Our Narrative Scottish Education for All

Our narrative is for Scottish Education For All. It recognises the importance of tackling poverty as a collective effort to ensure that every person in Scotland has continuing access to education. Our broader aims are :

• To improve our comprehensive wraparound model of education, care and health from early childhood and ensure that all children and family services support parents and carers where appropriate in identifying children’s needs and providing them with timeous and appropriate support
• To continue to build on the universal, broad and inclusive framework for the curriculum from early childhood to adult learning. This should include choice, depth, breadth, challenge and progression and value what learners know and can do so that all learners can be proud of their achievements. Scottish Labour should challenge any education system which results in limiting opportunities and leads to segregation by class or ability or any other form of segregation which fails to tackle inequalities
• To improve ways of targeting resources to reduce inequalities and promote achievement in the broadest sense throughout life
• To put inclusion and equal opportunities at the heart of education provision as well as challenging discrimination  in all its forms.
• To promote the development of local authority frameworks and partnerships providing strong local support and oversight of all educational establishments based on a model of sharing best practice and securing the highest standards of learning and teaching for our children and families in their communities.

Looking back Scottish Labour is proud of the achievements when it was in government. Scottish Labour has always supported a locally elected democratic structure of support and challenge.  In Scotland, 50 years ago 70% of young people left school with no qualifications. Now about 4% leave school with no qualifications.  Curriculum for Excellence originated under a Labour-led Executive who promoted on the National Debate involving teachers,  parents and communities.

Following the national debate high levels of funding and resources were directed towards Scottish education with budgets increasing year on year in Scotland.  Significant pay increases were part of building capacity and extending professionalism of our teachers.  Now the SNP have significantly reduced budgets and held teachers like other public sector workers to poor pay deals.

An additional factor in the failure of the SNP in education in Scotland is the lack of transparency about the performance of  school sand education authorities.  The present Scottish Government have dropped, changed altered any consistent approach to  statistics and analysis. No big data, no smart data, no consistent data has compromised the ability  to  identify strengths and areas for improvement, and provide accountability of this  Government’s  failures.