Chamber and committees

That debate ended up being a bit more heated than I expected. Maybe some of the poking and prodding touched a raw nerve.

I do not need to come to the chamber and run down Scottish education; the cabinet secretary has been doing that, along with his colleagues, for 15 years. When they get started on that, they try to suggest that Opposition parties are criticising teachers and young people.

I want to be very clear: I am criticising the Scottish National Party Government, its poor policy approach, the damage that that has done to young people, and the very difficult job that it makes for teachers trying to deliver good-quality education in every part of the country. The amendments in my name are important because the SNP Government cannot be fully trusted to deliver on those things in a future pandemic—it looks at the actions that it took during the Covid pandemic and pats itself on the back. That does not match up with the experience of young people and their families, who found that the support offered was often just not good enough.

That is true, although there are some lessons that we definitely learned. There is the fact that we were so slow, in so many parts of the country, to get the appropriate electronic devices. The amendments change that—expanding the appropriate electronic devices to laptops, which addresses one of the Government’s concerns.

Most young people and families whom I speak to would be happy with any device, frankly. A laptop would be an improvement on nothing. In other parts of the country, it has been possible to get devices out very quickly. My amendments put into the bill a challenge to ministers to get on with it and make available the resources to deliver those laptops before they consider shutting schools in the future.

Amendment 38 makes a similar point about consulting local authorities, rather than ministers just taking decisions all by themselves. There is also amendment 49, which it should not be hard for the Government to support, as it encourages a greater role for the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland in ensuring that the wider rights of children are explored when the powers are used.

There are also balancing provisions that ask Government ministers and key decision makers to look beyond the narrow health focus. One of the mistakes that we made is that, certainly in the early stages of the pandemic, we focused narrowly on one aspect of health and did not fully understand—or, in the Government’s case, recognise even when told—the considerable strain that was being put on our children or the long-term consequences of that. We must be more balanced in future.

I am interested to hear what the Government has to say on the amendments and whether it feels able to support any of them.

I move amendment 30.

The majority of the amendments in this group were debated during stage 2. I have brought back my amendments not to debate them again in full or to reheat the arguments that were had at committee, but to give the Government an opportunity to change its mind. There have been only two areas in which I have been able to work with the Government to bring back amendments that we agree on. It is welcome that I have been able to do that, but the amendments are very small, given the scale of the challenges that arose in education during the pandemic, and they provide quite modest protection for our young people in the future.

There are three key things behind the amendments in my name in this group. First, the bar should be very high when it comes to closing schools. Denying our children the right to in-person education is not something that should be done lightly. We therefore have to balance the power that ministers want to take on by putting in place additional protections. The same is true in other areas of our education system beyond schools. It is right that, with that power come criteria that have to be met, and it is important that some of those are put in the bill.

Secondly, during the committee debates, we heard a lot about what I termed the John Mason principle, which is that the people who are in government now might not be in government in the future. That cuts both ways, of course. There is a chance that we could have something better, but there is a fear among those of us on these benches that it could be the same people making the same mistakes.

That takes me to the third point behind many of my amendments: they address some of the lessons that we learned during the pandemic. They seek to push the Government a bit harder to get on with meeting some of the promises that it made to young people. That particularly applies to amendment 41—which, I have to admit, is a redrafted version of a stage 2 amendment by Stephen Kerr. It makes an important change.

How does the cabinet secretary possibly think that he will build consensus on the measures or secure widespread public support when he makes such political remarks about something that is so important? It is bizarre.

The member is absolutely right. As we have seen, the response, the resource and the general commitment from the Government towards education do not match the scale of the challenges that are faced by our young people. This is obviously not something for this debate, but the past 15 years have not been Scotland’s greatest in terms of education. In the past period, the Scottish National Party Scottish Government has been found wanting. At times, it has treated teachers and young people themselves with disdain, dismissing their concerns and saying that existing resources are enough. It has told us how fantastic it is that it has brought in new teachers, but, every time it restates that, it fails to mention that they are just replacing the teachers that it cut—the teachers who were missing during the pandemic, which put our schools under such pressure.

It is important that the bill speaks to those challenges. The very least that our young people deserve is a commitment in the bill, which will be enshrined in law, that they will not be treated badly or disadvantaged by the use of the powers.

I am not expecting an awful lot here. There is one amendment in the group on which I have been able to work with the Government. Amendment 12 proposes a very modest reporting mechanism whereby we will at least know in 12 months’ time how the Government is getting on with delivering electronic devices. I am hopeful that it will be well ahead of target on that. There are many parts of the country where local authorities and others have managed to get devices out to young people, but the fact that we are now two years on from the start of the pandemic and there are young people who still cannot properly access remote learning is a disgrace.

I move amendment 44.

Did Westminster have the final say on 18 September 2014?

We have heard the Government’s approach: it is its way or no way at all. That is sad, because there was an opportunity to work together and make sure that the principle of professional judgment was built into the legislation. That is the least that our hard-working educational professionals deserve. Yes, it is right that we have national measures, but there has to be a recognition that, if broad and blunt approaches are to be taken quickly in an emergency in an effort to get things right across the country, there needs to be room, at a local level, for people to take pragmatic and sensible decisions that are in the best interests of our young people.

To say that Government ministers can make rules nationally that fit all scenarios is wrong, and it does not speak to many of the challenges that we saw during the pandemic, when things that were announced here or on television did not work out so well when it came to their implementation. There needs to be more discretion and flexibility.

On amendments 57 and 58, I reassure members who are worried about the provisions that those amendments seek to take out that I intend to press them only if we manage to get the rest of the education sections removed. That is my preference. The legislation is not fit for purpose, and it is not right for such issues to be grouped in a catch-all bill. As we will argue in the closing debate, and as we have said throughout, the preparation work should have been done and the legislation should have been on the shelf, ready to go. We should not be putting some of the proposed sections on to the statute book and handing broad powers to ministers.

Yes.

Amendment 44, by agreement, withdrawn.

Section 9—Regulations on school boarding accommodation

Amendment 9 moved—[John Swinney].

I will not move amendment 12.

In retrospect, when the Deputy First Minister looks back at that period, does he feel that he got things right? Were mistakes made? Do young people not deserve to know that they will be protected from that in the future?