Education (Scotland) Act 2025 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2025

Considered in Grand Committee

Moved by

That the Grand Committee do consider the Education (Scotland) Act 2025 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2025.

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.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this measure. It is not a controversial measure in itself, but I probably need to declare an interest as all five of my children have been through the Scottish educational system—the older two, at a time when it was the admiration of the world. The latter three did all right but, I have to say, they were in the system at a time when Scottish education was not performing to its previous high standard.

The consequence of that was the legislation that is this order’s precursor—namely, on the abolition of the SQA, which was deemed pretty unfit for purpose. One of the things that did for it in the end was Covid. Children in school—I speak of my own—were in a situation where even the teachers did not know what they were preparing them for in terms of examination. In the end, awards were given without any examinations having been taken on a “here you go” basis; that was not at all satisfactory and raised questions, which have probably gone by, around whether the qualifications the children got were as valid as they might have been. It was a very unfortunate situation.

Going back, before that there was the establishment of the curriculum for excellence in Scotland. I genuinely believe that it was introduced for the best of reasons but, over a number of years, it became clear that it simply was not working effectively. I never quite understood the Scottish Government’s problem with the curriculum for excellence. It was established not by them but by the previous Scottish Government, yet they did not seem to be willing to accept the fact that something was not working and needed to change. They felt that that would somehow be an admission of failure on their part, as opposed to what it should have been: leadership.

I have to talk about anecdotal evidence. There were concerns about the way the curriculum was influenced by political undertones. What I would call nationalistic elements were introduced into the curriculum, with some subjects taught selectively to promote Scottish otherness rather than the UK dimension or Scotland’s role within it. That caused some concern and I know that some teachers, because they were allowed to do so under the curriculum for excellence, made their own interpretations and gave children the benefit of a broader assessment.

That may be irrelevant to this but, when you put it all together, there was an accumulation over 15 to 20 years of the Scottish system really deteriorating, having been the admiration of the world. I do not want to overdo it. As I said, all my children have been through it and managed to get qualifications—they have all got on—but they had some real issues while they were there. Other children perhaps did not do as well and many teachers found it extraordinarily difficult to cope, particularly when they did not know what they were preparing children for.

This order is a consequence of the amendment to the education Act. If the title was all you read, you would wonder why we are bothering, because this is no different from what we had before. Given that what we had before was deemed unfit for purpose, this is not an ideal way to introduce an instrument. I assume that we are saying, “Yes, we got it wrong. This is a new way of doing it that will work”. The importance of this order is to ensure that Scottish qualifications are recognised throughout the United Kingdom and beyond. Perhaps it is now up to the Scottish Government to make sure that standards in Scottish schools are good enough to ensure that they are not only recognised but valued.

I do not want to overdo that, because it would be completely unfair to suggest that the qualifications of children from Scotland applying to English universities are not good enough. We just need to be sure that we learn from our mistakes. We used to say: “If you got a qualification in Scotland, that’s good enough for us”. We need it to be like that again. I hope this new departure will help us get there. The order effectively puts the new qualifications authority back where the practicalities of the old one were, but I hope the performance of the new Act and the new set-up will learn from the mistakes of the past and deliver the improvements in Scottish education that we desperately need.

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.

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.

Motion agreed.