Chamber and committees

I would love to have another six minutes to talk about that.

As a former member of the Scottish Youth Parliament, I have raised one specific thing, which I mentioned in my opening contribution. As it stands, the SQA has no ability to simply send a direct email to every young person who is undertaking an SQA qualification. That is a basic operational issue. There should be the ability for qualifications Scotland to do that, so that it can pose simple questions and send out basic surveys and get a much wider response. Further effort would be required for those who are most disengaged, but, as it stands, we cannot even email every young person who just took the higher history exam to tell them what is going on. That is an operational issue that needs to be resolved.

The advisory council of the inspectorate also needs to be strengthened. As much as this provision needs amending, in the bill the advisory board for qualifications Scotland has a space on it for someone representing the interests of the board’s staff, and the advisory council of the inspectorate needs something similar. The staff of the inspectorate have a huge depth of knowledge, and that should be represented on the advisory board.

Willie Rennie posed an interesting question about why ministers should have the power to direct the inspectorate. I think that they should. For example, ministers should be able to direct the inspectorate to do thematic inspections to ensure that policy decisions are delivered, such as that our schools are LGBTQ inclusive, and to see how schools are dealing with issues such as the endemic problem of violence against women and girls. There is a way to balance that with independence and with the balance between Government and Parliament as well; for example, we could require the chief inspector to consult Parliament before planning inspections.

I am aware of the time, Presiding Officer. I say in closing that this is a good bill. It could be much better, but it is a good bill and it is one that the Greens will be more than content to support. I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for her engagement and her openness to proposals to change it at stage 2. There are so many positives in that, and I look forward to making those improvements. This is a huge opportunity that we simply cannot afford to miss. We must support the bill.

I will pick up where I finished my opening speech: on the need for good culture and practice, particularly in how qualifications Scotland will engage with young people. That is not the experience that young people have had with the SQA—and that even applies to those who have been involved nationally in its structures.

We have heard previously from members of the Scottish Youth Parliament who sat on the national qualifications group and on the Covid-19 education recovery group. They mentioned, for example, receiving papers for meetings that were hundreds of pages long the night before or even the morning of a meeting. That is not accessible for adult professionals, never mind young volunteers whom we expect to be able to contribute. In addition, those who have been involved in the SQA’s learner panel have regularly talked about the feedback that is given simply being ignored and never making it beyond SQA senior management. One amendment that I intend to introduce is to make the new learner interest committee and the teacher and practitioner interest committee directly accountable to the board, not to the senior management of qualifications Scotland.

Members have made a number of comments about the SQA board. I have been critical for years of the balance of the SQA’s current board. It is wrong that, for years, the board has had more management consultants on it than teachers. There is a space for management consultants—good corporate governance is important. However, that is not the right balance for our national exams body.

The bill starts to rebalance the board, but my preference would be to go a bit further. John Mason made a very important point about the wording in the bill referring to a space on the board for those with “knowledge of” those undertaking qualifications. That, to me, reads as an adult who will speak on behalf of young people rather than a young person.

There is space on the board for an adult who is, for example, an expert in the rights of children and young people, but that is not the same as having a young person on the board. It is also important to consider the distinction between children and young people and adult learners when we talk about learners. However, as John Mason said, children, young people and school-age students are of such importance here that there needs to be space for them.

My preference for the board is more similar to the General Teaching Council for Scotland model. A majority of board members should be registered teachers or lecturers. Within that, there should be spaces for those who are current classroom teachers. There is a value in having retired teachers, headteachers and members of senior management involved with their contributions, but it is particularly important to have current classroom teachers involved in the governance. We need to strengthen the provision that someone represents the interests of staff to ensure that that individual is chosen and elected by staff, with the obvious method being through their recognised unions.

The two advisory committees need to be further strengthened, as the convener mentioned in his remarks. I would also ask why there is provision for staff of the organisation to be on those committees at all. Parliamentary clerks and advisers to our committees do not sit on the committees—they support them. Council officers do not sit on council committees. I suggest that we amend that provision to specify that members of the advisory committee to qualifications Scotland cannot be members of staff at qualifications Scotland. Even a minority can dominate, especially in a situation where the minority are adult professionals in a body that has set up a space that is designed for children and young people.

That goes to the important point that Willie Rennie made about making sure that we hear from the boy at the back of the class who would never otherwise engage and who is never going be on the learner advisory committee. That is why I mentioned earlier that I will bring an amendment to require that the organisation consult much more widely, and not just with the relatively self-selecting groups that will be involved at a national level.

The bill has certainly been a long time coming. I thank everyone who has been involved, not just in the stage 1 process, but in the years of work that brought us here.

Education reform has consistently been a debate for the 25 years of devolution and, going back, long before that. However, the current cycle probably started around 2017. In that year, the Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee published a report on the performance of our national education agencies—the SQA, Education Scotland, Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council. I sat on the committee at that time, as did the cabinet secretary and Liz Smith. I apologise if I have missed anyone else who is in the chamber who was there, at that point.

That report made it very clear to Parliament that Education Scotland and, in particular, the SQA had already lost the trust and confidence of the teaching profession. They were seen as out of touch and hostile to feedback. Not only could they often not communicate with teachers, young people and parents, but they could not even communicate with each other. The clearest example of that is the fact that, in curriculum for excellence, there is a course requirement of 140 hours for national 5 courses and the ability to take up to nine of those courses, but it is not possible to timetable nine times 140 hours. That is the case because Education Scotland was in charge of the number of hours that were required and the SQA was in charge of the number of national 5s that could be taken. Despite being based in the same building, they could not communicate with each other to reconcile that.

One of the areas that we most consistently heard evidence on was the slopey shoulders within education governance in Scotland. That was exemplified by the curriculum for excellence management board, which, when it was asked who was ultimately responsible for any given area, would often simply point the finger at anyone else who was in the room, rather than take responsibility itself.

I want to read out a damning conclusion from that committee report to put it on the record. It said:

“even if the SQA’s position were hypothetically to be accepted, the Committee would still find it difficult to understand how the SQA has fulfilled its role to its core customers, the learners of Scotland, having produced qualifications that have led to an onerous workload, a breakdown in trust and threats of industrial action by teachers”.

That was in 2017. That same conclusion could be come to now.

A clear theme in that report, and in the OECD’s review a few years later, was the lack of accountability for areas of responsibility. Education Scotland got off easy in a lot of ways, because the evidence that we collected on the SQA was so outrageous that, naturally, the focus was on it instead. Significant challenges were unearthed at Education Scotland as well, but the culture at the SQA, especially in senior management, was an area of key concern.

The committee’s top conclusion at that time was:

“The evidence the Committee has received from teachers should give the SQA serious cause for concern. The Committee considers that the distinction in feedback between the Committee’s survey and the SQA commissioned survey is perhaps indicative of the current relationship with teachers. There would appear to be a divergence between what teachers will express to the SQA and what they will express to this Committee. The SQA is invited to review its approach to engaging with teachers to enable candid communication from those with criticisms to make. The SQA also needs to be able to demonstrate how these views impact on the SQA’s processes in order to improve trust.”

Again, the same conclusion has been arrived at years later. An overhaul of communication and a reset of the relationship with teachers simply did not happen.

Fast forward to 2020, and we had the biggest scandal at the SQA since 2000, which was all the more scandalous because of the fact that the SQA and the Government had been warned for months, particularly by Iain Gray and me, about the system that it was designing and the inequalities that were baked into it. I am not ashamed of the transactional politics that happened in the aftermath of that, when, in exchange for our votes in a vote of confidence, the Greens got the grades restored and secured multiple reviews, including what became Professor Hayward’s independent review of qualifications and assessment.

That allows me to make the point that the bill is only one part of a much wider reform picture. Organisational reform needs to go alongside qualification and assessment reform. I welcome the Government’s commitment to more continuous assessment, but I am disappointed that Professor Hayward’s recommendations have largely been rejected or kicked into the long grass. I think that we will be back here in five or 10 years’ time to belatedly accept them.

The Government still has no answer to what I think was the key question that came out of the 2020 scandal. Yes, grades went up across the board, but they went up more for young people from more deprived communities, which poses the question whether exams make our attainment gap worse than it needs to be. I think that the answer to that is yes, but I do not think that the Government has an answer to it either way.

The 2021 alternative certification model proved that continuous assessment can work. The problems were largely with workload and resulted from the decision to cancel exams being taken far too late. However, that whole experience during the pandemic highlighted the key issues of poor communication from the SQA to teachers, students and parents. The bill could be stronger on communication in particular. Section 8 in part 1 requires the strategic advisory council to be consulted, but just the SAC. I will lodge amendments at stage 2 to require wider consultation by qualifications Scotland, of teachers, young people and parents.

The communications challenges go beyond the bill. I will close my opening speech by going back to the evidence that we took recently on this year’s higher history exam. One issue that arose was that the SQA cannot at present directly communicate with students or even with teachers, so it had no ability to directly tell every history teacher in Scotland or every history student what was going on. Does the Government recognise that that is an operational problem that can be resolved with the creation of the new body?

Good communications require not just good platforms but good practice, and for that a far more significant cultural change will be required.

However, I will come on to that in my closing remarks. I have been working on this issue for some time so, as you will imagine, Presiding Officer, I have far more to say than there is time for, but I will conclude now and come on to the cultural challenges and the inspectorate in closing.

Will the member take an intervention?

I say at the outset that my contributions on future groups of amendments will be far shorter than this initial one.

I will begin where Annie Wells finished, by talking about my amendments 5 and 6, on aggravators. I lodged the amendments because I believe that democracy is under pressure across the world at the moment—not just here in Scotland and the UK. Unfortunately, attacks on people who are involved in the electoral process are rising. We saw that during the recent Irish election, including, unfortunately, an assault on my colleague, the leader of the Irish Greens, Roderic O’Gorman. We saw it yesterday when there was an attack on activists for the Social Democratic Party of Germany ahead of the election in February.

Amendments 5 and 6 would create an aggravator. For those who are issuing a sentence when an individual is found to have committed an offence, and if that offence has been committed against people who are involved in the electoral process, there would be a requirement to consider the application of the aggravator. There is no requirement to apply it. As Annie Wells said a moment ago, it would be at their discretion, but if they did apply it, they would have to state how it had varied the sentence and, if they did not apply it, they would have to give the reason for deciding not to apply it.

Amendment 5 would apply the aggravator to the category of individuals that are specified in the bill, which is the returning officers, registration officers and counting officers who are involved in administering an election. Amendment 6 would amend the Elections Act 2022, in so far as that act applies in Scotland, by applying the aggravator to the other group of people who are involved in elections—candidates, elected representatives and campaigners.

I lodged amendments 5 and 6 because I think that we need to have more, not fewer, people involved in our electoral process. Members across the chamber will recognise that all parties face challenges in recruiting more individuals, and people from more diverse backgrounds, to stand for Parliament, and that a significant part of the difficulty comes from the threats and risks that are faced by those who are involved.

I lodged amendments 5 and 6 because I believe that they are another useful tool to protect and strengthen our democracy. They are not, in and of themselves, the solution to the challenges that we face, but they are a tool that is worth having at our disposal.

I turn to the amendments on dual mandates. I thank the minister and my friend Graham Simpson for their work on them. I also thank the individual who sits elsewhere and whose recent errors of judgement have allowed us to bring the issues back for debate. The minister offered Graham Simpson and me a compromise at stage 2. In return for our not pressing our amendments, the Government offered to run a consultation on the issue, which would have meant that the rule could not be applied for 2026 but that the consultation would be conducted and that we would be able to legislate on that in the next session of Parliament. However, events since then have created the political space in which we can bring the issues back for debate now and apply them from the 2026 election onward. I am most grateful to the individual whose choices made that possible.

The Scottish Greens are glad to support amendments 34 to 36 for the simple reason that being a member of Parliament is a full-time job. The job is a huge privilege, but it is also immensely challenging, and it is the kind of challenge that requires dedication to the role—a level of dedication that I think we all recognise our constituents expect from us.

Amendment 35, in relation to the House of Lords, is something of a compromise following the amendment that I lodged at stage 2 that would have banned peers outright from this Parliament. Amendment 35, I think perfectly reasonably, includes provision that would allow someone who has a peerage to serve here for as long as they have taken a leave of absence from the Lords.

Section 28 is a very welcome section of the bill. It empowers the use of pilots to boost democratic engagement. However, there is always a risk when we change the arrangements for something as fundamental as how we vote and how we elect those who govern, whether locally or nationally. Electronic voting has been debated before in the Parliament but possibly only in members’ business debates and in a couple of committee sessions.

Many of us are concerned about electronic voting for a range of reasons. Any voting system must be secure, anonymous and verifiable, but electronic voting can only guarantee two out of those three outcomes. There is an element of mutual exclusivity when we try to resolve all three through an electronic system.

Through amendment 17, I do not seek to ban electronic voting, which is a much wider debate. I am trying to require that that debate takes place even before a pilot on using electronic voting proceeds. It would simply put a check on the system.

If a pilot of electronic voting is proposed, given the unique concerns about that and the fact that any pilot would still be for a real election, the amendment would require that proposal to come before Parliament for approval, giving an opportunity for effective scrutiny.

Amendment 17 is simple and requires that any electronic voting pilot be approved by Parliament, through a statutory instrument, before being put into place.

I move amendment 17.

I have nothing further to add. I press amendment 17.

Amendment 17 agreed to.

Section 45—Boundaries Scotland: changing date of next review of local government wards and number of councillors

The amendments would require a consultation then development of regulations, so that question has not been answered yet. It is right that it would be answered after the consultation. My personal preference is the latter of the two options that Keith Brown mentioned. However, I recognise the concerns that the minister raised at stage 2, and it is right for the issues to be thoroughly consulted on before regulations are brought back to Parliament and Parliament as a whole makes a final judgment on the matter.

At stage 2, I focused on the Lords simply because I and the Scottish Greens see the House of Lords as an anti-democratic outrage and we think that membership there is incompatible with membership of an elected body. We do not believe that being an elected representative and being an unelected unaccountable lawmaker are compatible.

I am glad that amendment 36 was lodged in the form that it has been lodged because, unlike amendments 34 and 35, it does not prejudge the outcome. Amendments 34 and 35, quite rightly, use the word “must”. We will decide this afternoon to ban MSPs double jobbing as MPs or peers. However, we need to take separate issues into consideration when it comes to councillors. The Scottish Greens do not have an issue with the de facto situation that we have with the one-year transition period between election to this Parliament and local authority elections in the subsequent year. Given that, in that circumstance, the cost of a by-election is about four times the cost of a councillor’s salary, there is no harm in consulting on what options could be taken. I am particularly glad that amendment 36 includes provision for a transition period of, for example, a year and a week to allow for that year of overlapping mandates.

To return to my amendments on aggravators, I note that, at previous stages, some members expressed concerns about amendments in this space. I simply emphasise again the point that I made a moment ago that we want to welcome more people from more diverse backgrounds into the electoral process. That is certainly a conversation that my party has had. I have spoken to a number of women in my party whom I am trying to encourage to stand at the next election, and at the top of their list of concerns they have raised matters of safety and the risks that are posed to elected representatives. Given a number of other debates that we have had in this Parliament in recent weeks, if we want not just to strengthen our democracy but to make it more accessible to those who are currently being shut out or who feel that there are significant barriers in place, having those tools at our disposal would be most useful.

I thank Kenneth Gibson for his support, and I also thank the minister and the bill team for their support. Amendment 10 is a simple amendment that would require a review to be carried out of how candidates and parties are ordered on ballot papers. Members will be familiar with the question of ballot randomisation, which results from the pretty strong evidence of advantage for candidates who are at the top of the ballot paper. Because of the way in which we and many other countries order our ballot papers, that means candidates whose names start with letters at the top of the alphabet, some of whom are staring me down in the chamber as I say this.

There is quite comprehensive evidence on the issue. A thorough study from Denmark’s 2015 municipal elections shows an average advantage of 4 per cent in vote share for candidates who are at the top of the ballot paper. We have not had the same kind of rigorous study here in Scotland, and I think that one would be useful, but there are plenty of others worldwide that show a similar effect.

This is about the principle of fairness but also the perception of fairness, which I think we can all acknowledge is almost as important as the principle of fairness itself. Elections need to look fair to have public confidence. Amendment 10 simply mandates a review, with no specific outcome in mind. Various suggestions have been made, such as randomisation of ballot papers or having two different ballot papers, so that, on half the ballots in a ward, the names would be printed from A to Z and, on the other half, they would go from Z to A. There is a range of options, and I acknowledge that there are accessibility issues to consider.

Ministers already have the power to vary ballot paper order, so the amendment simply requires them to undertake a review and consider what the options might be. I lodged the amendment because the bill is about strengthening our democracy and I think that, in a small but significant way, amendment 10, the review and its outcomes would do so.

I move amendment 10.

I start by thanking all the external organisations and individuals who contributed to the bill and made it stronger. If I have a small note of frustration, it is that there are some organisations and individuals who have had a lot to say about electoral reform over recent years but barely had anything to say during this process or were entirely absent for it.

The process was poorer for their absence, because I have agreed with many of the things that they have said in the past. I know that it might come as a surprise to those of us in the Parliament, but some people do not find legislating to be quite as much fun as campaigning. However, legislating is incredibly important, and I urge those who have made compelling cases about electoral reform to engage with the many consultations that will come about as a result of the bill.

A number of the amendments that I moved at stage 2 but did not press to a vote will now go to consultation. I am glad that the Government has agreed to that. One of my proposals was to deliver on an Electoral Commission recommendation from 2015 to remove cash deposits. It might seem a little odd that it was me who moved that amendment, given that my party can only now—finally—afford to pay deposits and stand in most places. However, I lodged the amendment because, as the Electoral Commission noted, it is wrong to place a financial barrier in the way of people participating in elections.

Of course, some kind of threshold is absolutely required. What we proposed instead, which is common in other jurisdictions, is a requirement to be nominated by a certain number of registered voters in the relevant area—the constituency or the region. I am grateful to the minister for agreeing to put that forward for consultation.

I moved other amendments in that space of democratic reform, one of which would have replaced council-level by-elections when a councillor has to vacate their post with the nomination of replacement councillors. That would simply replicate the system that a number of other countries that use the single transferable vote system have in place to recognise that a single-member by-election for a multi-member ward often distorts the result and results in a number of people going without the representation that they chose at the election.

I found it interesting that a number of members from different parties spoke to me about that proposal outside the committee proceedings, to either strongly agree with or oppose it, and there was no pattern based on which party they were from in the positions that they took on that. That was reflected in many of the issues that we addressed in the bill.

I thank Ben Macpherson for raising at stage 2 the issue of having residency as a candidacy requirement. It is a shame that we could not agree to his amendment on that. I do not think that it is controversial to say that someone should be resident in Scotland in order to stand for election to the Scottish Parliament. I hope that, although that will not be the case for the election in 2026, it will be the case subsequently.

The bill builds on a strong legacy of electoral reform in the Parliament. We have introduced votes at 16 and voting rights for refugees, which I was reminded of in the past few weeks due to recent events in Syria and the downfall of the Assad regime. At the 2021 election, I ran into two friends of mine who were Syrian refugees and who voted at the same polling station as I did. I am sure that they would not mind me saying that they were both middle-aged people who, for the first time in their lives, were casting their votes in a free and fair election. That was because this Parliament decided that they, as residents of this country, had just as much right to have a say in who governs the country as any other resident. I would contrast that legacy of electoral reform here with the previous UK Government’s record on the introduction of voter identification, which is an entirely unnecessary requirement.

In closing, I thank the minister and the bill team for their co-operation; Graham Simpson for his incredibly important amendments; and George Adam for the approach that he took in kick-starting the process. I would like to agree with not just Alex Cole-Hamilton but Winston Churchill, which is not something that I do very often. Mr Cole-Hamilton reminded us of that famous Churchill quote that democracy is the worst system, apart from all the others. It is indeed a messy and difficult way to run a society, but it really is the only way that is worth trying. As I said earlier, politics should be something that we, the people, all do together, and it should not be something that is imposed on the public by politicians. I am glad that the bill takes us a little bit further towards that eventual goal.