Educational Opportunities
Kenneth Stevenson Excerpts(3 days, 18 hours ago)
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Kenneth Stevenson (Airdrie and Shotts) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this debate. As a former senior lecturer at a further education college in Glasgow, I recognise the importance of this issue across the UK, but I will focus my brief remarks on Scotland.
In Scotland we have had 17 years of SNP Government: 17 years of money being spent on projects that have not worked and 17 years of further education being treated as an afterthought. As a former FE lecturer in engineering, I will always place particular value on STEM courses. A once-great industrial nation, Scotland has communities such as mine in Airdrie and Shotts where the industries of the past still shape who we are today, and indeed where we will go in the future. However, I cannot stress enough the importance of the word “opportunity”. Opportunity for a decent education beyond our school years and for well-paid, secure employment is something we may take for granted, but for many in my constituency it is a distant possibility rather than a reality.
I took the time to attend a meeting of the Educational Institute of Scotland, my former union, in North Lanarkshire, and hear directly from FE staff. The words “undervalued”, “overworked” and “underpaid” came up again and again. As a former senior lecturer myself, it was tough to hear that the challenges of working in the sector had worsened only a few years after I left, but my passion to see renewed focus on and investment in FE has only strengthened.
The lack of investment is understandable from a Scottish Government that are financially illiterate. We have come to expect this narrow Weltanschauung from them. However, we must understand how it came about: too many people placed at the top of institutions in our country who have never had a trade, never worked their way up learning every aspect of their trade or business, and never understood the basics of how industry works and what technical and human skills are required for a modern workforce.
I attended the Open University—an unashamedly Labour policy—and place significant value on a good education and the importance of opportunity in an individual’s outcomes. I will use my time in this place to fight to eliminate barriers to that, and I look forward to working with hon. Members in doing so. Again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe for securing this important and timely debate.