Labour will today commit to hiring 500 more foreign language teachers, as Jack McConnell publishes his manifesto for the next four years at Holyrood.
The party leader, who yesterday came face to face with another party leader - the Tories' Annabel Goldie - when their campaign diaries clashed in a cafe in Largs, will highlight education as the key he hopes will ensure a return to power, in a hard-fought race with the SNP.
His proposals include a boost for science in primary schools and foreign languages starting from primary three, in an attempt to help young Scots gain "globally useful skills", and to reverse a serious decline in language-learning over recent years. The addition of 500 more teachers in Scottish classrooms would include language assistants, many of them native speakers, with the manifesto highlighting the need for more Spanish and Mandarin learning.
The plan for Languages and Basic Science (LABS) would boost specialist science teaching in primary, improved teacher links between secondary and primary, and provide centres of excellence for upper secondary pupils.
Yesterday, Mr McConnell also announced he wants an elite unit set-up in Nairn for up to 16 talented junior golfers, to be based at Nairn Academy.
The education chapter of a 100-page manifesto will include 100 Skills Academies for school-age vocational training, raising the school leaving age of 16 and requiring young people to stay in education or training until 18, and an end to the limit on student places.
At the Glasgow launch this morning, Labour will set out health service proposals to have new waiting times promises extending for the first time to the "allied professions" of physiotherapy, psychology and chiropody, with a maximum nine- week wait to be achieved within four years. Labour also wants to halve maximum waiting times from referral by a GP to both inpatient and outpatient treatment, with faster targets for those with urgent conditions.
On crime, the manifesto is to promise more crime legislation, which could force police and councils to make use of antisocial behaviour orders.
Justice legislation would include further measures against serious and organised crimes, and Labour wants Scotland to have a "Payback" system, in which "tougher, swifter community sentences" are handed down by a new type of community court.
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