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Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 1 May 2019.

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Photo of John Swinney John Swinney Scottish National Party

If Liz Smith will forgive me, I will not take her intervention, because I still have a lot of ground to cover.

Focusing on the numbers of qualifications that are taken in S4 simply does not recognise that CFE enables our young people to achieve higher levels of knowledge and experience across a broader range of subjects by the end of S3. Nor does it recognise that more and more young people stay at school beyond S4 or S5. S4 used to be the end of a phase of learning that had the aim of learners accumulating as many standard grades as possible, after which many of them opted out of school. That is no longer how young people interact with our education system. They stay at school longer, engage in school-college partnerships, take up opportunities through the developing Scotland’s young workforce agenda, and work towards a range of national progression awards. For all those reasons, a comparison between the number of standard grades that young people sat in S4 in the past and the current circumstances in Scottish education is misplaced.

Surely the comparison that matters is what young people achieve on exit from school. For example, last year, 62.2 per cent of school leavers left with qualifications at level 6 or better, which was an increase from 55.8 per cent in 2012-13.