Our latest opinion column is written by Ross Greer, Scottish Green MSP for the West of Scotland region.

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The Scottish Government have not long released the latest survey of school pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills.

It made for some grim reading, showing a decline in reading and writing standards.

The very next day I heard directly from a newly qualified teacher who believed some of her colleagues did not even have the skills in numeracy to properly teach maths to 11-year olds. Clearly something isn’t working.

The problem is that the Scottish Government clearly want us to see the problem as something no-one else says it is.

Their response to bad report after bad report is to charge ahead with a governance review and their ultimate aim of moving education from the control of elected local councils to an abstract regional structure which doesn’t yet exist. ‘Governance’ isn’t the problem though.

The problem is four thousand fewer teachers than in 2007, five hundred fewer Additional Support Needs teachers and a hundred fewer school librarians since 2010 and a host of other cuts. You can’t deliver the same high standard of education with so many fewer staff.

When I challenged the Scottish Government, Cabinet Secretary John Swinney attempted to shift the blame by claiming that these are decisions made by local authorities over which he has no control.

Council can only work with the money they are given by the Scottish Government though and they have seen huge cuts since 2010.

For most it’s a case of just choosing their cuts, not avoiding them.

This started to change earlier this year, when the Green MSPs won £160 million back for local councils, avoiding another round of huge cuts.

We need to go much further though or our children’s education will continue to suffer.

The biggest issue in our schools in the last decade has been the combination of staff and resource cuts and an ever-growing workload. We can choose to solve that.

Our parliament has the financial powers to raise and give councils the money they need to hire more teachers, more classroom assistants, more librarians and we have the power to make their work manageable. We owe our young people that.