Education (Scotland) Act 2025 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2025 Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Katz
Main Page: Lord Katz (Labour - Life peer)Education (Scotland) Act 2025 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2025
Lord Katz Excerpts
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this order today. As with all the Scotland Act orders we have considered since the start of this Parliament, this is the result of collaborative working between the UK and Scottish Governments. The order before us will be made under Section 104 of the Scotland Act, which, following an Act of the Scottish Parliament, provides the power for consequential provisions to be made to the law relating to reserved matters or the laws elsewhere in the UK. Scotland Act orders are a demonstration of devolution in action, and I am pleased to say the Scotland Office has taken through 10 orders in the past 12 months. This is a legacy of the historic devolution settlement, introduced by the last Labour Government, of which we are rightly proud.
Let me turn to the purpose and effect of this order. It is being brought forward to make provisions in consequence of the Education (Scotland) Act, which received Royal Assent earlier this year. This Act of the Scottish Parliament provides for the establishment of a new qualifications body—Qualifications Scotland—to replace the existing Scottish Qualifications Authority, or SQA. It also creates the office of His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education in Scotland, removing the inspection function from Education Scotland, which is an executive agency of the Scottish Government.
The UK Government have worked collaboratively with the Scottish Government on this draft order, which is needed for the commencement of some of the provisions of the Act. The draft order under consideration today is necessary to ensure that the functions currently exercised by the Scottish Qualifications Authority can be fully transferred to the new body being set up: Qualifications Scotland. This will ensure that Qualifications Scotland is able to deliver all of the services and products that are currently delivered by the SQA, maintaining the same functional and geographical scope.
The order also makes a number of consequential amendments in reserved areas—and to UK, Welsh and NI regulations—to reflect the replacement of the SQA with Qualifications Scotland. These are needed so that existing provisions across numerous regulations can continue to operate in the same way as they do now.
Finally, this draft order is needed to designate the newly created office of His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education in Scotland as a non-ministerial officeholder in the Scottish Administration for the purposes of the Scotland Act 1998. This change is needed to ensure that the person appointed to the role is a civil servant; this is required to support the delivery model for the inspectorate being set up by the Education (Scotland) Act.
This order is about making limited changes to the law only so far as is necessary to give full effect to the provisions of the education Act of the Scottish Parliament. Although the order’s provisions extend to the whole of the UK, its practical effect is limited to Scotland. Without this order, there is a risk of disrupting both the education system in Scotland and the hard work of teachers and young people across Scotland. This order is an example of devolution in action; it is about the UK Government working with the Scottish Government to deliver for the people of Scotland. In that spirit, I commend it to the Committee and beg to move.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have made valuable contributions to this debate. With all due respect, it is of great concern that the Scottish National Party has allowed educational standards to slip for way too long, thereby damaging the prospects of a generation of young Scots. The aim of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition is to do everything we can to reverse this downtrend. While this reform might be a step in the right direction towards a common goal of better education for Scotland, many questions need answering.
The previous Conservative Government understood that, to achieve educational excellence, a country needs a goal-oriented and data-driven plan. From our first day in office, we reorganised authorities and implemented new measures that reflected this belief. In doing so, we demonstrated exactly what is possible and can be achieved with a Conservative outlook on education. From when we took office until the last PISA assessment in 2022, England jumped from 27th to 11th in the world in mathematics and from 25th to 13th in reading, in addition to improvements in science. It is deeply regrettable that this was not replicated in our devolved nations. Nowhere is this more evident than in Scotland, where educational standards have continued to slip across the board, more so than anywhere else in the UK.
Scottish children now sit 32nd in the world in mathematics and science; worse, the unnecessary decline has hit hardest those who desperately want a better education. Since 2015, the Scottish National Party has said that closing the attainment gap is its priority. Why, then, have we seen the opposite: an increase in the gap between the proportion of school leavers from the most and the least deprived areas who have one pass or more in National 5s, which now sits at 22.7%? At the Highers level, that gap now sits at 38.4%—an increase from 36.9% in 2023. This appears to be a postcode lottery, which is totally unfair by anyone’s reckoning.
A key element of this detrimental outcome is driven by a qualifications body that does not achieve the purpose it exists to serve. The Scottish Qualifications Authority has been described as misaligned with the wider school curriculum. Schools aim for breadth but are forced to narrow their scope due to an increased focus on exams in later years. Unfortunately, the SQA has lost the confidence of teachers—this was confirmed by Andrea Bradley, who heads Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, and who welcomed the introduction of a new qualification service—as well as that of parents and children. As was highlighted so well by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, in 2020, the SQA overlooked the professional judgment of teachers, issuing grades to 125,000 students through an algorithm. The result was that young people from the most deprived backgrounds had their grades downgraded.
It is crystal-clear that change is needed. A qualifications board that has the trust of neither teachers, parents nor students is not fit for purpose; that is why the announcement of a new qualifications body seems welcome. Looking past the announcement, though, it appears to be the same engine under a slightly different bonnet. In fact, I am particularly pleased to confirm to your Lordships that I am not able to put it better than the Scottish Labour Party, which is rightly on the record as saying that this is nothing more than a “superficial rebrand”.
The primary issue with the SQA was that it both awarded and accredited qualifications. Its remit was to issue qualifications and, at the same time, to set the standards to which those qualifications would have to adhere. It was self-referential and accountable to no one but itself. Its success was judged on how well it wanted itself to do. Various education experts have surmised that it had become its own policeman; it was marking its own homework. I am sure that noble Lords would agree that that is no way to run a qualifications authority.
It appears that the SNP has now brought forward the same failed strategy with the new Qualifications Scotland—another body that fulfils the same awarding and accreditation functions. No one wishes to see a repeat of the 2020 fiasco. Why should parents, students and teachers believe that this new body will have their best interests at heart? It is of course challenging for any noble Lord to answer for the SNP’s failings, and it serves no purpose to regret this Motion formally, but devolved Governments must take responsibility for educating children seriously. They cannot simply rebrand failing organisations, cross their fingers and hope that the outcome will be different a second time around.
His Majesty’s loyal Opposition are sceptical of this change. We wholeheartedly agree with our colleagues in the Scottish Conservative Party and other education experts that the SQA’s functions should have been separated. However, if that is not going to happen, our mission must be to have a relentless focus on bettering education for Scottish children through whatever means possible; we will retain a laser focus on that.
Lord Katz (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, and the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for their contributions to the debate; it is a distinct pleasure to respond to my fellow Whip across the divide. Both noble Lords focused not so much on the order but on its impact on the education of children in Scotland. Let me take a moment to say that we can all agree that the record of the SNP Government in Scotland on educational attainment levels is appalling.
The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, said that Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, described the creation of Education Scotland as nothing more than a “superficial rebrand”. Earlier in the year, he went further in his critique of the whole of the SNP’s failure on education, saying that it was the “defining failure” of the Scottish Government under the Scottish National Party. All of us in this Room might agree with that; indeed, with many young Scots leaving full-time education today without a single Higher or equivalent qualification to their name, it is certainly not a record to be proud of.
I regret the fact that there are no SNP Peers available here to defend their Government’s record in Holyrood when it comes to education or any of the other public services that they deliver—or, mostly, fail to deliver adequately. They simply do not know what they are missing here but perhaps they are, as they might say, a little frit. However, we are here not to scrutinise the failures of the education system under the SNP but to discuss the order being brought forward at the request of the Scottish Government, on which the UK Government, the Scotland Office and the Scottish Government have worked closely together as per the normal practice of the devolution settlement.
It is clear that, as we have already discussed, this order is necessary to implement the Scottish Parliament’s Education (Scotland) Act 2025. It is important for the whole of the UK because Scottish qualifications, whether under the SQA or Education Scotland, are taken by people in other parts of the UK—that is, in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is important that we align our regulations properly so that there is continuity for everybody in the UK taking qualifications offered and examined by what will be Qualifications Scotland, whose functions will become fully operational in early 2026. As I said, the order will also enable His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education in Scotland to be fully operational as an officeholder in the Scottish Administration, which is also planned for early 2026. Scottish Ministers simply cannot commence certain provisions in the 2025 Act until this order is made.
In closing, this instrument demonstrates the continued commitment of the UK Government to work with the Scottish Government to deliver for Scotland. As we have had a slightly critical discussion of the state of education in Scotland, I should add that, of course, voters in Scotland will have an opportunity next May to run the rule over the Scottish National Party’s record in office when it comes to education and much else. For my part, I am sure that they will find the report card wanting and will want to replace the teacher with Anas Sarwar and his Administration; I am also sure that others will have other views. With that, I commend this order to the Committee.