Scotland's Future Prosperity

As an amendment to motion S4M-15588 in the name of Iain Gray (Scotland's Future Prosperity), leave out from "education" to end and insert "the primary focus of education policy must be on reducing the attainment gap between the most and least deprived pupils; believes that this will be achieved by head teachers being given significantly more autonomy to run their schools, including giving Scottish Attainment Challenge funding directly to schools and ensuring that this money is awarded to deprived children, regardless of where they attend school; acknowledges the crucial role of vocational education and is disappointed that free tuition in higher education has been prioritised over adequate funding for colleges, which has in turn resulted in 152,000 places being lost since 2007; recognises the importance of substantially increasing funding for colleges, and regrets that deprived young people in Scotland are almost half as likely to get the chance to go to university as their peers in England."