Education and Skills Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Official Report 487KB pdf

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“Performance and Role of Key Education and Skills Bodies” (Responses)

As most members will know, this is the last meeting at the committee for Richard Lochhead and Fulton McGregor. Thank you both for your contributions, which have been greatly appreciated. Your wisdom has been very useful, as always.

I assume that you are talking about Richard.

You, too, Fulton—your wisdom as a former social worker has also been very handy over the past few meetings. You will be missed by the committee, although I am sure that you will enjoy your work on the committees that you are joining. Thank you for your work and good luck in your new committees.

Thank you, convener, for your valuable input and equally impressive wisdom. I wish my fellow committee members all the best.

Yes. Who could argue with that?

I echo Richard Lochhead’s thanks. This is a strong committee. Although we do not all agree, I have, as a new member, learned a lot from members from other parties, including Liz Smith and Johann Lamont, who are experienced—

You mean members who are old. Just say it.

I have learned a lot from my year on the committee. There has been good and wise convening.

Yes, the convener is a very wise man. Please remember that the meeting is in public, so we should have a bit less of the complimentary stuff.

Our next item of business is consideration of a number of responses to the committee’s report, “Performance and Role of Key Education and Skills Bodies”, which was published on 17 January. The committee made recommendations on the performance of Skills Development Scotland, the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, Education Scotland, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and local authorities. We have received responses from those bodies and the Scottish Government, whose response covers the work of all of those bodies. I thank all the organisations for their responses.

I suggest that we consider the responses to our recommendations on each body separately in the order in which they are set out in our paper. If members have any comments on a public body, the Government’s response or any suggestions for future work, please catch my eye.

The key issue with SDS was localised delivery of services. Would anyone like to comment?

Members indicated disagreement.

Okay. Essentially, SDS argues that it provides a very localised service, but evidence that we received cast some doubt on that. Do members agree that we should explore the question further as part of any future work that we do on skills and SDS’s work?

Members indicated agreement.

Did we get feedback from SDS’s meeting with chambers of commerce? SDS undertook to follow up on some of the criticism.

That feedback is in the main report; I can send that to you.

Thank you. Does anyone have comments on the Scottish funding council’s response to the recommendations?

Members indicated disagreement.

The committee made a number of recommendations and observations, many of them to do with the enterprise and skills review. We are likely to consider the review further, so we can bring up any points at that stage.

Are there any comments on the SQA’s response?

The SQA’s response is unsatisfactory in two fundamental respects. One key point concerns means of communication. The SQA is not responsive to teachers and other people on the ground, and its response in this case is simply more one-way downstream traffic, when the point is that it needs to listen more.

Secondly, I think that the SQA has a problem with technology. It said that the problem with the amount of guidance is that technology makes it more complicated, but its response seems to involve more technology. The SQA is not, at present, an organisation that inspires me with its ability to use technology well.

On the point about communication, which is narrow but fundamental, I do not find the SQA’s response comforting.

Does anyone else have any comments on the SQA’s response?

I do—but not on the issues that Daniel Johnson has raised.

Okay.

There has been a bit of publicity in newspapers about payment rates for markers, invigilators and so on. I do not know the full facts about any of that, because it is quite difficult to find them, but it would be in the SQA’s interest for it to be up front about all that, given that there is an impact in terms of whether people are motivated to take up positions as markers and invigilators. It would be helpful if we could get some clarity on that. I see that there are a few comments on the issue in the SQA’s response, but it does not give us a full explanation. It is hard to say whether there is a real problem. I find it difficult to know whether the problem has been solved, because we have not been given the right information.

Two points have been raised, one of which is on communications. We asked the SQA about the new national qualifications as well as the issue with markers. I suggest that we bring the SQA to the committee early in September to see how it has been getting on after this year’s exam diet. We should certainly write to it about the issue with markers, and reinforce what exactly we are talking about with regard to communication. We can ask the SQA for a response and, even if we do not get one—although I think that we will get one before September—it will know what we will be asking about at the committee meeting.

That is where the connection to the curriculum for excellence management board matters. When we took evidence on that, we found that Education Scotland and the SQA are doing everything in isolation. The curriculum for excellence management board is meant to oversee a new interpretation of exam setting and criteria—which is exactly the point that has been made.

As a committee, we want to be assured that the matter has been properly discussed, and that all the agencies are pulling in one direction and are not adding to teacher workload. Workload comes up as an issue time and again and has not—as far as I can see—been scaled back at all. I want to know that that will be covered in some way in September. I hope that we are not going to lose sight of the issues around the curriculum for excellence management board, which has not, as far as I can see, done its job over the past seven years.

Yes. I was just about to say that September seems to be the appropriate time for questioning, in order to give the SQA a bit of time to address the issues.

It is a very busy time for the SQA just now, with the exam diet coming up.

Exactly. Does anyone have any comments on the Education Scotland recommendations?

I am sorry, but I have another point to make about the SQA. On its having to be self-financing and doing international work beyond Scotland’s boundaries to achieve that, we have not had a satisfactory answer on whether focusing on that work dilutes the SQA’s ability to focus on its day job. I think that we should pursue that question with it. It has said that such work raises Scotland’s profile internationally, but if there are concerns about what is happening in the education system in Scotland, that will damage our international reputation more than it will be enhanced by the SQA taking on extra work. I want us to continue to focus on that.

We can certainly ask the SQA whether it could send us evidence that shows us the benefit to learning.

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The SQA has listed a number of reasons but, to me, they are just assertions. The focus should be on opportunity cost to its ability to do its core business. As we have discussed before, perhaps we should in the longer term reflect on whether the SQA should be self-financing. Why should it be, if it is absolutely integral to the workings of our education system? I am not convinced that it should be. If it is having to go looking for work in order to ensure that it can do its core business, there is a problem. There are questions on that that we should continue to pursue.

I agree that the issue is one for another day.

Briefly, I found the SQA’s response to be generally defensive and platitudinal. On its fourth point, about its workload and resources, I learned nothing from the SQA’s response.

That suggests that there is still an issue in respect of communication.

Exactly.

That is a point that we can raise in our letter.

Perhaps we should accept that there is an issue, because so much of the SQA’s response has been to say that people just do not get it, or do not understand. That is not about communication; it is about recognising that there might be a problem that goes beyond that—about people not being clever enough to understand what it is trying to say to them.

There has been a pattern in which the committee highlights an issue and the SQA simply reiterates what it is doing rather than responding to the issue that we have highlighted.

Okay. Our clerk is noting those points. We move on to Education Scotland.

I would like to start on that, because I feel very strongly about it. I will echo the point that Johann Lamont made about the SQA: the problem with Education Scotland is its inability to recognise exactly what the problem is. I know that we will have a debate in the chamber this afternoon about some of that, but the report that Education Scotland itself has undertaken has identified five key areas for improvement. In almost all of them—in fact, we could almost argue in all five—the problems have been created by Education Scotland itself. Therefore, there are big questions about its ability to recognise why the problems exist and what we have to do to address them. We got in the response to the committee an outline of what should happen, in theory, and what structures should work in Education Scotland, but the response did not deal with practice—with what is actually happening on the ground. That is my overall view of the evidence that we received.

It is very clear that people in the profession are struggling to understand what responsibilities they have in delivery of CFE, because a lot of the guidance is not clear—from the SQA and from Education Scotland. It is a worry to me that the body that is paid to oversee implementation of CFE has some real issues about delivery. That is not a party-political issue but a cross-party one, and it is coming through from almost every teacher that we speak to.

We have already agreed to speak to Education Scotland after the Easter recess, so some of those issues will be brought up then.

Good. Thank you very much.

I will be brief. Sections 3 and 4, in particular, of Education Scotland’s response are quite mind boggling. From reading section 3, one could think that Education Scotland has only a peripheral responsibility for CFE: it points in every direction other than at itself. That is certainly not my understanding of its role in CFE.

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, all the response talks about is the inspection regime. The question that was asked was whether we can assess how well CFE is actually working. It was about data, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study and the points that Lindsay Paterson made. The response simply ignores those points and talks about something else. I find that deeply unsatisfactory.

As I have said, we are going to have Education Scotland in to speak to us, so I am sure that those points will be raised with it at that point. Are there any other comments—perhaps on education authorities? In the absence of any comments, I will say that we received a very interesting response from Aberdeen City Council and the northern alliance. The key issues that we identified were how local authorities influence national policy and how they support their teachers. I imagine that we will consider those issues once the Government’s education review is complete. We have discussed doing some work on the north-east and the northern alliance. Perhaps we should just park that for now and pick it up once we know more about the Government’s proposals.

No one has other comments. That brings us to the end of the public part of the meeting. I ask people in the gallery to leave the room, please.

12:05 Meeting continued in private until 12:18.