Michael Russell

Over these past four years progress has been made in Scotland.  And that is progress we must protect:

We’ve focused on the early years with the smallest average primary school class sizes in Scottish history and a new legal limit of 25 pupils for primary one. We’ve also provided more free nursery education, benefitting 100,000 pre-school Scots.

We’ve brought a new focus to the skills we want pupils to develop by implementing the Curriculum for Excellence. And, we’ve helped this generation of students compete on an even level with the rest of the world by introducing new science and languages baccalaureates.

We’ve increased funding for college bursaries to support more than 42,000 students and been able to offer a record-breaking 20,000 modern apprenticeships this year – that’s a massive 28 per cent increase on 2007. We’ve also helped 250,000 people expand their learning with Individual Learning Accounts to pay for training courses. 

We’ve restored free higher education by ruling out fees and abolishing the £2,300 graduate endowment - a back door tuition fee.

A total of 330 new schools have been built or refurbished by your SNP Government - 80 more than planned by Labour. That means over 130,000 pupils have been taken out of dilapidated and substandard school buildings. We’ve also taken legal steps to protect rural schools from closure.