Bute House Agreement has been a disaster for Scottish education

I know this is meant to be an education newsletter. We’ll get there, I promise.

But this week I’m afraid we need to start with some politics.

First, though, we should go back a few years for a quick recap.

The Greens came out of the last election in an incredibly strong position. The SNP had not achieved a majority, and neither Labour, the Tories or the Lib Dems were going to be willing to form a government with the nationalists. The Greens’ performance, however, meant that they had the numbers to create a multi-party, pro-independence government with a working majority.

A deal seemed to suit both parties. The SNP wouldn’t have to worry about budgets failing or votes of no confidence and could simply get on with governing. As for the Greens, they finally had something tangible to show supporters after years of steady progress and, by entering government for the first time, could get their hands on at least a few of the levers that need to be pulled to move Scotland towards a net zero future.

Read more:

Lessons to Learn | Should primary school exclusions be banned? What does the data tell us?

But things are never really that simple in Scottish politics. Some argued (strongly) that the Greens were better off as the preferred opposition partners to a minority government, extracting concessions in return for support without tying themselves to the bright yellow SNP mast and, should the worst happen, being dragged down with the ship. They’d potentially enjoy less power, but they’d also assume less risk.

Joining the Scottish Government was always a dangerous proposition for the Greens, who only had to look to the Lib Dems to see how being bound to a larger, less progressive party could badly backfire, but in the end their members decided that the risks were worth the rewards, and the Bute House Agreement was born.

Today, after vigorously backing the deal made by his predecessor, First Minister Humza Yousaf kicked the Greens back out of government. In response, he was accused of having been forced to “capitulate to the most reactionary, backward-looking forces within the SNP”.

The calculation appears to have been fairly simple: it was no longer in the SNP’s interests to keep the Greens around, so out the door they go. This is particularly unsurprising after the announcement that, in response to the abandonment of climate change targets, Green Party members would be given a vote on continuing the agreement – but that it wouldn’t take place for several weeks. The largest party in the parliament certainly wasn’t going to sit around and allow the Greens to determine its fate, and it was silly to ever assume otherwise.

As I type this newsletter, Scottish politics is consumed with the question of whether or not the Greens will now bring down the government. Much about the future of the Greens, the SNP, and Scottish politics could depend upon what happens in the coming days or even hours.

But when it comes to the issue of education, their fate is almost certainly already sealed.

In the run up to the last election, the Greens made education a key strand of their campaigning.

This was continuing a tactic they’d been successfully pursuing for a number of years, positioning themselves as the party that would defend both the principles and the practicalities of Scottish education.

Subscribe and support our education coverage – only £20 for a whole year.

Before the 2021 election I spoke to a lot of people working in education who said they would vote for the Greens because they were the only party really speaking up for schools, colleges, teachers, pupils and students. Sometimes people talked about specific policies that they felt should be pursued, but mostly they just seemed happy to back politicians who were willing to vocally defend their interests, whether that was in parliament, in the media, or on picket lines. Ross Greer’s energy and commitment were often mentioned in particularly explicit terms.

But oh, how times change.

Ask those same people how they feel about the Greens and education now and many of the responses will be unprintable. There are still plenty of ‘explicit terms’, they’re just quite different these days.

The Greens may have been able to present themselves as courageous defenders of education while in opposition (a position that never quite aligned with the reality of supporting multiple SNP budgets) but their time in government was marked by what seemed like an absolute determination to be as quiet as possible. The conclusion that many drew was that education issues weren’t as important as securing a couple of ministerial offices, and it didn’t take long for those who had vocally supported the Greens’ education campaigning to become entirely disillusioned.

Sign up for a weekly expert insight into Scottish education straight to your inbox.

These days, when I speak to people in education, the word that comes up most often when talking about the Greens is ‘betrayal’, and it's not hard to understand why.

Whether or not the Bute House Agreement has been good for the Greens overall is still a matter for debate, but when it comes to the party’s education credentials, the deal had been an unmitigated disaster.