Our next item is to take evidence on the Scottish Government’s draft budget for 2016-17. We will focus on education spending. I welcome to the committee Larry Flanagan from the Educational Institute of Scotland; Jane Peckham from the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers; Seamus Searson from the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association; and Andy Smith from School Leaders Scotland. I will go straight to questions, beginning—correctly this time—with Liam McArthur.
I am ready for you this time, convener.
I start with the issue of the pupil teacher ratio. Obviously, agreement has been reached on that. In some of our discussions with local authorities, concerns were raised about the implications of the ratio, particularly with regard to a lack of flexibility in local authorities’ ability to respond to local demands.
What are the panel’s views on the appropriateness of the Scottish Government imposing a financial penalty on local authorities that do not adhere to the agreement on the pupil teacher ratio?
Lying behind the pupil teacher ratio is the headline figure on teacher numbers, which is clearly a key element in arriving at that ratio. We certainly welcomed the Scottish Government’s commitment around this time last year to maintain teacher numbers, because if we are to improve Scottish education and look at closing the attainment gap, it is absolutely essential that we have sufficient numbers of teachers in our schools.
At this point last year, we were happy to move into tripartite discussions with the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities around COSLA’s concern that a headline figure was insufficiently nuanced to deal with local circumstances. A group was set up to look at that, and frankly it was COSLA that failed to put anything on the table in those discussions. When COSLA and the Scottish Government could not reach an agreement, we welcomed the fact that the Scottish Government acted to establish bilateral agreements with every local authority. I do not want to comment too much on COSLA’s position, but how it conducted itself in those discussions was a little bit like turkeys voting for Christmas.
We are clear that the Scottish Government has to ensure compliance with the headline figures in each local authority; otherwise we will see further detriment to the education service. I understand that the mechanism is that £41 million has been made available through the general grant to local authorities and around £10 million is payable as additional payment to local authorities that reach their targets.
The Scottish Government was clear that it would monitor the figures quarterly rather than waiting for the census in December. Our view last year was that the penalties that were available should have been imposed. Politically, the Scottish Government thought that imposing penalties would be too difficult. However, we think that local authorities have a responsibility to deliver the agreement on teacher numbers that they signed up to this time last year, otherwise we will continue to see a decrease in the headline figure for teachers.
That has been the pattern for the past five years. Year on year, we see fewer teachers in our schools. Ultimately, that will impact on the pupil teacher ratio and the service that is delivered. We will not close the attainment gap with fewer teachers in our schools.
Does anybody have anything to add, rather than simply agreeing?
I agree with what Larry Flanagan said, but it is massively important that we recognise that, even with the commitment, the number of teachers is still falling. The penalties are absolutely appropriate—in the same way that money is given to create and produce an agreement, if the agreement is not upheld, there should be a penalty.
It was suggested in our informal discussions with a number of local authorities that the implications of the agreement were that other elements of the staffing complement in schools were taking a hit. We were told that catering, cleaning and janitorial staff were laid off in order not to fall foul of the agreement on the pupil teacher ratio. Is that your experience across the country?
Yes, I agree that that is the experience, but that does not make it right to reduce the number of teachers who are there to deliver education. More should be done to maintain the number of essential staff right across education. The number of additional support teachers has been reduced, the number of classroom support staff has been reduced and so on—including cleaners, as you say.
When we are dealing with a budget that is under pressure—we will see this in every area—choices have to be made. If the pupil teacher ratio, which has financial penalties if it is not adhered to, is essentially ring fenced, local authorities will have to make savings in other areas, such as the posts that I identified and the additional support posts that you mentioned.
You need to remember that the first time that we started to talk about maintaining teacher numbers was in 2011, when there was a tripartite agreement through the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers. There was a £60 million cut to education services, so there was a hit in relation to the service generally. At that point, more than 3,000 teachers left the system.
From 2011, there has been a commitment from the Scottish Government to maintain teacher numbers as part of the tripartite agreement. Each year since then, COSLA has failed to deliver on the agreement. In some years, it has been a relatively small variation, but last year, when COSLA again failed to deliver, the Scottish Government clearly took a decision that if it was going to be blamed for teacher numbers, it was going to have some more direct control over them, so it came up with a mechanism. Every council has signed the agreement. The target for this year for the councils that fell short last year was based on their complement last year, so the difficulties in the north-east, for example, were taken into account when the targets were set. I understand that it was made clear that the additional funding—it is not really about penalties—would be paid to councils that were compliant. I also understand that the majority of teachers are on target with their teacher numbers; I hope that that turns out to be the case.
Ring fencing one area of the budget creates difficulties for councils: if they are still seeking cuts in expenditure, ring fencing reduces the areas to which cuts can be applied. Our view is that we do not fight local authority cuts by surrendering our own ground; instead, we stand our ground and get others to stand theirs.
Should we accept a cut in teacher numbers to spread the pain across council services? To be frank, as trade unions that represent teachers, our job is to defend our members, and the teacher numbers guarantee is a key issue for us.
We must remember that the teacher is the most important resource for our young people. Reducing teacher numbers will affect youngsters and what we hope to achieve with them.
It is unfair for people to play off one service against another. That is not what this is about. We have seen that teachers are feeling the effects of the cutbacks through their workloads and what is expected of them. Many teachers are doing over and above what they should be doing because they are trying to do the best by the system. That is continuing, year on year. The number of authorities that seem to be slow to replace teachers or to get in supply teachers when vacancies come up is getting quite high. Our members say that regularly. In light of the cuts, their working conditions are being undermined. That cannot continue.
My concern is that we have to protect the teacher, but we also have to allow teachers time to do their job. To a degree, local authorities are failing in their responsibility to make that arrangement happens.
I have a good example of a school in Glasgow that contacted us last week. Two of our members at the school are on maternity leave and there is nobody to cover for them. Instead, the work is being done by other teachers on the staff. That concerns me because it seems to be the underlying trend.
It is important to understand that we do not want to be played off against each other. It is more important that we deal with the situation positively, and local authorities could be doing a lot more together to make a difference.
During our discussions, the parallel was drawn with police officer numbers. There is a specific number below which Police Scotland cannot fall. As a result, we are seeing significant cuts in civilian staffing and police officers having to engage in non-policing activity. What you have just described appears to be a situation in which additional stress, responsibilities and workload are laid on staff, some of which goes beyond their contractual remit. There is an apparent lack of flexibility that seems to play against the interests of some staff in the system.
The teacher side of the SNCT has made it clear that we should consider a national minimum staffing standard, although there would be a big debate about where the line should be drawn. We have been prepared to go into discussions about a way of taking account of local circumstances that is more flexible than using a headline count of teacher numbers. For example, pupil rolls are increasing in the primary sector, so we should be employing more teachers there rather than just maintaining current numbers. That increase will obviously feed through to the secondary sector.
As I said, we have been quite willing to go into those discussions. The Association of Directors of Education in Scotland has recently come round and is willing to consider them, too. The difficulty that we had with the group that was set up was that COSLA did not want to discuss flexibility because at that point it was smarting from the Scottish Government’s decision on maintaining teacher numbers.
It is also worth pointing out that the shortfall in teacher numbers last year and the year before amounted to a saving for local authorities of £20 million. It is therefore not true to say that there has not been a reduction in teacher numbers; there have been year-on-year reductions in teacher numbers, both before and since the 2011 agreement. The reductions were not proportionate because some local authorities met their targets, but there was a cumulative saving of £20 million last year and the year before through local authorities failing to reach their teacher number targets.
11:30
You talked about the changing school rolls in the primary sector feeding into the secondary sector. Is there enough flexibility in the agreement that has been reached to match demand with supply? In the secondary sector, there will be ebbs and flows in the demand for particular subject teachers. Is the agreement able to accommodate those different demands in different regions across the country over a period?
You almost touch on another subject. There is a huge pressure on workforce planning to anticipate where demand will be. We are moving towards a challenging situation—I was going to say “crisis”—when it comes to meeting schools’ demands in relation to teacher numbers. The problems in the north-east have a particular context because of the history in the region but those problems are becoming more widespread. There are certain subject areas, such as maths and home economics, in which there are real pressures at the moment. You cannot get a home economics teacher in the west of Scotland for love nor money, so there are difficulties.
The challenge is striking a balance in the workforce planning mechanism that does not take us back to the situation that we had only five or six years ago, in which there were unemployed teachers—there was a surplus of teachers who were unable to find work—and which ensures that sufficient numbers come through. One concern that teachers have raised is that we do not have a system for tracking where students who go through the induction scheme end up. If they end up in teaching or come back into it, we can track them through the General Teaching Council for Scotland, but we seem to lose around 20 to 25 per cent of our trainees every year. They simply do not go into the profession and we have no account of them. Workforce planning is based on 100 per cent take-up, more or less, of the teacher places, so that discrepancy is beginning to create a problem.
The introduction to Liam McArthur’s question related to nuance. We are open to having a more nuanced approach because we do not want difficulties to be built into the system, but we need COSLA to come on board for that discussion and, to date, it has not been willing to do so.
Good morning. I will probably duplicate some of the questions that we have covered. I was looking back at my notes from 8 September, when we met and had workshops with teachers. In the workshop that I chaired, teachers demanded a greater pupil teacher ratio—I am sure that that was fed back in the following session. We want more teachers, but will you explain to me again why the target for the pupil teacher ratio—I hate targets; I prefer outcomes—has an effect on improving attainment? If teachers believe that it restricts their efforts to achieve what we are trying to do, why do we have the straitjacket of pupil teacher ratios? Should we not have more flexibility?
I would be interested to meet the teachers who argued for a greater teacher pupil ratio, because everyone whom I have met argues for a smaller—
No, they did not say “greater”; the teachers said that they wanted more flexibility in the pupil teacher ratio. It might be greater or lesser.
In essence, the teacher pupil ratio translates into class size in classroom practice. We have a clear view that smaller class sizes are an efficient way to improve attainment, but they are not the only way. The EIS is committed to professional learning because we accept the adage that the system can only be as good as its teachers. There should be investment in professional learning. Upskilling teachers throughout their career is also an essential ingredient in improving attainment.
When I get off the train and walk out of Queen Street station, I see an advert for a Glasgow private school that makes a virtue of smaller class sizes. Smaller class sizes equate to more teacher pupil interaction. The focus on teacher pupil ratios is about reducing class sizes.
There is a big debate going on about the national improvement framework and closing the attainment gap. One of the points that I have thrown into the mix in a few discussions is that although there were a lot of faults in the five-to-14 levels and the way that we did the national tests back then, there was a period when we reduced the size of maths classes in secondary 1 and 2 across Scotland to an average of 20. The Lib Dem-Labour Scottish Executive introduced that and—lo and behold—we had the highest number of level E passes ever in the history of the five-to-14 levels.
Smaller classes work in improving attainment. That is why the teacher pupil ratio remains important.
I have a slightly different opinion. We are always keen to look at the research base, and John Hattie did a significant piece of research that some of you might be aware of, which listed the factors involved in raising attainment. Larry Flanagan is right that we need to continue to improve our teachers’ professional skills, but in that piece of research, which looked at attainment across the world, class size was way down the list. The Sutton Trust has recently done research that also suggested that class size is not a significant factor in raising attainment. However, smaller class sizes can make a teacher’s job a bit easier, particularly when there are pupils with additional support needs for whom significant differentiation is required in the class. I can see both sides of the argument.
On teachers’ skill levels, we might do better to argue that more funding should go into professional development opportunities for teachers, concentrating on strategies that have a high impact.
I will throw in something that I picked up from listening to the radio this morning—it may not have reached your BlackBerrys yet. It was about a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in relation to which Andreas Schleicher advocated increasing class sizes. However, I am not saying that I necessarily agree with that opinion. The debate will perhaps go on and on.
Andy Smith touched on this, and I will expand on it. The class size figure is always based on the fact that children are mainstreamed at a certain level. With the presumption of mainstreaming and the inclusion agenda, which we fully support, there are more and more children with additional needs who make up the class. Class sizes are being increased, difficulties are created through the reduction in classroom support and teachers have to differentiate the children’s various needs. Therefore, the smaller the class, the better the outcome will be. Class size needs to be looked at carefully with regard to the presumption of mainstreaming.
One recent example is a class of 20 in a secondary school, in which nine children—almost 50 per cent—have various additional needs. The class teacher is expected to differentiate and meet the needs of all those children. When ratios are being considered, it must be borne in mind that, with the presumption of mainstreaming, there are more and more children with additional support needs, which must be met.
I wonder why the teachers whom we spoke to—I am sure that you can meet them—indicated that they wanted more flexibility around pupil teacher ratios.
In classroom practice, most teachers do not think about the teacher pupil ratio in that sense. Even the figures that we get in the census, which takes on board all the teaching staff in a school, do not really reflect class sizes. The teacher pupil ratio per se is not a burning issue; class sizes are a bigger concern.
That is not what they said.
Clearly, we want more teachers. What other, less-costly approaches might be used to improve the quality of school education?
Another issue that came up in that session was connectivity and the use of digital technology. Interestingly, I attended a meeting of a YouthLink group in Ayr at which we talked about kids excluded from school or with additional support needs who get homework that requires access to information technology facilities, which a lot of homes just do not have. With regard to the broad issue of classroom performance, what role do you think connectivity can play in the sharing of teaching practice and knowledge across schools, particularly in rural areas where, as you have pointed out, there are difficulties with hiring teachers?
I think that it is essential. In a book that we recently published on poverty and education, we highlighted the importance of teachers and schools being aware of home circumstances and of not simply assuming that, because most pupils have computers at home, all pupils do. Given that such assumptions entrench these things further for the least advantaged kids, you have to look at how to create access for all pupils.
In that respect, we have talked about poverty proofing our schools, which means working on the basis of the minimum expectation. IT is a good example of that. Because you see lots of kids with mobile phones or games consoles, you assume that IT goes across the board. It is a bit like the assumption that is made about books at home; as far as computers at home are concerned, it is not necessarily the case that all young people live in such an environment.
IT offers many potential advantages, and we certainly want a digital classroom environment. However, that leads to a resource challenge, because to have that sort of environment, you need systems that are reliable. I do not want to start talking about glow, but I will say that in the past we have had some challenges with reliability.
You mentioned rural schools, and a lot of work is being done on digital classrooms and connecting schools not just across the geography of Scotland but internationally. However, I caution the committee against the notion that that reduces the need for teachers. Young people have a lot of space to do independent learning these days, but the fact is that schools and classrooms are about more than knowledge. They are also about growing, and that relies on having relationships. You cannot have a relationship with a computer, and a teacher still plays an important role in facilitating such learning.
Finally, because I did not get to comment earlier, I should point out now that Andreas Schleicher is a statistician, not an educator, so you do not need to listen to what he is saying.
I will not comment on that, Larry—I think that I will just leave that there.
Obviously, technology is the way forward, but it cannot replace a teacher. However, we need teachers to be trained in the equipment and able to use it, which also comes at a cost.
I agree with Larry Flanagan about giving everyone an equal start. The question is the point at which youngsters get hold of tablets, iPads or whatever, and if you are going to go down that road, you have a responsibility to ensure that everyone can access them at the earliest age. I have heard it argued that if families give iPads or tablets to youngsters at the age of three they should all be in the same place when they get to school. I see some value in that approach, particularly if the iPad or tablet has educational programmes that parents can be encouraged to work with and develop. However, although that sort of thing can play a great part and will replace some of the resources that we use, I cannot argue strongly enough for the importance of having a teacher in a classroom to support individuals, to assess what is going on and to prompt, encourage or do whatever is needed to move things forward.
As I have said, this is a way forward, and it has benefits not only for teaching and learning but for assessments and the other bits of work that we as teachers need to do. However, the difficulty is that the system across Scotland that everyone can use at the same time is just not good enough. Each of the authorities is doing its own thing, and if I am calling for anything, it is for some joined-up thinking about what we provide across the public services to ensure that they talk to each other and collate information. However, that is a much bigger job for us.
11:45
That was helpful. It was instructive when I sat down that afternoon with social workers from YouthLink. They have a bank of about eight computers there, and I found out that the level of attendance among some young people who have been excluded from school is very high. Youth workers will never replace teachers and I agree that we need more teachers, but we seem to be missing a trick in not having consistency across Scotland in the use of technology that allows teachers to do what they have to do and to reduce some of the exercises that are not really part of their prime reason for being there. Thank you.
Over the past eight years, nearly 4,000 teachers have left the system. One of the difficulties that local authorities have in meeting teacher numbers is with recruitment. Larry Flanagan talked about workforce planning and how we track where people go. How can we avoid cycles of oversupply and undersupply?
That is the challenge every year. In the past few academic years, the Scottish Government has increased the number of teacher training places at Aberdeen in the hope that a greater influx of local people will result in more people being happy to stay there. Additional probationers will come through from that system.
I do not want to repeat myself, but the key issue is that we need to know where the people who we have spent a lot of money training actually end up. We need to know what the fallout is from the fact that people’s lifestyles have changed. When I trained, people were desperate to get started in a job but, nowadays, a lot of young people get a qualification and then head off, and they might not come back to teaching in Scotland for a decade. That does not seem to be factored into the current arrangements, so we need to look at that.
We need to think through how we are spending money. The Scottish Government has announced £100 million of attainment challenge funding, at £25 million a year. That is excellent and we welcome that money, but I do not know where it came from. When we were at the committee last year talking about budgets, there did not seem to be any money but, somewhere in the course of the year, additional money was found to address the issue.
The money has been allocated across seven local authorities, most of which have come up with schemes that involve employing additional teachers, as that will have the most impact on the young people who we are seeking to support. However, most of those authorities are now having to revise their thinking on that spending, because the system has not created the additional teachers that are necessary for those additional roles. Another issue is that directors up in the north-east are complaining that some of the teachers who they expected to migrate up to the north-east from the central belt—I am making it sound as if it is really far away—are not doing that, because they are getting jobs in the central belt through the attainment challenge funding.
That additional money is very welcome, but it has thrown a bit of a spanner into the works of teacher planning, because more posts have suddenly become available. For example, Glasgow was seeking to create 90 additional posts through the attainment challenge. That is a lot of teachers to suck out of the system when we already have a very fine balance. The issue is about the degree of planning that we put in. We know that the attainment challenge funding will be there for the next three years at least, so that should result in a corresponding increase in the number of students who are being taken into our colleges. If they are on the one-year postgraduate course, that feeds into the system quite quickly. With the primary and other BEd courses, if we increase numbers now, it takes three or four years before they come into the system.
I am suggesting that there is no easy answer, because nobody wants to have unemployed teachers who are unable to find work. We certainly need to look at expanding student recruitment into the profession, because we are moving towards fewer teachers being available for employment. Given the policy commitments that have been made around the attainment gap, there will be increasing demand for teachers.
A lot of teachers have also retired because the pension changes gave them the opportunity to go. Some of that loss was not anticipated. The pension changes impacted on people’s thinking, so that people who might have worked on past 60 have decided to call it a day. In fact, the Scottish Public Pensions Agency had to employ additional staff during the summer so that it could cope with the level of applications for premature retirement. That was another unexpected challenge to workforce planning arrangements.
The shortage of teachers of particular subjects in the secondary sector is just as worrying. We need to identify where those shortages are; the curriculum is becoming narrow, because there are not the teachers to deliver the subjects and that is a backwards step. We need to look at what we need for specific subjects and put some effort into meeting those demands. That is equally worrying.
Career development for teachers is not just about recruiting people to come into teaching; it is about maintaining the teachers that we have. I am concerned about the career prospects for some of those teachers. For example, more needs to be done for probationers who are put on a one-year contract and are not sure whether they will have further employment. Equally, as things stand, a teacher reaches the top of the main scale after about six years of teaching. That happens very early on in their careers and career opportunities are hard to come by beyond that. We need to look at that, because we could be storing up another problem for the future.
You said that there are local teacher recruitment difficulties, especially in the north-east. Is it right that local authorities should offer teachers some sort of financial incentive to go there?
That is an interesting question. During the party conferences, we had a lot of discussions with various councillors and so on. One of the frustrating problems for those in the north-east was the retention of teachers once they were there. They get teachers going there under the preference waiver scheme.
The people we spoke to were concerned about retaining people, because the north-east is a more expensive area in which to live. Someone might have gone there for their one-year induction and received the £6,000 or £8,000—leaving aside the question of why there is a differential there; that is for another day—but they lose that when they go into their next year of teaching. They are already taking a hit although the extra money was only ever for the one year.
We need to explore ways of mitigating that, perhaps by offering something for more than six months, or by mitigating the loss until the salary catches up. If teachers remained in an area for three to four years, they would build up their social circle and look at staying in the area permanently, which would encourage more recruitment to those areas. At the moment, because of all the cuts and the fact that induction with the preference waiver is for one year, those areas are struggling to find sustainable methods of retaining teachers. Perhaps the detrimental impact of that could be looked at in more depth.
On the subject of attracting teachers to the profession, perhaps we could take a step back and have a broader look. A particular bugbear of mine is that, from time to time, I see negativity and, looking closer to home, political point scoring in the press about education. In countries that have highly successful education systems, the teaching profession is highly regarded and there is perhaps not the level of political debate and discussion in the newspapers because that regard is commonly agreed.
We have a strong education system and a strong curriculum that got broad agreement from all parties. From speaking to people, I know that the negativity that is sometimes displayed in the media has an impact on the numbers who go into teaching.
Is there an insufficient number of applicants for the courses?
I cannot give you the detailed numbers.
No, there is still a relatively healthy level of applications.
Teacher training places in Finland, for example, are nine times oversubscribed. We are nowhere near that in Scotland.
That does not sound like a good thing.
It gives the Finnish the opportunity to pick the finest candidates from a broader pool. The point is that the broader pool provides an opportunity to select from more people.
The key point is that there is still a relatively healthy level of applications but, as I indicated earlier, at the other end, when people have the qualification, they do not all move into Scottish education. There may be a number of people who want to get the qualification in the bank, as it were, and we need to translate those people into teachers in the classroom.
We have a national system of pay negotiation and we are keen not to detract from that, but we would welcome local authorities coming up with local initiatives. The General Teaching Council for Scotland is currently considering reintroducing provisional registration to facilitate the quicker recruitment in the north-east of people who potentially meet the GTCS standard, many of whom are trained in England. We are clear that there should be no dilution of professional standards in Scotland, but we support the creation of slightly more flexible approaches so that people can gain the GTCS standard. There is a project in Moray that would address some of the concerns.
The biggest challenge is housing costs. When I became a teacher, I went to work in Blantyre high school and got a Scottish special house in Cambuslang because I was an incoming worker to Lanarkshire—I thought that I was in Glasgow, but it turned out that I was in Lanarkshire—but we do not have that facility now. If we could address housing costs, we would reduce some of the challenges.
In protecting teacher numbers and pay and conditions, local authorities have to look elsewhere for budget cuts, which has the adverse effect of adding to teachers’ workloads. Will you expand on what that workload is? Is it management, support or something else?
Initiatives have been taken on workload, such as the tackling bureaucracy working group that Alasdair Allan chaired. Teachers have always gone beyond their contractual commitments; the key issue for them is control of their workload. If a teacher chooses to do additional work that he or she considers beneficial to the child, that is part of the vocation of teaching. The bigger concern relates to what is regarded as additional bureaucracy that does not impact on classroom practice.
The tackling bureaucracy working group, which made its recommendations a year and a half or two years ago, identified a raft of practices in schools that had developed on the back of the curriculum for excellence none of which added to children’s learning experience. One of the challenges is that, despite the group—which was reconvened only two months ago—having clear messages, those messages have not translated into a change in practice in the majority of schools. We have identified areas in which bureaucracy could be tackled, but it is so entrenched in the system that there is a challenge in getting schools to adopt different working approaches. The messages are right, but we need to get the practice to match it.
In secondary schools, there have been huge workload pressures around the arrangements for the new qualifications. That situation has caused secondary teachers a lot of concern. Much of that additional workload is predicated on SQA procedures, which are about the SQA, not teaching and learning in the schools. There is a challenge to ensure that we address all the additional work that the new qualifications have generated so that we focus on what the CFE senior phase was meant to be about, which was creating opportunities for deeper learning and more time for teachers in the classroom.
12:00
You talked about provisional GTCS registration and I accept your point that housing is probably as much an issue as anything else in the north-east. An issue that has been raised with me in Orkney—and it has been suggested that it is a wider problem—is that protection of vulnerable groups scheme checks are dragging out the process. There is no simple way to transfer from a teaching post in one local authority to a post in another, based on the PVG checks that have been done previously. Is that being or does that need to be looked at, in order to streamline the process and speed up transfers so that teachers can get in post and into the classroom quicker?
That is being looked at in the context of the work on supply teachers. There was a lot of discussion about having a lead authority for a cluster of other authorities, so that information on one PVG check could be shared. There were a lot of issues around the fact that the information would be covered by data protection legislation, but if the person signed a consent form for their information to be shared across four authorities or whatever, it could be done simply. There is no reason in my mind why information could not be taken from one authority to another, although it would have to take place within a certain time period. I am not sure whether anyone is looking at that, but it was explored thoroughly in the supply working group.
Good morning—actually, it should be “good afternoon” now. When I was a fresh-faced, brown-haired councillor—you can probably tell by looking at me that that was quite a while ago—council officers told me of a mythical place where councils shared services. That was the future; that was going to make the difference. However, it appears from some of the evidence that when councils, COSLA and council officers in particular face challenging circumstances, the first thing that they hit on is teacher numbers. They do not tend to look at sharing services between schools and local authorities. Is such practice happening anywhere? I know that Aberdeenshire Council and a few of the councils around it are talking about working together on teacher numbers and trying to recruit teachers. Is anything happening that is making a difference, or are officers not looking at that? Are they just going for the easy hits of shutting schools and sacking teachers?
There have been a number of attempts to look at shared services. It may be unfair to say that officers are the problem, because it is usually a change in administration that creates the breakdown. For example, the failure of the partnership between Stirling Council and Clackmannanshire Council was due to political considerations.
It is a good question. Clearly, there is an irrefutable case for sharing backroom services and creating savings through scale. We have a national system of pay bargaining and we have national pay scales, so do we need 32 different payroll operations? The challenge for COSLA is to get its act together on that. Otherwise, other political solutions to how we get shared services might emerge in the discussions. That is dangerous territory, so I will leave that there.
It is indeed.
There need to be incentives for authorities to work together. Larry Flanagan gave the example of payroll. We heard this week that the backdated pay increase is coming in at a different pace in different authorities. Some are getting some money this month and some are getting it in January—it makes no sense at all. That is just one example, and there are lots of them. Rather than punishing authorities for not working together, we might need to put incentives in place, so that authorities can come up with schemes to work with each other. Some of our authorities in Scotland are very small and they cannot deliver the same level of backroom service and support in schools.
I am interested in what Larry Flanagan said about how we deal with the situation and what we are looking at. Nobody is talking about another reorganisation of local government, because reorganisation does not seem to make any savings—the last round did not, anyway. However, there must be some way in which local authorities can work together to help with teacher numbers and services and ensure that we share resources and get the right service at the right time to the right pupil.
If only local authorities had an organisation that brought them together and allowed them to work across boundaries. That would be useful.
We do not have that any more.
I agree with George Adam. Glasgow, for example, is of sufficient size to get savings from scale in its own right, but there is an imperative for other local authorities to look at where they can share services, which brings us back to Seamus Searson’s point. Quality improvement officers have been decimated; indeed, in some local authorities, there is effectively no QIO support for schools, and that is detrimental to the service.
However, you move into political territory when you start to talk about models in which there might be the equivalent of boards to get the scale that is needed. The EIS’s view has always been that local authority input into education delivery is an important aspect of democratic control, and we would not want local authorities to lose out on that arrangement. However, there needs to be some dialogue about being more efficient and making savings through—and I think that this is the way you would want to phrase it—partnership working. We have been asked about schools working across school boundaries, but I think that a challenge for local authorities is finding out how to work across their own boundaries.
I have a question just for clarification. Regional councils such as Strathclyde and Lothian used to deal with the education payroll. Was that all split up when the regional councils were replaced?
Yes.
So the payroll systems were split up between the local authorities.
Yes. One of the difficulties is that payroll is part of the corporate structure, which means that there is always a tension between a council’s corporate identity and the fact that the education service operates under a legislative framework that is different from that for a range of other services. It was therefore quite difficult to explain to some human resources departments that teachers have national conditions of service rather than conditions put in place by the council.
I take it that, when the regional councils were in place, payroll and other things were dealt with by a small number of regions across the country. Is it not inconceivable that we could go back to at least that model if not a single national model?
It is not inconceivable, no.
The vast majority of Scotland’s 32 local authorities have either maintained or increased the percentage of their budget spent on schools, but there is no doubt that there are huge difficulties in that respect and pressure on the education budget. Given that background, how do we target the education budget to ensure that it has the most impact on attainment levels? Is there any evidence that the targeting that you might suggest would reduce the attainment gap?
To come back to the issue of research and finding out what works, John Hattie’s research, which I referred to earlier, has picked up a fair bit of traction, and a number of the strategies that the research lists as having a high impact in the classroom are now being picked up and taken forward. I should say, though, that some of them were already being taken forward in Scottish education—there is no doubt about that.
There are two aspects to this. First, we need to look at broader research but, secondly, we need to look at our own research. I hope that the attainment challenge fund will help in that respect and allow us not just to look at other programmes but to try things of our own.
I have already mentioned the use of IT. Although it can be exciting and engaging for young people, there is no significant body of evidence showing that significant expenditure on it leads to a significant increase in attainment or achievement. I am aware that a number of schools across the country have programmes in which whole year groups have iPads to allow young people in engage in learning, and I would like to think that somebody somewhere is looking at the efficacy of that strategy and whether it is improving attainment or otherwise. Lots of innovations are happening across the country, and we have an opportunity to gather them together and look at the key elements as far as raising attainment is concerned. There are certainly four or five high-impact strategies that there is really no question about, and they are the ones that our schools tend to concentrate on.
It is important, especially if education is going to be centre stage in the run-up to the Scottish elections in May, that we do not create a discourse of failure around our schools. Our schools have never been more successful—we are doing well. When the Scottish survey of literacy and numeracy came out, we had a lot of angst about the drop in reading attainment from 90 to 88 per cent. That completely missed the point that 88 per cent is a very high performance. In England, people were celebrating the fact that performance in the standard assessment tests at the end of primary went from 80 to 82 per cent. We went from 90 to 88 per cent and managed to talk ourselves into a sense of falling standards and failure when, in fact, against the CFE framework, 88 per cent was a very high performance on P7 reading. We need to focus on the fact that we are doing well.
I made the point at another meeting recently that everyone is now focused on closing the attainment gap but, 30 years ago, that was not on the agenda; indeed, we actually organised schools based on the attainment gap rather than on trying to close it. We have a good agenda, but there is no easy solution. As long as we have poverty outside the school gates, it will have an impact in the classrooms. We are seeking to mitigate that impact for the most vulnerable in our society.
The attainment challenge fund has made resource available, and it is incumbent on us to ensure that the money is well spent. We should not have a project approach in which we spend money for three years on a project that impacts on the kids who are involved in it but has no lasting effect. We have to look at how we change the practice in our schools in a sustainable way. That comes back to Andy Smith’s point about looking at what works. Some of it might crash and burn and we might have to try things. For example, we know that Hattie’s visible learning strategies can work. For them to work, teachers have to do the preparatory work around embracing the principles and then they can get into the practice. That is what we need to do.
It is not a quick gain. In a year’s time, people will ask what we have got for our £25 million. Changes that will be long lasting take longer than a year to have a measurable impact. That is the context that we need to operate in.
Larry Flanagan has made the point that I was going to make, but I just want to emphasise the importance of the fact that, whatever the strategy is—that will be decided by the area and the schools within it, depending on their need—it has to be sustainable in the long term and it cannot be a project. We saw that with the original nurture group approach many years ago. Funding was withdrawn from it and, frankly, the impact of that was worse than not having done it in the first place.
Whatever local authorities determine to do and whatever good work schools and teachers develop, it has to be shared. Because people can get very insular and possessive about a strategy, the message has to be that, if something works in a particular way for a particular group of children, that should be shared. The approach also has to be sustainable, because otherwise it will basically be a lot of years of effort for no return.
Last week, when I was at the cross-party group in the Scottish Parliament on skills, we heard about something that has been tried in America called the Khan Academy. We heard that a lot of young teenagers—it is predominantly boys—become uninterested in a particular subject or, because of peer pressure, do not want to look stupid and so do not ask for fuller understanding of that subject. The Khan Academy is an online approach that allows people, in their own time, to watch videos on particular topics and then sit tests. That has apparently been very successful in America. Are there any such initiatives in Scotland?
12:15
I am not aware of the Khan Academy, but what you describe echoes the issue that has been identified of alienation from school practice, particularly among a lot of white, working-class youths. Part of the CFE senior phase was predicated on addressing the needs of that group in particular and looking at different ways of engaging them. Across Scotland there is a range of things in schools to do that, such as the Prince’s Trust. That group of young people is often predominant in such organisations. In terms of the CFE senior phase and the Wood commission report, we are still in the foothills of that development. However, the issue that you raised has been identified and those are some of the ways that we have been looking at it. I would be happy to look at the Khan Academy and see whether we can take it on.
My final question is on a point that Seamus Searson picked up on earlier. Primary schools now have more pupils, which may create pressures because of the lack of secondary schools teachers in some subjects. The Scottish Government’s youth employment strategy states that
“Employers and schools need to develop strong two way partnerships ... that deliver improvements to teaching and learning and bring real-life context into the classroom, particularly in relation to science, technology, engineering and mathematics”.
Has there been any sign of movement in that direction in schools? Also, how do we protect teacher numbers?
That partnership between employers and schools is the Wood commission agenda. Although I mentioned the Wood commission in the context of the senior phase, its agenda is across primary and secondary education, so initiatives are under way. A recent publication about careers education, for example, talks about schools—including primary schools—facilitating exposure to different career paths and motivating young people in those areas. There is a lot of work going on. Andy Smith may know more about specific examples.
I echo what Larry Flanagan said. Schools are well on their way to involving employers and are engaging with them far more readily in order to give pupils a taste of what it is like to be in the workplace. There is significant movement on that agenda, at the minute.
I want to follow up on the attainment challenge funding. Jane Peckham and Larry Flanagan have both referred to and expressed concerns about short-termism and the importance of the work that it funds being project-funded and not being time-limited. The EIS and NASUWT both also expressed in their written evidence concerns about the allocation of the challenge funding—I think implicitly in the relevant paragraph in the EIS submission but explicitly in the NASUWT submission.
Yesterday I visited two schools in Johnstone, Renfrewshire—Cochrane Castle primary school and St David’s primary school. The two schools are on a single campus with a shared dining room, a shared gym hall, and all the rest of it. One of those schools benefits from the attainment challenge fund and the other one does not, in spite of the fact that they are housed in the same building and draw from the same catchment area.
Can you enlarge a bit more on how effective you think the attainment challenge funding will be in the context of how it is allocated and distributed?
In an ideal world, as you know, if everyone had access to additional funding that is going to be rolled out, that would be the way forward, because schools can use it in different ways. One of the issues that we raised was the fact that the seven areas that were identified for the pilot did not reflect any rural-poverty issues: the pilot was very much urban based. There are in rural areas real difficulties that differ from those in urban areas and which would affect what schools would use the funding for.
Again, with education, the hidden cost to parents of our free education system is quite telling and it is increasing. We do an annual survey—I apologise, I should have sent in stats as well as our submission—and just the basic cost of clothes can have an impact. Obviously we advocate having a uniform, but uniforms can cost more. My daughter has to wear a physical education T-shirt because if she did not, she would stand out. I have to pay £15 for two PE T-shirts. Why are parents having to do that?
Over and above local authorities looking at how they can poverty proof, individual schools really need to focus on such things. If the school is offering a breakfast club, that is great, but it needs to consider, for example, the children who rely on school transport and who therefore cannot get to school to go to the club, and whether that has an impact on them. They also need to look at what they are offering after school when there is no transport for children, and at such things as whether they give demerits to pupils for not wearing black shoes. Children need shoes to go to school, so why do they need to be so specific?
It is almost a case of paring things right back. Things like the colour of shoes that a child wears do not affect how they achieve in the classroom, so I think that we need to be a wee bit more honest about hidden costs and improving things to ensure that everyone has equal access to what is being offered.
I would not want to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I want to say that the EIS certainly welcomes the Scottish Government’s announcement of the attainment challenge funding and think that the money will be well spent and will have an impact. The views that have been expressed about project-type approaches will be shared by ADES, which is also looking for sustainability.
That said, if we are going to commit that amount of money, it will be prudent to take some time to think through how we are going to spend it. It is a little bit like the situation with the national improvement framework, which has been introduced at helter-skelter rate. I know that there are political imperatives with regard to closing the attainment gap, and the First Minister has clearly made a high-stakes commitment in that respect. However, you do not get sustainable development in schools with a quick fix; thought needs to be put into it. The London challenge, for example, built upon seven or eight years of a similar approach, and it was fixated on leaving a lasting legacy of £45,000 per secondary school per annum.
It is good to see everyone across the political spectrum so keen to see the attainment gap being closed, but we must ensure that the money is spent wisely, which might mean having to take a more considered perspective.
There was no consultation of, for example, the professional associations before the attainment challenge was announced. We would have welcomed that in any circumstance, but had we been consulted, we would have been able to put to the Scottish Government some of the points that I have just made about how we spend the money, how we ensure that it has an impact and how best to distribute it. As soon as the money became available, councils started competing with one another to get some of the first tranche of spending. We have had no complaints from any of the councils that got the money, but we have had significant complaints from those that did not. There is certainly a challenge in that respect.
Of course, we are only in year 1 of the fund. There are three more years to go, and we need to think carefully about how the money is being spent. Incidentally, that does not mean sharing it pro rata, because if that happens, it will just disappear into the mill.
Before I ask about school closures, I note that one or two of you have mentioned cuts. We have figures for the schools revenue budget as a percentage of the total council budget. I appreciate that the figures are raw and do not show the cost per pupil, but I was surprised to see that 25 of the 32 local authorities have increased their percentage share; for example, it is up 7 per cent in Aberdeen and 9 per cent in West Dunbartonshire. The share has fallen in only four authorities, and only by a very marginal amount, and for the other three there is no information. That does not give me a picture of local authorities cutting back on education, so perhaps you can address that point in your answer to the question that I am about to ask.
I want to ask the man who seems to know the most about research—Andy Smith—whether any work is being done to identify teacher shortages in subject areas, as Gordon MacDonald mentioned, and the age profile of teachers. My next question will be about school closures.
I am broadly aware of workforce planning, but it is not my area of expertise so I will defer to my learned colleagues on my left.
The workforce planning group is looking at subject areas.
What about the age profile?
The group has all the age profile details—anticipated pension exits, and so on. That is all part of it. The difficulty can be that there is so much information out there that it is difficult to find what is having an impact on behaviour.
If that information is fed into teacher recruitment, we should not have shortages of maths, science and IT teachers in the future. If that work is being done right and the information is going into the teacher training colleges, we should not be facing the shortages.
Some of the pressures around particular subjects relate to the available options for alternative careers. For example, you could find a direct correlation between the shortage of home economics teachers and the expansion of the catering and entertainment industries, in which people can have more financially profitable careers. There are also still a lot of alternatives in science, technology, engineering and mathematics that attract high-quality graduates.
I will move on to school closures. I represent the Highlands and Islands, which includes Moray. I am aware that Moray Council put a huge amount of work and consultation into school mergers and so on. To what extent do current legislative requirements on schools prevent local authorities from running their school estate in the most financially effective and high-quality way? Certainly, Moray looked at the quality of education as much as the financial aspects. Is legislation preventing local authorities from managing their school estate properly?
The most immediate answer to that would come from local councillors rather than from the Scottish Government. Any school closure should be based on educational rationale rather than just being to make a saving. I know that in rural areas the school’s role as part of the community is a big consideration that goes beyond education. It is a difficult balancing act.
I am not aware of a large number of cases in which the Scottish Government has called in and prevented closures; I am aware of some places where local members have defended their schools. I know that most councils operate a policy whereby the group whip is waived on local matters because such issues can in a number of areas be quite political.
On the question about cuts more generally, it is to the credit of directors of education and local authorities that they see education as a key service. If you look at the proportions, there have been attempts to protect education, but some of the problems have been dictated by teacher-number issues.
One of the challenges is that the costs of running schools have risen disproportionately. A situation might look healthy on paper, but even at school level the areas that end up being available for cuts tend to be in per capita funding—where schools and principal teachers spend their money on resources for the classroom. The discourse around cuts can therefore refer to a narrow area, but that is what gets most publicity because it is about what is available in the classroom.
I take your point about attempts to protect education, but there have been real cuts to resources, even at the classroom level.
My second question is about the benefits and disadvantages to children who are learning in very small schools. My colleagues talk about classes of 20, and so on, but I know one school that has had nine and 11 pupils. We would all love teachers to have about 10 pupils, but in that case it is one teacher teaching from primary 1 to primary 7.
12:30That is quite common in the Highlands and Islands. Do we have research that shows that children learn better in very small schools in their own community? There is an example in the north of Skye just now, where parents are fighting hard to retain four quite small schools. That is really so that the community is sustainable, because young people will not want to live in a village unless there is a school. I realise that the issue is complex, but what can we use to fight for pupils to be in very small schools, such as the example that I gave of a school with 10 pupils from primaries 1 to 7 and one teacher? Has work been done to say that there is a benefit from that and no disadvantage, or is it the opposite?
Does anybody know?
Ten pupils is actually quite a healthy size for a school. Some are a lot smaller than that.
Yes, it is—there is a school on the Out Skerries with one pupil.
Quite a lot of research has been done on rural schools. Essentially, there are advantages and disadvantages. There can be advantages in having a primary school with 10 pupils spread across the different levels, although there are the obvious challenges to do with the social mix and relationships. However, I do not think that we could say that a case has been made one way or the other. It depends on the relationships in the school and how it operates.
In a broader sense—to go back to the teacher numbers issue—a school that has two or three pupils is not an attractive career option for a lot of teachers. Some schools in Moray that have one, two or three pupils have struggled to fill posts not just because they are rural, but because for someone who is at the start of their career, that is not necessarily the most supportive environment to go into. Someone is required whose personal circumstances chime with the circumstances of the school. That is difficult.
Although Moray Council put a huge amount of time and effort into the school merger proposals with all the consultants and consultation, after a few months it had to pull out and now nothing is happening. Are we now at a stage where, politically as well as legislatively, it is almost impossible to close a rural school or even to merge two schools, regardless of whether there is a benefit or a disadvantage?
Does anybody have a view on that?
That is really one for your side of the table.
Yes, I know—that is why I asked whether you wanted to answer. Andy Smith put his hand up.
From what I see and read, it seems to me that that is the case. However, we underestimate at our peril the significance and benefit of education and schools for local communities, and how dearly held they are. That is why it is such an emotive issue, why it hits the front page of the newspapers and why there is such a high level of discussion about it. Personally, I would not like any school to be closed. In some cases, we just have to put the economic argument to one side and do what benefits the community.
Yes—especially when last year in Moray children were sent home. I should say that my granddaughter is at Mosstodloch school in Moray, which is one of the ones that was marked for closure. I feel that I should mention that.
I want to ask about education budgets and the implications for other council services. We have already said that for the majority of councils the education budget has increased over the past few years—although obviously it has also had increasing demands placed on it. The debate about poverty and attainment has highlighted that the attainment gap is not only about school education and cannot be tackled only at school level. That raises a question about which other council services are most closely linked to the potential of pupils to make the most of their school education. To what extent could cuts in other council services impact on school attainment?
The area that I think has the most long-term impact on pupil attainment is the pre-five service: all the evidence and research indicates that what happens to a child in the first five years creates the foundation for future learning. There has been some expansion of pre-five childcare, a lot of which focused on allowing parents to access the workplace rather than on the child. Local authorities need to prioritise the ages of zero to five.
The answer comes down to discussions between COSLA and the Scottish Government. I would not accept the argument that other services should be cut to fund education. If I was a councillor, as I once was, I would argue for increased funding from the Scottish Government to maintain services. That is where the debate needs to be—although the Scottish Government would argue with the UK Government, no doubt.
I am uncomfortable with the notion that we play one service off against another. In Glasgow, 10 per cent of schoolchildren have active social work files. The social work service is absolutely key to the health and wellbeing of young people in Glasgow schools. If we start trying to play one service off against another, things such as getting it right for every child, which is about wraparound support for the child, will start to crumble. People will retreat into their section of the service, rather than look at the child’s needs.
It is a difficult area, but if we are looking at how we support young people, we need to look not just in the classroom but beyond the school.
The named person legislation is an example of that. We need services to work together for the benefit of youngsters who are at risk. Any cuts to health and social services will have an impact on the school’s effectiveness in dealing with those youngsters.
To continue that theme, which non-school budgets have the most influence on pupils’ prospects in school? Social work services have been mentioned, and other examples include economic development spend, housing and libraries. I am trying to get a grip of what the implications of changes to those services would be for attainment levels.
I will add a supplementary to that. If you cut school librarians, not teachers, what effect, if any, would that have on pupil attainment levels?
The impact would be greatest on the people on whom our support is focused. If the school library shuts and that resource is not there, that is to the detriment of the whole school. However, it will have less impact on pupils who come from homes where books are part and parcel of the environment and reading is encouraged than it will on pupil from homes where books are not available. As a former English principal teacher, I am acutely aware of the importance of school library services to literacy programmes in schools and to active learning. Most school libraries now are resource centres, rather than traditional libraries: they are at the heart of school life and the school ethos.
If the focus of your original question is the most vulnerable pupils, rather than education generally, social work is a key element in support for them. However, there are a range of services around community education. There was a question about youth workers; a lot of youth workers provide adult interaction in an environment beyond the school gates, which helps young people to grow in different ways. The problem becomes really difficult if we isolate services from each other, but pre-five support for parents and children is the bedrock of improving the chances of young people from vulnerable backgrounds.
School libraries is a subject that is close to my heart. I read last year a bit of research from the Robert Gordon University that suggested that school librarians have a significant impact on young people’s learning and literacy. It called for an increase in the number of librarians or the amount of time that librarians have in schools, which probably flies in the face of what we are seeing nationally.
We must get to the understanding that schools are the centre of the community. When we talk about rural schools we understand that they are the heart of the community. We need to build all the services around schools. That is important. Libraries, health services, youth workers and so on should be seen as a partnership. Local authorities should be looking for joined-up services, rather than individual services, which is what happens sometimes.
Jane—would you like to say anything?
I have nothing to add.
That concludes the meeting. Thank you all for attending; we appreciate your giving your time to the committee.
It has been quite correctly pointed out to me that I made a mistake when we took evidence from our first panel. Instead of talking about the change from £17,000 to £19,000 in the eligibility threshold for grants, I mistakenly talked about £17,000 to £19,000 as a change in the repayment threshold. That was incorrect. I thank Liam McArthur for pointing out my error and for giving me the chance to correct it on the record.
12:41 Meeting continued in private until 12:42.Previous
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