I am happy to set the ball rolling. Last year, for the first time, more local information was used in a productive way to inform the process. One issue is the vacancies count. It has been increasing for a number of years, but there has never been a formal and robust way of putting a number on the vacancies, because of issues to do with interpreting what a vacancy is, deciding when a vacancy is long term or long standing and deciding at what point of the year the count should be done. COSLA carries out a survey, but we need to make that more robust and maybe even try to get to a state where we can put a number on the vacancies and add that into the considerations on the intake. At present, the information is used as background intelligence rather than something that is fundamental and central to the model.
Another issue is supply teachers. For a number of years, the ADES view on the advisory group has been that the number of supply teachers is being depleted. The committee has heard about the difficulties that that creates in relation to time in the school and pressure on teachers and headteachers.
We need a more rigorous and careful look at the supply pool and who is in it. There are different types of teachers with different attitudes to how much work they are prepared to do. Some authorities have permanent supply pools, which might be refreshed every two years. If people go into full-time permanent posts in a school, because they have earned the right to do that, the pool has to be supplemented.
I put all that in the category of formalisation of the local intelligence. Instead of it just informing the model, we should try to bring it into the model by taking a more robust and rigorous look at those issues.
Full account needs to be taken of new demands. There are always new initiatives, such as those on science, technology, engineering and mathematics or on modern languages in primary school, pupil equity funding and attainment challenges—all those issues. There are always curriculum changes and developments and their effect is not always clear—curriculum for excellence, for example, has changed the pattern of subject choice in secondary schools and changed the nature of the curriculum.
We need a more detailed account of how those initiatives impact on schools—how they affect timetabling and what they mean for the number of teachers, the types of teachers and their subjects. In some areas, we could create more robust and informed local intelligence for the national planning model. That is the trick—we have a national planning model, but staffing is managed and delivered locally in each of the 32 authorities. The issue is how we marry those two things together.