 The next item of business is a debate on motion 7111, in the name of Stephen Kerr, on the state of the Scottish education system. I would invite those members who wish to speak in the debate to please press the request to speak buttons now. I call on Stephen Kerr to speak to and to move the motion around 13 minutes. It is my privilege to move the motion in my name that speaks to what I believe to be the most important thing that we have powers over in this Parliament, Scotland's education system and the future of our children and our country. I have said before in this chamber that the gift of a Scottish education is the most prized gift that Scotland can give to her children and our education system is central to our national identity. An education system that gives our young people confidence to move forward, that thrives on innovation, that sparks entrepreneurship, that extends equal opportunity to all, the very definition of levelling up, an educational tradition that makes us feel proud of our Scottishness, which is why, Presiding Officer, you should expect to hear strong words and emotion from these benches this afternoon about the way that our education system has been mal-treated by the SNP. Their end-of-year report card reads must do better. The Scottish Conservatives have education at the heart of our political philosophy because education must be a golden ticket for every individual to live the life they desire to live. The equal opportunity to succeed in life is core to the Scottish Conservative vision of the Scotland that we want to see. Inspirational teachers are crucial to education, and the Scottish Conservatives are standing up for Scotland's teachers. I know how much I owe my teachers. Mr Mitchell, my history teacher at Forfer Academy, who fired my enthusiasm for history, Mrs Skinner, my English teacher, who told us that if they wanted to develop any kind of a vocabulary, we should read the times at least once a week. Sound advice indeed. We owe so much to our teachers, but we also have a responsibility to them. For the first time in 40 years, teachers are taking industrial action in Scotland. Teachers are frustrated. The teachers that I speak to do not want to be on strike. They want to be in the classroom doing what they train to do and love to do—teaching our children, but they expect to be respected. They deserve to be treated fairly, and they have been waiting eight months for this Cabinet Secretary to get serious. Shirley-Anne Somerville has made a total mess of this situation. She blamed the teachers, she blamed the unions, she blamed the local councils, she even blamed the UK Government. The only innocent party in this dispute, according to the Cabinet Secretary, is the Cabinet Secretary herself. What should have been resolved months ago is unresolved, and the buck stops with Shirley-Anne Somerville. John Mason has not yet said or always implying that there should be a better pay increase. I understand that the teachers have been offered £35,000, which seems reasonable. Could he put a figure on what he wants? Stephen Kerr. I thank the member for his intervention. If I was at the negotiating table, this dispute would have been resolved months ago, but the Cabinet Secretary has the responsibility to be at the negotiating table and has failed to resolve the dispute, and is intent on blaming everybody else for the dispute, including the teachers themselves. I will give way. Cabinet Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville? I thank Mr Kerr for taking another intervention. It did not answer the point, so if he was at the negotiating table, what would he offer and where would he take the money from in the education budget? Stephen Kerr. I think that the Cabinet Secretary may have got this the wrong way round. She comes to Parliament to be held accountable by the members of this Parliament, so I ask the Cabinet Secretary what exactly is she doing to bring the teachers' disputes to an end? That is far more pertinent than asking me what I would do. What are you doing, Cabinet Secretary, to end this dispute? There have been nearly 75,000 reported incidents of violence or serious threat against teachers in the past five years, over 20,000 of them in the last academic year alone. In February, I raised in the chamber a survey that said that nearly half of our dedicated hard-working teachers in Aberdeen were considering quitting due to the levels of violence that he has just raised. A fortnight ago, I raised that teachers at Northfield academy had taken a decision to do industrial action on the same basis. Can I ask the member, while researching today's debate, has he come across any evidence of this Government doing anything as a result of my questions to help teachers in Aberdeen? I thank my friend for his intervention, and I think that he already knows the answer to that. There is no evidence of anything happening. I will tell you what the current level of reported incidents of violence and threat amounts to them. There is an incident when a teacher is attacked or threatened in Scotland every three minutes. By the time we finish this debate, 40 such incidents will have been recorded. Teachers striking at Northfield academy and Barnum and High School do so because they feel vulnerable, unprotected and unsupported by this SNP Government. All this cabinet secretary ever does is pass the buck. It is the SNP that has cut deep into the resources of local government, and it is up to the SNP to re-order its political priorities, to properly fund the resolution to these disputes, to end the defunding of local government and to put resources back into the classroom, with a 15.6 per cent cut in ASN teachers since 2012. Despite a 92 per cent increase in demand, teachers are run ragged and unsupported by the specialists that they need. What is the cabinet secretary going to do to protect and support our teachers? What is she going to do about discipline in our schools? The SNP is leaving—I will not give way, I think that I have taken a number of interventions now—the SNP is leaving many newly qualified teachers without jobs. Out of nearly 1,800 probationers in 2012, only 400 had a permanent contract last year. 400 were so scunnered that they had left teaching altogether. That is a tragic waste of talent. How on earth does the cabinet secretary think that those newly qualified teachers can get on with the rest of their lives or plan for their futures when they do not even have a permanent contract? How does that make teaching the attractive career in Scotland that we all need it to be? Why is she not banging the table to fix this problem? The SNP likes to pretend that it is succeeding on attainment by focusing on the attainment gap, but writing in The Times in June, Professor Lindsay Paterson criticised the SNP's approach and showed that the marginal gains in narrowing the attainment gap were only a reflection of a fall in attainment at the top end, not so much levelling up as levelling down. He also said that today we know less about the performance of Scotland's schools than at any time since the 1950s. The SNP has taken this out of the international comparison tables on attainment. They are so reluctant to face reality that they simply do not measure it. So, cabinet secretary, today will you commit to putting Scotland back into those international comparators so that we can learn how we are doing for our young people and our children? The First Minister said that her neck was on the line. Education was her sacred responsibility. It is a shame that she did not even bother to turn up this afternoon for our debate on education, which is rare enough in this parliamentary timetable. It is really no wonder what little data we have illustrates just how much the SNP is failing. Few pupils at primary school are achieving the expected curriculum for excellence level in reading, writing, numeracy, listening and talking than in 2018. That is pretty much every subject area at a primary school. That, Presiding Officer, is not a debating point or a matter to cover up or evade by dissimulation. It is a national disgrace and it is a scandal. Will the cabinet secretary tell us what she will do to address overall attainment in our schools made worse by her Governments in action? We face another critical challenge, and that is in the availability of subject choice across all parts of Scotland. We are falling behind in science, technology, in engineering and in maths. The uptake in those subjects is at a five-year low, and there is a dramatic fall in the number of pupils studying modern languages, especially French, German and Spanish, compared with other parts of the United Kingdom. Will the cabinet secretary tell us what is being done to recruit teachers in STEM subjects and modern languages? What is being done to promote and facilitate subject choice? What is being done to attract more pupils into those subject areas? The First Minister decreed that Education Scotland and the SQA are to be scrapped. No-one I have ever spoken to or listened to in those organisations seemed to be prepared to accept that they had failed at all, least of all the leadership of those bodies. Surprise, surprise, it is those very self-same people who are now designing the new system. Only the SNP could create such a lily-putian scenario. I will give way. Martin Whitfield. I am very grateful to the member to give way. Would you not also agree with me that it was disappointing, the Scottish Government's announcement last week, that the new body would retain the awarding and regulation of qualifications? Where is the change? Where is the hope for a better future? I am grateful to the member for his intervention. It is further evidence that this Government and this Cabinet Secretary do not listen, because all of the advice is to the contrary of what the Government announced last week. I think that what the Cabinet Secretary needs to understand is that being seen to do something is not the same as doing something. It just isn't. I ask again why are there 59 people on the reform delivery bodies predominantly from the Scottish Government, Education Scotland and the SQA, and why are there only three places for teachers? Why does this all sound vaguely familiar as a game of musical chairs? Why is she so afraid of new voices and thinking in education reform? Did she even look at getting new people in? I conclude that Scotland needs teachers who are confident, held in high esteem and who are free to teach. Scotland needs head teachers who are free to lead their schools. Scotland needs pupils who are free to learn without disruption in the classroom. Scotland needs schools that inspire and uplift our young people to be all that they can be in life. If we get those principles right, we will succeed in vitalising our education system. However, when she stands to speak, I hope that we might see a Cabinet Secretary with some passion, some reforming zeal that will deliver an articulate vision of what Scottish education should be that goes beyond the normal SNP complacency and self-congratulation. Let's hear answers to the serious questions that I have raised in my speech. Acknowledge the real challenges that we face and then let us work together across this Parliament to tackle them together. I move the motion in my name. Thank you, Mr Kerr. I now call on Shirley-Anne Somerville, Cabinet Secretary, to speak to and to move amendment 7111.3, around nine minutes, please, Cabinet Secretary. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I move the amendment in my name. Scotland's learners, parents, carers and everyone who works in education have been through an extraordinary period over the past few years. They deserve our thanks, our admiration for everything that they have achieved against the challenging backdrop of the Covid pandemic, the drive for recovery and, of course, the cost of living crisis. Notwithstanding the significant challenges to our education system, I see first-hand examples, day in and day out of teachers, childcare practitioners and lecturers going the extra mile to support our children and young people and adult learners in their learner journey to ensure that they thrive and achieve positive destinations. Scottish education is performing well and is continually improving, thanks to the hard work and the dedication of the education workforce. Teacher numbers are at their highest since 2008, with the number of primary teachers the highest since 1980. The pupil-teacher ratio is the best on record and we have the highest spending per pupil within the UK nations. The latest figures show that more school leavers in Scotland are in education employment or training nine months after the end of the school year. That is 93.2 per cent in 2021. Progress is being made in closing the attainment gap and outcomes are improving. Scotland is the only part of the United Kingdom to offer the equivalent of 1140 hours of high-quality early learning and childcare to all eligible children, regardless of the parent's working status, putting children first. Internationally, Scottish education is viewed at high performing by the OECD, who recently reviewed and endorsed the curriculum for excellence. Indeed, the 2018 PISA study ranked Scotland among the top-performing countries in young people's global competence. Scotland leads the EU with the highest proportion of adults aged 25 to 64 continuing in their education. I appreciate the cabinet secretary giving way. On the PISA figures, does she not recognise that there is a long-term trend of decline on issues of literacy and numeracy in our schools? I recognise that we continue to strive to do better in literacy and numeracy, and I think that we will obviously have information that is coming out next week on the ASL statistics about how we have dealt with, as a system, the challenge of Covid and how we are moving to recover out of Covid. While, of course, there is more that we need to do in this area, particularly because of the Covid pandemic, I hope that we will see improvement next week, but of course we will need to wait for the statistics to come out to see whether, indeed, that is the case. However, we know that we can and must do better, and that is why I have, in Barton, a wide-ranging and ambitious programme of reform. Even though we start with strong foundations, I know that there is no room for complacency if Scottish education is to improve and to adapt the challenges ahead. The world around us has changed beyond recognition over the last few years and our learners and those who support them deserve a system that is flexible enough to suit their needs. I am very grateful to the cabinet secretary giving way. On that point, does she not see the contention that people have of the announcement last week that the new exam body will both award and regulate qualifications? Where is the improvement in that decision? The important reason behind that point is the recommendation that Ken Muir put forward. I did see the point of where he was coming from, but what we have to recognise is that the accreditation would have moved effectively in government and been delivered by civil servants. Accreditation has to be independent of government, and when we looked at the details of that, it would have lost some of the independence that it has. My challenge to everybody in the chamber as we move forward in this is how can we make it more independent from government? How can we take on the challenge that Ken Muir gave us? Unfortunately, I respectfully say that in a different way, because we would have lost that independence if it had moved to within the new agency, as I have been recommended in the initial report. I would like to make a little bit of progress, if Mr Rennie would forgive me. On to the national discussion. Alongside COSLA, I have convened a national discussion on the vision for Scottish education, which provides an opportunity for everyone who is passionate about education to shake that in a consensual vision for the future. I hope that Mr Kerr took the opportunity to take part in that national discussion. I do not know whether he took up that invitation that was made to party spokespeople or not. I have been humbled by the number of children, young people, nearly learning childcare practitioners, teachers, lecturers, support staff, parents, carers and others who have taken the time to consider what they value about education and to give their views. More than 5,400 responses have been received, and 26,000 young people took part in online school assemblies, ensuring that the voices of learners will be at the heart of that reform. That national discussion is the biggest listening exercise that has ever taken place in education, but listening is not just the first step, and if we are truly to meet the needs and aspirations of our learners, we need to build consensus for change. While the national discussion will provide a long-term compelling vision for education, it is supporting that we start with immediate work towards that vision. That is why, when it is published next year, the vision will be accompanied by calls to action, setting out short-medium and long-term activity to start bringing that vision to life. I was announced on October last year that Professor Louise Hayward is leading an independent review of qualifications and assessments to ensure that our report remains fit for purpose and to guarantee the best education experience for learners. Understanding the views of everyone in the system will be vital in shaping the future of our approach to qualifications and assessments. Professor Hayward is engaging widely and a public consultation is currently underway. That is a very important exercise, and I hope that as many people as possible will share their views. Professor Hayward will also consider carefully the views and ideas that emerge from the national discussion and will incorporate those alongside her work into a final report, which I am looking forward to receiving next year. The reform of our national bodies will ensure that our education system supports learners to thrive, providing them with the best opportunities to succeed. We are establishing three new national education bodies, and work is under way to design how those bodies will be structured. It is vital that new national bodies reflect and deliver change in how our education system supports education staff, children and young people. The independent expect that it will be able to provide all those with a stake in education, including the Parliament and ministers, with objective assessments and analysis on the strength of our system and opportunities for further improvement, which draws on a sufficient baseline of inspections. I am grateful to the councillor for giving way, but she accepts the criticism that is levied at those who are piloting the reform bodies. That is the same crew that were in those key positions in Education Scotland, the SQA and other boys, Scottish Government. Where are the new voices? Where are the new ideas? I recognise that the secretary is seven minutes into her speech and still has not mentioned the pressing issue of the teachers' dispute. Very clear on numerous occasions to Parliament my position on the teachers' dispute, in that the fourth offer that was put to teachers was a fair and an affordable one. The 10 per cent ask from teaching unions is unaffordable, and Mr Kerr had the opportunity to suggest how the Conservatives would like to move forward with that. He, funnily enough, had absolutely nothing to say on the matter, Presiding Officer. On the national bodies, I will make the decisions about what happens in the reform process. I am determined to move forward with that reform process, and, of course, when we look at the target operating models that will be developed, those will be available for consultation to everyone before I make the final decisions on those matters. Of course, we will see, for example, a more accountable, more representative Government structure within the new public body responsible for education. We will, of course, see a new agency for education that will be to do with what teachers want rather than all the time what Government wants. That is an important change that we will make in all of that. Of course, we also have the consultation on our shared framework on the inspection of early learning in school-age childcare settings that will be due imminently, and we have the work on the purpose and principles for post-school education as well. That, accompanied with the independent review of schools delivery landscape, is a package of reform built around the national discussion that will ensure that we have a reform package to ensure that our education system is fit for purpose and fit for the future, most importantly having learners at the heart of that. I sincerely hope that members across the chamber, particularly from the political parties that are taking part in this debate today, took part in that national discussion. They were all invited to meet our co-facilitators to be able to take part in the consensual way that we could deliver policy together. I certainly hope that they took part in that opportunity. This is an ideal time to get involved and seize rather than making statements to Parliament alone. We could work together in the national discussion and I hope that they did so. Today we are debating Scottish education with schools across Scotland closed as part of the first on-going national teaching strike in 40 years. That disruption and loss of learning is landing on a generation that has already lost so much in the pandemic and the real impact of which the Government continues to refuse to quantify and for which a new response is deemed unworthy of countenance. Strike action is certainly— Would he agree that the actual ASAL statistics that will be published next week and the work around the health and wellbeing census actually allows us to look at what's happened and to see what action needs to be taken on that? Obviously, I haven't seen those statistics. I'm sure that, if the cabinet secretary wanted to talk about many details, she could have brought them with her to Parliament today. Maybe she hasn't seen them, so let's wait and see what it says. I hope that there will be a statement on those statistics when they are produced and we can have the debate in Parliament as a result of if she's promising that discussion should be happened. I'm having three different conversations going on, which is too too many. Strike action is a failure on the part of this Government and their public pay plans and industrial relations are pitiful. They're characterised by bad faith and a lack of professionalism, illustrated by what was quite literally a last-minute offer. E-mail to the EIS at 4.29pm, when the committee was meeting at 4.30pm. That offer had sat on the cabinet secretary's desk for three and a half weeks. Nobody on those benches dismisses the challenges of meeting public sector pay demands with inflation running at horrendous levels due to the grotesque economic incompetence of the Conservative Government. However, what we should all expect are those challenging negotiations—I understand that they are challenging—to be conducted professionally and in good faith. The cabinet secretary knows that a fair deal will have to be done, and the sooner that happens, the better for pupils across Scotland. The warm words in the Government amendment today about our teachers are not borne out in those actions. Just as the list of working groups and reviews do not add up to a proper education policy that can transform the lives of our children and build the stronger Scotland that we need for the decades ahead. For each budget cycle—we're in the depths of one right now—this cabinet secretary and our ministers comprehensively lose the argument for education inside this sclerotic Government. Cuts to school budgets, cuts to colleges, cuts to universities and they comprehensively fail the test of leadership too. Colleges are crying out for a decision of any kind whatsoever as to what they should be doing. What did they get? A coherence review to be followed by a statement of intent to inform a purpose and principles plan. All impenetrable babble. So what does it actually mean? I'll translate, Presiding Officer. It means that the Government does not have a clue what it is doing. That's illustrated by a skills review lauded in the amendment of the Government of Lodge today that I would remind the chamber is only happening because Audit Scotland were utterly damming of a lack of any ministerial direction whatsoever. They don't have a clue what they want to achieve. The core STEM subjects that will provide a bedrock of any future prosperity are in long-term decline, with dropping teacher numbers, dropping number of students and dropping levels of attainment. It is urgent and it is happening now. Where is the response filed, unfortunately, under two difficult? It's a Government without a vision or a purpose for education in Scotland. It's little wonder then that the reform programme that we have been discussing for our national education bodies is collapsing into the rebranding exercise that we always suspected it would be. That process has been run by the managers of the existing education Scotland and the inspectorate and, of course, the SQA. Maybe the cabinet secretary does not hear the young people of Scotland. I have been involved in that national conversation on a day-to-day basis, visiting schools, speaking to teachers, speaking to pupils and engaging with them in this Parliament each time that it is a possibility is there. I can tell the cabinet secretary just how angry those young people are about what happened to them over the pandemic, not just the ones whose appeals for exceptional circumstances the cabinet secretary chucked in the bin, but how they were all betrayed by their qualifications agency and by the incompetence of a deputy First Minister who lurched out of one mess and right into the next time and time again. Kenyer was absolutely clear in his report, which we all said we would honour, that public faith in the qualifications agency was of the utmost importance that people must have confidence in that process, the outcomes and the certificates that should be a passport to a better life. With any currency, as Liz Truss learned to all of our costs, confidence is everything. Kenyer's key recommendation to rebuild confidence was to separate out-regulation and accreditation from the awarding body so that a reaction of the cabinet secretary further laid out today is scarcely believable. Under pressure from the managers who are calling the shots, she bends to their will and refuses to take the key decision, backing the status quo and more of the same. What that betrays is the same lack of understanding of what has happened that was displayed by our predecessor because they got it wrong and they got it all wrong year after year in the pandemic. Stephen Kerr. I'm astonished, as I'm sure other members will be at the lackluster speech that we heard from the cabinet secretary. Does Michael Marra agree with me that she seems to be a prisoner of the worst side of the Scottish educational establishment? Michael Marra. What I can say is that there's a real need for change and we have to understand, Mr Kerr, and I think that everyone who looks at this in good conscience would understand, is that the reform process we're in cannot be a cosmetic fix. It can't be new logos on the business cards above the same old names on the business cards below and we can't allow the new qualifications body to mark its own homework. The change must be real and the change could not be more needed. Despite calls on the education committee in this Parliament, there's no proper Government assessment of the impact of the pandemic. Yet we see the consequences everywhere. Key groups, P3 and P4, S2 and S3, groups of young people adrift and teaching staff struggling to cope, riots in Curtin Dundee, Nidry in Edinburgh and disruption across Scotland. Police saying that a cohort of kids in the police directly have lost years of structure and community, love and care due to lockdown and isolation. What do we get? No response, no concerted response, no support for our schools or colleges, not a word. Where is the plan? We have attendance down across the country. Where is the plan to re-engage? East Lothian Council has started a programme with Edinburgh College to work intensively with families. Where is the national response? Presiding Officer, in conclusion, the future of this country depends on the decisions that these ministers make. The greatest economic levers available anywhere are in their hands. We have a small window to make good the harm of the pandemic, but that window is closing. Thank you, Mr Marra. I now call Willie Rennie around six minutes please, Mr Rennie. The poverty-related attainment gap is wide as ever. Hundreds of teachers on zero-hours contracts for years on end, even more leaving the profession forever. An exodus of staff from private and voluntary nurseries because of government-directed inequality of funding. Violent attacks on teachers are a decline in pupils taking STEM exams. Big shortfalls in STEM teacher training recruitment. Scottish universities are more dependent than ever on tuition fees from international students. Despite the vulnerability that comes with global turbulence, Scottish universities lose hundreds of millions of pounds of UK research funding. The skills landscape review is still being reviewed five years on. The higher education minister criticised by Audit Scotland for a lack of leadership on skills. Colleges that still do not know what the Government wants them to do. Thatcherite, national testing and league tables, ignored by the teachers, ignoring the Greens and ignoring this very Parliament. On that, the SNP still has not learnt that you do not fatten a pig by measuring it. A Covid exams debacle that undermined the judgment of teachers and condemned poorer pupils. Pupil equity funding used to pay the police and under resourced reform of additional needs, keeping the SQA and Education Scotland in all but name. They will now even share the very same offices to top it all. Teachers on strike on pay for the first time for 40 years. The last time was when the Conservatives ran Scottish education four decades ago. It was that long ago, even I was at school the last time that we had a strike. The SNP is bereft of ideas. They are bereft. The vision today that the education secretary set out was a rosy picture, but it was so far removed from reality and the daily experience of teachers and pupils in this country. All of this, since Nicola Sturgeon made education her defining mission. Once the pride of the nation highly regarded across the globe in the last 15 years, slipping down the international league tables, now the First Minister has made it a whole lot worse. The flagship education bill was ditched, replaced by a basket of contradictory and knee-jerk measures. She put her most senior ally in charge of education. Now John Swinney is back at his old job. It was her number one priority. Now Nicola Sturgeon hardly even talks about it. It is a terrible record, but it is not the Scottish ministers who have lost out. It is a generation of young people who have lost out, and they should be ashamed of that record. Members know that I like to be positive. We need an alternative approach to the miserable performance of our Scottish National Party Government. What to do? We must start by valuing teachers with decent pay, better working conditions and trusting their judgment with a new microne agreement, the one that has reformed the profession under the last Labour-liberal democrat leadership. Just briefly, yes. Bob Doris. I thank the member for giving me. He has mentioned several times about the professional judgment of teachers. We are looking at a new national qualifications framework for attainment. How much do you think we should move away from exit exams and how much to wash more accreditation from teachers when we are looking at balance? That would be a positive and constructive contribution to making this debate on education rather than just soundbites. Willie Rennie? It is hardly a soundbite to set out the atrocious record of the member's Government. He should be ashamed that he supports this Government day in, day out. However, I want to enter this debate, and I am listening very carefully to the approach that is being taken. I think that there are some innovative ways that we can change the way that we have the exams and the qualifications and the years at which we take them. That requires decent consideration, but it is not a replacement for a proper strategy on the wider responsibilities of this Government towards education. We need to make the curriculum work with specialist advice and support for classroom teachers that has been absent for years since the curriculum for excellence was established. We must abolish national testing and reform the exams and qualifications so that they match the curriculum. We must elevate the prestige of vocational qualifications. Despite trying for decades to do so, we need to learn the lessons from Germany in those reforms. Reform the age at which children begin formal education at school, in line with SNP policy. I seem to support SNP policy on this more than the SNP Government does. Create a new national independent education bodies that have the trust of teachers because they are led by teachers following the recommendations of the Muir review. My colleague Beatrice Wishart would want the Government to explore making swimming a key part of the curriculum just like it has in England. That is incredibly important for our young people. Give clarity for colleges with an urgent statement of intent, including their central role in training and retraining for the new sustainable economy. Hold a national review of our universities to set long-term sustainable approach. Create the new Scottish Erasmus without any further delay following the Teth Welsh model, which is already up and running, offering opportunities for young people. Create the reform, the funding for early years to ensure that all staff are paid fair and equal wages, no matter their employer. Those are all positive proposals for our future. Liberal Democrats believe so much in education. It is the great leveler, the opportunity provider, the economic driver and the society maker. That is why we need a Government that prioritises education rather than the miserable record that we have had over the past 15 years. Let us have a change, a new vision and a new leadership. We will now move to the open debate. I call Liz Smith to be followed by Co-Cab Stewart. Thank you. When parents send their children to school, I think that they want three things. Firstly, that their children are able to read, write and count properly and do not let anybody tell me that that is old-fashioned. They want good quality discipline and they want a well-rounded education both inside and outside the classroom. All that is dependent on good quality teaching. I do not think that any of that is too much to ask. When Nicola Sturgeon told education leaders on 19 August 2015 that education was her number one priority, I agreed with her. Even more so when, six months later, she reiterated that commitment and told us that there would be a new education bill forthcoming, promising greater devolution to schools. Maybe, just maybe, the collective findings of the Donaldson, McCormack, Cameron and Bloomer reports into Scottish school education, all carried out by experts in their fields between 2011 and 2016, were beginning to sink in. Namely, Scottish education, despite all the things on which it could pride itself, needed to be shaken out of its complacency and moved on. Incidentally, exactly the same was said by Howie two decades before. Of course, those reports appeared at the very same time that the OECD, the Scottish Survey of Attainment, PISA, Reform Scotland and the Scottish Government's own statistics all produced compelling evidence that Scotland was flatlining when it came to attainment, and worse still, that the attainment gap between rich and poor was widening, thereby disadvantageing large numbers of young people, something that had always been fundamentally at odds with the basic principles of good Scottish education once renowned across the world. Let's be clear that the principles of Scottish education articulated very well with the curriculum for excellence, as set out by Peter Peacock. I was even more encouraged when in 2017 the programme for government proclaimed and I quote, a new education bill will deliver the biggest and most radical change to how our schools are run. Nicola Sturgeon even went as far in the Scotland and Sunday article to say that the London model of cluster schools was worth looking at because it was delivering good results for more disadvantaged pupils. John Swinney, when reflecting on the poor performance of one particular local authority, told us and I quote again, the status quo was not an option. So what on earth went wrong in the SNP high command? Why are after the successive tenures of Fiona Hyslop, Mike Russell, Angela Constance, John Swinney and now Shirley-Anne Somerville, are we failing to deliver better outcomes after all the professional advice that we have received? For me it comes down mainly to three things. Firstly, that teachers have been sufficiently undervalued as key professionals and Graham Donaldson at the time had very interesting things to say about that, particularly as he said that too many teachers were reporting that they felt uncomfortable with regard to some gaps in their professional training. Of course it doesn't help when we see the soaring number of cases of verbal and physical assaults as mentioned by Stephen Kerr. Secondly, the Scottish Government has shown an extraordinary unwillingness to properly reform the agencies in education. Not just rebadged them, Michael Marra made some excellent points about this, or moved the deck chairs round a bit, but properly reformed them to reflect the support that is available to teachers. No-one can argue that education Scotland and the SQA have had a happy history in recent times. Indeed, when I was on the education committee of this Parliament for a very substantial number of years, hardly a term went past without the committee's attention being drawn to significant problems within the agencies. Problems that meant that teachers felt remote and frustrated by those education agencies, and that can never be a blueprint for a successful education system. Thirdly, I want to mention the lack of rigor, because it comes back to the structure and the delivery of the curriculum. Back in 1992, Professor John Howey reflected on the abiding strength of the breadth of Scottish education in relation to England, but he also wanted to see a European-style baccalaureate, which introduced much more depth and rigor in assessment of the Scottish system. We should have listened more to what he said. The Scottish Government, through Mike Russell, attempted a Scottish baccalaureate, but that never took off because of the weak structure and the poor uptake of Scottish pupils. Part of that issue has manifested itself in the problems over subject choice, which was debated so many times in the previous parliaments on the back of the work of Professor Jim Scott. In one of those debates, John Swinney told me that, if we counted up the subjects that are on offer in Scottish schools, we would actually have more of them now than we had before. He's right if he uses that accounting method, but he couldn't deny that the subjects for arts, for social sciences and for science have been very badly squeezed, bringing about further difficulties in the curriculum. It's all very well having good skills, they're important, but if you don't actually know things as well, then those skills aren't much use. There is no getting away from the fact that both the quantitative and qualitative evidence tells that Scottish schools are stuck in a rut when it comes to raising attainment across the board. That has been happening across the board on the SNP's watch for a very long time, and the longer that that rut persists, then there is a fundamental problem in taking that forward. Far too many children remain functionally illiterate, which is a major concern to employers, and that is despite more public spending per head of people. It's not about the money, it's about the system. We have a huge opportunity to get our education system right. We need a vision of Scottish education in an all-round capacity, a vision that will not just suit the economy but one that promotes a fair-minded ethical society in which individuals are valued for who they are, both pupils and teachers alike. We need an education system in which every individual is encouraged to reach for the stars with schools of ambition and where every step of the way we are promoting excellence rather than the lowest common denominator, which far too often is the trademark of education policy. I remind members that speeches are up to six minutes. I call co-capture to be followed by Alec Riley. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I always welcome the opportunity to debate Scottish education in a constructive spirit, but I must begin today by reflecting on the unremitting negative approach of the motion from the Tories. That is such a lack of acknowledgement of the excellent work done by teachers and the incredible achievements of pupils around the country, or the international standing of our further and higher education institutions. One must assume that the goal of such a motion as this is not to improve but to undermine, not to support and sustain but to insult and injure. I would like to quote Mr Kerr. As recently as 7 November, Stephen Kerr said in this very chamber, and I quote, that we have one of the best educated populations in the world. He went on to say, we have always been at the forefront of innovation and development. Surely that is the result of Scottish Government policy. Amongst other things, looking at the tone of Mr Kerr's motion, I can say that I am not angry about it, but I am very, very disappointed. Education in Scotland—I am going to crack on for a little bit—education in Scotland and the UK is facing huge challenges. Challenges that have been made worse by soaring inequalities and continuing effect of the pandemic, the appalling state of the UK economy and the devastating effect of inflation on Scottish Government budgets. No Government can or should evade responsibility for delivering for its citizens, but to ignore the context that Government is operating in or the success that is being achieved in the face of it is, to me, unacceptable. The OECD values Scottish education system highly, describing the curriculum for excellence as a holistic, coherent, future-orientated approach to learning, and other countries are adopting this style and approach because of the value that it delivers. We must also remember that exam pass rates across the board have increased this year compared with the last year's exam diets of 2019, including A grade passes. Skills-based qualifications are close to the highest-ever figure. Positive destinations of school leavers stand at 93.2 per cent, and nine out of 10 head teachers agree that improvements have been made in closing the poverty-related attainment gap despite the impact of the pandemic. Michael Marr. I thank the member for giving way. She rightly cites the challenges of the pandemic to which I do not believe there has been any kind of coherent response in the Government, but would she recognise that the long-term decline in PISA outcomes for reading mathematics and science that Scotland has faced under this Government for a decade? I would recognise that the poverty-related attainment gap is incredibly stubborn and it requires measures that look at poverty as a whole, looking at social policy and health policy, working with education. I make no apology for listing policies that the Scottish Government has implemented to mitigate the effects of Tory austerity on education. I will continue. Attainment challenge funding of more than £1 billion over this Parliament, 1140 hours of quality early learning and childcare, rolling out digital devices for every school child, expanding free school meal provision, increasing school clothing grants and investing in the school estate. On the day that this year's exam results were published, I read a tweet from my colleague Michael Marr who wrote, congratulations to all young people receiving results today. Whether celebrating or slightly down at heart, please know that there are endless possibilities out there for you. He went on then to say that your achievements are also masking real problems in our education system. I suggest that young people's achievements, far from masking problems, reflect their own efforts, the quality of our education system and all those who work within it. I would further suggest in response to Mr Marra that the endless possibilities that he refers to reflect the Scottish Government's commitment to make higher education free for young people to support our colleges sector to deliver foundation and modern apprenticeships. I will give way. I appreciate the member giving way. Does he not recognise then that the young people who are achieving those qualifications do so in the context of declining the number of teachers under this Government, a compression in the number of subjects that they can choose in their schools and the huge impact that the pandemic is having over that period as well? That is the context that I was talking about and the challenge in the Scottish education policy to which this Government refuses to rise. That was quite a long intervention. Well, we have the highest level of teachers that we have had for many years since at least 2019, I believe. In turning to higher and further education sector, I am going to carry on. Presiding Officer, I will continue in the face of hearing. On the basis that the previous speaker was 45 seconds over, I will give you the same courtesy, so you have 45 extra seconds. I am very grateful for that, Presiding Officer. In 2020, the University of Glasgow was named the Times Higher Education University of the year. It is currently in the top 100 in both the Times Higher Education and Quackirelly Simmons world rankings. This year, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, also in my constituency, was also ranked as one of the world's top destinations to study the performing arts on the similar rankings. It came fifth out of 15,000 university programmes at over 1,500 universities. Also, the City of College Glasgow has retained STEM-assured status for the next three years, having once again met and exceeded the UK STEM Foundation's rigus accreditation criteria. Having started at the chalk phase, I think that you need to bring your remarks. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I didn't want to finish without pointing out the fact that I sympathise with teaching unions in their pursuit of a pay claim, and I know that nobody wants to strike. I urge all parties to work to find a compromise that is sustainable and fair. In conclusion, I offer the Scottish Government— Mr Stewart, I think that I've really been very generous, so please you really need to conclude now. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I now call Alex Rowley to be followed by Graham Day up to six minutes, please, Mr Rowley. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, as I have been raising issues around our current approach to education regularly, not least with regards to the education recovery from the impact of Covid through my work on the Covid-19 Committee. We are in Scotland governed by two Governments. The Scottish Government has direct responsibility for education, and we will come on to that, but we also have a Government in Westminster that has in the main direct responsibility for the economy. Reading the motion that has been brought forward by the Tories, I must say that I'm surprised that they have brought that forward without at least acknowledging the impact of failed Tory austerity on education, and indeed the current crisis in the economy made in Downing Street but wreaked havoc on public services, including education. Liz Smith said that it's not about the money that I respectfully disagree, and if you see the briefing that came out for COSLA today, they are very clear what the detrimental impacts will be on education if the cuts that are currently being proposed go ahead. If the continuous extra spending per head of people has always been going up, why is it, if it's not all about the money, that we're not improving the attainment level? We've seen, for example, and I will come on to it in terms of class sizes. I did an FOI in five last year, I think it was, and the number of children in classes that were way over, so five council showed that local schools have 400, this is in five, 412 primary classes of over 25, 136 primary class classes of over 30 children. I know when my granddaughter was in primary school and we were struggling with maths and we spoke to the teacher about it, she said, the class has 32 children in it, I'm sorry, I just do not have the time to put off. The EIS have been calling for years to cut class sizes, and they're right to do so, but that would cost a fair bit of money. At a time when Tory austerity and further Tory austerity that we're now facing, because you tank the economy, then you do have a bit of a nerve to come here and point the finger at one Government when both Governments clearly are responsible and the levelly cuts that have taken place. Now, for the SNP, it is a fact that over the austerity years you disproportionately cut the amount of funding going into local authorities, and given about 50 per cent off the local authority budget that goes on education, it's hardly surprising that cuts have taken place. I know when I was leader of a five council there was cut after cut taking place in local government as a direct result of the cuts that we were facing from this Government being passed on through the Tories. I'm grateful for the opportunity to give some statistics about local government financial stats that show that local government authorities spent £6.4 billion on education in Scotland 2021 and that was up from £6 billion in 2019-20. That's a 6.8 per cent increase in cash terms. It's about having ambition to actually improve education. I really believe that education in Scotland is going backwards. I can see it firsthand for the communities that I represent and for the Cabinet Secretary to shake her head and not acknowledge that it's the case. The number of children that are going through the whole primary school system, then going into secondary school, lacking the basic skills and numeracy and literacy, means that they've been let down at that point and they're deemed to fail every step of the way through their education system and come out the other side, not prepared for the world to work and having to take low-paid, low-skilled jobs. I do believe that the Cabinet Secretary and her amendment here today does not acknowledge that. I would say that in terms of teachers and the strike, you have to address that. You asked the question earlier, how would you pay for that? That's about priorities. This Government chose to prioritise other things over local government funding in the past, so we cannot continue with the strikes that are damaging education for children in Scotland that have already been damaged by the effects of Covid. It's your responsibility to find a solution to that, Cabinet Secretary, and you cannot run away from that responsibility. Our children need to be in schools getting education, and it's your role to address that and ensure that you do so. In terms of STEM, which I have also raised with the Cabinet Secretary on a number of occasions, in 2011-12, the number of pupils achieving higher-level mathematics was 24.1 per cent. It fell to 22.6 per cent in 2018-19. Similarly, biology fell to 10 per cent for 12, chemistry fell to 13 per cent for 12, and so on and so forth. In STEM subjects, we have to acknowledge that there's a failure. That's not to come along here and try and criticise. It's to say that if you've got a problem, you have to understand what that problem is in order to fix that problem. I'm saying to you, Cabinet Secretary, we have a problem in Scottish education, we need to address it and simply self-praise will not achieve that. Acknowledge the difficulties, work with our parties and let's get these problems sorted. Thank you, Mr Rowley. I now call on Graeme Day to be followed by Brian Whittle. Up to six minutes please, Mr Whittle. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Preparing to contribute to the debate, I was slightly tempted to opt for a lazy, cut-and-paste approach, because it's not so long ago, 69 days ago, to be precise, that we last debated education here in this chamber. So much for education debate has been a rarity here, by the way. When I read through the Conservative motion, it genuinely felt like Groundhog Day, as it bore very considerable similarity to Stephen Kerr's opening speech at the end of September. In contributing to that debate, I praise the approach being taken by the Education Committee as a genuine cross-party endeavour to interrogate the condition of our education system in a balanced way, given clearly where it's due and criticism where and when it's better. I've bemoaned the lack of a similar approach being adopted here in the chamber itself, where regrettably oppositional politics overtakes offering measured and balanced analysis. I'll let me acknowledge Alec Rowley's contribution, which stands in contrast to that. As I said, I repeat now, Presiding Officer, on education, as in other things, the Scottish Government isn't perfect, and yes, sometimes we in these benches need to acknowledge that. The Cabinet Secretary herself acknowledged the need for improvement, but not as a motion like this one before us warranted. By treating education as a political football, we as politicians, not only let down those seeking the best from it, be it parents, pupils or professionals. Interestingly, my contribution back in September secured a rang endorsement from none other than my good friend Stephen Kerr. He said, I completely take on board the message that he, that's me, imparted in his speech. Will that demacian conversion to adopt a considered reasoned approach didn't last long, did it? Here we are, less than 10 weeks on, and we're debating a motion which reads like a rant. Of course, Presiding Officer, this is all in marked contrast to the positivity that I pick up when I'm visiting schools across my constituency. Of course, things aren't perfect in education. There are challenges to be faced, changes needed to be made, but there's so much to celebrate in our education system, of course. Graham Day is making a fair point. As usual, he's making a fair point. But in my speech today, I laid out what the problems were, asked, I think, reasonable questions, serious questions about serious issues, and ended with a call for us to unite to work together. It depends on the basis of the Government's willingness to accept that there are challenges and problems that we should work on. What we get continually is nothing but self-congratulation. It doesn't create the right environment for a debate in this chamber. If that's how Stephen Kerr interprets his contribution today, he is no loss to the diplomatic corps, that's for sure. As I said, there's so much to celebrate in our education system. I've visited a large number of schools in my constituency over the last few months, and the whole spirit and the ethos in the schools is in such marked contrast to the depressingly negative conservative motions. I want to focus on something else, Presiding Officer. We hear all this negativity today, but let's look at something else. When the SNP came to power in 2007, just 61.6 per cent of Scotland's schools were in good or satisfactory condition. The most recently available figures show that the number has risen to 91.7. That's a fact. In Angus, the number is 94 per cent. I think that we would all agree that good quality teaching environments for our kids and our teachers are really important. I've seen enormous progress in my constituency, and in fact, for for academy Stephen Kerr's old school, which some of my student law constituers now is a brand-new community campus. At long last, we are in the planning process to give money-feath, the state-of-the-art secondary school that it deserves. Let's be clear, the credit for those advances does not rest with the SNP Government alone. Those bills and others before them were delivered in partnership with local authority administrations of various political colours. I say to the Opposition that if we are going to criticise the Government's record in education, we should at least recognise that, at the same time, there are success stories that include bringing up to an acceptable standard in excess of 1,000 schools on the SNP's watch. Let's also recognise that, just as credit for those advances is jointly due to the Government and local councils, so the responsibility for the delivery of school education and, with that, a company of credit or criticism is surely to be shared too. The Government may set a strategic agenda for its local education departments and, of course, individual schools that deliver. If schools and councils are rightly praised for positive exam performance, for example, it surely follows that responsibility, at least in part, when things are not going so well, also lies at their door. I would contend that specifically when it comes to the very important issue of threats and violence directed at teachers and, specifically, the reporting of those. Whilst my contribution has largely been schools-focused, I recognise that there is, of course, a bigger picture. I am pleased to serve on the education committee of this Parliament, which, in addition to the work that has been done over recent months on considering progress around the attainment challenge, has been looking at challenges facing universities and colleges. I suspect that there will be future opportunities to explore those topics in the chamber. I look forward to that, and I hope that we can do so in a measured and balanced way, setting aside the theatre that too often overshadows genuine interrogation of matters here. In conclusion, I say this to the Opposition. The criticisms of the performance of this Government on aspects of education would be more credible if they could occasionally bring themselves to acknowledge the many positive achievements in this regard. Their demands for money for education and all its guises, when the Scottish Government is under such pressure, would also carry some credibility if, once in a while, they identified from where they believed the funding could be sourced. In the case of the Tories, at those of self-awareness, would they go and miss either? Given their role, their woeful mismanagement of the economy and the impact that it has on the financial position that the Government finds itself in in Scotland, with all the implications that it has for education. Can I first declare that I have a daughter who is a secondary school teacher? I am delighted to be back again in the chamber debating education. A subject that many of you know I think links directly into my previous health portfolio, and I have often said that I thought education is the solution to our health and welfare issues. I have listened to the Cabinet Secretary and our colleagues, but I have to say that I think that they are hiding from reality. So let's just pause a bit and reflect on what teachers on the ground tell us what they are having to deal with at the moment. They are way overworked, they are so bogged down with administrative duties that many have to work on into the night, they are short staffed and they are having to deal with a growing mental health crisis in the classrooms. Many teachers are going off with stress, heaping even more pressure on staff. It is a vicious circle that this Government does not want to acknowledge. I spoke to a teacher who is concerned that the unprecedented numbers of pupils presenting with poor mental health was so high that the fear was that they would miss a sign that would lead to a tragedy. That is a dreadful cloud for teachers to have to work under. Education used to be the Scottish Government's number one priority. Judges on education, said Nicola Sturgeon. By any measurement, this Government is failing our teachers and pupils. We start from a position where there are 815 fewer teachers than when the SNP came to power, with 19 per cent of teachers on temporary contracts, and that figure has been on a steady rise from 12 per cent in 2012. What I would like to discuss here is the opportunity here to reset Scotland's education system to deliver skills and opportunities based on future needs. With a net zero target for 2025, the importance of delivering on the economics of environment and climate change should be a priority. We should have an education system that has the green economy embedded in it, but on examination we find that that is not the case. Scotland has some of the best wind resource in the world, much discussed recently, but not in the development of the technology. Wind turbines are important. The servicing skills for those wind turbines is important far too often also. Why are we not leading the world in the development of this kind of technology? Given the long and celebrated heritage that Scotland has in engineering, how can the Scottish Government justify importing so much of the green energy technologies and skills needed to hit the net zero 2045 target? Why are our schools and colleges not properly resourced to develop those skills? The SCDI report 2021 manifesto for green growth notes that shortages and green skills presents the biggest challenge to clean growth. Given the scathing report today from the climate change committee and the lack of any progress from the Scottish Government against its climate change targets, perhaps it is about time we started considering outcomes instead of creating sound bites. Engineering apprenticeships in my region are readily available, but there is a shortage of take-up reclining companies to search overseas to fill apprentice places. Why do our pupils feel they cannot fulfil those important roles? Of course, it would not be right for me not to mention the importance of extracurricular activities. I often note the big difference between private schools and state schools. If you walk past a private school, the pupils are tripping over cellos and hockey sticks. They have the same level of teaching and the same level of teachers. They just have more opportunity. Where those benches would close the attainment gap by offering the same opportunity for all, any quality of opportunity. When will the Scottish Government work out? That is why they are failing. I will give way to Alex Rowley. If you look at the stats, you will see that in private schools the teacher pupil ratio and, indeed, the teacher support pupil ratio is far smaller than it is in our schools. I thank Alex Rowley for his intervention. He is absolutely right. However, he also has an awful lot more opportunity outwith the standard curriculum, which broadens the education system. In the last term, the SNP put education as their main priority and then promptly dropped the education bill from the programme. That would have been an opportunity to reset our education system for the future and develop the skills and resources to deliver on our children's ambitions. Instead, we have a teacher shortage and teachers stretched to capacity. We have an underfunded FE sector and we have a Scottish Government with an inability to join up the dots and link future job demands with educational output. If we want to tackle Scotland's poor health record, invest in education, if we want to grow our economy and deliver a more prosperous Scotland, invest in education, if we want to tackle welfare issues or criminality, invest in education, if we are to succeed, surely education has to mirror the job requirements of the future and then resource it to match. Education is so much more than just maths in English, it is about life skills, it is about ambitions, it is about creating enthusiasm, it is about showing our young people what is possible, pushing back boundaries and inspiring. Our teachers can do all of that if the Scottish Government would let them. Let teachers teach, give them the tools and support they deserve to do what they are trying to do. Isn't about time education finally was made the priority of this Government? Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I speak to the Scottish Government amendment and, as a preamble adviser many moons ago, I was a secondary teacher of English. I am notorious for my pedantry, correcting those who say less instead of fewer or disinterested instead of uninterested. I will give lessons later. Incidentally, I went on strike in the 1980s when inflation was running above 23 per cent. I was married to an assistant head, two teachers were primary teachers, one in Orkney and the other in Aire, and our generations of teachers continue with a nice deputy head of a primary. I have therefore high regard for the profession, not only as a parent and grandparent. I also became accustomed to having my ear bent on all matters from those at the chalk phase. I think that, although we obviously disagree in many aspects, as evidence in the motion and other amendments, that all children, young people and adult learners, have the right to our first-class education. We all commend the hard work of all staff and teaching professionals in Scotland's schools, colleges and universities, early learning and childcare centres. In particular, that was tested and proved the dedication of the profession during Covid. Adapting teaching to online, individual teachers go to households to provide lesson material and keeping schools open while exposing themselves in the course of that to Covid. Turning now to how important education is to help children to make the most of their talents in a comfortable environment, and in particular helping those least well off. The mantra is closing the attainment gap, but in my book it is closing the poverty gap. In pupil equity funding in the year 2022-23, Midlodion has received 174,000 or so and Scottish Borders 2225,440 in pounds with more in successive years. That supports qualifying children from P1 to S3. Even before that, starting with preschool, the first intervention is a baby box, delivered to all requesting and brim full of high-quality items. It has, in the upper 90 per cent uptake, and it demonstrates in tangible terms the value of a child from the very start because education starts at birth. Then there is the provision of 1140 free hours nursery and onwards to free school wheels all P1, P5, free bus travel to all under 22. I say free, but those are choices made by the Scottish Government on its expenditure to provide as near as it can a level playing field for young people. A hungry child will have difficulty learning, and with free bus travel, children have the chance to access out-of-school activities, all part of education, in its wider sense. Tuition fees were abolished in Scotland, whereas in England, a student of not well healed will leave with almost 30,000 in debt at the end of a three-year degree. Why focus on poverty and in education debate? Because, while the school, the teachers, will do their utmost for every child, if that child is living in a household under stress because of poverty, short of food and warmth, it will be hard for that child to learn. That is why the child payment at £25 per week for every child under 16 in a qualifying family is so significant and, more so, when combined with other Scottish benefits that are already listed, already £84 million has been paid out since it was introduced. If the Tory Government were to reinstate the £20 per week uplift to universal credit, that would put a further £780 million into Scottish families, lifting 30,000 children out of poverty. Think of the difference that that would make, bearing in mind that most people claiming universal credit are working and how that would ease the financial concerns on households and on the children. We also need decent school buildings, and that is not easy in the time of raging inflation and impacting, for example, materials. However, in my own pension boarders in the middle of the year, three new secondary schools are on the cards—Gallish Heels Academy, Peoples High School and Beastlack, which will be built just outside my patch. None of those will be under the disgraceful PPP-PFI route introduced by the Tories, unhappily continued under Labour and Liberal Democrats here, which has led councils carrying millions in debt, the most costly borrowing possible. In Melodion alone, in 2021, the cost to the council of those extravagant contracts was £11 million, 12 per cent of its education budget. In Borders, the most recent figures are £29 million, representing 8 per cent of its education budget—money wasted. Finally, where I started with teachers. I understand that this harsh economic climate, which has been exacerbated by Tory mismanagement, Boris Truss and Brexit for starters, I understand the demands for clear rises. Teachers know, as this chamber knows, that the Scottish Government has a fixed budget when inflation was around 3 per cent—not 11 per cent—than the increased salaries means cuts elsewhere, so I hope that a middle ground will soon be found. I know that Stephen Kerr too will not answer the simple question of how much of the teachers and from which budget. His contribution, and I think that this appropriate in the debate on education was, quotes, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. McBeth, act 5, scene 5, thanks to Ms McGuffey, circa 1960, still fondly remembered for compelling us to learn all of Shakespeare's soliloquies. Thank you, Mr Kerr. I now call Clare Baker to be followed by Fergus Ewing for up to six minutes, Ms Baker. So the widespread disruption to education from the pandemic can't be underplayed and the impacts are continuing today. Schools reopened, but challenges of attendance and engagement do remain, and that impact is most keenly felt by the most disadvantaged groups. We have also seen following teacher numbers, regular reports of challenging behaviour in classrooms and increasing demands being placed on teachers and school staff. During the pandemic, I urged the then Cabinet Secretary for Education to commit to an equality audit when pupils returned to schools. That would be to identify where more support was needed so that it could then be delivered. That audit highlighted particular negative impacts for early primary school pupils and those moving from primary to secondary, the key transition points in a child's education, as well as showing higher numbers of pupils from less-advantaged backgrounds, showing regression in literacy and numeracy. The Scottish Government has a responsibility to ensure that those additional gaps in learning stemming from the pandemic do not result in further disadvantage or widening of the attainment gap by providing immediate support measures and by addressing the underlying causes of poverty. Our amendment calls for a further assessment to be made of the impact of the pandemic so that pupils, parents and teachers can receive the support that they need. I really want to emphasise that we cannot, because I think that the debate has moved on from the pandemic, but the impact of that will last on young people and children for a long time. I do not think that we can underestimate or forget about that. It is clear that, beyond the wider consequences of Covid, there are particular effects for those in schools, and we need to see targeted action to address those. Absence rates continue to be a challenge, and we need to see a plan for re-engagement being put into place. The equality audit also highlighted the impact of the pandemic on mental and physical health and wellbeing of children. While I note the inclusion in the national discussion on Scottish education, there is a question on support and care for young people. We need to see an increase in provision now of services related to mental health, emotional and social wellbeing. I recently asked the Scottish Government about access to school counselling services. With around 12,000 children and young people accessing such services in the past six months of this past year, the demand for them is clear. Those valuable services are often delivered by counsellors who are on fixed-term contracts, but we need to see certainty both for them and the pupils that they are supporting so that that funding will be continued. Services like that are an example of how we cannot develop and support education and look at it just in isolation, but it needs to be connected to other policies and budgets. That is a good example of how you do that. We need a guarantee that funding support, which has been provided to the mental health strategy, will be continued next year. Alongside the ongoing impacts of Covid, the current cost of living crisis is also being felt keenly in our schools. The survey carried out by NASUWT in the autumn found that 65 per cent of respondents saying that more pupils were going to school hungry, 58 per cent saying that more pupils did not have the equipment that they needed for lessons and 55 per cent saying that more pupils' families were unable to afford the school uniform. While Christine Grahame has talked about the bigger picture and economic levers that need to be used and the cost of living crisis that has extended beyond schools and education, we need to see specific action being delivered through schools to address that so that the situation does not further deteriorate or have a negative impact on young people's education. We cannot have children going to school without food, clothing and materials that they need. I recently visited Ferrell primary school in Kirkcaldy to see the community shop that they have set up there in response to the increased cost of living pressures that are faced by parents, carers and pupils. The shop is run by staff and parents with donations coming from local businesses in the community as well as larger retailers, and it aims to provide clothing, cleaning products and food for free or for a small donation. It is a really good example of the community in the school coming together to support families and one that people can access without judgment. It demonstrates the need for this kind of support as well as the valuable role of schools in providing for families beyond education. The decline that we have seen in significant areas in literacy and numeracy in our education system, though it predates the current crisis and the pandemic, has fallen significantly since the SNP took office and the impact on a number of key subject areas is clear. Teacher shortages put further pressure on existing staff as well as limiting subject choices for pupils, which can have a knock-on effect in terms of options for future study or work. In STEM subjects particularly, we have seen a drop in teacher numbers of over 500 since 2008, with impacts on the number of pupils taking those subjects, which are critical for major industries already facing skill shortages. Those were issues raised earlier by Brian Whittle. The message that my committee hears, the Economy and Fair Work Committee, is the message that we consistently hear around skill shortages. We need to ensure that our schools are able to offer the qualifications and skills that are needed to grow key sectors in our economy, but if teachers are not in place, that cannot be done. We are also seeing a fall in the provision of language courses and questions over how we are able to deliver the future skills needed for a sustainable economy based on green jobs. We need to get in place a coherent skill strategy that works with education pathways to deliver the skills that our economy requires, as well as providing the opportunities and capacity for people to reskill and upskill throughout their lives. Life on learning used to be a touchstone of this Parliament, but a contraction that we have seen in the college sector has really brought an end to this ambition. With further strike action on the table, the Scottish Government needs to act quickly to resolve the situation with teachers and provide them with a better pay deal, so that further disruption to education can be avoided. If we truly value those workers, they deserve more than kind words. They deserve improved pay and conditions, which recognises their vital role in society. Thank you, Ms Baker. I now call Fergus Ewing to be followed by Ross Greer up to six minutes, Mr Ewing. Thank you, teachers, lawyers, doctors, accountants, politicians, engineers, architects, journalists, civil servants, advisers, consultants, farmers, producers and people in just about every occupation or job that exists in society today share one common need in these times, in this century, and that need, Presiding Officer, is the ability and the skill to communicate in writing and to do so with reasonable speed and accuracy. That skill is one that can only really be developed to reach our true potential by acquiring the skill of keyboard technique or touch typing, as it is known, and employing that marvelous invention in 1868, the Querti keyboard. It has been around for over 150 years. Here is mine, and it is called Querti, as I am sure all the very well-educated and intelligent members of this particular audience. No, because the first six letters on the top three of the three ranks are the letters Q, W, E, R, T, Y. Now, 50 years ago, and I can remember that well, very few people actually required to touch typing. In fact, it was really only shorthand typists. Very often they would be dictating a letter for a boss. Their skill actually was probably far superior to his incidentally, but in those long-forgotten, male chauvinist days, when women were expected to do the menial work, which in fact was more highly skilled, typing was the exception, not the rule. Very few people had the skill, but now everybody is expected to be able to communicate themselves in writing. My plea to the minister today, and I know that she has probably heard this like a crack record before several times, and I must pay tribute that we had a very pleasant meeting when the minister very courteously listened to what I had to say. However, I have not quite got there yet, and like Bruce and the spider, I do think that persistence often pays off. In fact, Calvin Coolidge, the American president, once who find nothing in the world can take the place of persevering. I make no apology in persevering with my attempts to persuade the minister to do this. What is the plea? The plea is that we introduce, perhaps as a pilot, perhaps in one education authority—I know that the director of education is not sympathetic to this—a proper supervision and training programme to teach our young people how to acquire this skill, a skill that I submit, perhaps more than any other that I can think of, would equip them for the rest of their working life. In my case, it has been over 45 years to perform to their absolute maximum potential and produce work up to three times the speed of those who have to hunt and peck for the right keys. The skill is called cognitive automaticity. I am not keen and jargon, but I thought that I would try to impress you that I did not one such phrase. What does it mean? It means the skill of doing something automatically without thinking about it. The point is—this is why I mentioned it, not to show off that I knew it—that when one can touch type, you do not need to think about how to write. Your whole mental focus is on what you want to say. That means that your mental attention is not diverted from the primary task of focusing on what it is that you are trying to achieve. Of course, I raised that when I was in the education committee, as colleagues here will recall. The response from what I would call the education establishment was somewhat underwhelming. I do not want to be too negative, so I will just leave it at that. However, there are arguments that say that voice technology will replace it. No, it will not, because you need a written record of things. Voice technology does not really work very well at the moment. It might work in the future, but it is never going to replace having a written record. The second argument is that kids can learn this by themselves. Well, they cannot. They may think that they can, but they cannot and they do not. If they do, they do not learn it properly. What is required is 15 to 25 hours of supervised training. That is all. 15 to 25 hours of investment for the next 45 years. There is evidence from Holland that kids that learn how to touch type—I will not read out the quote, I am going to time—perform better, and from the British Educational Journal of Psychology, not my normal reading, but nonetheless the kids who do not learn how to type perform less well. The absence of this skill is damaging to children's education. I thought that I would just change the mood of the debate today. I hope that I have time. I do not think that I have time. The member is just winding up, I am afraid. I am very sorry, I would have, but I am very happy to. That is a date, as they say. So I commend touch typing to the cabinet secretary and do hope that she will seriously consider what I have had to say today. Thank you, Mr Ewing. I never thought that I would have to riprimant you for waving around your keyboard as a prop, but with that I call Ross Greer to be followed by Bob Doris for up to six minutes, Mr Greer. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I fear that this might be a little bit jarring after the last contribution, but I am somewhat grateful to the Conservatives for having given us a chance to debate education today, but I have to say that their motion is a complete waste of Parliament's time. This was an opportunity for Stephen Kerr to dazzle us with his grand vision for Scotland's schools to either put forward an alternative to the Government's reform agenda or to detail what specific shape he thinks those reforms should take, but instead we are debating a motion full of relentless negativity and not a single proposed solution. Bizarrely, the one demand in motion is for the Scottish Government to bring forward an education plan. For Mr Kerr's opening speech we get the impression that he has hardly noticed that the biggest set of reforms in at least 15 years are currently under way. Education Scotland is being reformed, a new independent inspectorate is being established, the Scottish Qualifications Authority is being abolished completely and a body fit for purpose is being set up to take its place. An independent review of qualifications is taking place and it is due to report this spring, and there is a national discussion covering the curriculum and everything that surrounds it. That is a major package of change, the most significant since the new curriculum was introduced. The Tories agree with plenty of that, or at least they used to. By last summer, we had achieved a consensus among all parties on the need to replace the SQA and the need to establish an independent inspectorate. I know from six years of sitting on Parliament's education committee that MSPs of all parties have long been frustrated by the underperformance of education Scotland and agreed on the need for change there. I recognise that we disagree significantly on the future of exams, but previous Conservative education spokespeople have certainly had thoughts about changes that they would like to see to the curriculum, short of the, frankly, cynical calls to scrap the curriculum for excellence entirely. Why, when there is so much opportunity for all parties to shape those reforms, are we debating a motion that makes no proposal of its own other than to demand that the Scottish Government do something? I feel that I should take Mr Whitfield's intervention first, but I will then take an intervention from Ms Smith. I am very grateful to Ross Gray in giving way. Does he not agree with me, though, that the new SQA is going to mark its own homework? That was one of the great challenges that the existing SQA has with the proposals that the Government announced last week. I am grateful for that intervention, because that was one of the recommendations in Ken Muir's report that I personally struggled with the most. I made my hesitation about endorsing that recommendation clear to the Government and to Mr Muir. It was for the reasons that the cabinet secretary set out, whereby if we split the functions and had one set within the new education Scotland, it would, in fact, be set far closer to Government. It would not have the independence that we desire for it. I have not seen any suggestions that, in fact, that accreditation function should set in an entirely independent body somewhere else. What we need to look at is if we are having both of those set within the same body, the qualifications agency that has greater independence from Government, how do we create a silo between those two functions, a separation between those two functions, so that they are both sufficiently separate from Government, but from each other as well? That is an opportunity that we have through this reform process. I think that I remember, and you will correct me if I am wrong, that on three occasions when the Conservatives had a motion on education, the Greens, Labour and Liberals all voted with us, because they were concerned about SNP education policy. What happened to that persuasion that you have with your ministers now? Ross Greer, and I can give you some of that time back. I appreciate that, Presiding Officer. Ms Smith is quite right. In the last session, we were deeply concerned about SNP education policy, which is why, particularly off the back of the SQA shambles in 2020, but since then, we have managed to persuade—not just the Greens, but others as well—the Government to take a different path. We collectively, the Opposition parties in the last session forced the SNP to withdraw an education reform bill that would not have addressed the challenges in education, but we are now seeing a series of reforms that Ms Smith will know that I have campaigned for for a long time, particularly around reform of exam and assessment, particularly around replacement of the SQA. We are now seeing a reform package much closer to what the Greens have been proposing over many years than what we saw in the last session. Take exams as a specific example. The Greens are looking forward to the results of Professor Hayward's review early next year. That process is a direct result of our intervention in the 2020 SQA scandal, because we did not think that it was good enough to simply restore the grades and move on, essential as it was to do that. The 2020 incident and the comparative datasets that we have from pre-pandemic versus those alternative models in each pandemic year made clear a deeper problem in our qualification system, one that some of us have been pointing out for many years. Why is it that the traditional high-stakes end-of-term exam model, the one that we have used since the Victorian era, results in such a wide attainment gap between those from the most and least-deprived backgrounds, whereas models that base grades on evidence generated through continuous assessment or teacher judgment result in a far narrower gap? I have never believed that the high-stakes exam model is the most accurate or useful way of assessing a young person's knowledge and abilities. It always felt more like tests of how quickly you could write things down or how much memorised content you could just recite on cue. Of course, they leave young people vulnerable to having their coursing life thrown off by a single bad day, whether it be due to sickness, lack of sleep the night before or any other reason. However, now we have a dataset that strongly suggests that they also contribute to a wider attainment gap than would otherwise have been the case. That should not come as a huge surprise. There is plenty of evidence to show that young people from the most deprived backgrounds are more likely to experience a chaotic household situation and, thus, being more at risk of the kind of disruption that would hamper their ability to achieve their best at that one opportunity provided by the high-stakes exam system. Continuous assessment models, on the other hand, are better able to recognise a young person's true knowledge and abilities through the generation of evidence over time. No one incident scuppers their chances of getting the grade that they deserve. Of course, there are challenges in our education system. The Government is trying to solve them, take last week's additional support for learning action plan and the commitments from the Greens manifesto that it includes. The Opposition does not need to agree, and it absolutely should scrutinise those reform plans. However, when no alternative is provided, I cannot come to any other conclusion than the fact that the Opposition does not take itself particularly seriously. I am greatly relieved that the Tories seem to have no plan to replace the SNP green Government. If they had a plan to replace it, presumably they would have a plan to implement their own policy agenda, but they do not seem to have one. This Government, on the other hand, does have a plan. Reform is under way, despite the challenges, and I am looking forward to seeing the results of those reforms. Thank you very much, convener. As Brian Whittle had done, likewise, practice should declare an interest. I was a secondary school teacher for around 10 years before being elected to Parliament. I want to say a little bit about the poverty-related attainment gap that has been spoken about this afternoon, but we should just remind ourselves first of all exactly what we mean by that. That has been lost a little bit. Those from lower-income households, families who are experiencing the day-to-day grind of poverty, their children not having their skills, their abilities and their talents recognised fully and accredited within Scotland's education system. Tackling that attainment gap is therefore based on what happens within education, which we will return to, but also on how we support families more generally living in our communities blighted by poverty. We have to acknowledge—it is reasonable to acknowledge—that child poverty lives in Scotland whilst remaining far too high, remain clearly lower than Conservative-controlled England and Labour-controlled Wales. That is just a fact. It is easy to see why. It is a clear Scottish Government commitment to tackling child poverty. Let me provide just a few examples. Of course, the ground-breaking Scottish child payment. Now £25 a week for children and households on qualifying benefits. To date, £84 million has been put into those households since it was established. No rape clause, no two-shell rummet, just getting the money. It could remind us, Parliament, that the call from campaigners was for £5 a week, not £25 a week. Let us just remember that. Mr Rowley made the point about how he directed resources. Of course, we could take that £84 million and give it to local government or to the NHS, but that is a direct resource commitment to the poorest families in Scotland, and I support that. We could also mention the school clothing grant. National Ministers now apply £120 for primary school children and £150 for secondary school children. I go on and talk about free school meals. I was proud that Parliament acted on something when I was elected in 2007 with something that I was keen to see extended, but I want to look about what happens in schools. It is worth noting that resources in schools could look at teacher numbers. That has risen now for six years in a row. Up 885 on the previous year and on track to deliver a commitment to recruiting at least 3,500 teachers and 500 classroom assistants. Back by an investment during Covid of £240 million, and then an additional permanent baked in £145.5 million to make many posts permanent. Those numbers are still below the level that they were in 2007 when he was elected to this Parliament and this Government took office. I am happy to reflect when you look at the numbers and your right to try to make that point, Mr Marra, but I would point out the teacher pupil ratio, which is at almost record levels. That is a key point as well, but I think that Mr Marra fails to recognise. I want to comment a little bit on progress on attainment levels. We know that, for the number of 18-year-olds from the most deprived backgrounds that have been offered a place at university, it is at a record high. It is up 32 per cent since 2019, the last year that there were exams. We know that pupils who left school in the last year went on to positive destinations. That was 93.2 per cent. The record high was actually 93.3 per cent. That is good going. In St Rock secondary school in my constituency, the figure was 100 per cent and I paid absolute tribute to them in a particularly deprived area. If we look at exam results for 2022, progress was made, not enough, I readily accept that. At national 5, the gap between those at the highest income levels and the lowest income levels should rank from 17.1 per cent to 14.6 per cent. If we look at it for higher, it went from 16.9 per cent to 15 per cent. I say again that it is not enough but that is progress. Given that we have just faced a global pandemic for two years in disruption in education, you might have anticipated that figures would have been worse, not improved. That is a significant achievement that Stephen Kerr and the Conservatives want to wish away in the debate this afternoon. The Education and Skills Committee published a recent report on the Scottish attainment challenge, and that was a constructive approach to addressing inequalities in schools. That might have been due, in part, that constructive approach to a new education convener, Sue Weber, who I see is here this afternoon. It would, of course, be impolite to mention who the previous convener of that committee was but I am sure that Mr Kerr could inform Parliament if anyone is interested. Our interrogation of evidence that we heard during that inquiry was really interesting. We heard particularly from schools in Glasgow in the west of Scotland based on an event that rocks in my constituency about concerns that a lot of really good work that took place in addressing the poverty-related attainment gap may be ditched because of issues about trying to secure those gains during the global pandemic and the impact of Scottish education. They were saying to us, do not ditch the reforms, stick with it. I want to say a little about the time that we have left about further and higher education. The commissioner for fair access said that, in terms of that access, our success was an ambiguous success. It spoke about exceeding our target to get 16 per cent entrance by 2021 for the most social and private backgrounds into further and higher education. I know that I am running out of time a little bit, because we have a fantastic track record, but I have concerns. I want to put those concerns on record. 60 per cent of all young people who are from SIMD 20, who have a place at university in first year, came through a further education route. Does everyone in the other sector face a flat cash settlement? I am really worried about the community work, the courses and the staffing implications, and the onward consequences for making further progress in addressing that attainment gap and getting young people into higher education. Do you need to conclude, Mr Doris? I am going to have to ask you to sit down. Murdo Fraser joins us online. We follow by John Mason up to six minutes. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. As others have done, I should declare an interest, because I am married to a primary school teacher. The duty of educating our young people is one of the primary functions of government. One of the ways that we should measure the effectiveness and success of a government is how it performs that function. As our motion makes clear this afternoon, in too many respects, this SNP Government has been failing our young people. Scottish education was once regarded as being the envy of the world, but in recent years we have been slipping down the international league tables until, of course, the SNP Government took the decision to withdraw us from many of these international comparisons, so we can no longer track that. But today and tomorrow, as Willie Rennie reminded us earlier, we see secondary schools across Scotland closed as a result of strike action, the first such strike action in a generation. That means that young people in senior school, some of them looking to sit their prelims for hires or not fines in just a few weeks' time, will see a further disruption to their education. We have the prospect of further strikes into January when these prelims are actually being set, and these are young people who, we have to remember, have already suffered because of COVID long interruptions in their education. The strikes are ostensibly around the issue of pay, but there are many other issues that affect teachers who feel undervalued as a profession, and I'm particularly concerned about the issue of the growth of violence in the classroom. There were nearly 20,000 recorded attacks on school teachers last year. That's a 10% rise on 2018-19, the last full year before COVID, and in the aggregate since 2017-18, there have been almost 75,000 recorded physical or verbal attacks on teachers. That's an extraordinary statistic. Stephen Kerr said earlier that there was an attack every three minutes, and he was half right because there won't be an attack every three minutes in schools today because many schools are closed today because of the strikes. Now, no one should have to go to their workplace at risk of physical or verbal attack, but that is the reality facing too many teachers today. In the words of the former EIS President Heather Hughes, quoted in the Herald in June, violent incidents are happening more and more in our schools because young people and teachers are not getting the support they need to prevent them from happening. As she went on to say, teachers often feel unsupported when reporting these issues, all too often they are made to feel that the blame lies with them and not with the lack of support for young people who are expressing their frustrations over the lack of appropriate help. In 2021-22, the number of attacks on school teachers rose despite a record number of pupils missing more than 50 per cent of the school year because of Covid. In addition to the bear statistics, which are bad enough, we hear anecdotally from parents just how serious the problem has become with a concern in some quarters that Covid-related interruptions to education have changed the culture in the classroom, making unacceptable behaviour more of a norm. We see the outcome of this manifest in the fact that we hear teachers in Northfield Academy in Aberdeen voting to strike just last month over school violence feeling unsupported by the Education Authority as Liam Kerr reminded us earlier in the debate. In Glasgow, teachers at Bannerman High School voted to hold 12 days of strikes in the run-up to Christmas holidays over violent and abusive pupil behaviour. It is a problem which is only getting worse. Now, it is clearly unacceptable that teachers are being put at risk in this way. It is no wonder that some are leaving the profession, some are taking early retirement, and we see in the strikes they are taking place a manifestation of the unhappiness teachers have with their lot. This situation doesn't just impact on the teachers. A teacher having to devote a large proportion of their time to try and deal with a disruptive pupil means that the others in the class do not get the support and attention that they deserve. This situation cannot be unrelated to the decline, the staggering decline in the number of school exclusions since the SNP came to power. In 2007-08, there were 39,717 exclusions in Scottish schools. In 2018-19, the last year before Covid, that has fallen to just 14,990. That is a drop of 25,000, or an incredible 62%. I cannot believe that this reduction reflects improving behaviour in the classroom. Indeed, all the other evidence suggests the opposite. Instead, what we are seeing is the consequence of a top-down policy to reduce the use of exclusion as a management tool. The drive to reduce the number of school exclusions simply means that there are more disruptive pupils being kept in a classroom environment when they should be put elsewhere. We need to consider whether an agenda of mainstreaming those who have serious behavioural issues is appropriate or whether some alternative provision should be made for them. We cannot go on as we are. Attacks in schools are reaching a crisis point, and this is something the Scottish Government has to address. Otherwise, we will see more industrial action from frustrated teachers, as is already happening. Presiding Officer, there is a dismal air of complacency about this Government's approach to education. That needs to change, and in this debate, the Scottish Conservatives have set out the improvements that need to be made. The SNP, with the backing of the Greens, will win the vote this afternoon, but in so doing, they are going to let down the teachers and pupils across Scotland who deserve so much better. Thank you very much. I believe that Scotland still has an excellent education system. Our universities have no tuition fees for students, and we have a high percentage of young people going to university. There has been considerable progress with more people from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university, and we certainly want that trend to continue. We have some tremendous universities. Let me get into this a little bit more. In recent years, the times and the guardian have ranked St Andrews as the top university in the UK—no mean achievement. Tom Mason is falling into the trap of this idea that university is what education is all about. There is a huge disparity of esteem between all the various routes that a young person can take in life. Let us not put a premium on universities. Let us back our young people when they choose other options. I was going on to say that because my very next line is that, having said that, apprenticeships are a great route to and are definitely a better option for some young people. Perhaps some schools have overemphasised going to university as the only measure of success, and I think that we probably need to redress that balance. There is also an issue with still relatively few women going into certain careers—for example, engineering and other stem subjects. One figure that I saw recently showed that only 25 per cent of students in those subjects are women, and again, relatively few men are entering primary teaching, childcare and the wider care sector. Colleges 2 are a key part of our education system, and I am very pleased that we have three colleges in Glasgow—City of Glasgow, Kelvin and Clyde. Kelvin and Clyde in particular have a strong reputation for drawing folk in who are further from the education system. I was at a Kelvin college graduation recently and was struck by the incredibly diverse range of students, a real mixture of age, ethnic background and social background. It seems to be much easier now to move on from college to university a step that was often fraught with difficulty in the past. I accept that there is an issue with funding for colleges, as Bob Doris was hinting at, and whether the way resources are shared out between schools, colleges and universities has currently got the right balance, the colleges certainly feel that they are treated as the poor relations. Last time I looked at Glasgow university's accounts, they had £1,000 million in their reserves, so a university like that is incredibly rich—richer than the Scottish Government—and compared to the colleges and newer universities. Moving on to schools, I do think that we are turning out young people who are more rounded than they were in days gone by. When I was at school, declaring my interest, the sole measure of success seemed to be academic and many of us lived in fear of our teachers. When I visit a school nowadays, it seems to me that there is a much healthier relationship between teachers and pupils on the whole and more of a sense of working together to achieve the best outcomes that I have already. Denominational or Catholic schools also have a valuable place in our education system, and while, of course, there must be common standards across our schools and especially when it comes to examinations—I am sorry, I am going to have to carry on—it is good that parents are also involved and can choose to some extent the ethos of the school that they want their children to go to. Speaking of parents and parental involvement, we must not underestimate the importance of that. I remember one headteacher saying to me that the school that he led was almost like two schools. On the one hand, the children whose parents were enthusiastic about their children's education were engaged and got involved in homework, et cetera, and then there were those where their parents were not really involved. I note that at least one school in my constituency has used the peff money specifically to try to build up relationships with the families. Of course, we need to do all we can to help and support and encourage those pupils who do not have parental support, but I think that we have to accept that there is a limit to what a school can do if the parents are not engaged. That is where families coming into an area from an African or Asian background can be a big boost to a school. In such cases, the whole family is often highly committed to education, and such highly motivated students can give a real lift to the whole school and can encourage other young people who are perhaps less self-motivated. In relation to schools, I can also say how much I appreciated having Maureen MacKenna as Glasgow's director of education, and I know that her replacement Douglas Hutchison has a hard act to follow. I am also very much welcome in Glasgow to the development of a new Gallic Medium primary school in Calton in the East End. I guess that we cannot talk about schools without looking at teachers pay. The Labour amendment calls for a fair pay deal, and the Lib Dems also refer to fair pay. However, what exactly do they mean by that? Scottish teachers are being offered £35,000 once qualified. I understand that that is more, £7,000 more than in England, and we would be the third-highest in the G7 group of wealthy nations very quickly. I am very grateful, but you recognise that the teaching profession in Scotland is a graduate-owning profession compared to England. If teachers are a hugely important part of our society, but so are other local council workers, how could it be right to give teachers a substantially bigger rise than their colleagues in other parts of local government? That is not even mention of affordability. Higher pay deals to match inflation may well be deserved by many, but they effectively mean cuts to services either in local government, the NHS or elsewhere. Please let us not overstate the weaknesses or understate the achievements of our education system, as I fear some of our Opposition parties are doing. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Mason. We now move to closing speeches. I call First Lady Martin Whitfield for up to six minutes. I am very grateful, Deputy Presiding Officer, and it has been a fascinating debate, one in which we have seen passion about probably the most important thing in any person's life, and that is their first few years through education, that time when they can hope and dream anything, be an astronaut, be a footballer, be a nurse, be a pilot, they can do that, and it is our education environment, it is those professionals that work with them, and not just the teachers, but those who help out in the classrooms, help out in the dining hall. Indeed, pick them up sometimes when they tumble in the playground and have a blooded knee to keep that imagination going, to keep that positivity in our young people, and it is right to say that. I agree with me that, to be able to keep that passion going, you have to be able to see it, so when we reduce our sport and our art and I am using our drama within schools, we actually take away opportunity from our children. I am very grateful for that intervention, and you have stolen my recommendation of your contribution. But it is right, and let's take a moment to pause that, to say that education is more with the greatest respect to Liz Smith than just being able to read, write and count, essential as that is. But it is also the experience of drama, of art, of music, of dance, of physical education, of sport, when your team that you are playing in wins and don't win, when you move from being the last selected in the playground through to the first, when you discover that the soft skills that you practice with your friends, with groups around you can keep you out of fights, can offer a better empathy going forward, and that is an essential element that I fear in so much discussion gets lost about our young people's lives, but they have suffered major disruption to their learning because of the pandemic and teachers are now striking, they're fighting for a better pay deal, and it is the responsibility of the SNP government to be at those negotiating table. It is one of the very few negotiations where the government has a seat, and you should use that, you should take the professional skill, the government should lead on that, to find a way to reconcile. It's what negotiation is about. We have heard the claim that education has been this government's priority, but we have serious failings at every level. The attainment gap is stubbornly wide, whether you call it an attainment gap or a poverty-related attainment gap, and it is growing. Our colleges, as so many contributions have said, do feel neglected and they are facing the prospect of massive cuts to their staff and our students. They're having to drop out of university because they can't find anywhere to live. This is what we are offering our young people, the hope of the future, and to listen to some of the contributions today, and it has been interesting, because I think that there have been some really positive contributions. There has to be a recognition, and as Alex Rowley rightly pointed out, there has to be a recognition where there is failure, where there is more to be done. Actually, it doesn't matter who's fault it is, it is what is the Scottish Government going to do about putting it better, and they will find cross-party support for ideas that will be implemented to improve the experience that our young people go through. I was very grateful to the intervention regarding the Government's statement because there is a concern that, by not splitting those two factors, people are just marking their own homework, which is one of the significant reasons the SQA got in. So I was very grateful to hear of the idea of properly sequestrating those two roles, and I would love to hear the cabinet secretary's view on how that's going to be achieved. I will make mention of Brian Whittle's contribution, because it did lead to the discussion about the role, and I'm going to use this word very carefully, culture and sport in young people's lives, but also because of his call to reset the skills priority about what this economy needs going forward by way of the green economy and the net zero. We need to provide those skills, we need to provide the ability for our young people, and indeed older people, to gain those skills so that we can drive forward this economy. I want to mention Clare Baker's contribution with regard to the equality audit, because that was the first time we started to see the damage that Covid has really done to our young people, and she is right that for so many adults we have moved on from Covid, but the reality for young people's lives, both those right at the start of their primary school experience and before, who may not be able to name what the challenge was. Through to those that moved on to high school, there are massive challenges that have come about by Covid, and we are not addressing them properly. I am aware of young people who are having to travel by taxi between schools to get the range of lessons, particularly with modern languages that they need. That is a tragedy in 2022, that we have young people passionate about foreign language, but having to find their own way to learn. I do want to pause very quickly in the short time that I have left to make mention of Fergus Ewing. I was severely disappointed that Fergus Ewing was not able to take my intervention on touch typing, because it would be lovely to hear at what age should that skill be acquired, and just like, as he discussed, the automaticity of touch typing, that is what exists in handwriting. When people learn to write, they just write. It does not hold back their ideas and their imaginations. That goes to the gap that is existing and the challenges that some young people have to attain those skills. We have classrooms that are large. We have teachers that are pressurised by individuals in the classroom that take a huge amount of time. That is a cry for help from that young person, but we need to facilitate the support for it. In conclusion, it has been a fascinating debate. There is so much more to be done. I would urge the Scottish Government not to fear the criticism that it has heard today, but to accept it, but to move forward, come forward with proposals that will find cross-party support here in Scotland. Education is the single greatest gift that we can give our young people and the population here. I am grateful for that. I now call the cabinet secretary to wind up for around seven minutes, please. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. There has been, I suppose, a mixed range of speeches for today. Unfortunately, those, particularly from the Conservatives, have had one thing in common with perhaps the exception of Brian Whittle, I would be fair to him in his contribution. That is a lot of noise, but there are no substantive policy proposals about how we take things forward. There is a great deal that is in the Conservative motion. There are no genuine attempts at how we move forward with policy on education. I will make some progress and I will take some interventions in due course. There has been a great deal of challenge towards the Scottish Government about being open to new ideas, about being ready to listen to others. We have just had the national discussion. The biggest debate that we have had on Scottish education for the past 20 years has just closed. I do not think—I am happy to stand corrected from any party in the room—that they have taken part in that. We had that opportunity. The co-facilitators met those from the Opposition benches, and we had that opportunity to build that consensual mission. Instead, what we have had once again from the Tories is a focus on SNP bad and very little else. Thank you. I am very happy to send your copies of the presentations that I have made to previous calls from the SNP to ask for our views. My colleague Jamie Greene did the same when he was in charge, and I know that Pam Gozel has. Will she accept that we have made presentations? I would accept the constructive role that Liz Smith had when she was an education spokesperson. I wonder where we are on the Tory party benches on whether we support curriculum for excellence, as I think Liz Smith did in her time, or whether they are still scrapping it, which has been the more recent policy. I will look back on Tory party policies of the past, but it is a bit difficult to know what their position still is, particularly on key aspects of curriculum for excellence that have been very positively looked at by the OECD, for example. A number of speakers—Cocab Stewart being one of them— spoke about the positive destinations for our young people. She is quite right to do that. She pointed rightly to the results and that they are a credit to our young people. However, they are also a fundamental function of our education system. An education system that is doing its best to support our children and young people at a time of great difficulty. Alex Rowley was quite right to point out—although the Tories did not like it—about the impact of Tory austerity and the cost of living crisis and the impact that it is having right across Scotland. It is very important that we recognise what schools can do, but the context in which they are working is made more difficult by the levels of poverty, something that I will come back to if I have time. It is also very important that we celebrate what is right in Scottish education. So, the higher spending per child in education in Scotland and compared to elsewhere in the UK, almost 130,000 leavers receiving SQA results in the past year. The best educated population in Europe, according to most recent Eurostats, is 1140 hours in ALC being developed. I could go on, Presiding Officer, but I will attempt to take another intervention. Liam Kerr, I am very grateful that the cabinet secretary has taken the intervention. I find it staggering that the cabinet secretary has yet to deal with the violence— Mr Kerr, your microphone is not on. Have you got your card in? It is me that is coming on. I find it staggering that the cabinet secretary has yet to deal with the violence points that have been brought up by Stephen Kerr, by Murdo Fraser and by myself earlier on. I ask what precisely has the cabinet secretary put in place, since taking up her post, which will reduce the physical and verbal abuse that has been raised, given that this is not a new problem? Cabinet Secretary, I can give you up to eight minutes. I was a situation due to come to, Presiding Officer, but I am happy to move to that point now. Everybody in the chamber that has raised this is quite right to do so because no teacher, no one, in fact, should go to any place of work and suffer verbal or physical abuse. It is for schools and councils to decide what action would be taken in each case, because councils are the employer. I did meet with the COSLA spokesperson just last week to discuss what more the Scottish Government can do to help. Indeed, I was due to be at a meeting on this with COSLA and other stakeholders this very afternoon, had it not been for work on this debate. I hope that that demonstrates that I would have actually been spending time exactly on the issue, but I am delighted to be here discussing another Tory motion on education. There is an issue that we have to look very carefully at, of course, around— I am sorry, but if Conservative party members do not like it, they should feel free to intervene, Presiding Officer, rather than a constant tuntering from a sedentary position. We have seen a number of comments also on the aspects around teacher workload. Of course, that is exactly why we have a commitment to reduce class contact time, about more teachers, that is exactly why we have a commitment for 3,500 extra teachers by the end of parliamentary term or on mental health, of course, her commitment to counsellors in schools. There are, for example, 1,000 more teachers in our secondary schools than before the pandemic. Now, Christine Grahame and Bob Doris quite rightly again pointed to the aspects and the challenges around poverty. That is a very important point that we need to look at. We, as the Scottish Government and in conjunction with local government, are determined to substantially eliminate the poverty related attainment gap, but it is a real shame that the Tories seem to do their level best to undermine that mission and make that more challenging given the state of the economy and the state of society at this point. It would be remiss of me, Presiding Officer, in the final moments that I have, not to reference Fergus Ewing's speech persistence, does pay off. I admire his tenacity and I do appreciate his on-going discussions with Highland Council and I look forward to seeing how that develops, Presiding Officer. John Mason quite rightly pointed out many of the aspects about Scottish education that we should be proud of and the importance of all of them, universities, colleges, apprenticeships. With apologies, I will need to move on at this point, but I pay particular tribute to colleges like Kelvin College and the fantastic work that they do and the important role that denominational schools have in our society. There are a number of aspects around Scottish education that we should rightly be proud of and that we are quite rightly commended for internationally. It is disappointing that, once again, we have heard very little from that about the Tories today. I recognise that we can improve. That is why we have had the national discussion. It is a shame that no-one seems to notice and take part. Earlier this year, life as I knew it changed forever as I became a first-time mum. I will never forget the moment that I met my daughter and how she instantly became the most important person to me in my immediate family. It has to be said that being part of the parent club is genuinely one of the best feelings in the world. I have been so fortunate to spend the last few months learning how to become a mum. As we know, there is no step-by-step manual and every baby has a different personality and milestones, but I am looking to return to my MSP role fully in January. If I may, before I get into the premise of today's debate, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for the well wishes and to my constituents who have been understanding of my maternity leave and, of course, my fantastic office team who have really gone above and beyond to keep my office running smoothly. Every child in Scotland should have the same opportunities in life, regardless of their postcode or family dynamic. As we have heard this afternoon, every MSP in this chamber agrees with this, although there are stark differences in policies and how we believe that Scotland is performing compared to other countries. My colleagues, Stephen Kerr, correctly outlined the importance of giving every child a golden ticket to their first-class education. He raised serious concerns about the violence and threats that our teachers face on a daily basis in our classrooms. That was echoed by Murdo Fraser, but not by the cabinet secretary until prompted by other members in this chamber. When we discuss education issues, it does not help when we have a Scottish Government that refuses to listen to experts, academics, parents and opposition politicians when they raise genuine concerns over the state of the education system. Therefore, it will come as no surprise that most of my contribution today will focus on the Scottish Government's flagship policy of providing every child in Scotland with 1,140 hours of free childcare. I feel like a broken record when it comes to 1,140 hours, but if I did not have a vested interest in childcare before, I certainly do now. When the Government introduced that expansion to the already existing childcare policy, the SNP said that it would deliver three main benefits. Number one, children's development improves and the poverty-related attainment gap narrows. Two, more parents will have the opportunity to be in work, training or study. And three, increased family resilience through improved health and wellbeing of parents and children. I would like to start on a positive note. In principle, 1,140 hours is a good policy. The First Minister herself held the policy as transformative. It has the potential to give children the best possible start in life as it removes the financial burden on parents who often struggle with the cost of childcare. That is especially true for working mums, as many choose to pause or stop their career progression to start a family. I do not believe that in 2022 a woman should have to choose between her career or children and the onus is on this Parliament to give them the tools so that they can do both successfully. As it stands, the ELC policy is not working. It is my view and indeed the view of many in the early years industry that those aims will never be achieved should the Government continue to ignore that a crisis has emerged in the early learning and childcare sector. It is not enough to simply have a good policy idea without having the will power and determination to see it through. As Brian Whittle said, we have an opportunity to reset Scotland's education system. Presiding Officer, since my election to the Scottish Parliament in June my time as a councillor in North Lanarkshire, I have been in direct contact with nurseries in the private, voluntary and independent sector. They have told me on several occasions about the deeply rooted problems with 1140. Those include the financial inequality that exists between the PVI and local authority nurseries, a staffing crisis and a loss of childminders, parents not obtaining their first, second or third choice of nurseries set in for their child. PVI setting is closing as they cannot afford to run their businesses due to the 11, yes, certainly. Michael Marra, I appreciate the member giving way. I really appreciate this area of our speech given problems in Huntley in my region where the inspectorate has resulted in the closure of a nursery and the council is not stepping up to take that way. Does she believe that the inspectorate need to do more with the Government to ensure that there is provision where they find a nursery has to close? Megan Gallagher. Absolutely. Again, I will be able to touch on that later on in my contribution. The levels of bureaucracy created through the mountains of paperwork and the cross-boundary issues that exist due to councils not working collectively—I will like to continue on, but I will take you later, if that is okay. The cross-boundary issues that exist due to councils not working collegially to deliver funded childcare. What used to be a healthy competitive market between the PVI nurseries and local authorities has now resulted in councils being the kingmaker, leaving many PVI nurseries in a checkmate position. The PVI sector has fought tooth and nail to try and make the rate process fair, but when the funding structure set by the Scottish Government in COSLA allows local authorities to pay ELC staff 30 to 50 per cent more than they fund the PVI settings, with 65 per cent of PVI nurseries fees being controlled by the 1140-hour policy, you can see exactly where the problem lies. The NDNA has said that lower static rates principally meant a real-time cut in funding for settings and threatens the existence of some nurseries. Excuse me, Ms Gallagher. I ask those who have just come into the chamber to desist from the low-level muttering and respect the fact that somebody is contributing in the debate. I am very grateful, Presiding Officer. The NDNA has said that the rates given are not sustainable since they are not keeping up with inflation but also with rising economic and living costs. Nurseries are finding it more and more difficult to meet the cost of delivery, which could result in the potential loss of smaller settings. The issue of 1140 that really gets me angry is that, under the SNP's 1140-hour policy, a child in a private sector nursery appears to be worth less than a child in a local authority setting. No child should ever be worth less or more when it comes to getting the best possible start in life. The SNP Government is fully aware of the problems, but there is yet to be any update to provide to Parliament on how it intends to fix the policy or to make it fair for all partners involved. While the SNP remains silent on the issue, nurseries will continue to close. A business will not survive if they are not able to identify and correct issues relating to their model, so I do not see why this Government should be exempt from acknowledging the problems that the PVI sector experience daily. It is not like this issue that is not reported time and time and again in the press. As recently as this week, a case study was reported in the Herald of a childminder losing their income to complete paperwork as the sector is in crisis. She revealed that she is losing an excess of £600 a month as she has to commit a full day each week to complete paperwork that she is not paid for. The childminder blamed the exercise levels on the bureaucracy that I mentioned earlier and is having a huge impact on her business. She said that she cannot do paperwork when we have children in her care. I absolutely love the job that I do. I love watching children develop and being a key part of that, but what I am in effect doing is paperwork for a job that I love, but I am not being paid for it. The childminder is not alone. What has become clear to me is that the Scottish Government has been in power for so long and we heard this earlier with Liz Smith's contribution and the timeline of failings that they have lost the will and desire to fix their failing policies. Opposition politicians are often told in this chamber by the SNP that we do not come to a table with any solutions, so for the benefit of the Cabinet Secretary and others, here are solutions that will make 1140 hours fair for both local authorities in the PVI sector. I am happy to give way to the minister on this point with regard to the fixing of the funding formula. Will she commit to a review of the funding formula to make it fair for the PVI sector and local authority nurseries? I think that offering to take an intervention when you have got 15 seconds to go is... Well, it is a yes, no answer, Presiding Officer. The member will perhaps remember that I met her on this very issue prior to her going on to my terms leave and I welcome her back to the chamber. It's very nice to see her and congratulations. We work very closely with the representatives of the PVI sector, including Child Benders Association, and I'm more than happy to meet her again and update her on all the work that's been going on while she has been taking care of her little daughter. I'll take that as a no, Presiding Officer, but I understand that I've got to conclude my remarks now, so we've heard today, Presiding Officer, the damning reports are members across this chamber and it's about time that this SNP Government gets a grip of our education system for the benefit of our children in Scotland. Thank you. Thank you very much. That concludes the debate on the state of Scottish education system. It's now time to move on to the next item of business. The next item of business is consideration of a business motion 7120, in the name of George Adam, on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau, setting out a business programme, and I call on George Adam to move the motion. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I'm moved. Thank you. I now call Alexander Burnett to speak to a move amendment 7120.1, Mr Burnett. Deputy Presiding Officer, I apologise for a short notice to speak on today's business motion and on my amendment, which I move. Now, throughout the journey of the GRR Bill through Parliament, we have consistently asked for more time to be given to this legislation against the background of tunnel vision from the SNP to wrap everything up before Christmas. The SNP have ignored our requests with excuses that seem to change each time the matter is raised. The most recent one from the First Minister suggesting that because the issue was loosely mentioned by the Government six years ago, that somehow counts as half a decade of scrutiny of the text of the bill is utterly ridiculous. Or, for example, the Minister for Parliamentary Business, telling me that there is such a busy programme that we couldn't possibly take our time over a bill, meanwhile granting an extension to the Hunting with Dogs Bill to allow the Minister to fly to Egypt. That didn't stop business from other parts of this Parliament being completely sidelined by this drive to avoid a gender vote in 2023. The last week before Christmas could have had a petitions committee debate or an update on the national planning framework or perhaps more scrutiny on the budget than the 40 minutes of questions we are currently limited to. Even the Bureau's own strategic planning meeting has been punted into the new year. There is no good reason for the Government to be going to this length to push all else out of the way. We are simply asking that adequate time be given to this bill for scrutiny and that this does not come at the expense of other important business of Parliament. What possible reason could the Scottish Government have for being so opposed to having stage 3 in the new year? Last time I raised this question in the chamber, I alluded to a secret answer being the true factor behind the hurry. Whispers and rumblings from around the Parliament, including in some SNP corridors, conclude that it is to do with one singular thing—making sure that the Scottish Government doesn't lose any more ministers. That is, quite simply, not an acceptable reason to rush legislation, and it certainly should not be the reason we delay getting to the many other issues this country faces. Therefore, we are seeking to amend the programme to take the bill off the agenda for the rest of this year, and we should focus on the business that was sidelined and, at the same time, give the bill more time to take evidence from stakeholders who are being prevented from doing so. We will, however, support next week's business taking place, namely the budget, so we will support the business motion. That does not rule out trying again next week to make sure that the Scottish Government sees reason. I urge the members to support my amendment today so that that does not have to happen. I now call on George Adam to respond on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer, and here we go again. It is a wee bit of a groundhog day in this place. However, the proposed business that we have discussed at Bureau, as all the business managers know, and the Bureau unanimously agreed to programme for business, and that included the Conservative Party business manager. I know that the member is quite new to the Bureau, Presiding Officer, and I think that he is learning on the job, so to speak. However, when I look at the fact— Minister, would you resume your seat a second? Can we listen to the minister without the shout-in, particularly from the front benches? It is up to the minister whether he takes an intervention. When I look at the fact that the position that we are in here is that it appears that the Tory's idea of the last week is to plan to shut the Parliament a week early to create a Tory MSP Christmas holiday for everyone to do that, instead of dealing with the hard issues that this Parliament has to deal with. Presiding Officer, I do not think that, for one minute, the people of Scotland would appreciate this nonsense from the Conservative Party. On the actual issue at hand, there is much talk from the opposition of the Tories about the fact that we have been trying to railroad the legislation through to rush it through. The reality of the situation is that, Presiding Officer, you will be aware that an extra week was given between stage 2 and stage 3, because that was asked by one of the business managers, and I said that we would work to do that as well. Not only that, this week there was also a request from the Labour Party because of the debate on the issue to have it for an extra hour, which I quite happily agreed with members to do that. When people have made reasonable requests, I have been able to work with colleagues to make sure that we can let this happen. In all reality, Presiding Officer, I think that the serious point here is the abuse by the Tory party and its attempts to close this Parliament a week early before Christmas. I move the business. The question is the amendment 7120.1, in the name of Alexander Burnett, which seeks to amend motion 7120 in the name of George Adam, on setting out a business programme, be agreed? Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to a vote. There will be a short suspension to allow members to access the digital voting system.