Chamber and committees

I have jotted down a few ideas.

I agree that we need to be looking at the childcare offer. The commitment to deliver childcare for children from nine months until they reach the end of primary seven by the end of this Parliament is hugely ambitious, and the committee should periodically take stock of progress towards that. The scale of the commitment is so huge that we need to keep an eye on it.

We also need to look at college and university funding: what funding is being provided and how that money can be better spent in a time when resources are scarce. I am also thinking about apprenticeships. We need to remember that 98 per cent of our children in Scotland go on to positive destinations, so good work is already going on. However, we need to make sure that we get better value for money where possible.

I would like us to look at the poverty-related attainment gap. We could perhaps carry out visits to look at best practice, because some schools are doing excellent work on the poverty-related attainment gap.

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We need to consider pupil support assistants who help children with special educational needs. We need to professionalise that work, because recruitment and retention is a challenge, and that situation does not serve the children well. There is a bigger space for specialist centres for children with additional needs who cannot be accommodated in mainstream settings. I understand why there is an inclusion agenda: including children with special educational needs in mainstream schools is an admirable aim. Ultimately, however, it fails the children, and it frustrates teachers, because they cannot deliver the kind of support that they need to provide. We need to have a serious think about that. We also need to consider behaviour, and how we can better support looked-after children.

I very much support the phone ban in schools, which I think is long overdue. As I said in the chamber, we need to consider how we support schools in enforcing the ban. As the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Culture and Gaelic told us, the ban will work seamlessly in some schools. However, in other schools it will be a real challenge—and some of that challenge will come from parents. Any system will have to have exclusions—and the cabinet secretary talked about that. However, we do not want there to be so many exclusions that it just becomes a tick-box exercise, and things are not getting done at all. That is a real danger. We will need to monitor that when the relevant bill is introduced.

I would also like us to talk about the impact that the private finance initiative has been having in our schools every day. In my constituency, PFI is costing around £30 million a year. That is £30 million off the top of two local authorities’ education budgets, before they have bought a jotter or a pencil. That is bordering on the criminal. It has cost our schools £9 billion so far across Scotland, and there is still £6.7 billion left to pay. That is not justifiable in any world. We need to revisit that and see what can be done to free us from the chains of that appalling legacy.

We also need to think about Gaelic education and about trying to make it more mainstream. Every child who wants to learn Gaelic should have the opportunity to do so, but that means training and delivering more Gaelic teachers in mainstream schools, which has resource implications.

I will end with this: Scotland is the only country in the world, as far as I am aware—somebody from the Scottish Parliament information centre might contradict me—where children do not learn about the history of their nation as a matter of course. I cannot understand why that is. Scotland gave birth to the enlightenment, but nobody in any secondary school anywhere in Scotland will have ever heard of it. I am bewildered by that. Teaching Scots about their history should be a compulsory part of broad general education. No other nation in the world would understand why we do not do that.

There has to be a greater emphasis on life skills and financial education. We also need to take a closer look at curriculum for excellence in the round and consider how it is delivering the life skills that our children need.

In reference to what other members have said about evaluating what goes on in schools and how education is delivered, that is done as a matter of course in schools under “How good is our school?” which is the benchmark and the working document for every school.

I promise that this really is the last thing that I will say. Part of school education is learning about culture and being taught literature. I know that there has been a greater emphasis on teaching Scottish literature in secondary education. However, I do not think that it has worked well. The literature that is taught shows the underbelly of Scottish society, if I can put it that way. This morning I jotted down the names of 12 Scottish writers whose works would enrich any child’s life. If we want to teach Scottish literature, we have to teach inspiring literature, rather than only talking about the underbelly of the nation. We are dealing with children, and we are trying to build positive outlooks.

Absolutely.

That is sort of the point that I made, but I was not as specific as you, Duncan. I spoke about university, college and apprenticeship funding and ensuring that we get the best use of the money that is put into those areas. I do not think that there should be courses that are 10 weeks long. That is a nonsense—something meaningful will take longer.

It was remiss of us not to have mentioned—although you did, Duncan—that we have a group of young people who are either in work for a short time or fall out of the workforce when they are still quite young. By “quite young”, I mean below 21. We need to provide more support in that regard.

However, it about how we spend the money. We cannot have somebody who leaves school going on a five-week course on, for example, bricklaying if, after five weeks, there are no bricks to lay or nobody to pay them to lay them. That is a really important point.

I talked about life skills, and BSL is very much part of that. In case there is any misunderstanding externally, I should make the point that when we talk about putting Gaelic more firmly on the curriculum so that every child can access it, that is not about displacing European languages such as French, German or Italian, which are very important—they can work alongside each other.

On what George Adam was saying about hard-to-reach children, I should say that schools are getting good at identifying children who do not go to school but who have a particular interest in a subject and matching them up with college courses that they can attend two or three days a week. Of course, they miss out on parts of the curriculum because of that, but they are engaged in something else, which means that on the days when they are in school they are much more engaged than they otherwise would be, because there is some part of their education that has tapped into their abilities and interests.

I have nothing to declare other than being an English teacher for 25 years. My membership of the General Teaching Council for Scotland is still active, but it is on the verge of lapsing.