Demanding better for our young people
The Scottish Greens have already started the process of transforming our education system from the ground up.
In the last five years we’ve scrapped the SQA, replacing it with a body which puts the voices of teachers and pupils at its heart. We’ve delivered free school meals for all children in P1 - P5, and for older children who need it the most. We’ve expanded mental health counselling, secured funding to teach children about the roles of Trade Unions, and delivered new guidance for Relations, Sexual Health and Parenthood guidance which is based around the principle of consent.
This is how we ensure our education system creates a generation of young people who are well equipped to learn, who know their rights, and who treat everyone with respect and dignity.
There is so much more we need to do though. The cumulative effects of the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, and
our ever changing world mean teachers are under pressure like never before. We need to ensure we have a well supported, well paid workforce who are given the time to invest in our young people.
We will make reducing teacher workload a mission across the education sector, ensuring teachers have the time needed to plan properly, and insisting that any reforms which add to workload are accompanied by those which remove
at least as much.
Young people too need the space to learn, without the pressure of having their performance judged at every turn. We will scrap high stakes exams as much as possible, end homework for primary aged children, and raise the starting age for school, with play based education easing young children into formal schooling.
And our education system needs to work for all pupils, regardless of their educational and support needs. We
will deliver more teachers specialising in additional support needs, and ensure special schools have the capacity they require, are properly supported and receive the resources they need.
- Raise the school starting age to seven and introduce a play-based kindergarten stage for three- to six-year-olds, led by qualified kindergarten teachers, ensuring young children are not pushed into a formal learning environment before they are ready.
- End the routine use of homework in primary schools, accepting the wealth of evidence indicating that homework does not lead to greater academic achievement and instead that many children simply develop a negative association with school as a result of its use.
- Continue the rollout of climate justice education through the Learning for Sustainability Action Plan, co-developed by Green MSPs, and ensure Scotland’s past is taught honestly and accurately, including tackling our role in the British Empire and slavery.
- Scrap P1-S3 Scottish National Standardised Assessments, and instead bring back the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy to monitor national performance.
- Replace Scotland’s Victorian-era system of high-stakes exams by implementing the findings of the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment (Hayward Review) in full, including reducing the role of high stakes exams, and increasing the role of continuous assessment throughout the year.
- Restructure National 5s to address the imbalance of courses hour requirements with subject and remove end of term exams entirely for National 5 course. We will review and reform the structure of National 5 courses and qualifications to address the imbalance of both a 160 hour course requirement and the availability of up to nine concurrent National 5 courses.
- Introduce a National Qualification on Natural History, drawing on the recently developed Natural History GCSE course.
- Support the upskilling, retraining, and retention of Gaelic speaking teachers and early years workers so every pupil across Scotland has access to some form of Gaelic medium education.
Supporting pupils
- Continue the rollout of free school meals, starting with universal provision in P6-7 and S1-6 pupils who receive the Scottish Child Payment, with the ultimate goal of free school meals for all school pupils.
- Deliver high quality Personal and Social Education, guaranteeing a curriculum which covers topics such as consent based sex education, LGBT+ inclusivity, mental health, and personal finances, co-designed by young people.
- Ensure young people learn about their rights at work, by rolling out the STUC’s Unions in Schools programme to every secondary and ASN school in Scotland.
- Require and support schools in the creation of independent Pupil Unions, so that young people can have their voices heard directly in their school community.
- Ensure delivery of free breakfast clubs in every primary and ASN school, as secured by Green MSPs during 2026 budget negotiations.
- Make the existing guidance to cap the cost of school uniforms statutory, to reduce costs for families and provide more flexibility for pupils in what they wear to school.
- Remove barriers to participation in education by making targeted interventions to give all pupils access to a broad range of national qualifications, including by investing in remote learning services like e-Sgoil and in support for those not regularly attending such as i-Sgoil.
- Continue the expansion of access to in-school mental health counselling, ensuring all pupils have access to these services, with further targeted efforts to increase their use by boys and young men in particular.
Supporting teachers
- Reduce teacher workload by requiring all working groups looking at curriculum and qualifications reforms to identify options for reducing teacher workload in their areas of focus, and reducing unnecessary bureaucracy associated with Curriculum for Excellence monitoring.
- Deliver the outstanding recommendations contained in the Scottish Government’s 2015 Curriculum for Excellence Tackling Bureaucracy report.
- End the use of arbitrary targets for school and pupil performance, ending the situation whereby pupils who are more likely to hit targets are prioritised over others.
- End the endemic use of temporary contracts for teachers by providing ringfenced funding for councils to transfer teachers on temporary contracts onto permanent full-time contracts.
- Develop a national register of supply teachers to ensure that all supply teachers only need to apply to one list. We will also ensure that all supply work via this system counts towards a teacher’s continuous service.
- Reduce class sizes to a maximum of 20 pupils, prioritising primary classes in this session of Parliament. Excessive class sizes mean less time spent supporting each pupil, undermining the quality of education they receive.
- Lower teachers’ class contact time to 20 hours per week to ensure that they have the time to prepare high quality learning and teaching.
- End the routine use of national inspections and develop a new model of peer review and self-evaluation for teachers. National inspections will be restricted to cases of complaints or areas of concern.
- Provide GTCS registration for school-based instrumental music teachers – creating a professionally-recognised national music teaching force.
Supporting pupils with additional needs
- Make Additional Support Needs teaching a promoted post to attract more teachers into this vital specialism.
- Ensure additional support needs are covered in Initial Teacher Education and in Continuous Professional Learning opportunities, equipping all teachers with the core skills required to support all of their ASN pupils.
- Ensure more young people with additional support needs are provided with the support they require by revising overly restrictive criteria for Coordinated Support Plans in legislation, therefore opening up access to more young people who need them.
- Establish formal recognition of further education qualifications for additional needs assistants and establish an accreditation and registration system through the General Teaching Council Scotland.
Supporting Children and Young People
- Complete the delivery of The Promise to care experienced young people by 2030.
- Support access to youth work by ensuring that it supports and empowers young people and improves their wellbeing and life chances.
- Deliver an updated National Youth Work Strategy, which recognises the value of youth work.
- Integrate funded youth work opportunities within secondary education giving pupils enhanced opportunities to fulfil project based learning as part the new Scottish Diploma of Achievement.
- Integrate youth work with local and national mental health support and referral systems.
- Deliver an updated national action plan on internet safety developed in cooperation with children and young people which ensures they have access to robust training, support, and information to stay safe online.
- Press the Scottish Government to make good on its commitment to consult on and then introduce an independent right for a child to withdraw from Religious Observance in schools.
