Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am happy to lead this timely debate for Labour.

These remain incredibly challenging times in our schools, and the disruption of the past few years is truly unprecedented since the advent of universal education in this country. All of our education staff deserve our thanks. An already difficult job is made worse by having to deal with the dithering and delay that has become a hallmark of SNP education policy over many years. We are now in late January, and the situation surrounding exams and assessment remains far from clear. Senior education officials speaking at the Education, Children and Young People Committee this very morning sought urgent clarity about the planning scenarios for assessment, and they commented that it is far better for schools to know what mitigations and support may be open to them.

If the cabinet secretary refuses to answer questions on that in the chamber and will not listen to members, I urge her to heed the calls from senior education professionals across Scotland. Equity in education is not a mere subjective value, and it is not fluffy or a nice to have; it is the objective basis on which a national system of qualifications is founded. Grades must be comparable if they are to act as a passport to employment and to the next steps of education.

The national system has been vital for social progress in Scotland, both material and cultural, for women, for Catholics and for black and minority ethnic Scots. It gives people a piece of paper that says, “I am as able as any other, and your prejudice is that alone.” The whole process gives validity to the very idea of social progress, even if the reality of it has become far less likely over the past decade and a half. We know that the experience of the pandemic has been unequal across different areas and demographics.

More work is urgently needed to assess for whom and how the impact has been greatest, but we know that, at an individual level, there are young people who have lost far more time in school than others, through no fault of their own. The next steps that are taken must redress that equity gap. The Government should urgently produce a plan to ensure that young people are supported, including through specific provision for those who need most support. Our education staff are working tirelessly in unprecedented circumstances to that end, but they need all the help that we can muster.

Further, and as the barest of minimums, the Government must immediately publish an appeals process, inclusive of a no-detriment policy, so that young people in exceptional circumstances can achieve redress if the Government fails to act before grades are assessed.

The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland has made it clear that the Government’s failure in that area—not once, but twice—was a breach of the children’s rights that the Government claims to respect. Those without standing appeals from 2020 were, at a stroke of the cabinet secretary’s pen, told that they would not have any route of appeal.

We are well past the point of cumulative lost education that forced the cancellation of last year’s exam diet. It stands to reason that, without taking steps now, the Government will fall below its own very low bar for action.

A senior teacher contacted me this very afternoon to express concern at the huge loss of learning that has been faced by his pupils. He said:

“I feel sorry for so many kids who are going to be treated like everyone else, when they are not the same.”

The Government has backed itself into a corner on the exam diet. Now we all need the exams to go ahead, because there is no real alternative. Teachers unions are very clear that there is no real plan B. We all want to see the decline in cases continue, but I am daily concerned that a surfeit of confidence might mean that the necessary preparations for new variants or for a rapid deterioration of the situation were neglected.

Let us hope that circumstances permit a full exam diet, but action must be taken now to ensure that it is a fair one. I hope that the chamber will back Labour’s amendment.

I move amendment S6M-02839.2, to leave out from “and the failure” to end and insert:

“; recognises the disruption to the educational experience of young people caused by COVID-19; believes that it is the duty of the Scottish Government to ensure that there is equity in the qualifications system; notes that in-year learning has again been disrupted in this academic year, and calls, therefore, on the Scottish Government to immediately publish a National Appeals Process, which includes exceptional circumstances caused by disruption and guarantees no detriment to pupils.”

I welcome the minister’s addressing of that question, but we should explore why that increase has happened. My understanding is that the removal of Valium scripts has partly created a public policy issue. We have to ensure that we do not open other Pandora’s boxes in the same way. If we do not learn the lessons from things that we have done wrong as a country, we will repeat those things.

Much has already been said about the recent developments around the Drug Deaths Taskforce, and I do not intend to take up too much of my time reviewing that unfortunate set of circumstances. Governments do not get everything right, and some Governments get very little right. However, we should welcome it when, if they believe that their approach is not working, they change course.

We are all concerned about the pace of progress. It cannot be allowed to replicate the glacial pace of recognition and acceptance of responsibility from the Government of this astonishing national shame. The cost of that neglect and delay is measured in lives more than it is by time. The impact on my home city of Dundee, the North East Scotland region that I represent and the whole country are huge. Our community remains deeply frustrated that the situation is still of such desperate failure, with continuing trends of death, destruction and devastation to families and communities across Scotland.

As our amendment and our actions have shown so far, Labour strongly supports the MAT standards and wishes to see them put into practice consistently across the country with the urgency that the minister consistently speaks of. Those reforms, which are to be implemented universally in a matter of weeks, are being demanded at an unprecedented pace, but they are of course responding to an unprecedented situation. I know that the minister will hear even more regularly than I do the well-founded concerns of agencies and experts about how they can be achieved, but we cannot allow inertia to prevail, and neither can we ignore the huge distances that some services have to travel.

I would like to place on record my thanks to the Minister for Drugs Policy and the Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care for meeting me and the Brechin Healthcare Group before Christmas break to hear about the fantastic work that it is doing and the challenges that it faces. The good will and receptiveness of the ministers at the meeting was evident and appreciated, but I still left it with very real concerns about how the MAT standards will be implemented in rural and semi-rural areas, which have lost so many health services over the past 14 years. Of course, how the reality of service access meets the rhetoric of ambition, even in Scotland’s urban areas, has been set out in this chamber.

In Dundee, the absence of a functioning same-day prescription service has been central to the tragedy that continues to plague the city. It is now three years since the publication of the Dundee drugs commission report, which had at its core the need for those services to be operational and working in tandem with other support for people. Since the report was published, far more than 195 people have died. That number reflects the published statistics and not the number of people who we have lost since last summer. It is a trend that has continued upwards for a decade and shows no signs of reversing.

The two-year assessment by the independent commission of what has happened with the implementation of the report is now concluding.

I have not had sight of that report but, given the many discussions that I have had, I would be greatly surprised if it were to say anything other than that very little change has taken place. Services have been rebadged and tests of change, as they are now called, have been started, but I can see nothing that has radically altered the situation that Dundonians face. There has been none of the urgent action that is needed to meaningfully improve the life chances of people who are in need of support. I might sound pessimistic, but more than 200 lost Dundonians and the grief of their families is the fatal proof.

David Strang is no stranger to the challenge of systems that resist rather than embrace change, given how slow the implementation of recommendations from his report into mental health services in Tayside has been.

A Scottish Drugs Forum report assessing progress towards the implementation of MAT standards across the country has found that just 8 per cent of the research participants had access to same-day prescribing. The interminable delays in Dundee’s service change must not be tolerated across Scotland.

The debate marks the first anniversary of what the minister calls the national mission. It is a mission with, unfortunately, little real success to show. In all honesty, I find it difficult to describe what the realistic evidence-based intent of the mission is.

I absolutely agree. If it is a mission, we should all share it and everyone must know its story and intent. Why is Scotland’s drug deaths record the worst in the world by such a huge distance? That is a key question. Why, when we have the same drug laws as the rest of the UK, is the number of drug deaths in Scotland three and a half times as high? A year on, Scotland is yet to hear answers to those vital questions from the minister or the Government.

What has come through the Dundee drugs commission is a picture of what the local problem has been—its character, the type of drugs and the situation. The why and the where are absolutely critical for a form of analysis that the public can buy into. I want to hear more from the minister in that regard. In order for there to be leadership out of the crisis—walking alongside families, individuals and communities—we need to hear the story of why.

In the early part of the past decade, under this Government, prescribing policy changed to stop the dispensing of Valium. That led directly to an illicit street market for cheap and toxic replica drugs. That is the most lethal policy error of devolution, and it has opened a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences. Why did it happen? What warnings were made and ignored? How can we avoid that happening again if the tragedy is not recognised and explained? I hope that the conclusion of the task force will be a moment for the minister to answer those questions—the questions of why—and to tell a painful story for which we must all write a better ending.

Twice in the past 13 years in times of great crisis, this country has relied on quantitative easing to save livelihoods, protect our economy and avoid a catastrophic depression. Earlier this week, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy posed a quite extraordinary question, which I hope the First Minister might answer. To be clear, this is not my question; it is one from the finance secretary:

“would it be such a great loss not to be able to conduct quantitative easing?”

Let us be clear that what that means is “Open the window.” After two years, that is what the Government has come up with. Young people are learning in freezing temperatures, wearing hats, scarves and gloves.

Just in the past week, a teacher in Dundee told me that the red light on their CO₂ monitor is on constantly. He has been told to ignore it and he now has Covid. At best, he will miss Christmas with his family.

Will the cabinet secretary begin the immediate procurement of high-efficiency particulate air—HEPA—filter machines for every classroom, so that that completely unacceptable situation does not arise for a third winter in a row?

Yesterday, the First Minister said that schools will open “as normal” in the new year, but, as parents and teachers have been pointing out to me since then, things are far from normal in our schools. Schools and classes have been closing for weeks, and disruption is widespread. Maintaining an exam diet will require new action from the Government. What new approaches will the cabinet secretary take on ventilation, testing, staffing and digital learning to ensure that our children have a fighting chance of sitting the exams?

This is a defining moment for Scottish education. The statistics show the lowest attainment on record under curriculum for excellence and an increase in what was already a staggering attainment gap. In response, the cabinet secretary has cut attainment challenge funding this year to the levels of 2017 and plans to return teacher numbers to what they were when the Scottish National Party took office in 2007. There is nothing in the plans to respond now to this urgent situation. Can we really have confidence that a failing pre-pandemic plan can protect the life chances of a pandemic generation?

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the “Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) Levels” statistics. (S6O-00549)

The cabinet secretary—