S4M-15588 Education

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Elaine Smith): The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-15588, in the name of Iain Gray, on Scotland’s future prosperity.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):

To state the obvious, education matters to us all, and to all the people of Scotland. Education has touched my family, as it has the families of other members. My grandfather started teaching in 1881. When he retired in 1926, he was a fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland. His father was a coal miner, so he did not come from a highly educated family. My mother was the daughter of a ship’s rigger, and started teaching in 1931—on an annual salary, I may say, of £36. Today, I have a niece who teaches in England and a nephew who teaches in Denmark. Alas, I do not seem to have in my family any current teachers who live in Scotland. My own pedagogic activity was strictly limited to the three years that I spent lecturing postgraduate students at Heriot-Watt University after I retired from my long-term career.

I accept that we all, across Parliament, have a shared ambition for and a belief in the importance of education. I presume that the same goes for training, because the two are often linked. We are really debating the means rather than the ends.

The title of the debate is “Scotland’s Future Prosperity”, and education plays a key part in contributing to that prosperity. There is, of course, the economic activity that is associated with the preparation and delivery of education. We employ teachers and others in, and we attract students from around the globe to, a system that has long been recognised as excellent. Substantial difficulties for that aspect of our education system have been created by the withdrawal of one of Jack McConnell’s achievements: the system of visas for foreign students. I very much regret that that is happening, and I suspect that most members in the chamber feel the same.

We also get economic benefit from education because it equips our citizens for future challenges and opportunities. Of course, future challenges are very interesting because we do not know what they will be. Above all, education is not simply about putting a set of skills into the cerebral cavities of our students; it is about equipping them to make future decisions, the nature of which this generation of politicians and teachers can know nothing.

I am a regular visitor to schools, as other members in the chamber will be. Most recently, I visited the North East Scotland College campus at Fraserburgh in my constituency. It has had significant investment, and there is more building work under way. Inside the building, there are new computers. Given the pressure of increased demand and increased student numbers, the school is stealing some of the public space for new teaching rooms. When the building is complete, we will return to the kind of balance that we want. More fundamentally, substantially more students in that college—the whole attitude and approach of which I like very much—have, on their graduation, certificates and diplomas that are relevant to the employment opportunities in the area, and which will also endure as a contribution to their wellbeing.

Historically, we in Scotland have, of course, placed an emphasis on rational argument and personal responsibility. That came partly from the reformation, which brought Calvinism to Scotland. We might say that that was a mixed blessing, but it put in place a value on education that was delivered by our having an education system that was available to most of our population long before other countries in Europe.

We were also fortunate, where others were unfortunate, in Scotland’s being one of the early medical training centres in Europe. That was because of the bad reason that Edinburgh had substantial morbidity in the old town because the buildings were built upwards for safety, so that people could live near the castle in dangerous times. That created a hotbed of infection transfer, which led to the opportunity to create a medical school of international renown.

I want to be a little didactic about the subject of technical adjustments to numbers, which has emerged, by illustrating something from our ordinary natural lives. If I had a car that I assessed a year ago as being worth £12,000, I might, in looking at my assets and liabilities, consider that it would be worth £10,500 this year on my balance sheet. That would represent depreciation of £1,500. However, if I went along to John Menzies and quickly, while no one was looking, looked in the appropriate books to see what its value was, I could find that it was worth £11,000. In other words, the depreciation that I had put on the balance sheet would be £500 less than the reality. That would be good news. My assets would have grown, but there would not be a penny more in my pocket. Perhaps members might care to think about the fact that some of the numbers that we talk about are exactly the same as that.

I commend the read, write, count campaign, and the making maths count campaign that the Government has been engaged in.

Teachers bring perspiration to their tasks much more than is commonly recognised. They work longer hours than people often realise, bring inspiration to their students and create a supernation.

Finally, on how to deal with raising tax, Gordon Brown said on 30 April 2008:

“We did not cover as well as we should that group of low-paid workers and low-income people who don’t get the working income tax credits”.

In other words, the last time Labour upped the tax for basic rate taxpayers, Gordon Brown acknowledged that it didnae work. The evidence is that Labour hasnae thought it through any more carefully this time.

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