The biggest issue that Scottish education faces is deteriorating pupil behaviour, says education secretary Jenny Gilruth as she marks two years in post this week.

On this, many Scottish teachers would agree - as they would with other concerns that she shares during a wide-ranging interview with Tes Scotland.

Gilruth speaks about the need to review the way schools are funded to take account of the wider role they are now playing in supporting struggling families, and talks of national education bodies that have been too “detached from the realities of being in the classroom”.

She also shares concerns about the rising number of students leaving school early and the lack of equity around the courses available to upper-secondary students, which are too dependent on the vagaries of staffing.

However, what Gilruth and the profession are less likely to agree on is whether she is doing enough to address these issues and the many other problems that Scottish schools are grappling with.

Talking about behaviour, she references the behaviour plan that the Scottish government published in August 2024 - but, as a former teacher, would she have deemed that a satisfactory response when she was in the classroom?

Scotland’s behaviour plan

The education secretary counters that relationships are the key to improving behaviour, and that this is the focus of the plan - it favours relationship-based approaches to behaviour over punitive responses.

In the coming weeks, she adds, an update on implementing the plan will report on progress being made “on things like consequences”.

Arguably the toughest consequence that schools have at their disposal is exclusion, but data suggests Scottish schools have largely stopped using it. Just one pupil was permanently excluded in 2022-23, according to national data, and the rate of temporary exclusions has fallen dramatically over recent years.

This is not, of course, necessarily a bad thing. Those who have championed the reduction in exclusions describe it as a bad habit and a reflex response to challenging behaviour, but that view is balanced by repeated reports from teaching unions that not enough attention is being paid to the impact of poor behaviour on teachers.

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Gilruth is not shy about admitting where behaviour ranks in her list of priorities: “In terms of challenges, I think undoubtedly the big one is good behaviour.”

And she acknowledges that there is “a bit of a disconnect” between reports about worsening behaviour and Scotland’s exclusions data - if behaviour is becoming more extreme and harder to deal with, surely exclusions should be rising?

Teachers, of course, say that exclusions are not rising because the sanction has effectively been outlawed; Gilruth insists that schools can exclude.

“You’re allowed to exclude - you are very clearly allowed to exclude. Obviously at national and local level we expect that there will be other methods used, but, of course, exclusion exists as a consequence, and it’s correct that it exists as a consequence,” she says.

Gilruth adds that she would be comfortable with exclusions rising, as this would indicate improved reporting of incidents by staff. Reporting is something she encourages as a way of helping the government to understand the “real challenge” that it faces.

“We very much want to encourage more reporting. And yes, that means you might expect to see exclusions go up, but actually [exclusion] exists for a reason in terms of a consequence that teachers can deploy. So we don’t want them to be dissuaded from using it, because it’s there to support them in their work.”

More teachers are needed

She also says the government’s recent announcement of more funding for teachers is another aspect of its response to a decline in behaviour.

“You can’t respond to behavioural challenges with fewer teachers in your school. You can’t raise attainment, you can’t close the [attainment] gap, you can’t improve attendance. To do all of these things, you need staff.”

However, while the government says it has put the money into councils to employ more teachers, it remains to be seen whether more teachers will be the end result.

In 2022, 2023 and 2024 teacher numbers fell, even though the government said that councils had been funded to maintain them.

This time, more money is being invested - the government announced in December that councils would receive an extra £69 million to restore teacher numbers to 2023 levels and employ more staff to support the inclusion of pupils with additional needs in mainstream schools.

The funding, says Gilruth, is also contingent upon local authorities “making meaningful progress in relation to reducing class-contact time” by 90 minutes a week, as promised in the SNP’s 2021 manifesto.

However, details of how the pledge will be fulfilled have yet to emerge. Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, is warning that a dispute seems “inevitable” after the government missed a deadline in early February for coming forward with “concrete proposals”.

Gilruth wants “to be able to point to progress” on class-contact time before the next Scottish Parliament elections in May 2026 - so what is her definition of progress?

“There are options that are being modelled just now,” she says.

Reducing teachers’ class-contact time

The government commissioned research in 2023, which ultimately recommended delaying implementation of reduced class-contact time until 2028. However, the report also said that in primary schools the reduction could be delivered by 2026.

Now more “scoping work” is underway to deliver the reduction, Gilruth says, with senior government and local authority officials working on “scenario planning”. The results of this should emerge “in the coming weeks, in relation to how that might be rolled out across the country”.

She adds: “We think just now, based on our modelling that we published in 2023, we would have enough primary teachers, for example, to deliver on it in its totality. But we need to look at individual authorities.”

In secondary, it is questionable if the policy is deliverable, in the short term at least, at a time when teacher shortages mean many secondaries outside the Central Belt are drafting in primary teachers to deliver maths and English.

‘It’s important that we use people with experience in our schools to help inform the improvements that we want to see’

Laurence Findlay, Aberdeenshire’s education and children’s services director and president of education directors’ body ADES, told Tes Scotland in February that reducing class-contact time would be “doable” in his authority’s primary schools. However, in secondary it would be “really hard”, as “we can’t get these teachers anyway, so how are we going to get even more of them?”

Access to teachers is also dictating the courses that schools can provide.

Gilruth talks about the “strong qualifications offer” in Scottish schools and the “record number of qualifications” being delivered. She says her increased caffeine consumption is testament to this broadening of the curriculum: it is now relatively commonplace for young people to learn the skills to become baristas in school, and she frequently samples their coffees on school visits.

“The pathways for young people - it’s not just five Highers as it was 20 years ago - it’s completely changed, and I think that’s a great thing for our young people.”

‘Equity issue’ around course availability

However, while the qualifications offer might be broader, access to courses needs to be “fairer”, Gilruth concedes. There is “an equity issue” around course availability, she says, because it “often depends on staffing”.

Secondary recruitment targets for initial teacher education have not been hit for years; in 2023-24, just half of places were filled on the most popular route into secondary teaching in Scotland, the PGDE.

Gilruth is “conscious that the mood music around behaviour might be putting some people off” teaching as a career, but insists that most pupils are well behaved and emphasises the difference teachers can make to children’s lives.

“That is the best part of being a teacher,” says the education secretary, who was a secondary principal teacher before becoming an MSP in 2016.

She says the government is reviewing the Teacher Induction Scheme, which guarantees graduates a year’s employment, and the preference waiver, which gives new teachers willing to be placed in any authority in the country a “golden hello” financial reward.

In terms of wider government reform, she says this will make education bodies, including the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and Education Scotland - which she concedes have in the past been viewed as “detached from the realities of being in the classroom” - more in tune with teachers and learners.

Teachers know the aspects of the system that are not working and are “quick to come up with solutions”, she says. Their expertise should be mined “to ensure [reform] is not something done to teachers”.

“It’s important that we use people with experience in our schools to help inform the improvements we want to see,” says Gilruth.

This is why former maths teacher and headteacher Andy Brown is leading a review of the maths curriculum, she says, as Education Scotland undertakes the first wholesale review of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence.

A headteacher has also now been appointed to lead a new “schools unit” within the SQA, as it prepares to change into Qualifications Scotland.

But the qualifications review, due to get underway in earnest when Qualifications Scotland comes into being this autumn, falls well short of the proposals brought forward by Professor Louise Hayward in June 2023.

It will look at striking a better balance between internal and continuous assessment and external high-stakes exams - but the Hayward report recommended scrapping exams below Higher level and introducing a system that borrowed heavily from the International Baccalaureate Diploma programme.

Concern over number of S4 leavers

Meanwhile, despite many schools now offering a wider range of qualifications, there has been a rise in the proportion of young people leaving school after S4.

Gilruth is “particularly concerned” about this.

In 2023-24, 14.4 per cent of school leavers were in S4; in 2013-14, that figure was 11.6 per cent. The upshot is that over 2,000 more students left school in S4 last year than in 2013-14.

Feedback from headteachers is that the cost-of-living crisis is “pushing young people out of education and into employment”, says Gilruth. ADES is also investigating this as a priority, she adds, “because we know the longer young people stay in education, the greater their opportunities will be in later life”.

Rising poverty, of course, is not just influencing the choices that young people make about their education, it is also being felt more widely in schools.

Gilruth has spoken about schools plugging gaps in the welfare state through provision of services such as “income-maximisation support for parents”, including help with claiming benefits. She is amazed by “the amount of work schools are doing in a poverty space they were not doing 20 years ago”.

Scotland has the best-funded schools in the UK and the Scottish government is spending “record amounts in education”, the education secretary says. However, “we need to be evaluating how we fund our schools post-pandemic” to take account of “the other services that are being provided in schools”.

But it is unclear what exactly she thinks should change.

Should money be flowing into the education budget from other portfolios such as social justice, so that schools are properly funded to take the holistic approach she says they are increasingly taking?

“There are lot of things that are happening in the education space that help other parts of government,” Gilruth responds, while stopping short of naming those departments.

Or would she perhaps like to bypass councils and increase the money flowing direct to schools through the Pupil Equity Fund?

There is no clarity provided on what her vision is for school funding - although there is a hint that it could feature in the SNP’s manifesto for the 2026 election.

And this is consistent with what many see as the key problem with Scottish education - the lack of vision. There is no shortage of reviews and reforms, both underway and planned, but little sign of a narrative that weaves these different strands together.

The difficulty, of course, is if you don’t know where you are going, how do you take people with you - and how do you know when you’ve got there?

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