This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

As The Herald reported yesterday, the Scottish Government has announced plans to invest millions of pounds supporting inclusive education in sub-Saharan Africa.

Over the next five years, a total of £12.5m will be spent on two projects operating across Rwanda, Malawi and Zambia: one to support disabled children attend school; and another to help women and girls access education up to the tertiary level.

This is on top of a £350,000 contribution to the World Bank’s Inclusive Education Policy Academy, and a £150,000 partnership with Heriot Watt supporting scholarships for women in Zambia.

But wait a minute – aren’t schools in Scotland facing major cuts, and aren’t there big holes in the provision of inclusive education right here?

Absolutely.

In recent months The Herald has given extensive coverage to this issue. In Falkirk, the council wants to reduce the school week in order to help balance the books. In North Lanarkshire, reductions in school transport provision have raised concerns about pupil safety. In North Ayrshire, proposals for impending budget cuts include a reduction in teacher numbers and the complete closure of a cherished outdoor education centre.

And in Glasgow, massive cuts to teacher numbers and reductions in other support programmes have already begun (we’ll have more on that soon).

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Since I joined The Herald I have spent a lot of my time investigating and reporting on serious education cuts that will have both short and long term consequences for young people and for the country as a whole – and if the people running councils are correct, there’s worse to come in the next year or two.

To be blunt, the situation is bad and getting worse. Every week I seem to be hearing about fresh examples of the system creaking under ever-increasing pressure, and of families being pushed closer and closer to breaking point.

So I can completely understand why some people seem to be angry about the Scottish Government spending money on supporting education projects in Africa. But I don’t agree.

There are two reasons for this.

The first is a matter of principle. Even now, when finances are tight, this remains an extremely wealthy country, and one that can trace the origins of much of that wealth to the exploitations of colonialism. We are rich because others are poor, and we’re in a position to offer some help to people who could benefit from our support. It’s the right thing to do.

The second reason is that I don’t believe this is an either-or situation, because there is in fact a great deal of money available in Scottish education.

Right now, the Scottish Government is refusing to sign off on nearly £150m of additional funding for schools. The cash has been earmarked for education spending, but the government says it will only be handed over if local authorities agree to spend it in the way SNP ministers want (for which read: in the way that is of greatest party-political advantage to the SNP).

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Specifically, they want councils to agree to maintain teacher numbers, even though the cash available is not, in many cases, enough to achieve that aim. What’s more, many believe that it would be better to spend some or all of the additional money mitigating a range of other, equally damaging, cuts to education provision.

All of this is, at least in theory, a decision for councillors and local authority officials to make, because it is councils that have the legal responsibility to make these decisions – a point that government press officers are always happy to make when it suits them!

Instead, the government has tried to strong-arm councils into accepting a bad, and potentially disastrous, deal – and is now having a wee tantrum about the fact that Scotland’s local authorities (including those run by the SNP!) refused to meekly acquiesce to a set of unacceptable conditions.

And as a consequence, pupils are suffering.

So if you’re bothered by £12.5m going to education in Rwanda, Malawi and Zambia, you should be absolutely furious about the fact that more than ten times that amount is currently being held hostage in Jenny Gilruth’s desk drawer.


And it doesn’t even end there. By the end of the current parliament, the Scottish Government will have spent something like three quarters of a billion pounds on its various schemes to close the attainment gap. A scandalous amount of that money has ultimately been wasted, as proven by the government’s own education statistics, and that problem is an ongoing one.

Scottish education definitely needs more money, but I don’t think we should find it by refusing to help others.

Instead, as a starting point, the Scottish Government should immediately release the money currently being withheld from councils and back down from the attempts to control the way in which it is spent, because our kids deserve a whole lot better than this sort of selfish political game-playing.