Kezia Dugdale last night pledged to make education a priority for a Scottish Labour Government. Speaking in Edinburgh, she described education as “our most important economic policy”.

Education is widely seen as one of the SNP’s biggest failures in office over the last nine years in office, and Labour are attempting to make it one of the big dividing lines in the run-up to this May’s election. In her speech to Scottish Labour conference in October, Dugdale said that education was the “silver bullet to slay the monsters of poverty, inequality and ignorance”.

In last night’s speech, she again returned to the the topic of how education and economic inequality are linked.

“A poor upbringing is more likely to be passed down onto the next generation due to the failure to close the education gap”, she said. “Wealthier young people are now twice as likely to go to university as those from poorer backgrounds.”

And she slammed literacy levels, which have become a national scandal in Scotland.

“More than 6,000 children in Scotland leave primary school unable to read properly. At the end of their second term in office the current government have finally announced a plan to measure the problem, she said. “I welcome that, but that is very different from having a plan to deal with the problem.

“We can’t wait any longer to take radical action to deal with this or we will pass disadvantage on to another generation.”

Setting out what Labour would do in power, she said:

“We would introduce a Fair Start Fund which follows every child from a poorer family to school. £1000 for every child from a poor background in primary school, £300 for every child from poorer family in nursery school.

“By linking funding to children we would ensure that every school has an attainment fund equal to its needs.

“We would also learn from the approach the Labour Government has taken in Wales. We would hand this investment directly to head teachers.”

Scottish Labour continue to languish in the polls, with it possible they could lose almost all of their constituency MSPs, and have to rely on the regional lists for representation.

Former Shadow Justice Secretary in Scotland Richard Baker yesterday unexpectedly stood down as an MSP, having planned to retire in May, in order to take up a new job with Age Scotland. He has been replaced with the next candidate down the regional list, Lesley Brennan – a left winger who supported Katy Clark over Dugdale in the 2014 Scottish deputy leadership race.