As members know, the Labour Party and the Liberal party introduced the reform at least partly because we believe that there is a fundamental need to address the needs of a huge swathe of young people in Scotland who are disengaged and are missing out on the benefits of education. Despite the strengths of the Scottish education system, it has been widely felt for many years that there have been too many exams and that there has been too much teaching for exams. Teachers thought that their role was overly prescribed. There is a particular problem among a cohort in our secondary schools who are unlikely to need qualifications to proceed to college or university and who remain unmotivated and disengaged from learning as they progress through high school. By focusing more on learning rather than simply on content, it was hoped that the new curriculum would be more stimulating and engaging, and that it would allow the development of vocational options for many who would be best served in that area.
It is not surprising that the curriculum for excellence has been embraced and endorsed by schools and pupils throughout the primary sector. With its open learning and greater use of projects, the model suits the style of teaching in primary schools, where one teacher often leads the class across a range of subjects, for example. However, the division of the secondary curriculum into departments and subjects has proved to be more of an obstacle. Teaching the curriculum in secondary schools has long been dominated by the need to progress our children towards their exams in their fourth or fifth year. The proposals for the new curriculum initially suggested that there would be a clean break between a more open style of learning in the first three years of secondary school and the fourth, fifth and sixth years, when pupils would focus on the examinable curriculum. Unfortunately, the minister has been unable to answer straight questions, such as whether any of the work in third year or earlier would be part of the examinable curriculum. There is already a fear that, as pupils learn and progress at different speeds, they will begin to split from second year onwards. The fact that we still do not know what the new exams in fourth year will look like is particularly unsettling. Teachers, parents and pupils all want to know what their final destination will be. It is up to the minister to steer his way through the reforms without losing sight of the fact that our schools are not broken—far from it—and that they work well for most pupils.
Although the new curriculum should be more engaging for all pupils, it is important to remember that exams still have a very important place and are motivational for many pupils—those who are motivated by the desire to gain the qualifications that they need to gain entry to university later in life. Similarly, although there is a new-found emphasis on learning—on helping to create good learners—subjects such as the sciences require a healthy grasp of content and will always rely heavily on accumulated knowledge, as the Royal Society of Edinburgh and others have pointed out.
None of the obstacles or complexities that surround the curriculum for excellence is insurmountable. The previous cabinet secretary took a step in the right direction when she responded to history teachers’ concerns about the content of the new curriculum, for example, and established a working group that involved those teachers. Although the current cabinet secretary has responded with some additional resources, which are welcome, some of his reactions, such as the new website, seem more like gimmickry. Writing to parents smells of panic. For the curriculum for excellence to be successful, the cabinet secretary needs to stop berating Opposition politicians for having the nerve to criticise him and start to do more to win over teachers and parents by taking decisions on the exam structure and the available resources to make it work. Dismissing teachers’ gripes by saying that they need everything written down or handed to them on a plate is hardly the right way to go about things. The cabinet secretary needs to work with parents and teachers and listen to their concerns to make the curriculum for excellence work for all.
One of the original aims and hopes behind the curriculum for excellence was that it would reprofessionalise the workforce and allow teachers the room and time to teach according to their abilities rather than to a prescribed curriculum, but the mismanaged introduction of the reforms and the treatment of newly qualified teachers have led to dismay and demoralisation. New probationers are widely reported to be the most qualified and motivated of recent generations, but unfortunately they find that no teaching jobs are available when they leave university. Those who find work have to take temporary contracts or exist on supply. The Government’s response has not been to fulfil its pledge to maintain teacher numbers, but to cut the teacher training intake dramatically. Yet again, the SNP Administration appears to be responding to rather than shaping events.
The recent threats of strike action from the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association and working to rule by the Educational Institute of Scotland over the implementation of the new curriculum demonstrate how bad relations between the Scottish Government and the profession have become. Those who rely on public services in this country are learning the hard way that the election of the SNP Scottish Government means one thing: more nats, fewer teachers.
I move,
That the Parliament notes with concern the reduction in the numbers of teachers and classroom assistants since 2007 and the sharp rise in the proportion of newly qualified teachers who cannot obtain permanent or even temporary employment; further notes the widespread disquiet that exists among teachers and parents over the lack of preparedness for implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence and, in particular, the lack of clarity over new qualification arrangements; recognises that the Curriculum for Excellence is a wide-ranging reform with significant resource implications, and calls on the Scottish Government to reach an early agreement with local authorities and teachers organisations that guarantees the necessary preparation time and resources for successful implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence.
09:30
It is deeply appropriate that Ken Macintosh gave that speech when “Alice in Wonderland” is at the top of the movie charts. I would never call any of my political opponents a Mad Hatter, but the cap—or hat—may fit. The reality is that Ken Macintosh’s presenting himself as the Lenin or Marx of Scottish politics in a socialist perspective is oppositionalism for oppositionalism’s sake. Labour has created a financial desert in Scotland and is now claiming that that is somebody else’s fault.
I have serious points to make about education. [Interruption.]
Order.
We heard not a single serious point about education from Ken Macintosh. I want to describe what is happening and what still needs to happen in Scottish education and why that is a serious matter. It should be treated seriously, not in the way that Ken Macintosh and his colleagues are treating it.
I begin by focusing on the curriculum for excellence, which should be at the heart of the debate. A lot of criticism of the curriculum for excellence is being heard. I always listen and respond to criticism, but I believe that there is a strong relationship between the Scottish Government, teachers’ organisations and individual teachers. I foster that relationship through constant discussions and constant listening. For example, at a meeting with the EIS that took place very recently, it convinced me that additional time was needed for curriculum for excellence implementation. I listened and announced last week an additional in-service day in 2010. In my regular discussions with the teachers’ unions and others, I continue to address details and difficulties.
Ken Macintosh rose—
I am not taking any interventions from Mr Macintosh. I want to describe what is happening in Scottish education.
The cabinet secretary never takes interventions.
Order. I have heard enough of you today, Mr McMahon. Thank you.
I emphasise to members how serious the matter is. The picture of teachers who are not confident and cannot decide how to teach until they receive central Government edicts that some members are trying to paint is a travesty. The picture that Mr Macintosh has presented is a travesty.
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
No, I will not. I am sorry, but I must address the topic with real seriousness. The principal Opposition party has misrepresented what is happening in Scotland’s schools, and it is my duty as Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning not to allow that misrepresentation to go forward.
This week, I met Frank Lennon, who is headteacher at St Modan’s high school. He was quoted yesterday in The Herald, and I quoted him yesterday at the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee. He is clear, as the vast majority of teachers are, that the curriculum for excellence
“provides the best opportunity in a generation for teachers to be freed up to use their creative powers and passion for learning to motivate and inspire young people”.
At the same meeting in Stirling, I met parents who urged me not to listen to any requirement for further delay. That call has been supported by the national parent forum, which has called on the management board to maintain momentum towards implementation. It has said that it believes—teachers believe this, too—that the curriculum for excellence offers better opportunities for Scotland’s learners. It would be deeply irresponsible to listen to the calls from Ken Macintosh and Labour, which would disrupt the curriculum for excellence and our schools. The wreckers of Scottish education are on the Labour benches—Labour members wish to disrupt the curriculum for excellence and our schools for party-political advantage. Let every parent in Scotland hear that message clearly.
Concerns about our education system have been acknowledged since the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999. By 2002, those concerns had led to two major initiatives. I was fortunate to be there at the beginning, as a member of the Education, Culture and Sport Committee, which held an inquiry into the purposes of Scottish education. I commend those members of the previous Scottish Government who had much more serious intent in relation to education than any member on the current Opposition front bench has and who brought forward the national debate on education.
Those two initiatives concluded that the Scottish education system was overassessed, too centralised and insufficiently deep, that all the aspects of learning were not joined up and that the system was not moving forward in relation to international comparisons or domestic assessment. There was broad agreement that what Scotland needed was a balanced, modern curriculum that placed excellence at its core. The curriculum for excellence was, and is, the answer to that list of problems. There was, and is, consensus that it is the right way forward, which is why one of my first actions as cabinet secretary was to emphasise my commitment to it. The curriculum for excellence will, for the first time, provide our education system with a coherent route from nursery through to a range of positive, sustained destinations. The curriculum for excellence tackles the challenges of our current system. The current S1 and S2 experience can squeeze out time for what we know helps children to learn and develop. The curriculum for excellence makes connections across the curriculum, making learning deeper and richer.
This country began the journey towards the curriculum for excellence with our schools in 2004. However, between 2004 and 2007, not enough was done to take it forward. Since then, when I have visited schools, I have been hugely impressed to hear the enthusiasm for the changes that the curriculum for excellence has already brought about and for how much more teachers plan to achieve. Of course, in any society, there is always resistance to curricular change—that is the history of education. Delays have characterised every educational reform in every country. The leading educationist Keir Bloomer told me recently that although standard grades were first mooted in the late 1960s, by the time of their introduction, they were in place for the children of the children for whom they were first designed.
Resistance to change is understandable, but it is not an option. Equally, we will not take risks with our children’s future. The curriculum for excellence management board has assured me—unanimously—that the existing programme plan remains realistic and achievable. I have accepted the board’s advice with regard to the timetable for the introduction of the new national qualifications. I remain open—very open—to what the unions and others are telling me about the need for more detail. That detail is being brought forward. I remain open to any member in the chamber who tells me that extra detail is needed. I remain open to practical suggestions—I am not open to the empty rhetoric that we heard from Ken Macintosh. I will continue to monitor implementation closely.
Of course, over the entire period that I have been in my post I have listened to concerns. I was the one who asked for the survey to be undertaken. It did not produce the results that Ken Macintosh gave; at least, it did not produce the results of a partial nature that he gave. Where there were messages from the survey—and I listened to them—I responded to them. That is why, before we even published the results of the survey, I brought in what I call the 10-point plan. [Interruption.] A member on the Labour benches who used to be an education minister is laughing. I can only think that she spent her entire time in office laughing. That is why some of the difficulties exist in the curriculum for excellence today.
We are giving targeted support to every school that needs additional help. Between August and December, schools will receive the support that they need as the curriculum for excellence moves into secondary. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education is spearheading that work in partnership with every local authority and others. Additional practical materials have been published in summarised versions. Excellence groups are bringing subject teachers together with non-teaching experts. All of that is proceeding right now. There will be five regional events that will assist headteachers to share experience. Additional materials for pupils and parents are being produced. For anyone to call communication with parents “desperate” is desperate in itself. I have written to every primary 7 parent, as I should and as my duty demanded. The national parent forum is providing recommendations about what other materials are needed.
Another aspect of the 10-point plan is to simplify the means by which we will formally recognise literacy and numeracy. I have acknowledged the importance of literacy and numeracy as first-order questions. I want to ensure that the curriculum for excellence makes a real difference. Again, it was my duty to ensure that the existing proposals are the right ones for the circumstances. That is precisely what I did. The framework for assessment sets out what we want children and young people to achieve. A strong package of support has been put in place, including £3 million of new money—even at a time when Labour has laid waste to the public finances—and we are building the national assessment resource. I have convened a wide-ranging group of organisations with different perspectives on learning, the members of which are advising me on the implementation of the curriculum for excellence. The group met for the first time on 2 June and will meet again in September. [Interruption.]
Order.
Support is being provided. Teachers who are able to model confidence, motivation and a professional ethos to learners are being encouraged. Teachers are being equipped with new knowledge, understanding and skills. I meet teachers every day who give the lie to the type of teacher whom Ken Macintosh presents. I meet teachers who are enthusiastic about working collegiately to share and improve their practice and that of their colleagues. I meet every day inspired leaders in education and inspired leaders in schools—
Will the minister take an intervention?
Will the minister give way?
I will finish my point, then I will take Mr O’Donnell’s intervention. [Interruption.] I am willing to take constructive interventions.
Those inspired leaders are listening to what Ken Macintosh, for example, is telling them and are saying to themselves, “Thank goodness he is not in the education ministry. Thank goodness he never will be.”
Among the people to whom the cabinet secretary says that he speaks every day, has he had conversations with the many unemployed teachers and heard their reaction to the situation?
Indeed, and I deeply regret the situation. The overexpansion of teacher numbers under the previous Administration created the problem. I am endeavouring to tackle the issue in two ways: first, I am always looking to encourage local authorities to employ more teachers if they can, given the circumstances; and, secondly, I have reduced the number of teacher training places. In time, that will have an effect. That is a practical response to a situation that I am concerned about and think about every single day. I regret that we are there; I want to try to make a difference.
Will the minister take an intervention?
No. I have a point to finish. My time is almost up.
I want to make a point about school buildings. Others will talk about the subject. Indeed, Mike Rumbles has already spoken about the circumstances in his area to The Press and Journal. I hope that, when we come his speech, he gets his facts right, because he did not got them right in the P and J.
We have continued to build schools and to take children out of unacceptable circumstances. However, we will not mortgage the future. The reality in Scottish education budgets is that so many of the problems and pressures have come about because of the unsustainable nature of private finance initiative costs. The foolishness of the previous Administration in allowing that to happen—[Interruption.]
Order.
—is now being paid for in teaching jobs.
Rubbish.
Mrs Craigie.
The reality is that there is a direct link between encouraging PPP and PFI—encouraging unsustainable expenditure—and meeting day-to-day expenditure on teachers and other matters. The responsibility lies firmly with the previous Administration and its foolishness—if only its members had the honesty to admit it.
In all that we have done and achieved, there is a real test. Labour says that it wants 2,000 more teachers at a cost of £80 million per annum and that it wants to bring back PPP. Of course, there is no money for PPP in the private sector, as we see south of the border, but Ken Macintosh can apparently magic it up. But will he build more schools? The reality is that neither of those things will happen. That is empty rhetoric from Labour. What a tragedy to apply it to the future of Scotland’s children.
I move amendment S3M-6580.3, to leave out from “or even” to end and insert:
“employment; further notes the unanimous recommendation of the Curriculum for Excellence Management Board, including the representatives of the major teaching unions, that implementation in secondary schools should begin in August 2010; notes the announcement of a 10-point plan to support implementation including an additional £3 million, tailored help for secondary schools that need it, increased training for teachers and improved practical materials; recognises that the Curriculum for Excellence embodies the cross-party recommendations of the 2002 report by the Education, Culture and Sport Committee into the purposes of education, and calls on the Scottish Government to listen to teachers’ and parents’ concerns over the new curriculum and reach an early agreement with local authorities and teachers organisations that guarantees the necessary preparation time and resources for successful implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence.”
09:43
I am tempted to say that headmasters who shout are usually under considerable pressure.
If there is one issue that has dominated the education brief over many long months—obviously, it has raised the temperature—it is the curriculum for excellence. It has dominated our debates and our discussions with parents and teachers not only because it represents a major change in our approach to education in our schools, but because of the extent of the difficulties that we are encountering in the lengthy and sometimes tortuous planning process. I accept that some of those difficulties are understandable and necessary, but others are entirely avoidable.
The Scottish Conservatives have been supportive of the main principles of the curriculum for excellence since the start, specifically the need to enhance education in its widest sense so that the educational experience better reflects the needs of individual schools and individual pupils and because of the opportunity that it should afford to simplify and strengthen the rigour of our examination system. With hindsight, I suspect that it was never totally clear that this radical change was one of teaching methodology rather than a change to the finer detail of the curriculum. If the change was designed to help teachers to think more about the way in which they teach, how they can inspire an increasingly wide diversity of pupils in their classrooms and about how schools—primary and secondary—can be better linked into, and more responsive to, the needs of the world of work, culture and outdoor learning, then it has to be a good thing.
However, the real challenge has been to ensure that much of that skills-based philosophy can be achieved without any threat to discrete subject teaching, the basic skills of literacy and numeracy and the essential knowledge that equips for life after school. The cabinet secretary knows my concerns about what I see as the threat to academic rigour in some of that process—concerns that I share with people such as Professor Lindsay Paterson and Professor John McLaren—and I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for discussing those concerns further with me recently. I suggest that that issue is very much at the root of teachers’ concerns, especially in secondary schools. The expectation among the public and parents, and maybe even some teachers, was that there would be a new curriculum, but in fact that was never the intention. The undoubted need to address issues in teaching methodology was quite properly accompanied by questions about what exactly had to be taught and, for secondary 4 to 6, what had to be examined.
I am the last person in the chamber to argue that education is all about exams, but the reality is that they are vital in anyone’s school career and for subsequent job prospects, and to a large extent they represent the endgame for our senior pupils. I am conscious of the hard work that is going on within the Scottish Qualifications Authority to provide the details of the new exam structure, but I suggest to members that that work has been made much more difficult because of the Scottish Government’s own confusion about what it has been trying to achieve.
We were told that there were to be stand-alone literacy and numeracy tests, then we were told that there were not. We were told that there was to be a simplification of the exam structure to reduce the burden of assessment, yet we heard about new exams that were to be introduced, accompanied by complaints from School Leaders Scotland that the assessment burden would actually increase. We saw confusion, much of which alarmed our employers and higher education institutions, about what was to be internally and externally assessed. We were promised more formal vocational courses for schools, but we have yet to hear how that will be delivered.
On top of that, we had the extraordinary sight of the cabinet secretary having to tell the civil servants six weeks ago that much of the documentation that accompanied the guidance notes for the curriculum for excellence was woolly and vague and should be rewritten in plain English. That occurred no fewer than seven years down the road of development work that was designed to improve the literacy skills of the pupils but was largely unintelligible in its own composition. It is little wonder that teachers and parents remain so confused about what is going on.
The Labour motion mentions some of those concerns, but it quite rightly also highlights concerns about teacher numbers and the resulting fears about whether sufficient resources have been made available to support the development work for the curriculum for excellence. I would add to that the specific issue of the undue pressure that has been placed on our local authorities, not just as a result of the financial pressures of the economic downturn, but as a direct result of the overtly ambitious Scottish Government manifesto commitments: 18 or fewer pupils in primaries 1 to 3; universal free school meals for primaries 1 to 3; maintaining teacher numbers; two hours of PE per week; and five days of outdoor education, to name just some. Not only were those not deliverable, given the resources available, but in many cases they were not the priorities of local government—class sizes and free school meals being clear examples of that. The combination of huge financial pressures and the headaches of trying to deliver the Scottish Government’s very rigid national targets were too much for most authorities and were a major reason why some of the focus was removed from the curriculum for excellence development work, which has been the main concern for teachers and parents.
I do not believe that it is in anyone’s interest to scaremonger on this issue. That is why we deplore any moves to engage in industrial action, which would serve only to harm the best interests of those we are trying to help, namely the pupils. I began my own teaching career in the 1980s and well remember the difficult environment that was created by industrial action, which took away some of the activities—many of them outside the classroom—that sought to involve children in the wider educational experience that we have all agreed is so central to the curriculum for excellence.
Does the member agree that many of the extracurricular activities that children can engage in involve school playing fields, many of which now lie completely empty at evenings and weekends because of PFI contracts that deny pupils the chance to use them?
I do not doubt for a minute that there are issues about playing fields. That has been the case for 20 years, and I fully acknowledge that my party was involved in some of that. However, my point is that we will never be in the position to offer extracurricular activities if we cannot provide the facilities for staff. Industrial action harms nobody but the pupils. We really must take that on board.
I suggest that there are many issues that we must deal with and that it is important that we are positive about doing so. The curriculum for excellence has many good points and can be delivered. However, it will not be delivered unless we have a different mindset about how we approach our schools. I have no doubt that the vast majority of parents across Scotland would agree with that. The teaching unions, which were represented on the curriculum for excellence management board, need to understand that there is a willingness out there to make this work. However, we need clarity, vision and some kind of direction from the Government.
Will the cabinet secretary himself end up as a successful learner, an effective contributor, a confident individual and a responsible citizen? There is not much doubt about the confident individual part of that—Mr Russell is not known to be a shrinking violet when it comes to schools policy, or any other policy for that matter; nor is there much doubt that he is an effective contributor, who is blessed with a way with words that could beguile many of us if we were not so wise to his political rhetoric. So, that leaves the successful learner bit. The iron chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, said:
“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
I suggest to the cabinet secretary that there is still a lot of learning to be done, and that it must be done very quickly indeed. Teachers, parents and pupils are confused and concerned; they need clarity, direction and a responsible citizen as the man at the top.
I move amendment S3M-6580.1, to insert at end:
“, and deplores the threat of industrial action by some teaching unions, which will impact adversely on many of the extra-curricular activities that take place out of school hours and that are such an essential part of the wider educational experience for so many young people.”
09:51
In 2007, the SNP inherited record numbers of teachers, unparalleled spending of £1 billion annually in our universities, and real—if members will excuse the pun—concrete investment in our schools. Sadly, the SNP has failed to build on that legacy. As I have said in the chamber before, I am proud of the Liberal Democrats’ record on education. When in government with Labour, we delivered more teachers in Scotland’s classrooms, more money in our further and higher education institutes and a clear programme of school building. Now, there are 2,500 fewer teachers in our classrooms, and Mr Russell seems remarkably blasé about it. I do not recall Fiona Hyslop, Michael Russell or anyone else from the SNP standing up and saying to people in 2007, “Actually, we have too many teachers,” which is what he tried to tell us yesterday and what he has tried to tell us today. I would have more trust in the cabinet secretary on that point if that was what the SNP had told the people of Scotland three years ago.
Yesterday, the cabinet secretary informed the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee that he had no powers to stop local government reducing teacher numbers and that to demand micromanagement of the figures would be counter-productive. Perhaps it is just me, but I do not think that a cabinet secretary should be quite so happy to pass the buck to local government for such a decline in teacher numbers. I do not recall any appendices or caveats in the 2007 manifesto that said that the SNP had no power to deliver on that issue.
At the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee yesterday, we attempted to question Mr Russell about how accountable national Government and local government are for the money that they spend on education and how open they are to scrutiny of delivery on the key promises that the SNP made in 2007. Having explained why ring fencing and micromanaging are wrong, the cabinet secretary outlined that, in some situations—including the provision of extra teaching resources for the curriculum for excellence—there has been an agreement with local authorities that extra cash will, as a special case, be used for a specified purpose. I asked the cabinet secretary yesterday why that was different from ring fencing. I do not believe that any of the Opposition was convinced by his response.
The cabinet secretary’s argument seems to me to be fatally illogical. We can have no confidence when the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and local authorities sign up to deliver lower class sizes through the concordat, despite the fact that the cabinet secretary tells us that the policy was fully costed and supported, but apparently we can have confidence that occasional special arrangements will be delivered. It all rather begs the question: if the cabinet secretary can deliver on those issues, why has he not delivered on teacher numbers, class sizes, school buildings and all the promises that the SNP Government made to the pupils and parents of Scotland? To simply write that off as political rhetoric, as Mr Russell did yesterday, is to show contempt for the parents and pupils of Scotland. We can only hope that the electorate choose next year to consider carefully not only what the SNP said in its manifesto, but what it has delivered—or not delivered—in the past three years.
Whether we think of the lost teachers, the decline in places on teacher training courses or the plight of probationary teachers, the picture is pretty bleak. In 2009, 3,478 teachers were allocated a probationary year, but only 354 teaching posts are vacant at present. I agree with the EIS that that is shocking. Education professionals should be in our classrooms. To train them but not use their skills is a waste of talent.
Of course, we cannot ignore the budgetary situation that we face. The United Kingdom has a massive deficit as a result of Labour’s recession and dealing with that will not be easy. However, cutting education budgets is not the way forward. It is neither the right action today nor the right path for the future—it is short-sighted.
The SNP has exacerbated the budgetary situation. Costly policies such as free school meals have added an extra burden on local authorities that are struggling to meet the demands that are placed on them while balancing their books. The Government needs to get its priorities right.
My colleague Mike Rumbles will expand on school buildings. It is disgraceful that, three years after coming to power and nine months after the first tranche of funding was announced, the Government has only just given the go-ahead for the first round of investment in the school building programme. Building work will commence this year, but the first primary school will not be delivered until 2011 and the first secondary school will not be delivered until 2013. It is highly likely that no schools that have been begun and funded under the SNP’s school building programme will be delivered in the Government’s lifetime. That is a far cry from the manifesto commitment to match our school building programme brick for brick.
That is not simply a result of the global economic situation, as the SNP would like us to believe. It is a result of the Administration’s chronic mismanagement of the process and its lamentable Scottish Futures Trust experiment. The investment that the previous Administration made means that pupils from my constituency are now learning in new and refurbished high schools—Craigmount, the Royal High, St Augustine’s, Forrester, Broughton and Craigroyston. When I attended Craigroyston’s prize giving the other evening, I had no doubt that the investment in that new school was bearing fruit in educational attainment, discipline and the school’s wider ethos.
We share the concerns that Liz Smith and others have expressed about the changes to literacy and numeracy testing and the confusion about tests, assessments and the new qualifications. However, we welcome the principles behind the curriculum for excellence, which has been the subject of many debates in which l have made the Liberal Democrats’ position crystal clear. In the past two years, we have called for more support for teachers, information for parents and extra resources for schools. When the cabinet secretary has found those resources and listened to the calls from us, from other members and from the teaching unions, we have welcomed that. However, we know from our constituencies that preparation and support are patchy. On a recent committee visit to the City of Edinburgh Council, central officials said that all was well and that they were putting in place what was needed to make the curriculum for excellence happen on the ground. However, Boroughmuir high school’s respected headteacher told us something completely different.
There are 54,000 primary 7 pupils whose futures depend on proper implementation and adequate resourcing, and concern remains that progress is patchy and that secondary school teachers feel ill-prepared for the shift to the curriculum for excellence—three quarters have said that they do not have enough information to implement it properly.
We are concerned that teacher unions feel the need to threaten industrial action, but we fundamentally believe that teachers have the right to do that. If they feel unable to implement the curriculum for excellence because of a lack of support from the Government and if they feel that they are being asked to do something that is unachievable and which they believe to be wrong, they have the right to threaten industrial action. It is up to the Government, local authorities and everybody to provide the support on the curriculum for excellence that teachers need to ensure that they do not take industrial action.
We want the curriculum for excellence to be implemented and we want it to succeed. The curriculum for excellence management board met yesterday; we need clarification on what it discussed and what action was decided to address teaching unions’ concerns and avoid industrial action.
The curriculum for excellence has the potential to improve learning and to make it relevant to all our children and young people. We must grasp that potential, but we cannot get away from the fact that the SNP is not delivering, which is an uncomfortable truth for the cabinet secretary. The Liberal Democrats and other Opposition parties will continue to articulate that uncomfortable truth to the people of Scotland.
I move amendment S3M-6580.2, to insert at end:
“, and notes that the Scottish Government’s package of education failures includes the abandonment of SNP election commitments to reduce class sizes in P1 to P3 to 18, dump student debt and match brick for brick the previous administration's school building programme.”
10:00
The Parliament has held the SNP to account many times. The gap between what the SNP manifesto promised Scottish parents, children and young people and what has been delivered is significant. The SNP’s promises were easily made, but they are proving extremely difficult to deliver because of the Government’s failure to protect and prioritise education. The SNP Government has tried to move the goalposts for many pledges, but the fact remains that delivery has fallen far short of what was promised.
Class sizes of 18 for primaries 1 to 3 were promised. The Government might find it hard to accept, but parents thought that that would be delivered. Now we have an extremely watered-down policy that relies more on falling school rolls than on any positive action to reduce class sizes.
The SNP made commitments to deliver free school meals, to provide access to qualified nursery teachers and to deliver two hours of quality PE a week by a qualified teacher—all policies that, if they are being delivered at all, are being delivered inconsistently throughout the country and with no guarantees that they are reaching the children who need them most.
The Government gave a clear commitment to maintain teacher numbers—that was central to its plan to deliver smaller classes. The Government has rolled out the excuses for not maintaining numbers, but that was its commitment. The failure to deliver has meant that teachers are unemployed and that public investment has been wasted on student teachers who cannot obtain jobs. That is a waste of enthusiastic and well-informed graduates.
Promises were made on school buildings. The SNP inherited a programme of new build and refurbishment that has stalled. The previous Labour-Liberal Executive created momentum in the school building programme that has been lost. Cuts are now being made to education budgets throughout the country at a time when the sector faces new challenges and needs to be resourced properly.
That is the context for the curriculum for excellence. No one in the chamber relishes having to return to the debate on the continuing concerns about the roll-out of the curriculum for excellence. In August, pupils will start secondary school who expect a fundamental shift in their learning experience. They and their parents deserve to have confidence in the changes that will happen.
We all have a stake in the curriculum for excellence. It has had a lengthy passage through Parliament yet, weeks from its introduction, an unacceptable level of uncertainty and unease about its implementation continues. When Michael Russell took over as Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, we were told that the curriculum for excellence had been taken in hand. At Easter, we were assured that the timetable was realistic and could be delivered. It is unfortunate that that confidence is not shared throughout the sector.
It is understandable that parents are cautious about significant educational change, particularly when it involves a change to examinations. It is unacceptable that, as their children are about to begin secondary school, parents remain uncertain about the exams that their children will sit and the curriculum for those exams. Parents are not sufficiently reassured that every school has a clear exam route to higher education. Uncertainty remains about the expectations of higher education under the new curriculum. Although entrance to university will continue to centre around highers and fifth and sixth-year qualifications, the national qualifications will be the doorway. Concerns among teachers and parents about examinations and preparedness cannot continue into the new school year.
There remains uncertainty about preparedness, concern about course content and tensions over workloads. Caution continues about subject readiness. It might be easier for some subjects to adapt to a multidisciplinary approach to teaching, but in subjects such as science, a lack of confidence remains.
The reliance on supply teachers raises concerns about teaching consistency and classroom commitment to the new curriculum. We need to raise the status of teacher education and provide proper resourcing of continuing professional development in the future.
Cuts to school budgets are having an impact not just on some subjects but on devolved school budgets—the pots of money that can deliver flexibility and innovation in schools and support the holistic learning that comes with the curriculum for excellence.
I am concerned about the limitations that are being placed on school buildings that the Scottish Government will partly fund. The Government’s provision of only partial resources on a like-for-like basis lacks the ambition that is needed to create modern and contemporary buildings that can deliver the new curriculum.
If the new curriculum is to be delivered imaginatively and creatively, colleges and universities should be engaged, as they can provide opportunities for pupil education as well as teacher education. It is a curriculum for three to 18-year-olds, and more can be done to engage adult learning institutions in delivery and supporting delivery.
The Scottish Government urgently needs to improve the context in which the curriculum for excellence will be introduced. The announcements from the EIS conference at the weekend are concerning. The EIS has been supportive of the curriculum for excellence, but it is now calling for a delay in the exams and has voted to pursue a work-to-rule policy, which is extremely worrying. The Government must urgently address its concerns about implementation.
The continuing worry around resourcing must be addressed. Teachers are struggling with current funding settlements; rightly, they are also worried about the future. The Government must show commitment to Scottish education and the introduction of the curriculum for excellence. If we are to have confidence in the changes, it must reach an agreement with local authorities to protect education funding and staffing levels.
10:05
Like the cabinet secretary, I am astonished at the self-reinvention of Ken Macintosh, the newest of new Labour MSPs, as a scion of the left. He even appeared to mention the dreaded S-word—socialism. No doubt Diane Abbott can count on his vote in the forthcoming Labour leadership stramash. As for the SNP being like the Tories, it is not our former members of Parliament who stampede to join George Foulkes in the House of Lords, it is not our party that introduced tuition fees and expanded PFI, and it is not the SNP that is in formal coalition with the Tories in five Scottish local authorities.
I state my opposition to the motion. I will focus my remarks on concerns about the reduction in the number of teachers since 2007 and the problems that newly qualified teachers face in their attempts to secure a job.
Will the member take an intervention?
I will move on a wee bit before letting Mr Macintosh in. I know that, whenever I mention him, he always leaps up seconds later.
It is true that the number of teachers who are unable to find permanent or even temporary employment is a problem. However, there are a number of reasons for that.
I have no wish to respond to personal remarks and will address the policy issue. Can Mr Gibson tell me why extending free school meals to the children of better-off parents, extending free prescriptions and freezing the council tax, while putting up council house rents, are progressive policies?
I am sure that Mr Macintosh’s constituents in Eastwood would be interested in his answers to some of those questions. He probably recalls that a number of organisations that are active in the anti-poverty area made clear to the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee that provision of free school meals would be beneficial to all children. My figures may be slightly off, but well over 100 organisations—114, if memory serves me well—supported the Scottish Government’s policy on the issue. None of the anti-poverty organisations opposed our policy, unless Mr Macintosh can name one. I am happy to sit down to let him do so.
Will the member take an intervention?
No, if the member does not mind—I am not even a quarter of the way through my speech, and a third of my time has gone. I was responding to a point by Mr Macintosh; he was the member to whom I was hoping to give way, but sadly he did not intervene.
Labour councils are using the future of Scotland’s children for party-political ends. I will put some figures on that. Labour-led councils are responsible for two thirds of this year’s drop in teacher numbers. The November 2009 figures indicate that more than a quarter—28 per cent—of teacher posts that were cut by councils were cut by Glasgow City Council. The number of posts that were cut in Glasgow was 379, out of 1,348 throughout Scotland. Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee colleagues will recall that the reason given for that in evidence was falling school rolls, because Glasgow does not believe in smaller class sizes.
All councils are facing financial pressure, thanks to the Westminster cuts that Labour has imposed on Scotland. I say to Mr Rumbles that we would not have to endure such cuts if Scotland were independent. Of course, SNP councils—Perth and Kinross Council, East Ayrshire Council, Stirling Council and East Lothian Council—were able to increase teacher numbers in 2009.
Why do Labour-led councils make cuts while SNP councils are hiring? Let us look at what the EIS has said. On 6 June, it said on BBC Online:
“Promises have been made to reduce class sizes in our schools, and the progress has been extremely limited to date.
Some local authorities have openly refused to work towards their commitments to reduce class sizes, in defiance of the Scottish Government's stated aims and the concordat that local authorities freely entered into.
The message to the Scottish Government and local authorities is clear—teachers expect the promises made to them on class sizes to be kept, and teachers will do everything possible to hold our political leaders to account.”
That message is directed to local authorities and the Scottish Government.
I turn to the sharp rise in the number of newly qualified teachers who cannot obtain permanent or even temporary employment. Teacher numbers are decided many years in advance. The number of teachers who did their probation year in 2008-09 was decided in 2006-07—before the SNP came to power—for those who took the postgraduate diploma in education route, and in 2003-04 for those who took the bachelor of education route. Labour and the Liberal Democrats—who were its pals at the time, but have now switched sides—were the ones who got their sums wrong.
It was preposterous for Mr Macintosh to say that there are no teaching jobs in Scotland. As of 1 June, 280 teaching jobs were advertised, 95 of which had been unfilled for three months or more. In its motion, Labour describes the decline last year in the proportion of newly qualified teachers who went into permanent, full-time work as a sharp fall, but that decline of 10.4 per cent is smaller than the decline from 2004-05 to 2005-06, which was 15.5 per cent.
Will Mr Gibson take an intervention?
I would really like to, but I am only halfway through my speech and am tight for time.
The Labour Party has forgotten about its disgraceful management of Scotland’s education system. Ms Craigie is whooping with shock, but there were far more unemployed teachers under Labour in 2000, 1999 and 1998—1,015, 1,230 and 1,675 respectively—than there are now. Mr Macintosh said that at the end of the session there will be 100,000 pupils in “bad” or “poor” schools. That is a lot better than the figure of 260,000 that Labour bequeathed to us in 2007.
The Scottish Government is concerned about some of the problems and is committed to resolving them with utmost haste. We are supporting early retirement. More than 10,000 primary, secondary and special school teachers over 55 could retire at any time. More than 20 per cent of teachers in 2009 were aged 55 or more. Anthony Finn, the chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland, said in December:
“Indeed, given the number of older teachers expected to retire over the next couple of years, I expect that we will need all the teachers we are currently training to fill future vacancies.”
We are addressing that problem. Councils have been given a borrowing facility of £10 million to support the costs of early retirement and to pave the way for the employment of new teachers this year and next.
There are hard times, many of which are unforeseeable and unavoidable, especially after Labour wrecked the UK economy with its imposed recession. The Scottish Government is committed to education and making progress in these difficult times. One of my colleagues said to me yesterday that this debate would be only the
“latest in the long line of lie-drenched fear-dominated hypocrisy-laden Natbashing education debates.”
I hope that future speakers from the Labour benches will make clear that that is not the case. Sadly, so far it appears to be.
10:12
Over the past year or so, a number of debates in the chamber have been directly about the curriculum for excellence or have touched on it. That should not be surprising, as reforming our education system is one of the most important tasks that the Parliament will undertake.
During this period, there has been widespread support for the principles of the curriculum for excellence. The aim of placing the individual child at the centre of the education experience is welcomed by professionals and politicians alike. Similarly, the drive to reduce the burden of overassessment has been welcomed. As I have mentioned previously in the chamber, my local authority, North Lanarkshire Council, is leading the way in implementing some aspects of the curriculum for excellence in primary schools.
This is not political point scoring—[Interruption.] Rather than sighing, the cabinet secretary should listen to what I am saying, because I am trying to be constructive—that is what he wanted. It is not true that, because people raise concerns, they are scoring political points. Consistent and, unfortunately, persistent concerns have been raised about aspects of curriculum reform. That is regrettable but, as responsible politicians, we have a responsibility to address those concerns, which have focused on the practicalities of implementing the curriculum for excellence rather than its principles and ethos. In particular, teachers in secondary schools have raised concerns about readiness for the new qualifications.
The cabinet secretary refused to take an intervention from me earlier, as he had said that he wanted to listen only to constructive points. I will try to be constructive. Will he tell us when children will sit the new qualifications and how they will be assessed? No one in Scotland is clear on those points, which are not political points but points of fact and substance that the Government needs to address. I acknowledge that the Scottish Government has taken steps to address some concerns, but many teachers and professionals in our education system are not convinced that we are ready or sufficiently resourced for the implementation of the curriculum for excellence in August.
The extent of concern was made crystal clear in the recent report “Curriculum for Excellence Management Board Survey of Teachers”. The cabinet secretary suggested that Mr Macintosh misquoted the report, but I mention it again because it is important that we realise what Scotland’s teachers said in response to the survey. Every teacher in Scotland was surveyed and about 24 per cent—almost 15,000 teachers—responded. The responses show that Labour members are not scoring political points but raising the serious and substantial concerns of a large number of teachers.
Teachers were asked about their confidence in delivering literacy and numeracy qualifications. According to the findings, only 24 per cent of the 7,023 secondary teachers who responded
“expressed some level of confidence that they will have sufficient information and support to draw evidence from across the curriculum for the award of Literacy and Numeracy Qualifications while 72% ... were ‘not at all confident’.”
I welcome the recently announced proposal for literacy and numeracy units to be built into English and maths qualifications, to simplify the system for formally recognising those skills, but the announcement has come a little too late and does not provide sufficient clarity.
The survey report went on to say that only 23 per cent of secondary teachers
“expressed some level of confidence that they will have sufficient information and support about the senior phase to enable them to plan for the delivery of courses which lead to National 4 and National 5 qualifications, while 72% ... were ‘not at all confident’.”
Similar levels of concern were expressed about the ability to deliver a broad general education. Teachers also said that there was a need for improved guidance on and support for the implementation of the curriculum for excellence. At the time of the survey, there was considerable confusion about many aspects of the practical delivery of the new curriculum, in particular assessment.
The cabinet secretary’s 10-point plan attempts to address some of those concerns, but there remain questions about whether it goes far enough. Like him, I am regularly in schools, and I know only too well that we have confident, articulate, committed teachers. Teachers are right to raise their concerns, because ultimately they will be responsible for implementing the revised curriculum in August. The cabinet secretary should not dismiss their concerns so lightly.
Given that we have not yet felt the full force of the impending budget cuts, it is worrying that the SNP Government has presided over a fall in teacher numbers and the creation of a jobs vacuum for newly qualified teachers. In 2007, the SNP promised to maintain teacher numbers, but the cabinet secretary told the Parliament today that we overinflated teacher numbers and did not need all those teachers. That is not what parents and teachers in Scotland think. By 2009, teacher numbers had dropped to 50,610—a reduction of more than 2,000. During the same period, pupil to teacher ratios increased slightly across primary, secondary and special schools.
That is a betrayal of the young teachers who entered training in the not-unreasonable expectation that they would have a job on completion of their degree. Instead, in recent weeks I have met teachers who are off to teach in Dubai and Canada. Indeed, last week three probationary teachers applied to work for me in the Scottish Parliament. When they were asked why, they said that they did not want to leave teaching but that they would rather have any job than sit on the dole. The situation is simply not good enough. Those young teachers would make a real difference to Scottish education. It is tragic that we are losing many of our brightest young teachers and it is unacceptable that the Government chooses to ignore their concerns.
The Scottish Government will play its usual game of claim and blame: it will claim for itself schools that it never funded while blaming the UK Government and local government for the decline in teacher numbers. However, the people of Scotland are increasingly showing their dissatisfaction with a Government that constantly carps, “It wasnae me.” They want a Government that is honest when it has tough decisions to make. A Government that always seeks to blame others ultimately looks weak. I urge the Government to listen to the legitimate concerns of Scotland’s parents and teachers and to support them to implement the curriculum for excellence.
10:21
Two hundred and forty-four million pounds in one year—that is how much money was siphoned out of local authority education budgets straight off last year, before authorities had bought even a pencil. Some £244 million was siphoned off and wasted on paying the private profits of bankers who run the special delivery vehicles of PPP and PFI projects. Nearly quarter of a billion pounds a year has been stripped out of the scarce resources that are available to local authorities for education. The money has been lost as a result of the credit card mortgages that Labour took out on Scotland’s school estate, yet Labour members have the brass neck to swan into Parliament with a motion that complains about the scarcity of resources—and that is before we face the cuts that will be imposed by the Lib Dem and Conservative Government as a result of the massive economic failures of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling.
The biggest irony of all is that PPP/PFI was supposed to be a fantastic way of moving the risk of large-scale capital projects away from the public sector and into the private sector. Somehow it did not turn out that way; what little risk transferred came thundering right back at us when the UK Government started firing our money at the banks. Now we are in the interesting position in which public money is being used to prop up private financing of public projects in which private profit is the overriding concern. The public purse is paying through the nose for the privilege. Some 5 per cent of the education budget has gone. One pound in every £20 has vanished from education resources and the situation will only get worse.
Revenue expenditure on education has increased massively under the SNP Government and is more than double the level when Donald Dewar was First Minister. We spend £5,000 per primary school pupil per year, compared with less than £2,000 in 1999, and we spend getting on for £7,000 per secondary school pupil per year, compared with just £3,000 in 1999. The Government has ensured that Scotland’s schools are well resourced, and has done so in partnership with local authorities. It respects councils and values their position and their right to run their areas. The resources will help to deliver the important changes that are coming in Scottish education, as will dedicated staff members and committed parents.
Like Karen Whitefield, I speak to teachers regularly, most of whom tell me that they are ready to implement the curriculum for excellence and that they are looking forward to doing so. However, they are increasingly telling me that they are sick fed up of hearing politicians talking them down, saying that they are not able to implement the new curriculum and suggesting that they are not professional enough to do their jobs well. They tell me that morale is being affected by the constant onslaught on their professionalism. They say that teachers are feeling the pressure and that parents and pupils are being unnecessarily worried by the harpies’ continual wailing, which they want to stop. Politicians should stop talking down Scotland’s education system and stop blighting children’s lives with petty point scoring and instead get on with the job of delivering improvements in Scottish education.
Perhaps Opposition members should listen to the sage advice of Robert Brown MSP, from the old days when he was Deputy Minister for Education and Young People, who said:
“The curriculum for excellence programme will produce a curriculum for children from three to 18. Moving to a single curriculum that starts at age three, with the early stage of the revised curriculum going to the end of primary 1, has the radical potential to extend the child-centred, active learning approaches that are used in nursery into the early years of primary. That is extremely important. Good work is being done in many schools and other establishments across Scotland in that regard. From experience across the sector, we know that transitions are always difficult. Continuing the active learning style of nursery into primary 1 will make the transition from pre-school and nursery to school easier. It is vital that the eagerness and enthusiasm for learning that young children have in early years settings are maintained throughout their school careers.”—[Official Report, 8 February 2007; c 31922-3.]
I could not agree more.
Many ministers in the previous Administration did a lot of work to start the development of the system that SNP ministers are now implementing. It is sad that their colleagues appear willing to discard that work for the sake of some newspaper headlines and petty political point scoring. Yes, Ms Whitefield—petty political point scoring indeed. It offers little advantage politically and much damage educationally. Those members might wish to reflect on the fact that ill-considered actions can have serious long-term effects. They might want to remember that the newly qualified teachers who cannot find work now entered teacher training under the previous Administration as a result of hasty decisions based on poor workforce planning by Labour ministers. Those newly qualified teachers who cannot find employment, who are noted in the Labour motion, are unemployed because Labour failed them. They entered teacher training on Labour’s watch to fill vacancies that Labour predicted but which never came. Labour played a cruel trick on those young professionals.
The motion is based on false premises. Labour hopes to divert attention from its failings. It is just as well that we have an SNP Government that is working to make Scotland smarter and more competitive and to give Scotland’s children the best possible start in life.
10:27
In the course of the first eight years of devolved government, when we had a coalition Government in Scotland, I was pleased that new primary and secondary schools were built in my constituency: new schools at the Hill of Banchory and Lairhillock, and a new academy at Portlethen. Those schools were built as part of the public-private partnership scheme that was initiated by the Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition Government. As a result, children from those school catchment areas are being educated in modern and well-equipped schools.
When a change of Government occurred three years ago, in 2007, little did we know that the new SNP Government’s promise to match the previous coalition Government’s school building programme “brick for brick” was simply campaigning rhetoric. Little did we know that that promise to continue with the school building programme was like the SNP’s promise to dump student debt, to get rid of the council tax and to give £2,000 to first-time house buyers. Although the list goes on, I do not have time to go through all of the promises that the SNP made in its election campaign and the disappointments since it was elected. Ken Macintosh was far too kind to the SNP Administration in his speech, hence my intervention. I thought that he had identified an SNP promise on schools that had been kept, but unfortunately Mr Macintosh was being too polite to the cabinet secretary—pity that that courtesy was not returned.
Not one school has been built in my constituency since this sorry excuse for a Government came to power; not even one school has been started with the extra funding promised by the Scottish Government. Although the SNP Administration has promised to fund two thirds of the £43 million that is needed for Mearns academy at Laurencekirk in my constituency, that is not expected to happen until 2016—and we are supposed to be oh so terribly grateful. Not only will no school be built in my area under this Government, but the schools minister does not expect Mearns academy to be built under the next Scottish Government, which will be elected in 2011. The SNP is great on promises and awful on delivery.
To add to Mike Rumbles’s concerns, he might want to check Aberdeenshire Council’s pockets, because he will find that the two thirds relates not to the cost of building the school but to a notional formula, which will be significantly less.
I made the mistake of being too kind to the SNP Government.
My point is that our children are educated only once. None of the children currently attending Mearns academy will be educated in the state-of-the art facilities that they deserve. I do not want to hear the excuse from the cabinet secretary or his back benchers that financial times are hard. This Government has never planned a school building programme in my constituency, even in a time of relative plenty.
The previous Government did not pay for it.
The member is wrong.
Aberdeenshire Council has great plans to use money from its budget to build and renew several primary schools throughout the shire and to build a new community school campus at Alford—no thanks to any new funding from the Scottish Government. The cabinet secretary knows that there is a desperate need for new and refurbished academies at Kemnay, at a cost of £38 million; at Stonehaven, at a cost of £34 million; and at Banchory, at a cost of £18 million. That is not even on the radar of the SNP Administration. It should dump its ideological opposition to using private funding and launch a new round of public-private partnership funding so that those schools can be built or refurbished. I ask the cabinet secretary to drop his ideological problem in that respect.
It is worth repeating that our children are educated only once. We need new schools now. I find it amazing that SNP members attack Labour for using political rhetoric when political rhetoric is all that we have heard from the SNP today. If ministers refuse to take the necessary action to help to build new secondary schools in Aberdeenshire, the people of Aberdeenshire will have the opportunity at the ballot box next May to eject them from office. I am sure that they will take that opportunity.
10:32
I pay tribute to the dedication of staff at all levels in schools and nurseries in Cumbernauld and Kilsyth—staff who are committed to providing the best possible opportunity for the young people in their charge. I was proud to be a member during the first two sessions of this Parliament and I am proud of the legislation that was passed in that period to deliver quality and access for every child, especially the legislation that was designed to provide additional support when needed. How sad it is to see what has happened in the three years since the nationalists came to government. Additional support for our most needy children is reducing. The Government’s just ask radio campaign is seen as a sick joke by parents who are trying to do the best for their child, and who are wondering why the SNP is spending so much money on a meaningless advertising campaign when a few thousand pounds needs to be invested in their child’s future.
It is sad that the new school building programme has disappeared and to see the effect that that is having on children and the construction industry. The SNP—especially its back benchers—would do well to listen to what is being said. Contrary to what Christina McKelvie said, I can come to Parliament holding my head high. I want to see more schools like St Patrick’s primary in Kilsyth, which was built using the PPP method of funding. It provides a positive and pleasant environment for nursery and primary-age children and facilities, such as playing fields, that can be used in the evenings and at weekends. Unfortunately, under the SNP and its SFT—or schools fantasy trust—we will all need to wait before we see more schools.
We take part in today’s debate at a time when figures show that up to 70 per cent—yes, 70 per cent—of newly qualified teachers fail to find work. I am grateful to Kenny Gibson for reminding us what a difference Labour made by increasing teacher numbers between 1997 and 2007. How sad it is to find that, after only three years of an SNP Government, teacher numbers are falling. The excuses that the cabinet secretary gave for that were disgraceful. No wonder he has been looking to the skies throughout this debate and turning his back on speakers whenever those points have been made.
If the First Minister and cabinet secretary—who seem to live in their own naive utopia and want to silence criticism wherever it comes from—believe that their party is doing a good job in leading education in Scotland, I can tell them categorically that that is not the case. Across the board, the SNP has failed. The SNP’s fruitless promises to parents, pupils, teachers and university and college students are clear to see in its policies, the majority of which have fallen by the wayside.
Contrary to SNP press office statements, the teacher crisis has been caused by the SNP. As colleagues have stated, more than 2,500 teacher jobs have been cut, as have the jobs of more than 1,000 support workers. In my constituency of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, I have witnessed at first hand how teachers have lost their jobs and how newly qualified teachers who cannot find a position have been forced to up sticks and move to England or overseas simply to find work. Such are the dire straits in which our educators have been placed by the SNP. [Interruption.] Rather than just sit on their backsides making comments, SNP members should sit up and intervene.
Will the member give way?
I am happy to do so.
Is it not the case that unemployment among teachers is proportionately higher in England, Wales and Northern Ireland than it is in Scotland? Yes or no?
Mr Gibson, I was elected to represent the people of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth in the Scottish Parliament. Under the devolved settlement, I want the best possible education experience for our young people. The SNP is taking its eye off the ball in education and my constituents are suffering because of an incompetent SNP Government.
The figures do not lie. The General Teaching Council for Scotland’s figures show that only 25 per cent of teachers have signed a permanent full-time contract. The EIS has said that such shocking figures “paint an alarming picture”. When the SNP set out its key pillars of education back in 2006—all of which have since, without question, crumbled—Fiona Hyslop said:
“The SNP will provide teachers the time, space and resources to teach”.
Far from providing teachers with resources, the SNP is not even providing them with jobs. The fact is that the SNP Government has failed our teachers since it came to power three years ago. Its cuts have damaged the teaching profession and threatened the education of young people not only in my constituency of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth but the length and breadth of Scotland.
Sadly, the SNP’s action on teachers is not its only failing: its class size policy was a shambles from the word go; its unfunded promises to university students were a disgrace; and its pledge to match Labour’s school building programme “brick for brick” has left the bricks stockpiled in the brickworks and construction workers sitting on the couch. That is another disgraceful let-down by the SNP.
When Fiona Hyslop was axed, there was a belief that she might—just might—be replaced by someone who was willing to sort out the mess that she left. We got Mike Russell, who should have been able to stand up for education, but he has simply carried on from where his predecessor left off. He lives in his own fantasy SNP bubble.
As colleagues have said, the Scottish Government is very quick to play the blame game, which—apart from independence—seems to be the only policy that it is sticking to. The blame is given to Westminster or to local authorities; it is never given to the SNP. Well, it is about time that the SNP took responsibility for its actions in government. How can the Scottish Government justify cutting the budget of local authorities by £270 million—more than £17 million of which is to be taken from North Lanarkshire Council—when it has twice as much to spend as Donald Dewar had? If North Lanarkshire Council had followed the Scottish Futures Trust model for the schools that that council has built under PPP, the cost to the taxpayer would be £1.2 million more per annum—
You should be finishing now, Ms Craigie.
As a result of SNP cuts, local authorities are being forced to cut front-line services as well as review and even close schools and nurseries. As the minister knows, that is happening in my constituency.
You should be finishing now, Ms Craigie.
Since 2007, the SNP has without doubt damaged education—
I am sorry, Ms Craigie, but you must finish now.
And that has not been without impact. The SNP should move over and let Labour take control again.
10:41
The motion that is before us today ranges over two topics, whose only direct relationship is that they are both in the field of education. As time is limited, I will concentrate specifically on the part of the motion that deals with the introduction of the curriculum for excellence and associated matters.
Last week, those of us who were in the chamber experienced at first hand the depressing negativity of the Labour Party when it comes to implementation of new ideas. At that point, Labour members expressed fears about introducing minimum unit pricing for alcohol, on the ground that no one else had done it before. In their eyes, the idea that Scotland should be a trail-blazer rather than a camp-follower was obviously too fraught with danger even to be entertained.
Today, their fear is about the introduction of the curriculum for excellence. Everyone thought the curriculum for excellence was a brilliant idea when it was conceived in the first few years of the millennium, but now that we have come to its practical application, the attitude is different. Those who say that Scotland is not up to it are raising their voices once more, as we heard especially in today’s rather scattergun opening speech. I can assume only that some people are worried that, if children are taught more about economics, they will realise the enormous financial burden that the previous Government has placed around their necks, thanks to PFI.
Let us consider a little of the history behind the curriculum for excellence. In 2002, the then Minister for Education and Young People, Cathy Jamieson, launched a national debate on education. She described that as an unprecedented move to involve everyone in Scotland in discussing the future of school education. Briefing packs were sent to every local authority and school in Scotland and to every organisation that expressed an interest in hosting a national debate event. A national phoneline was set up. Press and radio advertisements were commissioned to raise awareness of the debate and to let people know how they could participate. In that way, teachers helped to shape the curriculum for excellence as long as eight years ago.
In 2004, there followed the report “A Curriculum for Excellence—The Curriculum Review Group”. That report was enthusiastically received by the Labour-Lib Dem Administration, which pledged in its response, among other things, that
“We will work closely with teachers to ensure that the changes will work in the classroom.”
At this stage, in the spirit of consensus, let me congratulate Cathy Jamieson, Peter Peacock and all those who were involved in steering the future of Scottish education all those years ago. I appreciate that the parents of schoolchildren who were consulted then are not necessarily parents of schoolchildren now, but one thing that we can be sure of is that both parents and teachers have been widely involved in the development of the curriculum for excellence over many years.
Since the advent of the SNP Government, teachers have been even more widely consulted. Representatives of both the Educational Institute of Scotland and the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association are included on the management board that supervises the programme. In the future, a stakeholders group that includes a large representation from teachers will advise on future developments of the curriculum for excellence. Its first meeting took place earlier this month, and its next will be on 22 June.
I appreciate that new ways of working come more easily to some people than they do to others. In particular, primary school teachers have for many years worked in an environment in which projects and joined-up activities have been the norm, so they should find little difficulty in coping with the changes. The situation is different in secondary schools, where single, stand-alone subject teaching has been more the norm. Although secondary teachers have welcomed the theory of the curriculum for excellence, they might have reservations about their ability to put it into practice. New skills might be required along with new ways of working with pupils and colleagues. To help to prepare for that, many specific measures have been taken, such as additional in-service days, targeted support and extra funding.
It is understandable that parents and teachers become concerned when ways of teaching that have been in place for years are replaced, but the curriculum for excellence is one of the most well-trailed policies ever. It has the support of educationists from all over the world, and now is the time to put it into practice.
Finally, I will say a word about the qualification arrangements. Although secondary 1 pupils will be learning under the new curriculum, the first new qualifications will not be offered until 2013-14, so nothing is imminent. There is a more important point to be made here, however. We need to move away from the teach-to-test mentality that has so hamstrung Scottish education in recent years. In these early days, the emphasis should not be on devising a test for the curriculum before that curriculum is in place. The emphasis should be on encouraging, even inspiring, pupils to undertake more research, analysis and independent thought, which are skills that they will need in later life, when a person can expect to have to adapt to the changing work and life circumstances of the time. Of course there will be support materials and development for assessment and qualifications, but those are not the most important needs today. We are sure that they will come.
Labour members can be proud of the curriculum for excellence, a project that they nurtured in its infancy and which is now on the verge of confident maturity. Let them put aside the negativity that they have expressed today and join in welcoming a development that will once more place our country at the forefront of educational progress.
10:46
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in today’s debate. The power of education to change people’s lives is what brought me from education into politics.
This is an opportune time to be discussing teacher numbers, among other things, given the cabinet secretary’s performance at the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee yesterday, when he said that teacher numbers had been unsustainable under the previous Labour-led Scottish Executive. Given that the 2007 SNP manifesto promised to maintain teacher numbers in the face of falling school rolls, Michael Russell’s remarks were cynical. Indeed, he and the SNP leadership owe the parents, pupils and teachers of Scotland an apology for a manifesto that was nothing more than a cynical exercise to win votes with absolutely no intention or way of implementing it.
To be charitable, the education manifesto was written by Fiona Hyslop, who was seemingly totally oblivious to John Swinney’s plans for the concordat. It is no wonder that the electorate is turning its back on the SNP when it cynically offers cheques that simply cannot be cashed. When it comes to education, the SNP has not just ripped up the manifesto: it has shredded it, poured petrol on it, and set fire to it.
Tempting though it is to dwell on the many ways in which this Administration is failing our young people, I will focus my remarks on the important role of literacy in the curriculum. I give a cautious welcome to the way in which the Government has responded to the report of the literacy commission that Labour set up.
The promotion of improved literacy levels is shared across party politics. Every one of us in this chamber realises that literacy is key to Scotland’s future. Of course, it is a central plank of the curriculum for excellence and is key to pupils becoming confident individuals and independent learners. When the literacy commission reported, the cabinet secretary promised to bring forward an action plan for literacy. We were told that that would happen in June. Perhaps the cabinet secretary can tell us whether that is still going to happen in June and, if not, when we will have it. There are still areas that require clarification, particularly in assessment, so I would be grateful if Mr Russell could update Parliament on those.
The naive proposal to assess literacy through a cross-subject portfolio seems to have been dropped. Although I accept that all teachers have a responsibility to teach literacy, the proposal was not sufficiently focused and it lacked accountability. I welcome the fact that the responsibility for assessing literacy will be with English departments, but it is vital that there is a distinct literacy component within assessment of English. Perhaps the minister could elucidate on that. Will there be a separate literacy assessment? That is absolutely key.
Does the Scottish Government now recognise the concept of functional literacy? In past responses to parliamentary questions, we have been told that the Scottish Government does not recognise that concept. As the cabinet secretary knows, such a concept is fundamental to the literacy commission’s proposals, and without a benchmark for basic literacy, we will continue to merely describe a child’s progress, as we have done in recent years through the five-to-14 language assessment.
If the Government accepts that it is no longer acceptable for 13,000 pupils to leave primary school without functional literacy, it follows that any literacy action plan must tackle head-on the failure of some pupils to reach basic literacy levels. Assessment of functional literacy is central to the pioneering work that has been done in West Dunbartonshire and Clackmannanshire, and the excellent work that is being done in North Lanarkshire and, I am delighted to say, in Midlothian Council’s recently launched literacy strategy.
Of course, the assessment of literacy needs to be embedded right through from nursery to school leavers. I say “from nursery” quite deliberately, because it is vital to screen for pre-literacy communication skills in nursery, and to couple that with picking up on children who have complex needs and require intensive work, for example through nurture groups.
I am sure that Rhona Brankin will know better than I that there has been a lot of debate and discussion around functional literacy and technology. Young people use text messaging and abbreviations. How does Rhona Brankin feel about that being part of an assessment process of what I regard as genuine literacy? There has been some debate about that, particularly in The Times Educational Supplement Scotland.
That issue is slightly separate. The basic point about being able to measure a child’s acquisition of literacy is the fundamental concept of what constitutes a basic functional literacy that allows people to function within society. That is the sort of basic literacy that I am talking about.
Low literacy rates are linked to deprivation, but it is also important to know that, even in areas of deprivation, such as West Dunbartonshire, intensive work with pupils can achieve real success. We cannot begin to tackle the persistent low levels of attainment by too many pupils in Scotland without tackling the underlying cause for many youngsters, which is their failure to master functional literacy skills.
Does the cabinet secretary recognise the need for a national plan for literacy to have defined outcomes that can be measured? West Dunbartonshire Council achieved functional literacy levels across its schools within 10 years. One of the key features of successful literacy plans is that they set out clear targets or outcomes, and there is a structured plan for evaluating their success. Millions of pounds have been spent on literacy over the years, but few projects have been sustained, and any literacy plan must be sustainable. Government is key to achieving that long-term sustainability.
I regret that I must end on a negative note. Cutting learning support staff levels and classroom assistants means cutting some of the key staff for delivering a step change in literacy. If the Government is committed to eradicating illiteracy from Scotland, it will require commitment and strong leadership across the education sector, across councils, from parents and, critically, from the Government itself. We simply cannot afford to continue to fail pupils. They deserve our commitment and support.
Is the Government up to delivering a step change in literacy? I certainly hope so. Everyone in the chamber hopes so, but the omens are not good. I ask members to support the motion in the name of Des McNulty.
10:54
I do not think that today’s debate has been Parliament’s finest hour. Many of the speeches have been directed to the hustings rather than parliamentary debate. Perhaps it is an end-of-term aberration, but teachers and parents will have every right to be disappointed—especially if today has been a trailer for forthcoming electoral attractions.
Education has, rightly, always been a Scottish priority, and we all have an interest in ensuring that our national education system upgrades, improves and meets the needs of 21st century Scottish society.
The serious issues of teacher employment opportunities and curriculum innovation are being deliberately used as political propaganda in the fundamentally flawed motion that is before us, which simply misses the point. It is simplistic to treat fluctuating trends as being somehow endemic problems, especially for party-political purposes. Teacher recruitment is, in reality, a complex management problem that involves many and changing variables including teacher numbers, population changes, school rolls—which can rise and fall—the age ranges of teaching staff, and subject specialisms. In the current times of financial decline, the general economy also comes into play.
Will the member take an intervention?
Later.
Prediction of future teacher demand is a very difficult procedure. If we add into the mix the length of teacher training and a four-year time span, we see that the accusations that are made in the motion point right back to the Labour Party, which held power for the relevant years. Indeed, councils in which Labour is currently in power are responsible for two thirds of this year’s drop in teacher numbers.
No credit is given for the positive signs that are being created. The number of post-probationers not in employment has halved since October, and Scotland has the lowest teacher unemployment in the UK. There is no point in playing the blame game in a sector and profession that is crucial to the future of our country. The decline in teacher numbers began some time ago, and the “sharp decline” that is claimed in the motion is in fact a smaller decline than in recent years.
The real task is to ensure that Scotland maintains its traditional emphasis on having an education system that is fit for the 21st century, that is based on traditional Scottish values and which uses modern thinking in tune with the needs of this century. Traditionally, Scotland has had a unified system from elementary education through to university, which has been designed to allow every student to progress as far and as fast as their ability can take them. That sees education as a continuous process that is available to all. As a former secondary teacher and further education senior lecturer, I believe that we should be considering what I see as being the gaps between primary and secondary, and between secondary and the further education and university sectors.
In the past, we all relied on information that we carried in our heads, but today’s world has information overload, requiring other skills such as analysis, co-operation, co-working and interaction, communication skills, discrimination and judgment. The walls of our primary schools throughout Scotland show that those lessons have been learned, and I have seen at first hand excellent pupil-teacher interaction, as well as pupil interaction, creating a positive teaching environment. That is what the curriculum for excellence is all about: modern methods for modern situations.
We should all remember that the curriculum for excellence is a method and an approach to teaching. It is important that secondary education becomes a natural progression from primary and that further education and universities all form part of an interlinked continuum, raising students to higher levels on the foundations and methods that are laid down at each stage of development. I did not hear any of that earlier on, and I wish I had because that is at the heart of Scotland’s education future. If that were introduced, it would fulfil the historic and far-sighted objectives that were the basis of Scotland’s traditional educational strengths.
It is time to make the system work as a co-ordinated, progressive and integrated continuum to give Scotland an education system that is adaptable and fit for the 21st century. I regret that the real issues have rarely been addressed today and have instead been drowned out in party-political rhetoric. Scottish education deserves better than that.
10:59
I had intended to make a critically constructive contribution, but the tirade of personal abuse that was the cabinet secretary’s opening speech, and which has been reflected in the speeches by some of his back benchers, makes that rather more difficult. Nevertheless, I will do my best to be constructive because I am not negative about the curriculum for excellence, and I am desperate for it to deliver the best possible outcomes for the children of Scotland and for Scotland’s future.
There were good and sound reasons for wanting to introduce a more flexible approach to the curriculum. The rigid subject-bound approach in secondary schools was, for many children in S1 and S2, not delivering. The period of adapting from a topic-and-project based approach in primary school to separate subjects delivered by different teachers in different classrooms too often resulted in a period of stagnation in the early years of secondary school and, in some cases, in a deterioration of children’s skills and confidence.
I have observed in schools examples of excellent practice that would fit in very well with the principles of the curriculum for excellence. I attended Dumfries high school a couple of weeks ago—to partake of a school dinner, but that is a totally different issue—where I was given the chance to drop in on an S2 environmental project, which was exemplary. The young people were looking at the changes in the school’s environment over the past 100 years and were collecting samples of plants, insects and so on. The science teacher was working with a creative writing teacher and an art teacher, and he was brimming with enthusiasm. I could see that enthusiasm being caught by his pupils, who in front of my eyes were developing their skills of observation and classification, which are key scientific skills. I said to the headteacher afterwards that it was the type of learning that was envisaged by those who had conceived the curriculum for excellence.
I also recently presented Duncow primary school with its second green flag. That gave me a chance to chat with its eco committee, which includes children as young as primary 3. Without a teacher being present, they were able to describe to me what they had done to get the award. They communicated effectively—part of what the curriculum for excellence is about—and they were clearly developing early science skills.
I studied science and I also taught science, admittedly mainly to adults, and I have some concerns about the way in which the curriculum for excellence will be implemented in science education. It is great to get young people interested in and enthusiastic about science, but there is a time when the “Wow!” factor has to develop into core competencies, skills and knowledge. That development will and should be challenging, and those competencies, skills and knowledge are not identical across the spectrum of sciences.
I know that the teaching unions have expressed concerns that teachers may be expected to teach unfamiliar subjects because of the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework. I have had some experience of that, as I was required to teach both geology and biology when I taught the Open University science foundation course, but had never studied either in my life. It told me something about the learning and teaching experiences, but it was challenging. I know that teachers, in particular, will be sensitive to the effect that their possible lack of confidence may have on their pupils’ learning.
I know that the science baccalaureate is intended to prepare school students to study science and engineering at university; we had a presentation on the science baccalaureate at the cross-party group on science and technology a few months ago. There was a lot of enthusiasm from those who are involved in its delivery, and I imagine that many students will be enthused, but I am not convinced that it will be right for all students or that it is a panacea.
First, pupils who are going on to study scientific subjects need to develop their problem-solving skills and knowledge before the senior stage, which commences in S4. Students will need, for example, to distinguish between physics and biology and other sciences and to know which disciplines they are attracted to. That is obviously tied in with both teaching resources and the new qualification arrangements.
Secondly, I am concerned that the science baccalaureate might narrow students’ focus. It seems to be more in line with the English A level system and the three-year honours degree. The flexibility of the four-year Scottish honours degree has its advantages—the cabinet secretary addressed a reception last week to celebrate the success of Scottish science and engineering, during which he described being forced to take a science subject at university and then really enjoying studying it. I had the converse experience at university of not being allowed to do extra maths and being forced to do philosophy, which I then really enjoyed. The fact that we have a broad curriculum, even at higher education level, that brings us out of our comfort zone and allows us to learn new things, is a strength of our system, and I would not like us to lose it.
My final point on the curriculum for excellence is on how it fosters what I would call general scientific literacy. I must say that that is an area in which previous education regimes have failed. Too many people feel that science is too difficult and that they cannot do it. The vast majority of people do not have the confidence in their own scientific judgment to challenge what they are told by the media or advertising, which leaves them open to being conned.
I believe that what is perhaps even more important is that everyone can enjoy science at some level, just as they can enjoy sport or the arts at some level. One of the great strengths of the curriculum for excellence is its potential to give children the confidence to engage with science—a confidence that, I hope, will grow with them. That will not be achieved if we do not get the curriculum for excellence right. Rushing it in without proper consultation and discussion with those who will deliver the curriculum will not result in the kind of education system that we all want.
I will finish on a local issue. Kenneth Macintosh mentioned the pressures that are building in the Scottish education system at the moment. I know that the cabinet secretary has had—and possibly still has—an interest in Dumfries and Galloway, and I wonder how he feels about the loss of 23 teachers in this current year, the potential reduction in the numbers of classroom assistants and the removal of school transport from places such as Stranraer and Heathhall in Dumfries. We are seeing reductions in the quality of our education in that area at the very time when we should be seeing consolidation, given that there is a new curriculum coming in.
11:06
Not entirely unexpectedly, this has been a fairly bad-tempered debate, and such exchanges shed more heat than light on the subject. Mostly, that is done for political effect. However, on this occasion, there can be little doubt that the debate has shown that there is a broad consensus—with the exception of SNP back benchers—that this Government has overpromised and underdelivered on education. Member after member has demonstrated, with a litany of genuine facts and figures, just how poorly the Government has performed. We heard from Mike Rumbles about his constituency experience, and we heard from others about teacher numbers. A couple of references were made to posts that are available—Kenneth Gibson mentioned a figure of 280 posts. However, most of them are not entry-level posts but promoted posts or posts that call for people with specialist skills. Probationary teachers cannot apply for those posts, because they do not have the necessary experience.
The curriculum for excellence is causing huge concerns. Those concerns are coming not from the Opposition parties—although we are voicing them—but from the teachers’ unions. Our contributions to this debate are reflecting their concerns, because they represent people who are at the front end of delivering what is, principally, a good way forward.
Mike Rumbles and Kenneth Macintosh were too gentle with the Scottish Government. The fact is that it has not delivered on any of the manifesto commitments. I do not remember an appendix to the manifesto that said that the commitments would be fulfilled only if the moon was in the right phase, or whatever.
What about the Liberal Democrats’ commitment to abolish the Scotland Office?
The Government has huffed and puffed—as its back benchers continue to do from sedentary positions—but it has failed to deliver. From the First Minister to the most recent Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, we have heard a tale of woe, full of sound and fury but signifying almost nothing. We have listened as SNP back benchers have stood up to try to defend the indefensible: the total failure of the Government to keep the promises that it made to the people of Scotland slightly more than three years ago.
Even more galling are the facile complaints from cabinet secretary after cabinet secretary that this is all someone else’s fault. We hear, “It’s the big bogeyman in London who has cut our budget,” or “We don’t employ teachers; it’s the councils.” It is either Westminster’s fault, or it is the bad wee councils, who are not doing what is asked of them. I have to say that the most culpable people are those who will not accept culpability for their role in this situation. The misdirection of funding towards vanity projects such as free school meals for every child amounts to nothing less than mismanagement.
I seem to recall that it was the policy of the Liberal Democrats some time ago to reduce income tax, with a cost to the Scottish exchequer of around £800 million. Where would that money have come from, in today’s financial situation?
The tax policies will be fully addressed in the forthcoming emergency budget. However, if we are talking retrospectively about parties’ policies, I have to say that the SNP has no room to criticise anyone else, given its leaflets about dumping the student debt and mortgage grants for first-time buyers.
This Parliament has news for the SNP Government, whose leader thinks that it is more important to write to local authorities about spurious issues around schools than to apologise to teachers and parents for the shambles that his Government has made of running the education system. That type of approach is just like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic, but without the nice music to compensate for the disaster ahead. No amount of bluster from the First Minister or flowery rhetoric from the current cabinet secretary will disguise the ineptitude of the Government’s handling of the most important job of any Government: the education of our children. In the best of times, that is important, but in these times of economic challenges it is critical.
However, the Government’s desperation to drive forward populist agendas and an agenda that no one wants has led it to take its eye off the ball. It has let down Scotland, its teachers and its students. The Government’s failure will not be forgotten and is unlikely to be forgiven easily. The Government has failed, and will be punished for its failure.
11:12
Inevitably, I suppose, a debate about the roll-out of the curriculum for excellence has become entangled with other issues around the Government’s education policy. That is because when there are competing demands for resources—the implementation of the curriculum for excellence requires resources—the budgetary choices that are made by the Government, and its errors and failures, are bound to have an impact on that and to lead to criticism, even in relation to subjects on which there has been an impressive degree of consensus in the chamber, ever since the proposals set forth by the review group in its report “A Curriculum for Excellence” were published and accepted by the previous Scottish Executive in 2004. Further, it is a fact, I am sorry to say, that the number of teachers and classroom assistants has been in decline since 2007 and that there has been an increase in the proportion of newly qualified teachers who cannot obtain employment.
If the cabinet secretary is complaining that there was an overexpansion of teacher numbers under the previous Scottish Executive, why did the SNP say that it would maintain those numbers? Why was that pledge enshrined in the concordat that the SNP signed with local authorities? Mr Russell is smiling. Perhaps he would like to explain that.
He cannot.
No, he cannot. Mr Russell sits in silence. That is an extraordinary situation that is rarely seen. However, on this fundamental point, Mr Russell is stunned into silence.
It is certainly a fact that there is widespread disquiet about the implementation of the curriculum for excellence. Karen Whitefield was quite right to say that we in the Parliament have a responsibility, as does the Government, to listen and respond to that.
Those facts have to be weighed up against the back-cloth of a Government that was elected on a fraudulent and totally unrealistic policy on class sizes and which was stubbornly determined to put feeding children free of charge at taxpayers’ expense ahead of educating children free of charge at taxpayers’ expense. However, on that subject, I remind Kenneth Macintosh and others in the Labour Party who rightly criticised SNP priorities in that respect that we would not have the policy if the Labour Party had had the guts to vote against the relevant Scottish statutory instrument when it came before the Parliament for decision. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats voted against it, but I am afraid that the Labour Party was guilty of the same spineless populism of which it accuses Mr Russell. That, I am afraid, is the fact of that particular matter.
Let us not forget that the architect of the class sizes policy was not the hapless Fiona Hyslop, who carried the can for it, but her successor, one Michael Russell, now the cabinet secretary, who in an earlier guise told an SNP conference that it could all be achieved within five years. Well, he kens better noo. That is not just a function of the crisis in the public finances that we have inherited from Labour, although that will, no doubt, be used as an excuse. No, the fact of the matter is that the policy was never doable—and in some respects not even desirable—even in the best of times for the public finances.
All that is a salutary lesson that an important change such as the introduction of the curriculum for excellence requires focus, the establishment of priorities, the resourcing of those priorities, and the determination to see the job through without distractions. It will never be achieved by people who have the attention span of a gnat. Hugh O’Donnell encapsulated the SNP’s problem succinctly when he said that the Government has overpromised and underdelivered. The failure to focus is a charge that can rightly be levelled against the Government. The cabinet secretary needs to buckle down to the task with teachers and ensure that they and our schools are properly equipped and resourced to implement this important change.
In that context, however, I must say that, while we support our teachers, we deplore the threats of industrial action, from which our children and young people would be the losers. The unions are represented on the management board for the curriculum for excellence, which voted unanimously to press ahead with the start date in August. They should accept the consequences of that decision and work with the Government to see it through. Teaching is a vocation and teachers are members of a profession. Their union leaders do their reputation and public standing no good whatsoever by promoting industrial action with such irresponsible posturing.
I congratulate my colleague Elizabeth Smith on her informed and authoritative contribution to the debate. She pointed out the critical link between the curriculum and qualifications, as did Karen Whitefield. The two things must march in tandem, so how can we possibly implement a new curriculum in August but delay implementation of a new structure of examinations and assessment by a year? It cannot be done. It strikes me as a recipe for a dog’s breakfast. It is not fair to our teachers and it is certainly not fair to our young people, who should be at the centre of all this. The Government could do better and it must do better. That is why I support the Labour motion and the amendments in the names of Elizabeth Smith and Margaret Smith.
11:19
This has been a somewhat dismal debate. That is what I expected, so I am not disappointed. I want to set out at the beginning of my response that the truth of Scottish education is that, as we speak in this political bubble today, hundreds of thousands of good pupils are being taught by tens of thousands of good teachers in thousands of good schools. That is the reality in Scotland. It is a reality that I support, and it is one that the Parliament should support. The judgment on the Parliament is when it fails to do that and, indeed, when we have education debates that run entirely contrary to the principles of education. Every teacher whom I know wants to ensure that there is positive reinforcement so that those who are allegedly not doing well will do better. Instead, we have just had negativity.
Andrew Welsh got it absolutely right—I congratulate him on his speech—when he called the Labour speeches a rehearsal for the next election. That is exactly what they were. As a former critic, let me say exactly what notices I would give them. To start with, the casting was deeply unconvincing. The lead was very weak indeed and the supporting performances were often over the top. The script was badly written. I do not think that anybody will book the performance for a four-year run.
However, I have two exceptions to talk about—two impressive performances that were potential Oscar winners. I want to be serious about them. I find it quite extraordinary that I am saying it, but Rhona Brankin’s speech was important and searching in terms of what we need to talk about in the chamber, because she addressed real issues of literacy. The action plan will come forward and it will be a national action plan. It will not come forward in June, because I have asked the management board to intensify work with officials and others, including the literacy commission, for example to look at—[Interruption.]
It is unfortunate that any member, including Richard Simpson, should attempt to make jokes about this important issue. He is doing so from a sedentary position, which is most unfortunate.
The role of learning difficulties needs to be taken into account in the action plan. I agree entirely that benchmarking is important, and we need to have a real handle on the scale of the problem. Statistics on adults will be published in July. We need to see the issue as wider than just an issue for children. Hugh O’Donnell’s point on the technological connections is correct, and there is a lot of discussion about that. We need the national plan, and we will have it. I am grateful to Rhona Brankin for raising it.
I also thank Elaine Murray for her speech. There are many good schools, including in Dumfries and Galloway, in which I maintain a strong interest. I look forward to seeing her there yet again. We work hard on a range of issues of science in schools. Professor Anne Glover, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, has established a science and engineering education advisory group, which I have been involved with, and which is looking at teacher confidence in science, examples of good teaching, links to the CFE, and indeed the idea of enthusiasm for science. I will ask Anne Glover to engage with Elaine Murray on those issues, because I thought that she made a positive contribution on them.
The rest of the Labour contributions were like the present world cup football games. They were full of annoying and distracting noise. Labour members really are the vuvuzelas of Scottish politics. They engage the lungs and not the brain. I want to go through a list of points that were raised, but let me start with two points. Claire Baker, Margaret Smith, Ken Macintosh, Karen Whitefield, Mike Rumbles, Cathie Craigie, Rhona Brankin, Elaine Murray, Hugh O’Donnell and, I anticipate, Des McNulty all demand more public expenditure. Where are they? What have they been looking at in the past few months? The reality of the situation means that that will not happen. The more they argue in the chamber for more public expenditure, the more foolish they will seem.
I want to be entirely clear about the Government’s—
Will the minister give way?
No. I really must make progress. I will take the member in a moment.
The Government has delivered, we are delivering, and we will go on delivering real educational progress in Scotland.
Will the minister give way?
No. I want to finish this point.
We have delivered record funding even as Labour’s squeeze took hold. We have delivered the smallest ever class sizes in Scotland, and when difficulties arose in that policy, we negotiated. We did not stamp our feet as Labour seemed to want us to do. We have delivered substantial progress on PE. More children are having free school meals, and I am absolutely not ashamed of that. More schools have been built or refurbished, and we have prevented further damage to the public finances by stopping the ridiculously expensive and ruinous PPP. [Interruption.] I will come to Mr Rumbles in a moment; I hope that he is waiting for that.
There has been successful support for the curriculum for excellence, despite Labour’s attempt yet again to undermine it. We have more CPD and a review of teacher education. I could go through that list again and again. I am very proud of the fact that this Government has delivered and will go on delivering in universities and schools. When the going gets tough as a result of Labour’s catastrophic management south of the border, which is affecting us all, we will continue to work.
I am sorry that Mr Macintosh and Karen Whitefield have such a complete misunderstanding of the secondary curriculum.
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
I do not want to take an intervention from Mr Macintosh; I want to tell him where he got it wrong in his opening remarks.
The qualifications will be built on prior learning, there will be no artificial split between S1 and S3 and S4 and S6, and there is for the first time a coherent curriculum. As Mr Macintosh knows, it is not the Government’s duty to be centrally prescriptive on these matters.
Karen Whitefield used the phrase “jobs vacuum”. What an extraordinary position to take. Of course teacher unemployment is a problem in Scotland, but it is significantly lower than elsewhere in the UK. The figure is 5.3 per cent in Scotland; 7.4 per cent in England; 8 per cent in Wales; and 11.8 per cent in Northern Ireland. Moreover, 86.5 per cent of post-probation teachers have found employment as a teacher in Scotland, while less than 1 per cent of post-probationers have left the teaching profession and have no intention of seeking teaching employment in future. This Government has taken and continues to take action, and I think that in these matters there should be a realistic recognition of facts rather than an indulgence in fantasy.
On school buildings—
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
I have a great deal to cover and I am almost running out of time.
Members: Aw!
I, too, regret that I am running out of time. I would be happy to go on getting rid of the myths that we have been listening to all morning.
With regard to the myths that we heard from Mr Rumbles, funding for Mearns academy and Ellon academy will commence in 2012-13. That is not what he said. Given the standard procurement, design development and consultation timescales, not to mention issues related to identifying appropriate sites, it is very unlikely that the council—even if it wants to—will be in a position to commence either project earlier. I am pleased to say that on 2 June 2010 the provost of Aberdeenshire, Councillor Bill Howatson—I am sure that Mr Rumbles will want to talk to him, as he is a Liberal Democrat ward member in Mearns—said:
“Today’s announcement will be welcome news for the communities served by Mearns Academy ... Clearly a lot of work has been undertaken to progress us to this stage and I am grateful that Aberdeenshire’s needs have been recognised in this round of funding.”
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
I hope that Mr Rumbles is about to withdraw his criticism.
I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues welcomed that announcement, but that was before we knew that the Scottish Government was not going to complete the project until 2016. That is what I said.
The date of 2012-13 is what has been confirmed and recognised. Aberdeenshire is the only council in Scotland—
Listen!
The member should listen to this. Aberdeenshire is the only council in Scotland to have been awarded funding for two secondary schools. Indeed, the funding needs for all the schools mentioned in today’s Press and Journal article have been widely known since 2005. I regard Mr Rumbles’s position as quite extraordinary, particularly given the fact that he supported PPP projects whose cost in 2008-09 represented more than 4 per cent of Aberdeenshire’s gross revenue expenditure on education. Unfortunately, he has supported proposals that are impoverishing the council that he is talking about—
Shameful.
—and now he is blaming somebody else. As the member says, that is indeed shameful.
Claire Baker’s point that Labour’s school building momentum has been lost is also the opposite of the truth. That momentum is what is leading to the millstone that, by 2020, will consume 10 per cent of education budgets. She needs to think about that very carefully indeed.
The curriculum for excellence is vital and there is huge support for it. It is moving ahead in a constructive and positive way. Where problems exist, we are addressing them; I am working with every school and teacher in Scotland who has come to me with problems and I would welcome the involvement of all parties in the chamber in that regard. Karen Whitefield is right: where there have been genuine concerns, I have addressed them. Indeed, I will go on addressing them. However, we have to address genuine concerns and listen to what people outside this bubble are saying.
There are many such quotations that I could use. Last night, at a parents’ event at Trinity academy here in Edinburgh, the headteacher, Alec Morris, said, “Curriculum for excellence? My reaction is: bring it on.” That shows the Scottish education system’s enthusiasm for what is happening, and the people who are involved in it would not recognise the system that many members have described this morning. That is sad but, as is so often the case, the reality is outside this chamber.
11:29
Presiding Officer, I hope that you can give the cabinet secretary the benefit of your advice on appropriate classroom manners, because I am not sure that the approach that he has taken to this debate is what we would have wished. The angrier he gets, the more unbelievable the statements he makes.
The cabinet secretary mentioned “Alice in Wonderland” at the start of his opening speech. In many ways, the reference covers some of the contributions not only from him but from the rest of the SNP benches. For example, Andrew Welsh talked about fluctuating trends in teacher employment, but the reality is that since 2007 the line on the graph showing the numbers of teachers in our schools has been going down. Kenny Gibson seemed to think that unemployment levels among young teachers in Scotland were acceptable, perhaps even praiseworthy. I have to say, though, that the 85 per cent figure is a complete con; about 30 per cent of those teachers have permanent jobs, and one can get up to 85 per cent only by including anyone who has ever been in a classroom anywhere. That is not the reality and is not the sort of thing that we expect.
There are three things that we have not heard from the SNP benches today. The first is contrition or any acknowledgement that, since the SNP took office in 2007, we have had a catalogue of broken education promises on student debt, class sizes, school meals, the number of hours of PE, school buildings and teacher numbers. There have been other failures that, although not highlighted as promises in the SNP manifesto, have been real nevertheless. The sharp rise in the proportion of newly qualified teachers unable to find jobs and the mismanagement of the implementation of the curriculum for excellence are examples of issues on which the SNP made no promises in advance of the 2007 election; since then, however, its performance in that regard has been woeful.
The cabinet secretary’s rose-tinted version of the SNP’s stewardship of education bears no resemblance whatever to the reality as experienced by teachers and parents out there. The people out there know that schools have suffered year-on-year cutbacks under the SNP. As anyone who voices criticism of the cabinet secretary is treated as an enemy of Scottish education, I will, to parry the North Korean-style response, quote the general secretary of the EIS, whose commitment to Scottish education cannot be doubted. Last Friday, Ronnie Smith told the EIS conference that across Scotland
“we see attacks on instrumental music instruction, the non-replacement of departing teachers and the reduction in teaching support staff”.
All those cuts are direct results of the SNP’s concordat with local government, an agreement that delivered the tax priority of the SNP—a freeze in council tax—at the expense of education and other council services.
Michael Russell said yesterday that one of the reasons for falling teacher numbers was undoubtedly the unprecedented financial pressure on local authorities. However, it is his Government that through the concordat has forced authorities to make swingeing cuts not just in teacher numbers, which are down 1,300 from last year, and classroom assistants, of which there are more than 1,000 fewer compared with 2007, but in school budgets, which have been pared back to the point at which teachers tell me that they cannot replace the ink drum in the photocopier when it runs out or the bulb in the classroom projector when it fuses. Because of the SNP, teachers cannot do their job.
Every year that goes by puts more pressure on school budgets and things will get worse next year. The holes in the Scottish Government budget that have resulted from the SNP’s frittering away of the £1.5 billion accumulated end-year flexibility that it inherited mean that, next year, Mr Swinney will start with a sizeable deficit before any of the decisions made by Mr Osborne and Mr Alexander are factored in. For schools, which are already under pressure from the cabinet secretary to provide a fig leaf for class sizes and school meals and squeezed by the concordat, the prospect of further reductions, with no sign whatever of a plan from Mr Russell and his colleagues, is a betrayal.
The second thing that we have not heard from the SNP this morning is any understanding of the problems that secondary teachers face in implementing the curriculum for excellence from August. It is clear that Mr Russell is in denial about that, believing that the implementation is on track and that all the outstanding issues are being resolved. However, as Ken Macintosh pointed out, secondary teachers are saying something quite different. They have highlighted the lack of information from the SQA about the new qualifications, the lack of materials from Learning and Teaching Scotland and the lack of resources for vital professional development as barriers to the curriculum’s successful implementation.
Of course, the fault does not lie with Mr Russell alone—his predecessor failed to treat preparations for the implementation with the required urgency. Belatedly, Mr Russell has turned hyperactive, with a new website one week, HMIE being told to drop school inspections and support implementation the next and experts being asked to rewrite key documents. Those things and other more fundamental steps should have been thought about before Mr Russell pre-empted the survey of teachers’ views, which his Government commissioned, and instructed that the curriculum for excellence would go ahead in August. Mr Russell’s 10-point plan, which he announced in March, does not address the top-line issues that were raised in the survey: the lack of clarity in the examination arrangements and the vagueness of the specification of changes in teaching practice that the curriculum for excellence is supposed to introduce. I highlight the comments that Liz Smith made on those points.
Now, with two working weeks left before teachers and pupils begin the new curriculum, too many secondary teachers are still saying that they have not got the information, resources or preparation time that they need for successful implementation in August. Our objection is not to the curriculum for excellence. We support it, and we have never argued for a delay in implementation. Our point is about the SNP’s failure to implement the curriculum for excellence properly, for which Mr Russell and his colleagues are solely responsible.
The third thing that we have not heard from the SNP benches is honesty about the circumstances under which the curriculum for excellence is being introduced. Yesterday, Mike Russell said that, with historical hindsight, the number of teachers was actually artificially increased over a period of time and that that was unsustainable. It is correct that the Labour and Liberal Democrat Administration increased the number of teachers. Money was allocated for the purpose of reducing class sizes, providing better support for schools in areas of high deprivation and improving standards. The SNP’s withdrawal of that resource has led to increased class sizes and taken money away from schools where it is most needed, and it is leading to cuts in specialist provision.
By casualising employment for young teachers, by making it more difficult for schools to find the required time or resource for professional development and by driving down staffing establishments, the SNP has jeopardised the implementation of the curriculum for excellence. As the Conservatives do, I hope that there will not be a strike over cuts in school budgets but, even if a strike is averted, much of the vital good will and co-operation that are needed to make the reforms a success have already been eroded.
The particular problems that the secondary sector faces as a result of the Scottish Government’s mismanagement of the implementation of the curriculum for excellence should not overshadow the threat to successful implementation in primary and secondary education as a result of the SNP cuts. If the original timetable had been adhered to, the curriculum for excellence would have been up and running a year ago. Because the process has been mismanaged, implementation will take place in the most difficult circumstances possible and, to use Mr Russell’s phrase, at a time of extraordinary financial pressures.
It is the Scottish Government’s job to anticipate, to prepare for every contingency and to ensure that nothing is allowed to get in the way of our young people’s education. Labour’s motion sets out the key defects in the implementation process so far and calls on the Scottish Government to reach an early agreement with local authorities and teachers organisations that guarantees that the curriculum for excellence will be delivered successfully. Our young people deserve the best that we can provide.
One of the costs of having an education debate is that we get to hear twice from Michael Russell. He has chosen to respond to the genuine points that have been raised with his usual bluster. He has blamed the previous Labour-Lib Dem Executive, the previous Labour Government at Westminster, Labour councils and the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Administration. Last week, he was blaming backsliding teachers. However, we are debating his Government’s record, and the statistics show absolutely unambiguously that, on his watch, there are fewer teachers, fewer classroom assistants, more unemployed newly qualified teachers and less money in school budgets.
The downward trend has not been reversed. Indeed, the crisis is gathering pace. Newly qualified teachers cannot get jobs and more children are being taught by a succession of supply teachers as vacancies are frozen. Rome burns and our Nero is slashing music instruction. Parents and teachers can see that this emperor has no clothes. The risks that are associated with implementing the most wide-ranging reform in Scottish education for a generation are not being properly managed. The SNP Government is failing in its obligations and responsibilities. I urge members to support the motion in my name.