Education

"Dithering, drifting - whatever you call it - the lack of focus" from the Government

"is probably going to damage the education of thousands of children".

It continues to show "a poverty of ambition for Scotland's children."

That is how Councillor Bhatia, the executive member for education on Scottish Borders Council, sums up her feelings, which are mirrored in local authorities across the country, on how education is faring on the SNP's watch.

Sadly, the Government's latest solution seems to be to wrest still more control away from councils. Far from coming as a surprise, the threats of the past week to

"nationalise every school in Scotland"

represent just one more example of the SNP's power grab.

We have seen it all before. The SNP's vision of localism is to turn local government into some kind of puppet theatre, in which local authorities are reduced to doing central Government's bidding but kept as a buffer to take the flak when it all goes wrong. We have seen it with the SNP's idea for a new taxation system-a local income tax in which rates are set nationally-and, all too obviously, we have seen it in the historic concordat that it pushed on local councils when it came into office. The Government says that the concordat is based on "mutual respect and partnership", but that is only as long as councils do what they are told. It is a partnership that restricts councils' control over their budgets and decision making yet imposes unworkable, unfeasible and unwanted demands over their spending decisions.

Michael Russell: I do not recognise that description of the concordat. Does the member think that Liberal Democrat councils and councils in which Liberal Democrats are jointly in power

Indeed. The SNP's default position is always to bluster and blame. A little mature reflection might benefit its members today.

One cannot deny that the SNP has developed a clear strategy. As Margaret Smith said, it is to centralise the power, localise the blame. No doubt it is an attractive strategy for the man who is sat comfortably in Bute house. However, as the past week or so has shown, the strategy cannot last. It is a strategy that will inevitably cause unrest, resentment and downright rebellion among local authorities. Councils will neither accept unreasonable demands within unmanageable constraints nor be bullied, blamed and belittled. Even the most loyal SNP councillors will begin to revolt. They have begun to see that the Government does not have-indeed has never had-the "unprecedented respect" for local government that it claims to have.

Of course, most headlines this week focused on the failures of Fiona Hyslop, but we should all be clear: the SNP's failures on education will not stop just because Mike Russell has taken charge. Everything will not suddenly become rosy just because we have a new cabinet secretary. Things will get better only if Mike Russell commits to overseeing a fundamental change not only in Government policy but in Government attitude.

The relationship between local authorities and central Government has to be rebuilt. The SNP has to regain councils' trust. It also has to begin to demonstrate the respect that it claims to have and look again at the demands that it is making on local authorities in terms of education. It has to appreciate that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution and that headline-grabbing promises do not necessarily equate to practical policy commitments.

Over the past few days, I have spoken to a number of councils about their current situation. The overriding message is clear: councils do not have enough money to meet the SNP's pledges and, even if they did, the money could be better spent on other things. The Government's white elephant pledge on free school meals for all primary 1 to primary 3 children is a classic example of the issue. Instead of investing in areas where a real difference could be made, it prefers to direct councils to spend some of their already overstretched budget on buying lunches for rich kids. "Warped priorities" is one councillor's succinct description of the policy. In any case, there simply is not enough funding to meet the target. One council warned me that not only is it unable to allocate enough money to deliver the meals but the rest of the schools budget may face future cuts due to tightening finances if it has to maintain the funding that it has allocated.

On class sizes, the Government needs to quickly rethink its attitude. How can it have the gall to criticise local authorities for not making progress towards delivering smaller class sizes in primary schools, when it knows full well that the money is simply not available to do so? One councillor explained the situation in their local authority to me very simply:

"If the government doesn't provide increased funding, then reducing class sizes to 18 is simply impossible. And if the government does provide the extra money that's needed, there is no physical school space available, and no prospect of meeting the target within the Government's stated timeframe of this Parliament."

The scale of the task that the Government is demanding is easy to overlook. One of our smaller councils has calculated that, if it were to reduce all P1 to P3 classes to 18 and provide all the pupils with a free school lunch, the cost would be equivalent to 1 per cent of its total budget for this year. That is before it counts in the cost of improvements to kitchen facilities or expansion of school buildings, both of which would be needed. Things are even more startling when one looks at a large, chronically underfunded authority such as Aberdeen City Council, where the cost of meeting the targets is more like 9 per cent of its annual budget. Clearly, that money could be better spent elsewhere.

The nub of the problem is this: while the Government has spent its time arguing with local authorities, it has forgotten about what is important in education. It has let the curriculum for excellence stall-it has failed to provide the necessary funding and has still not clarified how the curriculum is to be reflected in examinations. Local authorities want to be able to fund the best possible education for their children, but they are not getting the support, funding or freedom that they need from Government.

I truly hope that those developments can be reversed and that the arrival of a new cabinet secretary will herald a change in the Government's education policy. I hope that today the cabinet secretary will commit himself to rebuilding the relationship with local authorities, and to working with them, in a genuine partnership, to correct the problems of the past two years, to review what the real priorities for education in Scotland ought to be and to establish how best to meet them.