Sketch: Murdo Fraser is worried about the children

Murdo Fraser is very worried about the children. They are our future, or so he’s been told. And so, when he heard about the high number of kids trashing their future – and by extension, all of our futures – by bunking off school, the Tory MSP was mad about. 

What is the Scottish Government doing, he demands in a topical question, about these truants? 

He asks that question from the middle seat on the front row of the Tory benches – you know the one, it’s usually reserved for the leader of the group. But the twice-failed-leadership-contender is definitely standing there to raise the issue of absenteeism, and not simply to try out the Tory throne. It is, after all, the closest his butt cheeks will ever get to the top seat.

Education secretary and former teacher Jenny Gilruth agrees it’s a problem. She says returning to school after the Covid pandemic has been a “challenge for some young people”. Indeed, bothering your backside to go to school can be a challenge when you’ve enjoyed the freedom of not having to. Unless, naturally, you’ve got a teacher like Miss Gilruth – for whom you’d go rushing back.

But, she says, it’s technically the responsibility of parents and carers to send their kids to school. And then for local authorities to handle, given they have a duty to provide all children – even wayward souls – with an education. So, it’s not really anything to do with her.

Still, she goes on, the Scottish Government has magnanimously stepped in to provide a “programme”, “learning events” and a “publication”. Never say ministers aren’t taking clear, tangible steps to tackle the problem.

Fraser is not content with that answer. He highlights that Scottish pupils are regularly missing more school than kids elsewhere in the UK. “Why does the Scottish Government believe the figures here are so much worse than the figures for south of the border?” he asks. He might well have wondered, ‘why is Scotland so crap?’

The education secretary warns him against putting Scotland’s record against England’s. “I accept the challenge in Scotland is greater,” she says, but don’t make any “direct comparisons” because she doesn’t like the result. She would probably be quite happy to make those comparisons if Scotland came out on top, but that’s neither here nor there. 

She adds that this is a problem “across the UK”, and also “internationally”. Scotland is not the only place doing badly, says Scotland’s education secretary in Scotland’s parliament when responding to a question about Scotland’s pupils in Scotland’s schools. 

Fraser says there are “good practices” happening across the country to get children back in class. For example, off the top of his head, in “Conservative-run South Ayrshire Council”. So what are ministers doing, he asks innocently, to ensure good sense of Tories is “shared more widely”? This is a party that really loves to bang on about common sense, even when it appears so few of its politicians have it.

Gilruth replies that she is more than happy to hear about “good practice” from other parties. It allows her to take credit for it if it goes well and blame someone else if it goes wrong – a tactic she has learnt from the SNP school of thought.

Labour’s Pam Duncan-Glancy takes a rather novel approach to the issue. She tells the chamber that she’s actually spoken to some youths about not going to school. Who’d have thought it, that actually talking to teens about their problems might actually help solve them? 

The recently-agreed Scottish budget delivering cash to children’s mental health services will help some of those problems, says Gilruth, as she urges Duncan-Glancy to “reconsider her position” on the budget. Because as everyone knows, if Labour doesn’t vote for the budget, logically that must mean the party supports denying children access to mental healthcare.

Liberal Democrat Willie Rennie worries that bunking off has become a “widespread problem”, not just among a small number of persistent truants. He argues that part of the issue is that going off on holiday is just too damned expensive when school’s out. It’s practically forcing parents to take their kids away to Malaga in term time! So what does the cabinet secretary have to say to those families taking their kids out of school for trips abroad, Rennie asks. 

“As a former teacher,” Gilruth says she is against parents taking their kids on holiday instead of to the school gates. Education is “hugely important” to attainment and wellbeing in a way that a seven-night all-inclusive trip to Ayia Napa just isn’t. She does, however, acknowledge that families are “facing a number of different challenges”. So she gets it, she really does. But that doesn’t excuse missing school. Miss Gilruth rules her classroom with an iron fist. And no lessons were learned by any MSP in the chamber.