Strategic Plan for Session 7

Purpose

The Education and Gaelic Committee will seek to add value to the policy process within its remit, including development, agreement, implementation and delivery, with a view to supporting children’s rights and influencing better whole life educational outcomes for the people of Scotland.

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Objectives

The Committee will prioritise:

• work which is impactful and influences better whole-life educational outcomes and supports children’s rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
• being proactive in terms of our policy-influencing role alongside our role in scrutinising government legislation
• scrutiny of how Scottish Government legislation and policy translates into practice, including the level of progress, policy implementation and delivery challenges, barriers to change, including fiscal constraints and variability of outcomes
• hearing directly from those who use the public services within our remit, including parents, children and young people, in addition to scrutinising the public bodies who deliver those services; and ensuring our work reflects the evidence, including the views of both service users and service providers
• adopting a cross-cutting approach which recognises that better educational outcomes are interdependent with better outcomes across various other policy areas, such as health and the economy and public sector reform.

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Ways of working

The Committee will aim to work:

• collegiately and consensually: taking an evidence-based approach to decision-making, recognising that committees work best when they listen and learn from a wide range of voices, through well-defined inquiries directed towards better outcomes
• innovatively: for example, in relation to how we work with other parliamentary committees and how we engage beyond the 'usual suspects'
• creatively: through, for example, identifying areas of good practice and exploring how these might be scaled up across delivery bodies
• reflectively: for example, in regularly reviewing our strategic plan based on periodic evaluation of how our work progresses in influencing better educational outcomes in the short, medium and longer term across Session 7.