S4M-13246 Education (Equity and Excellence)

The Presiding Officer (Tricia Marwick): The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-013246, in the name of Angela Constance, on equity and excellence in education.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP): It is interesting to hear echoes in the debate. Cara Hilton has just mentioned Queen Anne school, where my mother started teaching 85 years ago. Her first year’s wages were £36, which was not a great deal of money then and sounds even less now.

We are a different Parliament to that which we see down south. Most of us went to our local school and we have had some exposure to the subject that is under discussion—albeit that I left school in 1964 and I can see other members who might have left at a similar time or even earlier, so we are probably significantly out of date. That said, even then we saw change. In 1962, I was in the first fourth-year cohort to sit ordinary grade exams. They were introduced in that year and as fourth and fifth years, who would previously have sat lower grade exams to complement the highers, we were the first to sit the ordinary grade. There has been change in the system for many years.

As we always will do in such debates, we have talked a bit about money. It is interesting to note that the average spending per primary school pupil in Scotland is nearly £400 higher than it is in England, and in secondary education, it is approaching £300 higher. Some of the reasons for that can be geographic, and some of our schools are smaller and the overheads are therefore higher, but we have seen expenditure in education rise by about 4.5 per cent since the Scottish National Party has been in Government. I do not think that we should imagine that throwing more money at education while doing the same things is likely to lead to significantly different outcomes.

The motion and amendments that are before us are interesting. The Government says that there is

“much to be proud of in Scotland’s schools”

and who could disagree? The Labour Party

“welcomes the Scottish Government’s attainment fund and widening access commission”

and it is good that it does so. The Liberal Democrats, like Harry Burns, the former chief medical officer, focus on the early part of life.

I want to talk about a few eclectic things that matter to me. Willie Coffey talked derisively about Turing, but the Turing test is one of the most important tests in artificial intelligence and, of course, the first book on artificial intelligence was written in Edinburgh in the early 1970s. The Turing test was developed in 1950 by Alan Turing. I am a great fan of Alan Turing and of many other things.

I confess that I am currently a student: I am doing an online course to improve my genealogical skills—a hobby I have had for more than 50 years—through the University of Strathclyde. I do not visit the university; I spend so many hours on the train each week that I can do my studying then with a few hours on a Saturday and Sunday night online. The world of learning has changed dramatically; my lifelong learning is quite different from that of previous generations.

As somebody who studied mathematics, I am naturally interested in how we deal with numbers. I am currently reading a book on quantum mechanics and steeping myself in Einstein, Dirac, Pauli, Schrödinger and many other great luminaries of the 20th century. I admire the work of many of the women in computing, including Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was, in the modern era, probably the first computer programmer and, of course, Ada Lovelace, who was Byron’s niece and the programmer for Babbage in the 19th century.

I ask the cabinet secretary why we do not put some money aside for some relatively small-scale but long-run tests of different approaches. I have raised previously the Trachtenberg system of speed mathematics, which is a terrific system that was developed by a Jew in a concentration camp during the last war. It enables children to develop their memory and mental arithmetic skills. I used it on a previous occasion to demonstrate that 240 is 1,099,511,627,776, which, of course, we can immediately work out is the square of 1,048,576.

The real point about that is that if we add the digits in 1,048,576, we find that, if we keep adding them up, we get 4. Multiply 4 by 4 and we get 16, and add 1 and 6 together, we get 7. Keep adding the digits of 1,099,511,627,776 together and we end up with 7. In other words, it is not just about doing the arithmetic but about having checking systems. Other countries use the Trachtenberg system to good effect.

I also look to the work of Tony Buzan and the mind-mapping approach that he has developed to memory work. It may be worth equipping children with specific skills in improving their memory.

I echo what others have said about diversity in education being well worth having. I was a very poor student at all stages of my educational career, but I studied maths, natural philosophy, chemistry, psychology, geology, logic and metaphysics, French, Latin, English, biology, geography and history at various times—and I am amazed by how useful I find much of that learning to be.

This is a good and timely debate. The Government accepts the nature of the challenge; I hope that it demonstrates that it is open to other ways forward, and to diversity, as we work our way towards new solutions for those who are most disadvantaged in our communities.

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