 The statement by the Deputy First Minister. My apologies to the two members I was unable to call. The next item of business is a debate on motion number 15282 in the name of Angela Constance on delivering a world-class education system, and I'll just give a few moments for people to get into their proper seats. Can I invite members who are staying for this debate and who wish to speak in the debate to press the request-to-speak button now, and I call on Angela Constance to speak to and move the motion. Cabinet Secretary, you have 14 minutes. Thank you, Presiding Officer. It's a pleasure to open this debate, particularly at this time. It's the start of a new and exciting year for education in Scotland. Just six days ago at the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement in Glasgow, the First Minister launched the National Improvement Framework, and four weeks ago the OECD published the review of our progress with curriculum for excellence. We are extremely grateful to the OECD review team for their thoughtful and comprehensive reports entitled Improving Schools in Scotland and OECD Perspective. We very much welcome the report and its 12 recommendations, which provide us with a strong platform to help to reach our goal of an excellent and equitable system, where every young person is able to achieve their full potential irrespective of their background or needs. It is important to reflect on the many strengths that the report highlights about curriculum for excellence. For example, it states that curriculum for excellence is an important reform to put in place a coherent 3 to 18 curriculum, which rests on widely accepted tenants of what makes for powerful learning. The deputy director of the OECD's directorate for education and skills Montserrat Gomendio said, we applaud Scotland for having the foresight and patience to put such an ambitious reform as curriculum for excellence in place. The OECD notes a picture of positive attitudes, engagement and motivation, partnerships outside the school, supportive ethos and teamwork, and that learners are enthusiastic and motivated, and teachers are engaged and professional and system leaders are highly committed. I am particularly heartened at the OECD's findings that our education is inclusive and that our children are resilient, and that is exactly what curriculum for excellence is designed to foster. I can assure members that our response to those positive endorsements and, indeed, all of the recommendations will be bold, focused and resolute. I think that what parents and families around a country will recognise above all else is that schools are completely different now to what they were when they were at school, whether that was 10 or 20 years ago. In my many visits to schools, I am always struck by how confident, articulate and enthusiastic our children and young people are and how they really own their own learning. That is due in part to the freedom that schools have with curriculum for excellence, the freedom to adopt a curriculum that is relevant to learners' needs, to local contexts and settings, which builds on the teachers' expertise and talents, as well as the interests of learners. Curriculum for excellence has given us a broader, more flexible and child-focused curriculum. It will ensure that young people have the opportunity to develop the right range of skills, qualifications and achievements to allow them to flourish. Learning at school is now exciting, stimulating, lively and crucially fun. Children are highly motivated and enthusiastic, teachers, professional, engaged and committed. All of that is delivering higher standards of achievement. Last year, there was a record number of passes at higher and advanced higher and more young people received qualifications relating to wider skills for life and work. More students are staying on at school until six years, fewer are leaving with very low or no qualifications and all young people can now undertake relevant work-related learning as part of their curriculum. Now more than nine out of ten of last year's school leavers were in employment education or training nine months later. The OECD highlighted that. If there is analysis of the proportion of one out of ten who have not got satisfactory destinations, have come from those poor and deprived backgrounds in Scotland. I think that, Ms Lamont, you would know as well as I do that the relationship between young people not in positive destinations and their socioeconomic background will indeed be very high. One of the things that I have worked on along with colleagues in the fair work and youth employment and skills is to move towards a more meaningful real-time measurement of where individual young people are in terms of positive destinations. It was this Government that was committed to opportunities for all. It was this Government that led the way across the UK and introduced opportunities for all, ensuring that there was an entitlement for every 16 to 19-year-old in this country of a place in education or training who required one. The OECD highlighted that Scotland has a historic high regard for learning, education and teachers, and the trust that it invests in teachers professional judgment is an admirable counterbalance to the trend in many other systems. The quality of our teaching workforce and the excellence of our educational leadership provide the bedrock of our education system. As a Government, we will continue to do all that we can to support and strengthen teacher professionalism. That is why we are investing in our teachers, the initial teacher education and professional learning, and in maintaining the numbers of teachers working in our schools. It is also why we have worked with partners to embed the core ideas of teaching Scotland's future and will continue to do so through a new strategic board for teacher education. Of course. That was very great for the cabinet secretary giving away. She rightly made the point about teacher professionalism, which she recognised that in her new head teacher qualification it is important to recognise the difference between rural authorities with rural schools and small schools and the larger schools and the difficulties sometimes of recruitment given that narrow qualification requirement. I do indeed appreciate that there are particular challenges for rural communities, especially communities where they have small schools. That is something that I discussed last summer when I attended the first of our islands education summit on education. We are working closely on how we roll out that commitment to ensure that all new head teachers come to 2018 are indeed in possession of the headship qualification. Being a head teacher is a professionally and personally demanding role, and we have to ensure that all head teachers are supported to achieve the very best in that post, because of that all the evidence shows us that it is necessary for our children also to achieve their best. We have already established the Scottish College for Educational Leadership. It has committed £4 million over the past three years to support master's level learning for teachers and created partnerships between universities and local authorities to improve teachers' experiences in the early part of their careers and provide high-quality learning opportunities for experienced teachers. We are also taking steps to require all new head teachers to be qualified before appointment, as I have outlined to Mr Scott. We are in a good place, but the OECD's recommendations give a clear sense of how we can improve our system further, specifically to close the attainment gap and delivering excellence and equity in education for all. Those include the need to ensure an approach to improving equity based on what is known to work well, to strengthen the professional leadership of curriculum for excellence on a local basis, to simplify and clarify core guidance on curriculum for excellence, to further support strong relationships between schools and the wider communities that they serve, and to develop an integrated framework for assessment and evaluation that encompasses all system levels. The OECD report states that curriculum for excellence is at a watershed moment and suggests that what is now needed is a bold approach that moves beyond system management in recognition of a new dynamic and energy generated nearer to teaching and learning. I wholeheartedly agree with that. That is why, last week, after three months of extensive consultation with thousands of teachers, parents, educationalists and crucially children and young people, we launched the national improvement framework based on four key priorities for education—raising attainment, closing the attainment gap, improving health and wellbeing and improving employability. The framework is broad and comprehensive and sets out measures for school improvement, school leadership, supporting teachers and engaging parents. I want to be very clear that our faith in the expertise and judgment of teachers is absolutely central in assessing pupil progress and the continuation of the curriculum for excellence assessment framework. That approach will support an understanding of what works and therefore enable rapid and significant improvement. Teacher judgment lies at the heart of the system. From 2017, following pilots later this year, teacher judgment will be informed by a system of new national standardised assessments at primaries 147 and S3, which will help teachers and parents to make better, more objective and more consistent judgments about children's progress towards the different curriculum levels. That teacher judgment data, underpinned by the new assessments, will be collected and published nationally each year to give us, for the very first time, a clear and consistent picture of how children and young people are progressing in their learning. The national recruitment framework creates a system that strikes the right balance between supporting the development of individual children and providing information and accountability about national and local performance. Teachers will be able to use the new assessments during the school year to help inform their judgments about and action to support individual children. Assessment must be used in a way that both informs and elicits timely action to improve outcomes for our children. For parents, it will mean clear meaningful information on their child's progress, which is consistently presented no matter where they are in the country. For teachers, local authorities and community planning partnerships, it means better data for identifying areas for improvement. For the Scottish Government, it means that we will have clear information to guide national policy. Crucially, it means that everyone gets enough information early enough in children's education to pinpoint issues for individuals, schools, local areas and at a national level and to address them with the right support at the right time. We can be rightly proud of the success that our education system delivers for most of our children, as it was evaluated and reported on by Athyra, an independent team of experts at the OECD. It has broadly endorsed our approach and given us 12 recommendations for action on where we can make further improvements. In particular, it concluded that we have a great opportunity to lead the world in developing an integrated assessment and evaluation framework. That is what our new national improvement framework is designed to achieve, but we must not lose sight of the fact that success is elusive for some of our children, particularly those from deprived communities. The gap in attainment is narrowing, but if we are to achieve our ambition of delivering a world-class education system for all of our children, then we must and will do more. The Government has already started work on taking forward the OECD's reports recommendations with vigor and energy, and we are considering how to capitalise on this watershed moment identified for curriculum for excellence. We have launched a national improvement framework and are now focused very much on its implementation. We have put education at the very heart of our agenda so that we can create a system focused on attainment and achievement that is built around delivering equity and excellence and, crucially, aspiration and ambition—in other words, a world-class education system. I move the motion in my name. Excellent. Thank you for finishing on time. It is very tight for time today. Before I call on Ian Gray to remind people who wish to speak in the debate to press the request-to-speak buttons, I call on Ian Gray to speak to and move amendment 15282.3 Up to 10 minutes. I rise to move the amendment in my name. We all want Scotland to have a world-class education system, and our amendment is designed to strengthen the Government motion in which there is little to object to, apart from the usual complacency and the complete absence of any action towards the end it purports to pursue. No wonder, since there is no aspect of this Government's record which moves us closer to a world-class education system. It is quite the reverse. After nine years in power, it has achieved almost four and a half thousand fewer teachers in our schools, 140,000 fewer students in our colleges, bigger class sizes, though they promise smaller, student debt doubled, though they promise to abolish it, fewer level 3 and 4 apprenticeships than we had even 10 years ago, falling standards in literacy and numeracy and the attainment gap between the rich and the rest as bad as ever. In next year's budget, we see cuts in spending in real terms to higher education, to further education, and £500 million slashed from council budgets, the very councils who have to deliver, of course, are school education. You simply cannot claim to be taking education forward if you are clawing education funding back year on year. Of course, the Government found now on the OECD review, as the education secretary did today. I thank the member for giving way. He mentions the challenging time for local authority budgets. Has he reached a view yet as to where he would seek to find this money elsewhere in the budget and what he would intend to achieve? To come here and say that you are supporting schools education while taking £0.5 billion from local government cannot be an honest approach to either politics or budgeting. The OECD report actually says—this is what it says in summary—that we are above average but that the world is catching up. It says that there are declining relative and absolute achievement levels on international data. It says that performance, illiteracy and numeracy are declining. As I said last week, the Government may be satisfied with the domination of such faint praise but it is not good enough for Scotland. For once, we did claim a world-leading education system in reality, not just aspiration. Our system has been a world leader over history, right back to the world's first education active Parliament, a school in every parish in the 17th century. In the 20th century, Scotland led the way in the creation of comprehensive schools serving the whole community. Breads of curriculum, flexibility, equity and high attainment—those have always been the principles on which we have in the past led the world. We have to nurture exactly those values anew in the 21st century now. That is why the pernicious attainment gap matters so much. The OECD report tells us that the gap is increasing as measured by illiteracy and numeracy. It acknowledges Government initiatives to address that, but it also tells us that there is no strategy to be seen and warns of a danger of what it calls a scattergurn approach. It is right. Firstly, a framework of any kind will not close the attainment gap, but it best will describe it. Although, in our view, the dangers of the national improvement framework are wildly overstated in the Liberal Democrat amendment, but it best will give us information on which we must act or it will be of little value. When it comes to the Scottish Government's attainment challenge fund, it is simply under-resourced and badly targeted. The First Minister re-announced bits of it again yesterday in another new and apparently random initiative. That attainment fund has been announced a couple of million pounds at a time. Salami sliced into a plethora of projects, giving every appearance to be made up as they go along. In truth, it looks less like a focused strategy to close the attainment gap and more like a convenient instrument to fill the First Minister's media grid. I have talked before about Cochran Castle in St David's schools in Johnson's two schools, one building and the same community. One gets attainment funding and the other does not. Last week, I was in East Ayrshire this time in Kilmarnock, where children at one end of a street go to one school and the other end of the same street somewhere else. One will get attainment fund support in their school and the other will not. It makes no sense. Labour's fair start funding proposal would fix this. Indeed, East Ayrshire, where Kilmarnock, of course, is found, would receive over £2 million under our proposal instead of a few thousand and half a dozen primaries. My constituency of East Lothian, the schools would share almost £900,000 instead of not one single penny. Nurseries would benefit too in our proposal because we know, and the OECD report tells us this again, that the gap is already established by age 5. It persists. At the weekend, we saw new figures regarding the attainment gap in senior school because when it comes to three hires or more, the gap between those from poorer families and those from the richest grew yet again last year. The OECD report has nothing to say about that because it only reviewed primary 1 to S3, but today we have placed in Spice an important submission that it received from education expert Dr Jim Scott on the impact of the new national 3, 4 and 5 exams. Dr Scott showed last year that the new qualifications had narrowed the curriculum and reduced attainment. Ministers dismissed his concerns. Now, analysis of the second year of the new exams show that those trends have continued. Those teachers, the education secretary, purported to respect so much, made similar warnings to and have had to ballot for industrial action just to get a hearing. Dr Scott shows that overall level 3 to 5 enrolment dropped by 17 per cent compared to standard grades and attainment by 24 per cent. In French and German, the drop is almost 50 per cent and Gaelic learners it is 60 per cent. At level 5 credit level, as was, pass rates have dropped below 80 per cent from the low 90s. Dr Scott is very clear who is suffering here. He says that lessable and middle-ranking learners appear to have differentially disappeared from both passes and enrolment. Ministers cannot dismiss those figures. The amount to the loss of over 92,500 level 3 to 5 enrolments and 120,000 grade A to C passes at those levels is exactly the pupils at the wrong end of the attainment gap who are affected. That threatens the historical progress that the education secretary claimed as her own earlier. It is true that, in 1965, when comprehensive education was introduced, 70 per cent of pupils left school with no qualification at all. Reforms such as raising the leaving age and standard grades took that to less than 5 per cent. However, the truth is that we have never completely pushed comprehensive education through to senior years. Those figures show that curriculum for excellence has created an unintended narrowing of the curriculum there, too. A world-class education system has to have more, not fewer paths for young people, vocational as well as educational. It is time to make that reform. Reforming senior phases, encompassing colleges, universities, learning hubs and work experience as well as school is a reform that would properly reflect the recommendations of the wood report and learn from systems elsewhere such as Germany and Finland. It is built on a new parity of esteem between academic and vocational attainment and a new trust between sectors. It would require a proper reinvestment in colleges so that they can re-establish their central position in a world-class system of education and training. Instead of reducing and narrowing the qualifications of thousands of young Scots, we should now seek ways to broaden and raise attainment, perhaps by creating a Scottish graduation certificate, reflecting exam results, vocational training, work experience, structured voluntary work, foundation apprenticeships, open university, YAS courses, all of those things pool together and properly resourced and recognised. The OECD report calls this time on what I said and that is right. To make the best use of that moment, we must have the honesty to admit and to face up to the problems in our education system. We must have the political will to provide the resources that we need and the courage to push through curriculum for excellence to the senior phase, and then we can claim to be delivering a world-class education system. One thing is for sure, cuts and complacency will not do it. Thank you very much. Now Colin Lear MacArthur to speak to you and move amendment 1528 to point 1. Mr MacArthur, up to six minutes please. Thank you very much, everybody, Presiding Officer. Aspiring to a world-class education system is absolutely where our sites should be set. It is not to denigrate the work of those working in our schools, colleges, universities and other parts of the education system. Many are pioneering, delivering exceptionally high quality education to those in their care, and I pay tribute to them for their efforts. However, this is about how we build from that base, recognising the challenges set out in the OECD report, as Ian Gray said, and presented by an ever more globalised world where change is remorseless and rapid. Our young people need the skills to equip them not just to cope but to thrive. That, in part, is why curriculum for excellence was developed, providing a depth, breadth and richness of learning that allows successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors to emerge. However, the evidence suggests that, all too often, those from disadvantaged backgrounds are still not able to fulfil their potential. By the time they arrive in formal education, the gap for many has already opened up and has never successfully narrowed far less closed. Ministers are right to have identified that as a priority, albeit eight years, into their office. The question is whether that approach is likely to be effective. Indeed, academics, as Ian Gray pointed out at Dundee University, warm that we are going in the wrong direction in certain respects. Clearly, closing the attainment gap and achieving greater equity of outcomes is not something that can or should rest with our education system critical though it undoubtedly is. That said, ministers present the NIF as a centre piece of their strategy. An improving school leadership, teacher professionalism, parental involvement and performance information are all sensible and necessary components of any such strategy. Where I have a problem and the minister will not be surprised by this, is in the determination to reintroduce national testing in our primary schools. This move, whose sole advocates previously were the Scottish Conservatives, goes against the very ethos of curriculum for excellence. Assessment of pupils, of course, is at the heart of good teaching. Teachers do this on a daily basis, observing what happens in the classroom, marking pupils' work and gleaning information from the standardised tests that are already in place and, crucially, from having an in-depth knowledge of the young person as an individual. The Scottish education system has no shortage of such data, particularly at classroom and school level. The focus should be on making better use of this wealth of information. National tests in literacy and numeracy simply will not provide a rounded evaluation of student learning. The risk of error is high, yet the information will inform Government policy and decisions. Whether ministers believe that they are sanctioning teaching to the test or lead tables, those are likely to be the inevitable consequence of introducing national testing in primary schools. That is why teaching unions, individual teachers, parent-teacher councils and parents are all expressing concern. A one-size-fits-all approach that one education expert recently denounced as hopelessly blunt has also been described by teaching unions as a backward step. However, not all that far backwards—not so long ago, the former education secretary, Mr Russell, was describing the previous national testing regime in its lead tables as, quote, "'thatcherite". I recall the SNP hailed the scrapping of these Tory tests by the Labour Lib Dem executive. They even sought to claim credit for it." Of course, the minister prayed in aid the recent OECD report, but even here there are warnings about the dangers of crude testing systems. Historically, in terms of educational reform, quote, "'outcomes-based learning succeeded by high-stakes testing and a broad but inconsistently interpreted curriculum gives way to a prescriptive and more basic one." For all the assurances offered by the First Minister and the education secretary, the Scottish Liberal Democrats remain unconvinced by the case for national tests, either to help to close the attainment gap or to achieve a world-leading education system. The skepticism may partly be informed by what has happened from ministerial assurances on early learning and childcare. Under pressure from my party, the Government promised to deliver free provision for 27% of two-year-olds from the poorest backgrounds by last summer. New figures show that only 7% currently benefit. Interestingly, in terms of the twin name of raising attainment and closing the gap, the Royal Society appeared to question whether, indeed, both are compatible. It suggests that quote, "'universal approaches aimed at raising attainment may do so, but in a way that does not lead to greater equity." Increased parental involvement, for example, quote, "'could increase the gap." This point presumably is made to underscore what the Royal Society sees as the need for quote, "'re-prioritisation' and redeployment of existing education expenditure." While ministers will point to their attainment fund and its recent extension to additional local authority areas, that still rather misses the point. 11 councils remain ineligible for funding, despite the fact that children in need are to be found in communities the length and breadth of Scotland. Ministers picking and choosing postcodes flies in the face of the reality of poverty and need. That is why Scottish Liberal Democrats like to save the children, believe in a pupil premium, linking funding to the individual child in need, being the right approach, as happened south of the border, thanks to the previous coalition government. In addition, the attainment fund has to be seen in the context of Mr Swinney's brutal cut of £500 million in local authority budgets next year. Orkney Islands Council had been preparing for a cut of 1.6 per cent. The reality is an eye-watering 4.3 per cent cut, a settlement that the convener described as wholly unacceptable. Given that education is around half of what councils do in budgetary terms, the cuts are likely to fall most heavily on the education budget. Diolch yn fawr i'r S&P claims about prioritising education and those councils to carry the can for the government's failure to put its money where its mouth is. The ambition of creating a world-class education system is one that I wholeheartedly support, so to the objective of enabling every child and young person to fulfil their potential. I question, though, whether the S&P's obsession with a return to national standardised testing under achievement on early learning and cuts to council funding is a recipe to achieving those aims. I move the amendment in my name. I would like to start by saying that, unusually, we are supporting the governance motion today. The reason is that the Government has acknowledged the recommendations of the OECD. It has accepted the recommendations of the OECD, acknowledged areas for improvement and the determination to focus on excellence and equity, along with looking at not just the Government councils, teachers and so on, but what I want and I think the Government wants is that no single child will be left behind. The fact that they have stated the full potential, regardless of their family circumstances or background, is that they have borne into it. We fully accept that. It is a nice change to look at a Government motion that is constructive in looking at the facts. It will be no surprise to Ian Gray that we are not supporting the 50p tax rate, and it will be even less of a surprise to Liam McArthur that we are not supporting his amendment, given his opposition to testing. There is just one thing that I would like to seek clarity on when the minister sums up. I listened very carefully to what she said about information being published, but I am not sure that I am entirely clear whether every single local authority will be mandatory on each one to use the new assessment tests in the national framework. It seems to be a bit of a divide, and that would be helpful if we could look at that. However, we are very much welcome to the fact that the Government is reintroducing national assessments in primary and secondary schools. As I said, the main issue is that no child is left behind. Some things that we would like to raise, in particular relation to literacy and numeracy, are the actual time that we welcome the fact that we are getting new teachers, but it is the time in the teacher training colleges that is allocated to literacy training. FYs have been done over the years by Stuart Maxwell and others, and as little as 25 hours is being spent on literacy training in Scotland teacher training colleges compared to an average of 90 in England. I think that, while looking at the teacher training programme, it would be enormously helpful if the Government could give that commitment to ensure that the teachers have the tools and the support to do the job that we expect them to do. We also welcome the investment of the £100 million for the attainment fund, but we want to make sure that that money is effectively spent. We would like to see the attainment fund money go directly to schools with high proportions of children from socially deprived backgrounds so that individual pupils with poor attainment are identified and supported in order to improve their attainment levels. If we go to the OECD report, there are, despite the 180 pages that I looked at, quite a few figures from the Audit Scotland report that I have highlighted many times. My main concern is the transition from primary 7 to S2. Attainment is not perfect, but it is not that bad at primary 4 and primary 7, but between primary 7 and S2, something strange happens in Scottish education and attainment dips dramatically. The other thing is that Scottish adolescents are less likely to report liking school than students in many other countries, and liking also drops sharply in secondary school according to the OECD. If I could just use a couple of figures, if we look in order to close the gap, we need to increase the percentage of pupils performing well and performing very well at a level. If we just look, it is falling between 2011 and 2013, with primary 7 going down by 6 per cent of performing well in those two years, and in S2 it has gone down again. However, the dramatic difference is that, in primary 7, in 2013, 66 per cent performed well, and in S2 it is 42 per cent. That is too huge a reduction, not to look at it significantly. That is for numeracy. If we then look at reading, the fall is again on primary 4, primary 7 and S2. There is a fall in performing well between 2012 and 2014, but there is also that drastic fall between primary 7 and S2. I feel that if the money is going to be spent wisely, we have to understand what happens, why there is such a deterioration in performance between primary 7 and S2, and why performance has deteriorated in the last couple of years. While we all want pupils with low attainment to do better, we would all hope to close the attainment gap, but I do not think that any of us want the standards from other deprived backgrounds to fall. People are performing less well from the least deprived backgrounds, as well as the most deprived backgrounds. I appreciate that my time is almost up now, Presiding Officer, and I will leave it there. We are extraordinarily tight for time today, so in order to protect the closing speakers on this debate, less would be more today, up to six minutes please. Thank you Presiding Officer. Like many of my colleagues here, fellow MSPs, I became involved in politics. I have said this in other debates in the past in education to try to make a difference in our community. Education is a cornerstone, and it is a foundation for all those desires to change lives. However, it is not easy, and that is why it is important for us to put in place a world-class education system that enables us as a nation to close the attainment gap, giving each child the best possible start in life and improving the life chances of her sons and daughters. The OECD report, published last month, highlights many positive areas in the Scottish education system, including our schools being highly inclusive and our levels of academic achievement being above international averages and distributed evenly. The report stated that there are clear upward trends in attainments and positive destinations. Over nine in 10 and 10 of school leavers entered a positive follow-up destination in 2014, and nearly two-thirds of school leavers continue in education. There have been continuous upward trend in recent years. A key point that I have taken from the report is that the OECD shares the Scottish Government's view that we have a great opportunity to lead the world in developing an integrated assessment and evaluation framework. I firmly believe that the framework will play an important role in driving towards closing the attainment gap and continually improving Scottish education. I wholeheartedly share the First Minister's view that education improving a child's life is the most important thing that we can do as a Government, and although the OECD report is very positive and notes the many strengths of our education system, like the First Minister, it notes areas that need improvement when launching the new national improvement framework that the First Minister stated. Despite the progress that we are making, nobody can be comfortable living in a country where different levels of wealth create such a significant gap in attainment, and therefore the life chances of so many children. That is why the Scottish Government is taking concerted action now. I feel that our point goes to the heart of this debate and what we are trying to do. Again, as highlighted in the report, children in Scotland are performing well. We still are producing the doctors and the scientists of the future, so we are getting it a lot right, but we need to do more and quickly to support all the children in Scotland and raise attainment across the board. The national improvement framework allows the Government, local authorities, teachers and parents to quickly see where there are issues and more swiftly to address them. Although teacher judgment will always be the heart of the system, we will see new nationalised standardised assessments for pupils in primary 1, primary 4, primary 7 and S3. The Scottish Government believes that, to be able to act swiftly, we need to understand what we are doing is working. Although some form of start devise assessment is already monitoring children's progress in other local authorities, those assessments have not been done and conducted on a consistent basis. As a result, they currently lack the information and overall performance at both national and local levels, so we need to identify where we need to improve and get on with doing the hard work. The OECD report makes 12 recommendations for action to improve Scotland's education system across the areas such as leadership and schools, issues that are presented by existing data sources and complexities around curriculum for excellence. However, all the indications that I can see are that we are already working towards improvements in those areas. The OECD report paints a largely positive picture of Scottish education and the on-going implementation of curriculum for excellence. Those improvements are being and will continue to be achieved by the many initiatives that are set up and funded by the Scottish Government. Currently, it is investing £1.5 million per year and reads right and count campaign to ensure that every primary one to primary three child has access to library brooks and education materials to improve early literacy and numeracy. Further investment will see more than £1 million over three years from 2014 to 2017 in national and local numeracy hubs to raise standards and to share best practice in teaching learning of math and numeracy levels. That is all in the back of the many achievements that the Scottish Government has already had in education. The pupil-teachers ratio is the same as last year. However, not resting on that and the third of January this year, the Scottish Government announced that over £2 million funding has been made available to train extra 260 teachers next year, the increase of 60 primary and 200 secondary school teachers. While I could go on all day about the good work that the Scottish Government has achieved at this stage in education, it is always important to look at where we have come from, how we got here, how have we improved. When you look at the fact that 40% of pupils from the 20 per cent most deprived areas are getting at least one higher, that is up from 23 per cent in 2007. A record percentage of young people are in work, education or training after leaving school. In 2006-2007, only 87 per cent of school leavers were in positive destinations. The OECD 2012 PISA service shows that we have halted the decline in Scotland's relative position in mass reading that began under Labour. Since 2009, under this Government, we have seen improvements against other OECD countries. In conclusion, are we getting everything right in Scotland? No, it would be foolish to say so and to think so, but is this Government committed to delivering a world-class education system? I would say yes. As the Scottish Government has worked in partnership with other organisations and everyone else in education, it is time for us to all work together in this chamber, like we did for Curriculum for Excellence, and work together for the benefit of every single child in Scotland. This Scottish Government debate today is here, I believe, not by choice, but is a reaction to the criticisms of the education policy. It is easy to see why the SNP is under attack. Young people from wealthier families are twice as likely to go to university as those from poorer backgrounds. Over 6,000 Scottish children leave primary unable to read properly, and teacher numbers are now at the lowest level for 10 years. Finally, after nearly nine years in power and after nine years of Scottish labour pressure, the SNP has admitted that it needs to up its game. If it gets back into power, it will make education its focus unless it decides to have another referendum. So what do we get? We get a framework designed for sound bites that does not address the gap between the rich and poor, offers little by the way of real change, and for its big idea has the heavy introduction of national testing. Of course, there was an outcry from the professionals, and rightly so, because they thought they had got rid of unhelpful league tables a decade ago. So now it is called standardised testing and definitely not league tables, the First Minister insisted in the newspapers. But in January 6 this year she tweeted that the percentage of pupils achieving literacy and numeracy curriculum levels will be published by school. So how does that work then? How will the SNP stop people turning published results into league tables, and perhaps the cabinet secretary can tell us that when she is summing up on her closing remarks. Scotland has, of course, dropped down the European educational league tables, but the latest OECD report does highlight some potentially good things that are happening alongside the bad. It says that the curriculum for excellence could be the basis of a good system, but it needs strengthening and more rigorous strategy, which is a stronger role for local authorities. Now that might be a tad more difficult with councils getting hammered by SNP cuts. It also notes the poor literacy of primary and secondary students, and the decline in relative and absolute achievement levels in mathematics. Since that report was published, we have heard that pupils from well-off backgrounds were seven times more likely to get three As at higher than those from poorer areas, while 14 local authorities had fewer than five poorer pupils achieve three As. Enrolment in national 3 to 5 subjects has dropped by nearly 17 per cent since the introduction of curriculum for excellence, meaning pupils are doing fewer subjects. Overall attainment in these subjects has dropped by 24 per cent. Both enrolment and attainment in modern language is in the deep decline, to the point where some subjects may longer not be viable in Scotland. Clearly, the Scottish education system, which used to be held as a model for others, needs some TLC that has not been getting recently, if it is to rise again. We need to make education the first priority, not just slip service but investing in early years in education as our most important economic policy. We need to tackle the vicious circle of poverty and educational underperformance, and we need radical action to change the way we fund education so that the opportunity and achievement are not dependent on wealth. Funding to tackle the attainment gap should be targeted, but not with a blunt instrument of grants to some schools and not to others, for it is a nonsense that one school can get funding while another next door gets nothing, even though both have pupils suffering from deprivation. That is why Scottish Labour wants to see a fair start fund that gives an extra £1,000 for every child from a poor background in primary school and £300 in nursery school. That would ensure attainment funding based on need. Like the Labour Government in Wales, we want to see that funding managed by headteachers. For them, they are the people best placed to the side, which of the available measures will work best in their schools with their children. That would be a permanent arrangement, not just a temporary sticking plaster. If education is to be a national priority, then we should not be viciously cutting the budgets of those who provide education. Not only is it unfair, but it is also very short-sighted. To neglect the education of our young people is to neglect the future of our economy. For many reasons, education should be our priority, not just for lip service and sound bites. It should be for real action that makes that difference. I apologise for my voice and, hopefully, it will last six minutes. Scotland is a fine history of achievement in education, starting with the establishment of church schools in the Middle Ages, five universities in Scotland by 1600, compared with only two south of the border, and the world's first national education act passed in 1696, providing for a school in a very parish a fixed salary for a teacher and financial arrangements through property tax to pay for it. In 1872, the education act took control of the education system from the churches and handed it to local authorities, followed by the establishment of a single external examination system for Scotland in 1888. Scotland was at the forefront of innovation and education. Over a century later, international comparisons were introduced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, with the programme for international student assessment in the three areas of reading, mathematics and science. In 2012, 65 countries took part in international comparison, and the Scottish results highlighted that levels of academic achievement are above international average in science reading and close to average in maths. Science Scotland has been above the OECD average in each piece around since 2006. Reading Scotland's performance in 2012 was above the OECD average, as it was in 2009, after falling under the last Labour Lib Dem Executive between 2003 and 2006. Scotland's relative position compared to OECD countries in the rest of the UK has improved since 2009, with a greater number of countries performing significantly lower than Scotland and fewer countries performing similar to Scotland. In maths, the OECD found that Scotland's performance was similar to the average for all countries, and there was clear evidence that the decline in Scotland's performance between 2003 and 2006 has not continued. Again, Scotland's position in 2012 improved with fewer countries outperforming and greater numbers performing significantly below Scotland. That was the position in 2012, and we await the 2015 PISA scores that are due out later this year. However, the report Improving Schools in Scotland, a OECD perspective published in December, gave us an indication of progress. It stated in its overview that learners are enthusiastic and motivated, teachers are engaged in professional, and system leaders are highly committed. As many as nine in 10 inspections report improvements in confidence, engagement, staying on in school and national qualifications over the recent past are broadly coincident with the implementation of curriculum for excellence in schools. The report has highlighted that there was much to be positive about and that there was a high level of social inclusion and that a large majority, nine out of 10 students who feel positive about their school and teachers. Part of the reason for students feeling positive about their school may be that the number of pupils reported as being in schools of good or satisfactory condition has increased from 61 per cent in April 2007, just prior to the first SNP Government taking office, to 85 per cent in April 2015. Or that the latest national performance report shows 90 per cent of schools were graded satisfactorily or better, including 69 per cent that were graded as good, very good or excellent. As a result, students across Scotland achieve a record of 156,000 higher passes in 2015, with advanced higher passes having increased by 4 per cent to record levels. Despite progress since 2007, that does not mean that there are no challenges facing Scottish education. The First Minister outlined last autumn at the Western Hills Education Centre in my constituency her twin priorities of improving attainment for all children and tackling the attainment gap between children in deprived and better off areas. The £100 million attainment Scotland fund to improve literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing for primary schools was extended to a further 57 schools, including three in my constituency, taking the total number of primary schools benefiting from the fund to more than 300. The December 2015 OACD report found that Scotland has been among the OACD countries with the most equal scores for mathematics achievements among 15-year-olds. The spread of social economic background in Scotland is narrower than across the OACD as a whole. It continued. A third of disadvantaged students were identified as resilient in 2012, meaning those from the bottom quarter in status terms who performed in the top quarter of international performance. That is higher than the OACD average of 25 per cent. EIS General Secretary Larry Flanagan said that it confirms previous data that indicates that Scottish schools and levels of pupil attainment compare well both internationally and with other countries in the United Kingdom. The report painted a largely positive picture of Scottish education. As the OACD recognised, curriculum for excellence has the ability to deliver a world-class education system for all, putting Scotland once again at the forefront of innovation in education. We all want Scotland to have an education system to be proud of, a Scotland in which every child in every community can achieve their true potential at school and in life. There is nothing more important than ensuring that every child gets a fair start. Today, while the SNP Government is keen to highlight the positive aspects of the OACD report, the fact remains that the achievement gap between the most-enleased deprived children is continuing to grow under the SNP's watch and that the SNP's solutions so far fall well behind what is needed to end the inequality in our classrooms. We must use the powers of this Parliament to change people's lives, to reshape our country and to transform life chances so that opportunity and success at school, at work and in life are determined by the hard work, effort and talent, not by who your parents are or how much they earn. Ie Gray talked earlier about the attainment fund set up by the Scottish Government. In my disfodd constituency, there are two schools benefiting from this fund, yet in every nursery school, in every primary school and in every secondary school in my constituency, there are children and families from poorer backgrounds who need extra support. One of the schools receiving attainment fund support in my constituency is in Zavar in Oakley, and it shares a campus with Holy Name primary. The children use the same gym hall, the same assembly hall, the same library and the same playground, yet Holy Name gets no funding at all to close the attainment gap. That is why today our amendment is calling once again for us to be more ambitious and to use the powers coming to Holyrood to invest more in the children who are currently being left behind and ensure that every child from a poorer family gets a fair start in life through a fair start fund based on needs not on what school they go to, making support available not just to schools but to nurseries too. Across Scotland, we are asking people to take a fresh look at Scottish Labour, so maybe the Cabinet Secretary too will take a fresh look at our plans to give every child a fair start at school and nursery. The Liberal Democrat amendment today talks about the issue of preschool provision and its importance in improving outcomes for children for more deprived backgrounds. That is important too because we know that the attainment gap begins well before children start school, but three years old 15 per cent of children already have speech and language difficulties, with children from the most deprived areas more than twice as likely to have issues. By the same age, children from deprived backgrounds are already nine months behind in the average development and readiness for school, and in starting school there is already a 14 per cent gap between the most unleased advantage children and a 16 per cent gap in vocabulary. All the evidence shows that children who start school with these early development difficulties are much more likely to fall behind other children in their attainment at every stage of the education system. It is therefore really vital that we get it right for every child in the early years. Yet in December 2015, as Liam McArthur highlighted, just 7.3 per cent of two-year-olds were registered for early learning and childcare, well short of the 27 per cent promised. There is real evidence that, across Scotland, many children are not only missing out on the free childcare for two-year-olds, but they are also missing out on free places available for three and four-year-olds too. The SNP is going into the election in May, promising parents are doubling up preschool hours that are still unable to deliver the hours that are already in place. Never mind to say how the 30 hours will be delivered or paid for. Research by the fair funding for kids campaign found that as many as one in five children are missing out on the free places, doubling the three hours could make the situation worse, reducing the number of spaces in council nurseries by as much as 40 per cent. That falls into line with what the commission on childcare reform said just earlier this summer, when it found that many parents across Scotland are unable to access the 600 hours. It concluded that the focus on delivering this policy was at the expense of broader childcare provision. Given that there is only 15 per cent of councils in Scotland with enough capacity to meet the childcare needs of working parents, parents across Scotland want to know who want to work and make a better life for their families, needs much more than a promise of three hours, and I think that we need a radical overhaul of childcare so that it is affordable, flexible and available for children of all ages where and when parents need it. In the briefing for today's debate, Save the Children highlight their excellent read-on, get-on campaign, and this has got Scottish Labour support. I think that it is unacceptable that Scotland's poorest children are starting school, already struggling with language and literacy, and that it is unacceptable that those same children, many of them, are leaving school unable to read well. Within the national framework, I think that there has got to be a lot more emphasis on the importance of preschool intervention to close the language gap and ensure that every single child has the support that they need to meet the key milestones in early language and literacy before they start primary school. However, we cannot look at education policy in isolation and members across the chamber already have referred to the budget cuts that are going to be hitting our councils. Those certainly will not help in our mission to close the gap. Cots to our council budgets are cuts that will hit our schools, our early years services and measures that have been taken to close the gap. In Fife, for example, where the council already had a £20 million budget shortfall to make up in the common financial year, the additional cuts announced in the budget before Christmas mean that the council will need to make a further £17 million of savings. In this chamber, we regularly hear attacks on the Tory austerity agenda and quite right to, but yet now the communities that I represent in Fife and communities right across Scotland, the austerity agenda is not just being imposed by Tories in Holyrood, it is being imposed here by Holyrood too. Our children and young people should not be paying the price of cuts and the secretary certainly should not be paying the price of austerity in cuts to our schools, cuts to our colleges, cuts to our universities, cuts to our youth work services. This is not the route to educational success, so I can see a run out of time. If the Government is serious about making our education system world class once again, then action is needed now to protect our education budgets and to give our councils a fair deal. I now call on Willie Coffey to be followed by Stuart Stevenson up to six minutes. The OECD report for most of us who aren't experts can be a challenge and read at times, but it's a very positive report, both about Scotland's achievements to date and the potential for Scotland to be a world leader in education. It describes the curriculum for excellence as being a watershed moment, with 10 solid years of patient work in place and now presenting us with the opportunity to move the agenda on to a new phase, to move beyond what it calls system management and into a new dynamic nearer to teaching and learning. It says that we need to strengthen what it calls this middle area involving networking and collaboration. I take that to mean that we need to see more engagement among our professionals up and down the country and among our education authorities, too, so that we can truly bring about the kinds of improvements that we need that will begin to close the various gaps that concern us, principally attainment of course, but hopefully also to do something about opportunity gaps that exist within our system. The report acknowledges a number of improvements and gives particular mention to Scotland's above international averages in science and reading, that our achievement levels are spread fairly equally, that a high number of Scottish students from our bottom socio-economic status groups perform in the top quarter of international achievers, that our schools are inclusive and that there are clear upward trends in attainment and 90 per cent of our school leavers entered a positive destination, which has been continuously improving in recent years. Improvements are also noted in relation to pupils' positive attitudes towards their schools and teachers and a welcome drop in negative behaviour involving things like smoking, alcohol abuse and general disruptive behaviour, all on the decline, thankfully. In terms of current performance, there is evidence of an improving picture in a number of areas. Higher numbers of our young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are getting better qualifications, almost double the numbers that are getting at least one higher when you compare to 2007. We have record exam-passed results with passes in the highest and advanced highers both on the up, and we have the highest numbers of youngsters ever applying to go to university with a huge 50 per cent increase coming from youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds. More needs to be done, of course, but there is good progress being made. What then lies beyond this watershed that the report says that we are currently at? At the heart of it, according to my understanding anyway, is how we assess and evaluate and how that leads us towards improvement. The report plods our teachers for their current ingenuity in devising varieties of methods to collect information, but then goes on to say that there is some concern that insufficient use is made of that assessment information to support children's learning progress and curriculum development, and that too many teachers are still unclear about what should be assessed in terms of experiences and outcomes, all of which serve to blur the connection between assessment and improvement. In other words, if we are all measuring things differently, we have little chance of concluding anything meaningful from it, and we have less ability to claim that improvements are evident across the system. We need a robust and consistent evidence base to help us with our assessment methods, and the OECD paper supports the view that the national improvement framework has the potential to deliver this for us. Standardised assessment gives us the chance to move forward from this watershed to provide that clearer and more concise narrative within the assessment process and to begin this important next phase in the life of curriculum for excellence. Cair Bloomer's comments that measurement systems in themselves do not raise standards or close gaps are spot on, but they should provide us with some consistency in the assessment process from which we can hopefully make informed judgments that are more reliable than anything that we currently have. The First Minister has made it clear that using new standardised assessments in primaries 1, 4 and 7 and in S3 will help our teachers to form those crucial judgments about the progress that our children are making and to provide the required support when it is most needed. Offering parents' access to this information, too, means that we can extend the scope of interest to the wider family and the crucial role at this place in the education of our children. As usual, we will rely heavily on the good services that we obtain from Education Scotland to drive that process forward. Education Scotland has been at the vanguard of curriculum for excellence for many years, and I know that many colleagues in the organisation are totally committed to improving excellence in education. I want to add a little note of caution to the debate that is winding up my contribution. As Cair Bloomer said, systems and processes do not do very much themselves. The act has enabled us to help us to get things right, and we must still work hard to improve anything. Closing the attainment gap between our wealthiest and poorest communities in the next decade will be an amazing achievement if we manage this, but an opportunity gap still exists. Members might recall the story last year about the young student from Possil Park who achieved all the necessary qualifications for medical school at four of Scotland's finest universities but was still refused entry. Attainment and opportunity are two very different things, and I am glad to see that our universities are aware of this and doing something about it through their reach initiative. Closing the attainment gap will surely help many more talented young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We have a duty, Presiding Officer, to make this possible for all our young people in Scotland, and I am hopeful that this new framework will take us closer to this goal than we have ever been before. We will continue to be challenged as individuals and as an educational system by the youngsters of today. Most youngsters do not carry a pen or a pencil, very different from my time as a youngster, but most have an intelligent phone and are more adept at operating the on-screen keyboard on that than they are perhaps at using a pen or pencil. The modern world is very different from the world in which my grandfather started teaching 135 years ago, and it will keep changing. In 1881, my grandfather was a pupil teacher in Bones by 1890. He was a school teacher in Imouth, and in 1900 he had his own school in a rural location in the Black Isle. The school photograph for that year shows the majority of pupils at the school were barefoot. They depended at lunchtime on my grandmother preparing soup as the school lunch, which was made from the vegetables that the pupils themselves took to school. When my grandfather retired from teaching in 1926, he had achieved the lofty heights of the fellowship of the Educational Institute of Scotland. A very different experience from today's teachers, a very different experience from the pupils of today in my grandfather's school. Today, other members of my family, my niece Morag, teaches in England. She is taught in both the public sector and the private sector. She looks with some envy at aspects of the Scottish system. My nephew Jamie is based in Denmark. He married to a Danish family, a very different educational system there as well. One, not without its difficulties, the Government chose, because of a dispute with the unions in Denmark, to lock all the teachers out for over a period of month. My nephew didn't much enjoy that. Perhaps as an illustration of how things changed, when I was a student studying mathematics in the 1960s, I was in my intermediate honours year, and one of my diggs landlady's friends, a 12-year-old pupil, came to get help with those maths. He was studying topology at school. We at university had yet to reach that subject, so we cannot expect the past to be repeated in the future. Of course, we should not also imagine, although the report is about the formal education system, that all education takes place in school. It is important that parents and relatives are equally equipped to answer the very intelligent questions that our youngsters will inevitably come up with. I did a little experiment with my four-year-old goddaughter a couple of months ago. She was asking about a rock crystal that we had, and I explained crystals by showing her salt crystals, dissolving them in water and then evaporating the water on the stove. She was fascinated by that, and we had a discussion. Hopefully, that is typical of the kind of discussions that are going on across Scotland. One of the things that I have very much taken by, in the OECD report that is particular to my parliamentary constituency, was the comment that Scotland enjoys one of the smallest proportions of low performers among its immigrant students. That is important to me because of the four secondary schools that I have in my constituency. On average, there are 20 different languages in the schools. At Peterhead, it has just become 28 with the addition of Hungarian. It is not new in the north-east of Scotland that we interact with the rest of the world than language is an issue. As long ago as 1853, the post office directorate shows that there were three foreign consulates in Peterhead. Of course, that is both a challenge and an opportunity. In some of our schools, I have seen that the immigrants who bring their own language to the school have very successfully passed on aspects of culture and more critically language to the local population who, in return, have taught those who have come to our community how to speak Doric. Only a minority of the people who hear it this afternoon are likely to be able to do that. Education is and will always remain a work in progress. Informal learning and having the opportunities for that is important. I looked at what the OECD report said about some international examples, referring to the Ontario teacher leadership and learning programme and the Alberta initiative for school improvement. Both are fascinating insights into what can be done elsewhere. We have to accept that there is no single answer. What is most important is that those who are engaged in education are committed to picking up new ideas and trying them out. There is no single idea. If there was a magic bullet, somebody would have found it and applied it. Equally, we have to be slightly conscious of the Hawthorne effect that comes from a factory in the United States in the 1920s to the early 1930s, where the mere intervention of change can deliver short-term value. However, there is excellent work in the OECD report that leads us to where we are. I continue to say that the Trachtenberg system would be good. Speaking from the lofty heights of my many years, I think that it would be worth looking at the experience of older people making sure that we get them into schools imparting their knowledge and experience to our students. We have to be adaptable. The report is a good interim report. There is more to do. I am confident that the Government is both willing, able and actually doing it. I declare an interest as a member of the EIS. I was a teacher for 20 years and probably at my heart still. I always welcome the opportunity to be involved in the debate in education, recognising its role in creating a stronger fairer economy and tackling inequality, releasing potential and offering important means out of poverty. I am sad to say that I think that too often debates in education become a kind of a theoretical argument in exchange for figures that can prove almost anything. I think that there has been an element of that today. I think that we are at our best when our debates in education are rooted in the real world, in the real-life experience of people across Scotland. I would urge the Scottish Government to reflect on Jim Scott's report rather than to find a way of explaining it away because there are important issues that are being highlighted. As a young teacher, I taught non-certificate classes before standard grade came in. If you were in a non-certificate class, it basically meant that there was no course, there were no resources and there was no recognition of the effort that you made as a young person. With standard grades, there came a recognition that every child was entitled to have a course and resources put behind them and they could show what they had achieved. I would be very concerned in the current circumstances if we are moving away from that. I would urge the Scottish Government to look at that again. On the question of testing, I think that there is an argument to be had about the benefits and merits of testing. However, my concern is that the proposal will simply describe the situation without action to address what that situation tells us. We know that there are key issues in relation to poverty disadvantage in relation to attainment. If all we are doing through testing is reflecting that, then, frankly, we are wasting our time. The Scottish Government has announced its attainment grant fund, but I would contend that any drive to close the attainment gap must be mainstreamed into our education policy. It is not an add-on, it is not an extra, but it should inform all of our policy and budget choices. Again, I would urge the Scottish Government to have the confidence to look at the choices that it has made in this context and, against the test of closing the attainment gap and the things that you are spending money on in education that are going to make that better or worse. I will give you one example. I would strongly argue that, if the attainment gap is at the heart of education policy, the further education sector would not have suffered the ruthless cuts and attacks that it has experienced from the Scottish Government. For early intervention, for example, it is even more effective where parents can be supported and what better than a parent taking a second chance at education or securing skills into work offers the college sector in the past of giving and had less likely to be there now. I would say that education Scotland is relatively good at supporting and developing young people who are settled with supportive families and with families who can step in and fill the gaps left by cuts in school funds. However, I congratulate all those in schools who support young people with greater challenges, perhaps because a barrier that is created by additional needs not least the parents and young people themselves or in school communities facing families with real problems within their own lives. We know that schools cannot just be buildings, teachers and daughters but need to understand the needs and pressures of young people and how current spending decisions have an impact on them. Of course, we should be clear that there are pressures on young people from all kinds of families, not just those who are living in poverty. The bereavement, bullying, neglect and abuse are no respecter of person or class. They can happen to any child and it is essential that schools are alive to the danger that young people faced by those pressures will simply fall out of the system. However, we know that poverty and disadvantage are key determinants in attainment and require a rigorous approach, not short-term initiatives that are not sustained. I would highlight in particular my view that the Scottish Government must review its approach to the funding of local government if it is serious about its commitment on attainment, not just the cuts in general but the lack of rigor in ensuring that education spending follows need. If a young person is vulnerable to falling out of the school system, attending less, achieving less, becoming less engaged, action needs to be speedy, proactive or it becomes too late and we live with the consequences of that for a generation. That is why I urge the cabinet secretary to ensure that she is enabling schools to fund properly. The attendance officers, the support staff, the learning support, the behaviour support, the classroom assistance, the personal assistance, the educational psychologists, home link staff, admin staff that allows a school to reach out to children who are vulnerable and unsupported. Those are not a bonus or an added extra. They are critical in holding and supporting young people to come to school in order that they benefit from the assessment and learning that is in offer. In spotting problems, in addressing challenges for families, in addressing additional needs, there is an opportunity to give those young people the chance to learn. If those are stripped out, there are massive consequences and all the evidence is that that is exactly what is happening. Scottish education through the years has prowded itself in developing inquiring minds, open to new ideas, willing to scrutinise and test ideas and views that were perhaps the established view. That is the challenge for the Scottish Government now. Do not close down the debate in education. Do not simply defend the choices that you have made. Open the debate up and we will be with you if we are going to ensure that we resource local government and communities properly so that we can genuinely address the attainment gap and get the potential for our young people that education offers. Thank you so much. I regret that I now have to reduce the remaining open debate speakers to five minutes. Mr McMillan, Stuart McMillan, to be followed by Alison Johnson up to five minutes. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. In listening to Stuart Stevenson's contribution, two things struck me. First of all, we spoke about children and the questioning from children. I have got two daughters and I am sure that I will certainly work about what the cabinet secretary will agree with as well, but I have got two daughters and certainly some of the questions that are coming from my daughters, certainly in the last few months, have been particularly challenging, not so much in the scientific element but certainly in other areas. The second point is in terms of the informal learning that Stuart Stevenson was talking about. A number of years ago I went to Sweden for a visit to visit some friends and Professor Zell was asked to go in to speak to two classes in a high school and that was very much informal learning but in a formal setting. I was asked to go in because the kids were learning English, but they were used to either learning English by hearing an English accent or English from an American accent, so it was to hear English from someone with a different accent. It was a fascinating experience and something that I generally thought was a great thing to do, but I certainly took something from it as well. It came to mind when Stuart Stevenson was speaking. I was encouraged by the recent OECD review on Scottish education and, as others have mentioned, the report paints a largely positive picture of Scottish education and the on-going implementation of curriculum for excellence. We share the view of the OECD that we have a great opportunity to lead the world in developing an integrated assessment and evaluation framework. We firmly believe that the framework will play an important role in driving forward to close the attainment gap and continually improve Scottish education. I am sure that everyone in the chamber wants to be able to say with confidence and evidence that there is no better place in the world to be educated than here in Scotland. We want to know that that claim holds true for all young people, regardless of their background or their circumstances. Scotland must seize the opportunity to be a world leader in assessing and driving forward educational progress for all children. It is no secret that the last eight years have been tough. The recession and the deep public spending cuts from Westminster, which followed that, have created pressures for the Scottish Government, for local government and for many families, but the fact remains that education in Scotland has made progress. In every part of the country—I only have five minutes, I am sorry—Scotland has good schools, good teachers, and our young people are good learners. Standards have risen and are continuing to rise. We are committed to protecting teacher numbers, and all 32 local authorities have committed to protecting teacher numbers and will share £51 million in investment from the Scottish Government to support that. As we have already heard, the announcement on 3 January has been additional £2 million of investment by the Scottish Government to train an extra 260 teachers next year—60 teachers in primary education and 200 in secondary education. A child born today in 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, and we certainly want to close the attainment gap completely. That will not happen overnight, but this is more than just an economic and a social challenge for all of us. It is a moral challenge. Last week, the First Minister launched the national improvement framework for education, which will help to eliminate the attainment gap between the least and most deprived children. The framework has been developed in consultation with teachers, parents and local authorities. When we consider the range of people who are supporting the framework, it is there for all to see that it will be a positive development for Scotland and for our education system. The framework will see new and better information gathered throughout primary and secondary, early secondary school years, to support individual children's progress and to identify where improvement is needed. The framework will be backed by the attainment Scotland fund of more than £100 million, with four years to drive forward improvements on additional educational outcomes in Scotland. We will defend the achievements not just of the Government but of students, pupils and teachers across our country, but we will also be open to where we need to do better. In every single work of life, we can always improve. We always have to strive to be better, to develop things better. It is a sustained investment in learning from early years to further and higher education. We will continue to drive up attainment and to mobilise all Scotland's talents. I thank the Government for bringing this debate today, as it is important that Parliament has the opportunity to scrutinise our education system and propose changes to parts of that system to look at what is working well and what could be improved upon as the motion acknowledges. There is much in the motion to welcome the more holistic approach of the curriculum for excellence, the stress on trust in teachers professional judgment and a recognition that reducing energy sapping, frustrating and time-wasting bureaucracy is essential. The motion tells us that the OECD report suggests that the national improvement framework has the potential to provide a robust evidence base and that it will be a key means of driving work to close the attainment gap. Key education partners, such as the EIS, tell us that yes, good evidence is part of the equation and that assessment is absolutely central to teaching and learning, but they confirm that we already have this evidence and we know that assessment is on-going and not only in literacy and numeracy. Teachers assess pupils daily and use this knowledge to help our young people to progress. The EIS does not agree that standardised tests are the key to improving education. 30 out of 32 local authorities use standardised tests, yet the attainment gap persists. Perhaps, in closing, the cabinet secretary can confirm whether the tests that are currently taking place will be replaced or will there simply be more. We all appreciate that there are, in school, between school and beyond school, particularly home and family drivers, which can help to close the attainment gap. It is really important that we take the broadest approach to attainment, as well as ensuring that we are making progress where formal attainment is poor. I appreciate that the Government knows that good evidence is only one part of the equation. I hope that, at the end of the debate, the Parliament is clear about how the Government intends to avoid unintended consequences such as national leak tables. The EIS and its response to the consultation on the national improvement framework ask that protections are put in place to ensure that that does not happen, and I would be grateful if the cabinet secretary could address that. I would also like to understand what the Government will do with this evidence that it has not been able to do so far or is not able to do currently. However, I would ask the Government to focus instead on areas such as teacher recruitment, class sizes, which are clearly linked, and teacher workloads, and a greater focus, too, on the quality of early years childcare. I am very concerned, as are parents and the Scottish Children's Services Coalition, about the fallen numbers of additional support needs teachers that colleagues have raised this to today. I recognise that the Government is working to fill vacancies, not just in ASAN, but has the Government considered making support for learning a promoted post? The cabinet secretary is aware of a marked increase in children with additional support needs since 2010 to a figure of 153,190 pupils, so currently 22.5 per cent of children in Scotland schools have additional support needs. Local authorities are facing budget cuts on a staggering scale, but the costs from not ensuring that adequate provision for those young people with additional support needs is in place will outweigh any savings, exclusions will increase, and positive destinations will be harder to secure for those young people. Those positive destinations include our further education colleges. I recently spent a very cold Friday afternoon outside the Scottish Funding Council's offices with members of the EIS Further Education Lecturers Association, and the cold was only matched by their passion—passion for the invaluable work that they do, and passion for an equitable and secure future for those working in this sector for equal pay. Our colleges have as much to offer as our universities, and we should treat them and those who study and work in them equitably. We must ensure that more financial assistance beyond fees is available for those students who require it. Many potential students can't afford to feed, close and house themselves without a wage. Grant funding is essential. We don't want young people to opt out of further or higher education through necessity, not choice. I, too, would like to thank all those working with the young people on whom today's debate has concentrated, but education should be encouraged and enabled from the cradle to the grave, because parents, grandparents and carers are children's first educators and clearly have a central role in any education system. We must be absolutely clear that austerity shouldn't impact on those who study in local community centres across the land, enabling them better to bring up and educate their own children. Our young people's future choices are impacted by their time at school, but that isn't the whole story. I would like to understand if every child in nursery education in Scotland will have access to a nursery teacher, because, as we have heard throughout the debate today, inequalities in literacy often begin in early childhood. Increasing teacher numbers would help to address that equal access to early years' education. Thank you so much for now, Colin Beattie. After that, we will move to the closing speeches. Up to five minutes, please, Mr Beattie. The independent review on improving schools in Scotland and OECD perspective published last month by the OECD clearly shows to me that the Scottish Government is on the right lines with the progress that is made to date in our education system. Further, the review confirms that the steps proposed going forward are without doubt to correct ones, although there can be no resting on our laurels. The aim for Scotland's education system is clear. We aim to have an exceptional and fair system where every young person in this country has the tools they need to achieve their potential, regardless of background. I hope that everyone would agree that that is a worthy role. In this regard, the OECD review highlighted many positive developments in Scottish education, including levels of academic achievement being above international averages and distributed evenly, the high inclusion rate of Scottish schools, a clear upward trend in attainment and positive destinations, positive attitudes in schools and among pupils, noticeable drops in alcohol consumption and smoking among children and young people. The report also highlighted that more than 9 out of 10 school leavers entered a positive destination in 2014, with nearly two thirds of school leavers continuing on in education. Those are figures that we can be proud of, especially when we put them in the context of the years before this Government came into power. For example, the statistics show that 40 per cent of pupils from the 20 per cent most deprived areas are getting at least one higher, and that is a substantial increase from 23 per cent in 2007. Meanwhile, 91.7 per cent of young people are in work, education or training after leaving school, and that compares favourably to 2006-07, when only 87 per cent of school leavers were in positive destinations. Very encouragingly, we have also seen a 50 per cent increase in university applications from 18-year-olds from the most deprived areas since 2006. Of course, we must ensure that equity and excellence in our education system go hand in hand, and the OECD review highlights some of the improvements in this context, including that academic achievement is above international averages in science and reading and near average in maths, while the most recent studies show that we have halted the decline in maths and reading seen in Scotland's relative position prior to 2006. Performances in literacy, maths and numeracy can be improved further, and we are taking ambitious steps to continue the work that is done to date. Those include investing £1.5 million per year in the Read, Write and Count campaign to ensure that every P1 to P3 child has access to a library of books and educational materials to improve early literacy and numeracy. The introduction of a draft national improvement framework, which will focus on improving outcomes for children by providing better evidence on progress in literacy and numeracy. Focusing education in Scotland inspections on raising attainment in literacy and numeracy, each school will be expected to demonstrate a very clear strategy for raising attainment in literacy. Investing £1 million over three years from 2014 to 2017 in national and local numeracy hubs to raise standards and share best practice in the teaching and learning of maths and numeracy at all levels. Launching the Making Maths Count programme to drive up maths and numeracy attainment in primary and secondary schools by championing the importance of maths. We also need to ensure that we have the right number of highly trained teachers to preserve our educational standards and teacher pupil ratios. We worked with local authorities last year to maintain teacher numbers, and that will be done again this year with a further £51 million in funding. Those steps ensured that the pupil-teacher ratio stayed constant at 13.7 over 2014-15, despite an increase in the number of pupils in that time. As recently as January 3, the Scottish Government reiterated their commitment to teacher numbers with the announcement that over £2 million funding is being made available to train an extra 260 teachers next year, an increase of 60 primary and 200 secondary student teacher places, which will bring the total intake to 3,490 a rise for the fifth year in a row. The OECD review also endorsed the Government's introduction of a national improvement framework that features standardised assessment at its heart. At present, there is a significant lack of information about overall performance at both national and local levels. A national framework will ensure that we can gather the right evidence about children's progress to show that everything—local authorities, schools, teachers, parents and children and young people—are doing to raise standards—is working. There can be no doubt that Scotland's education system will always face challenges, but it is clear to me that the steps that have been taken so far are continuing to be taken, including the national framework, the £100 million attainment fund, the recent announcement of the £1.5 million innovation fund that will identify and fund projects to improve literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing for children, adversely impacted by deprivation, can truly give Scotland the potential to become a world leader in education. It has been a very useful debate with some very considered speeches across the chamber. I am particularly grateful to Joanne Lamont for her contribution. I did not necessarily agree with all of it, but she useful reminded us why the debate matters. The ability of education to unlock the potential of individuals, yes, but of communities and of Scotland as a country. The shared objective of creating a world-class education system was again something that was very evident in all of the speeches that were made. The OECD report probably wins the prize for most name checks. Colin Beattie, Willie Coffey and Gordon MacDonald legitimately pointed to the elements of that report that suggest things that are performing well in the Scottish education system and trends that are moving in the right direction. Although there was a bit of a tendency to adopt a bit of a year-zero approach in terms of those positive trends, I think that Mary Scanlon, Ian Gray and others were right to highlight some of the areas where there are cause for concern. Whether that is in terms of the progress that other competitor countries are making comparative to ourselves, but in specific areas such as literacy and numeracy as well. In my earlier contribution, I made a number of criticisms of the Scottish Government. I think that those were intended to be constructive. I think that they are in the context of the constructive approach that we as a party have taken in a range of areas, not just in relation to education, but it stems from a recognition of the crucial importance of the early years in shaping and determining later attainment. Carahelton made some very salient points in relation to the difference in speech and language difficulties presented by those from more deprived backgrounds when they arrive in formal education. It is why we prioritised investment in early learning in childcare, particularly for those from most disadvantaged backgrounds. We refused to accept ministers' assertions that that required the powers of independence to achieve. We pressed for more ambitious targets and we welcomed the agreement to move from short of 2 per cent to 27 per cent the two-year-old from such backgrounds. We are disappointed that that figure is currently only just above 7 per cent. I will be interested to know how that gap is to be bridged to the 27 per cent, let alone the 42 per cent that we are seeing south of the border. In the same way, in relation to the national improvement framework, we have sought to engage in that debate. The way in which the consultation has been taken forward has not necessarily helped in that regard. However, as I said earlier, there is much within the framework that has made absolute sense in terms of the focus on leadership, teacher professionalism and parental involvement. All those things are aspects where the evidence shows that improvement can be made and it can deliver real results. The focus on literacy and numeracy is absolutely right, George Adam referred to the Read, Write and Count campaign, but I think that Kara Hilton was right to draw attention to save the children's efforts under the read-on get-on initiative, which I very much support. However, as Sam H made clear in his briefing, there is somewhat an underplay of the extent to which happy and healthy children are children who are likely to fulfil their potential. I think that that is something that may need to be revisited within the context of the framework. However, it is the obsession with national testing—previously, the preserver of Conservative education spokespeople, which has a glowing endorsement from Mary Scanlon earlier, which I believe is wrong-headed. It is this implied reference in the Scottish Government motion that prevents us from supporting that at decision time. Assessment is key to good teaching, but, as the Education Committee heard in evidence, it already takes place and there is a wealth of information that is not being used—a point that was made, I think, very well by Alison Johnstone. As children in Scotland point out, the educational inequalities that stem from socio-economic disadvantage are complex and multifaceted. Highlighting real concerns within the sector over aspects of the framework, the accused ministers have quote, reducing what is a complex set of issues to an easily identifiable slogan with the hope that those issues will be amenable to equally short-term solutions. Turning briefly to the issue of funding and, in particular, the attainment fund, as I said earlier, that is fine in principle, but I believe that in practice it is flawed. The pupil premium, which we support, is targeted at the need of the individual. It seems to bear some relation to the fair start initiative that Iain Gray was referring to. I thought that his description of a salami slicing and a re-announcing of the fund was absolutely apposite. In the context of a £500 million cut to council budget, it is hard not to see how that works entirely against the grain of what the Government is saying in relation to education and the de-children services. Stuart McMillan referred to the teacher numbers guarantee, but councils have pointed out that, in order to honour that agreement, what we are seeing is the laying off of classroom assistance, learning assistance, other staff within schools, as well as additional support for needs teachers. It is hard to see how that will not impact most significantly on the education or services on which those from the most deprived households rely most heavily. The OECD report gives the basis for optimism. Much that we are doing is good, some of it is indeed world-leading. Equally, there is enough in this report to stave off any sense of complacency. All share the ambition to create a world-class education system, so to the objective of enabling every child to fulfil their potential wherever their background and wherever they live. I question, however, again whether the obsession that the Government appears to have with the return to national testing in primary schools under achievement on the early learning and nursery provisioning cuts to council funding are a recipe for achieving those aims. This has been an interesting debate, which is centred around the key question of what it is that makes an education system world-class. In previous generations, when that was the generally accepted definition of Scotland's school system, there was a fundamental policy principle, which was enshrined in the best of the Scottish Enlightenment. All people, whoever they were or whatever their background, had a democratic right to access the intellectual capital of the nation. Learning was seen as egalitarian, very rigorous in its approach and respected by every class in society. There was a very healthy balance between what and how things were taught and learnt and a very strict self-discipline expected to accompany the educational experience. As such, I think that there was great pride taken in schools and what they stood for irrespective of their community environment. We now know that the eagerly awaited OECD report commends much on that line about Scottish education most of it related to those traditional features. It complements schools on their egalitarian approach on the fact that schools value their pupils for who they are rather than from where they have come. It praises the commitment and the professionalism of teachers and the general contentedness and enthusiasm of pupils. It reflects positively on the basic principles of the curriculum for excellence, although, surprisingly to me, it chooses not to say very much about the accompanying assessment and I will come back to that in just a minute. However, the report also issues some stark warnings and let me deal with them just now. May I begin with the curriculum for excellence since that is clearly the centrepiece of what schools now do? While praising its concept, the OECD report does say something rather worrying about its delivery. Indeed, it actually tells the Scottish Government to come up with a new narrative for the curriculum for excellence. That is because some of the benefits have failed to materialise because there is too little clarity and too much complexity in the accompanying guidance. The poor authors of that report clearly felt obliged to go through, with a fine tooth comb, the teacher and parent guidance. They found four capacities, twelve attributes, 24 capabilities, five levels, seven principles, six entitlements and no fewer than 1,820 experiences and outcomes. They rightly questioned what that all meant, because, just as teachers could tell them themselves, no-one in education Scotland or the Scottish Qualifications Agency or whatever other Government quango can actually explain sometimes what it means in plain English. That is quite a serious charge from the OECD and I would suggest that it has to be urgently addressed. It is also because of part of the reason why there is some growing concern around the boundaries for discrete school subjects—two members in the Labour Party mentioned that—the resulting fear that we will actually end up possibly with a slightly narrower curriculum, which is actually doing everything to undermine subject choice. The curriculum for excellence was designed to deepen learning, but not to the extent where subject choice has been compromised or where some concerns about the failures of the English system could actually be mirrored in Scotland. I suspect that the reason why the OECD chose not to comment too much about the accompanying qualifications for CFE was because they were too new to assess, but I find it slightly strange that very little mention was made of the qualification structure, since that is clearly a key part of measuring the success of any education system. National assessments do matter. Not in the numbers taking them as a Scottish Government is always keen to present as a key measure, but in terms of their specific results. Those results, in turn, depend on effective subject choice and that is clearly a matter of concern in some schools. There must not be any weakening of the distinction between the different subjects on the curriculum, since that dilutes the process of identifying what the pupil learns. It is that move that perhaps we have seen go a little bit too far to the how pupils learn. That can threaten to undermine some of the best traditions in Scottish schooling. It is also the reason why the First Minister, in her view, is absolutely right to put more emphasis on the learning and testing of the three Rs, most especially, I have to say, at the end of primary seven. To all those who have very grave doubts about tests, I do think that it is time for them to come up with some specific evidence as to why it is that we have had decline in some of the basic standards for quite a long period of time now, since actually there has been a lack of consistent and standardised testing. I think that that is an answer that is important. It is not about having more tests, it is about better quality tests and it is about a healthy balance between formative and diagnostic testing. That is the most important thing. I just make a plea once again that the Scottish Government should have a look at going back into the pearls and tims international data, because I think that they are very important when it comes to that quality of assessment. At the end of the day, there are some very good things happening, excellent things happening in Scottish education, but there are some very worrying things too. There are aspects of declining literacy and numeracy, a third of schools are failing to reach at least good when it comes to inspections. There is a deficiency in hours, as my colleague Mary Scanlon said, in teacher training in literacy and numeracy. There are declining teacher numbers, including those in nursery level, when we have just agreed that early years are so important. There are declining applications for headships and, of course, there is the awful attainment gap. There are lots and lots for us to take from this that is positive, but there are also a lot of very stark messages, and I hope that the cabinet secretary will address those in her summing up. I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate, one that has again shown that there is a grown cross-party consensus on tackling the attainment gap. The same goes, the first step to fixing a problem is recognising that there is one. After eight years in Government, I commend the cabinet secretary for speaking honestly about the challenges that we face and I am also encouraged that all sides of the chamber are committed to ensuring that educational inequality is a top priority for this and for the next Parliament. As has been pointed out by other speakers this afternoon, there is a gap in attainment between children from poorer backgrounds and those from more affluent circumstances, yet the report card from the Scottish Government after those eight years does not make comfortable reading. A pupil entering primary one when the SNP began running our education system will now be hitting high school. In this period, this group of pupils have borne the brunt of education budget cuts, falling teacher numbers and the increasing attainment gap, all the time watching classmates from wealthier families pull away from them academically. The OECD report last month set out starkly what was already apparent to many of us. We are no longer world leaders in education. We are falling behind the rest of the world and change is the need to get our education system back on track. Much of the media attention and rhetoric so far has been on the reporting requirements and national testing. That is understandable as it animates the co-operators and gets stories on the news desks across the country. On the issue of standardised testing, there needs to be some clarity from the Government. I hope that the cabinet secretary in her closing will offer more details because I have rightly raised the point that the Scottish Government has to consider carefully the information that will be put into the public domain so as to avoid encouraging league tables or putting undue stress on pupils and teachers as a result of heightened media attention. It would appear that the Scottish Government has attempted to leave us by not publishing the results of standardised testing directly. The question remains, though, as to how ministers propose to stop league tables being created. If data, while not being published by anyone, will still be available through freedom of information. Testing and reporting are a means to an end that that end is affecting substantial improvements in the educational outcomes of disadvantaged pupils. On the side of the chamber, we believe that there is action beyond what the Government is proposing that can make a difference. In the coming years, the Parliament will have a substantial suite of new powers that will open up new choices in education. We would use the additional revenues from a new 50p tax rate on the top earners in the country to redistribute money from those who can afford to pay it to those who need it most, investing in additional resources over and above the Government's proposals in tackling educational disadvantage. The SNP Government's budget yet again slashes funding for local schools, which will make the problem even worse. We would use the Parliament's new powers to introduce a fair start fund, which would give every primary school an extra £1,000 for every pupil from a deprived family. That money would go directly to headteachers so that they would make the decisions choosing from a suite of proven methods about how that money is spent best in their schools to close the attainment gap between the richest and the rest. We would also offer support to parents to enable them to learn with their children, and we would introduce a special literacy support programme for looked after children. We also believe that a strong legislative framework is needed to secure faster progress in closing the attainment gap in every part of Scotland. We particularly believe that an ambitious goal is needed to help to close the socio-economic attainment gap in children's literacy. Specifically, we want to see a clear approach and ambitious timescales for making progress set out in legislation. As part of the discussions on the education bill, we are often an amendment that would set a target of reducing the attainment gap by half in the next decade. There is a precedent for that approach, such as national targets on fuel poverty, climate change reduction and child poverty eradication. It is our belief that by enshrining targets in legislation it will clearly articulate the scale of the Government's aims in relation to closing the gap and to promote a greater public understanding of the key Government priority and raise the profile of the issue. It demonstrates the changes that need to happen to make the Government's priority and the Government's ambition a success, and it makes sure that future Governments remain committed to that vital objective. Achieving those goals in Scotland will require greater focus on supporting improvement for the poorest children who are most likely to fall behind, while being consistent with the responsibilities of education authorities to support all children's attainment. It will therefore drive a more effective strategic approach to closing the attainment gap at a national and local level. As I have said, we would use the additional revenue from a new 50p top-rate of tax to redistribute resources from those who can afford it to those who need it most. Ending the examples that have been given by earlier speakers of shared campus schools where one school gets funding through the attainment fund and another doesn't, all schools who have pupils who need that additional support would get that through our funding mechanism. We would invest those additional resources over and above what the Government proposes to invest the tackle educational disadvantage to ensure that the pupils who face the greatest educational challenges have the opportunity to achieve the qualifications that they need in order to have a career in science, maths, engineering, technology or whatever fields they choose to pursue. Additional resource is only part of the answer but an integral part. It would be a shame, Presiding Officer, given the weight of support that we have found here in the chamber in this debate and numerous other debates, for tackling our education challenges, for tackling the attainment gap if this opportunity were to pass us by. Thank you. Thank you, Mr Griffin. I call under consciousness to wind up the debate. Cabinet Secretary, until five. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I'm very pleased that Mr Gray has returned to the chamber because in his opening remarks this afternoon he reflected, as he often does, along with the likes of Stuart Stevenson on the history of education in Scotland. He was reflecting, like others, that in Scotland we used to be world leaders in education, whether that was in the 17th century or, as he specifically mentioned in 1965, with the introduction of comprehensive education. He said that in my opening remarks that I had claimed this history as my own. Presiding Officer, just for the record, I want to point out to Mr Gray that I wasn't actually born in 1965. I have never looked at education in Scotland through rose-tinted glasses, either past or present. To explain the point that I was making was that, over a long period of time, 50 years of comprehensiveisation, we have seen more pupils leave school with more qualifications. The point that I was making was that the evidence from Jim Scott suggests that, for a significant section of young people, that trend might be endangered now. I think that that is something that we need to pay attention to. I accept that attainment in Scotland is increasing. That is according to that report that Mary Scanlon often refers to in Audit Scotland. Over a range of measures over the past decade, we can demonstrate that attainment in Scotland is increasing. However, with reference to Dr Scott's work, I know that he is a passionate advocate, in particular for languages. I do not always agree with the conclusions that he reaches in his analysis. I do not necessarily agree how he has applied his research in terms of the changes in our curriculum or, indeed, taking a snapshot of attainment and achievement at S4 when the purpose of curriculum for excellence is far more focused on looking at attainment, achievement and young people by the time they leave school. Nonetheless, I recognise his interest in the area and some of his interesting remarks about local accountability and governance in decisions that are taken at a local level. However, I hope that, across the chamber, that we would all accept that it is indeed good news that the number of entries and passes in higher-grade languages has indeed went up over the past year and over the term of office of this Government. That is something to be celebrated. The point that I wanted to make about never looking at education in Scotland through rose-tinted glasses, either past or present, is that I am not saying that we have never had a proud history or that we have never been at the top of the league, but we have to accept that iniquity in education is not new. It has always been with us, whether it is pre- or post-introduction of comprehensive education, because for many of us we will only have to look at our own families. My grandfather, despite passing his 11 plus and going to the grammar school in West Lothian—that was Bathgate academy—still had to leave school at 14 to go down a pit. My mother, who left school in the late 60s post-introduction of comprehensive education, left school with better qualifications than my father, but was always paid far less. We have to face up to the iniquities in our system, past and present, and not to admit or to mirror from that challenge that that places on us all. The debate about Scotland's history in education is, of course, important, and it is interesting, but the future is far, far important. Today's debate has been about a seminal report on Scottish education, and we have heard various reports from various speakers who have highlighted particular aspects of that quote. The quote that I want to mention in my closing remarks is from Andy Hargreaves, a member of the OECD review team. That quote encapsulates our recent journey and what we need to do next. He says that Scotland has taken a bold and brave direction in developing an engaging and challenging approach to learning that is driven by the expert judgments of a strong teaching profession. If it builds on this impressive foundation, Scotland can, should and will become a world leader of positive educational change. To do that, Scotland will need to ensure that its curriculum achieves equity as well as excellence for all pupils from all backgrounds wherever they live. It will need to communicate the effects of its educational efforts through a clearer narrative of progress and track that progress through better indicators of impact. It is an already strong profession that will need to collaborate even more closely among schools, across local authorities and with the wider community to achieve its vision. To be bold is to be admirable, to stay bold and to become bolder still in ways that benefit every learner is essential. Liz Smith, I thank the cabinet secretary for taking the intervention. I think that you are absolutely right on that comment. When it comes to the actual delivery of the curriculum for excellence, the OECD report did ask for a new narrative. Can you say something about how that might be delivered? Yes, indeed, and I concur with the need for less complexity and more clarity. I will be discussing that very point with the curriculum for excellence management board when I meet them tomorrow. However, picking up on some of the other remarks that were made by colleagues, colleagues will be aware that a new group on qualification and assessment has been established, and that is about getting the right balance, getting some more clarity, but getting the right balance in terms of that burden of assessment, but neither letting standard slip. Many speakers spoke about the importance of transitions between primary 7 and S2, and I agree with that entirely. I would also point to the importance of transitions from early years to primary 1 and also post-school transitions. Indeed, we need to get the balance between universal provision, whether it is attainment advisers, the new innovation fund that is announced by the First Minister or the access to education fund. That has to be balanced with a more targeted use of resources through the Scottish attainment challenge £100 million over four years. The only person who is obsessed with national testing is Liam McArthur. I stress to Liam McArthur in the time that I have left that we are not returning to the high stakes national testing of the past, and I urge him to stop fighting the battles that are long gone and to look to the future, because he says that there is no shortage of data in the system. It is just not available and it is not consistent. I will give way briefly. He talks on the one hand about not returning to high stakes testing in league tables, on the other she keeps talking about the need for consistency across the country and for this information to be available on a national basis. How does she square those two statements? I would urge Mr McArthur to read the national improvement framework and to look at the consultation document and the document that highlights how we responded to that very detailed consultation process that we undertook. However, we have to accept as the OEDCD rightly points out that current national assessment arrangements do not provide significantly robust information, yet Scotland has the opportunity to lead the world in developing an integrated assessment and evaluation framework. To Mr McArthur and others, nothing trumps teacher judgment, and education is indeed about thinking outside the box, and it is most certainly not about ticking the box. I am often asked by members in this chamber, Presiding Officer, about what my strategy is. I have never been one of those ministers who likes to sit in my office, either upstairs or in St Andrew's house, where I am happy the world at my back and a glossy shelf full of strategies. My strategy, first and foremost, is about ways. The introduction of national standardised assessments is about having the right information at the right time to intervene to help our children to progress. Those are diagnostic assessments where teachers have the flexibility to use those tests at any time in the school year as and when they see fit. One of the reasons that the national improvement framework has been put on a statutory basis is to ensure that this Government and indeed our partners in local government are subject to annual reporting, that we are both accountable and transparent. We do not just get into that cycle of describing what the problem is, so that we have the information to intervene at the right time in the right place with action firmly rooted in the real world. My obsession as a Cabinet Secretary for Education, first and foremost, is on children, and secondly, it is on front line what we need to do to enable our teaching profession to support our staff. As recommended by the OECD, this Government will indeed, with rigor, pursue relentlessly closing the attainment gap and raising the bar simultaneously, because it is not acceptable on absolutely any level for wealth to determine educational achievement and life chances. This Government had the courage to invite the OECD in to review Education Scotland, and we have the courage to open up this debate, and we will now act in the best interests of our children. Thank you. That concludes the debate on delivering a world-class education system. The next item of business is consideration of business motion number 15305, in the name of Jo Fitzpatrick, on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau, setting out a revision to the business programme for tomorrow, Wednesday 13 January. Any member wishes to speak against the motion, should press the request button now, and I call on Jo Fitzpatrick to move motion number 15305. Firmly moved. Thank you. No member has asked to speak against the motion, therefore I now put the question to the chamber. The question is that motion number 15305, in the name of Jo Fitzpatrick, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. There are three questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first question is that amendment number 15282.3, in the name of Ian Gray, which seeks to amend motion number 15282, in the name of Angela Constance, on delivering a world-class education system, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 15282.3, in the name of Ian Gray, is as follows. Yes, 34. No, 84. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is amendment number 15282.1, in the name of Liam McArthur, which seeks to amend motion number 15282, in the name of Angela Constance, on delivering a world-class education system, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 15282.1, in the name of Liam McArthur, is as follows. Yes, five. No, 80. There were 33 abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is motion number 15282, in the name of Angela Constance, on delivering a world-class education system, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion number 15282, in the name of Angela Constance, is as follows. Yes, 108. No, 10. There were no abstentions. The motion is therefore agreed to. That concludes decision time. We now move to members' business. Members should leave the chamber, should do so quickly and quietly.