Under item 7, we will continue our work on educational attainment, and discuss the third and private sectors’ roles in improving attainment and achievement for all school pupils—in particular, for those whose attainment is at the lowest level.
I thank all those who have provided us with written submissions, which were very interesting.
I welcome to the committee Susan Quinn from the Educational Institute of Scotland; Angela Morgan from Includem; David Watt from the Institute of Directors; Allan Watt from the Prince’s Trust Scotland; and Susan Hunter from YouthLink Scotland.
We have a reasonably big panel, so I hope that we can keep our questions and answers fairly brief. I apologise to panel members for keeping them waiting because the previous item overran. If they saw any of that, they will have perhaps caught a flavour of why they have been kept waiting a little bit longer than they expected.
We have about an hour. I will go straight to members’ questions.
I have permission from the convener to refer to Audit Scotland’s report.
No, you have not. [Laughter.]
Yes, I do. We agreed that privately, and the report is mentioned in the committee papers.
The “School education” report, prepared by Audit Scotland, focuses on attainment. I am sure that all panel members are familiar with it. It says:
“Some schools have achieved better attainment results than their levels of deprivation would indicate, suggesting that the gap between the lowest and highest performing schools cannot be wholly attributed to different levels of deprivation.”
We all know that attainment is linked to deprivation, but deprivation is not the only matter that affects attainment. What else affects it?
I have a second point, which is my main concern. The report says:
“there has been no independent evaluation of how much councils spend on education and what this delivers in terms of improved attainment and wider achievement”.
We are about to spend another £100 million of taxpayers’ money but, according to Audit Scotland, we do not know the link between spending and attainment. What is the panel’s response to that?
Who wants to kick off? If someone does not volunteer, I will pick one of you. [Laughter.]
I could always move on to the next question.
It was interesting to note that attainment is not always linked to deprivation. When I talk to young people through the Prince’s Trust Scotland, what strikes me most is the lack of aspiration and hope. There is often a belief that if a person has missed out the first time round, the chance will not come back.
That is very much brought home when you meet, for example, a 24-year-old who has moved on to an apprenticeship through one of our programmes and who thought when they left school at 16 with no qualifications that that was it. For me, it is about an environment, whether school, home, college or wherever, that keeps saying to the young person, “You can progress. You can move on.”
To answer Mary Scanlon’s question, it is about having teachers, youth workers and organisations such as the Prince’s Trust who are able to give people the desire to move on to the next level. We see that happening in all sorts of schools.
On the independent evaluation, it is obviously hard for me to comment on the specifics of the latest proposal as I have not looked at it in detail. However, we need to look at things in the round; it is about not just the education spend, but the wraparound support. That point was made in a number of the written submissions. We should look at the investment in young people in total. We could think about it sometimes as an investment, which would mean that we were investing in young people for a long-term future, although it will sometimes cost more money to get the right results.
You say that it is not all about deprivation. The education budget is huge across the 32 councils and £100 million over three years could very easily be absorbed. We have no way of measuring the spend and relating it to attainment. It would be helpful, convener, if the panel members could give us some indication of where they feel the money would be best invested.
Okay. I will let Allan Watt think about that for a second. Susan Quinn can give us the EIS’s point of view.
From our point of view, the key is spending the money on long-term projects. As I am sure my colleagues here will agree, the difficulty is often that projects start and we see some improvement from them but then the spend goes elsewhere or is prioritised elsewhere. That is one of the challenges that we face.
When I started teaching 20-something years ago, home-school link workers were key in areas of the city that I worked in. However, they were an easy target when it came to budget cuts in the 1980s and they were lost to the system. We are now beginning to consider that great improvements can be made through home-school links. The challenge is to maintain projects over an extended period of time rather than look for quick fixes.
On what else it is about if it is not all about deprivation, it is about how aspects of deprivation are addressed and raising both the aspirations of communities and those of young people in schools. If a young person cannot see a way out of the poverty in their community, then all angles of that deprivation must be considered. It is about all young people being able to access a wide range of opportunities and, as we heard in the previous debate, being able to target appropriate support for them rather than have a one-size-fits-all approach. Not every community will require to have particular projects in their area, but projects need to be able to be sustained beyond their areas.
On being able to track the spend on education against attainment, it is for treasuries and financial departments to consider how that might be done. However, like Allan Watt, I suggest that more than the education spend for a school is involved in raising attainment in the context of deprivation and the barriers that it creates.
11:30
I will build on what colleagues have already talked about. I can speak only from Includem’s experience, which is of course partial. We have seen that each school that we work alongside is different. The difference is created mainly by the leadership of the school. We have found that the most successful approach has been to adapt our flexible service to fit with what the school has already created to recognise the barriers to attainment for their pupils.
One of the key areas has been in helping to address the barriers for the child, and it has been equally important to address the barriers for the parents in their role in supporting the child and communicating effectively with the school, which is often one of the areas that causes most difficulty for teachers. Through doing that, we are able to help the teachers to do the best job that they possibly can. The limits of their role are of course within the school day and the school environment.
Two different scenarios emerge. One is when it is known that there are problems at home, perhaps because there has been an older sibling, although the school might have no control over how those problems are worked through. It is equally likely that we will be asked to work with the family and the child in cases where the staff know that there is something wrong but nobody has been able to get behind closed doors to find out what it is. Often, it is in cases of that sort that we have been able to make the most impact. We might find that the problems are not really to do with the child; they are often to do with the family. There could be mental health problems with the mum, for instance, or debt or a housing problem. Very commonly, there are core problems with family relationships and with how family members communicate with one another.
By addressing those issues, which are not education issues as such, we are able to stabilise things and we can help the child to re-engage and to attend. It can be as basic as ensuring that the child actually gets to school every day, at the right time, in clean clothes, hopefully having had some breakfast, and then supporting the parents with appropriate communication. That builds their confidence. Often, the parents have themselves had a very poor experience of education. They lack confidence and they are resistant, and that is communicated to the child, who does not get the support that they need in what is the most important aspect of their life.
I have a number of perhaps disjointed thoughts. I welcome the points that have been made. There is a tendency in this country to say that we have an educational problem, so we should spend more money. That simply does not bring the result—it does not actually work. In a variety of places around the world, that does not actually happen.
I have recently listened at length to Graham Donaldson, the former senior chief inspector at Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education. There have been a lot of very sage words coming from him. I am sure that you have spoken to him, and I certainly recommend speaking to him on a number of matters.
To some extent, it is still true to say that what goes into school comes out of it. There is no question that, where we have managed to change that model, we should be following the examples of good practice.
Going back further, the work that Susan Deacon and others did on early years is still to be commended. There is no question but that that is the place to invest. Even we in the industry would say that. We recognise that that is a bit of a problem, because a number of young people in this generation are missing out, but early years is still the way to make the longer-term changes, and it is the single-biggest determinant factor in whether or not somebody goes to university.
There is an issue around what we consider to be attainment. In my view, it should very much focus on positive outcomes; it should not be focused on qualifications. We should stop measuring schools on qualifications. On the question of positive outcomes for young people, education is about life and work, not qualifications—it is really not about that.
I very much agree—as I suppose I would, coming from the Institute of Directors—with the point that leadership is crucial. There are a lot of examples of good schools all across the UK. We are all aware that there are a lot of good examples in London. In every single one that I have seen identified, that I have any association with or that I have seen any coverage of, there has always been an erudite, focused headteacher who has driven that forward. That is an important point.
To go back to what Graham Donaldson discusses quite a lot, we tend to talk about class sizes and numbers of teachers. There is an awful lot of evidence to say that it is the quality of the teacher, not the quantity of teachers, that makes the difference—[Interruption.]
Sorry, convener.
Could you put your phone off, please, Mr Beattie?
My final point is that we need to focus our spending on what actually works. From reports such as “School education” we know some of the things that work. Let us focus on them. We fundamentally believe—I will probably repeat this several times—that we should not have the number of young people who leave schools without basic life skills that we do have. It is all our responsibility to do something about that. We will talk later about how we can do that.
YouthLink Scotland thinks that the education system goes beyond schools and includes learning that takes place in other settings, such as youth work.
Mary Scanlon asked what factors other than deprivation affected attainment, and colleagues mentioned leadership. The issue is about leadership’s ability to seek an opportunity. That opportunity may be for youth work or for business work. It is about doing things differently and being brave in our aspirations, so that young people can see that there is a different route for them to develop, and so that they can look at themselves as whole people.
We need to ensure that we consider young people as not just pupils but young people in all aspects of their lives, wherever learning can take place. All those factors will contribute towards their attainment.
I am pleased that David Watt mentioned the London challenge. The EIS is not impressed with the London challenge. It says:
“the London Challenge model ... must be treated with caution.”
It goes on to say that elements of the private and third sectors
“do not fit with the structures or values ... at the heart of ... Scottish Education”.
It also says:
“Any proposal for private sector involvement in Scottish Education must be very carefully evaluated.”
I am keen to hear your views on that. The First Minister seems to welcome many aspects of the London challenge.
The “School education” report says that
“some councils test pupils in P1, P3, P5, P7 and S2”
and that others test less frequently. However,
“At a council level, there is no consistent approach to tracking and monitoring the progress of pupils from P1 to S3.”
That is a concern. It is also a concern that
“only 0.2 per cent of P4 pupils and two per cent of P7 pupils”
are not working at their expected level in numeracy, which means that 98 per cent of P7 pupils are working at their expected level, when, two years later, in secondary 2, only 65 per cent are working at their expected level. What happens between primary and secondary schools to cause such a dip?
Can I start with you, Susan Quinn?
Do you want me to answer all those questions? The EIS is not against any of the proposals in the London challenge, but, as with everything, we are cautious. The London challenge was a four-year project that focused on secondary pupils. It has now finished in London, and there has been significant spend to take it forward. When it was transported wholesale to other cities, it did not have the same impact.
We are cautious about bringing in wholesale to Scotland anything that was designed and worked in another particular setting, but aspects of such things are worth consideration. Last week we met the cabinet secretary to consider some of the things in the London challenge. We do not dismiss outright private sector involvement in the Scottish system; there are great examples of work that goes on in our schools. However, such work must be managed by schools and the operations of local authorities. We do not want to dismiss things outright, but one size does not fit all and just because something worked in London does not mean that it will work if it is transported to a totally different area in Scotland, where we are looking at early intervention. It will not necessarily work if we just mirror what was in London. That is where our caution comes from.
You say:
“The elements ... do not fit with the structures or values which are at the heart of the Scottish Education system.”
Which elements do not fit with Scottish education?
The move to academies and free schools in the English system is one that we would find difficult as an option.
I am talking about the private and third sector input.
That is the private and third sector input into academies and free schools. The consortiums of academies are funded and run by private companies, and there are options and difficulties around that in terms of what sits within the Scottish system. We have a system that allows a Scottish curriculum to be delivered at local level, so that it can meet the needs of the young people who are there.
There are difficulties around the tracking systems, as people say that there is no consistent approach. As far as I can see, some local authorities have taken account of the new proposals around assessment and moderation within the curriculum as it has been developed, and have moved away from considering attainment as simply the scores on the doors. That is where there are differences in how they track attainment in their local areas.
Some areas still have use of a standardised test. However, if that is the only aspect that they are using, I suggest that they are doing exactly what we do not want them to do, because they are setting out a system that looks at attainment only in narrow areas, without looking at the achievement of their schools or taking into account the wider options that show what the curriculum was designed to do.
Everyone in this room is fiercely proud of Scottish education, but that does not mean that we should become myopic. We gave it to the world, but sometimes the world can teach us other lessons as well, and we should look at London and at other examples for options that we can use. There are already examples in Scotland of the private sector and the third sector creating significant opportunity in education and in supporting young people both within and outside school, and it is important to remember that.
However, we should look for evidence from other places. Sweden, for example, has a system that I would probably have advocated until I heard about its effects. It devolves full-scale management to the headteachers, and as a result Sweden has dropped in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development rankings from fifth to 20th over a 20-year period of doing that. We need to be cautious about what we adopt and do not adopt. Nevertheless, if there is evidence of other things that are going on, we should certainly be looking at it.
My final point is that we are fiercely enthusiastic about curriculum for excellence. I have some reservations, but as a general principle I think that it is fantastic. I support it so strongly because it has, I hope, turned secondary education away from teaching subjects and towards teaching young people. I hope that we will be able to develop young people through that, and that everybody, whatever their level of attainment, will improve as a result. There is a lot to be done to make that happen, but as a former teacher myself—it was a long time ago, I have to say—I know that we used to focus too much in secondary education on learning French as opposed to developing young people. We have moved away from that, and that is welcome. There will be positive outcomes, but we all need to keep focusing, and my plea to you is to keep looking at the evidence. My dogma would have been the Swedish model, as I said, but I now accept that that was probably not a good idea.
I want to pick up on an earlier point that David Watt made about investment in early years, which we absolutely support. The evidence also shows that it is essential to do early intervention at all stages, and we think that the transition between primary and secondary schools is one opportunity to focus on what is happening at home and to work with parents and children to prepare and gear them up for that major shift. That is one of the points at which vulnerable children and young people tend to fall off the edge, so it demonstrates that it is worth making that effort. An early intervention can be made at any point, both to improve individual outcomes and to prevent worse things from happening.
11:45
We can make an early intervention only if we know that there is an issue that needs to be addressed. There is a need for continual assessment of children, starting from nursery. In fact, nurseries are doing good work on that, and they are probably better than other parts of the system, but they do not always get the support that they need. If we do not continually and consistently assess, we do not know where there is a problem until the young people leave school.
It is all very well saying that we will put in measures, but the Public Audit Committee heard that many councils are buying expensive private tests from England and that there is no way to evaluate those or to make peer comparisons. My point is that, unless we know that there is a problem, we cannot address it. That is what I am looking for—it has to be the first step. We have to identify who needs support, such as a home-school link worker or whatever.
I am sorry, but you are incorrect to suggest that there is no assessment going on. There is continual—
I read out the point that the assessment is inconsistent. That is the point.
No. Across local authorities, different systems are used for assessing attainment but, within every single establishment and classroom, there is continuous assessment. If you were to ask any teacher—
There is no consistent approach—that is what I am reading in the Audit Scotland report.
That is about how local authorities are measuring.
It is from P1 to S3.
Mary—let Ms Quinn answer.
Every local authority has its own policy on that. In every classroom and early years establishment, a range of assessments go on. Every teacher would be able to tell you about any child who they felt was having difficulties.
The Audit Scotland report talks about the local authorities’ approaches to measuring. They have always had a range of strategies. When we had national assessments, some local authorities spent thousands and thousands of pounds on standardised tests, because they were part of a toolkit for assessing everything. There is a range of ways of assessing what is needed and what is there. That is how schools know whether they need to look for other approaches. As David Watt rightly said, we use the third and private sectors in a range of ways.
It is sometimes difficult within an establishment to know what is available and what is appropriate in the area, but work can be done on that. Work is being done through the getting it right for every child approach to ensure that local solutions are available for children. However, schools have knowledge and understanding of each individual child and they know where early intervention is needed. They just need to know where they can access the solutions.
I should mention one of the pluses of working alongside the third sector, where schools know how to access it. Often, a family will engage positively with a third sector organisation because there is no threat of formality. Families worry about that. If we go through social work and say that we are going to use a third sector group, there will be resistance from the family because the social worker says that they have to do that. However, if through the partnership between the school and the home, there is a proposal to use the third sector, that is often received much more positively, because the family does not feel threatened by it.
The panel members have touched on the issues of measuring achievement rather than attainment, and of taking into account young people’s lives and the work experience and skills that they gain outside school and the education system. A lot of the evidence that we have heard points towards local authorities having difficulty in recognising those skills and the achievements of young people outside school. How can local authorities start to recognise that achievement? How likely is it that schools, employers, colleges and universities will start to add greater weight to that achievement when it comes to offering young people positions?
Thank you for asking that question. We are particularly interested in that, because many of our member organisations are part of the awards network, which is a forum for supporting achievement awards. Some awards are credit rated on to the Scottish credit and qualifications framework and others are not. As a sector, we are concerned that the insight benchmarking tool can cope only with awards that are SCQF credit rated. Things such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s award and the highest award in scouting are not credit rated in that way, but they are recognised by business, employers and universities as having real currency as an indicator of young people’s skills.
We are particularly interested in empowering young people to be able to articulate their skills in their learning so that they are their own best advocates. Whether young people undertake learning in the classroom or in youth work, we want them to understand what they have achieved and how they can translate for different audiences—such as an employer, their parent or their class teacher—what they have learned and what they can do.
That young person’s voice is very much being developed in classrooms. It is a high priority in the curriculum for young people to be able to articulate what they are learning, and that is considered by the inspection teams when schools are inspected. They are now less interested in the bits of paper on which schools say what they are doing and more interested in whether the young people can articulate—in exactly the same way, we hope, as their teachers can—what is going on, both within and outwith their classrooms, that is having an impact on their learning.
Susan Hunter is right. It is about finding ways of including those wider achievements within the insight benchmarking tool, for example, and giving them broader recognition. Recently, universities have begun to look for and give weight to not just the qualifications that young people get, such as highers and advanced highers, but the wider conversation of what they have achieved. Some work is beginning to happen there, but there is an awful lot to be done around the focus on qualifications.
There is also a lot to be done on how we promote wider achievement to the wider Scottish society. We can compare the high profile of the introduction and first year of the new qualifications with what the media were interested in during the 10-plus years of the introduction of the broad general education.
Two weeks ago, we had 350 young people with us at Hampden at an event that we called welcome to your future. We had about 40 different employers and young people from the 100 or so xl clubs that we run in schools throughout Scotland. That event gave young people access to information about the jobs that are out there and what they will need to do them. Most of the employers were not starting from the point of requiring particular qualifications. They were looking for an attitude, and there was a certain range of experiences that they might want to see.
That approach helps young people to ask the right questions. At the moment, it is often just framed around people putting down their qualifications. We have all written a CV, thinking, “What sort of person am I?” and trying to capture that. We need to give people belief in themselves and the activities that they have undertaken with youth organisations such as the Prince’s Trust or in schools. If they can present that in a way that is attractive to employers, it is very helpful. However, they need to understand what employers are looking for, and that understanding will start to close the gap between people’s perception that they have no skills and nothing to offer and what employers are actually looking for.
It is unfair just to expect teachers or parents to know what the jobs are. The jobs of the future will be very different. One of the positive things about bringing together the third sector and groups of employers is that it shows people that there are choices and opportunities for them.
I want to expand on some of the points that have just been raised. Various submissions seem to indicate a discrepancy between what schools and parents see as valuable and what employers see as valuable. They suggest that schools, further education institutions and parents seem to value academic qualifications much more highly, while employers are looking for social skills, attitude and a much wider approach. How can that gap be bridged?
I will make a few comments, some of which relate to the previous point.
First of all, it would be lovely if politicians and in particular the media did not focus on academic league tables as a way of rating schools. I suggest that we introduce a literacy league table to ensure that schools do not let young people leave until they can read, write and spell appropriately—well, perhaps not spell, but at least read. This is a serious matter. Employers genuinely tell me all the time that the issue is basic literacy. Most employers do not want or expect anyone, whether they come from school, college, university or wherever, to be ready to do the job, but they expect them to be ready to work. That is quite a different thing, and I will expand on that in a minute.
As I have said, this is all about positive destinations. Schools, like colleges and universities, should be made to record quite clearly over a period of time what young people’s destinations are to ensure that they can be tracked. Somewhat unbelievably—to me, too—I have been with the Institute of Directors for 12 years now, and in those 12 years, no one has ever knocked on my door and said, “I can’t find a graduate.” It has never happened. However, people have said, “I can’t find a mass spectrometry technician”, “I can’t find an apprentice engineer” or, indeed, “I can’t find engineers of any sort.” I could go on about the whole variety of trades and skills that people want. During the recession, we were particularly concerned about the construction trade, and there are still some challenges to face in that respect.
If I am honest, I think that we focus far too much in this country on going to university. It is not necessarily the be-all and end-all, and it is not necessarily the career for everybody. Many bright young people—indeed, many of the country’s best and most successful people—did not go to university at all or went later in life; I can think of Jim McColl and other such examples. We need to change some of our traditional ways of thinking. Education is not just about going to university; it is a lifelong experience that everyone can keep doing, and employers can help with it once people are employed with them.
I absolutely take your basic point: employers want someone who can literally read, write and count, who will get up in the morning and attend their workplace, and who understands what work is like. That is why the Wood commission report and other such reports are so important. At the moment, young people can leave school in Scotland having done a week of work experience. That is just madness. How does one week’s experience teach them anything about anything? It also depends on where and how they get that work experience. There is a massive job for everyone, including us in the private sector, to engage with schools and perhaps colleges and universities and to change the model of education to engage young people, to ensure that they understand what work is all about and to open their eyes to the opportunities that are out there. Those opportunities are not all about academic achievement, but they are about achieving and doing things.
Finally—and, to be fair, I think that this is happening—schools need to realise that what matters is a pupil’s personal record of achievement, not the number of qualifications that they have when they leave school. The questions that matter are: how many days have they been off school? Are they timeous? Do they turn up on time? Are they consistent? Are they enthusiastic about the things they do, even if they are not good at them? We want all those things in the people who work beside us. Kids do not need to be brain of Britain; what really counts is that they deliver consistently. Schools can and need to record that kind of achievement and attainment, not academic achievement.
I have said already that family relationship problems often lie at the root of many of the situations that we work with. Although every situation is different, family relationship issues and difficulties always come up, and I think that the features that are desirable to employers are the same features that help functional families stay together.
In effect, therefore, by working with families around their social skills, their communication abilities, the boundaries between parents and children and self-management—by which I mean not only the child but the parent—we can set a bit of a grounding around that one thing that the child or young person might believe that they are good at. That has to be the stepping stone; we need to find the talent or interest, whether it concerns sport, the arts or whatever, that allows them to get some praise and recognition.
12:00From that, a virtuous circle can be built up. Unsurprisingly, certain children develop a reputation in school for not being good. Teachers have other children in their classes to look after and the children who are presenting difficulties reinforce that view of them. We have found that, if we can break into that, there can be a real shift in relationships between children and their teachers, which means that teachers feel more confident about their skills when responding to the children with difficulties. We have found some interesting feedback around that in schools that we are working with.
I absolutely agree that it is essential that the outcomes need to be recognised as being far greater than attainment. The GIRFEC framework provides a fantastic opportunity for that, as does the use of the safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible and included—SHANARRI—indicators and the methodology around the wellbeing web, which helps a young person track their progress and see how well they have developed in important areas such as anger management. That lays the bedrock in terms of the personal skills that are required for living in communities, working in workplaces and, hopefully, going on to create functional families.
I will start by saying that schools focus on qualifications because, sadly, that is what they are measured on by pretty much everyone else. A whole lot of other things go on in schools that people do not hear about in the same way. Although we hear that business wants particular things, the work that is done in schools in that regard is not seen as being sexy by the media.
We certainly aspire to ensure that there is a balance in relation to formal qualifications. The historical formal qualifications are important because, as I said, that is what the school is measured on, but we need to move forward on the range of opportunities that our young people have. The developments around Scotland’s young workforce provide us with a framework to engage in conversations about striking a balance between formal traditional academic qualifications and vocational qualifications. We do not want people to be in the position of having to make an either/or choice. Students should be able to come and go within the range that is available and have something that is tailored to them.
The education of wider society on what the new qualifications are about is also important. We still focus on spelling, handwriting and such things, but in modern times we have to ask where those skills sit in relation to everything else. When I was at school, they were 75 per cent of the priorities. Is that still the case or, given that other things are important now, is there a different balance to be struck?
Within that, we must consider the wider range of opportunities for formal academic qualifications that young people are being offered. They can do life-skills maths, but we hear that it is not being given the same credibility as a traditional maths qualification.
There is some education to be done around the new aspects and the developing aspects of qualifications that need to be taken account of, because those are the qualifications that the young people whom we are discussing this morning will be engaging with.
Life-skills maths and literacy are about day-to-day life and are exactly what business is looking for, but we do not give them the same status as traditional maths and literacy. People are told, “Oh you’ve not got higher maths”, when they might have something that is equivalent but with different content. The academic levels are the same, but we do not give them the same credence.
By extension, there is a division between employers’ expectations and what parents and schools might be looking for. Are schools likely to have the infrastructure or time to deliver the non-academic skills that employers are looking for?
Schools do what they do within existing structures. That is why we work alongside third sector organisations and others to support that.
We have heard that class size is not the answer to everything, but the EIS argues that class size and the number of teachers makes a difference when engaging with smaller groups. Opportunities for that to happen are needed. Schools are timetabling and we hope that as the senior phase of curriculum for excellence is fully rolled out and the intended principles are seen, space can be provided in timetables to engage in wider achievement and the necessary wider life-skills projects.
At the moment, in lots of places there is just duplication of the old system of qualifications. As we move forward, the reflections group’s recommendations on the qualifications and the work that is being done by the CFE management board should, if properly resourced, mean that time is freed up to do those things because we will be taking a different approach to qualifications.
In its evidence, Universities Scotland said that pupils from private schools are good at producing carefully crafted statements with high status and relevant content, whereas pupils from state schools seem to receive a lot less assistance in composing their statements and struggle to draw on suitable work and life experience. That comes back to what we were talking about earlier. Their statements also contain a lot of writing errors, I believe. How can schools best present pupils’ skills and abilities to employers, colleges and universities?
We need to give young people access to opportunities so that they can see what the jobs might be. There are whole sectors that young people do not understand, including the ones that they think they understand—for example, retail and hospitality; we have all been to a shop, hotel or restaurant. They do not understand what the careers involve and how they can be structured, so they need to reflect what they have done at school, in their youth organisation or in other third sector organisations. That is one element.
Many schools and other environments could give so much more support; mentors who have been to the particular university and understand exactly what is required, for example. The Prince’s Trust and other organisations have access to a large number of people who are willing to give up their time to support young people; with the assistance of schools, we can find ways of bringing that extra support into schools, especially when someone needs to make that university or job application. There are resources out there that we do not tap into as well as we could. The central point is that if we show young people the chances and opportunities, they will respond.
When I was with a group of young people last week, I asked them what would really motivate them. One thing that they said was that the alphabet of qualifications is very confusing. If you ask what they studied at school, they sometimes struggle to tell you what qualifications they got. Was it a standard grade or a national certificate, for example? They find that difficult to cope with.
The second thing that they talked about was headteachers: they said that it would be interesting if headteachers were performance-managed on the basis of how many pupils got jobs. [Laughter.] I would hate to put in another layer of performance measurement, but if young people feel that the school’s leadership is genuinely interested in their long-term future, that will turn them on.
I will come back to the business of qualifications. I have said before that I abhor targets and that improved performance outcomes are the way to go. On achieving that, we mentioned earlier the role of parents and said that, for attainment, resources need to be invested in parent-school relationships. Those relationships are not good in general, are they? We know that there are children who need help, but what about the parent-school relationships?
That depends on the area and the parents. There are pockets of schools where—
Why does it just depend on the parents?
Sometimes it will depend on the parents’ attitude to school. If they have had a bad experience of school and do not have a positive approach to school, they stay away and do not want to engage with the school. As I said, there are great opportunities for working with the third sector to build relationships between parents and schools. Schools work really hard to try to develop links with parents, but there is a range of difficulties.
To return to Colin Beattie’s question, parental involvement with schools and their level of engagement with them is a factor in why private sector schools produce better outcomes. There is definitely a link with how much of that is done through the school and how much is done through work with the families.
There is a lot of work to be done on parent-school relationships, some of which will be generational in terms of parents who say “Ah dinna like school so Ah’m no gonnae go back tae the school” or who believe that parents get called to the school only if “the wean’s in trouble.” It is about breaking down those barriers. We see loads of opportunities for sharing and celebrating success, which gets parents into schools now and gives them a much more positive experience of them.
Does that not come back to the situation that we talked about in relation to qualifications? Parents who are interested are driven by qualifications and not by the wider societal outcome that we expect.
I will ask about the wider outcomes in terms of the role of YouthLink. At a meeting here with the Boys’ Brigade I was surprised to find out how many members it has, which is also the case for the scouts and girl guides. Who drives that? How do we encourage parents to get involved in those types of organisations, which can have a wider outcome?
Many of the uniformed organisations’ volunteers were participants in their programmes when they were young, which then evolved into their contributing their time to help other young people, so they have a better understanding of the wider skills, attributes and values that young people can develop beyond the school gates.
On Friday evening, I attended a ceremony for the Scottish Borders saltire inspire awards, which are about recognition of volunteering. A total of 18,000 hours of volunteering was undertaken by young people in the Scottish Borders. The audience included parents; it was really important for them to see not only the opportunities that their children had participated in but those that other children had participated in and what is available outwith school. Some of that work is done in partnership with schools, which is equally important.
I will bring in George Adam at this stage, because I know that there is a bit of an overlap between his question and what Chic Brodie asked about.
Thank you, convener, and thank you, Mr Brodie, for nicking my question. [Laughter.]
I want to expand on the role of the third sector. We mentioned earlier that it is not just about what happens in school. The uniformed organisations—girl guides, scouts, the Girl’s Brigade and the BB—have all done good work in the past, but things have now been repackaged and a lot of good work seems to be happening out there that is attainment based but which uses sport, drama and the arts as ways of getting to the harder-to-reach children. The third sector is doing that work, so what is the role for it in working with schools to try to get to the harder-to-reach children in order to ensure that we can get them on the right career paths?
12:15
Those opportunities require effective local partnerships among all the education providers—the schools, arts organisations and youth organisations—so that there is an understanding of the needs of the cohort of young people or of the community, and so that what the third sector offers responds to identified need. There is also a need to ensure that programmes are delivered in partnership, and that all the learning is recognised and valued by all the partners.
Susan Quinn’s very first comment was that we need long-term funding to make such programmes and opportunities a success. For schools to commit to working in alternative ways, the funding must go beyond the financial year. In the first place, the school year is different from the financial year, so there may be a programme only for half of the school year. We also need to be able to timetable for the year ahead.
We know that there will be a cohort of young people who may benefit from an alternative curriculum or an expanded curriculum for excellence delivered by a partner organisation. There are conditions, which members can see in our written submission, around what it would take for such partnerships to be effective over the longer term.
I heartily agree. I was struck by the description that was given by a council chief executive of his visit to one of our schools that run xl clubs, which is a Prince’s Trust programme. The school makes space in the curriculum for when a pupil drops a subject, such as French, from which they are not seeing much benefit, and the xl club’s programme is built into the curriculum in its place. The pupil will do community work, personal development and work experience. The chief executive visited two xl clubs. The one that he visited in the morning was chaotic—it was quite difficult for the teacher and the xl adviser. The people in the xl club that he visited in the afternoon performed brilliantly as a team, and there was a sense of cohesion, enjoyment and aspiration. The difference was that one was the year 1 club and the other was the year 2 club. That takes us back to the point that such programmes much be run consistently over a period and—most important—they must have proper follow-on.
Following the Wood commission, we are looking at how we take young people from some of the programmes into our employer-based programmes with Marks and Spencer or Arnold Clark, to give them job opportunities that they can grab. The danger is that unless we can keep them moving on the journey, people will drop through the cracks at some point and we might not see them again for three or four years; they might come to us from the job centre when they are 20.
We must have long-term commitments in school. We must also ensure that the next steps, when they are not along the traditional linear academic route, are thought through and that there are opportunities in the third and private sectors for young people to move on to.
On the behind-the-scenes work with parents, we are conscious not only of the importance of being effective when we are supporting parents to support their children into other opportunities; our aspiration must also be for a sustainable solution. That is why we might do separate work with the parents, away from their child, on their skills in supporting their child with homework, for example. Otherwise, if a service such as ours moves away from the home—that might not be visible because we are not as visible to the schools as services that are physically located in them—then all the work that has been done by the school alongside other partners can collapse quickly. We need a sustainable approach. The investment in the family and in the parents’ skills supports a young person in the longer term, and, I would hope, supports any siblings following after.
There are two issues. The first is around schools’ knowledge of what is out there, which will depend in part on the local authority having a comprehensive list of what is available in its area. That sharing of information—that catalogue, if you like—of what is available allows schools to target, approach and build the opportunities into what they are planning for, and for them to look at that long term.
The other issue, especially in secondary schools, is about how to create time for such activity in the school day. As I said, part of that will happen with the move to the qualification stage and the three-year senior phase, which will give people more time to focus on everything. Instead of pupils doing their highers quickly in nine months or a year, they will do them over two years, which will allow them not only to get more in-depth knowledge and understanding of the subjects, but to engage in wider achievement programmes that will have different impacts on their life chances. There are different elements.
I was interested to hear Susan Hunter’s comments about working in partnership. Renfrewshire Council has its street stuff programme, which involves the local football club—St Mirren—the police and fire and rescue services and Engage Renfrewshire, which represents the third sector. The programme, which has been very successful with street football—it also has a bus with a gym and so on—is able to deal with a lot of hard-to-reach children that schools and everyone else find it difficult to engage with. That is because of the credibility that comes with the stripes of the St Mirren tracksuit—although I suppose that if the programme was in another area, it would have to be its local football team’s tracksuit.
On partnership working, am I being too sensible and practical in thinking that there must be a way of getting all the groups together and taking the idea to the next level? I know that funding is available and that we already fund various initiatives, but can we not get all the organisations to work together and act as an access point to ensure that we reach the young people? A witness who gave evidence a couple of weeks ago told us about a boy whose school had found him difficult to engage with, but the minute they found out that he was a boxer and started dealing with him on those terms, they discovered that he was very disciplined and knew about health and nutrition and so on. In that way, they got him back on the right track.
Susan Hunter said that partnership working is extremely important. Is there no way we can take programmes such as street stuff, which are happening all over the country, and make them larger—or am I being far too sensible?
That approach could be taken, but I think that we have to respond to local and even individual needs. On the example that George Adam highlighted, if you were to develop a boxing programme and put it into every local authority, that probably would not work. The point is that such things hook into and connect with each other and lead to a dialogue between a professional and a young person based on a specific interest. There is no shortage of creativity; whatever that hook is, it will be there.
Susan Quinn talked about a catalogue of offers. Quite often, though, the offer has not been created, so it is not in the catalogue. It is all about knowing the professionals who have something to offer young people in their community and creating something with them that is really going to make a difference.
As for funding of programmes, in the example that George Adam highlighted there has probably been no devolution of funding from the school resource to work with the young people in question. That funding will have come from external funders, from charitable sources, directly from the Scottish Government or from elsewhere. Although working in partnership with schools might be great, the challenge for the third sector is that it will have sought funding first and then chapped on the door of the school, saying that it has the money and a great idea that it would like to run with young people in the school or shared community. We need to consider the value of such offers and to look at them as preventative spending. Allan Watt talked about investing in young people; that is exactly what youth work does.
First of all, as a Kilmarnock supporter, I have to say that I do not see the connection between St Mirren and football.
Speaking as someone whose background is in sport and recreation, I think that we could solve a lot of the problems that we are talking about if we put some of our health spending into schools between years 3 and 5, or years 4 and 6, and if we had voluntary activities. As for St Mirren—God bless them.
Thank you. I am hurting enough this season.
I do sympathise.
I am on the board of Scottish Sports Futures, which does a lot of good work across the country and, in fact, has a basketball programme that is similar to the programme that George Adam described. Cash for crime has also been really helpful. We need to think differently, and such an approach can make a significant difference outwith and within school. If young people are exposed to such schemes, the experience will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Sport can do that, but so can the arts, culture and other things; indeed, I am sure that there are science clubs outside and inside schools that have received funding.
Just in case the wrong message goes out from the committee, we are talking about cashback for communities and not cash for crime—that would send out altogether the wrong message. [Laughter.] I was listening very hard and noticed that Susan Hunter did not answer the question as to whether George Adam was being sensible.
I will move on from the role of the third sector to ask about its status—in doing so, I may exploit the fact that the two Susans are sitting at opposite ends of the panel. There is a divergence of opinion in the written evidence that we have received about the youth work sector. For example, Youth Scotland states:
“What is becoming very clear to the Youth Work sector is the need for youth workers to be seen, in the spirit of curriculum for excellence, as equals amongst education providers.”
In contrast, Renfrewshire Council states:
“although the third and private sectors can, and do, play an important part in the joint effort to raise attainment/achievement, it is done so by complementing the excellent work of teachers.”
The council also makes the point that teachers are accountable for educational outcomes. Is there any likelihood of our seeing more parity of esteem between those in the youth sector and those in the teaching profession once the senior phase of curriculum for excellence is fully bedded down, or is that either not desirable or not practical to expect?
The workforce that delivers youth work is diverse and ranges from people who have masters-level qualifications to those who volunteer one hour a week in their local youth group. Through our partnership with the Standards Council for Community Learning and Development for Scotland, there is now a code of ethics for youth workers and professional registration on a voluntary basis. Compared with the situation in the teaching profession, that is still in its infancy, but it is about investing in those initiatives so that our workforce can feel empowered and be confident that it is of equal value in terms of contributing to the education and life of a young person.
The quote about youth workers or the third sector complementing others’ work describes exactly what we want to be doing. We want to be adding value to the experiences that a young person has in their life. It is not about competition but about knowing that what youth work does has not only a monetary but a social value, and about ensuring that professionals, whether teachers, social workers or others, recognise that youth work has a place.
Is the answer then the point that Susan Quinn made about sustaining partnerships over time and parity of esteem coming from the fact that they are seen as genuine partnerships rather than something that is reached for on an ad hoc basis as resources allow?
Yes. Sustainable partnerships grow and strengthen. Just parachuting somebody into a school for an afternoon a week for six weeks because that is only what the funding allows and for them to then disappear from the life of the school creates a body of work that means that the impact of that person’s work may be limited in the longer term. If we create sustainable partnerships, people begin to work together in ways that complement each other and build in best practice.
What we do not want is a situation whereby young people will engage with youth work colleagues but then go into a class and not engage with the teacher. It has to be a situation in which education professionals are able to work alongside other professionals rather than separately from them. Some of that is about sustaining projects. For example, sense over sectarianism projects in Glasgow have been going on for a number of years now, with the same workers going into schools on an annual basis and getting to know the young people who are coming through, who then have an expectation that those workers will continue to come. However, where the work is about quick hits by someone who then vanishes, there is nothing to be sustained. As I said, that kind of work can mean the school having a workload issue that outweighs any positives that might occur. It is about sustaining projects.
To go back to the line of questioning pursued by others, presumably there is another benefit, which is that it is easier for the private sector to recognise the wider attainment that is being achieved if it can see what the partnership is delivering over a period.
12:30
That is true. The point was well made earlier. Some kids struggle to write their attainment stories. What they do outside school, and perhaps in projects in school with others, is important, and it is important to articulate that. In the past year in Scotland, we have seen the impact of volunteering at a very high level. That profile is quite good—I hope that that legacy lasts and that young people understand how important it is to do things like that. A massive international worldwide project depended on the volunteers.
Life depends a bit on volunteer effort. If you show a bit of extra effort, and can reflect it in your personal statements, employers buy into that. I am involved in reserve forces. It is the same type of thing. You are a special person if you take that commitment on as well as your day job. It is the same for young people. They all have challenging lives through puberty but if they volunteer, and do other things, it is recognised by employers. It distinguishes you from the crowd and makes you much more employable.
What I have got from the panel is that there has to be a move away from a complete focus on academic qualifications. What should the role of the private sector be in respect of vocational education in our schools? How would that help to address the low level of school leaver employment, given that only 27 per cent of employers take on a young person straight from school and only 13 per cent of employers take on an apprentice?
Those figures reflect a number of issues, one of which is that there is still not enough engagement by the private sector in many aspects of Scottish civic life, one of which is education. We need significant engagement of employers at a local level in all schools, colleges and universities.
It is a two-way thing. Employees—ideally younger employees—can go into schools and talk about work experience, about what work is really like and about what they do. The point was well made earlier about the complexities of work, particularly in relation to technology, the changing patterns of work and the fact that most of us will not have a career for life. There are massive changes, which are quite complex for all of us to understand, and certainly for young people to understand before they get into the workplace. There is need to educate young people, if you like.
There is also a need to educate the employers, which is why work placements are fantastic. At a higher age, an astonishing number of young people do an engineering placement at college or university and end up working in that factory. Employers do not see enough of how good young people are. They tend to believe some of the stuff they read in the media, which tends to be pretty negative about young people. There is bit of that going on.
There are challenges out there with some youngsters. We talked earlier about employability, job readiness and understanding workplaces. I heard about a young person falling asleep during a job interview, which is not the way to get a job. There is something fundamentally wrong at the moment. We need to improve the exchange. It is interesting to look through the Government’s response to the Wood commission. We have this fantastic group about implementing curriculum for excellence, but no one from the private sector is represented on it. I know that it is largely happening in schools, but what about work placements? Who engages with that? There is no connection.
I could go through hordes of committees that we have in Scotland in a variety of sectors. Private sector employers are not engaged. They are largely not engaged in schools and we expect them to know about young people. Not all employers have children, or they might have older children. We need to get that engagement. If we did that both ways—by getting employers into schools and getting young people out of schools and into workplaces—and had a much wider work placement scheme, it would be beneficial for both parties. Employers would see some gems and start employing them in larger numbers than we have talked about today. The numbers do not reflect well—I accept that completely.
I spoke to a large employer that said that it had forgotten how to employ young people. It had recently engaged with us to start bringing young people back into the workforce. Its own employees had loved it because they had become buddies and mentors to young people. Perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, everyone expected to have a young person join their company and to look after them through the early stage of their career. The company saw a huge level of engagement on the part of its employees.
Often, you only need to give young people a chance, and one of the roles of the third sector can be to de-risk things for the employer. Last Wednesday, the Marks and Spencer’s store in Argyle Street in Glasgow took on 15 young people who probably would not have made it through the standard Marks and Spencer’s entry process. We had taken them through a four-week programme that we developed with the employer that gave them some work experience and provided them with some life-skills training and an opportunity to work on polishing up the skills that they had. Marks and Spencer’s was happy to take every one of them, although they would not have been obvious choices for the company previously.
For a lot of employers, there is a need to look under the bonnet a bit more. In cities such as Glasgow, where something like a third of young people are not working, we need to go into those pools of talent—because that is what those young people represent: talent, not problems. A lot of those young people can be brought into the workforce with the right support.
It is tough for employers. It is a big ask to get them to take someone who does not fit their standard criteria. They have all developed some fantastic apprenticeship schemes, but the issue that we are concerned with involves bolting the front end on. How do we bring in people who do not come from the background from which a company’s employees traditionally come? That is where the third sector, schools and a range of other people can help.
You are referring to large companies that bring youngsters on board and have employees who mentor them. However, the vast majority of Scottish enterprises are very small. How do you engage the small employer?
In a number of our programmes, a large employer is the host for the programme and might take 50 or 60 per cent of the young people, and we will work with the rest of the young people to find them opportunities. The Glasgow restaurateurs have been fantastic in relation to our get into cooking programme, which we run through the City of Glasgow College. A range of restaurants employ one or two people and give the young people a chance because they can see where they come from, they understand the background of the course and they can look in on the young people during the four or five weeks that the course runs, which means that it is not a case of having a quick interview and taking a chance. That is how you engage the small employers. You need to find a way to de-risk the proposal.
Getting the employers involved at that level provides a third part with regard to what David Watt was saying, which is that it demystifies the new qualifications. Often, when you get a taxi home at night, you are asked, “What do you do?” and you say, “I’m a teacher,” and the driver says, “Oh, I got no O grades,” and you say, “Well, that’s one or two qualification systems back,” and you wonder whether there is an understanding of that. Unless people are engaging in schools, there might not be.
We see a lot of those sorts of projects going on in communities, and there needs to be consistency around that. We should promote that as a way forward, particularly in the senior phase, when you are looking at leaving points and destinations. If I may say it for a third time, it would be helpful to move to a senior phase that takes place over three years, which would create space for young people to do that within their timetable rather than bolting it on at the end of the school day, when they want to go and do what young people do.
We also see lots of projects that are going on in primary schools that involve classes going out to visit local shops and so on as part of other projects. That gets the children known in the area and starts to build those community links. Those kinds of projects need to be promoted more widely.
How do we get more businesses involved in mentoring, acting as role models or providing work experience, in order to highlight the importance of social skills, attitude, life skills and so on, in such a way that it complements the work of teachers and does not create friction?
Do it locally. Allow for local discussions on it. Let learning communities and schools consider what their local needs are and look to the work of the third sector and the private sector communities in their areas to see what is being done and what the likely destinations for young people are, rather than imposing projects that say that every school has to engage with Marks and Spencer’s—there is no Marks and Spencer’s in Stranraer, so young people will not be working there. It is about local solutions.
I agree that it is about local solutions. I would say this, but I think that schools should be engaging actively with local business organisations, or with the Federation of Small Businesses. Your point is absolutely valid, Mr MacDonald, because we are talking about very small enterprises in many parts of Scotland. That is something that we tend to miss.
I take Allan Watt’s point that there are some good ways of doing that, but it tends to be focused on the larger areas of population. When we get down to places such as Stranraer, there is a challenge. When we get the headteachers sitting around the table and getting involved with businesspeople, they can then call on those people to come into schools and engage with young people, advise them and give them work placements. That exchange is very important. I know that teachers have a lot on their plate, but it is vital.
In all my time with the IOD I have never once asked anybody to engage with young people who has said no. People are genuinely interested in the next generation—if they said no, you would not want them anyway—so it just does not happen.
The Wood commission’s report has come up a few times in your evidence this morning, but there are only two specific recommendations in it regarding the role played by the third sector, and one statement about employers and their role in education. That seems to be it. Do you think that the Wood report has given enough prominence to the third sector and employers?
The Wood commission sets out an aspiration for the whole education system. In the third sector, particularly youth work—we see ourselves as part of the education system—we would recognise ourselves as being included more widely in some of the other recommendations.
I am sorry, but I have lost my train of thought.
I will jump in then. I have already had significant discussions with the Government about employers getting involved on a wider scale. A national group on employer engagement has already been established and is looking to facilitate that across the country. That is very welcome and follows up on what we have been talking about. Hopefully, there will be a private sector-led group of employers, working with college and local authorities to implement the Wood commission recommendations in a real way, so that the strong link, particularly around work placement and building independence—as we have just been talking about—is built in from day 1.
I am optimistic. You are right to say that we did not get as many mentions as we might have, but we are already discussing with Government and others how to get it implemented, and that is the most important thing.
As you will see from our evidence, we have been funded by the Government, but also by the Wood Foundation, to put together a joint package to help us engage with more schools and give them some of the employment options and opportunities. We will start that programme over the next few weeks and months. We hope to engage with more and more local authorities to show them a way to do it. How we will do that in the Borders and the Western Isles will be very different from how we will do it in Glasgow, Edinburgh or Dundee. We will explore how we can customise it to the needs of specific local authorities.
We work with young people into their late teens and early twenties and we support them in looking at training and employment options, but because they have had difficult lives and difficult relationships, they continue to need support around those issues and many of them are also becoming parents themselves. I want to reinforce the point that what is happening around the young person, in terms of their whole system and community supports, also needs to be considered for successful involvement in employment.
Thank you. That concludes the questions from members of the committee. I apologise again that we started a bit later than you had expected. We appreciate your attendance this morning and your written submissions—and those of other organisations—to our inquiry on educational attainment.
Meeting closed at 12:44.
Previous
Subordinate Legislation