Chamber and committees

Does the cabinet secretary now accept that it was wrong not to address rural poverty in all the previous years in which the money was being handed out?

By introducing criticism of the Government in my amendment, I have perhaps been less generous than colleagues. However, I suspect that the motion would be hard for it to support.

The debate perfectly sums up the challenges in Scottish education under the SNP. It is yet another example of where the rhetoric does not match the reality. After its action on SAC funding, the idea that the Government can continue to claim that education is its number 1 priority is a joke.

Since I was elected to this chamber, I have consistently made the case for more funding for rural schools and for recognition of the challenges that rural poverty brings to education. In one sense, I am pleased that we have now had an admission from the Government that that has been overlooked for years. However, at no point did I imagine that such support would be paid for by taking money and resources from others who are experiencing poverty.

It is not just the seemingly casual redistribution of the funds that troubles me; it is the timing off the back of the Covid pandemic and the speed with which the authorities that are losing out will have to make eye-watering cutbacks. Perhaps all that would have been more excusable if our schools had not become so reliant on attainment funding to plug the gap and pay for key staff and specialists.

Under the SNP, our education system has been stretched to breaking point and left woefully understaffed and under-resourced, as the pandemic exposed. In the pandemic’s aftermath, we are left with an SNP Government and cabinet secretary who seem detached from the realities that our schools and young people are facing. The Government’s priorities are all wrong and the level of investment is insufficient to deliver on past promises.

Looking at the issue more widely, there is little point in claiming to put additional financial support into the system to increase attainment when you do not get the teaching and learning bit right. That is where teachers can make a difference and help close the gap. No one is saying that welfare and wellbeing are not important, but we must stop asking teachers to do everything, and we must start resourcing them to do the job that they are there to do. We must support teachers and let them get on with helping young people.

That means making sure that we can recruit and retain the right teachers, specialists and support staff across the country. It means getting class sizes down to a level at which behaviour can be managed and individual pupils can get the support that they need. It means offering pay and conditions that reflect the work that teachers do. It means trusting teachers to decide more about what a school needs.

The PEF and attainment challenge funding serve as nothing more than a mirage when we do not properly resource our schools in the first place. There are many questions over additionality when it comes to this money, and I could go on about them all afternoon, but they are for another day.

That is because, for the areas of the country that are seeing their funding cut back, we are not talking about additionality. We are talking about fewer resources going to our most vulnerable young people. We are talking about fewer teachers and fewer professionals being there to support young people off the back of the pandemic. Yes, we are seeing more resources going to other parts of the country, and that is to be welcomed, but those resources do nothing for the young people and teachers who are left to pick up the pieces.

How a cabinet secretary who claims to be here to champion education can say that that is enough, and not be able to find more resources within her segment of the budget, instead of pushing her colleagues in Government to find more money for what is one of the most important areas of public life and our most sacred duty in this Parliament, beggars belief. I do not know how the cabinet secretary can justify robbing Peter to pay Paul. That is a matter for her conscience, at the end of the day.

I move amendment S6M-04445.1, to insert at end:

“, and believes that, if the Scottish Government and the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, had kept their promise to make education their number one priority, resourced the education system properly, and had not cut thousands of teaching and support roles prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the challenges that are being seen could have been significantly reduced.”

5.

To ask the Scottish Government what action is being taken to increase subject choice for secondary pupils. (S6O-01074)

I thank Maggie Chapman for bringing this important debate to the chamber and for giving voice to the concerns that are felt by many in the university sector.

As a member of the Education, Children and Young People Committee, and from the contents of my inbox, I am well aware of the strength of feeling on the issue. Although it is hard for the committee to intervene in a dispute between employee and employer, I welcome the fact that the committee has committed to looking at wider issues and challenges in the university sector later this year.

Scottish Conservatives, like others who have spoken today, remain incredibly grateful to lecturers and teaching and support staff at universities, who have worked exceptionally hard in the past two years as Scotland has gone through the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. That work builds on years of professionalism and world-leading research and teaching. Without our lecturers and teaching staff, our university sector would not be as vibrant and successful as it is and would have fallen further behind in the face of financial pressures.

Given that clear and unwavering commitment, the fact that we are seeing widespread strike action and discontent speaks of a deep unhappiness in the sector, which is something that Scottish Conservatives are concerned about. Of course, we do not want education to be further disrupted, especially for students, but we recognise that staff face pressures and that changes to pensions and issues with pay and conditions are understandably sources of frustration and threaten the long-term viability of the sector.

Although I do not believe that it is for politicians to tell independent institutions how to employ their staff, I cannot believe that anyone thinks that the casualisation of the university workforce, unsafe workloads or inequalities in pay and promotion are in the best interests of university staff, students, universities or Scotland as a whole. Parliament and Government have a role here: we should be asking difficult questions about funding and the general decline that the current model promotes.

If universities do not feel that fair working practices are affordable under the current funding model and in the context of the courses that they provide, they must speak out to explain the challenges that they face. In the meantime, the priority must be for university bosses to get back round the table with staff and unions to try to find a way forward. It is disingenuous of members of the governing party to suggest that the Government has no role. Although it is not for the Government to tell universities what to do, it has an important role in facilitating that discussion and in making it clear that, where Government funding supports activities, fair work and good relations between employer and employee must be at the heart of all decisions.

The long-standing issues must be resolved, or everyone will suffer. We cannot let the issue drag on: all parties must take responsibility for bringing it to a conclusion and moving the sector forward. I again thank the member for today’s debate, which I hope will nudge the situation a little further forward. As we have heard from other speakers, the issues will not be easy to resolve.

That is all very well and good, but I would like to know what the cabinet secretary has to say to my constituent who wrote this:

“As a parent of an S3 who is picking her options for next year, I am very concerned at this narrowing of the curriculum and education generally at such a young age. We have relatives in England of the same age as my daughter and they will be sitting ten exams next year. It just doesn’t compare and surely leaves our children here in Scotland lacking a wide and rounded education and massively disadvantaged against their peers in other parts of the UK and, indeed other parts of Scotland where children still get to sit at least eight subjects at Nat 5 level.”

Does the cabinet secretary agree that there should be a minimum number of subjects offered to all pupils in Scotland?

However, the issue is compounded by the fact that those schools often have a small staff facing a number of competing priorities, which means that they do not have the same space that teachers in a larger school might have to take part in that reflective work. I have a big worry about that. Sometimes, people in single-teacher schools are under more pressure and do not have that kind of professional freedom or space. I know that all teachers are pushed for time and are under pressure, but I think that it is a particular challenge in those schools.

Staff in smaller schools have a barrier to participation, because they do not have the time and space to participate in initiatives beyond school level. They struggle to find cover to keep a school going, which would allow them to participate.

I regularly get feedback from teachers that Education Scotland still feels too remote from what is happening in the classroom, that it can be urban and central belt-centric in its thinking, that the needs of smaller, rural schools, in particular, can be missed and that, although a lot of the advice and guidance that the agency gives is fine—they are not challenging its content—it can be quite generic. Does Education Scotland take that feedback on board?

There are more things that I would like push on, but, in the interests of time, I will accept that.

That leads to the second issue that I will raise briefly, which is that a lot of headteachers in smaller schools feel excluded from PEF, either because they are in the 3 per cent of schools that get no PEF at all or because they receive such a small amount of PEF that it is difficult to do something meaningful with the money. Do you reflect on that? Is there a policy challenge for schools that get no PEF? Such headteachers are not empowered in the same way to do things differently in their schools. That is another problem that attaches itself particularly to smaller rural schools.