 Does it help anyone and doesn't take any of these issues forward in a reasonable and considered way? That ends topical questions. The next item of business is a debate on motion number 13246 in the name of Angela Constance on equity and excellence in education. Members who wish to take part in the debate should press request speak button now and I'll give a few moments for the front benches to settle themselves. Thank you. I now call on Angela Constance to speak to a move of motion Cabinet Secretary around 14 minutes. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I want to start by informing chamber that I issued a correction and an apology to yourself as Presiding Officer and to Mr Michael McMahon MSP due to an inadvertent era that I made during general question time on 13 May. I just wanted to take the first opportunity where I've been in my feet in chamber to put that on the record. Presiding Officer, the education of our children is one of our greatest responsibilities, so it is right that we debate and discuss our education system with fragments, with conviction and always with our children's best interests at heart. The experience of our children's learning in schools here in Scotland has changed greatly for the better in recent years, so we look to the future from a position of strength. There is much to be proud of. Since 2007, we have delivered a 45 per cent increase in childcare to 600 hours, providing more hours of childcare and early learning than any other part of the UK. We have secured agreements with local authorities to maintain teacher numbers, providing £51 million to do so. We have delivered improvements in class sizes in primary 1, achieved record exam passes in 2014-15, with a record number of higher passes gained. We have reduced the proportion of young people from the most deprived communities leaving school with no or very low levels of qualifications from 9.7 per cent in 2007-08 to 5 per cent in 2013-14. We have secured positive destinations for a record number of school leavers at 92.3 per cent, up from 86.6 per cent in 2006-07. We have overseen a fall of just under a quarter, 22 per cent in youth unemployment over the past 12 months, to its lowest in six years. We have allocated more than £100 million over four years in the attainment Scotland fund to close the attainment gap between children in the most and least deprived communities. We have also rebuilt or refurbished 526 schools. That is a substantial set of achievements, but there is much more still to do and there will always be much more to do. While we have halted the recent decline in PISA scores, overall we remain mid-table, similar to most, better than many, not as good as some. The recent SSLN scores also make plain that, while attainment is high for most children in literacy and numeracy, there are some worrying indications of decline at particular stages, especially children from our most deprived communities. Our challenge is now to deliver equity and excellence for all so that every child in every community gets every chance to succeed at school and in life. As Teaching Scotland's future recognises, the foundations of a successful education system lie in the quality of teachers and their leadership. Teachers are key to all that has been achieved so far and will remain so. As part of a significant long-term effort to raise teacher quality, we have invested over £5 million since 2012, supporting initiatives in teacher professional learning. We must also ensure that new teachers have the skills and confidence that they need to teach literacy and numeracy to the highest of standards, and every teacher training course must spend sufficient time and resources on those basic skills. Indeed, in this next phase of embedding curriculum for excellence, we cannot afford to stand still. Our shared focus must be delivering equity and excellence for all. The starting point must be the evidence about what works within Scotland, but also internationally. Next week, as long planned, we welcome an international expert team from the OACD to undertake an authoritative independent review of our performance. We expect to receive the final report from the OACD before the end of this year. That will provide a clear and unbiased assessment and will be fundamental to how we take things forward. There is also much that we can learn from other countries. In Ontario recently, I saw how effective their focus on a small number of key priorities could be, and I am sure that this would be beneficial in Scotland too, particularly if we consider underpinning those with a statutory framework. I want to talk about five priorities that I think are particularly important. First, I have already stressed that we must tackle iniquity in Scottish education, addressing the impact of poverty and austerity, but also not allowing it to be an excuse for leaving some children behind. We cannot and must not underplay the role that poverty plays. Scotland is one of the richest countries in the developed world, yet tens of thousands of families are dependent on food banks. Poverty is on the rise in our country for the first time in a decade. This Government is committed to doing everything within its power to eradicate poverty in Scotland through our welfare fund, bedroom tax support, council tax reduction scheme, emergency food action plan and free school meals for primary 1 to 3 children. I welcome the idea that you prepared that nothing is off the table, but could you explain to me how a council tax frees benefits to people who are living most in poverty, given that they would not be paying council tax if they were living with those levels of income? Ms Lamont will be aware that poverty affects people who are on benefits, but it also affects people who are currently in work. We know that, given the state of the economy, we have lived through some really challenging times. That includes people who are not entitled to any benefits by modern standards and would not be considered to be paid excessively. I think that there is something in benefits that are available to everyone, so I am proud of the fact that the council tax reduction scheme has been part of the social wage. I recognise and deplore the effect of austerity in poverty and the impact that that can have on the life chances of Scotland's children. However, it will never be acceptable for poverty to be an excuse for any child's lack of success at school. Already, there is outstanding practice in our communities. One example is Langley primary in Gallus Shields, which has paid forensic attention to their data, which showed that children were making good progress in reading in primary 1 to 2, but that that progress dropped off thereafter. Through engagement with the raising attainment for all programme, the school is addressing that and literacy skills are improving. It is within our gift to raise attainment and close the equity gap. Targeted interventions, using evidence of progress, can make a difference. That is why the First Minister launched the Scottish attainment challenge earlier this year. I thank the cabinet secretary for that. She is absolutely right to point to that very good example of how attainment can be raised. Could she explain what the situation might be in putting that into a national framework? I think that that is a very opposite point. The second point that I was going on to raise in the issues that I think are very important and the issues that we need to debate this afternoon is that, as we implement initiatives such as the attainment challenge, we need to gather reliable data on experiences and on attainment and to use that intelligently. Data shows us not just what is working but why and for whom and what circumstances. A lot of the work that is taking place within the raising attainment for all programme will be imperative as we move forward in our discussions with everybody across the sector about the shape and substance of the national improvement framework. It is important to ensure that, when we are gathering information, as I announced, that we will work with partners to develop that national improvement framework and that that framework crucially has to have the buy-in and support of teachers and others in the system. As the First Minister said in this chamber on Thursday, we are not going to jump to making decisions about the detail of that framework before we have properly considered and continue to discuss with all our partners how best we should move forward with that. I firmly believe that that is the right thing to do. Documenting children's progress and literacy as a core basic skill is vital to understanding how children are doing at school generally and we need to collate such data in a consistent and proportionate way. I can therefore confirm today that I will be making additional tools such as reading score assessments available to the raising attainment for all programme to help them to achieve improved literacy and numeracy. We will explore with these schools how their experiences of working with data can inform, as I said, the development of the national improvement framework. Thirdly, I pray that parent children to succeed in life and for the world of work through success at school has to be a key and central goal. I am particularly passionate about the developing young workforce agenda. That will transform our approach to tackling systemic youth unemployment, offering a new wave of vocational pathways that are accessible to all young people that start in school and crucially allow progression to college, university, training or a job. I believe that that will usher in a genuine personalisation of the senior phase of the curriculum for excellence. Developing Scotland's young workforce is crucial to building a fairer society, tackling inequality and ensuring sustainable economic growth. The fourth thing that I want to speak about is that through all of this work we need to recognise and support the role of parents. Evidence shows that parents' involvement in their child's education, taking an interest, helping out with homework, providing motivation and moral support, has a significant and positive impact. We also know that parents and families do not feel a positive connection with their child's school or their education. Our efforts to encourage more parents back into work create other challenges, as many parents re-enter the labour market at a time when their children also start school. We need to overcome the barriers that exist. Our education system needs to reach out to parents and develop real channels for two-way communication. We know that good practice exists, but across the education system we need to think more creatively about when and how we interact with parents. I am listening to what you are saying about opportunities and I very much support that, but many opportunities are limited by the level of literacy. Are you concerned in teacher training colleges in Scotland as little as 20 hours in a four-year course are allocated to literacy training compared to a minimum of 90 hours in England? It was a freedom of information request from Stuart Maxwell that gave that information. Absolutely, Mrs Scanliffe. Several pages ago, I think I tried to address that and that is something that I have certainly reflected upon greatly because, to my knowledge, it was first raised in this chamber. Certainly, in my capacity as education secretary by Stuart Maxwell, I think the last time that we had a debate on attainment on education. It is something that I will seek to address further with the providers of initial teacher education and also the GTCS, but it is an important point that if we want our children to be achieving literacy and numeracy levels at the highest levels, we therefore need to consider what support we give to people, particularly as they enter the profession. I want to finish by touching upon the needs of a group of children that are hugely important. We know that children who experience a secure, loving and nurturing home environment are better able to withstand life's challenges and achieve their full potential. That is why we are developing a national mentoring scheme to provide an opportunity for looked after children and young people to build long-term relationships with a supportive, reliable, trustworthy adult who is consistently there for them. Earlier this year, I announced funding of £500 million per year, with the intention that that will eventually be available to all looked after children and young people right across Scotland. We have to understand that inequality and disadvantage comes in many forms and understanding and tackling poverty and income inequality is important, but so too is supporting looked after children and other children with additional support needs. Finally, my aims are clear. I want to have an education system in Scotland that achieves equity and excellence based squarely on the professionalism and dedication of our teachers. In doing that, I will be led by the evidence and not by dogma or ideology, and that should be the ambition of us all. Everyone in this chamber has a contribution to make to help realise that ambition. This is a good time to be taking stock of both our successes and indeed our shortcomings, and this is a good time to consider what next for Scottish education. It is a good time for us to be collectively looking to the future and chatting a course to a destination where every child and every community has every chance to succeed. Excellent. Many thanks. Iain Gray to speak to and move amendment 13246.2. Mr Gray, 10 minutes please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I rise to move the amendment in my name. The Government's motion this afternoon is properly in the name of the education secretary, but we do know that it carries the weight of the First Minister behind it. Mr Gyn told us once again yesterday in the pages of the daily record, no less, that her own education is the reason she is now First Minister, and that it is her sacred responsibility to ensure that every child in Scotland gets the same chances she did. In this, she is not that different from many of us. I, too, am the first in my family to go to university to start working life in one of the professions, and that will be true of many of us here. The difference is that the First Minister has been part of the Government for the past eight years, and if, as she says, our education system is not good enough, then she cannot escape the real responsibility for that. Indeed, it is the whole history of Scottish education that any education minister in this Parliament holds in sacred trust, the First Nation to invest in and legislate for universal education, university's ancient yet open to the fabled lad of parks, a system that prided itself on its bread and its world-class quality. Unlike all of the best myths, they are part true and part false, but they point the way to our future aspirations as well as tell us about our past, and they were, at least partly true. After all, the embodiment of Scotland's intellectual and cultural life burns may have been the son of a tenant farmer and a sometime ploughboy, but he could read Latin and Greek and speak French, too. The recent and worrying trends in our education system strike at the very heart of those historical and traditional strengths, and they are recent in origin. The evidence that we have drawn to Parliament's attention with regard to the impact of the new national exams is exactly so worrying because it demonstrates a narrowing and a worsening of achievement at a crucial stage in our schools. The statistics show that an unintended consequence of the way in which curriculum for excellence has been rolled out is that pupils sit fewer exams and are failing more of those that they do sit. The minister's response has been to try and fail to trash the statistics or to point to progress made by pupils who have not sat the new exams or followed the new curriculum because it has only just reached fifth year. Even then, it is the case that higher and advanced higher pass rates from last year had fallen as well. That ministerial complacency is reflected in the Government motion, which is why we cannot support it this afternoon, though there is little else in it that we would disagree with. I hope that he won't do this as ministerial complacency if I point out to him. There is a record number of provisional entries for the current higher diet, 201,000 compared to 191,000 in 2014. I really do not think that that shows a curriculum that is failing young people. If we look at last year's pass rates for higher, they dropped from 79 to 77 per cent and an advanced higher from 84 per cent down to 81 per cent. Those are the very years that the cabinet secretary made reference to. Those are early warning signals that we present, as indeed is the frory over this year's new maths higher, and they cannot and should not be ignored. Has the education secretary spoken with the SQA about the higher maths problems? Has she asked for an investigation? Does she understand that scaling marks will not be an answer for any pupils who were too upset and they were some to complete the exam? We have already told the cabinet secretary that the new appeal system is not fit for purpose and it is likely to be tested to destruction by this looming problem. Perhaps even more alarming is the evidence that the cabinet secretary referred to of a sharp decline in standards and basic skills, literacy and numeracy. Scotland introduced universal education exactly to guarantee those skills for all and now standards are moving in the wrong direction. The correlation between a child's family income and their success in reading, writing and counting remains stubbornly unmoved. The cabinet secretary said that she will support what works and any independent study is very welcome, but we do know much of what works already. Start early, get the basics right, work with parents as well as children, target resources not equally but for equality, support teachers and raise their professional standards, demand that everyone has the highest aspirations for the children that they teach. All of that is why we welcome the Government's attainment challenge but question how it is being deployed. The blunt instrument of targeting seven local authorities simply means that, for example, children and families in communities such as Craig Miller or Westerhales in this city will miss out altogether. Meanwhile, using resources to appoint advisers and authorities rather than practitioners in communities cannot be the first priority. I just wanted to highlight to Mr Gray and I think that it is a matter of public record that the Government has already said that we will start with the seven local authorities with the greatest proportion of children from disadvantaged communities, but as we move forward we will certainly be looking at areas where there are pockets of deprivation across the country and will indeed be given consideration to challenged schools or challenged communities. The problem with all of that is that the children we are talking about cannot wait, their opportunities will have passed them by the time the Government get round to doing that work. Those attainment advisers we find now are secondments, which will presumably mean that we identify those with the greatest knowledge and skill in overcoming educational barriers and then remove them from our schools for two years. All of that is why we have proposed doubling the resources devoted to the attainment gap and using those resources to employ more teachers, more classroom assistants to free teachers up and teams of literacy specialists in exactly those school clusters where the problem is sharpest and the biggest gains can be made most quickly. That is why we suggest that instead of taking teachers out of classrooms we reintroduce and revamp the charter teacher scheme to reward teachers for staying in the classroom, working at the hard end of the attainment gap and being rewarded for doing just that. The truth is that we will not reduce the attainment gap while cutting thousands of teachers, increasing class sizes and spreading resources ever thinner. That is why we should commit now as a signal of intent that when we have the power to raise a top tax rate of 50p, we will do that and use the resource to raise the life chances of those children. Early intervention is the key, but it is not the only challenge. We are also the worst in the UK at getting students from poorer backgrounds into university. I acknowledge the Government's widening access commission, which is very welcome indeed. Again, we know some of what is wrong. When I was a teacher in Livingston, I lost a whole higher physics class because Feranti took on 100 apprentices. Every pupil who went would have got the hires for university and would have succeeded there, but they left because Feranti was offering them a job. They could see how they would live as well as learn for the next four years. While I welcome the cabinet secretary's correction, cutting bursaries for poorer students as this Government has done, I cannot encourage such students to take that leap to university. It needs to be reversed. I bet that many of those pupils of mine going to Feranti did end up with a degree at some point after their apprenticeship, after going to college and perhaps then going on to university. That is the other thing that the Scottish Government has got spectacularly wrong. To close the attainment gap over people's lifetimes, they need second chances as well. 140,000 students have gone from their colleges and they are exactly the part-time students studying while they are in a job, second chance learners who have missed out first time around, women returning to work and those trying to get the hires they failed to get for whatever reason at school. Those are exactly the opportunities that have gone. Now, Miss Constance styles herself Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. The truth is that she should change her title or better, change her Government's policy on colleges because the truth is that lifelong learning looks like it is a long way towards going. We all have a sacred responsibility to ensure that no child, no young person in Scotland is left behind and that every one of them has the best possible chance in life. That is exactly why we will continue to hold this Government to account for its failings over the past eight years and always press it now for action in the future rather than just words. The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. I now call on Liz Smith to speak to and move amendment 1, 3, 2, 4, 6.1. Deputy Presiding Officer, can I move the amendment in my name and can I also say that we will be supporting the Labour amendment and also the Liberal amendment? The Scottish Government has chosen a very interesting topic because equity and excellence are two extremely important things. I note that the cabinet secretary has asked us to accept the definitions of both that she produced in her Glasgow University Robert Owen Centre lecture. When it comes to the definition of equity, I think that the cabinet secretary says that it's about ensuring that every child has the chance to succeed. When it comes to excellence, it's about ensuring that every child has the best possible learning experience at all ages and stages of education, and I think that's absolutely right. The question, of course, is how we go about that. Before we debate this just a little bit more fully, I think that it's useful to look at what the Royal Society of Edinburgh's response to the new education bill has been. It says very clearly that there is a very important difference between the terms equity and equality, a difference that matters greatly not just in terms of the loose language that has been used in the bill to date, but in terms of what the desirable and achievable outcome is given the changes that are taking place in Scottish education. The Royal Society of Edinburgh is absolutely correct when it makes that distinction and when it puts the emphasis on the need for greater equity, ensuring that every child has the chance to succeed, as the cabinet secretary rightly says. Not only is that much more practical and educationally the right thing to do, it's actually in line with what is happening in Scottish education. Radical change is coming whether the politicians like it or not, and there are two drivers for that. Firstly, the changes that are taking place in further and in higher education reflect a very fast-changing world of employment. Secondly, the fact that the current comprehensive system of schooling is not making sufficient progress when it comes to improving literacy and numeracy or closing the attainment gap. As a result, our foremost educational thinkers have challenged what has become a consensus in Scottish that the Scottish school system is fully fit for purpose and that the curriculum for excellence will be the panacea that we all crave. Secondly, they have questioned the wisdom of adopting a philosophy that treats equity as the same thing as equality and a system that is built to offer uniformity across the board. That's all at the same time as Suri and Wood has made plain the need for a much more diverse form of schooling that responds to the different needs of the economy and the desire amongst a growing number of parents that there has to be greater responsiveness to what is happening in our schools. That does not mean the wholesale dismantling of the school structure. That would be both unacceptable and unwise, not to say very expensive, but there has to be a degree of reform that allows the weaker performing parts of the system to match the stronger performing parts. I have sympathy with the Liberal Democrat motion on pupil premiums in that. Where the expertise of teachers and the talents of pupils and the wishes of parents can all be much better aligned and free, perhaps, from political interference. Messrs Bloomer, Donaldson, Patterson and Cameron have all had very important things to say in that regard at a time when the monopoly of COSLA has been broken and there is much discussion in the reform of local authorities. I believe that there is real scope for change. That means challenging whether catchments are really the best means of deciding where pupils go to school. It means allowing new or different types of school to start up, if that is what parents want. It means ensuring that there is a particularly relevant and appropriate criteria that is set when it comes to all the work that is done so well by HMIE and the Care Commission. It means questioning whether we know as comprehensive education really fits with the ethos of the curriculum for excellence and the very extensive changes that are taking place in higher and further education. It seems to me most unfortunate when many people criticise—yes, of course. I have to ask this. The member has mentioned a couple of times about comprehensive education and I may be misinterpreting her tone, but can I just clarify that the member is in favour of Scotland having a comprehensive education system? Up to a certain age, I am, but not in the question of S1 and S2, where I think that we have run into difficulties about the S1 and S2 curriculum. If we look at how we are measuring up for the future phases of the curriculum for excellence, we have severe problems and we are going to allow the S1 and S2 curriculum to be as diverse as it is, which is one of the reasons that we are having struggle with literacy and numeracy. The cabinet secretary was quite right when she addressed her issue about why there is a deterioration in the standards of literacy and numeracy between primary school and the early years of secondary school, and that is something that Keir Bloomer has reflected on is a very important point. I am not in favour of comprehensive education right throughout the school, and I think that one of the things that we will find is that the way that the world is changing agrees with that point. Can I just finish my remarks about excellence? I think that excellence is just as important. There was a very interesting paper produced by Lindsay Paterson in Edinburgh University two years ago where he said that Scottish education has rather neglected the outstanding students in the interests of public accountability. He said that it has neglected the diverse, imaginative and controversial ideas that might be provoked by some diverse sources of finance. That is important, just to take up the point that Ian Gray made about the history of Scottish education. We have a very proud history in this country of being able to ensure that that philanthropy benefits everyone, no matter what their background is, and I hope that the Scottish Government will address that as they look to see what we can do to inculcate a real spirit of excellence. Excellence demands, I think, a free thinking, and I hope that the Government can give very careful thoughts as to how it might progress, given that educational policy from this Scottish Government at the moment tends to be very centralised and dependent upon the Government taking very much more control over educational institutions than they do themselves. I am happy to conclude on that basis. I think that it is an interesting debate about equity and excellence, but I think that it does require a spirit of free thinking, and I would urge the Government to think further about that. Any thanks. I now call on Leah McArthur to speak to you and move amendment 13246.3. Mr McArthur, six minutes thereby. Thank you very much to every Presiding Officer. I appreciate this debate. It falls hot on the heels of a very similar one last week, but that is perhaps no bad thing. Given the importance of the issue of attainment and the lack of progress that we have seen in closing the gap for those with more disadvantaged backgrounds and a range of other indicators that illustrate that the Scottish Government has rather taken its eye off the ball. Like others, I welcome some of the statements that were made by the Cabinet Secretary and, indeed, the First Minister over the last few days. However, their call for a fresh start on education does rather serve to underscore the failure of the Government to get to grips with those issues over the last eight years in office. Although that debate will only serve a useful purpose if we focus on where we go from here, I do not think that it is unreasonable at the same time to reflect on the Scottish National Party's record in Government, both good and bad, and that appears to be acknowledged and accepted by Angela Constance in what I thought were generally measured opening remarks. For example, as my colleague Willie Rennie pointed out in the debate last week and as Ian Gray highlights in his amendment, since 2007 teacher numbers have fallen by well over 4,000. The average class size for P1 to 3 is not the 18 that was promised by the SNP eight years ago, but is closer to 23. PISA studies scores for maths have gone backwards in 2009 and 2012 for the latest Scottish survey of literacy and numeracy makes for disappointing reading. As EIS suggests turning around and blaming teachers, given the drop in their numbers, the increase in pupil ratios and the ballooning of workload pressures is hardly an appropriate response for the cabinet secretary. All the more so, as over the last eight years any of us raising concerns were told by SNP ministers that we were wrong, that everything was fine and irony of that, ironies, we were all guilty of talking down Scotland's teacher. That was never the case and perhaps now that ministers appear prepared for a fresh start we can have a serious debate with the frankness alluded to by Angela Constance earlier about the improvements that are needed and where and how resources can be effectively targeted. In 2007, when the SNP came into office, the OACD made it abundantly clear that the major challenge for Scottish schools and our education system as a whole was the need to close the achievement gap for children from poorer backgrounds. Quite apart from the damaging effect, that gap has on the individuals themselves and the lack of opportunity they have to fulfil their own potential. All the evidence shows that that has a debilitating effect on wider society and the economy. That is not someone else's problem, it affects us all. Ms Constance can quite reasonably argue that closing the achievement gap is not a new challenge. However, the concern is that, over the last eight years, we appear to be moving in the wrong direction in too many areas, often because of steps taken or not taken by this Government. I will return later to some of those decisions relating to colleges and universities referred to in my amendment, but let me first start with the crucial early years. No-one now seriously disputes that investment and intervention in the earliest years bears the greatest return. Professor James Heckman and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, among others, have shown how the gap between those from poorer backgrounds and their more affluent peers invariably begins to open up well before school age and thereafter grows wider and more difficult to address. Yet evidence from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation also shows that there is nothing inevitable about the link between poverty and poor attainment, as the Cabinet Secretary herself underscored. The EPI project makes clear that access to high-quality early learning and childcare support before the age of three can help children develop their communication, language and literacy skills, as well as their reasoning, thinking and math skills. That is why Liberal Democrats have attached such a high priority to ensuring that this is made available to those who need it most. I am pleased, as I have said, on many times previously, that the SNP dropped its initial opposition to do more in extending such provision. However, the 27 per cent of poorest two-year-olds who will benefit this year still falls well short of the 40 per cent of their peers who have been benefiting for a couple of years south of the border. There is a need for greater ambition from the Government, ambition that can be achieved with the powers that we already have. In terms of ambition, the establishment of the attainment challenge funds is welcome, and I think that Angela Constance is to be congratulated on that. However, although the principle is sound and deserves support, I, like Ian Gray, have grave misgivings about an approach that targets areas of deprivation rather than individuals from deprived backgrounds. Those of us representing any of the 25 local authority areas in Scotland who stand to be excluded at this stage from the £100 million fund will be able to point to any number of children, young people and families that are as deserving of support as those from the seven council areas selected by ministers. I appreciate that there are specific challenges facing those communities with the highest levels of deprivation, and I do not seek to diminish those at all. But nor should ministers overlook the difficulties of those living in poverty amid plenty. Moreover, I understand that the Government's targeting by area risks excluding well over 60 per cent of those living in greatest poverty. When pressed on this at FMQs last week, the First Minister appeared to concede that she may look again at this area-based approach, and Angela Constance in her earlier remarks suggested that the Scottish Government may look to go further, but in what time scale and with what budget remains clear. I hope that this happens, and that we can see support targeted at those individuals who need it most wherever they live in Scotland. That is the principle underlining the pupil premium introduced by the previous coalition Government, thanks to the Liberal Democrats. Back by £2.5 billion of funding, the pupil premium has enabled tailored support to be provided where and how it is needed, whether in terms of additional tuition, education materials or work to involve parents in their child's learning. As well as targeting substantial resources that individuals in need, whether through poverty or for any other reason, this approach has also enabled banks of best practice and banks of resources for teachers in schools to be developed. Are there things that can be done to improve the pupil premium without doubt? Would its introduction in Scotland require an adaptation almost certainly? However, does it offer a more sensible approach to using the resources that are available than one that is inevitably more indiscriminate? I think that most people would agree that it does. Presiding Officer, given the time available, I will return in my closing remarks to the issues in the Government's approach to colleges and universities that seem to go against the grain of what we are seeking to achieve with regard to equity and excellence. I urge members to show more ambition on early learning and childcare, and more of an open mind with regard to the pupil premium and targeting what resources are available at individuals and not simply post codes in need. I move the amendment in my name. Before we move to open debate, I will let the chamber know that we are pretty well on time today, so six minute speeches. Stuart Maxwell will be followed by Johann Lamont. I am grateful that we have the opportunity today to focus on the progress that has been made in our education system and to assess what challenges lie ahead for the Scottish Government in building on the success that we have already achieved. I would argue that the importance of education transcends that of any other Government portfolio that is debated in this chamber. The success of our education system is fundamental to how we create a successful economy, tackle poverty and create a society that serves all of its citizens. An education system that enables individuals to meet their own personal goals will ensure that we maximise the potential of the whole nation. A key indicator in judging the health of our education system is not only how well students can memorise certain information, but in how it empowers them with skills that they can use throughout their life to adapt and thrive in whatever environment they choose to go into. I am proud of what we have already achieved in this regard and, unlike the cabinet secretary, I am committed to an education system that is free and open to all, that recognises the needs of our children as individuals and values and invests in the vital work that has been undertaken by our teachers. I am particularly keen to ensure that we continue to develop an education system that gives our children the best possible start in life regardless of their background. Therefore, I very much welcome the Scottish Government's £100 million commitment to closing the attainment gap. I believe that if we can implement that policy effectively, it will result in significant and long-term benefits. The principle of creating equality in our education system will help to break down the crippling barriers that people may experience due to poverty. Unfortunately, there are still too many people in Scotland, particularly children, who are held back by their economic circumstances. A report issued in October 2014 demonstrates clearly how that can be the case. The report outlined how just 3.9 per cent of people from Scotland's most deprived areas managed to achieve three A grades in the higher exams compared with 24.2 per cent of those from the wealthiest areas. I am sure that members from across the chamber will agree with me in saying that the issue of poverty is deeply ingrained within our society and has not been caused by a single Government nor can it be solved by the Government working in isolation. We all have a responsibility to tackle the problem of poverty and in creating a more equal education system we can transform individual lives and generate benefits for the whole of society. Other members of the Education and Culture Committee will know that closing the attainment gap has been a major focus of our recent work, and I certainly look forward to the cabinet secretary giving evidence later in the year. That will be an opportunity for the Scottish Government to provide additional clarity about how we can tackle the attainment gap in the most effective way. I firmly believe that the Scottish Government in partnership with organisations within our system has already made significant progress on the issue. I note that, in my own region west college Scotland, delivered 45 per cent of its learning to students from some of the most deprived backgrounds in Scotland, more than any other college in 2013-14. That important work complements the successes that the Scottish Government has already been able to achieve, namely the record drop of those leaving school with no qualifications, record numbers of school leavers securing positive destinations and a record proportion of Scots from the most deprived areas entering higher education. It is not enough. We still have a long way to go, but we cannot ignore the successes that have been achieved. The Scottish Government's schemes such as opportunities for all and the modern apprenticeship programme have been particularly effective in achieving some of those results. The Scottish Government is also investing more in colleges than Labour ever did, reaching £526 million in 2015-16 and has surpassed its commitment to provide 116,000 FTE places, reaching more than 119,000. Further, the Scotland Schools for the Future programme is investing £330 million that will allow dozens of schools across Scotland to be built or refurbished, including recently crook for primary school in Eastwood. At this point, it is worth issuing an unequif ago reminder that, unlike the Labour Party and some others, the SNP will never allow front or back door tuition fees. We remain resolutely committed to an education system based on the ability to learn and not the ability to pay. I accept the member's point. Where does equity come in when those who are from England and foreign countries are paying fees whereas those who are domiciled in Scotland and the EU are not? I am sorry that Liz Smith has raised that issue. We are responsible for those who live and reside here in Scotland. We are not responsible for young people from around the world, and I think that our responsibility should be for the young people of Scotland, and that is what the Scottish Government is doing. I know that, despite the Scottish Government's success, there are clearly many challenges that remain in improving the education system. I regret that some will seek to paint an inaccurate picture of those challenges, and I believe that those who do so are doing a disservice to both teachers and pupils. The results contained within the 2014 Scottish Survey of Literacy and Humanity show one such example in which the Scottish Government can still do more. Although the survey results were extremely disappointing, we should also keep a sense of perspective. Around eight out of 10 pupils at all stages are still performing well or very well in reading, and a number of programmes have been launched since the survey took place. The Scottish attainment challenge, raising attainment for all, read, write, count, campaign and primary 1 literacy assessment have all been recently introduced. In light of that, I welcome the cabinet secretary's assurance that the Scottish Government will reflect on those results and read double efforts to ensure that we continue to give students the best possible start in life. As an aside, I am pleased to see that Mary Scanlon is closely following my work and my FOIs. I would like to conclude by saying that it is clear that there is much to be optimistic about in our education system. Scotland continues to enjoy a high-quality system from primary school up to the further and higher education sectors, and there are many programmes currently in place that will deliver positive results for the future. However, we are taking nothing for granted, and we must identify those aspects of the system where progress has not occurred at the necessary rate. We must use a rational, evidence-based approach to those challenges. Ultimately, we will give confidence to parents across Scotland that our education system is empowering children to reach their full potential. Education is not simply about children, schools and teachers. It is a lifelong opportunity for people to learn, and it is critical to understand that we can close the attainment gap by supporting parents to learn, as well as supporting children. I hope that I can start with two quotes, which I would like to think could frame the debate. The first is a Japanese proverb, vision without action is a daydream. The other from an American senator is perhaps a little more sharply put, do not tell me what you care about, show me your budget. Yes, we should have the optimism to see the power of education, a vision of opportunity for all, with a focus on the least well-served by the current system. We also need the rigor and focus of a plan, with people across education and beyond clear about the scale of the challenge and their role. I welcome all of the initiatives that the cabinet secretary has identified, but it is critical that that plan follows the vision. Yes, we should care, but caring will only make us feel better if it is not supported by resources properly directed. It may be about increasing resources through the imaginative use of the taxation system or challenging our own spending priorities in terms of our own claims to equity and equality. I talk for 20 years longer than I have been in this place, and for only two years of that time did I teach under a Labour Government, and yes, it did make a difference. However, even in those years when there was a Tory Government, there were amazing initiatives taking place, particularly because the role of local government in that time saw itself as a dented shield against attacks from a Tory Government. We saw areas of priority treatment. We saw early intervention, looking at early years. Initiatives that stand the test of time now and did make a difference in those toughest of times. Of course, we must and should talk about the impact of Tory policy on the capacity of this place to deliver a fairer education system, but we cannot stop there. In those times, it is even more important that we adapt the notion of the dented shield that we protect, our poorest and more vulnerable, and we defend the basic values of an education system that we will deliver for all. That should mean that nothing is off the table. I believe the cabinet secretary when she says that, but it would appear that her own backbenchers have not got that message yet. It must be that everything is tested against the evidence and not assertion. It must be about mitigating the impact of a Tory Government or of poverty or disadvantage not amplifying it. We should test those choices and justify them. The funding currently of higher education, should it be funded at the expense of further education as it currently is? Do we have the right funding regime in place if the poorest children, the poorest young people from the poorest backgrounds have support, which is less than the whole of the rest of the United Kingdom? Should it be a concern for us that we have the highest drop-out rates across Scotland? Is it right to prioritise 16 to 19-year-olds in a further education system at the expense of part-time students? Those with caring responsibilities are very often women with children or caring for elderly people. There are very ones who need training and support to access education. Those are the ones that we are not prioritising at that stage. Should we have a system of regionalisation of a further education sector, which in reality defines cuts as savings with a consequence for students across the FE sector? I am grateful to Ms Lamud. I just wanted to draw to her attention that the number of full-time students over 25 has increased by 25 per cent. The number of women studying full-time courses has increased by 15 per cent. Of course, the point that she makes about part-time provision is important, and we have invested £6.5 million additional for part-time provision, which is important to some women. The reality is that the FE sector has been cut and cut and cut again, and we know that. You may be able to justify it, but you need to justify it rather than simply allowing it to continue in the way that it does. Can we justify choices in and control of local government funding by this Government if it is having direct and long-term impact on the way in which education is delivered within our communities? By that, I mean particularly that we understand the importance of teachers, but the reality of education is delivered in our communities not just by teachers but the support staff that go alongside them. I urge the FE sector to give attention to that. Support staff who will support children in episodes in their lives, whether it is a bereavement or a break-up in the family or some challenges. Attendance officers who are able to identify young people who may be in danger of dropping out of the system, and I fear that there are young people now dropping out in second and third year who are not being picked up in the way that they might have done in the past. Classroom assistants, personal assistants who support young people to achieve their potential in education. Teachers do matter, but those other supports are absolutely critical if we are going to ensure that children are able to sustain an education. I was surprised when I raised the question with the minister at general questions that would appear to the Government. Neither knows the levels of support assistants available in our schools, never mind identifying standards that would be reasonable to accept. In the time that I have left, I urge the cabinet secretary to be true to her word, that nothing is off the table and that we can work together in the reality of what is happening in our schools, colleges and universities to ensure that what we all aspire to, which is a hope that education gives to all families right across Scotland. I am delighted to speak in this debate also, mainly because I believe that no child should be born to fail. That is probably the most important thing that I will probably say all afternoon. Recently, the bank holiday weekend, I visited my five and a half-month-old granddaughter Daisy, and like every other grandparent, she has her in her knees. She thinks about what she can do with her life, what she can achieve. It was a very similar discussion that I had with my daughter when she was born in the REH in Paisley. It was the same thing then. All parents want the very best for their children, and that is one of the reasons why I think that this attainment debate is one of the most important things that we will discuss. I have also mentioned how we had a lost generation in other debates during the thatcher years. Friends of mine, who drifted away effectively, just became husks of themselves as instinctive survivalists, as life made things extremely harsh and difficult for them. That is why this is so important to me, and that is why I welcome the fact that the Scottish Government has made education and educational attainment its top priority. The First Minister recently said that I am determined. Indeed, I have a sacred responsibility to make sure that every young person in our land gets the same chance, and I had to succeed at whatever they want to do in life. For me, that is the most important part of this debate, because those opportunities are what is going to make the difference to our young people's futures. Since taking office in 2007, the Scottish Government has seen a return to free university education, free school meals for primary ones and threes, increased modern apprenticeship. We have much to be proud of, but still, too often, children who grow up in deprived areas achieve lower attainment than those in more affluent areas, and that is not just something that has happened overnight, but something that has happened over decades, if not lifetimes. In my home town of Paisley, I take no pleasure in saying that fewer children in an area like Fergusley will achieve positive learning outcomes and go on to positive destinations when leaving school than from another area like Ralslan, only 10 minutes away, one in the east end of the town, one in the west end of the town. The difference could be that the difference between them might as well be another universe, as far as many young people are concerned, but many of those young people will even attend the same high schools, but factors outwith their control will dictate their educational achievements and, therefore, their life chances. As elected representatives, we have a duty to everyone in our towns to ensure that we are doing all that we can for our children. In Paisley, we have numerous groups helping to raise attainment and close the gap outwith traditional educational framework. As a member of the education and culture committee, I have heard evidence from numerous people on how we close the attainment gap. Our committee is currently undertaking a year-long inquiry into educational attainment, and, recently and totally coincidentally, we heard from Brian Caldwell, chief executive of St Myrn football club and Stephen Gallacher, manager of the street stuff project. A local project run by St Myrn and the local authority Police Scotland and Fire and Rescue Scotland. It was interesting to hear about the impact that street stuff has had in our area. Not only has it been a way to stop antisocial behaviour throughout Paisley and Renfrewshire, it has been developed into a way for it to get young, hard-to-reach young people to ensure that they can work with them to offer them something better. In the future, some have gone on to get better educational attainment in college places and others have managed to find a way to get employment within the football club itself, which offers quite an opportunity for these young people as well. I think that this is one of the things, when we are talking about attainment, we have to ask ourselves what is the best way, because we talk about hard-to-reach children and hard-to-reach parents. The language is quite bad in itself. I think that it would be better if we find ways to make sure that we find a common goal and interests that both the parents and young people have. Projects such as this one at St Myrn are a perfect example of how we can use something that people want to do, whether it be the culture, whether it be sport, giving them an opportunity to access and see that there is something else to do, because not every child that is born in an area that Fergusley Park believes that they are born to fail. They are born, like the rest of us, with dreams and desires and hopes and wishes to do better in life. We have to be upon ourselves to make sure that we can engage with those young people and their parents in particular to show them that there is a better way forward. However, when we talk about attainment, what exactly do we mean? Is it a positive destination for that young person, or is it a place in higher or further education? During the Education Committee's evidence into the inquiry into attainment, much has been said on this. It appears that some schools are purely focused on the academic and are not showing the leadership necessary to offer other careers for our young people. When I asked Phil Ford of construction industry training boards, some schools measure success by the number of pupils who go to university. We need to challenge that and promote vocational careers as being equally valid. We had a similar debate last week, where we have to find a way where we can find a different stream for young people to be able to access that vocational future. There seems to be too much of a reliance on us going down the academic side. Terry Lannigan, Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, said that, I believe that vocational education is important to academic young people as it is to others. The skills that are developed through work-based learning are important to everyone in society. One of the challenges is to persuade Scottish society, particularly but not exclusively parents, to recognise the value of different routes to lifetime achievement. I think that this is an important part of the debate. In closing, I would say that we rightly need to highlight the achievements that the Government has already made so far and build on them. However, we have to ensure that no child is left behind and that no child in Scotland should be born to fail. I am pleased to have an opportunity to contribute to this important debate, to recognise the many achievements that are made collectively by the Government, the profession and the thousands of pupils and students that are studying in Scotland today. To explore what exactly it is that we want from our education system for our young people, I am sure that all of us want the same end point for our children, our students, to get the best education possible. We will give them opportunities to work and earn a living, be a good citizen and ultimately share their wisdom and experience for the greater good of society. We will probably argue about the best route that we should take to get us there, but I hope that we do not end up squabbling about the details of the route that we choose and instead share some ideas and thoughts about the real purpose of education and the value of being educated in a country like Scotland with our long history of excellence and achievement. Looking at what has been achieved so far is certainly impressive by any standards. We do have record exam results. Higher passes are up. More pupils are leaving school with four, five and six hires. That is the same for youngsters from our deprived communities, too. We have got record numbers of school leavers in work, education or training. The Accounts Commission reported that performance has improved against all 10 of the attainment measures that they examined in the last decade, the majority of those coming in the last five years. Of course, we do not charge our students tuition fees when they go to university. All of those achievements are worthy of celebrating, but they are never enough as many of the members have already said, and we should always strive to do better. The £100 million attainment challenge fund targeted at those communities who need help the most is a fantastic opportunity for schools and youngsters learning and challenging environments to really start realising their potential. It will focus on literacy and numeracy, health and wellbeing in primary school, it will provide more teachers resources and, more opportunities for learning outwith the school setting. Will it help to later close those attainment gaps that our education committee is considering? Time will tell, and our colleagues on the committee will know about that very closely. There are some wonderful quotes around about education, and Johann Lamont mentioned a few that are perhaps some of our favourites. Nelson Mandela said that education is the most important, most powerful weapon that we have to change the world. Martin Luther King tells us that it's purpose is to teach us to think intensively and think critically. One of my particular favourites by none other than Malcolm Forbes said that the purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one. That really begins to point us in the direction of how we best develop the skills that enable young people to think critically, to challenge accepted wisdom and to open up new possibilities for themselves and the rest of society. When I think back to my own time at school, I can recall some of the pain of having to learn the next page of Latin verbs or to read the next 10 pages of a history book about the tutors. For me, that wasn't education, that was no more than absorption of information and a test of my memory. I think that we might still be having a debate along similar lines today. University was an incredible leap in complexity and challenges, and I am so thankful now that, along with my computer science degree, I was required to study other areas and chose sociology and psychology. I learned about social and political systems and I began to listen to others who thought differently about a lot of things. My mind wasn't too cluttered with things like recursive algorithms or Turing's virtual state machines or solving mountains of differential equations. It was reasonably balanced and widened out for me, and what a wonderful experience that was. My, perhaps one cent to mine, was at last beginning to open too. I think that we owe a debt of gratitude to our colleagues on the Education Committee who are asking some fundamentally important questions like what exactly do we mean by increasing attainment and closing attainment gaps? How do we measure the success of that? Are we still too fixated on passing exams? What should the relationship be between schools, colleges and universities? Why are we still pushing our youngsters more towards university than to the colleges? Is it about numbers and getting more of one group through college or university to catch up with another group? Those are crucial questions already being posed by stakeholders, so the committee is engaged in some crucial work that will hopefully take Scotland forward yet again to a new level of understanding about the role and the purpose of education. I think that Scotland does have a lot to be proud of in terms of the quality of education that we offer our young people, the achievements that they have made and the professionalism that is shown by our teachers and lecturers. Yes, I think that it is right that we should also challenge and continue to improve and to offer our young people a pathway to critical thinking and informed learning. Making progress on this and opening that doorway for all of our youngsters is a task that we should all relish. I am delighted to have the opportunity to take part in today's debate on equity and excellence in education. There is nothing more important than ensuring that every child has the best possible start in life that would develop the ambitions of all our young people. I got involved in politics to fight for social justice, as I am sure many members did across the chamber, and I believe that we will only ever achieve a fairer and more progressive Scotland and a fairer and more progressive world if we ensure that life is fairer, better and more equal for every single child. The fact that right now in Scotland the lottery of birth, where a child is born and who their parents are, has got more impact on their life chances than their ability, their efforts or their talents is simply unacceptable. I know that we recognise this across the chamber, but what is even more unacceptable is the fact that the gap in attainment levels between children from the richest and poorest backgrounds in Scotland is continuing to grow and there are a lot of stats out there on the impact of poverty and education. I will not repeat them today, but the outcome is that tens of thousands of children in each of our communities right across Scotland are simply caught up in a cycle of disadvantage from which there is little prospect of escape. I want to live in a Scotland where every single child in every community has got the best possible start in life, where every single child has got the opportunity to fulfil the potential, where every single child has the support that they need to be all they can be. I was pleased that the cabinet secretary said in her speech at Glasgow University that she would be led by the evidence about what works when looking at ways to make improvements. In that respect, I would like to highlight the success of Fife in bucking the national trend in both literacy and numeracy in closing the attainment gap and in reducing educational inequality. Fife Council, in the past few years, has made closing the gap its absolute top priority. They have embraced a really radical approach that has involved investing £7.8 million to create transformational change in the early years, based on early targeted intervention to ensure that every single child in Fife has the best possible start in life to reach the potential, and central to that approach has been the development of a nurturing school initiative, aimed at making teaching in Fife schools as inclusive and supportive as possible for all our children. That has been backed up to by an additional £2.5 million investment to help break the cycle of disadvantage. An investment that has been targeted into the key areas that have a proven positive effect on children's education. That has included the introduction of an additional 51 classroom assistants in the schools in the areas where they need the most help. Fife has embraced a radical workshop for literacy and numeracy approach, which has transformed learning and teaching approaches in all primary schools and has now been rolled out into secondary schools, too. A Fife-wide team has been set up to develop professional learning for headteachers, teacher support staff, ensuring a consistent and effective approach to the teaching of literacy and numeracy in every five schools. Improving outcomes of literacy and numeracy has been at the centre of all the school improvement plans in Fife over the past few years. Those are plans that have been delivered much more intensively in the most disadvantaged communities, using the best evidence of what actually works. The intervention has been continually tracked and monitored to ensure that it really is making a real difference to the social and educational experience of children and families. Central to the Fife approach is the recognition that resources need to go where they need most. That means targeted work in schools, focusing on supporting children and young people who are looked after, who are not attending regularly, who have high levels of exclusions, or who live in high areas of deprivation. It really is our approach that is delivering real results. While the recent literacy stats for Scotland made worrying reading for mums and dads across the country in Fife, the results were good and they are improving. For all pupils in Fife, reading accuracy improved. Reading comprehension showed a highly significant improvement. For pupils from the 20 per cent most disadvantaged background, performance and reading accuracy is above the national average. Again, reading comprehension showed a highly significant improvement. It is not just literacy levels that are rising. Fife is successfully starting to close the attainment gap, too. The attainment gap for literacy at S4 closed by 5 per cent last year in Fife, with a 10 per cent improvement amongst children in the most deprived areas of Fife. That is an approach that works and it is delivering real results for children in Fife. It is a huge credit to the Labour-led administration but also to the teaching staff and all the other partners that are involved in making Fife's approach a success. I have visited a number of schools in my constituency to see the workshop for literacy approach work in practice. It really does engage and include every single child. It is certainly a departure from what we can remember from either at schools or ourselves. It really does engage every single child capturing their imagination. I hope, therefore, that the cabinet secretary will reflect on and learn from Fife's success and look at what can be achieved when new approaches are adopted. When ending the cycle of disadvantage is a top policy priority, it is also a lot closer to Scotland than Ontario. I know that she is visiting Queen Anne High School in my constituency on Thursday, so it might be an opportunity to catch up. The Scottish Government's motion today quite rightly highlights the fact that, while poverty can be a barrier to attainment, it should never be an excuse for failure. Education should always be a route out of poverty. It should enable every single child to reach the full potential. Right now, the fact is that too often our education system can reinforce inequality rather than unlock potential. We will only successfully close the gap if we recognise that measures to tackle the attainment gap go hand in hand with the determination to fight inequality and to end child poverty. That is why Scottish Labour has proposed using the powers that we will soon have at Holyrood to redistribute wealth and to deliver extra resources to help with the poorest children by using a £50 top rate of tax. Across Scotland, our schools and teachers are committed to tackling the impact of poverty on education attainment, but they really need the resources to make that happen. I have noticed that we are running out of time, so I will finish up here. I think that we really need to make the attainment gap the absolute top priority of the Scottish Government. Ian Gray has already said that we need action, not word. We owe it to our children to get this right, to ensure that every single child in Scotland can be the best they can be and to ensure that Scotland really can be the best place to grow up. Many thanks. I now call on Stuart Stevenson to be followed by Gordon MacDonald at six minutes. It is interesting how things in the debates of Echo and Kara Hilton have just mentioned Queen Anne's school, which my mother started teaching at 85 years ago. Her first year's wages were £36, which was not a great deal of money then and sounds even less now. We are a very different Parliament from that that we see down south. Most of us went to our local school. We have some exposure to the subject that is under discussion, albeit that, given that I left school in 1964 and I see others who may have left at a similar period—no, he is saying even earlier—we are probably significantly out of date. Having said that, even then, there was change. In 1962, I was the first fourth-year cohort to set ordinary grade exams. That was the year in which they were introduced in fourth and fifth years, where previously I had sat lower grade exams that complemented the hires. We were the first to set ordinary grade. There has been change in the system for many years. We have talked a bit in the debate, as we always will do in such debates, about money. It is interesting that the average spending per primary school pupil in Scotland is nearly £400 higher than it is in England and, in secondary, it is approaching £300 higher. Some of the reasons for that can be geographic, because our schools are a bit smaller than they are, and the overheads are higher. However, we have seen expenditure rise by about 4.5 per cent per secondary school in education when the SNP has been in government. Therefore, I do not think that we should imagine that simply throwing more money and doing the same thing is likely to read to significantly different outcomes. The motions before us are interesting. The Government says that there is much to be proud of in Scotland's schools who could disagree. The Labour Party welcomed the attainment fund and the Widing Access Commission, and that is good that it does so. The Liberal Democrats focus, as Harry Burns, the former chief medical officer of the Government, on very early part of life. I want to just talk about a few eclectic things that matter to me. Willie Coffey talked derisively about touring, but the touring test is one of the most important tests in artificial intelligence, which, of course, the first book on artificial intelligence was written here in Edinburgh in the 1970s, very early 1970s. The touring test was developed in 1950 by Alan Turing. I am a great fan of Alan Turing and of many other things. I confess to being a student and doing an online course to improve my genealogical skills—a hobby that I have had for more than 50 years at Strathclyde University. I do not visit it. I spend so many hours on a train each week. I can do my studying then, and a few hours on a Saturday and a Sunday night online. The world of learning has dramatically changed. My lifelong learning is quite different from previous generations might have been. As somebody who has studied mathematics, I am naturally interested in how we deal with numbers. I am currently reading a book on quantum mechanics, seeping myself in Einstein, Dirac, Pauli and Schrodinger and many other great luminaries of the 20th century. I admire the work of many of the women in computing, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was probably the first computer programmer in the modern era and, of course, Ada Lovelace, who was Byron's niece, who was the programmer for Babbage in the 19th century. Why do we look at cabinet secretary putting some money aside for some relatively small-scale, but long-run tests of different approaches? I have raised before the Trachtenberg system of speed mathematics, which is a terrific system developed by a Jew in a concentration camp during the last war, which enables children to develop their memory and to develop mental arithmetic skills. I myself have used it on one previous occasion to demonstrate that 2 to the power 40 is 1099511627776, which, of course, you can immediately work out is the square of 1048576. The real point about that is that, if you add the digits in 1048576, you find that the digits add up when you keep adding them up to four. Multiply four by four—I should multiply the big numbers together—you get 16, add one and six together, you get seven, add the digits of 1099511627776 together and you end up with seven. In other words, it is not just about doing the arithmetic tickets but about having checking systems, and in other countries they use the Trachtenberg system to good effect. I also look at the work of Tony Bizan and his mind-mapping approach, which is to develop memory work. Equipping children with very specific skills in improving their memory might be something that is worth doing. I echo what others have said. Diversity in education is well worth having. I was a very poor student at all stage of my educational career, but I feel that I am very much welcome from studying maths, natural philosophy, chemistry, psychology, geology, logic and metaphysics, French, Latin, English, biology, geography and history at various times. I am amazed how useful I find much of that to be. It is a timely debate. The Government accepts the nature of the challenge. I hope that the Government demonstrates that it is open to other ways forward and to diversity as we work our way towards new solutions for those most disadvantaged in our communities. Scottish education is in a very strong position at the moment. Not my words, but those are the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland when they gave evidence to the Education and Culture Committee in September. They highlighted that we are well placed to move forward, but that is not to ignore the major challenges that are ahead. There is no doubt that challenges lie ahead whether it is dealing with the UK austerity measures or closing the attainment gap, but we should also recognise what has been achieved given that backdrop. At the same committee meeting, the General Teaching Council for Scotland stated that we are trying to deliver for the first time ever an ambitious curriculum programme that covers ages 3 to 18. That has never been done before in the history of Scottish education. Curriculum for excellence encourages each child to be a successful learner who is also a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor. The success of curriculum for excellence is witnessed in inspections, audit reports and examination results. Plus, the proportion of school leavers staying in a positive destination of either work, training or education at over 92 per cent is the highest level on record. Education Scotland stated back in September that we have seen a transformation in learning and teaching in Scottish schools. For example, 90 per cent of secondary schools inspected have been found to have young people's motivation and engagement in learning as a key strength. The Accounts Commission report, School Education, published in June 2014, performance has improved against all 10 of the attainment measures that we examined over the last decade. Further on in the report, the vast majority of the improvements and attainment have been made in the past five years. Then there are exam results where they are at record levels with higher passes up 3 per cent from 2013, with more pupils leaving school having gained three or more hires. The new national qualifications were successful this year, introduced with nearly 300,000 passes at either national 4 or national 5 levels. However, one of the biggest challenges that is still facing education is the closing of the achievement gap between those pupils from poorer families who are not performing as well as those pupils from advantaged backgrounds. However, that is not a new problem, as the Royal Society of Edinburgh states in its written evidence for the education bill. Over a period of at least 50 years, many of the most important initiatives taken in Scottish school education have been intended to improve outcomes for the disadvantaged. From the introduction of comprehensive secondary education in the 1960s to the initiatives of the present, that has been a consistent policy objective. Teachers and Government at both national and local levels have been committed to the same. In those circumstances, the rate of progress is all the more disappointing and demonstrates the intractability of the problem. The Scottish Government has increased education spending by £208 million, with the average spend per primary school pupil 9 per cent and secondary school pupil 12 per cent higher than south of the border. 526 schools have been rebuilt or refurbished since 2007, and that is almost 200 higher than the previous eight years of the Labour-Lib Dem Administration. The education maintenance allowance has been retained to help 35,000 young people from the least well-off families to stay in education by granting them £30 per week if they have 100 per cent attendance. In Scotland, we have improved the curriculum, increased education spending, refurbished schools and incentivised the less well-off pupils to stay at school, yet the attainment gap still exists. Could it be because the Scottish Parliament does not at present have the power to tackle poverty? The Association of Headteachers and Deputies in Scotland, a near written evidence for the Bill, stated that it is important to consider that the proportion of time children spend in school means that social inequalities cannot be remedied by schools alone, nor solely within school hours. Save the Children's written evidence for the Bill said that there is a large and growing group of children who are socially, economically disadvantaged. At present, one in four children in Scotland experience poverty. We are concerned that the number of children affected by poverty is expected to rise to one in three by 2020. That suggests that the challenges that we face to reduce inequality of outcomes will become even greater in coming years. That is before the next round of cuts being imposed by the UK Government, where it intends to cut welfare by a further £12 billion. It is unacceptable that, due to the decisions of the UK Government, children and families in Scotland are suffering when we are one of the richest countries in the developed world. The UK Government said that the UK Government at the very least should honour the spirit of the Smith agreement and devolve meaningful powers over welfare and the minimum wage to the Scottish Parliament in order that we can start to tackle poverty and boost the closure of the attainment gap. If we can do that, I would accept that what the Scottish secondary teachers association stated back in September could be true for every pupil. That is a very exciting time in Scottish education, and I think that we have a very exciting future ahead of us. I would begin by wanting to associate myself with the comments that Willie Coffey earlier agreed with the majority about what he said. In particular, he congratulated all children, all pupils across Scotland in terms of where they are in education and the successes that they are having, their parents and all those involved in schools, teachers and all the staff in schools. I think that it is important that we recognise that teachers and staff are working under a lot of pressure. I should say that one of my own daughters is a secondary school teacher and I know the amount of work that they do not just in school but in the evenings and the weekends, and that is true of the teaching profession right across Scotland, so we should recognise that. Education authorities are under an immense amount of pressure, but I believe that the more we can localise and take the powers down from central government into local education authorities and into the schools, classrooms and parents, the more successful we will be. Audit Scotland, a 2014 report, pointed out that council spending on education has reduced by 5 per cent in real terms between 2010-11 and 2012-13. That has put a major pressure. I was looking at Fife's education budget and I was looking at their budget for 2009-10 up to 2012-13. It was the previous administration to the one that I was in that was a coalition between the Lib Dems and the SNP, but if you look at some of the cuts that they were making here, the devolve school budgets over £2.5 million cut out in 2010-13 in primary schools, that was support staff in primary schools being cut, removal of free bottles of water to primary one, withdraw swimming lessons, study support funding for primary schools, and you go through it and there is a list of some £30 million cuts that was taken out of those years for those schools. You can see the type of pressure that education authorities are in. I know that, as a council leader previously, the chief executive of the council and the director of the finance of the council was always keen to stress to me that education was not protected and that the education budget was not protected and therefore had to have its share of the cuts. We know that local government is facing some horrendous cuts and I think that if we are going to have this discussion in this debate, we need to be honest about the types of pressure that our education system is under. I wouldn't, for example, agree with Liz Smith on a lot of the points that she makes in terms of comprehensive education and where she would want to see that go, but I agree that we need to think out the box. I think that Liz Smith talked about the spirit of free thinking, but we need to be able to think out the box and look at education because the fact is that, while we are doing the best we can, we have to do a lot better. Our education system in Scotland has to do a lot better if we are seriously going to reach the point where every child is able to reach their potential. That is not just the kids that are getting few examer's passes at the present time. It is also the kids that are doing well, but they could be doing a lot better if they had more support there. It is right across the education system in Scotland that we should be doing much better and we need to do much better. As I said, in listening to Angela Constance, what struck me is the lacky ambition. We talk about poverty, but the Scottish Government lacks an up-to-date anti-poverty strategy. Surely, if we are going to tackle inequality and poverty, then it is not just going to be done through the school. Indeed, it cannot be done simply through the school and through the education system. It has to be done through all aspects of Scottish life. Everybody's government in here, everybody's government running through into local government, has got to be joined up to tackle poverty. I was thinking, as Angela Constance was speaking some years ago, when I visited a home-start project up in Benarty, which is in my constituency, and the workers there were explaining to me that without their intervention and their support, there would be some kids still in nappies when they were going to the primary school. That is social breakdown. It is family breakdown. There are the root causes of poverty and deprivation, and the impacts of poverty and deprivation need an injection of support and cash and need projects through the community planning partnerships to tackle inequality and poverty at that level. You cannot simply say that the schools are able to do so. Kara Hilton spoke earlier about Fife, and she would expect me to endorse what she had to say. However, I remember the time that I visited Benarty primary school and the kids came through and gave me some toast and tea. It was in the morning, early morning meeting, and the head teacher explained to me that the teachers were going out and buying the bread and then making the tea, and the kids were involved in it. For some children, just getting a slice of toast and a cup of tea in the morning, the contribution that that was making to their education, because if they were sitting there in the school absolutely starving, then they were hardly likely to be focused on learning and education. It struck me, and one of the things that we actually did in Fife at that time was that we started to put pockets of money, small amounts of money, £10,000 into primary schools, those in the highest deprivation area, as measured through free school meals. We started to put that money in so that the head teachers could use that money at the local level for them to decide how they would improve numeracy and literacy and tackle inequality. At that level, it can make the difference, so the more money and the more resources—if you look at Fife, and I will send the minister what was done here—in Fife, over the last number of years, we started to put more money and reverse some of those cuts and classroom assistants and others. We put money and investment into IT. I visited Coweringbeath primary school just a number of weeks ago to look at what the investment that was put into IT had achieved there. In that school, we had young children learning computers and talking language, which I certainly did not know. The lessons are that we need to put more resources in. We need to recognise the issues that are there. We need to empower education authorities. If we can do that, then we can move forward. It is but six days since we discussed a similar motion and but three months also since we debated an equally similar motion, a motion in which harness constructive and aligned Opposition amendments. I understand and share frustration, but we will, I believe, have improved outcomes. We should pay attention to the views of those who are a bit more discerning of the matter and recognise outcomes that have improved in general. The Save the Children said on 16 February, after our last motion just three months ago, it welcomed cross-party focus on tackling the achievement gap over recent months. We are encouraged by the fresh leadership by the First Minister to put this challenge at the top of the agenda, and it is. Cross-party focus agreement. Closing the gap, the attainment gap, is the number one education priority, which can only be buttressed by attending the greater priority of inequality of income and inequality of opportunity in tackling these two together. We can sit or stand here and throw numbers at each other, anchored by targets, rather than improved outcomes. However, let's try and command that Save the Children cross-party focus on outcomes. I have to say that I am somewhat bemused by an amendment that calls for the more rigorous testing of literacy and numeracy, presumably also that of primary school children, yet it goes on to say that there has to be much more focus on tailoring the learning experience to the best educational interests of individual children. Is that one test for all primary school children or one test for each? I hear echoes of the 11 plus. We should be establishing a system, yes, and of course literacy and numeracy must improve, but a system that prepares children for life, not for exams. As I say, we could trade numbers all day. We on this site could highlight more spending for pupil here than elsewhere or more expenditure on new schools and refurbished schools. In the opposition, we will talk of literacy and numeracy attainment or pupil-teacher ratios. The education committee, involving nearly all of our parties, I believe will tackle head-on the issue on informed data constructively. I predict that we will get answers and will recommend serious proposed actions for the earliest implementation. Change is a constant. It is always there. In education as in other areas, we face changes in big challenges such as falls in pupil numbers, changes to the curriculum agenda and infrastructure, challenges of the iniquitous incomes and living inequalities, all of which have to be addressed. The issue of poverty is an overarching and critical one on educational attainment, one that is indeed eating away at the fabric of our society and impacting children particularly. Even in those straightened circumstances, I add my commendations, as has been said before, as Alex Rowley just mentioned, to the work that teachers do. However, there is, I believe, an incumbency on parents in the wider family, many of whom accept their responsibilities, but some who can't or don't. It is their responsibility for their children's progress and attainment. Three weeks ago, I attended a meeting with a social housing programme that is being built in Spain, a programme that seeks the building of low-energy costs three-tier family homes where the grandparents live on the ground floor, the parents on the middle floor and the children on the top floor. However, that family unit cannot, of course, apply to all families, but it becomes indeed an integrated unit not just for care but for development of the children and the freeing up of employment opportunities for the parents and, therefore, an aggregate income for the family. One might even call it the modern day Los Tenementes. Highlighting the curses of inequality and poverty and the two-headed attack on attainment is right, and we can expect rightly the opposition to pursue that, but those monsters will not be defeated by intense debate alone and not just in this chamber. I repeat, Presiding Officer, parents and the wider family must be helped to understand their role in the joint war on the attainment gap. There is no shame for us in learning from others, like the London challenge. It is not the children that are the problem. What we need is local school high-calibre leaderships, untrammeled by targets or paperwork, then changing the school cultures and the parents' role in that change of culture. Can we do it? Of course we can. I, for one, do not like sitting in the middle of any table, in the middle of any ratings, least of all in international education, and I am sure that all of us in this chamber will work to ensure that we become top of that table. I doubt that anyone in the chamber today would disagree that education provides the main route for anyone from any background to reach their full potential, and I believe that the Scottish Government is absolutely committed to delivering an education system that this country can be proud of. We now have record exam results, with fewer pupils leaving school with no qualifications than when the SNP was first elected to Government eight years ago. Peoples are leaving school not just with one, two or three hires but with four, five, six or more hires. Those educational achievements, which we should remember, are not solely down to the Government, but also the effort of all stakeholders, including local authorities, parents and most crucially pupils themselves, have fed into post-school results. According to the national statistics on attainment and lever destinations, the proportion of school leavers staying in a positive destination, whether that be work, training or education, reached 90 per cent in March 2014, an increase over the previous record of 89.5 per cent the year before. Skills Development Scotland have expanded on that, with the school leaver destination return statistics report noting that 92.3 per cent of school leavers entered an initial positive destination in 2013-14. That is a rise of 0.9 per cent on the previous year. Meanwhile, the report also confirmed that the percentage of leavers' report was unemployed and seeking employment or training had fallen to 6.3 per cent, down from 7.1 per cent the previous year, and the lowest this figure has been in the last decade. Those figures are a reflection that the Scottish Government's programme for education is bearing fruit, but there is no doubt that more can always be done, and we cannot forget those that do not manage to go on to a positive destination or those who do not leave school with enough qualifications to attend college or university. The Government's initiatives have been a start, but we all know that there is much more to do. We are well aware that improvements in education need to start as soon as possible in the early years. To that end, there are more hours of high-quality childcare than in any other part of the UK. Our time in government has seen an increase in the annual funded entitlement of early learning and childcare to 600 hours. That is the equivalent of a 45 per cent increase in hours for three and four-year-olds over the past eight years, which has helped 120,000 children a year and saved families a very much needed £707 per child per year. The Government's 2016 manifesto will set out a plan to increase childcare provision by the end of the next Parliament from 16 hours a week to 30 hours a week, and will shortly receive the findings of Professor Irham Siraj, a leading childcare expert who was commissioned to conduct an independent review of the early learning and out-of-school care workforce. I look forward to seeing Professor Siraj's findings and how that will feed into the Government's education programme. It would also be remiss to me not to mention that the free school meals programme, which is benefiting an additional 135,000 pupils in primaries 1 to 3, over and above the 35,000 pupils who are already entitled to free school meals. The families of those pupils will now be saving at least £330 a year, and we know from the results of a similar pilot scheme in England that free meals have a positive impact on nutrition and health with the increase in attainment strongest among pupils from less affluent families and among those with lower prior attainment. I would like to mention at this point that the average spending per primary school pupil stands at a higher level in Scotland compared to England, £4,899 versus £4,500. We need to ensure that once pupils reach secondary schools that they will have the support needed to attain the highest number of qualifications possible, and the Scottish Government has certainly not been behind in that regard. As of the spending on primary school pupils, the average spend on secondary school pupils is also higher than in England, standing at £6,738, compared to £6,700. Of course, work with local councils is fundamental to providing schools and pupils the tools that they need to attain at the highest level, and the Education of Scotland bill places a statutory duty on both the Scottish Government and councils to reduce inequalities of outcomes in schools. That includes a requirement for them to report and progress made in narrowing the attainment gap. John Fife, the President of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, stated of the bill's requirement for each local authority to create a chief education officer post, I quote, that the action being taken by the Scottish Government to address the disparity in outcomes faced by pupils from disadvantaged communities is positive, as is their commitment to ensuring that each and every local authority has a chief education officer. That officer will play a key role in ensuring that our approach to the delivery of education is built on a clear understanding of what works, and we look forward to working with ministers in Parliament as the bill has progressed, unquote. However, our job does not finish once Scotland's young people have left school and are making their first steps into their new lives. The newly established commission on widening access met recently for the first time to examine how barriers to fair access can be broken, so a child born today, irrespective of a background, has an equal chance of attending university. We have also legislated in the Post-16 Education Scotland Act for statutory widening access agreements and, in fact, are the only country in the UK to do that so far. All of the aforementioned should be put in the context of the severe cuts that Westminster has imposed and will be continuing to impose over the next Parliament. Welfare reforms are going to see an additional 100,000 Scottish children living in poverty by 2020, and I am sure that no one here would consider that one in five children growing up in poverty is in any way acceptable. We have come far in eight years of SNP Government, but there is more work to be done, and I believe that the measures that are intended will help ensure that Scotland has an education system of which we can justly be proud and which will provide our young people with the support that they need to make the most of their lives, whatever their background. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I welcome the debate on educational attainment this afternoon. Over recent years, we have seen considerable changes to teaching in Scottish schools through curriculum for excellence and more recently, changes to the examination system. Many of our young people do leave school with very good record of achievement, but too many have persistently underachieved and consistently the evidence points towards poverty being the main reason for this attainment gap. Children from low-income households continue to do worse at school than those from better-off homes. How do we meet those challenges? Of course, tackling poverty is fundamental to that, but we also need education policies and priorities that recognise the challenges. The evidence suggests that progress has been too slow. The priorities of this Government's education policy have made little impact on these trends. By age 5, the gap is between 10 and 13 months. By ages 12 to 14, pupils from better-off backgrounds are more than twice as likely as those from the most deprived backgrounds to do well in numeracy. Save the Children made a recently interesting comment saying, we have concerns that current approaches have so far been too focused on improving attainment for all children in Scotland. We question the benefit that this has for the poorest children. The recent commitments to attainment are very welcome, but we need to be very clear about where the money is going and what it is there to achieve. At the end of school, the attainment gap between the richest and poorest young people is equivalent to around three A grades at a higher level—a cystistic that talks of limited opportunities, wasted talent and underachievement. To change those cystistics, we need to be focused, prioritise activity, properly evaluate and do what works. In early years' parental involvement, prioritising the learning needs of children who are living in poverty, evidence suggests that those all make a difference, but we need robust evidence on what works. Joseph Rowntree's closing the attainment gap in Scottish education report highlighted the lack of data, research and evaluation as a hindrance to making progress. That is an area of education that needs additional investment, and it must be targeted in the right areas. That is why, in the spirit of constructiveness, Labour is proposing to double the number of teaching assistants in every primary school associated with the 20-secondary schools where the attainment gap is most acute. We will look at the opportunities that will come from increased revenue-raising powers for the Parliament to invest in those areas. That would be in addition to what is already being announced by the Scottish Government. Although the additional money that has been announced is targeted at attainment is welcome, I am disappointed by the initial allocation of the decision. Fife is to receive no money or no support in this first tranche of funding. Fife is Scotland's third-biggest authority. Yes, it does have a very diverse population, but to allocate money purely on a local authority basis has meant that too many schools and communities where poverty impacts on the educational achievement of children and young people have missed out. It is less than 16 miles to drive from methyl to St Andrews, but too often these two places are worlds apart, and educational attainment is one of those areas. Because of the geography, Levenmouth, which is one of the areas with the highest levels of deprivation in Scotland—never mind within Fife—it is not yet to receive any additional support targeted at addressing educational attainment. Fife has the third-largest amount of children living in poverty in Scotland, and the mythology that has been used so far has been used to allocate the resources as flawed and unfair. A mythology that fails to recognise the needs of areas such as Levenmouth is not good enough. We should be getting support to where it is needed most. High schools in those areas are working very hard. They are acutely aware of the additional challenges that their pupils face, and they see the bigger picture, the importance of inclusivity and shared experience in learning. I visited Kirkland High School in Levenmouth for the end of the show last summer, and they had been a school of ambition, a scheme that was dropped by the SNP Government in 2007. That additional investment at that time had enabled them to focus on drama, music and performance by improving their facilities and opportunities. The level of involvement in the arts is important to that school, to the pupils, to the parents and to their community. To see the confidence, the teamwork and the ambition of those young people demonstrated to me how important arts in school is. Meaningful engagement in the arts supports other academic learning. The system of projects in the RAP block and more recently Glasgow is an ambitious and intensive approach to raising attainment through artistic engagement. Projects like that help to create the right environment for learning, for confidence, for wellbeing. I was at Balweary High School in Kirkcaldy earlier this year with the minister, and we were there for a meeting of the instrumental music expert group. There is evidence that learning music can have a positive impact on other learning, but schools often find it difficult to deliver, and children whose parents can afford private tuition are getting the greater benefits. When we look at those who are reaching the attainment levels needed for art college acceptance or entry to the conservatoire, increasingly there are groups of young people for whom I creed in the arts is just not possible because of a combination of financial constraints and the lack of opportunity. James McAvoy recently stepped into the debate saying that, while no one detracts from the talent and success of actors who are coming from more privileged backgrounds, we are really worried about a society that does not give opportunities to everybody from every walk of life to be able to get into the arts, and that is happening. If we are not going to accept the current situation, we need to see change at all levels—government, local authorities and schools—and we need to see real investment into the areas where it is needed most. Thank you very much. I now call Richard Lyle to be followed by James Dornan. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I want to begin this afternoon by saying loudly and clearly that Scotland's education system must be fair and provide excellence to every child irrespective of their background or circumstances. We must make sure that we provide the best possible chances for our children and young people to thrive and be the best that they can be. That is why, Presiding Officer, I am sure that this SNP Government will continue to take action. The Education Secretary, Angela Constance, has already made it clear in a recent speech at the University of Glasgow's Robert Oren Centre for Educational Change that nothing is off the table in developing evidence-based work to tackle education inequality. That is because there is no quick fix to this issue. It is a collective approach that we must take to tackle the attainment gap, starting with Government, where measures such as the introduction of the national improvement framework, which follows best practice from high-performing systems around the world, will be used to gather data that shows not only what is working in Scotland, but why, for whom and in what circumstances. However, it is also an important part for everyone to play from teachers playing their part in raising the attainment, including understanding more about how poverty affects children's lives, to the role that parents play in being involved and interacting with their children and young people's education. It is absolutely essential to overcoming any barriers that our children and young people face. A name of this Government in relation to equality in education has been that a children born today, one of our most deprived communities, should by the time he or she leaves school, have the same chance of going to university as a child born in one of our most affluent communities. It is honest that we across this chamber must surely agree, Presiding Officer, that we believe that no child should be born to fail, and that every child, regardless of background or circumstances, shall have the same chance to fulfil his or her potential. This Government, I note, is taking action, Presiding Officer, through initiatives like raising attainment for all programmes. They are starting to make a positive impact, and we should be proud of what has been achieved. I have heard a lot of praise and support for Angela Constance this afternoon, which might fairly be merited, but given that SNP has been in government for the past eight years, would the member like to give an evaluation of Mike Russell's record to date? Richard Lyle? I have great respect for Angela Constance, who I have known for years. I have known Mike Russell for years, and I also have great respect for him. I agree that more needs to be done. Too many of our young people have life chances narrowed by circumstances out of their control, and we should do all that we can to make sure that that is not the case. I want to share a quote, Presiding Officer, that states, and I am sure that many people remember this quote, that I am determined indeed that I have a sacred responsibility to make sure that every young person in our land gets the same chance that I had to succeed at whatever they want to do in life. That was the words of the leader of this SNP Government, First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. With passion and determination, like First Minister and Angela Constance, we have the responsibility to make sure that children and young people get the best chance of success. It is with that responsibility that I suggest that the Scottish Government is acting with the introduction of the Education Scotland Bill, a bill that places a statutory duty on the Scottish Government and councils to reduce inequalities of outcomes in schools and will include a requirement for them to report on progress on narrowing the attainment gap. A bill that will support this Government's existing work to raise educational standards, to raise attainment for all Scottish children and underlines our expectations of local councils in the progress of addressing education and equality. It also arrives with councils, and most of them are Labour councils, and I would like to see what they are doing. Of course, all is not rosy in the garden, but there is so much to be proud of in Scotland, the education, and we should take the opportunity to celebrate the many successes of our children, young people and, of course, the role of our talented teachers. Under the SNP Government, through the hard work and talent of pupils and teachers, we have record exam results. The number of higher passes is up 3 per cent, from 144,749 in 2013 to 148,684 in 2014. In that same year, we also saw the successful introduction of the new national qualifications with 173,648 passes at national 5 and 123,734 passes at national 4. An area that is so important is that fewer pupils are leaving school with no qualifications now than was the case in 2007. More pupils are leaving school with not just one, two or three, but four, five, six or more higher. That is not just overall, but it is also true for those in the most deprived parts of this country. National Statistics on Attainment levered the designation published in June 2016, showing that the proportion of school leavers staying in a positive destination, work training or education after leaving school, reached 90 per cent in March 2014. The highest level on record up from a previous best of 89.5 in March 2013. In closing, it is clear that the SNP Government stands ready to always champion the successes and achievements of Scotland's children, young people and teachers, but also to make improvements and change the picture where needed. That is what just we will do. Thank you. Strong education is an essential cornerstone for any young person to begin building their life upon. The necessity for strong numeracy and literary skills are prevalent throughout everyday life. It is upon us to provide children with access to the resources needed to foster these skills and to allow them to grow. It is essential that our education system is fair and operates at an unparalleled level of excellence for every child, regardless of their background. We need an education system that will not settle for good enough but aims to deliver a level of outstanding quality, equity and education that will apply to all children. The equity that we speak of is about ensuring that each and every child is given their best possible chance to succeed in school. The excellence that we want to see come around is all about ensuring that children get the best possible learning experiences at all levels, at all stages and at all stages in ensuring that we invest in teachers and other staff so that they have the skills, knowledge, competence and confidence that they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Parents, teachers, academics, locals and central government all owe it to the children of Scotland to rise to the challenge of inequalities that persists within our education system. No child should be born to fail. Every child should have the same chance to fulfill his or her potential. The determination to tackle educational inequality is at the heart of this SNP Government. Despite what our political opponents try to claim, this Government has accepted the problem that it is still facing. In a speech announcing the Scottish attainment challenge, the First Minister highlighted that school leavers from the most deprived 20 per cent of areas currently do only half as well as school leavers from the least deprived areas. In the most deprived 10 per cent of areas of Scotland, less than one young person in every three leased school with at least one higher, rises to four out of five in our most affluent areas. The Scottish Government established a commission on widening access, which met for the first time last month to help us to ensure that a child born today, irrespective of her background, should have an equal chance of attending university. It will identify the key barriers to fair access. We have already legislated in the Post-16 Education and Scotland Act for statutory widening access agreements, the only country in the UK to do that. Ucast stats show a higher percentage of 18-year-olds from disadvantaged areas being accepted to universities under the SNP 6.4 per cent in 2007 to 8.9 per cent in 2013. At this point, I want to play the role of a proud grandfather. My granddaughter comes from a very normal working class family. Her mum and dad work extremely hard to make sure that she can get what she needs to do, to study, to get into university. She was fortunate enough last year to get the requirements, the five A's, band ones, with a smile on his face, to make sure that she was accepted for the university this year. Abigail is going to that university. It has cost her parents a lot of money to make sure that she can get the study and she can get all the books that she can get wherever she requires, but they would have struggled much, much more if they were then having to face paying for her university tuition fees. I accept that there are costs and challenges with young people going to university, but that not having to pay those university fees is a great load off their mind. I am sure that in two years' time they will be saying exactly the same thing when Mark falls on their footsteps. As the First Minister said, over the next months and years, making sure that the Scottish education system becomes genuinely one of the best in the world will be a driving and defining priority of my Government. That statement highlights how much our SNP Scottish Government is focused on working for the Scottish people, aiming to improve lives and give Scotland the future that it deserves. As the next Glasgow City Council and as a Glasgow MSP attainment is at the heart of what I want to see in any education Scotland bill, the Education Scotland bill and tuition on 23 March will place that statutory duty on the Scottish Government and councils to reduce inequalities of outcomes in schools and will include a requirement for them to report and progress and narrowing the attainment gap. The bill will support the Government's existing work to raise educational standards and to raise attainment for all Scottish children and underlines our expectations of local councils in the process of addressing educational inequality. However, we will defend the achievements, not just to the Government but of students, pupils and teachers across our country. We will also be open to where we need to do better. There is work to do in our education system and we make no bones about that, but we will not allow any politician in any party to reduce the achievements of our pupils. As Richard Lyle just mentioned, we have record exam results. Few pupils are leaving school with no qualifications in 2007 and more pupils are leaving school with more hires than they did then. National statistics and attainment lever destinations show that the proportion of school leavers staying in a positive destination worked training or education after leaving school reached 90 per cent in March 2014. That is the highest level in record up from its previous best of 89.5 in March 2013. With such high levels of school leavers moving on to work, training or furthering their education, it allows for youth unemployment to remain low in comparison to 20 other EU countries. Only five come in lower than Scotland. It is important for this Government to continue building upon the ground work that we have laid down to prove for us with the Education Scotland Bill. With record exam results and a record number of school leavers finding work, training or education, it is clear that we are on the right pathway. Even though we still have more work to do to improve those numbers further, it is still refreshing to have seen such great progress made. Many thanks. That brings us to the closing speeches and I call on Liam McArthur, seven minutes please. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I didn't participate in the debate last week. I'm not sure whether this reflects much of the tone and themes from them, but I've certainly found it interesting. I think that every speaker has tried to rise to the challenge of coming up with an alternative to sacred duty in terms of underscoring the importance of the issues that we are discussing. I think that Stuart Maxwell did a fair attempt with describing education as the subject that transcends all other policy areas in the transformative effect that it has, but I think that it was a point emphasised by all speakers. I think that Willie Coffey, George Adam, Gordon MacDonald and I think that all of the SNP backbenchers rose to give support to the cabinet secretary in identifying those areas where progress has been made. I think that that was entirely right and fair. I don't think that any of us are trying to denigrate what is happening within our education system or denying that achievements have been made in a range of areas, but I think that it is incumbent on all of us to recognise where we are not coming up to the mark and I think that that has been fairly articulated by many speakers this afternoon. I think that there are figures not just from the SSLN but from PISA as well that indicate where progress is not being made and, in fact, we are potentially going backwards, although I was interested in what Hannah Helton's comments about Fife may suggest that there are regional variations even within that. I have to say that listening to Stuart Stevenson and his description of the Trachtenberg system had me questioning my numeracy skills, I think, quite profoundly. However, the message about pupils not lacking the potential—many are already showing how they can overcome the obstacles in front of them—was a theme picked up by a number of speakers. The attitude that we all have is that no one is born to fail and that the efforts of staff should not go unremarked upon. Alex Rowley and Willie Coffey drew attention to that. Again, another common theme was a broad welcome across the chamber for the statement by the Cabinet Secretary in a recent speech at Glasgow University about a willingness to keep an open mind and a commitment not to take anything off the table, although, in observing the contribution or the exchange between Richard Lyle and Claire Baker, it was interesting to note whether, if Mike Russell had done such a great job, it was necessary to have such a profound fresh start at this point. At the outset of this debate, I set out the compelling case for greater ambition from the Scottish Government in relation to early learning and childcare. Individuals' life chances are invariably shaped and determined in the earliest years, sometimes even before birth, but nothing, as I say, should be preordained or inevitable. As with any complex problem, closing the attainment gap does not lend itself to quick or easy solutions. Silver bullets are unlikely to penetrate, but greater investment in extending more widely access to good quality early learning and childcare, delivered by highly trained staff, can and does go a long way to rebalancing the skills in favour of those from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Building on the laudable steps taken in the last 12 months, both for three and four-year-olds, but crucially also for disadvantaged two-year-olds, it is now time for Scottish ministers to commit to going further. It is time to match the 40 per cent provision for two-year-olds from the poorest backgrounds south of the border. On the pupil premium 2, as I said before, there are lessons that can be learned from targeting support for individual children and young people where, when and how they need it. Unfortunately, as Claire Baker, Ian Gray and others have suggested, the area-based approach adopted by the Scottish Government in its otherwise welcome attainment challenge fund risks overlooking the needs of around two-thirds of poorest children in Scotland who happen to live outside the seven council areas selected. However, the case for early intervention is the most compelling of all, any debate about equity and excellence cannot ignore what is happening later on in the education system. Again, aspects of the approach taken by the Scottish Government appear difficult to reconcile with its stated commitment to equity and excellence. Cuts to college budgets, for example, have understandably attracted most of the attention and criticism. Between 2011-12 and 2013-14, there was a 12.3 per cent real terms cut, resulting in a major reduction in staff numbers, but also a loss of around 130,000 places. Ministers have sought to dismiss those as hobby courses in unnecessary duplication, but that glossies over the real practical effect, which has been a loss of opportunities, particularly for women, older learners and those in need of additional support. Implications, as Ian Gray said, in his opening for genuine lifelong learning, despite the stocal efforts of Stuart Stevenson to upgrade his genealogy skills. Meanwhile, according to HESA statistics, participation rates at university for young full-time first-degree entrance from the poorest families in Scotland are down by 1.2 per cent since 2005-06, notwithstanding what Stuart Maxwell said, yet they have risen by 3.3 per cent across the UK as a whole. Of course, ministers like to focus solely on the issue of fees, but this ignores the impact that their decisions to replace grants with loans have had quite apart from how this squares with their 2007 promise to dump the debt. Joanne Lamont echoed comments made by the Government's former head of higher education Lucy Hunter recently, who explained, for young students in full-time higher education in Scotland, the net effect of policies decisions over the decade to 2015-16 will be a resource transfer from low income to high income households. After a cut of £35 million last year, total spending on grants and bursaries is now barely half what it was in real terms when the SNP came into office. As the Financial Times pointed out recently, statements from Ms Sturgeon in 2006 showed that she believed that the debt of more than £11,000 would, quote, impede access to education. However, the amount of debt many of the poorest Scottish students will graduate with today is now often double that. I recognise that small steps were taken by the cabinet secretary earlier this month, though not quite the £19,000 heralded in a parliamentary motion signed by 19 SNP MSPs last week. Let's only hope that no student rushed out on a spending spree in misplaced anticipation of such a ministerial windfall. In terms of ensuring equity and the widest possible access for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, ministers need to take a fresh look at all of the costs associated with attending university. Closing the attainment gap, achieving greater equity and delivering excellence will require more than ministerial statements and, as the RSE pointed out in a warning to Richard Lyle and James Dornan, vague commitments written into legislation. It will require ministers to target their energy and resources at where the need is greatest from the earliest years and throughout the education journey. I have tried to offer some ideas about how this best can be done and I hope that the cabinet secretary is true to our word about having an open mind so that those can at least form a basis for the fresh start that we are told is now on the way. Thank you very much indeed and I move the amendment in my name. We agree with much of the Government's motion, particularly that there is much to be proud of in Scotland schools and that much more needs to be done to give every child the education to grasp opportunities in life and that all options should be considered. I put on the record that we welcome the OECD report due by the end of this year but I would also say that there is an evidential base to do more work now. I trust that Angela Constance will be applying Stuart Stevenson's quantum theorem mathematics to attainment issues and I look forward to her making an announcement to this chamber, preferably in Latin or Greek, so that Mr Steven would appreciate that. I would also say that my colleague here has some Latin. I think that that may satisfy Mr Stevenson for one afternoon. At this time, there is no independent evaluation of what is spent on education and what delivers in improved attainment and achievement. To be fair, I think that we are further forward than we were a month or a couple of months ago. I cannot speak for everyone but we all want better attainment. We all want the equality gap to be narrowed. We may have different ideas about how to pursue it but the ends in themselves are something that we certainly all want. However, the fundamental issue is that we need a system that can identify when a child, a child, not an area, a child is struggling to keep pace with the rest of the class whether that is in a single subject, all subjects or across subjects. Only when development needs are identified for that individual child can an appropriate and uniquely tailored level of support be given. Allocating resources to areas of greatest deprivation will help, but only if they are drilled down to find each and every child in need. Otherwise, the money will be lost in education departments who will only need to tell the Scottish Government every two years what efforts they have made to address poor attainment in our schools. The areas of highest deprivation, do not directly correlate to the areas of lowest attainment. That is a point that is lost on many SNP speakers. If I could give the example, Midlothian is the fifth lowest in Scotland in terms of achievement, but they get nothing. Angus, who is ninth lowest in achievement at level 5, also get nothing. Last week and this week, SNP speakers have focused almost on poverty and deprivation as the main issue determining attainment levels. Indeed, it is one issue, but one of many. The Audit Scotland report last year confirmed that East Lothian and Inverclyde have almost identical levels of attainment but widely different levels of deprivation, but Inverclyde will receive attainment funding, but East Lothian gets nothing, and yet their achievement levels are identical, as the report says. Some schools, as Audit Scotland also says, achieve better attainment results than their levels of deprivation would indicate. So, although deprivation is a factor, Audit Scotland identified two important factors in raising attainment as improving teacher quality and developing leadership, both of which are already being done by Glasgow City Council, who have invested in staff development, with 90 managers completing aspiring heads programme and over 100 teachers achieving the Harvard leaders of learning accreditation. So, what happens to the child living in an area of medium to low deprivation? Will they get nothing? So, we need a system, not for an area but a system that identifies every child. Between Glasgow's approach to leadership and development and East Renfrewshire's approach to testing every child to identify learning needs, the Scottish Government would do well to look at what is working in Scottish education, to look for the evaluation and understanding of the money spent and what is achieved in terms of attainment, to ensure that the 100 million does do what we all want it to do. I would also hope that some resources will go into preschool education to ensure that children start school with the appropriate support provided. I think that most of the speeches today have been about what happens in school, but I think that we need to look at preschool as well. But with the percentage of pupils achieving five awards at level five at 30 per cent in Dundee, Clarkmaninshire and Glasgow and over 70 per cent in East Renfrewshire, East Dunbarton, Shetland and Perthyn Cynros, there is no doubting where some of the hard work needs to start. The Royal Society of Edinburgh confirms that there is no national assessment data and also that states that the Scottish Government's strategic approach is seriously unclear for the future bill to address attainment. I am going on my remaining seconds. We have from Sue Ellis University of Strathclyde. We have four proposals. It is fairly simple. The GTC, to look at whether sufficient weight has been given to literacy, I mentioned earlier. Secondly, Education Scotland, looking at linguistic analysis and teaching again. Thirdly, a new understanding of the usefulness of data in schools. Finally, the Scottish Government should encourage schools to create positive cultures for data use with three national available tests, standardised where appropriate. Testing is the answer. It has to be done in order to identify that individual child who needs support. Thank you very much. I now call in Mark Griffin. Nine minutes please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Addressing the attainment gap in our schools is one of our top priorities. We welcomed the Scottish Government's recently announced plans to try and tackle it after eight years in government. Educational inequality is a symptom of a deeper problem of poverty, which we need to address. The focus nature of any programme is vital, rather than the area-based approach that Liam McArthur raised. In the debate last week, I talked about the situation in Cymynald, where the variation in educational attainment is massive. In the council ward of Cymynald North, the child poverty level is 8 per cent, which is too high. However, when you cross over the footbridge across the M80 into Cymynald South, a two-minute walk child poverty trebles to a staggering 23 per cent. That is exactly the same different universe that George Adam mentioned with East and West Paisley, except that is just a two-minute walk across a motorway. Mr Griffin, could I ask you if you could pull your microphone slightly towards it and get a bit of an echo? That difference in child poverty impacts on the educational attainment of young people, which can stop them from breaking out of that vicious cycle of poverty. The measures that we agree to tackle attainment and equity must be focused on our most deprived communities as a result. I think that the examples from Fife, given by Kara Hilton and Alex Rowley show that that targeted approach really sees results. With that in mind, we would use the additional revenues from a new 50p tax rate, redistributing resources from those who can afford it to those who need it most to invest an additional £25 million per year over and above the Government's proposals to tackle educational disadvantage. We have doubled the number of teaching assistants in every primary school that is associated with the 20 secondary schools facing the greatest challenges of deprivation. We have supported provision of high-quality wraparound care for primary school pupils, such as the provision of breakfast clubs and homework clubs, to give pupils a productive start and end to the school day, extending the ability of education to break people out of that cycle of poverty. The issues raised by Gordon MacDonald, where he said that the approach of education alone is not enough, but if we extend the impact of that education to those wraparound provisions, then it can make a bigger difference. We would also introduce a new literacy programme for schools and recruit and train specialists to support pupils in the associated primary schools and first and second-year pupils in the 20 secondary schools in those areas of highest deprivation. As raised by Johann Lamontchick Brody, the intervention and support of parents in their child's education cannot be underestimated. That is why we would also offer support to parents so that they can learn with their children. We would also introduce a special literacy support programme for looked after children. I would support Mary Scanlon's point, where we would ask Education Scotland to carry out an annual review on progress to tackling the educational inequality in Scotland through the schools inspectorate programme rather than that two-yearly assessment. We would look for that report to include a specific section on looked after children and the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Life and Learning to report to Parliament on the progress that is being made annually to reduce the attainment gap and allow that progress to be monitored and scrutinised by Parliament. It has been raised in a wider context about the contribution that computer science, maths and those key subjects can make to the economy. That is what we forget when we are talking about the abstract of an attainment gap or equity in education. It is the highly skilled positions that we need to be skilling our young people to then go on and enter the jobs market. There is an expectation that by 2030 in the UK over 7 million jobs will depend on science skills. Those science roles are exactly what we need—high quality, highly skilled, highly paid jobs—which other economies would struggle to compete with us for. I wonder whether Mark Griffin would agree that it is not just stem subject to me, it is also steam subject and the importance that the arts play in making sure that we have fully rounded people going into the workforce. I totally agree with that. The contribution that arts make certainly to my own field of study and engineering was certainly clear the creative skills that were brought to bear at university with those who had studied in those fields in terms of designing invention by people from those backgrounds. The point that I was about to make was that by 2030, when those jobs will be available, the four and five-year-olds who are starting primary school this summer will already be in work or possibly the final years of study. If current spending levels continue, the same pupils with the same academic ability, the same attitude for science in England will have enjoyed more than 10 years of state education, with 80 per cent more in primary school and 27 per cent more in secondary school spent on science equipment, according to a recently published report from the Learned Societies group. They also flagged up the issue of 98 per cent of Scottish schools depending on external funding for science equipment, which has a bigger impact on our deprived communities, where the parents will struggle to make a contribution to their children's education, and they will struggle much more than those affluent communities. The issue of science equipment—I have already spoken about that in Parliament—was raised by Johann Lamont on technicians, school support staff and staff in schools other than teachers. I recently had an FOI request to all 32 local authorities on science technician and science support staff, and there has been an overall drop in the numbers of science technicians and one authority cutting staff by over 50 per cent. Those are the staff who maintain and repair equipment and give advice beyond the capability of the teacher. Those are the skills that are focused in that the right areas could be equipped in bridging that gap for pupils in our most deprived communities. I have raised that as well in the chamber in relation to computer science. Again, as a result of the cuts that we have seen, computer science teacher numbers fallen, and there has been a disparity around how computer science teachers are identified and how we are able to tackle that and to give pupils in our most deprived communities the opportunities to bridge that attainment gap across the field to enter those highly paid and lucrative professions. As I have said already, we would use that additional revenue from our new 50p top-grade attacks, redistributing resources from those who can afford it to those who need it most. We would invest that additional £25 million per year over and above the Government's proposals to tackle educational disadvantage and ensure that pupils who face the greatest educational challenges have the opportunity to achieve the qualifications that they need. I am glad that the Government is making educational attainment a priority after eight years in government. I hope that it will look at the areas where our proposals can improve those plans by redistributing wealth and increasing the resources available. I thank you. I will call on Angela Constance to wind up the debate, cabinet secretary. You have until five o'clock. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I start by saying to Stevenson and Mary Scanlon that I think the days of learning your times table backwards in Latin has probably long gone, but my own seven-year-old assures me that mental maths is alive and well in our primary schools. Touching on maths, I want to make a serious point—I think that it was raised by Mr Gray and other members—that education ministers have indeed discussed the concerns of parents and young people with the SQA regarding last week's maths and biology exams. SQA has made a very public statement and has assured us that it has robust regular procedures in place to ensure that no candidate is disadvantaged if an exam paper turns out to be more demanding than intended to be. I very much appreciate her responding to one of the questions that I posed, but I did make the point that what SQA is saying there is that they employ proportionate marking, that they scale the results, but for those students who were so upset that they left early, that will not, in fact, solve the problem. The SQA has also confirmed to ministers that it also considers where there has been evidence that, if a question early on an exam paper has put students off or caused distress and has limited their participation in the rest of the paper. I have enjoyed today's debate and the many contributions, and I want to pay tribute to Cara Hilton, because I welcome the positive developments that she has described, because they show what can be achieved with focused local action backed up by the good use of data. We will certainly work with Fife and other councils in developing our national improvement framework. I can also say to Mary Scanlon that I am very well aware of the work that was undertaken by Professor Sue Ellis, and when I spoke at the Robert Owen Centre last week, I agreed with her that we do need to have a debate about the use of data that is proportionate and sensible, and not a burden to either children or to teachers. It is crucial that when we consider our education system that we do consider it in its entirety, and most speakers have done exactly that. Equity and excellence has to start in the early years and continue throughout schooling and onwards into vocational education and further in higher education also. I want to reassure Liam McArthur that we are most certainly not turning the clock back to year zero, because under this Government, we have seen a massive expansion of early learning and childcare, and we are not done yet. We have also introduced or implemented the golden threads of opportunities for all, pioneered, I have to say, by Michael Russell, the first country in these islands to introduce a guarantee to every 16 to 19-year-old of a place in education or training. We also have teaching Scotland's future curriculum for excellence and crucially developing Scotland's young workforce. Sorry, Liam McArthur, please. I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for taking intervention. As I said earlier, I think that she has adopted a generally constructive approach to this debate and I very much welcome that. In that spirit, would she be able to set out a likely timeframe for increasing the opportunities for two-year-olds and those disadvantaged backgrounds from the 27 per cent at the moment to the 40 per cent that we are seeing south of the border? Of course, Mr McArthur will be well aware that we are just about to increase provision to the 27 per cent most vulnerable two-year-olds. I suppose that I am a little bit skeptical of the progress that has been made south of the border, where recent surveys have shown that 40 per cent of councils in England have struggled to deliver that 40 per cent commitment. However, this Government has done more than any previous administration to massively expand the early years. We must also remember that it is not just childcare—important though that is, this is childcare and early learning. What this Government has done throughout its tenure is, yes, we have had to make very difficult decisions about reform and public services at a time of great financial pressure. College reform has been challenging and it has not been without its controversies. However, it has delivered more for those who are under 25 and over 25 years, as I hope I have demonstrated in my exchange with Johann Lamont earlier today. Where Johann Lamont is right and what I think we need to do more about is that we need to ensure that parents who need additional support with their own literacy and numeracy needs that they, indeed, can access that support, whether it is in colleges, whether it is through adult learning, whether it is through community learning and development. We have already started some of this work with a very ambitious statement on adult learning, because the evidence tells us that parents' involvement and their own literacy and numeracy is absolutely vital in terms of raising attainment for all children. Johann Lamont Come what the cabinet secretary has said, but we would encourage her again to reflect on what he said about support staff at secondary school stage. We do know that boys in particular drop out of the system in first and second year. That explains the level of literacy for some young adults. If we sort that, it means that we have a lesser problem at a later stage. I am encouraged by Ms Lamont and if I could say that I am not blind to the gender challenges either for young women or indeed for young men, can I say that in terms of the issue that she raised with regard to classroom assistance, there has not actually been a fall in classroom assistance. It has increased by 6 per cent from 5,700 to an excess of 6,000. Nonetheless, we have to recognise that while this Government is absolutely committed to maintaining teacher numbers, there is a wider education and learning community. What this Government has not done and what this Government will absolutely never do is allow austerity to limit our ambitions for our children and for our young people. That is why we have proceeded with £100 million fund through the Scottish attainment challenge, which will, in the first instance, reach 50 per cent of Scotland's poorer children. Of course, we want to reach all of Scotland's children, and we will continue to pick up the pace with this work and say something soon about how other areas in Scotland can benefit, particularly those areas with deep-entrenched pockets of poverty. I would also like to clarify for some members that the total revenue spending on schools has risen by £208 million. I know that councils plan to spend more on education in 2014-15 than they did last year. We will see whether that has been borne out with figures that are due to be published later on in the week. If I can also add, there are indeed more disadvantaged young people going to university under this Government than the previous, but we know that we have more to do and we need to improve this area, and that is why we are proceeding with the work that is under the commission for widening access. Curriculum for excellence is a success story, but time stands still for no-one. The Accounts Commission report in 2014 that was mentioned by Mary Scanlon shows that performance has improved against all 10 of the attainment measures that have been examined over the past decade. We know that the proportion of young people with low or no qualifications has fallen further and faster under this Government. However, while I can point to disadvantaged young people achieving more and better qualifications, we know that the gap still remains. For example, a third of our most deprived young people left school with at least one higher, and while that is up from 20 per cent, the gap that remains is massive, with 82 per cent of children from the least deprived communities leaving with one higher. That is why I want to pick up on the point raised by Liz Smith, that this has to be about raising attainment for all children as well as closing the attainment gap. All of our children have to be challenged throughout their educational journey, but they also have to be cherished and cared for at the same time. If I can say to Liz Smith and Ian Gray that, while we will honestly and dispassantly praise where we are today in education, we should be very careful about not hankering back to the past and looking at our past educational performance through rose tinted glasses. We have to be very thoroughly focused on concentrating on the future. My final point is that some speakers have made very personal reflections in today's debate, and I want to end on a personal note. I am an education secretary who, once upon a time, was a kid with a free school meals ticket from a family and a community that, in today's parlance, is described as poor or disadvantaged. I am very thankful because at times I was very well supported, but there were also at times where I was held back or written off. Therefore, while at times I am far less than word perfect and not all that polished, I have a grit and a determination and indeed an anger that in resource rich Scotland no child should be left behind. We must have the highest expectations and the highest hopes and dreams and aspirations for all our children. If I had to have one mantra, it would be this. If it is not good enough for my son, it is not good enough for anybody's child, and it is most certainly not good enough for Scotland's poorest children. As a Government, we will absolutely do everything to eradicate poverty. We are not going to lie down to it. We will do everything, despite our limitations, to overcome it. What is the alternative? Our children do not deserve our anguish, the deserve our anger and the deserve action, and we are most certainly not powerless in this. As we must now proceed with courage, courage to have a conversation with each other and courage to challenge each other and the courage to embrace, debate and be led by the evidence to ensure that every child in every community has every chance. Thank you that concluded debate on equity and excellence in education. The next site of business is consideration of business motion number 13264, in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau, setting out a revision to the business programme for the week. Any member who wishes to speak against the motion should press a request to speak, but now, and I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion number 13264. Firmly moved. Thank you. No member has asked to speak against the motion there for our now put the question chamber. The question is that motion number 13264, in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, be agreed to. Are we all great? The motion is there for agreed to. The next site of business is decision time. There are four questions to be put as a result of today's business. Can I remind members that, in relation to today's debate, if the amendment in the name of Ian Gray is agreed, the amendments in the name of Liz Smith and Liam McArthur fall? The first question, then, is that amendment number 13246.2, in the name of Ian Gray, which seeks to amend motion number 13246, in the name of Angela Constance, on equity and excellence in education, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 13246.2, in the name of Ian Gray, is as follows. Yes. 47. No. 58. There were four abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. Can I remind members now that, if the amendment in the name of Liz Smith is agreed to, the amendment in the name of Liam McArthur falls? So, the question is that amendment number 13246.1, in the name of Liz Smith, which seeks to amend motion number 13246, in the name of Angela Constance, on equity and excellence in education, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 13246.1, in the name of Liz Smith, is as follows. Yes. 13. No. 97. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is amendment number 13246.3, in the name of Liam McArthur, which seeks to amend motion number 13246, in the name of Angela Constance, on equity and excellence in education, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 13246.3, in the name of Liam McArthur, is as follows. Yes. 17. No. 64. There were 29 abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is at motion number 13246, in the name of Angela Constance, on equity and excellence in education, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion number 13246. In the name of Angela Constance, is as follows. Yes. 67. No. 13. There were 30 abstentions. The motion is therefore agreed to. Mr Lyle, do you have a point of order? You don't have a point of order. No, you don't have to, Mr Lyle. Well, I believe that it was 13264, not 13246. I just say, Mr Lyle, it was not a point of order. It could have been a point of information, but I have been assured by the clerk that I actually called it properly this time. Can I also remind all members that we do not have points of order during decision time? That concludes decision time. We are now moving to members' business. Members who leave the chamber should do so quickly and quietly.