I agree with a lot of what Eileen Prior was saying. What is attainment? That is one big issue that I have. What is attainment from one school to another? Attainment in a deprived area might be just getting the kids to turn up at school. That could be seen as raising attainment, simply because they are coming to school. Another definition of attainment could be how many national 5s people have.
We perhaps need to look at some sort of standardisation of what is or is not attainment. It is not good enough just to ask authorities what their attainment levels are, because they can all give different answers. What is the destination of school leavers? That is an attainment level, but we do not specifically ask, “What is the destination of your school leavers?” and get a chart. We ask how many kids get five national 5s. Only about 20 per cent of kids in that year group sit and get those qualifications. What about the 80 per cent who do not? That is where we are beginning to lose out.
If we start cutting budgets, as was mentioned, of course attainment will drop and we will never close the gap. Under curriculum for excellence, you have to help the high fliers in the school, so they will rise. Even if you help the kids at the bottom, things will move at the same level, so how will you bridge that gap?
That leads on to the quality of teaching; we need quality teachers. There are issues with teachers across the country. The General Teaching Council for Scotland is beginning to deal with some problems. God forbid that it gets rid of some teachers. I used to call teachers bombproof because you could not get rid of them once they were in a job—that was it—but we are now beginning to look at the problem and sort it out and we are beginning to get quality teachers through. When you see some of the new young teachers who are coming through the colleges under CFE, it is like night and day. Some of the ideas that they are using to bring the kids on are mind-blowing.
The big issue is that, if budget restraints start to kick in, I honestly think that it will turn into a postcode lottery, because some authorities work far better with their budgets than others and we are beginning to see gaps across the country. Some councils pay more to fund the kids for the year than others, but in a lot of them there are cuts. In the past three years, there have been cuts. Not a lot of them have been to education, but in the next three years there will be serious cuts to education because a lot of the other departments in local authorities have been cut to the bone.
How do authorities make savings in education? Paying for the bus trip down the road just when statutorily required to do so is not much of a saving. The only way to make serious savings in education is through staffing cut and school closures, neither of which is acceptable to parents. If we carry on down the road that we are going down with CFE, we could have one of the best systems in the world. If we pull the carpet out from under it now, there is a good chance that we will end up a big step back down the ladder.