Nicola Sturgeon jousted with opposition leaders over the teacher brain drain, a nurse recruitment pledge and the SNP’s controversial council tax freeze at First Minister’s Questions.
Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, took the First Minister to task over what she said was a broken promise to double the number of specialist motor neurone disease nurses following an emotional campaign by Gordon Aikman, who has MND.
She said: “We now know that promise, that pledge, has not been met. Nicola Sturgeon has not kept the promise she made directly to Gordon.”
Health boards were given £700,000 in June to recruit MND nurses to meet the target of doubling their number across NHS Scotland by the end of October.
Asked when the target would be met, Ms Sturgeon said: “I genuinely don’t think it’s fair to say we are not fulfilling the commitment that we gave to Gordon Aikman.
“The funding is being provided and health boards are in the process of recruiting additional specialist nurses. The delays are to do with difficulties in recruitment and getting the right people with the right skills into post”.
Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson said Scotland was losing 100 graduates to England because of the SNP failure to sign up to the TeachFirst programme, which trains some of the brightest would-be teachers and puts them in schools in deprived communities.
She said: “With teachers threatening strike, with a shortage of graduates going into teaching and poor areas falling behind, why doesn’t the First Minister back the scheme for Scotland?”
Ms Sturgeon, who launched her blueprint to close the attainment gap last week, said they would continue to look at the evidence over such teaching programmes.
“I close my mind to nothing that can be proven to work in terms of raising standards and that remains my position,” she said.
But she added teachers in London told her she should be wary of TeachFirst because “it had not been in their experience the thing that had made the biggest difference”.
Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Willie Rennie said the proposal by Moray Council to defy the SNP’s council tax freeze demonstrates the strain councils are under after cuts of hundreds of millions of pounds to local authority budgets.
Fife and Highland councils are also considering a boycott of the freeze.
Mr Rennie asked Ms Sturgeon to review the Scottish Government’s “choice” to cut £500 million from councils to the detriment of schools and other areas.
She said the Scottish Government compensates councils for what they would have raised in council tax – and quoted an independent report’s suggestion that it may have over-reimbursed councils.
Ms Sturgeon said the cut to the council’s day-to-day budget is 2%, and added: “I don’t pretend that is easy for any council, but we live in challenging financial times and in that context I also think it’s fair to say that local government has been treated reasonably and fairly.”