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.

Whatever it was, however that budget scrutiny was to lie and wherever the responsibility for it lands, Mr Greer, we have to make sure that it can be delivered, that it is done well and the time is given for us to do it. That is all I will say on that one.

You may be aware that the current Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland has newly come into post. We had her in front of us recently.

We have been quite thoughtful about how best to carry out the scrutiny role, given that she is new in the position. We also have to recognise that each commissioner is quite different. As convener, I was never given the opportunity to scrutinise the previous commissioner. I have only ever had Nicola Killean in front of the committee.

We heard evidence from her and her team about their strategic plan and that set the tone of what we will look for from her in the next year or so. We looked at what her priorities will be and we were glad to know that they are around poverty, education, mental health, climate change and discrimination. Nothing is unfamiliar or a surprise. Those priorities are all in the work plan that the commissioner is keen to focus on.

We were interested when she spoke at length about her accountability tracker, which, in the landscape that she works in, is designed to hold the Government and other bodies to account for how they are progressing their plans in relation to the promises that they have made to children and young people. We are keen to see how that develops and whether it gives us some oversight as a tool to track progress.

I do not know how long I have. I could talk for a while, Mr Gibson.

The only one that springs to mind right now is additional support for learning, but I am afraid I cannot talk an awful lot about that until tomorrow.