Chamber and committees

You are a very good advert: I am keen to get myself up there fairly soon.

Please carry on, Willie.

If you do not mind, Donald, as your mic is already on.

The last question is about your views on the financial memorandum. On 13 May, the Finance and Public Administration Committee wrote to the cabinet secretary to raise a number of concerns associated with the measures that are proposed in the bill, as well as about funding and support for Gaelic and Scots more generally. It asked the Scottish Government to reflect on the issues that had been raised in evidence on the adequacy of the funding.

What are your thoughts on that issue and on the view that the bill will constitute

“a shift in activity, a repurposing of resources in terms of effort and attention”

but will not require significant additional funding?

Who would like to go first? Would it be okay to start with you, Donald?

We have to bring in Liam Kerr and Pam Duncan-Glancy before we get to that.

Do you have an example of when your sheer resilience and independence resulted in success?

Nicola Sturgeon said:

“If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people then what are you prepared to. It really matters.”

It mattered so much that the SNP Government has presided over 17 years of failure in Scottish education.

Despite the efforts of our dedicated teachers, Scotland has fallen down the international rankings in maths, science and reading. The SNP continues to starve local authorities, schools and staff of resources. The number of secondary school pupils with additional support needs has increased significantly. I am sure that we will hear from the SNP that the budget has grown, but it has not grown to the extent that is needed to reflect the rising numbers.

In 2007, primary school pupils with additional support needs accounted for 4.3 per cent of the school roll. In 2023, the figure was 42.9 per cent. Furthermore, almost 93 per cent of pupils with additional support needs spent all their time in mainstream classes.

Here, in Edinburgh, the City of Edinburgh Council recorded that 46 per cent of pupils in its schools had an additional support need, which is significantly higher than the national average of 34 per cent, yet the total number of pupils in Edinburgh who are educated in special schools has remained at around 1.25 per cent for the past five years. That is despite the city’s population growth and the exponential increase in pupils with additional support needs. As a result, a more complex range of needs are having to be met in the mainstream school sector.

I thank those members who have made reference to the highly critical report by the Education, Children and Young People Committee that was published today, which describes the situation for families and young people with additional support needs as “intolerable”.

I want to reinforce the point that there has been a rise in the wellbeing and nurture element of additional support needs in our schools. Issues such as mild anxiety or other factors do not necessarily have an impact on a young person’s ability to learn, but they have an impact on their capacity to engage constructively in education. Such issues are now more often at the core of the additional need.

The Scottish Conservatives believe that pupils with additional support needs should receive more support but are being let down.

On GIRFEC—getting it right for every child—despite all the rhetoric, we are failing to get it right for so many children. Many need more support and additional learning using innovative approaches. We want to ensure that initial teacher training fully prepares all our teachers to identify and support children with conditions such as dyslexia and autism.

We would like to pay teachers and school assistants to hold extracurricular activities and extra lunch-time classes, which would top up their salaries. We want to see a thriving extracurricular culture in our schools, as that will provide immeasurable benefits to pupils in so many ways, including in attainment, health and wellbeing, and school culture.

However, it is not just the SNP that is letting down our children and the education system in Scotland. Labour’s plans to introduce VAT on fees for independent schools would place a significant burden on the state sector and would disrupt the education of thousands of children. The report by BiGGAR Economics for the Scottish Council of Independent Schools found that 6,000 pupils would have their learning disrupted by being forced out of the sector and that the cost of children joining the state system in Scotland would be more than £50 million. The report highlights that pupils with additional support needs who had to move from the private sector into the state school sector would be most affected by that disruption.

It is time that we prioritised education, it is time that we prioritised our teachers, and it is time that we prioritised all our children and young people.

Will the member give way?

It has been a long time since I did maths, but surely if we have more teachers, we will also have a better pupil teacher ratio, so can we not have both?

Will the member take an intervention?

We already do. The Children and Young People’s Commissioner said that the fact that there are areas of overlap prevents them from carrying out investigations and inquiries, albeit that that is peripheral and around the edges. I cannot remember the specific detail. The fact that there is already overlap with the public bodies that are responsible for exercising specific functions prevents the Children and Young People’s Commissioner from carrying out investigations. Therefore, in my view, if we were to add more complexity, more commissioners and more areas of overlap, that would raise a big red flag.