The next item of business is a debate on motion S1M-877, in the name of Mr Sam Galbraith, which proposes that the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Bill be passed.

I am pleased to stand before the Scottish Parliament today to speak for the Scottish Executive on the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Bill. It is a major piece of legislation which, with the new investment the Executive has made in schools education, will promote improvement and excellence in all Scotland's schools, for the benefit of each and every child in Scotland.

The bill places the child at the centre of education. It ensures that every child has the right to an education that is directed towards the development of their personality, talents and mental and physical abilities so that they may achieve their full potential. It imposes, for the first time, new duties on Scottish ministers and education authorities to promote improvement in school education. It puts in place the strategic framework to deliver that improvement. It will link national priorities, local authority improvement objectives and school-level targets to create an integrated framework for schools education in Scotland.

National priorities are the key to that framework. They will determine the outcomes for education, so that every child—

I ask members to keep the noise level down while the minister is speaking.

I thought I was speaking pretty loudly.

You were, Mr Galbraith.

Thank you.

They will determine the outcomes for education, so that every child is equipped with the skills required for life. We are already consulting widely on what should be the national priorities for schools education and will present our proposals to the Parliament later this year.

The improvement framework will be underpinned by the new power to inspect education authorities. That will allow us to highlight good practice but also to identify areas of underperformance to ensure delivery of the improvements in education that our children deserve.

The bill contains the first substantial provisions relating to the General Teaching Council for Scotland since it was set up in 1965. We have strengthened the GTC's role in ensuring the highest professional standards in Scotland's teaching force by extending its responsibilities into the areas of teachers' continuing professional development and competence. For the first time, the council will have aims consistent with the general raising of standards in the profession and will be subject to a general public interest duty.

The bill ensures that the membership of the council, while retaining a majority of registered teachers—a majority that has been increased during the passage of the bill—represents the teaching profession and a wide range of other interested parties. The future direction, structure and conditions of service of the profession will be taken forward in the context of detailed discussions on the implementation of the McCrone report. That report has been prepared following thorough and wide-ranging consultation but implementation will require considerable groundwork with teachers and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

I have already signalled the Scottish Executive's intention to use the summer period to take forward bilateral discussions. I hope that that will clear the way for the tripartite implementation group that will commence in the autumn. This is an important stage for the development of the profession and the future of our schools. I hope that the Parliament will be supportive of us in this task.

Parents have a key role to play in the education process. That is reflected in the bill, which places new requirements on education authorities and schools to consult and involve parents in school education. For the first time, the bill defines the purpose of school boards as supporting schools. It removes the by-election in school board elections to streamline the process and generally to make it less intimidating for parents to put themselves forward for board membership. The bill will support the dramatic expansion of pre-school education, with a new, stronger, statutory framework, guaranteeing access for children.

The bill contains major steps towards promoting inclusive educational policies for children with special educational needs, whether they are in school or unable to attend for some reason, such as ill health. It combines a strong commitment to including all children in mainstream schooling with a realistic acknowledgement that the needs of a small number of pupils will be best met through alternative provision.

The bill has been introduced and promoted by the Scottish Executive, but its final form has been moulded by the Scottish Parliament and the people of Scotland. The Education, Culture and Sport Committee has worked hard to ensure that it is the best it can be and I thank its members for their diligence and for the excellent way in which they have brought it through the process. In particular, I thank them for the constructive role that they have played. I wish also to thank the clerks for the assistance that they have given.

I want to put on record my thanks to my colleague, Mr Peter Peacock, who has done all the hard work behind the scenes—and up front—to make this such a successful bill. Finally, I also record my thanks to all who participated in the various consultations. The new processes have worked and, as we have seen today with further amendments in respect of equal opportunities and Gaelic-medium education, we have a better bill because of them.

The bill offers a major opportunity to develop and take forward schools education in Scotland. I call on all members of the Parliament to show their support for this objective and to approve the bill.

I would like to join Mr Galbraith in thanking a number of people. It is entirely appropriate to thank the committee clerks for their work and assistance throughout the progress of the bill. I would also like to thank my colleagues on the Education, Culture and Sport Committee for the constructive spirit in which we approached consideration of the bill. We did not always agree and we had a few good debates, but the approach was constructive and was designed to improve the bill. I hope that we have achieved that.

I also thank the deputy minister and his officials for the good humour with which, for the most part, they have dealt with amendments to the bill. It would also be appropriate to thank the Minister for Children and Education for popping in for the final stages of the bill and joining us as it passes. Finally, like Mr Galbraith, I thank the many individuals and organisations who took the time to give evidence to the Education, Culture and Sport Committee. Their input was invaluable, if not always listened to by the Executive. I hope that that has confirmed in their minds the value of the Parliament's procedures to ensure that the people are listened to.

This is a bill that, in general terms, the SNP has been happy to support at all its stages, although we made efforts, especially at stage 2, to improve and to strengthen it where it was seen to be weak. Some of those efforts were more successful than others, but the bill that we will pass today is in many respects better than the one that was published a couple of months ago.

Any moves to raise the standards of education in Scotland are to be welcomed and endorsed. There is much in the detail of the bill that, I agree with Mr Galbraith, will help to improve the educational experience for children in Scotland. The obligation on ministers to consult on and to publish national priorities in education and have them approved by Parliament will, I hope, ensure that change in education is developed and implemented in a much more inclusive, measured and thoughtful way than has been the case in the past, avoiding the sense of alienation and initiative overload felt by many in the teaching profession and in parents' organisations.

The bill will at long last remove the divisive, Tory-imposed opt-out legislation. That legislation was always rejected by the Scottish people and it will now be removed from the statute book. That is to be welcomed. I hope, however, that the minister will take time to reassure the parents at St. Mary's in Dunblane that they have nothing to fear from the bill. The provisions on independent schools, the tidying up of the placing requests system and the start to extending the remit of the General Teaching Council are also to be welcomed.

The Executive made a number of concessions at stage 2: a code of practice will be issued for HMI school inspections; the national priorities will be approved by the Parliament and not simply issued by the Executive; measures will increase the democratic nature of school boards; there will be an increase, albeit a small one, in the teacher majority on the General Teaching Council; and local authorities will be required to pay heed to guidance on sex education.

There were other issues on which the Executive did not concede, such as the strengthening of the GTC's power to regulate the teaching profession, the inclusion of children with special educational needs, Gaelic-medium education and ensuring that the system is child-centred. The debates on those matters will continue and I hope that the Executive will show that it is willing to listen.

I remind the chamber that for all that this is a good bill, there are big issues in education that it will not address. Far too many of our school buildings are in an appalling state. It will take £1.3 billion to bring them up to an acceptable standard. Implementation of the McCrone committee's recommendations is an important issue. I hope that the minister will acknowledge that local authorities cannot afford to implement the recommendations and that he will say how much money the Executive will make available to ensure that they are implemented. We must also tackle deficiencies in our curriculum: only 12 per cent of our school population study modern languages to higher level.

Let us pass the bill and reflect on the good things it will do, then let us quickly address the other, much more difficult, issues that we must face if we are to improve the education system for the young people of Scotland.

I, too, would like to record my thanks to the clerks and all those on the committee who helped with the bill. I also thank the people in the Scottish Executive's back-room team who have helped to smooth the way for a number of amendments to be accepted.

It is recorded that the Conservative party group voted against the bill at stage 1. Sadly, I have to say that not enough has been done to it since to allow us to find our way to support it now.

We believe that the bill represents a missed opportunity. It is ironic that it is called the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Bill, as it fails to give the GTC the powers that would enable it to raise the professional status of teachers, it fails to give the reassurance over sex education that it could, it fails to deal with areas of great importance such as discipline and it fails to deal with the pay and conditions of teachers. All those affect standards in schools and tackling them properly would increase confidence in schooling.

The bill devotes five sections to raising standards but seven sections to repealing the self-governing status that has contributed to raising standards at St Mary's school, a local school with 65 pupils that has achieved, through independent management, what we like to talk of often in the committee and in this chamber—partnership. The school has achieved a good partnership between parents and teachers, which is what we want all our schools to achieve. The words "sledgehammer" and "nut" come to mind when one considers the bill.

There is much talk in committee and in Parliament of a new politics and a new consensus, but the bill gives us a clear example of the listening Government failing to listen. Conservatives could have supported the repeal of self-governing status for schools if the independence of the schools could have been maintained. It would have been an anomaly to maintain St Mary's independence, but Jordanhill in Glasgow is an example of such an anomaly and it survives. We see double standards, not standards, in schools.

The bill is not a major contribution to raising standards, it is a managerial handbook for the Labour nomenklatura—the Labour elite that says one thing and does another. It says that ministers will have to seek to improve standards, yet the ministers seek to snuff out a school in which standards have improved. Independence can bring results. Parents at St Mary's think so and I have found parents at Jordanhill who think so. I presume Sam Galbraith thinks so—he sends his children to Jordanhill.

As if that were not enough, the minister announced last week that £32 million is to be given to schools independently—not through local authorities. If Sam Galbraith's policy is to let local authorities manage state schools, why not apply that to all schools? He was asked and could not respond.

Ministers were invited to St Mary's, but they did not have the guts to face the parents, the teachers and the children. The minister would not even talk about St Mary's in his winding-up speech. He should not be proud of this bill, he should be ashamed; ashamed that he is the political bully who in losing the argument—indeed, not even facing it—has used the Executive's majority to force it through.

I rise to my feet with some trepidation after Mr Monteith's speech. I hope to strike a slightly warmer and more positive note.

This has been a first for many of us. I have never been through the legislative process before and I have never done anything like this. Personally, I am proud to have played a part in shaping this impressive bill, which takes us forward.

I also thank my colleagues on the Education, Culture and Sport Committee—Nicola Sturgeon, Brian Monteith and all the other members. I say a special thank you to Mary Mulligan, who has piloted us through choppy waters and has shown a mixture of common sense and grace when dealing with difficult colleagues such as me and Ian Jenkins. A special thank you also goes to Gillian Baxendine and the clerks, who have worked extremely hard trying to make sense of some of my amendments.

In particular and last, I thank Sam Galbraith and Peter Peacock; both are masters of the art of taking members on in debate across the committee table. We did not always get what we wanted, but Nicola Sturgeon must admit that it was an interesting and instructive process.

I will close by making one serious remark. My good friend Mr Alasdair Morrison was mentioned earlier. I will say this about Alasdair: he is a true son of Gaeldom and has done good work for the Gaelic cause in Scotland. Let no one be mistaken about that. I have seen through my constituency work how people who want to learn Gaelic near their homes through tertiary education have been enabled to do so. That has been made to happen. It has the fingerprints of Mr Alasdair Morrison on it.

Through talking to Karen Whitefield, I happen to know that Alasdair went down to Airdrie and Shotts and surrounding villages the other day to meet some people who have been learning Gaelic and have won a top prize. Let us make no mistake about Alasdair's role. I am deliberately going on the record as being supportive.

Some months ago, Alasdair Morrison said:

"It would be sad if political walls were to come between Gaelic and its success and development."—[Official Report, 2 March 2000; Vol 5, c 388.]

Some of us would have liked to see more on Gaelic in the bill today, but that is not to be. That is the nature of democracy. There has been an improvement. Let there be no mistake; it is better today than it was yesterday. However, I ask the Executive to consider the possibility during the lifetime of this Parliament of a Gaelic bill, not just to address the language, but to address the culture and the fragile economy of the Gaelic-speaking parts of Scotland. If in their hearts ministers in the Executive could find the time—I know the problems with Cabinet business—for us to consider such a bill, I know that it would send out an important and supportive message to Gaeldom.

We are supposed to finish this debate in about 20 seconds' time, but I will give the Education, Culture and Sport Committee convener a chance to make a brief speech.

I add my thanks to the committee clerks, who kept me on the straight and narrow, and the witnesses. As has been said, without the people who were willing to put their views in writing and to brave coming to the committee, we could not have made the informed decisions that members have seen here today.

Stage 2 produced much thoughtful and considered debate. There is much to be welcomed in the bill. Issues such as Gaelic-medium education and special educational needs have already been mentioned, so I will not go over them, but I will address Brian Monteith's point about St Mary's school. I am more than certain, Brian, that St Mary's will continue to go from strength to strength under the auspices of the local authority. We will see that in the coming months.

The bill's promotion of equal opportunities and the raising of standards will be welcomed by people all over Scotland. It is a good basis for discussions and for teachers, parents, local authorities and this Parliament to work together. I hope that it augurs well for the future.

I would like to thank Peter Peacock, who attended the committee and assisted us in all our decision making. The committee worked well; I am sure that issues that have been discussed today will be returned to in future.

Mr Galbraith, do you want to respond?

No. [Applause.]

Clearly the most popular speech of the day. That concludes the debate.