Continued Petitions

We agreed to consider the next two continued petitions together. The first of those is PE1813, on reforming the national curriculum to include all African Scottish history, which was lodged by Eunice Olumide. The petition calls on the Scottish Government to reform the national curriculum to include Afro-Scottish history, including artefacts of African diaspora, cultural and economic contributions, the role of the British empire and the benefits to Scotland from colonies in the Caribbean and Africa. The other petition is PE1814, on compulsory education on black, Asian, and minority ethnic history in Scottish schools, which was lodged by Toby Amamize. It calls on the Scottish Government to embed BAME history into the school curriculum.

Since the committee’s last consideration, submissions have been received from the Scottish Government, the petitioner for PE1813, the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights and Andrew Strachan, and they are summarised in the clerk’s notes. The Scottish Government advises that it has now formally committed through the programme for government to find ways of promoting diversity and better teaching and learning about BAME history and the importance of tackling racism in society today in schools. This commitment will in part be met by the increasing diversity in the teaching profession working group and the recommendations of Professor Rowena Arshad’s report, “Teaching in a Diverse Scotland: increasing and retaining minority ethnic teachers”.

Since our papers were published, we have received a joint submission from the CRER and the petitioners. The submission notes that the Scottish Government discusses diversity in teaching, including addressing the underrepresentation of minority ethnic teachers in Scotland and the creation of learning resources, but it raises concern that the Government has not identified specific actions to address the issues that are raised in the petition.

Again, I think that these are a very important couple of petitions, which raise important and challenging issues for us about the extent to which there is diversity in our teaching of history and our understanding of our history as a country, and the extent to which BAME people are teachers and therefore are providing role models. The petitions are a challenge to the view of what our education system should be about. There are very important issues here. It feels to me that this is a longer-term and bigger project than we can offer in the short time that the Public Petitions Committee will remain in action, but we may want to flag it up to a relevant committees as something that would be worth further examination.

I remind colleagues that, because it is the end of a parliamentary session, a petition can be brought back immediately once the new Parliament has convened and the Public Petitions Committee has been re-established—the year rule would then apply. That is perhaps an important and comforting option for some petitioners whose petition has been closed.

In other times, we would have referred the petitions to the Education and Skills Committee, but because the session is coming to an end, the petitions would simply be sent back to us at the conclusion of the session. However, the recommendation that we write to the Education and Skills Committee is probably an important one.

Thank you very much.

I think that there is a consensus that, recognising that these are important issues, they involve a substantial bit of work over a long period of time and, in the circumstances, the Public Petitions Committee will not be able to add to the petitions at this stage, but we want to write to the Education and Skills Committee and the Equalities and Human Rights Committee to emphasise the importance of these issues. The issues are what is taught and by whom it is taught, and the context is the human rights of people and the recognition of the experience of people feeling excluded from the education system and us not properly appreciating our full history as a country. We thank the petitioners very much for bringing both these petitions before us. We are agreeing to close them, but we will write as members have indicated.