– in the Scottish Parliament at on 2 March 2017.
Nicola Sturgeon
Scottish National Party
Matters of importance to the people of Scotland.
Willie Rennie
Liberal Democrat
Now that the First Minister is thinking again about her plans for education, will she think again about national testing? She told me before in the chamber that she would avoid league tables. Has she kept that promise?
The First Minister:
We do not publish league tables and we will not publish them. Willie Rennie asked me whether I will change my mind on national testing. No, I will not change my mind on it. I do not support national testing and we will not introduce it. What we are introducing is standardised assessment that will be used to help—[
Interruption
.] Well, the teachers and the professionals understand very well the distinction between the two. I suggest that Willie Rennie might want to talk to one of them to educate himself a bit more on that distinction.
Standardised assessments will inform the judgments that teachers make about whether a young person is meeting the required level of curriculum for excellence. I think that it is really important—perhaps Willie Rennie and I just fundamentally disagree about this—for a teacher to have an objective source of information to inform all the judgments that they bring to bear. We will therefore continue to introduce standardised assessment and we will continue to publish the data, which I think all parents and, indeed, all members have a right to see.
How are our schools doing in terms of the performance of young people against the required levels of curriculum for excellence? If we do not know that, how do we know whether we are doing well or whether we need to do better? The worst thing that any First Minister or Government could allow to continue is some kind of flying-blind situation where we just hope that we are doing the right things. I want us to have the information to make sure that we are doing the right things.
Willie Rennie
Liberal Democrat
The First Minister is wrong. We already have national school league tables. We have the information on every local authority, every school and every test result. It is published by her own Government on the basis of experimental information. We have national school league tables. She promised that that would never happen, but it is exactly what is happening.
The Educational Institute for Scotland has said that standardised testing
“crushes creativity both for learners and for teachers, does not take full account of pupil progress and causes unnecessary stress for the children and young people who are subjected to it.”
Is it not time that the First Minister abandoned the implementation of national testing, which was last brought in by Michael Forsyth under Margaret Thatcher’s regime? Is it not about time that the First Minister recognised that she has got this wrong?
The First Minister:
No. Willie Rennie is 100 per cent wrong on that. He is 100 per cent wrong on lots of things, but he is certainly 100 per cent wrong on that. I would go further than that, as I think that he—perhaps inadvertently, but I suspect not—is trying to mislead people about what is happening through standardised assessments.
I know exactly what the Scottish Government is publishing. We are not publishing and will not publish league tables that rank schools by their performance. What we are publishing and will continue to publish—I make absolutely no apology for this—is information that tells us school by school how young people are performing, because parents, teachers and those of us who are accountable for the education system have a right to know that.
If we do not know, for example, what percentages of our young people in primary 4 are meeting and not meeting the required level of curriculum for excellence, how are we supposed to take the action to put things right if the percentages are not as good as they should be? How are we supposed to take the action before the young person gets further into school, when it becomes too late to rectify the situation?
I make no apology for that. Parents have a right to know how their young people are doing, and those of us who have the responsibility for making education policy need to know that as well.
That is not national testing; it is standardised assessment to inform teacher judgment. I said once before to Willie Rennie when he raised the matter that, at a previous meeting of the council of education advisers, Larry Flanagan of the EIS gave what I thought was the best articulation that I had heard of the difference between testing and assessment, so perhaps Willie Rennie should talk to him. We are talking about standardised assessment to inform teacher judgment and, to be frank, we should be publishing that information to allow us to know whether we are doing what we should be doing by the young people of this country. I will never make any apology for that.
Mike Rumbles
Liberal Democrat
On a point of order, Presiding Officer.
The Presiding Officer:
I will take the point of order at the end of First Minister’s questions.
Douglas Ross
Conservative
In December, the First Minister agreed with concerns about the openness and transparency of the Scottish Police Authority. Now, a member of that authority has resigned, reportedly because of the reaction to her having dared to raise a dissenting voice about how it conducts its business. At the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee this morning, a Scottish Government official said that the matter requires further discussion.
Does the First Minister agree that what is needed is not further discussion but for the Scottish Government to tell Andrew Flanagan that his damaging governance review is failing the SPA, failing Police Scotland and failing the public? What will the Scottish Government do to ensure that this vital scrutiny body can become “proportionate, accountable and transparent”, as is required by the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012?
The First Minister:
The governance review is about improving governance, accountability and transparency. I am clear that the Scottish Police Authority should take decisions in public session and that papers and agendas for those sessions should be available to the public and to the media.
The member will be aware, or certainly should be aware, that in January it was reported that Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary for Scotland will inspect the Scottish Police Authority during 2017-18. That will be the first such inspection since the SPA was established, and it will look not just at the state, the efficiency and the effectiveness of the body but, as specific areas of focus, at the transparency and effectiveness of how it does its business. I hope that all members welcome that. Transparency and accountability are vital, and I say again what I have said in the chamber before: the Scottish Police Authority must make sure that it operates in line with those principles.
The First Minister:
We had two important revelations from Ruth Davidson in this morning’s
Times
. First, she seems to suggest that in areas where Westminster currently has no power over Scotland, such as agriculture, it intends to use Brexit to seize such power, which would be a clear undermining of the devolution settlement if ever there was such a thing.
On money, Ruth Davidson seems to suggest that, instead of Scotland getting its fair share of any savings that Westminster makes by no longer having to pay European Union contributions, the Treasury should keep all that money and the Scottish Government should be left to raise taxes to fund farm payments. That is absolutely outrageous and completely unacceptable, and I hope that, before the day is out, the Tories will clarify the issue and make sure that there will be no power grab and no cash grab by the Westminster Government on the Scottish Government.
I do not know whether this morning’s interview was just inept or whether it was a window into the thinking of Westminster—it was probably both. It is clear that Westminster has no intention of giving new powers to this Parliament. All that it wants to do is muscle in on the powers that we already have.
Murdo Fraser
Conservative
Last weekend, the First Minister was quick to respond to comments about nationalism that Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, made at the Scottish Labour conference in Perth. She described them as “spectacularly ill-judged” and “an insult”.
According to last Friday’s
Perthshire Advertiser
, the deputy leader of the SNP administration on Perth and Kinross Council, Councillor Dave Doogan, who until recently was employed by the Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, told councillors:
“Let us not reflect on concerns that we have been under the heel of foreign influence and power for 300 years. The island of Britain is no longer subject to the actions of quislings who may seek to see smaller cultures extinguished on an island of coffins by redcoats”.
Given the First Minister’s comments about Sadiq Khan’s language, does she believe that Councillor Doogan’s comments were appropriate, or does she apply one standard to members of other parties and a different standard to members of her own?
The First Minister:
I apply the same standards to everybody. Let me be clear: no matter who they come from, I condemn any comments or language that are in any way, shape or form racist or anti-English or that in any way seek to divide people on the basis of their ethnicity. That is not what my party or the movement that I am part of is for or represents.
I will also say—I ask people to reflect on this carefully—that right now the Scottish National Party, the Scottish Government and the wider independence movement are among the loudest voices in the United Kingdom to be calling for diversity, tolerance and freedom of movement, and among the loudest voices to be standing up for the benefits of migration. We have a Tory Government that still will not even guarantee the rights of EU nationals to live here, and that is disgraceful.
I will practise the values that I hold dear, and I expect everybody to do likewise.
The cabinet is the group of twenty or so (and no more than 22) senior government ministers who are responsible for running the departments of state and deciding government policy.
It is chaired by the prime minister.
The cabinet is bound by collective responsibility, which means that all its members must abide by and defend the decisions it takes, despite any private doubts that they might have.
Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and chosen from MPs or peers of the governing party.
However, during periods of national emergency, or when no single party gains a large enough majority to govern alone, coalition governments have been formed with cabinets containing members from more than one political party.
War cabinets have sometimes been formed with a much smaller membership than the full cabinet.
From time to time the prime minister will reorganise the cabinet in order to bring in new members, or to move existing members around. This reorganisation is known as a cabinet re-shuffle.
The cabinet normally meets once a week in the cabinet room at Downing Street.
Ministers make up the Government and almost all are members of the House of Lords or the House of Commons. There are three main types of Minister. Departmental Ministers are in charge of Government Departments. The Government is divided into different Departments which have responsibilities for different areas. For example the Treasury is in charge of Government spending. Departmental Ministers in the Cabinet are generally called 'Secretary of State' but some have special titles such as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ministers of State and Junior Ministers assist the ministers in charge of the department. They normally have responsibility for a particular area within the department and are sometimes given a title that reflects this - for example Minister of Transport.
The political party system in the English-speaking world evolved in the 17th century, during the fight over the ascension of James the Second to the Throne. James was a Catholic and a Stuart. Those who argued for Parliamentary supremacy were called Whigs, after a Scottish word whiggamore, meaning "horse-driver," applied to Protestant rebels. It was meant as an insult.
They were opposed by Tories, from the Irish word toraidhe (literally, "pursuer," but commonly applied to highwaymen and cow thieves). It was used — obviously derisively — to refer to those who supported the Crown.
By the mid 1700s, the words Tory and Whig were commonly used to describe two political groupings. Tories supported the Church of England, the Crown, and the country gentry, while Whigs supported the rights of religious dissent and the rising industrial bourgeoisie. In the 19th century, Whigs became Liberals; Tories became Conservatives.
Maree Todd
Scottish National Party