The Scottish Government

« Previous | Contents | Next »

Listen

SECTION 5 - A SMARTER SCOTLAND

A Smarter Scotland - Expand opportunities for people in Scotland to succeed from nurture through to life long learning, ensuring higher and more widely shared achievements.

Throughout our history, Scotland has prized and been powered by learning and has often pioneered educational innovation. Since last May, we have taken action to maintain and develop our world-class education, to enable Scotland's people to be all they can be and to build a system that is as attractive to our own people as it is to talented people from elsewhere.

We began with measures needed most urgently:

• Restoring free education in Scotland, beginning with abolishing the graduate endowment fee, lifting a £2,289 burden from students and replacing loans with grants for part-time students;
• Making it a priority to focus on getting it right in the early years of children's lives and on early intervention, by increasing the entitlement to free pre-school education and by developing a joint policy framework together with Scotland's local authorities to improve outcomes for all of our youngest children and for all children and young people at risk;
• Transformational reform of the learning experience in Scotland from 3-18 through the Curriculum for Excellence, including consulting on a review of our National Qualifications to ensure they are fit for the future;
• Looking to the future, pursuing a major modernisation agenda jointly with Scotland's universities and maintaining the competitiveness of Scotland's universities through a record share of government expenditure and an additional £100m capital funding package;
• Enabling colleges to retain their charitable status, laying the first of two Orders to allow for this, with the second Order to follow later this year; and
• Setting out a new Skills Strategy with a vision of how skills can be developed and used to better meet the needs of individuals and employers in Scotland.

Education helps people to move ahead and escape disadvantage. It also enables them to contribute more effectively to their communities, to put more back in. Learning helps people to become more confident, ambitious and self-sufficient. People may come to learning later in life or decide they want to re-train. A vital element of our social democratic contract with the people of Scotland is to enable people to make the best of themselves, as a key driver of economic growth. We have introduced measures that give people more opportunity to achieve that:

• Ensuring that access to learning is based on the ability to learn and not the ability to pay, legislating to get rid of the £2,289 graduate endowment fee, so that current and future students no longer have to pay that charge and beginning the transition from student loans to grants, by removing loans for part-time students in 2008-09 and replacing them with a £500 grant.
• Ensuring that children of asylum seekers who have been here for at least three years get the same access as Scottish children to full-time further and higher education.
• Publishing proposals for rural schools and improving consultation on all proposed school closures. We intend to introduce a Rural Schools Bill, after considering responses to our proposals.
• Working with local authorities to provide nutritious free school meals for all P1-P3 pupils in five pilot local authorities from October 2007 to June 2008. If the evaluation of the trial is positive, we will be introducing secondary legislation and if passed, local authorities will provide free nutritious school meals to all P1-P3 pupils from August 2010.
• Working with Scotland's councils we are committed to reducing class sizes, as quickly as possible, in P1-P3 to a maximum of 18. We have provided additional capital allocation and specific arrangements for local authorities to maintain teacher numbers in the face of falling school rolls. Evidence shows that extra support in the earliest years pays dividends for children going forward.

Over the coming year we will work with COSLA, local authorities, colleges, universities, employers and the third sector:

• To take action to improve outcomes for our youngest children and those affected by risk by ensuring every child gets the help they need, when they need it, through universal services whenever possible and by refocusing services on building the capacity of families and communities;
• On proposed amendments to the Additional Support for Learning Act. In the autumn we propose to introduce an Amendment Bill to improve and further strengthen provisions for young people with additional support needs;
• To move into implementation of the biggest educational transformation of a generation - the Curriculum for Excellence. Working with local government, the school year 2008-09 will be spent on preparation for the new approaches - based on the recently published framework for learning and teaching - to be in place from school year 2009-10;
• By continuing to develop the thinking emerging from the Joint Future Thinking Taskforce on Universities and from the Review of Scotland's Colleges to maximise the contribution which Scottish universities and colleges will make in the next 20 years to the Scottish economy, culture and society; and
• Moving on apace with our Skills Strategy and working with Skills Development Scotland to achieve the right skills for Scotland's businesses and workforce, with a particular focus on skills utilisation.

Having spent this first year in government addressing the most urgent wrongs, we are turning to some of the difficulties that have held Scotland back in the past. This will also help enhance our good reputation internationally.

Over the next year, we will:

• Work together with local government and other partners to lead a profound shift in culture and service delivery around implementation of the early years/early intervention framework;
• Work with local authorities to embed the principles of Getting it Right for Every Child, so that services apply those principles in specific contexts such as children affected by domestic abuse or parental substance misuse, children who are looked after, and young people involved in offending;
• Consult on the details of the reform of the Children's Hearing system and then develop and bring forward a Children's Hearings Bill;
• Take forward the implementation of key legislation, including the Adoption Act and the Protection of Vulnerable Groups Act;
• Develop a Youth Framework which will support all young people to achieve positive outcomes and make positive contributions through a wide range of opportunities and services;
• Subject to necessary secondary legislation being passed, extend entitlement for free school meals to all primary and secondary school pupils from families in receipt of both maximum child tax credit and maximum working tax credit from August 2009;
• Building on the abolition of the graduate endowment fee, consult on our plans to restore free education for all in Scotland, and develop our student support measures in light of that;
• Implement the Review of Scotland's Colleges;
• Provide opportunities to further develop resilience, confidence and skills in young people and ensure that those who need it have more choices and more chances to access education, employment or training, building on the Determined to Succeed approach and collaborating with Scotland's employers on this agenda;
• Take forward proposals for the next generation of National Qualifications and Scottish Science and Language Baccalaureates;
• Improve knowledge transfer across the Scottish economy and stimulate demand for and use of research and innovation by businesses;
• Launch a new science strategy for Scotland; and
• Continue to support £2bn of planned investment in new and improved schools, supported by the development of the Scottish Futures Trust.

In all of this, we hope to fully develop the people and the talent we have in Scotland.

« Previous | Contents | Next »