It’s all about giving pupils best chances

The council have a number of important priorities.

But for me, perhaps the most important is that we make sure all children in Wishaw realise their full potential.

We have invested heavily in this: over recent years, half a billion pounds has been spent on our schools, and the standard of facilities support both our pupils and our teachers.

That’s why it was hugely gratifying to discover this week that the pupils of North Lanarkshire had returned their best ever exam results. And we can link that directly to the investment this council have made in our schools.

The percentage of S5 pupils achieving an award at higher has gone up by an enormous 20% since 2007.

For three or more awards, that improvement is 15 per cent and for five or more the improvement is 5 per cent.

In S6, for Higher, there is an even more pronounced pattern: 24 per cent increase for one or more awards, 17 per cent for three or more and 13 per cent for five or more.

There is no doubt that our pupils, teachers, parents and carers deserve tremendous credit for this.

But I’m not satisfied: there is much, much more to do.

We can improve further and achieve more. And making sure every child can realise their full potential is about more than exam results. We also need to continue to invest in vocational education, making sure our young people can find work if they are not leaving school for further study.

What these achievements show is that we have a good and improving system in North Lanarkshire.

The improvement in attainment has been stark.

That’s why it’s essential that we are allowed to direct the work that goes into that improvement directly and not, as the Scottish Government wishes to do, centralise education.

They plan to use council tax reform to take £100million from councils and distribute to some head teachers, at a stroke removing that money from being locally accountable.

We’ve proved that teachers and head teachers need to be left to the vital work they do best and not have responsibility for personnel issues, budget management and administration and Scotland’s largest teaching union are scathing about the proposals.

The government have a track record of trying to fix things that aren’t broken.

The integration of health and social care wasn’t needed here, where we were already delivering joined up planning and delivery of adult social care which was recognised as one of the best arrangements in the world.

That didn’t matter: integrated arrangements were forced on us. We had great oversight of policing, with local considerations taken into account.

That didn’t matter: we now have a national force which has no prospect whatsoever of making the savings required by the government.

All of these issues are best dealt with locally.

The government should let councils get on with it. As demonstrated by last week’s exam results, we know how to get the best for our communities.