Thank you for that, Mr Johnson, although I suspect that Mr Flanagan will have much more to say about it than I do.
Your point is well made and well understood. We are moving into a system in which we have to start school up again, look at the young people we will get through the door and devise a system that will support all young people, both learning in school in a different context and learning outwith school in an unknown context. There is a workload issue, and what is achievable must be clearly understood at the outset. The system must be based on the most effective way in which we can get young people to learn. It is also a resource issue. The system that we will have until the summer is not the same as the one that we will have in August. The notion of what blended learning will be also has to be shared with the profession in a certain way.
There will be guidance for professionals on what blended learning is coming out of one of the workstreams. It is not a thing; it is a way of responding to a set of circumstances that young people will find themselves in. It is easy to say “blended learning” and make it the same thing as distance learning and using IT to learn, but it is not the same thing. The discussions that we have had over the past eight or nine weeks have related to the hardware that is required and the platform on which we can deliver blended or distance learning. We are now into a discussion about pedagogy and how individual pedagogies, working throughout the system, can look at engagement with young people and how we support them at that point in their learning, given their attendance and non-attendance at school between now and getting back to normality.
11:00
I understand that I may not be getting to the nub of your question. However, it goes without saying that, if we are going to do that, we need resource in excess of what we have now. If we wish to work with every child in Scottish schooling—and each one of them has had their education disrupted to a certain degree—we have to find the most effective and efficient way of using the resource that we have now and decide how to expand and develop it.
In doing that, we must also ensure that we keep our workforce sane and healthy, because we are in a deficit situation and the last thing we need is the workforce starting to fall off because we are putting far too much pressure on people.
To a degree, people understand what is ahead of them. No one is certain about how it will operate, but we understand that it is going to be different and that we are going to have to operate in an unfamiliar way. It is important that schools, school leadership and people in the wider community understand and have realistic expectations of what we can do and what the journey back to normality will be like, as well as how long it will take and all the other things that we will have to adjust and change before we get back to normality. We need to do that in such a way that young people recover and people in the system have confidence in what education has done and could go forward to do.
It is not as straightforward as dropping something called “blended learning” into the system and saying, “Here’s what it means to everyone,” and that will solve the problem—it is a very complex problem. Blended learning is sophisticated, and we have to understand the levels of sophistication to be able to engage with young people at the level of their understanding and their progression in learning in order to make sense of the way forward. There will be different implications for young people across the system: those within broad general education, those in the senior phase and those who, as we have discussed, have been disengaged from their learning. It is very complex and very sophisticated. The profession is up for it, but we have to take great care of the professionals out there and the ways in which they will address this particularly complex, demanding, time-consuming and stressful situation.
Sorry, I said that Larry would say more about that than I would. Go on, Larry—beat that.