Under item 2, we are looking at the educational attainment gap and, in particular, the role of sport and the arts. It is part of our work on educational attainment at school. We wanted to drill down a little bit in certain areas. Last week, we looked at the construction industry. This week, we are looking at the role of sports and the arts in raising attainment.
We have talked about the attainment gap, about closing it and about what it means. I hope that we will get some more detail on that this morning. Of course, we want to focus not just on examination results but on attainment in its wider sense.
It is fair to say that the academic literature on this area—the impact of sport, the arts and so on on the attainment of pupils—is slightly limited, so I am hoping that we will get some practical examples today from our witnesses. I welcome Brian Caldwell and Stephen Gallacher from St Mirren Football Club. Unfortunately, Donald Gillies is unable to be with us—I thank Chris Smith from the Scottish Football Association for stepping in for him late on. I also welcome Colin Thomson from the Scottish Rugby Union; Graham Main from the Electric Theatre Workshop; and Ruth Wishart, who is a broadcaster and journalist. Thank you all for coming along.
There are two gentlemen from St Mirren Football Club—for any questions that you wish to answer, I ask that just one of you answers. I do not mind which one it is, but you are not getting two bites of the cherry. I am sure that St Mirren fans would love to hear from you—I am thinking of one person in particular—but it would help if just one of you answers each time, given that there are six people on the panel and we want to get through this as quickly as possible. George Adam will start the questions.
Good morning, everyone. I wanted us to have this session mainly because I think that sport and the arts can contribute so much. One of the issues that have come up in evidence to us is the fact that we are having difficulty engaging with hard-to-reach children and young people and hard-to-reach parents. We need to get both groups involved in order to push up educational attainment.
I know that all your organisations do various pieces of work on this. Can you give us evidence about some of the young people and parents who you have met through your work who have had positive outcomes, such as following a career path or going into other parts of education?
I run a programme called street stuff, which is a partnership between St Mirren and Renfrewshire Council. The programme started off working with young people in harder-to-reach areas, to get them away from youth disorder and antisocial behaviour. As the programme has gone on—we are about six years down the line now—48 per cent of the young people involved in it are staff members. We have taken on the kids who were dropping out of school and causing trouble and made them members of staff to run the programme. It has helped reduce youth disorder and has also given the young people a positive outcome. It also gives the parents the feeling that their kids are doing well. Now that they have somewhere to go, they do not have to say that they do not have a job. The parents see that there is a positive place for the kids to go. We are working away with that programme at the moment.
Your new ground, St Mirren park, is in Ferguslie Park, which, as we constantly hear, is the biggest area of deprivation in Scotland. Have you had quite a lot of involvement with the young people in that area to try to help them?
There are a few examples of that. Every Friday and Saturday night, 50 or 60 kids will turn up between 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock to play football—on both nights. Just the other week, we managed to take 10 kids from that area on their first ever trip out of Ferguslie Park. We took them to London for a week. It was a real culture change. It was their first time on the tube, their first time in the city, their first time out of Paisley. The parents were panicking and asking what they were going to be like. The kids were seeing things up close. It was an exciting time for us, but for the kids the memory of that will last. Those kids turn up at the football club every week and see that there is somewhere for them to go and something else for them to get involved in, which is probably something that they have never had the chance to do before. It is using sport to get kids involved in something positive.
A lot of your clubs have a 50:50 split between young men and young women. You have dance classes as well, which cross over. You do a lot on the culture side as well.
The dance part has really taken off. The University of the West of Scotland came in and spoke to the kids. The kids told us what they wanted to do. Instead of us changing the programme, which we tend to do, the kids said what they wanted. Dance was one of the big things. We have a programme now where the girls are turning up more than the boys. At one of the venues, more than 100 kids turn up every night—60 girls and 40 boys—just to do dance, although we still have the football part of it. That is coming along—it has been more successful—but we are trying to get more of the kids to lead the sessions the way that they like to do it, under the watchful eye of the trained coach.
Can I ask the other groups what positive outcomes they have had in working with hard-to-reach young people?
I am happy to answer that. There is loads of evidence across the board. The programme that I manage is the school of football. I look after five schools in the south-east region, all of which are in difficult areas. Probably one of the most difficult at the moment is Craigroyston high school, where we have a link with Spartans Football Club. A lot of the young boys and girls who take part in our programme attend Spartans on a regular basis. It runs a number of programmes, such as a footie club on a Friday night. It also has young boys and girls working as ambassadors for the club at various venues and events. That is one of the foremost examples. It is not looking so much at what academic qualifications the young people are going to achieve but at what they are going to do outwith football.
We have several programmes throughout the country, mainly funded by cashback for communities funding. We have 30 schools of rugby operating the length and breadth of Scotland. We also run what were street rugby sessions, which have now morphed into referral programmes.
We found that the street rugby sessions were a bit hit and miss—you had to take the children’s word that they were going to be there on a night. We have therefore worked with the campus bobbies, local social work, and the referral teams within schools and education. I circulated a paper to the committee on a typical programme that we ran at Braeview academy and at Craigie high school. We have fifteen such programmes running. They are for children who are at risk of dropping out and who are referred to us by guidance staff or indeed by campus police. The children go through a development programme in which we use rugby to teach wider skills such as teamwork, respect, engagement, communication and life lessons. Similarly to many other programmes that we have heard about, the programme takes them on a journey to qualification, working in rugby, playing and continuing in rugby and continuing beyond that.
11:00From the point of view of the experiences of the young people involved—and indeed the adults around those young people—we have found that the programmes have been most successful when we have had a partnership approach between physical education staff, school staff and delivery staff from rugby. Scottish Rugby could give you lots of examples of what it has done, but it is when we take the PE, physical activity and sport—PEPAS—approach that what we do has a maximum return and is more sustainable. That is because education is buying into it and the schools are buying into it. That usually comes from the headteachers.
For example, in Maxwelltown high school in Dumfries, there is a very positive headteacher who spoke at the Parliament when we had the Scottish Rugby parliamentary reception. She talks glowingly about the impact that the rugby programme has had on her children and on her small community in a deprived area in Dumfries. The impact for the children is huge. Attendance, attainment and achievement have gone up and the drift into the local rugby club has gone up as well. Within the past three years, we have taken that school from having one team to having four or five teams.
What I want to put over to the committee is that when we have good partnership working between a sports organisation—or indeed an arts or other organisation—and education, it works. However, it has to work in a sustained way, year in, year out, rather than being an initiative that stops when funding stops or when those leading it move on.
Before we move to questions on the arts, Mary Scanlon has a question on rugby.
Colin, am I right in thinking that when you gave evidence to the Health and Sport Committee many years ago on pathways into sport, you spoke about physical literacy?
Yes, I could have done.
I think that you might have done and I feel that it fits in here. I just want to ask something about the Scottish Rugby paper, convener. I was very impressed by all the natural benefits of the Scottish Rugby project—I will not read them out. We are looking at attainment for people from disadvantaged areas and communities and I was really pleased about your partnership with the High School of Dundee, because many of the schools in Dundee focus on football rather than rugby. I wonder whether you could also say a word or two about that.
The one thing that I thought was missing from your excellent paper was any word about parents. Did you find that parents got involved? Were they supportive? They are not mentioned at all and I just wondered whether the programme helped bring parents into being supportive towards their kids.
Ideally, I would like to hear about the partnership with the High School of Dundee, physical literacy, which I think is very important to what we are looking at, and parental involvement. The football side might want to respond on that point as well.
With physical literacy—I hope that I do not contradict what I said in evidence previously—
I probably would not notice if you did; I just remember the term.
We will check, Colin.
With physical literacy, it comes back to the idea of sustainability, like anything else—sport, the arts, music. Many stone ago, I was a PE teacher. One of my education philosophies was that if there is a reason for a child to go to school—if they have a purpose—it is pretty easy to educate them. For many people, that purpose could be maths; it could be English; it could be arts or drama; or it could be sport. If a child has a reason to go to school, the other things become easier because they have a purpose when they go to school.
To go back to the issue of physical literacy, the teaching of that has to take the same long-term approach that is taken in the teaching of maths and English. We often have a short snap of activity in sport that tries to lead to something else. If we take the long-term approach to physical literacy that is taken in English from when children learn their ABCs, young people of 15 or 16 will feel physically confident and competent enough to take part in whatever activity they want. However, if they do not have that, they are never going to get it. That is why a longer-term sustained approach to physical literacy is very important. Children with physical literacy feel confident and competent and can enjoy being part of things, especially being part of the community.
Do we have examples from our experience of parents getting involved? Yes, we do. All children have parents and some want to be involved, some do not and some are just not there. I have an example from Glenrothes Rugby Club of a parent getting involved. A child was exposed to street rugby and was then taken down to the rugby club. His dad said that he wanted to see what was happening at the club and the club welcomed him in. He then got a coaching qualification and is now coaching at the club with the youth section, and his son has gone on to play for the senior part of the club.
That is how it happens. The sense of community that sport—in my case, rugby—can give is huge. It can come from physical literacy and parental involvement.
We have heard that parents do not always get involved in their children’s education, especially if they had a bad experience when they were at school. My question is really whether a child’s involvement in sport, whether football or rugby, is more likely to get parents involved in their children’s development.
Apart from what happens in our clubs, in many of our schools the teaching workforce is supplemented by parents who want to help—that is a natural by-product. However, we are finding that many of the adults who are now being involved have not experienced school sport themselves, so we have to undertake a huge education process to get them qualified to be able to help the teaching staff. We run an extensive coach education programme that has put 4,500 people through coaching, and the majority of them will be parents.
However, there is a large section of the community whose parents, quite frankly, do not care. We have got to make sure that we cater for them as well by putting in good-quality coaches.
What about the High School of Dundee?
It is the rugby playing school in Dundee, and we have been engaging with it on outreach programmes for the wider community to broaden the rugby base. We are having particular success in Harris academy in the west end of Dundee. We are in discussion with the High School of Dundee at the moment because the development officer has recently moved on from there and we are appointing another one. That is part of the wider work that we want to do in Dundee.
Just to add to that, we have run a programme recently to engage with parents. Football tends to be a male-dominated sport and there was an issue in Ferguslie Park, where we are based, to do with male parents bonding with their children and being able to cook a healthy meal on a budget. We have run a programme a couple of times now that we call the buddy hell kitchen, whereby we got local fathers to come along at 4 o’clock after school to use the kitchen in our hospitality suite. They were taught how to cook a healthy meal on a budget while their children played football or sport inside our airdome; that went on for an hour and then the children spent a second hour with their dads and ate the meal that they had prepared. That helped better bonding between the dads and their children, and the children got health benefits. The hook was that it was quite acceptable for a dad to come to the football stadium, whereas that might not have been the case if they were invited to go to a council or school kitchen, for example. However, for the fathers it became quite sexy, shall I say, to go to the football stadium, and the programme was very successful.
Well done.
I ask Graham Main to respond to my original question.
The question about outcomes is quite a difficult concept for us to understand. I acknowledge what Stewart Maxwell said about there probably not being enough work to show us what methods have the most impact.
I think that the biggest impact that we have for young people is to make them feel involved in a community. We deliver a project in schools. Maxwelltown high school is one of our key schools, and we are there for six months, embedded in the curriculum. We run the project across all the schools in Dumfries, and the school partnership is vital to us understanding the needs of the pupils and the community. We give them interdisciplinary learning across performance, but ultimately we are looking to get them involved in a major carnival that includes 4,000 people. To do that, we teach them theatre skills, design skills and acting skills. For us, the impact is often not pupils excelling at a particular discipline but those young people feeling part of a wider community celebration.
The point about parental involvement is also relevant here. We spend six months getting pupils involved and then we have a major celebration, and we also have shows and events that, perhaps, the community could not otherwise afford. We have a task force that goes round and offers free tickets. The relationship between the pupil and the parent is really important. Often, parents tell us that, because their child is involved, they are interested in coming to see the show. There are all sorts of different outcomes.
Colin Thomson mentioned leadership in schools, which has come up quite a lot. If the headteacher is not interested in engaging, there tends not to be a crossover of work. How do you feel about that, as organisations that are involved? Could you do more work with local schools and local authorities? Colin Thomson has already given us a couple of examples of where that has worked out, but are there others? Would that access be beneficial for you?
Before anybody comes in, I ask you also to give us your views on the original question about the activity of the arts and theatre sector and broadcasting—of which Ruth Wishart has much experience—in making pupils interested in getting involved in education.
I am here as chair of the strategic group for the creative learning plan rather than in my professional capacity as a journalist. We have been talking about partnerships. For curriculum for excellence to work as it is structured, it has to concentrate on creativity, in the sense that creativity should be knitted through all parts of the curriculum. It is not just about the expressive arts, important as they are.
I will leave with the committee the report that we have produced. It involved a partnership between us at Creative Scotland, College Development Network, Education Scotland, the GTCS, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, Skills Development Scotland and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland. In essence, we got together and said that if we mean what we say about creativity, we must, in all our professional capacities, ensure not just that students are introduced to creativity but—this is important—that it is introduced as part of teaching practice.
One of the nice things that has come out of the work is that both the SQA and the GTCS now have qualifications that are specifically about teachers imparting knowledge creatively, or indulging, with their students, in creative activities. However, I know that the committee is interested in evidence of how that works so that this is not just mouth music. The portfolio manager for education and young people at Creative Scotland sent the committee a paper with a bibliography attached; I draw members’ attention to one report in particular. It is actually an American report, but it is important because it covers four longitudinal studies. It is called “‘The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings from Four Longitudinal Studies”. In essence, “at-risk youth” often meant people from a deprived background. The results were really quite remarkable, because almost half the people from those areas went on to college or university, which was a quantum leap from what you might hitherto have expected.
11:15You will all know about Sistema in Raploch and Govanhill. There is the aspire Dundee project, which is working with nine schools in the most deprived areas there. We also use the cashback for creativity programme, which has helped us to give access to positive creative experiences for a lot of kids.
The youth arts strategy, “Time to Shine”, has just been published. I was interested in what was being said about letting the young people decide the programme. That is really important. We at Creative Scotland have created 11 youth arts hubs around Scotland, which are designed and run by young people according to their agenda.
The Government provides a lot of money every year for the youth music initiative. That is really important, because there is a huge body of evidence about how learning a musical instrument impacts on self-confidence, self-belief and classroom attainment levels. That initiative gives 40,000 kids up to primary 6 every year a guaranteed year of music tuition.
Loads of stuff is going on. We have run several days in which we have involved staff from schools and our friends in the arts sector. As Graham Main knows, there are a huge number of partnerships between major arts organisations—including all our national companies—and schools, which is really quite exciting. I will not bore you with details of all the days that we had, but one of them was at the science centre, because we wanted it to be a fairly sexy environment compared to the classroom. The day was recorded by very young school children on their own laptops, and they made cartoons, films and story books about it. It left us feeling inadequate, to be frank, but it showed how we can use not just creativity per se but creative means of teaching to enthuse young children and get them interested in subjects that might previously have appeared to be dull.
Can we go back to George Adam’s question now?
It was about schools and how you can work with them.
St Mirren’s programme is delivered at night time and it is needs based. We sit down daily with a community safety team and work out where we should be working with young people who are most at risk. It is street work all the way, doing football activities—we manage to get indoors only a small percentage of the time. While we are on the street, we find out the needs of the young person and whether it is a social work case, a police case or whatever, and we pass that on to the relevant people. A lot of the time we find kids below the age of 7 or 8 who have problems and we have to pass that information on.
The community safety team delivers a programme in school called the safe kid programme, which we also deliver at the club and which includes workshops. The kids come to us. We have on occasions asked whether we can take the programme into a school, but when we have asked we have been met with a “no”. We are told that we cannot get in because we are not part of what we would call the council establishment. We are a street programme and a third party, so we are on the outside. However, we work with 25,000 attendances every year. If we can get to those kids in the schools earlier to do the job that we do, we could make a bigger impact. We are told that we cannot get in, because we have to be part of a hub—you have to be part of this or part of that. Tell us how we can do that so that we can get in, because we want to do the job safely and efficiently with the kids as early as possible so that they do not end up going down the route that their older brothers and sisters or their parents have gone down over the years. We are trying to get in quicker and earlier, but at the moment we are being met with a “no.” We are trying to get round that.
It has taken us time to build a reputation through the good work that we have done in Dumfries and Galloway, so that teaching staff know that our work is of good quality. I echo what has been said about access to schools. It really depends on the management. In our example, the head teacher really embraces any involvement with the school.
Some of the other work that I do in Dumfries and Galloway is about merging the arts through our hubs. The same thing keeps coming back to us: when we are inside the schools, they tell us that they are dying for activities but never hear about them; meanwhile, back in the arts sector the artists tell us that they cannot get into the schools. We have been trying to combat that. Of course, because our region is quite wee, we can get round it and try things out.
However, for a couple of years now, we have been trying to get access to teachers’ in-service training days, only to be told that there is no way we can do that because those days are dedicated to Scottish Qualifications Authority time. That illustrates to us the potential that exists. It would be really advantageous for all sectors if we were able to do community development stuff with teachers and to bring partnerships together when the kids are not there.
We are all familiar with such problems, but I think that there is a way into the schools. Thirty of the 32 local authorities, I think, are part of the creative learning networks, and the job of the person who runs the network in their area is to make marriages of convenience. Because they not only know the arts opportunities out in their communities but have connections with the schools, they are able to broker the kind of relationship that is sometimes difficult to develop from the outside.
Another thing that is worth looking at for all schools is the very useful creativity portal that Creative Scotland has been running for a couple of years now, and which teachers can access to see for themselves what is available and what they might or might not want to dip into.
However, there is resistance, and I understand why it exists. There is the tyranny of the timetable and the need to deliver certain parts of the curriculum, but I also think that quite a lot of teaching staff are still living somewhat in a silo instead of understanding that cross-fertilisation can help attainment in their subjects.
We are quite fortunate in that all the headteachers with whom the SFA works—certainly the five with whom I have been working closely over the past four or five years—are really supportive of our programme. The fact is that if we are to teach leadership to young people, they need confidence. According to the last piece of research that we conducted, 95 per cent of the pupils with whom we are working said that they feel more confident. If we are to teach pupils to be leaders, we need to give them confidence from a very early age. Little things such as giving secondary 1 and 2 pupils ownership of part of the sessions that we take—say, the warm-up—or giving them little tasks on trips or events are important at that early stage of their development. For us, the key to leadership is to give them confidence at that young age. When they reach S4, S5 and S6, we start to engage them in a little bit of coach education; they might start to work with, for example, the school football team as an assistant to a senior staff member or an employed football coach. Those, for us, are the early steps.
At the moment, I am working with Newbattle high school in Midlothian, and we already have two or three S1 pupils who are volunteering with the local football development officer, Keith Wright, to work on the holiday programmes and Easter camps that he runs. We are talking about 11 or 12-year-old pupils putting their hands up, asking to contact the local football development officer and then going to work with them as an assistant coach at a holiday camp. Of course, they might not have an awful lot to do—they might just be picking up cones, counting numbers or whatever—but to do that and to be given that level of responsibility is an important life lesson for them. Also, as part of Sky Sports living for sport initiative, a number of Newbattle high school pupils who have come through the school football programme have acted as ambassadors for the school.
I want to move on, because we have quite a lot—
Can I ask one more question, convener?
Okay.
This question probably covers arts and sport. Is there a case for formalising our sports and arts hubs’ engagement with education and attainment and making that part of their remit? After all, you are the people to whom those in education are coming in order to engage the children whom they find difficult to reach. To come back to the St Mirren example, I know that the sport is used as the hook, but could there be links with UWS and West College Scotland to ensure that the young people who go down that route also have access to education? Could we join everything up and ensure that all the arts and sports hubs feed into the education system?
To go back to my experience, speaking about the hubs in our area, we are not seen as a sports-based club, although we work for St Mirren Football Club.
I watch them; they are not much of a football club. [Laughter.]
I know. You are right—although they did okay at the weekend, George.
The programme that we deliver is a model to engage with young people in order that we can take them on. If you speak to the people who run the hubs, you find that there are a lot of criteria for engagement with the hub. If we want to take a kid from the street and get him fed into a hub that has a sports-based club, we have to ask that kid to pay £X to join that establishment. The kids in the areas where we work cannot afford that. In times of poverty, we cannot ask them to do that, so we need to try to create something ourselves for them, in the hope that maybe one day they will be accepted into the hubs. It is like the situation with education—you either get in or you do not get in; either they want you there or they do not want you there.
For the sake of the young people we are working with, we need to think about this a wee bit better: we need to think about having a bigger hub where everything is in one place. That would be better, because then we could say that although they may not get the full package, the kids will all still get to do a touch of what they want, while the kids who are the “flyers” can be taken down a path within that structure. That sounds to me like a better idea.
If I understood the question correctly, our programme is for S1 to S3, and the key thing for us is that it is difficult at the moment for us to link into colleges and universities. If there was funding for us to run the programme through the six years of high school, that would be fantastic for us. In fairness, a couple of schools, including Gracemount high school, have taken the programme on board.
Spartans FC on the east coast, for example, has made itself like a community education hub to a certain degree. That is what I am talking about.
The work that Spartans does is fantastic, but a lot of it comes down to external funding and the sponsorship that it manages to raise that allows it to employ staff to engage in that way.
First and foremost, given our resources, what we are doing with the dynamic youth awards and youth achievement awards is massive for us. The pupils who have come into our programme have had roughly 180 sessions a year—180 in S1 and 180 in S2—but the programme has not been recognised as a qualification subject for them. The schools recognise it as a subject; the pupils take part five days a week in S1, S2 and—potentially—S3, but they have not achieved anything for that until this year, since we have started to engage with the dynamic youth awards. Now, all our S1 pupils are going through the awards, which now sit within and are accredited by the SQA. For us, that is key. As I said, we piloted the programme last year, and this is the first year that we have run it across Scotland with S1 pupils. We are hoping to get about 80 per cent of our pupils through some level of qualification from that.
The building blocks of the creative learning plan are partly about people going along a route such as George Adam suggests. It is about removing barriers and making sure that arts organisations understand the need to get involved with education. The youth hubs are part of that: they were set up relatively recently—within the last year—so they post-date some of the previous demarcation lines that we have heard about. I am fairly confident that the links exist and are being built on.
I know that everybody wants in. I will go to Chic Brodie first and then move on. I am sure that you can answer some of the points that have been raised earlier in your next answer.
Good morning. We all recognise the work that the members of the panel are doing in both sports and the arts. As a South Scotland MSP, I am aware of the work that Graham Main and his team are doing.
As far as I am concerned, there is a dilemma. Sport is not one of the eight curriculum areas, but arts is, so I will concentrate on sport to begin with. How clear do you think it is that current sporting initiatives are leading to improvement in young people’s engagement with basic learning and school education? What evidence is there?
I do not think that there is much evidence—
Before Colin answers: there is another academy in Dundee—Morgan academy.
That is absolutely right.
The question was about sport specifically. Physical education, physical activity and sport are in some cases happening in isolation. Physical education is—correct me if I am wrong—one of the compulsory elements of education.
Sport falls within health and wellbeing, but it is not identified as a specific separate individual element within the curriculum. The arts is.
Within that, the Scottish Government recognises the positive impact that physical education can have on learning, through health and wellbeing. However, where is the evidence?
11:30
You have heard a lot of evidence today that, through the initiatives that are happening, sport makes a difference to people’s lives. You will find that in any research database. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills did a report in July on the impact of sport on attainment in England and Wales, and many research studies have been done in Scotland. We could go back to John Pollatschek and Tom Renfrew and the Linwood daily PE scheme in the early 1980s, which I took part in when I was just out of college. PE, physical activity and sport, under health and wellbeing, make a difference.
Where is the evidence?
As I said, if you go back to the daily PE project in Renfrewshire in the early 1980s, you will see the figures on raising attainment, attendance and behaviour in schools. You have today heard anecdotal evidence of schemes using football and the arts that make a difference to young people’s lives.
I do not disagree that such schemes have an impact—I hope a beneficial one. I will come back to such schemes, particularly in the arts, in a minute, if I may. However, I am trying to relate them to basic learning and educational attainment. There is no real link, is there?
I disagree. There is a huge link. It might be anecdotal, but from my experience—
I am sorry, but there is no evidence of the benefits.
Ask any primary teacher about the impact on his or her children of their having had a run about for an hour—they come in, sit down and get on with academic study. The evidence is there, if you ask teachers. The problem is that teachers have to deal with what was called earlier the “tyranny of the timetable”. I like that expression. On achievement, maybe we need to step back and think about wider achievement and recognise that attainment is about more than just academic success. Curriculum for excellence says that it is a value-laden curriculum; there are many values in sport that correlate to the curriculum and that we have to push forward. The curriculum talks about physically competent and confident children. Sport and the arts can provide that, as we have talked about.
It seems to me to be absolutely clear that there are benefits. Looking at it from the other end of the spyglass, employers say that they want people who are good team players, who can work collaboratively, who are innovative and who are confident. Sport and the arts deliver all those things in spades. So, the evidence—
Forgive me, but—
Forgive me—I refer you again to the bunch of links that the portfolio manager at Creative Scotland sent to the committee. I will not go into them all, but they give chapter and verse on how the arts have improved outcomes. Speaking as a person who has dodgy knees because of all my years playing hockey, I absolutely agree that sport delivers those values.
Yes. At least in my opinion, the encouragement of parents to balance sport in school with educational attainment has helped.
I want to go back to the expressive arts part of the curriculum. On the features that affect sport and the arts, parental involvement, which we have talked about, is critical. We are looking to narrow the attainment gap for those who come from deprived areas. With the arts and sport, as well as the importance of parental involvement, there are issues of time and finance, along with the danger of creating overarching expectations. To go back to my original questions, are we achieving that balance? I do not decry the initiatives, which I think are great and which involve more people, but I come back to the issue of basic learning and narrowing the attainment gap. Given the features that impact on both sports and the arts, are we achieving the balance?
That is an interesting viewpoint. Schools have the expressive arts curriculum, which is mostly split between music, art and drama, although there is some dance as well. When I go into music classrooms in schools—particularly secondary schools—I am frustrated to see 28 children sitting with headphones on, receiving individual music tuition, because the schools have decided that pupils have to learn that way to pass the course. It is much more effective to use community music models, in which we get young people to come together, away from the classroom setting, and just express themselves.
If children are allowed to be expressive, they have an opportunity to learn. For example, it takes three classes to create one piece of samba, but children learn skills in creating that piece of music and playing all the different parts. As Ruth Wishart said, it is about discipline, organisation and understanding that you have to practise something to make it okay. After three sessions, you can move on to something else.
The difficulty is that children are still stuck on their keyboards in the classroom. We are trying to energise teachers’ approach. Often teachers tell us that our presence in their school is helping to inform their practice. We are an asset and usually when we go in teachers ask whether we can do more—of course, we are restricted in that regard.
I am not decrying music tuition, because it is great: we have some brilliant musicians. However, we need a balance that includes a little bit of individual tuition to reach our talent. I would prefer our cultural offer in schools to be much broader and much more about inclusion.
I think that that is right.
There is a lot of evidence that, however creative teachers may be, teaching is missing a trick by not responding to the way that people learn. Our children learn in wholly different ways from the way that my generation learned. They learn through a series of different platforms, models and so forth.
One thing that stuck in my mind might address the point about attainment. A chap called Derek Robertson, if memory serves, wrote about a class in which there were a couple of kids—with whom I have every sympathy—who were completely bored by maths. The children were mildly addicted to Guitar Hero, which is not something I have on my laptop, and the teacher utilised their interest in that to fire up different mathematical strategies. They did not become mathematical geniuses as a result, but they passed their exams.
There are a lot of areas in which we need to listen to our children and watch them learn. We need to respond to that and not to force feed them information and material in a way that, by and large, is yesterday’s news.
The question was on closing the attainment gap. There are lots of great examples in the health and wellbeing curriculum, especially in relation to sport—you have heard about some of them today. What we have to do goes back to physical literacy and the need for a long-term, joined-up approach, which has to be more common practice across more schools than it is.
There are a lot of great initiatives out there. There is lots of good progress in PE and on active schools. There are a lot of great examples of how sport can link with education. Where that works with the headteacher, it works. However, there are not enough of those examples, which should be the norm in every school. The challenge is to turn good initiatives and good practice into common practice, with leadership buying into it.
The answer to Chic Brodie’s question whether we are further forward on using such activities to reduce the attainment gap is that we are not, because that does not happen as standard practice.
I will talk a wee bit about educational attainment. For a number of years, I have been on to the council about a programme that we run. I felt that there was a real opportunity for the football club to run a programme for children who leave school at Christmas—the winter leavers. The schools do not want them there and the pupils do not want to be there and are a disruptive influence.
Over the past two years, we have been running a programme that involves bringing children to the football club. The hook of sport brings them there, and we give them some football activity. However, on top of that, we do CV building and interview techniques, teach them first aid at work, for which we give them the qualification, and give them health and safety training. They also get coaching certificates. Over two or three months, they come to the football club two days a week and build their CV.
Those kids are probably the hard-to-reach ones that we have been talking about. They could leave school at Christmas and waste four or five months of their life in which they get no qualifications. However, instead they come out with some activities on their CV that make them more job ready, which is of huge benefit to them. The programme is also of benefit to the schools, because the children who are trying to attain educational qualifications are not disrupted by the children who are perhaps not really interested. We hope that the programme acts as a springboard as well as helping those who are left in school five days a week to achieve better qualifications, because they will not be disrupted by the pupils who are not really interested and who leave school at Christmas.
We need to look at the hard-to-reach children, and the issue is how we can use sport as a hook to bring them in, educate them and send them out so that they are better off and—this is the interesting point for me—job ready.
My point has been partly picked up in Brian Caldwell’s final comment. We have heard that both sport and the arts have an intrinsic value by providing young folks with things to do, with an opportunity to bond with their father or their parents, or with an opportunity to improve their learning across the curriculum in other ways as they get ready to learn in other environments. However, we have had a challenge with parity of esteem in relation to how academic and vocational qualifications are sometimes viewed.
It strikes me that there is a challenge with raising attainment, which is that we do not necessarily know how to value or give credit for what young people are achieving in the environments that the witnesses are involved in, which the various initiatives are helping to open up. Are there examples that we can look at that can give us a better handle on how we give due value to and credit for young people’s achievements, attainment and success, whether that is in the arts or in sport and physical education?
I am perhaps going against the grain here, but I am a big fan of the work of Carol Dweck and in particular her book about growth mindsets. We should be focusing on the process, not the outcome. When we talk about attainment, we always talk about the outcome, be it a qualification or something else, and I would far rather that we focused on the process. We have curriculum for excellence and we know what it is trying to achieve, but what is the process for achieving it? Many of the softer skills that we talk about in curriculum for excellence, including children being responsible, safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible and included, come through sport, through the arts and through processes.
Ruth Wishart is quite right. The innovative maths teacher who presents her subject in a different fashion illustrates the things that we need to focus on for attainment to go up. We need to strike a balance with work on the process. I believe that every child has an innate ability to develop and reach certain standards if they are given the right opportunities, the right circumstances and the right process to help them learn. We should be focusing on the process, not necessarily the outcome.
I think that that is correct. Young children have fabulous imaginations, and it sometimes seems that parts of their schooling squeeze that creativity out of them, rather than nourishing it.
There are some small examples of where the GTCS and the SQA are beginning to understand that out-of-school activities—environmental projects, theatrical projects or whatever—can sometimes be used to recognise both staff qualifications and pupil attainment. That is important. Learning does not just happen from 9 to 4; it is holistic—it is about everything that children are exposed to in their own environments.
11:45
I am interested in the witnesses’ comments. Colin Thomson’s argument that it is about the process rather than the outcome seems counterintuitive. Graham Main spoke about the ability to engage with teaching staff through in-service days and so on, but that seems to be inhibited by an undervaluing of what his and other groups are able to deliver through those means, as opposed to the stuff that the SQA sets down, which almost needs to be taken on by rote and upgraded through continuous professional development. We need to take a slightly more nuanced approach to what continuous professional development of teachers’ professionalism and skills is all about. I am not sure that we are capturing well enough what you have all been talking about. Clearly, there are great examples going on across the board in Scotland, yet the attainment gap has remained stubbornly wide over successive Administrations and successive initiatives.
I will give you just one sentence in response. There is lots of room for the SQA to loosen its stays a bit more.
That is not a good image, to be honest. [Laughter.]
Delete it—but take the message.
I get the message.
Liam McArthur’s point is very well made. Sadly, the only reports that we can draw on—certainly for our sector—are by Arts Council England. Those reports go back to 2000 and, basically, they try to understand the value of inclusion. However, the problem is that it takes such a long time to support attainment; it takes a life-cycle for us to understand the social asset impact on a young person. Maybe we need to think about partnership ways of measuring that impact in sports and in arts and culture, or in any activity.
Recently, my team and I walked into a school that has really low attainment, and the headteacher welcomed us by saying, “Let’s get one thing straight: we’re not interested in attainment.” That was quite an introduction for our team and meant that, really quickly, we stopped suggesting that we could support the school’s drama students to get better exam results. The enriching process that the young people got at that school during those six months was probably the best work that we have ever delivered. We worked on skills that could help those young people, asking the teaching staff how we could add to what the young people were learning in the classroom. That was the cycle, and I think that people should be really honest about that and let us do our work in that way.
The other point that I need to make is that most of the organisations that are here today probably have very low capacity—they probably have 2.1 project staff, if that. I do not think that the sector that is delivering the work has the resources to then measure it. The big problem for our sector is that we just do not have the capacity to do that.
We are talking about achievement, but my experience of working with young people for the past seven years is that achievement means something completely different for every young person I have met.
For example, I sat in a meeting yesterday with a young boy for whom achievement means still being at school over the next six months, given that his behaviour in our programme and in school has been so poor. That will be a massive achievement for him. We will lose the chance to engage with him when he steps out of S2 or S3, because the programme does not continue beyond that, but, for me, it will be an achievement for him to stay in school. I am not looking at attainment; I just want to make sure that he stays in school. If he can do that, that will provide him with a chance to get some form of qualification when he goes into S4, S5 and S6.
I also have pupils in the programme who are very intelligent, so we look to use the programme to try to enthuse them to stay in school and make sure that their attendance is really high. Their achievement then is about what qualification they can get, which we can help them with.
Schools are buying into our programme, and we are starting to roll out an S3 version in a lot of schools. We have a chance now to shape how the S3 programme will look. One example is our work with Craigroyston community high school and Gracemount high school. Both those schools have looked at having an S3 programme that is not just about young people playing football once a day but about how we shape their learning during S3 so that when they step into S4 they are ready straight away to go and sit a national 4 or 5 in PE. We probably would not have presented a lot of those boys and girls at that level, but we can do so because we are getting to work with them at S3 and devising a programme for that. That might be a way for us to close the attainment gap in the long term, certainly for the boys and girls we are working with.
Can I just—
I will have to stop you there, because a number of members still want to get in and time is against us.
I was quite interested in the SFA’s evidence. It is mainly about the school of football, but I note that it contains a lot of assertions about the engagement of young people, rather than attainment. Do you have any evidence that the engagement illustrated in your submission, which is about football, extends to other sports or the arts?
We always ask our pupils to engage with extra-curricular clubs. A young boy or girl who comes into S1 and gets involved in our programme will get football five days a week, but I believe that they have to get involved in other sports and have other aspects to their lives. At that age, children need a general and broad education, because we want them to develop as people.
As a real-life example, I knew of a boy called Daniel who went through our programme at Newbattle high school in S1 and S2. When he went into S3, he wanted to follow his real passion, which was music, and with our full support he stepped out of football completely. He is now completing a music degree at university in Leeds. A lot of cross-curricular work certainly goes on in our programme.
That is anecdotal evidence based on your knowledge of individual cases. Have you gathered any statistics, figures or whatever to support the suggestion that young people are engaging more in learning and school-based education, other sports and the arts?
To be honest, I am probably the wrong man to answer that question; my colleague Donald Gillies, who should have been here today, is far more versed in the evidence. I can speak only from my experience, which is probably a wee bit more localised and comes from working with certain schools, but I think that young people are engaging more with other things. That is because of a number of factors; a lot of it is to do with the staff we have put in place, who work in the schools every day and who work with the rest of the school staff to ensure that those pupils are engaging in other subjects.
Organisations in the cultural sector such as Creative Sparks, which is based in Edinburgh, are definitely gathering evidence from most of Scotland’s key venues. That piece of work, which is supported by Creative Scotland, is looking at audience behaviour, and there is evidence that in areas where there is active participation there has been broader engagement with the art forms.
I will provide evidence if need be, but the work that my organisation, which is coming up to its fifth major celebration, has done in Dumfries’s deprived communities has had an impact. By matching postcodes, we can see that the audience is starting to buy tickets at a much quicker rate than we had expected. That said, we are making an awful lot of investment in the community to achieve that aim.
You are highlighting evidence of participation in the arts rather than evidence that such participation is leading to young people having better engagement with school education and learning in general.
At the risk of repeating myself, I will say that it is clear that young people who engage in the arts at school are, by virtue of the skills that they learn, proving to be much more employable when they leave school. If we were to put the same question to the Confederation of British Industry, say, it would say that the end product—the young people leaving school or university—display enhanced qualities as a result of that engagement.
As Graham Main pointed out, it is easy to measure outcomes for specific events such as the festival of dangerous ideas, but the fact is that very few organisations have the resources to carry out on-going in-depth impact studies, in addition to what they are trying to deliver. All of us here today have spent a lot of time in a lot of places with a lot of young people, and the experiences that I have heard about and the reactions of teachers to the way in which those people have blossomed have been uniformly positive. The problem lies not in trying to find out whether the approach works but in trying to find some methodology of proving to the committee that it works.
The difficulty for the committee is that we are always looking for evidence. Without an improvement in engagement, we will not get an improvement in attainment. That is a simple fact. How can we measure this? Where can it be measured? We all feel that participation in sport, the arts and so on is a good thing, and we all have anecdotal evidence that it seems to be a good thing, but we do not have the hard facts.
Would attendance records at school count as hard facts?
They would be part of it.
Records show that the average attendance in secondary 1 and secondary 2 is around 92 per cent, whereas the average attendance for the school of football sits at around 96 or 97 per cent. That is important for engagement and making sure that the pupils who we work with are at school on a daily basis.
Your submission says:
“Attendance at school was on average 4% higher for SoF than non SoF pupils”.
That is significant, but it is not a huge figure, is it?
I would say that 4 per cent of 180 days in the school year is pretty big. I am not a mathematician, but I think that that is a fairly high number of days to miss.
This might be getting into the anecdotal evidence that I talked about earlier but, even if a school’s average attendance level is, say, 97 per cent, one or two pupils’ attendance rate might be around 60 per cent, because their home life and social environment are poor. The fact that that happens but we still have an average of 96 or 97 per cent paints a bigger picture.
The measurement question is valid. How do we measure these things? The impact of the environment, the school, the home and interventions from arts, music and sport are difficult to measure. I would welcome research on that.
We hear all the time that we need to move away from anecdotal evidence to a situation in which we can point to the results. Surely we can go around the schools that have recognised sport and music programmes and do governmental research on the benefits. Are the children who are in poor cultures and environments achieving more than they otherwise would? That might be research that needs to be done.
I am not sure whether we are allowed to ask the committee members questions—
You can ask Colin Beattie a question.
I will throw a question back to the committee. What would you find if you could measure what would happen if the programmes were not in place? They are vital lifelines for a lot of young people.
I spend a lot of time in a part of Glasgow where I see kids being dropped off at things such as Saturday morning music schools by parents who are really involved and supportive and all of that, and who have their children’s violins over their shoulders and so on. We need to provide something for all the kids who do not have that supportive home environment and who do not have the money to access classes. The youth music initiatives, the youth hubs, the sports clubs and so on keep kids in a positive framework—I will not say on the straight and narrow, because that is ridiculous—and that is at least as important as a piece of paper with their exam results on it.
I do not doubt that you are correct. I do not think that anyone around the table would argue anything other than that sport and the arts enhance a pupil’s experience and result in a well-turned-out person. However, the issue is the old one of evidence.
Is a well-turned-out person not evidence?
How many of them are there?
There is another difficulty. I do not know about the experience of others at the table, but most of the young people with whom we work have a resurrection point—it happens way after they leave school, perhaps when they are 21 or 22—when they come back into the work that we do and are ready to take part. It is as if they have matured. If they had not been introduced to us in S1 or S2, they would not have known that we exist. Giving them a brief introduction to us during their development allows them to come back if they have gone off the straight and narrow. We need to focus on having community resources in place to deliver that.
I welcome the idea of building a community hub and I wonder whether our future schools should consider that in more detail. I sometimes find it quite galling that we have high-profile arts centres in well-to-do areas but not in our most deprived areas. Why not? The benefits are obvious.
12:00
I have a quick question that follows on from what Colin Thomson said. It is a cliché in the west of Scotland that, for someone from a working-class background, rock ’n’ roll and football have always been the ways out of poverty. Is this just repackaging everything that has gone on before?
There is not much evidence as such, because this has been going on since time immemorial, although it has worked in some areas. The churches and uniformed youth organisations used to do such work, but now it has been branded slightly differently and we are aiming to get educational attainment or just attainment and career paths in general. Last week, one of the contracting companies brought up the fact that, when surveyors, for example, talk about someone’s career path, it is not necessarily academic—they might have gone down the route of a trade.
Does anybody disagree with that?
No, although I disagree that we are repackaging an old song. Some of the most successful companies in the world just now—the Googles and the Apples—are full of creative free thinkers, not people with a batch of advanced highers.
The problem is that we are focusing on education in schools, but a lot of the kids we are working with on the streets at night time have dropped out of school and are not getting an education. They would not know who Carol Dweck is, let alone be able to spell her name. Those kids still need somewhere to go and somebody to trust—somebody they can open up to who is with them all the time and is working with them.
The beauty of the football club in the wider sports industry is that it has a lot of links to other businesses. We are bringing in kids through school-based work experience programmes and linking them in through sport and art—we do photography classes at the pitch side on match days, so they are linking in with the national media.
Businesses then ask to give the kids a chance to go on, even if they do not have qualifications. They trust the links that they have made through the club and take a chance on those young people, which provides them with an opportunity that they would never get by going to the job centre. Their CVs are the same, but we try to change them a wee bit by giving them that real-life experience. That is what the kids need, and we are trying to use the sport side to give them that. That is the value that we are getting, and other guys are getting the same.
I have a question about the cashback initiative that goes across the programmes that most of the panel members operate, whether they involve diversionary activities, funding for sports facilities or cashback for creativity. We are talking about addressing the attainment gap and reducing inequality. Is the funding from the cashback for communities initiative targeted properly? Given the renewed focus on tackling inequality and helping the hardest-to-reach young men and women, is spreading cashback funding over the whole of Scotland the right approach or should we be focusing on the same areas as the Government’s attainment fund is targeting?
That is an interesting question for us, as our organisation has never received cashback funding, despite having applied for it—but I will leave that for another committee.
I am slightly anxious about what you just said. In our sector, the attainment challenge fund seems to replicate what Creative Scotland is doing with the youth arts hubs. Some of the 11 youth arts hubs are in the areas that the fund covers, and I bet that some of those communities are benefiting from the cashback initiative. We need to be careful that we are not creating a poverty league table and saying, “That’s where the poverty exists.” In our community, our young people feel an acute sense of poverty, as they are often quite isolated because there is nothing around them for maybe 50 miles. I worry that we are focusing too much on the target zones.
We have to be realistic. Creative Scotland gets £3 million from cashback for creativity over three years. In a pan-Scotland context, that will be spread pretty thinly.
The funding base for our programme is that we have to apply to local area committees to receive funding. We managed to receive some cashback money through the Scottish FA for the midnight league programme this year. The money that gets delivered across the whole country does not go a long way, but it gives us a small part of the funding.
I think that the money should go to local areas rather than to national bodies. If it came into the local area, it could be divided up better, instead of people saying, “Let’s go into the main pots and see where it all goes from there.” If it was fed out locally, it would hit the areas a wee bit better.
First and foremost, the money from cashback is vital for us. The funding that we get from it is massive. When we were provided with the funding, we thought about where we wanted to spend it, given the inequalities in the areas that the money can be spent in. We have schools of football in the 10 most deprived areas in the Scottish index of multiple deprivation. We set ourselves that target. We thought that we needed to be in those areas.
As regards how we spend the money, the school of football is an S1 and S2 programme in the main. I had a discussion with a headteacher recently about whether the programme should change for his school and become an S4, S5 and S6 programme. The difficulty with that is that we would miss three years of engagement with young pupils. We want to make sure that the difficult pupils that we get in from difficult areas stay in school until S4. If we do not engage with them in S1, S2 and S3, we lose the chance to do that.
I think that we have identified the right areas that work for our programme in local authorities. The schools are starting to see that now and to try to match the investment from cashback with their own investment, to make sure that the programme can continue in S4, S5 and S6.
What we do is about diversionary activities in harder-to-reach areas. As Chris Smith said, there might be a need to say to partners in the area, “For S1 and S2, we are doing this. Who in the area could do the same thing and work with these harder-to-reach kids to take the programme on to S3 and S4?” In S5 and S6, we are looking to take those kids into employment, because the harder-to-reach kids are the ones that may be missing out. If we are working with young people in the establishment through a partnership approach, that will be better for them and, collectively, it will make the programmes work a lot better. People are faced with the challenge of getting their foot in the door—we are trying to get people to that point.
We are grateful for the cashback funding that we have received. With that funding, certain outcomes are set, which we deliver against—there is external evaluation of that. We focus the money back to communities across 32 local authorities. The money is used to work with partner organisations and employ club development officers to put in place 30 schools of rugby and diversionary activities. From that, we use the money and money of our own as a multiplier to get further funds out of local authorities.
That involves a partnership approach, which goes back to one of my earlier points. Things generally work when we have strong partnerships in place, especially when we have leadership in education. We can then bolt everything else on to that plan. Without cashback funding, we would not be in a lot of places.
It is great to hear about all those things working but, to get back to diversionary activities, I have been running a programme for six years in the Renfrewshire area and I have yet to work at night time with other sports. Is there something that could be brought into the streets at night to give the kids another opportunity outwith school and the education system? For kids who are not getting the opportunity to go to something after school or to be involved in clubs and who do not wish to be pushed in because they cannot afford it, we should have something that is street based. That should be there, but the kids are not getting the chance to do that, because the funding is not getting put into the places where it is needed for the kids on the street at night.
I am already convinced that sport and the arts have a positive effect on children’s wellbeing and on their educational attainment. Whether it is about developing or reinforcing people’s skills, making them more confident or improving their self-image, it can only have a positive effect on people’s education.
I am keen to learn more, particularly about the arts but also in relation to sport. In my constituency I am fortunate in having WHALE Arts in Wester Hailes, which does a fantastic job within the local community, and the Big Project Edinburgh in the Broomhouse area; people from that project sang at the opening ceremony of the Olympic games.
Wester Hailes and Broomhouse are both areas that I would describe as having challenges. I have seen the benefits of those two projects in my areas. What challenges, apart from the financial ones, do you guys face in rolling out the provision that you currently have to other areas? What soft skills for young people do you help to improve when you come into an area?
We face many challenges. One of the first things that I noticed when I went into an area was that it was a case of, “Who are you? Why are you here? Why are you coming to work with me?” We have to build up trust with the kids before they will start to work with us, open up and allow us to realise what their backgrounds are. That takes time. Every four years, a new group comes through and we have to keep working away.
You could throw money at programmes and projects all day, but it would never be enough to fix things. Kids have to trust us, believe in us and understand that we are going to help them. If there is a team of people who are prepared to do that every night, every day of the week on the streets where those kids will be, they will come back to us and they will change. We have proof that they are changing—they are moving into employment, they are doing programmes and they are taking charge. We have to still be there, but they have to understand that we believe in them. They have chaotic lifestyles—they live from day to day and minute to minute. First and foremost, they want to know that there is someone who cares for them. Only then can we start to get the best out of the kids.
The first thing to do is to pick the right person. We could pick a sports coach who was great at putting a drill out all day, but we have to get someone who can understand the kid and what they are going through. If that person can understand what they are going through, they will make a difference to that kid’s life and to the community. That is the most important thing that we think can be done through sport. Sport is sexy—it is great for getting young people involved—but if someone does not care about the child, they will never win; they will never make a difference.
When we asked the question about the challenges that people face in Dumfries and Galloway, through our arts hub process, an interesting point emerged, which was that people such as youth arts or youth development workers are very specialist workers, because they embody the roles of youth worker and the artist or the leader in their field. They are quite hard to come by, because they might have a good talent and be able to inspire and motivate young people to take part, but for us the best work often involves our having qualified youth staff with us, which can be costly.
Our sector responded to that question by saying that we need to have a more rounded development pathway for us as practitioners so that when young people present us with problems, we give them the right advice. I deliver face-to-face youth arts work, and I always will. Some of the stuff that comes at us is not about the sport or the art; it is about benefits or what the young person’s pal is going through. We have to make sure that the people who deliver such provision across our country are qualified.
As far as the skills that young people learn are concerned—I am sure that my colleagues will talk about the skills that they help young people to learn—it is hugely important for us as a nation to develop their creative thinking skills. When our parents were younger, they knew which job they would go into. There was a pathway or an apprenticeship. Most of the young people between the ages of 25 and 30 whom I work with have already had about 10 or 12 jobs since being at university. We really need to support our young people to be creative thinkers and to be flexible so that when jobs come up when they are older, they will have creative flexibility. That is extremely important, because it will enable them to adapt to situations.
I would say that there are two or three things that we need. Leadership in a school or a club is crucial. We also need the proper professional skills, as Graham Main has just flagged up.
I will give some examples. Dumfries and Galloway seems to be getting a lot of good publicity today. There was an expressive arts teacher in Dumfries and Galloway who managed to persuade her heidie to come off curriculum for a whole week, outwith the pressure that surrounds the exams. The whole school was then able to do a project for that week, so everybody was involved. That is important too because, as with academic schools, everybody is gifted, but they are gifted in different ways. When Scottish Screen was alive, before Creative Scotland came into being, it did a film-making project in Fife; all the kids had buy-in and were part of the project, whether they were sewing the costumes, making the scenery, behind the camera or acting. I am sure that Graham Main finds that happening all the time.
We need enough people who have the skills to make that happen in schools, and we need people in schools to be sufficiently receptive and confident to come out of the tramlines. At Creative Scotland, we have found that one of the shortfalls that we have at present is that there are not enough teachers with the confidence to teach creativity and to teach creatively. That will take time. The curriculum is not that old.
12:15
I echo all that has been said. What I am hearing is the importance of good old-fashioned teaching skills and teachers. The good teachers were the ones who spent an awful lot of time with children, and they were usually the ones who got results from children. I am sure that you can all remember teachers who went over and above and spent a lot of time.
We have to accept that, in the chaotic modern world, there are different challenges. We need teachers who are teaching beyond the curriculum—by that, I mean the inspirational people who are working on the streets; they might not be teachers by profession, but they are absolutely teachers in the way that they go about their business. It is about developing people and getting them to spend time with children and make a difference to young people’s lives.
The biggest challenge is to get more people out there who can think creatively, and to open up the confines of education to be receptive to that. I go back to my earlier point that, where that happens, it works very well. Where it does not happen, we have the silo mentality—lots of things happen and there are lots of good initiatives, but the culture does not change. What we are looking at here is a change of culture.
On the softer skills that we have touched on, the big role for us, working with children at the ages that we work with, is to teach them to be confident. That is a skill in itself. Any child who has a level of confidence such that they can stand up and speak in front of a group, speak to an adult and be polite and respectful when they speak to adults has a massive skill. I remember having a conversation with a university lecturer who was doing interviews with pupils who were applying, and it is not what they have on their CV that gets them in. That gets them an interview, but having the confidence to speak and having passion about something that they have been involved in are important. That is a massive soft skill.
Another issue is the time that people spend on programmes and their commitment. That seems to be disappearing quickly in society. I have always been taught that, when you commit to something, you see it through. At present, certainly in football, it seems that you commit to something, and if it does not quite work for you, you step out of it. We have seen that over the past two or three years. We ensure that our young people are aware that, when they step into the programme, they are making a commitment for two years; there will be rough times and challenges in those two years, but they have to see that through. Those softer skills are massive.
Stepping into a new school for the first time is always a challenge. When a teacher finds out that they might lose some of their pupils for a period each week because they are going to play football, that is a challenge. It is always met with, first, a chance to sit down and discuss the impacts of our programme. When we changed to the curriculum for excellence, we had to sit down and go through our programme and look at what expectations and outcomes we would hit through the school football. We had to show that, and we put together a curriculum map to show that we hit the Es and Os across six or seven of the areas. That is massive. That became a challenge, but it is one that has been met. Every time, we seem to manage to turn everybody round.
The other challenge is to engage with the parents. I did not get a chance to touch on that earlier, but the way in which we engage with parents is massive. Because the programme sits in areas of real deprivation, it can be really tough to get parents into school, so we need to look at ways in which we can do that. The first part is that any pupil who comes into our programme has to go through an interview process. The 11-year-old, P7 pupil has to come in with their parents to sit through an interview. It is very informal, but that first step is really important for us. There is then an information night when the pupils are selected for the programme.
We also engage with parents through nutrition evenings during the year and through school reports. We have a presence at every report night in schools, so the parents again have a chance to meet us. We provide them with three or four different opportunities in which we sit down with them and discuss how we think the pupil is doing and how we can engage with them to make them a little bit better.
I thank you all for coming along this morning. It has been an interesting session, which has been very helpful for our inquiry into educational attainment in its widest sense. We still have a lot of work to do and we will carry on with our inquiry over the coming weeks and months, but once again I thank you for taking the time to come along. I particularly thank Chris Smith for stepping in at the last minute.
12:20 Meeting suspended.Previous
Education (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1