Education and Culture Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Official Report 514KB pdf

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Education Scotland

The first item on the agenda is an evidence-taking session with representatives of Education Scotland, the major new educational body that was created very recently. I welcome to the meeting Bill Maxwell, the body’s transitional chief executive; Ken Muir, chief inspector; and Alan Armstrong, director of curriculum and assessment. I invite Mr Maxwell to make some opening remarks before we move to questions.

Good morning and thank you very much for the invitation to give evidence on the role and remit of our new integrated improvement agency, Education Scotland, the name of which, I should add, has been improved since it was first announced. Convener, you have already introduced Ken Muir, who as one of our chief inspectors has responsibility for our new school inspections framework and will be able to answer questions on that in detail, and Alan Armstrong, who manages our curriculum for excellence support programme in relation to curriculum and assessment support and aspects of the glow intranet. I am sure that his input in those areas will be helpful.

Committee members will have seen the briefing papers that we provided, but I wish to make a small number of opening remarks. Having started on 1 July, we are still less than 100 days old but I am very excited by the new agency’s potential—and indeed have been since it was announced last October. Given the maturity and historical evolution of our education system, I believe that by bringing together inspection and the broad range of support functions that now fall within our remit and putting them under the umbrella of a single coherent and strategic public body we are very much making the right move at the right time. It builds very logically on the direction of travel that we have been taking for many years with regard to inspection and support for the system.

In inspection, the trend was very much towards capitalising on the investment that we have been making for many years in building education providers’ capacity for self-evaluation and driving their own improvement. Increasingly, that has led to inspection being a process that we do with, rather than to, schools and colleges, which means that inspection has become much more proportionate in its approach. It is no longer a one-size-fits-all process cycling around every provider on a fixed, cyclical basis. Instead, the process has become much more streamlined, so that providers who are evidently successful at improving themselves are visited less often, although we would still be interested in seeing some of them to know how they do it. We target our effort more particularly on the providers who need more support.

Inspection has become much more strongly focused on evaluating provision against outcomes rather than seeking to standardise the teaching process through which outcomes are achieved. Inspection has also become increasingly responsive and flexible in considering a wider range of teaching and learning approaches through which good outcomes might be achieved.

On the curriculum side, we have seen a parallel direction of travel towards less prescription. That is evident in the sort of national guidance that we have provided, which has an increased focus on building the capacity of professionals at the front line to take responsibility for their own implementation and continuous improvement of the curriculum and teaching that they provide within the broader and more flexible framework of national guidance and support. As I am sure that the committee is well aware, curriculum for excellence exemplifies that principle.

As a result of the creation of the new agency, we have an opportunity to develop a really powerful virtuous cycle in which Education Scotland, through capitalising on synergies between our inspection and support work, can act as an engine for driving improvement through the system. It can do that by identifying, nurturing and evaluating the best practice that emerges in schools and colleges and feeding the lessons from that experience directly into improved advice and support resources, which are then made widely available to practitioners across Scotland, while also mixing in the best intelligence and research from beyond Scotland, internationally and elsewhere.

We can therefore accelerate good practice round the system. Certainly, my vision is of an education system that is based on a strong national consensus about the purposes of education and the commitment to ambitious levels of achievement for all, and which is world class in its ability to improve continuously and almost virally spread ideas about the most effective professional practice in ways that ensure that every learner gets the best-quality experience suited to their individual needs.

Hargreaves and Shirley, who are a couple of Canadian academics and influential writers on school improvement, have talked about the ideal approach to driving improvement across all education systems being one in which you build from the bottom and steer from the top, but provide support and pressure from the sides in fairly equal quantities. In very broad terms, that is exactly what we are trying to do.

Thank you very much, Mr Maxwell. It is a pleasure for the committee to meet you this morning. We have a very tight agenda, so I will move straight to questions. Marco Biagi will kick off.

Thank you very much for coming along. It is good to hear from you. I am interested in how you manage a broad range of functions. It is fine to talk about visions, but when we consider functions we can see that there are jobs to be done on the ground, especially in the context of the reducing head count and the coming together of a diverse set of functions. How have you been able to manage that so far and how do you envisage it going?

Our short-term focus has naturally been on the safe running of the continuing commitments for business that we had already planned. I think that we are achieving that pretty successfully. We have effectively taken the pre-existing business plans—four different bits came together to form Education Scotland, of which Learning and Teaching Scotland and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education were the largest—and are continuing to deliver those programmes on their planned basis.

Like all other public bodies, we are dealing with reducing resources for the next foreseeable period, but we were already planning for that within the inspectorate and LTS. There has therefore been no shock to the system; it has been more a matter of integrating the programmes. Indeed, I am sure that in due course we will develop additional efficiencies out of synergies between the two organisations, particularly around back-room functions and so on.

Safe running is our current priority, but we are looking at developing new and innovative ways of re-engineering some of our work to create more impact and to increase synergies between the two main parts of the business.

You have been given the new function of validating language schools by the United Kingdom Border Agency, which came as a bit of a surprise to some of the language schools that have contacted me. How have you been able to manage that? It is a completely new function.

That is a new area of business: we will develop a programme to look at the quality of learning and teaching and educational provision in a number of language schools. I will hand over to Ken Muir, as he has been deep in the business of preparing for that. We have a lead-in time, as we will not begin to undertake inspections until next year.

The UKBA asked us to undertake inspections of the quality of educational provision in private colleges and English language schools. We have prepared a framework for taking that forward, and we are finalising the fee scales for charging those establishments. The idea is that by the end of December 2012, all such establishments in Scotland will have been inspected by Education Scotland. The reports that we produce for the individual colleges and schools will be available for those establishments to use in whatever way they choose. We anticipate that they would use the reports as part of their submission to the UKBA in seeking continuing tier 4 status after December 2012.

It is obvious that the establishments would use the reports for that purpose, but do you envisage that they would be used as some sort of marketing tool, especially if the colleges and schools receive particularly good inspection reports?

Publicly funded and independent schools currently share with prospective students the outcomes of inspections, and I imagine that private colleges and English language schools might do likewise. The reports are used for a variety of purposes, of which that is certainly one.

When Education Scotland was established, concerns were raised about combining HMIE’s inspection function with the functions of Learning and Teaching Scotland, which was responsible for developing the curriculum. There was concern that the organisation would, to a certain extent, be inspecting itself. I appreciate that Education Scotland was established only in July, but how are you able to combine those roles? How is that developing?

There are a number of challenges in designing any new organisation, but at the forefront of our minds is the need to maintain absolute public confidence in the impartiality and objectivity of our inspection evaluations. I anticipate that we will take that forward, and we will publish a protocol—indeed, we have already set out in the public domain a set of principles under which we conduct inspections. We will seek to strengthen that further and put in train a set of arrangements to make clear that any inspection evaluations and reports that are published under the Education Scotland banner will be objective and impartial, and will not be influenced by any support work in which we are involved or by political process.

Marco Biagi mentioned the reduction in head count in the organisation. It can be argued that you are facing greater challenges than when the organisations were separate, and that you are trying to do so with fewer staff. However, while there has been a reduction, secondments have been used to quite a large extent in the organisation. Can you say a bit more about that?

The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning was very clear when he announced that the bodies were being brought together that it was not being done as a budgetary reduction exercise. Indeed, the predecessor organisations were looking at similar levels of budget management—if they had continued to exist separately—as we are facing now, so we have not suffered any increased budget pressure as a result of the merger. We may find efficiencies that help us to manage the difficult budget situation that we are all in more effectively as a result of being one efficient organisation together. In that sense, it is not a big issue.

The fact that we use secondments has given us a lot of flexibility, and will continue to do so, in how we manage our head count. It is also a good thing in its own right. It is really important for us as an organisation that we have a continuous connection and throughput of current front-line practitioners who work with us for a period and then go back to their schools and classrooms around the country. That is healthy, and I would be keen for Education Scotland to continue to build that live connection with the field into its business model.

10:15

Generally speaking, the feedback from schools is pretty positive, particularly on the reforms that have meant that inspections are based more on outcomes and much more self-appraisal is involved from the school itself. That is all very good.

Having said that, I think that one or two questions remain, which we need to convince parents about. You will be aware that the Health and Sport Committee in the previous session of Parliament raised the issue of physical education inspection and the fact that certain areas of the general inspection were not as thorough as they should be. Can you assure us that the process that you have put in place will be more rigorous in certain areas?

Our inspection process for schools covers a number of aspects. We have our continuing annual programme of inspecting a proportion of schools across the country on a regular basis. There is a limit to what those inspections can look at in depth, but they will be targeted on and directed by self-assessments that the schools provide at the beginning. If we need to dig in more depth and look more rigorously at certain areas of provision in any individual inspection, we will certainly do that.

Let us say that a school’s self-assessment had not come up with what you would consider appropriate for a proper inspection. What assessment would you make? What criteria would you use to decide whether you should dig deeper?

I will hand over in a second to Ken Muir, who has been working on the new school inspection framework.

We have a range of detailed guidance. In effect, we need to be convinced by the evidence that schools offer us to justify the evaluations that they give of any aspect of their provision. When we feel that that evidence needs to be tested further, we will test it—we will sit in, observe lessons and look at what is happening on the ground. We can also triangulate evidence with the views of parents and pupils, as we take account of those views systematically from the beginning of the inspection process.

Can you guarantee to the committee that you have taken on board some of the criticisms of the inspection process that were made in years past and raised by other parliamentary committees and that certain areas will be much more rigorously inspected?

Yes, certainly. As you probably know, last year we went through a public process in consulting on our new inspection framework. It attracted a huge range of responses around a number of issues. We have drawn from them in designing the new framework.

I will respond specifically on the PE issue. We are looking at PE in all our inspections; we committed to doing that. As part of the new inspection framework, we have shared the more detailed record of inspection findings with parents, through the chair of the parent council, in recognition of the role that parents play in supporting learners and their overall achievement. We are trying to engage with parents through the chair of the parent council, giving them the full set of evidence on the issues that the parent council may wish to discuss with the headteacher so that parents have a role in effecting improvement in the school.

PE is part of the wider curriculum, so we continue to make evaluations on the five quality indicators, three of which sit in the national performance framework. One is curriculum. If there are any issues in relation to the curriculum and the extent to which young people and children are getting a broad experience, we would comment on that and it would be taken into account in the evaluation of that particular QI.

I have one final question. With the greater emphasis on a light-touch approach in some areas in the inspection process, how often could a school expect to have a full inspection?

That is now more variable. Although we have moved away from our rigorous—or, shall we say, routine—commitment to cycle round schools regularly, we will monitor schools’ performance more frequently through annual discussions with local authorities and drawing on a range of performance evidence. The principle now is that if a school looks as if it needs closer examination we will go in much quicker than we have in the past. If that is not the case, the school will come up at some point in the normal balanced inspection sample. Indeed, we might even look at schools that are performing particularly well because we want to learn more about what they are doing. The cycle is no longer fixed.

Given the absence of national tests, the fact that children will not sit tests until quite late on in their academic career and that sampling will be used to assess literacy and numeracy standards, are you confident that failing schools and areas of concern will be highlighted early enough in the process?

Alan Armstrong, who deals with assessment, will pick up specific issues about the use of assessment data. However, I am determined to sit down with local authorities and examine a range of evidence on how each of their schools, including primary schools, is performing. Many authorities have introduced other methods of assessing pupils’ confidence over and above collecting teachers’ data, but the current direction of travel is to consider teachers’ assessment data moderated by the local authority. Indeed, our organisation will want to be confident that authorities are moderating teachers’ assessment effectively and will look on such data as important evidence of how well each school is performing.

There are two aspects to this: first, how schools are getting a handle on where their young people are; and secondly, how to share that information and ensure that they are in line with the expectations of other schools and teachers.

Schools and local authorities are thinking about ways of assessing attainment in literacy, numeracy and other areas. In some cases, they are using the methods that they used before and, in others, they are introducing new methods, ideas, standardised tests and so on. In recognition that such methods cover only certain aspects of a young person’s learning in literacy and numeracy, they are supplementing all that with other evidence—and that other evidence is the focus of discussion about quality assurance and moderation, which is a new and very important element of the policy framework for assessment. Through that, Education Scotland will be working with local authorities and schools to help them understand the effect of sharing standards between classes, schools, stages and indeed right across the country. As a result of those two aspects—getting the evidence of attainment and sharing standards with others to reach a certain understanding—local authorities should be assured of where their performance sits.

Mr Maxwell mentioned performance evidence and Mr Armstrong referred to attainment evidence, quality evidence and just “the evidence”. What type and range of evidence are we talking about? What will you actually be looking at?

Schools will be looking at the attainment evidence with regard to a young person’s literacy and numeracy and, more important, where it might be generated. After all, it cannot always be generated through tests, even though they are important in a class or any other setting. Evidence can be gathered from a wide range of activities across the curriculum. Given that literacy and numeracy are everyone’s responsibility, the schools will collect evidence from across the curriculum and that richness of evidence—and its being shared with other practitioners—will allow teachers to come to a really good understanding of a young person’s attainment.

As a body that is effectively at one remove from schools and councils, how will you decide how this new light-touch regime will be used? How will you decide which schools will be inspected more often and which less often?

In our annual engagement with each local authority, we will look across all their schools and consider the attainment evidence and any other evidence or concerns that we might have received directly about individual schools. I am also keen for every local authority and school to regularly assess parents’ views about the quality of what they are getting from their schools.

That is where I was going with my question—I was wondering what the input of parents was. I heard what you said about councils and your engagement with them; it is your engagement with parents that I am interested in.

Individual schools and, in many cases, whole councils routinely and regularly survey the views of parents. That is the best practice, but we are actively discussing with the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland how that might be extended and supported further by us. We produce questionnaires that we use in inspections. I would like to get to a position in which we did not need to issue questionnaires when we carried out inspections because we could pick up on robust processes in schools and councils that routinely pulled in the views of parents.

I am interested in this from a committee and a personal point of view. I am not aware of ever having been surveyed by my local authority on the performance of my daughter’s school. How routine is that process across authorities?

As I said, a number of school and authorities do that on various sampling bases—

What number? You said that a number of authorities do it.

I do not know, off hand. I would have to get back to you with detailed figures.

It would be good if you could do that. I am interested to know whether the figure is two authorities or 30 authorities.

I know that several authorities do so.

It would be helpful if you could get back to us on that.

Sure.

I have a final question. One of the issues that ministers asked HMIE to look at was the educational attainment of looked-after children, which the committee is interested in. How will the new inspection regime allow you to pick up that area, given that those children are a relatively small group in the school sector?

We are preparing some evidence for the committee specifically on our findings in that area.

We can come at that in two ways—we need to take a two-dimensional approach. Part of that is about ensuring that when we do our routine school inspections, we look at the arrangements that are in place for particularly vulnerable learners, of whom looked-after children form one of the most vulnerable groups, if not the most vulnerable group, that one typically finds in mainstream education. Equally, there are times when we need to mount a more detailed thematic study, outwith our normal cyclical inspection programme, that involves sampling in depth the provision that is available for those children. I am keen that we use both those methods appropriately to keep a handle on the extent to which the needs of our most vulnerable learners are being met.

I look forward to receiving the information that you will provide for the committee’s inquiry report.

On curriculum for excellence, I understand that the schools inspectorate adopted quite a thorough approach, engaging with schools on coming to terms with curriculum for excellence and on how it would inspect performance in that regard. How will that be rolled out across the rest of your organisation to ensure that curriculum for excellence delivers for our children?

As the implementation programme for curriculum for excellence has progressed and gradually been rolled out through the school system—that process has been going on for a number of years—we have gradually adjusted what we expect to see in schools by way of implementation and have issued schools with new guidance on what our inspectors expect to see. At the beginning of this term, we put out guidance to establish our expectations for all schools. As Ken Muir drafted that guidance, he might like to comment.

We have tried to keep the inspection process in line with the national implementation timescale for curriculum for excellence—hence the updated advice notes.

Initially, in the early years, we looked at areas such as teachers becoming familiar with the experiences and outcomes and thinking about ways in which they might report on learner progress. We also looked at how secondary schools were thinking about delivering a broad general education from secondary 1 to secondary 3 and, more generally, at the curriculum models that they might use for the senior phase, building on, for example, work that they had done with colleges and others.

10:30

As Bill Maxwell said, we have been trying to match our inspection expectations, particularly in terms of curriculum and self-evaluation quality indicators, to make sure that schools are keeping on track with what is recognised as the national implementation timescale. Where we see particularly good practice as part of the new inspection process, we revisit it and try to create continuing professional development materials for schools that are not as far down the track so that they can see what is happening elsewhere. Where we are unhappy with the progress made and where specific areas need to be progressed, we point that out to the school and use the wider resources of the new organisation to provide appropriate support.

From September to December 2010, we held back on secondary inspections in order to provide support to secondary schools, because the sector needed support on a number of issues. Along with the education authorities, Learning and Teaching Scotland and others, we undertook 400 CPD activities with secondary schools across Scotland in order to provide support for curriculum for excellence. We are trying to move the inspection model—and what we look for in an inspection—with the national implementation timetable to make sure that it keeps to that timetable.

From that answer, it sounds as if some schools are better prepared for curriculum for excellence than others. Why is that?

I think that that is true. Each school—whether it is a pre-school centre, a primary school or a secondary school—is at a different starting point in moving forward with curriculum for excellence. Based on inspection evidence, some of the schools that have strongly moved on share two characteristics. The first is that the staff have embraced the philosophy of curriculum for excellence—they see the value of interdisciplinary learning and focusing on building on experiences and outcomes. The second factor is strong leadership in delivering curriculum for excellence, either within the institution or within the authority. Schools where that has not been the case to the same extent include those where the context of the school includes large numbers of youngsters with additional support needs.

Good morning. I want to ask about the delivery of online services in relation to the curriculum and, in particular, the witnesses’ take on the glow project, which is in abeyance until we are reassured that it will work. As with curriculum for excellence, teachers have varying views on how well glow works for them. I would like you to look beyond glow 2. I think we are starting to see a curriculum that would not otherwise be available in certain high school situations. I refer to subjects that can be taken by pupils in rural schools with small numbers. I want to get a feel for where that is now.

We should recognise that we are in a strong position in Scotland. Glow was the world’s first complete intranet for schools, although some others have caught up. It was pioneering. We have 400,000 active users of glow and many million hits a week. It is a live and valuable product that has helped to extend access to subject areas that might have been hard to deliver in an individual school in a rural area. It is a strong system but technology moves at a frightening pace.

The Scottish Government, rather than Education Scotland, is handling the reprocurement, but the judgment has been made that simply reprocuring a contract that is similar to the existing one for glow—as was perhaps originally envisaged would happen—might not be the best approach to ensure that we have enough flexibility to continue the pace of development and extension that we want the system to deliver. In all that, it is important that we maintain, build on and enhance the benefits that glow has provided.

During last winter’s severe weather, many schools discovered how flexibly they could use glow and online services to keep young people engaged even though they were at home behind a wall of snow, and to keep teachers and pupils connected when they were not in the same building. Online services have great potential, but we must continue to develop and ensure that we do not tie ourselves into something that prevents us from fully exploiting that potential.

Alan Armstrong is heavily involved with glow, so perhaps he wants to comment.

There are two aspects. One is the online service, which is the first point that Jean Urquhart mentioned. That has the full range of support materials that Education Scotland’s predecessor organisations brought together to allow teachers to share good, interesting and innovative practice. There are film clips and so on. The service has about 4.5 million visits a year—it is an education website that is heavily used by people not only in Scotland but beyond. That is a central plank of curriculum for excellence support, as of course is glow, which is the second aspect. The interactive nature of glow, with schools being able to connect with other schools, has been mentioned.

The move now is to look to the future of information and communication technology and to consider which platform is best suited to harnessing the wide variety of applications and ideas that are coming on stream now and those that will arise in future. The review will consider what is the best possible option for glow, although with the basis that the content, features and concepts of glow as an entity must be maintained. The review is looking to find the best possible solution for the present, but it is also seeking to future proof the system, by making it flexible and adaptable as technology changes in the coming years.

What are the downsides? Are there any warning signs? For example, because of budget issues, it is hard to maintain numbers of peripatetic teachers who visit schools. I wonder about an overreliance on such services. Are there circumstances in which they could be overused or abused?

Do you mean because they are replacing peripatetic teachers?

I am just saying that there is nothing like learning from a real person showing you how to do things.

Personally, I do not envisage computer screens ever totally replacing human contact with a skilled professional teacher. Although we might envisage big changes in the way in which education is delivered, I do not think that that will ever disappear. We need to be a little cautious about assuming, for example, that whole subjects can be delivered through an online medium with no human interaction involved in the teaching. I do not envisage that happening in the short term.

Last week, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning gave a statement on post-16 reform in which he suggested that Education Scotland could take on additional roles in several areas, but particularly in relation to quality assurance for post-16 learning and skills, and continuous improvement activity, which is currently delivered by Scotland’s Colleges. I appreciate that it is less than a week since the announcement, but do you have an initial reaction to it? Do you foresee resource implications if you were to take on those additional functions?

Those are only proposals that are out for consultation so, naturally, we will wait to see the outcome of the consultation before we become too involved in giving a view on them. However, we currently undertake quality assurance of further education college provision through the contract that we run with the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council. Ken Muir could say more about that, because he in effect runs that contract, in consultation with the funding council.

We have a continuing programme of individual reviews and enhancement activities that go beyond the individual inspections and examine thematic issues across a number of colleges. The difference with the school sector is that, as you highlight, the more curricular and pedagogical support is funded through Scotland’s Colleges.

On the school side, we can see ways of doing quality assurance and continuous improvement, and we can see overlaps. Curriculum for excellence, for example, applies to college provision as it does to school provision.

I certainly see logic in the proposals. If they came to pass, they would have resource implications for us. We would certainly require the resources to deliver them.

We have a service level agreement with the funding council, which is renewed annually. As part of that, we undertake a number of quality assurance and quality enhancement activities, some of which are college reviews—the equivalent of college inspections, if you like.

We have subject and thematic tasks. We focus on particular areas of the curriculum in any given year; we are currently focusing on four. We have a couple of thematic tasks—for example, we recently published a report on self-evaluation across the college sector. Our college team also engages directly with the colleges themselves in a link or support role.

Many of the quality assurance and quality enhancement activities are already in place through the service level agreement.

On the quality improvement activities, we already work closely with Scotland’s Colleges and staff in colleges—and have done for a number of years. We publish reports and share the outcomes of those reports in advance with Scotland’s Colleges so that it can provide support to the sector on those outcomes.

There is a long history of the former HMIE and the former Scottish Further Education Unit part of Scotland’s Colleges working closely together, so there is already a degree of synergy between the organisations. We have tried hard to build on that, particularly since the appointment of the most recent chief executive of Scotland’s Colleges, John Henderson.

Marco Biagi started off by focusing on the coming together of various roles, but a key aspect of what you are required to do is to work closely with other inspection bodies, such as Social Care and Social Work Improvement Scotland, which I think has taken on the child inspection role that used to be the responsibility of HMIE.

The convener rightly pointed to the committee’s interest in the provision of support for vulnerable looked-after children. The combination of roles that different bodies have in that regard needs to be as effective as it possibly can be. I know that it is early days, but how is that joint working operating? Will you touch on the skills mix that was previously required of you but which may need to change over time?

I am very encouraged by the joint working with the other inspectorates. We are now, in effect, a new family of improvement bodies. Health Improvement Scotland, SCSWIS—I believe that it is considering changing its name—and Education Scotland have all been reprofiled recently and we come together to talk in some depth about how to build on recent work, particularly through the shared risk assessment arrangements for monitoring and scrutinising local authority performance.

We also discuss how to extend that work further, beyond local authorities, to examine how children’s services are delivered across community planning partnership areas, for example. The Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland are leading on work that involves us and SCSWIS quite deeply on how we tie together all our intelligence on children’s services across the getting it right for every child agenda, taking in local authorities and other partners, such as the health service and the police. That is a continuing direction of travel and we need to build on that work further.

When we passed the lead for child protection inspections to SCSWIS, some of our staff went with that. However, we retain many staff who have skills in broader areas of children’s services inspection. We will continue to be engaged in joint inspections. With SCSWIS, we are looking at children’s services inspection more generally and considering a methodology for that. I am sure that joint scrutiny, joint inspection and joint improvement work is a flavour that we will increasingly develop.

10:45

Do you expect that work to take on a formalised structure? As Liz Smith said, your approach to undertaking inspections has changed markedly. I presume that SCSWIS—we all look forward to its name change—will have its own approach. How are those approaches dovetailing? Will who takes more of a lead depend on the issues that you are examining?

We are working closely and jointly with SCSWIS on its new methodologies—for example, it is adapting methodologies for whatever will come after the current round of child protection inspections finishes. A good blend can be achieved of inspection styles that pick up effectively how institutions are functioning and other inspection styles, such as the child protection ones that we pioneered, which focus on an individual’s needs and consider how all the services engage with an individual young person, learner or whoever. To reach a rounded view about how well the system is working, one wants to consider provision through both those lenses.

You touched on the process for the learner and the inspection agency, but it is obvious that all this places an enormous pressure on people in the teaching profession. The McCormac review noted that

“A teacher in Scotland not only needs the necessary skills and confidence to deliver a high quality education programme, but must also have the capacity to interact with the wider set of services responsible for the welfare of children.”

What additional support do you have to provide to ensure that teachers feel supported in the complex role that they now play? I suspect that that question is more for Alan Armstrong.

There is an increasing need for the ability to engage with a wider range of professionals who might come into play in meeting the needs of any child or young person to be part of the core competence of teachers or educators. That is acknowledged in the broad vision of the four competences of curriculum for excellence, which recognise that the job of education is more than just delivering learning in the traditional sense—it involves creating confident individuals, responsible citizens and so on.

Alan Armstrong might want to flag up some issues.

For several years, in the support agenda for health and wellbeing and for looked-after and accommodated children, we have had several lines of work and programmes that involve a link with health professionals. We work closely with health authorities on how we can support their priorities in schools. A rich blend involves the former LTS—now Education Scotland—working with other agencies to support young people.

Ken Muir talked about the support that was provided from September to December last year. Was the work that you have just described a key element of that support, or was it just part and parcel of the overall support?

In some specific cases, authorities and schools requested such targeted support. However, the additional support that we offered for curriculum for excellence in secondary schools last year tended to cover more general issues, such as management, change management, the curriculum structure, how to embed the experiences and outcomes and how to deal with some assessment requirements. Some of the activities that we undertook—as I said, we had more than 400 CPD activities—concerned more specifically how to deliver on additional support needs and how to offer CPD in that area.

Members have no further questions, so I thank you very much for coming in, gentlemen. Your organisation has had an interesting start. I know that you are a new organisation and I am sure that the committee will take a keen interest in your work over the next few years. I thank you again for coming along and helping us with a witness session on Education Scotland.

I announce a brief suspension to allow us to set up agenda item 2.

10:50 Meeting suspended.

10:58 On resuming—