Chamber and committees

A high number of military families have children in the independent school sector in Scotland. What discussions has the Scottish Government had on the impact of the UK Government’s introduction of VAT on school fees, and on this week’s news that the UK Government will also put VAT on school meals for those children?

I recently visited Craiglockhart primary school to see its free school library, which operates outside the school, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, where children can help themselves to books, parents can give used books and the whole school community can access them. It is a great example of a children’s free library.

Has the cabinet secretary had any engagement with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to make sure that every primary school across Scotland could have one of those built outside their school?

To ask the Scottish Government what discussions the education secretary has had with ministerial colleagues regarding action to improve access to books for, and encourage reading by, children and young people. (S6O-04275)

To ask the Scottish Government what its position is on whether the remit of the Scottish child abuse inquiry remains appropriate. (S6O-04241)

The Deputy First Minister will know that people who have attended the inquiry are concerned that many victims have felt that their voices have not been heard, that non-disclosure agreements used by public bodies have often stopped truths coming out in the inquiry, and that it is looking at only historical abuse. One of the campaigners has put forward the idea of establishing an independent national whistleblowing officer for education and children’s services. Will the Deputy First Minister consider that, and will she meet me and campaigners to further discuss the issue?

I want to touch on literacy, because there has been a claim that the outcomes that we saw in the 2024 history exam results reflected falling literacy standards. We cannot see the performance of candidates across the subjects but, anecdotally, would the English teachers in your schools say that the same pupils who did not perform well in that history exam also did not perform well in English? Have you had conversations with them about that? The fact that we cannot benchmark those pupils’ performance means that that sort of anecdotal evidence is all that we have to go on.

That is an important point. On the engagement, it has not been easy to ensure that those people’s voices are heard.

In your opening statement, you mentioned the UNCRC. What impact has the incorporation of the UNCRC had on children and young people so far? You mentioned the Right Way project. I do not know a huge amount about that or about what people are asking for with regard to a framework for the delivery of the UNCRC. Could you say more about what that includes?

In your experience, has this happened in other representative volunteer organisations for other subjects? Are you the canary in the mine, and is it the collapse in the results that have identified the issue and created this conversation? An adversarial culture has been allowed to develop.

Publication of the survey might present more evidence on the issue, if it was part of the questioning that you took up with your fellow teachers.

What you have said today is quite depressing. This episode has been depressing. I cannot imagine what it is doing to motivation, apart from making people not want to be markers or have a positive relationship with the SQA. I hope that the Education (Scotland) Bill’s direction of travel can rebuild that confidence.

Have the Scottish Government and SQA listened to your concerns? From what you have outlined, it does not feel like that; it feels more like they want to move on and want the issue to go away. I do not think that that is good enough. From the conversations that you have had and communications that you are having with SQA and Scottish Government, where do you think things now stand? I asked the cabinet secretary whether she would look at doing a wider investigation if other teachers came forward with issues, and she did not rule that out, but we have not seen any progress on that to date.

Maybe you could share those resources with us once they have been updated so that we can see for ourselves what is being provided.

I want to return to the questions that the convener and Willie Rennie asked. For all of us committee members, there is real cross-party concern about school environments in general and the violence that is often reported to us. What surveying has been done since the pandemic about where young people are at? How are you feeding into that?

I have had several meetings with different organisations that have described that there is a very challenging situation for many young people now—young people who are picking how long they want to stay at school and sometimes just wandering school corridors. Obviously, they are disaffected with their learning environment following the pandemic. How is your organisation capturing young people’s solutions for some of that problem that could feed into the work that we are doing and the plans that local authorities have been tasked with putting together?