Additional Support for Learning (Code of Practice)
The minister is coming at 12.00, so I would like to deal with item 3 now. We have a draft report before us, which was prepared following the committee's earlier discussions. In fairness, some of the matters were dealt with by Lord James Douglas-Hamilton's letter and the response from the minister, but we have a fairly substantial report in other respects.
Paragraphs 23, 24 and 25 relate to the relationship between personal learning plans, individualised educational programmes, records of needs and co-ordinated support plans. Those paragraphs do not properly capture the tone of the issues. We are no longer concerned with the "50% of children"—if that figure is indeed right—mentioned in paragraph 23 who would have had a record of needs but who will not have a CSP. We are concerned with the practical needs of working through the different documents and how they all work together.
We had the handicap that there was not yet much information available about how personal learning plans would work. That was the central point. Do colleagues agree that the slant is wrong? The issue is not so much insufficient emphasis on personal learning plans as insufficient information and the need for the draft code to be clear about how the different plans relate to one another. We were not entirely satisfied with how the draft report covers that. Will the clerks be able to reformulate that bit?
If that is agreed, yes.
Are there any other general observations on the draft?
I have a couple of points about transitional planning, which we referred to last week and which Futureskills Scotland has raised with me. First, there should perhaps be a more explicit statement in the code about the role that Careers Scotland can play in supporting young people with additional support needs at transition. The second point—which I did not pick up until it was pointed out to me—is that chapter 5 of the draft code says that the process of seeking information
"must be started no later than 12 months before a child or young person is expected"
to leave school. However, during the discussions on the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill, it was made fairly clear to us that those duties should have been fulfilled no later than 12 months before a child or young person is expected to leave school.
The Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004 says that, I think.
Yes, but the code does not; the code implies something slightly different.
That is right. Well spotted.
I have a number of points to raise. First, on paragraphs 5 and 9—
Of the report?
Yes.
As opposed to the code.
Paragraphs 5 and 9 of the draft report. I beg your pardon. Paragraph 9 talks about the
"decision to produce a user friendly version of code of practice for parents and young people".
I do not remember discussing that in those terms. We have had a discussion of the full code and I am confident that the full code begins to meet our concerns. However, I am concerned about paragraph 9 in particular, which says:
"The committee fully endorse the Scottish Executive's decision".
The background to that is that the code was designed to be a working document primarily for the use of professionals as a resource. Parents and others would have much more limited acquaintance with the code—they could be referred to the full code, but there would be another, more user-friendly document that they could pick up. That is what the minister said that he was producing.
I have no qualms about that being a good thing do, but we have examined the full document at length and I am confident that it does what it is supposed to do. It is certainly on the right lines. It is true that we fully endorse the Executive's decision, but we do not endorse fully the abbreviated document, which might not be as clear.
We said that we fully endorse the document, but it has not been produced yet.
Yes, but will we see the shortened document? Has it been made clear that the full document is freely available to parents should they want to read it?
Right, both those points are good. They should be put into the report. The wording is okay, but it needs that addition: we shall want to read the document to enable us to comment on it. Nothing will prevent the full document from being available. Do those two answers satisfy you?
Yes. Absolutely.
Is the user-friendly document the one that was produced by Enquire?
That is a different document. The work carried out by Enquire is useful, but the abbreviated document has yet to be worked on, which is why I was anxious about it. I understood the draft report to be saying that we endorsed the document.
That is right. Do you have other points to make, Ken?
Yes. I do not understand paragraph 11. It states:
"there will be a resource provided … for the proper professional scrutiny of requests to the external independent adjudicator."
I do not understand to what "a resource" and "the external independent adjudicator" refer.
The point is about the need to take oral evidence in addition to written evidence, depending on the circumstances, I think. It was felt that some people—parents, in particular—might be disadvantaged if they were not used to producing written material as evidence.
The issue was slightly wider than that. The report refers to the decision whether, in fact, a valid request was made. I do not mean only in terms of its style, but the criteria for going for independent adjudication. That was the point. It was said that things would be carried out at ministerial level—not by Euan Robson, but by Executive officials at the appropriate level.
Yes.
I asked whether the adjudicator or someone else should undertake the action instead of there being another formulation.
For what would the request be made?
A request would be made for independent adjudication. We are talking about the adjudication system.
The draft report does not say that. There is nothing wrong with the paragraph. I am sure that it is accurate, but I do not understand it.
Those issues arose out of Lord James Douglas-Hamilton's letter, which said that validation of requests for further adjudication falls to Scottish ministers. The paragraph developed from that text. You are right, however. Perhaps the matter could be clarified under a subheading such as "Validation of requests for independent adjudication".
Paragraphs 16, 17 and 18 of the draft report do not quite capture our argument. They certainly do not capture what I meant during our discussions. Two different points are made in paragraph 16: the availability of speech and language therapy and what level of therapy would qualify as significant. That important point was raised by Philip Kunzlik and several others. The helpful long submission by Sense Scotland outlined the issues perfectly.
Paragraph 16 of the draft report states:
"The Committee note that there remains a suspicion among parents".
We should say that suspicion remains among "some parents". If possible, a line should be added to that statement. The code and the 2004 act specifically try to get away from confrontation between parents and local education authorities. The act and the code do not recreate the tensions that bedevilled the record of needs system, in which the record of needs became a device to lever resources out of the system. The new system is based on the idea of provision across the board for all children with additional support needs. Although the demarcation point relates to a co-ordinated support plan, the point is that we are trying to get away from the idea of CSPs just replicating records of needs and being the only way for parents to access resources. It is important to state that. I suggest adding the words "some parents" and saying that the committee also recognises that the code tries to avoid the confrontational approach between parents and education authorities.
The aim is to avoid a confrontational approach and using a CSP as the basis for accessing resources.
Exactly—that should be spelled out, as I said. I agree with paragraphs 15 and 18, which say that an explicit statement should be made that assessment of a child's needs should be independent from resources, but that should be accompanied by the idea that a CSP is not a device to guarantee resources.
I do not think that paragraphs 17 and 18 are right.
The third sentence in paragraph 17 is not quite right—there is something wrong with it.
I am concerned not just about that sentence, but about the whole meaning. I have noted—although I am not sure whether I can read my writing—that the written evidence highlighted a related concern about the significance of the role of health services, particularly access to speech and language therapy. The trouble with making shorthand notes is that they cannot be read afterwards.
Depending on how it is read, the code could imply that one child's requirement for a speech and language therapist once or twice a week was not a significant need, yet anybody who knows about the system would say that that was a very significant need. That is a question of how the code is read. I agree that if a school or a class, rather than a child, accessed a speech and language therapist once or twice a week, that might not be a significant need. Sense Scotland's submission says that. We should return to Sense Scotland's submission, which captured the matter, as did Philip Kunzlik. That would be sensible.
What is relevant is not so much concerns and all the background as the committee's view that the code should reflect the fact that speech and language therapy issues ought to be significant. Do we want to phrase the comment as strongly as that?
The code steers away from describing exactly the threshold for qualification.
However, it gives examples.
It gives examples, but it is difficult to know what the example about access to speech and language therapy means. Access to speech and language therapy is difficult, because the service is usually provided by a health authority rather than an education authority. The point is crucial. My concern is that we do not make clear enough what is expected of health authorities. The matter brings resources to the fore.
We must say what we expect to qualify as significant and therefore to qualify for a CSP. I disagree with the last sentence of paragraph 17, which says:
"There is the possibility that this might result in … downgrading".
We should say that slightly differently. We should say that that position could create a disincentive and therefore might lead to downgrading of a child's significant support needs to avoid preparing a CSP. That could be flagged up as an anxiety, but we cannot say that that will definitely happen, because that does not follow.
I will suggest a way forward. We are not trying to redraft the code.
Absolutely.
We are encouraging the Executive to revisit the code's ambiguity. I tried to redraft the text of paragraph 17, but we should say that we believe that the current code could be better drafted to affirm individual children's right of access to therapy services and, in so doing, to alleviate parents' on-going concerns. If we took that approach, we would simply invite the Executive to redraft that bit of the code in light of those concerns, without saying whether they are appropriate.
I should point out that the current examples that have been given do not provide any clarity.
Exactly. As a result, the best contribution that we can make is to invite the Executive to redraft the code in that light.
I also suggest that we put the second sentence in paragraph 18 in bold. I realise that that might well happen with some of the recommendations, but I think that one or two other points in the report should certainly stand out.
The problem of access to and availability of therapy services has been highlighted by either Philip Kunzlik or Sense Scotland. At the moment, those services are simply not there and the problem is that appropriate organisations might suggest support that was based on what was available rather than on what ideally should be available. To be fair, we should acknowledge that the minister realised that that was a problem and said that he had undertaken to delete the paragraph that mentioned therapy services or used such services as an example.
That is helpful.
I have a number of very brief points, two of which refer to drafting. Paragraph 4 mentions "25 November" but does not give the exact date in February when the consultation closed. It might also be worth adding to the end of paragraph 6 the number of comments that we received.
In paragraph 29, it might be useful to add after the words
"revisit the issue with Universities Scotland"
a phrase such as "and the Association of Scottish Colleges and other interested parties". That is what the ASC wants. Universities and colleges should be subject to the same obligations to help those with additional support needs, but their status as independent bodies must be recognised. Such institutions have excellent structures in place for those who have additional support needs and are co-operating effectively in that respect. That might be a drafting point, but it is very important to them.
I hope that we can agree to delegate authority to the convener to approve any final changes to the text of the report to be published next week and that we can establish the precise date on which it will be published.
Before we move on, I want to draw members' attention to a letter from the Deputy Minister for Health and Community Care—
I am sorry, convener, but I want to make another few points.
I am not bringing the item to a close; I will come back to you in a moment. I simply want to draw attention to two points that emerge from the letter, which has emerged from the Health Committee's consideration of the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Bill and concerns sight tests for children of school age and below school age. I should point out that the Health Committee is looking at that issue in a slightly different way.
The minister's letter refers to the importance of the normal sight test, which takes place when children start school, and the need to pick that test up later if it is missed. If such an assessment is carried out as a matter of routine, it should check difficulties with eyesight and accompanying problems. We should perhaps adapt certain references in our report to take account of the minister's letter. I assume that the Minister for Education and Young People will take on board the fact that ministerial links will help with that important issue, which echoes the problem that we uncovered about picking up things later on if they have been missed.
I think that my colleague Kate Maclean is lodging an amendment to the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Bill to that effect.
I turn to funding responsibility and dispute resolution. Paragraph 22 refers to
"the development of a simple system for resolving funding disputes".
I would prefer to say that we should have a simple system that clarifies to local authorities their responsibilities for funding before funding disputes arise. That sentence continues:
"and for establishing procedures to avoid conflict between authorities."
I am looking for specific guidance saying who should pay. That does not mean having a mechanism to resolve who pays once there has been disagreement. The Executive's guidance should be clear in saying who should pay up front.
I was looking at that with more of a gimlet eye, as a Glasgow representative with concerns about what the implications might be. We require clarity. I am not sure that I know what the precise arrangements are. That issue needs to be sorted out and made clear so that children can get a place in some other local authority. Perhaps other things could happen after that—the whole issue gets complicated when the children go on to secondary school. One imagines that there must be clarity behind the scenes, but we need to be clear about it ourselves. Ken Macintosh's proposed correction will help.
The only cases of which I am aware are those where there is not clarity.
I do not agree with paragraph 26 of the draft report. We did not hear evidence on the issue. The point was raised, but I think that it is more a reflection of the how the matter is reported in the newspapers. I do not think that paragraph 26 does justice to the Association of Headteachers in Scotland's concerns. It puts all the emphasis on resources, which was not quite the association's point.
That goes back to a point that I made earlier. I wonder whether paragraph 26 could simply be deleted. The matter is dealt with, albeit in a slightly different formulation, elsewhere.
The topic is important, but I do not think that that wording captures the points that have been made.
Paragraph 30 is headed "Transitions from record of needs". I am not sure that it was the right solution
"to include this information as an annex to the code of practice".
Did we discuss that?
That is what the minister said.
He said that he was going to do that, did he?
Yes, he did. He said that he thought that there was a separate document covering that.
Of which we had a copy.
That was why the annex to the code of practice was mentioned. It was to add that information in for the sake of clarity and openness.
Is that not still under consultation?
It is, yes.
I think that it is and I think that the draft report reflects that. That seemed to me to be a sensible way to progress.
Let us note those additional changes. Are members happy for me to finalise the draft report, or shall I get it sent round by e-mail?
Yes.
Yes what? Do you want me to finalise it?
E-mail it round, please.
E-mail it, please—although we trust you.
Okay. I will work on it with the clerks and we will send a version round. When does the draft report have to be finalised?
We want to get it done as soon as possible, convener. The final deadline is 20 June. We want to get the report out well before then, however.
We should manage to do that within a day or two, given the stage that we have reached. Thank you for that.
Before we hear from the minister, let us take a five-minute break, for the usual purposes.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I welcome Peter Peacock, the Minister for Education and Young People. There is quite a serious supporting panel: Ruth Campbell is the policy manager of the Scottish Executive pupil support and inclusion division; Laura Joyce is a policy officer in the same division; and Philip Rycroft, whom we have met several times, is the head of the schools branch.
I believe that you want to make an opening statement, minister, but I urge you to be fairly brief because we are quite tight for time this morning.
I will try to do that convener. I just want to give the committee the context of how the Executive approaches motivational issues. That might help with some of the questions that members want to ask.
I have been following at a distance what the committee has been doing and have read some of the evidence. Obviously, the inquiry has the potential to be very wide ranging. I want briefly to address three questions. First, what evidence do I have about motivation or demotivation in the school system? Secondly, is the motivation of head teachers, teachers and pupils of concern to me? Thirdly, what am I doing to address any concerns that I have?
What broad indicators do I have at my disposal to show whether the system is motivated or not? There are several issues. Do we struggle to recruit teachers into the system? The answer to that is no; we turn away far more people than we take. The recruitment of teachers is up by more than 30 per cent in the current year, compared with previous years.
Are teachers retiring early in droves and are they desperate to get out of the system? The answer is no. There has always been a high level of early retirement; that is part of the nature of the profession and the demands that it makes on people. Is the retirement rate increasing dramatically? No. There is no significant change in the trend.
Are more kids staying on in the system, or do they leave at the first opportunity? The answer is that marginally more are staying on. Slightly more girls are staying on than boys. The figure for boys is static and the figure for girls is increasing slightly, but there is no overall rush to get out of school, compared with previous years.
Are more kids taking exams in the fourth, fifth and sixth years? The answer is yes. As a proportion of the whole school population, more pupils are sitting exams. Is attainment in the five to 14 age range improving? For the majority, it is. There has been improvement of up to 20 percentage points in some test results for that age range.
Are more pupils leaving the system with no qualifications? No—fewer are leaving with no qualifications. There has been a marginal improvement in the right direction.
Are more kids getting good qualifications out of the system? Yes. More kids are getting five or more qualifications at level 5 before they leave school than was the case in the past. Again, it is a marginal gain, but no one is arguing with it.
Do pupils feel satisfied with their school experience? The recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study shows that, for the most part, they do. Seventy per cent get on well with their teachers; 86 per cent thought that their teachers were interested in them; 90 per cent thought that their teachers would give them more support if they asked for it; and 85 per cent had a sense of belonging to the school. There are many positive indicators.
However, some indicators point in the other direction. The same OECD study showed that 27 per cent of kids in Scotland did not want to be in school. That is better than the OECD average, but it is still a significant number. Fifty-six per cent—marginally higher than the OECD average—said that they often felt bored at school, which is clearly a concern. Thirty-one per cent felt that they were never given interesting homework.
What other evidence do we have? Last year, 21,000 pupils were excluded from schools in Scotland. That represents only 3 per cent of the school population but it is still a significant number that is not to be ignored. Most of them were boys, and many were repeat offenders—they had been excluded more than once.
Our latest figures also show that 19 per cent of pupils had tried truanting. We do not know whether that figure is rising or falling or is static, because this is the first time that we have collected these statistics. However, on the face of it, it is a significant number. Nine per cent of our pupils account for 90 per cent of our unauthorised absences. The problem is concentrated, but if someone is truanting they are clearly not motivated to be at school.
The biggest issue is that the national tariff score for the 20 per cent of pupils who are the lowest attaining in our system has not really shifted in recent years. While other pupils are improving their performance, the performance of that bottom 20 per cent is pretty static. The statistic represents about 12,000 kids, a significant number of whom come from the most deprived communities in Scotland.
Overall, we have a generally positive education system. A quick summary of the evidence to the committee is that kids are reasonably well motivated, although there is a clear problem at the bottom end of the system. Also, with the majority who are performing well and who are well motivated, all the anecdotal evidence from teachers and parents is that some could be better motivated and could get even more out of the system. In international terms, we are performing well, although not as well as some other countries are. Obviously, motivation is a factor in that.
My second question was whether the motivation of those who are in the system, including teachers and pupils, is of concern to me. The answer is that that is one of our key concerns. Poorly motivated pupils, teachers and head teachers perform much less adequately than they would do if they were well motivated. A huge number of our current actions are designed to address that motivational issue, which is the third issue that I want to touch on.
We are addressing the issue through a range of key drivers. At present, the main driver that underpins our actions is "ambitious, excellent schools: our agenda for action", a policy document that came out at the back end of last year. The aims that are set out in that document include setting high expectations for the system as a whole and for individual schools, local authorities and pupils; ensuring that we give a higher priority to thinking about and investing in leadership as a key resource in the system; radically reforming the curriculum and giving teachers more flexibility and more choice about what they teach and when; and placing more trust in teachers and head teachers by giving them more professional discretion and more freedom. Another aim is to have more personalisation of learning to try to turn education from a largely production-based system into a personalised one. That will be a huge challenge, but it is necessary if we are to tackle motivation issues and plan kids' learning better.
Another dimension of the reform programme is the aim of providing more choice for pupils about what to study, when to study, what exams to sit and when to sit them. We also aim to remove clutter from the curriculum, by which I mean subjects that we do not need to teach in the way that we did in the past. That can create space for other opportunities, such as music, sport, drama, enterprise education and other subjects that we know are motivators for kids. If kids experience such subjects and enjoy them, they will stick in the system and take other subjects. Rather than encourage just the academic stream, as we did in the past, the programme also aims to open up more vocational options and to give greater respect to such options as clear, legitimate and desirable outcomes for young people to pursue. We are taking a range of measures through our ambitious, excellent schools programme.
Other key drivers are initial teacher education for the next generation of teachers, and what we are doing to equip teachers to improve performance and to motivate pupils more effectively. We are trying to improve student placements and we have radically improved probation for the profession, so that teachers now have a structured probationary year, which helps to improve teaching practice. That relates clearly to motivation. We have also changed the approach to continuing professional development, with the aim of developing classroom skills. A hugely important point is that teachers' craft and their pedagogical style are critical to kids' motivation to learn.
One big measure that we are taking that receives little public attention—it is a quiet revolution inside Scottish education—is our assessment is for learning programme, which is founded on the belief that learners learn best when there are clear but high expectations of them; when they receive quality feedback on how well they are performing through the use of formative assessment techniques; when advice is given on how to improve performance; and when the learner has a high degree of participation in setting the learning objectives and targets that are to be achieved, which gives them individual ownership of their learning. The programme is having a profound impact on classroom practice—one need only meet the teachers who are on it to realise how it empowers them and provides new ways of working.
I could mention other important drivers, such as parental involvement and how we share best practice. Below all that work, we also promote many individual initiatives by individual teachers. In her evidence to the committee, Ruth Campbell mentioned 17 or 18 distinct programmes. We regard those as programmes that support teachers and widen their repertoire by providing them with a choice of techniques that they can use in schools and classrooms to motivate pupils more effectively.
There are big drivers of change and support for motivation. When I go round schools, I am struck by the enormous variety of things that teachers do that help to motivate pupils. A rich tapestry of activities goes on in our schools, from foreign trips to good enterprise education, sport, music and the choir. Hundreds of things are happening that help motivation.
That is all I want to say in giving the committee some context. Pupil motivation is important to me. We are doing things that at their root are about improving motivation, because if we get that right the performance of the system as a whole and of individual pupils will be that much better.
Thank you. That was helpful. The committee is trying to get a general picture of the system and to home in on bits of the system that could work better or policies that are not achieving what they should.
I will begin—as I have done previously—by trying to get an idea of the scale of disaffection and discipline problems in schools. They attract a lot of media publicity, yet on our school visits they are not the issues that come through. As I said earlier, I suspect that you can smell a good school as you go through the door, because of the general attitude. Do you have a feel for the extent of the problems in schools and the extent to which they are dealt with not by penal sanctions but by positive measures, such as leadership and motivation, which are exactly what we are looking at in our inquiry?
Those are among the thorniest issues that I have to deal with, because I have to address the real and, in some places, intensifying problems in some schools. Those problems are: the nature of societal change; kids running away from home; kids living in drug-abusing and alcohol-abusing families; kids living in homes where there is massive domestic abuse; and kids living with mental health and emotional problems, which are becoming more apparent in our society. All the objective evidence shows that those problems are intensifying and that they do not stop at the school gate but come right into the school. I recognise those issues and acknowledge that, day by day, teachers in many schools face a lot of low-level problems, and that in some schools they face high-level problems—not every day, but occasionally. We are doing a range of things to address those issues.
I have visited dozens of schools and, as I have said privately, I do not think that I have ever left one—well, perhaps one—without being overwhelmed and genuinely inspired by what I have seen. You meet the most fantastic young people and great teachers. You meet well-motivated kids who are sophisticated in their understanding of society, what their role is, what they can do and how they are learning. They are doing really positive things. Most schools that I visit are havens of calm, reason and good order. That is not to say that schools do not have issues to deal with—there are low-level problems, as teachers keep reporting, which is why we are taking so much action.
Are we aware of the facts? Today, we received from HMIE its follow-up study on "Better Behaviour—Better Learning", which showed that one in 30 primary schools and one in 12 secondary schools have more pronounced problems than others. The convener and I visit schools and we see the differences. We know what works in relation to disaffection and behaviour improvement. If all the things that I am speaking about are working in a school, the situation is better than if they are not working.
Fundamentally, it comes down to good leadership in the school. That is not just about the inspired individual leader; it is about the person who empowers and liberates their staff and pupils. Pupils can be part of the leadership of the school and take responsibility. The other day, I was in a school that is setting out its expectations of its pupils and where the pupils are setting out their clear expectations of the staff. The deal in that school was that staff had to behave appropriately to pupils as much as pupils had to behave appropriately to staff. That was explicit and understood.
When a school has rules that are clear and which pupils and staff believe are fairly applied, there is better order. When staff are motivated by the actions of the head teacher, teachers motivate pupils better and the school performs better. Other things that will result in schools that are havens of calm, reason and good order are flexibility in the curriculum—provided that it is used appropriately—the existence of lots of school clubs and the provision of more parental support than average.
That is not to say that something will not happen in those schools. Our entire history of experience of school life tells us that young people are challenging. From time to time, fights and all sorts of things will happen. It is a question of dealing with and minimising such situations by improving motivation and bearing down on disaffection. The HMIE report showed that problems can be dealt with when all the right measures are in place. That is why schools of similar type in different communities perform differently. We must keep addressing the situation in schools in which such measures are not fully in place. That is one of the many purposes of inspection.
The difference between schools is interesting. The potential exists for schools in areas that face significant challenges to do more than they sometimes do at the moment.
Minister, your remarks were enormously helpful, as we have been struggling to bring the evidence to bear on our inquiry. It was useful that you focused on the evidence, but I still have a few questions, which might involve your writing to us.
You talked about the relatively small number of pupils who are seriously struggling—I think that you mentioned that the lowest 20 per cent amounted to about 12,000 pupils. There is an issue on which it would be helpful if officials could provide clarification. Pupils can be motivated only if they are at school. The fact that a small number of pupils simply do not turn up means that they cannot be motivated. It might be helpful if officials could write to us with some trend analysis of how many pupils are consistently not at school and whether the distribution is even across Scotland or whether there is a concentration in particular areas. That information would be helpful.
You mentioned that we know what works, but I think that only those who are at the centre really know what works. You also spoke about the rich tapestry of activity in our schools. During our inquiry, the committee has heard about many parts of that rich tapestry and has listened to everyone asserting that they have got it right. On the back of what you have said, perhaps you could write to the committee with the Executive's view of what works. I am sure that that will reflect what you have said today about the craft of teaching, the role of initial teacher education and the assessment for learning programme. It would be helpful to find out about your view from the centre of what works. The committee has got a wee bit lost in the rich tapestry.
Do you want an indication not just of what works in the minister's view, but why he thinks that it works, which would involve reference to the research background?
Yes.
We will be happy to provide the committee with more material on that, to the extent that it exists—such material does not always exist. A few days ago, Philip Rycroft and I talked about how interesting it is that although billions of pounds are spent on world education research, no one has the perfect solution to everything. If they did, we could all retire and the system could run itself—God forbid. We will provide what evidence we can. As I have described, we know from good practice what is working in Scotland.
A weakness in Scottish education has been that we are not good at sharing good practice; my experience in other portfolios and in my past life tells me that that is a weakness in Scottish public service generally. A striking feature of the education system is how isolated an individual teacher in their classroom is from the rest of their school. That is where staffrooms and CPD are important. I am making efforts on reducing class contact time and providing more time for activities such as preparation, discussion and marking. Schools are isolated from other schools and—I do not mean this in an offensive sense—local authorities traditionally look to themselves and what they do within their boundaries and do not look beyond those boundaries often enough. That is understandable.
One of the interesting and dramatic post-devolution changes in education and, perhaps, in other aspects of the Executive's life is that we increasingly find ourselves saying that we see things from the centre that others do not necessarily see, albeit that we do not always see them as clearly as others sometimes see them. However, we need to help to oil the wheels of the system and share best practice. Ruth Campbell does an awful lot more work than anyone in previous generations of Scottish Office civil servants on getting out and speaking to people, networking with them and connecting them. We have a potentially bigger role to play in all that but, equally, local authorities have a role, too, as do professional organisations such as the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland.
I will get Philip Rycroft to comment in a moment but, before he does so, I will pick up Wendy Alexander's first point and give the committee what we know about the lowest 20 per cent. There are clear patterns. I do not know whether Ruth Campbell has the figures handy, but looked-after children's life chances are substantially diminished, compared with other children's, simply because of the fact that they are looked after. Looked-after children who live in a community with a high entitlement to free school meals have even worse life chances than looked-after children who do not live in such communities. There are another two factors: one is to do with single parents, but the other escapes me. A child who faces a conjunction of those four factors has almost zero life chances, to be frank. We know where such communities are and we know the concentrations of deprivation that have an impact.
The school meals statistics that we put out yesterday show that although there is a higher average take-up of school meals in areas that have a high number of pupils who are entitled to free school meals, those who are most entitled are not taking up free school meals nearly as much as they should, because they are off sick, because they are truanting through being disaffected, or for health reasons. Philip Rycroft and I have just come back from some intensive discussions on how we can do more to address the spatial concentration of educational disadvantage in Scotland. The matter is complex but, on the face of it, the evidence is so clear that we must do more about it in future.
Perhaps Philip Rycroft would like to pick up the point about shared practice.
Philip Rycroft (Scottish Executive Education Department):
The minister mentioned our changing role at the centre. It is far more about creating networks, getting information to flow round them and finding increasingly sophisticated means of doing that. When the Scottish schools digital network comes on stream, it will be a very powerful instrument for making knowledge and information flow round the system.
It is also about attitudes to policy making. For example, we went about the assessment is for learning programme by consulting widely, working with people on where we wanted to get to and then running a series of pilots to work out what worked. However, we did not run the pilots; teachers did that, so the practice was developed in the classroom and the conversations were teacher to teacher. The momentum behind that programme is down to the fact that the foundation was laid in the classroom. That sort of model will inform the way in which we develop the curriculum for excellence. We will not impose a view from the centre; it is a matter of taking out ideas and the clear sense of direction that the curriculum for excellence now gives us and allowing teachers to develop the good practice so that there is ownership of it in the schools.
I will say one other thing about the richness of what we have. Because HMIE is in and out of schools every day of the week, examining closely what goes on in them, it has an enormous database of good practice. It spreads that good practice through documents such as "How good is our school" and "Count us in", which consider good practice on inclusion. It is also working on pulling some good practice together under the heading "What makes an excellent school?" to put the capstone on the array of extraordinarily rich material that is accessible to teachers and schools.
There has been support for champions of particular issues, such as eco-schools or the primary schools in which French is taught. It is the job of a particular teacher to lead such initiatives with a bit of enthusiasm, which seems to have worked quite well.
I was struck by the emphasis on staffrooms, because I have heard that, in one or two of the new schools that we have been building, staffrooms have been missed out. If that is the case, I would echo the ministerial suggestion that they should not be missed out.
I visited a school that is in design—I will not say where—and that was one of the issues that the head teacher was trying to reconcile that day; I know which way he was leaning. Staffrooms have negative impacts as well, but they have the potential to be overwhelmingly positive as a way of getting isolated people together.
A couple of weeks ago, we discussed the nature of the Finnish education system with people from Finland. We will have more such discussions because of its interesting aspects. Among the key features that make the Finnish system a success are the way in which teachers behave in a collegiate fashion and the research disposition of individual teachers. As part of their professional task as teachers, they share good practice with colleagues. They believe that such action is the reason why performance improves and remains at a high level. Teachers should have the opportunity to develop practice collectively. Bringing teachers together for such purposes within a school is of huge importance.
That example emphasises your earlier point that the quality of school leadership is absolutely crucial to establishing a school ethos, building a team of teachers and empowering both the staff and the pupils within a school. Can you explain your systematic approach towards lifting the levels of school leadership throughout the country?
In the past, we had not identified leadership as a key issue, but we have now identified our approach as a clear, major priority for the future and we intend to focus attention on it. From our own personal experience and the evidence that we receive from inspections and so on, we all know that, when a school's leadership changes, the institution transforms utterly within a year. The atmosphere and motivation change and the system performs so much better.
We know that leadership is crucial to how schools operate and we understand what gives rise to that. There are many factors to what constitutes a good leader. Leadership operates in different ways. We are receiving support from the Hunter Foundation for our ambition to develop leadership within our system so that it is the best in the world. We are willing to go anywhere to find people to help us with that task in Scotland. Furthermore, we want people in Scotland who understand our aim and who are working extremely well to share such their experience with their colleagues more effectively.
We intend to invest more money in our project. Over the coming period, we shall invest several millions of pounds in leadership development. In the past wee while, we have been part of the Columba 1400 initiative in Skye, which is one manifestation of how we can concentrate resources and allow people to reflect on their practice and share experiences with others. Almost without exception, the people whom I have met who have taken part in the initiative have come back refreshed, with new perspectives and new goals. Sometimes, such experiences have resulted in the head teacher, other members of the management team and, indeed, pupils—the whole school—having a joint vision of how to refashion the school.
We have a Scottish qualification for headship and we are about to review the standard for headship required to achieve that qualification. We want to open up more routes so that a leader's competence is recognised. We want to create more choice and opportunities for head teachers so that such outcomes can be achieved.
We hope to develop a programme whereby we can spot the next generation of leaders. From where will they come? What attributes can be spotted early in their career and how can those attributes be nurtured and developed to provide more opportunities?
We talked hitherto about creating a leadership academy in Scotland, but that may not be the right title because it implies that only one place would be involved, whereas we intend to use resources to set up a distributive network of opportunities for people. I think that we are about to advertise for the head of the network. A small team will pool together resources and drive forward the project. During the next few days, we want to publish a discussion document that will explain how we want to flesh out our ideas for leadership in consultation with head teachers and others in the profession. We want to know what they are looking for and to make sure that we share the same objectives and can agree on how to push forward the project. Having identified the opportunity for such action, we are beginning to make the necessary investments and to put things in place to make our aims more coherent and consistent.
Philip Rycroft may want to deal with any points that I have missed.
I will add one point. We are considering a number of bids that have come in for the schools with ambition programme. One of the common features of a lot of those bids is the question of leadership. That will give us another rich source of ideas and practice, which will be evaluated and spun out round the system. It is another tremendous opportunity for us to develop this line of thinking.
A lot of new thinking and work are obviously going into this. We have been trying to address the question of teacher motivation and careers over the past five or six years, particularly in the light of the McCrone agreement. How does your developing thinking on leadership link to the principles on which the McCrone agreement was built, or are we looking beyond that agreement? If you could flesh that out for us, that would be helpful.
In a sense, there is no direct connection. We came to our conclusion about leadership independently of reaching our conclusion about McCrone. Having said that, lots of aspects of the McCrone settlement were designed to deal with the question of motivation.
When I was the Deputy Minister for Children and Education, in the first session of the first Parliament, we were on the verge of a national strike. All the negotiations with the teachers and the employers—the millennium discussions, as they were called—had broken down and there was a huge lack of trust on both sides. We were heading for absolutely dire trouble, which is why the McCrone inquiry was launched. We wanted to ensure that the teaching profession was better rewarded and better respected and that it had the status in society that it ought to have.
Teaching is, arguably, the most important job in society. It is the foundation on which everything else is built, and teachers deserve respect for the role that they carry out. However, we had got to a point at which that was not recognised in teachers' conditions of service, and teachers felt beleaguered. We have tried to turn some of that around, but there is still a lot to do. Part of that work will be done through our curriculum reforms. A lot of that is about saying to teachers, "You are the experts in education. You are trained professionals who have undergone long years of training to get to where you are. We want to give you more trust in what you do. We want to trust your professional judgments in the broad frameworks that we make." That is one way of restoring trust in the profession and giving it the respect that it deserves.
All those things are part of the McCrone settlement and are growing out of it. The chartered teacher route has started, and we are considering how the role of chartered teachers in our schools might develop. Do chartered teachers have a leadership role? The answer is that they probably do, which connects chartered teacher status to the leadership agenda.
More widely, we think that the investment that we are making in leadership is right and necessary, and we will continue to make it. As we go through the debate, we will have to keep making connections between the classroom teacher and leadership throughout the whole system. A very powerful set of connections are necessary.
I assume that you are working with the Scottish Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society. You and I attended an inspiring SELMAS seminar dinner one night a few months ago, and Judith McClure, the president of SELMAS, has appeared before the committee. They seem to be people whom it would be well worth using as champions of that concept.
Absolutely.
There have been changes in the levels of promoted posts as a result of the McCrone settlement. I have received complaints from a number of people about the way in which local authorities are moving towards a faculty-type system and knocking out a layer of senior subject teachers. That sounds a little bit like taking away a stratum of the potentially motivated, dedicated leadership that we need, especially as people with subject knowledge are involved. Does the Executive have any views on that quite complicated issue?
Philip Rycroft will keep me right on this, as he is the joint chair of the tripartite arrangement that we now have between the local authority employers, the trade unions and the Executive, which manages all the detail.
The McCrone agreement did not require management change of that kind, but local authorities have seen an opportunity, for logical reasons, to bring about that change at the same time that other changes are taking place. I am aware that some of that has been quite controversial—especially for those who feel displaced. During the job-sizing exercise that we undertook, a lot of people told us that they felt that their contribution to their schools was not receiving proper recognition. There have been a lot of rumblings in the system about both the job-sizing exercise and the promoted posts structure. Those are, principally, matters for local authorities to determine.
Our evidence—from feedback from the unions as well as from other sources—is that the changes have been handled differently and better in some places than in others. I have had evidence of concern about faculty management, but I have also had evidence about improvements that faculty management has brought about, because the focus is on management rather than just on the subject. I have spoken to people who have said that they feel better managed as a consequence of being part of a faculty because they are being challenged, stimulated and supported in different ways. However, I recognise that that is not universal, and we will be having further discussions on that. Philip Rycroft may be able to say a bit more about the detail.
There is not much to add. The teachers agreement took out three layers of management: assistant head, assistant principal teacher and senior teacher. That required some change in the system, then job-sizing impacted on all of that. Clearly, issues will arise as we go through what are pretty major changes. As the minister said, the impact of that varies greatly by school and by authority. A lot depends on the level of consultation, engagement and so on with teachers about those changes. A test of that is whether people are saying that we should go back to what we had, with a promoted post structure that could involve 50 or 60 per cent of the staff in a school, where there was equality among the principal teachers—irrespective of the size of their departments—and where the focus was not on management and developing the school. No one that I have encountered has said that we need to go back to that system; however, it is inevitable that as we make changes we are going to run into teething problems. Local authorities and schools will take time to learn about what works best, but already the evidence is beginning to come through.
To link back to my earlier point about dissemination of intelligence around the system, the teachers agreement communication team—a shared enterprise between the Executive and local authorities that is based in the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities—is working extremely well. It provides a great opportunity for authorities to learn about what other authorities are doing, to pick up that good practice and to develop it in their own systems. As an innovation to encourage learning in the system, that work has been hugely beneficial.
I have a question for the minister about bureaucracy and the concern that has been expressed by teachers that the administrative burden on them is sometimes so great that it is difficult for them to concentrate on planning the innovative and differentiated lessons that they would like to teach. What action can the minister take to reduce unnecessary burdens on teachers?
I regularly say to teachers, "Tell me what you're confronting that is burdensome and we'll look at what we can do." We have no interest in overburdening people with bits of paper if we can possibly avoid it. Some of the feedback that we get through the system is necessary to help us to discuss policy issues such as those that we have just touched on, but there is no particular desire to do that. We have recently been carrying out an internal communications audit that examined how we communicate with the system at local authority level and what happens between the local authority and the school. That has uncovered quite a lot of practice that we want completely to re-examine, not only because we are probably putting out more paper than we require but because we are not putting it out in a way that is sensible to teachers, to head teachers and to local authorities. We need to consider a lot of that, and we are in the process of working out in detail how we will manage it, with the intention of trying to reduce burdens on the system.
However, one of the key things that we are doing and which teachers regard as a burden relates to curriculum matters and to our intention to de-clutter the five-to-14 curriculum. We wish to ensure that teachers do not feel under pressure to teach everything in the voluminous guidance that has been issued over the years. In fact, we can thin that down, and we can give teachers more freedom, more choice and more discretion about what to teach, when to teach it and when to pause and go into things at greater depth than they have had the opportunity to do in the past. At some point we need to ensure that we have an eye on how teachers are using that freedom and whether choices are opening up for pupils as a consequence of the freedoms that teachers have. That will to some extent change the nature of inspection in the future—it will feature in future inspections.
Does it follow from that that every attempt will be made to try to simplify complex, intricate and detailed processes with a view to trying to assist teachers?
Absolutely. As I said, I have no desire to have unnecessary bits of paper flying around the system. We genuinely want to free up teachers. Post McCrone, one thing that made a big contribution—we intend to keep moving in this general direction—was that we put more support staff into schools to free teachers from other tasks so that they can teach. Many thousands of people who previously did not work in schools now provide that help within the education system.
How will the McCrone agreement's long-term impact on teacher motivation be assessed?
There are several levels to that. As part of the McCrone agreement, mechanisms were put in place to keep reviewing where we have reached and whether we are meeting all our targets so that we can continually refresh our thinking. HMIE and Audit Scotland are part way through a pretty major evaluation of McCrone and of the impact that the agreement has had. I am not sure when the report of that evaluation will be available—perhaps my officials will clarify that.
It will be about a year before all that evidence comes through and is published.
The committee's inquiry has been very encouraging, as it has allowed us to look at schools in a positive light and to consider what works rather than focus on problems.
Although good complementary things are clearly happening at local and national level, the national framework or guidance—if it exists—within which motivation is encouraged or led has so far eluded me. When the HMIE witnesses answered this question earlier, they suggested that their role was to encourage good leadership and good practice at local level. In other words, motivating pupils is ultimately the job that HMIE encourages teachers to do. However, I suspect that there is still a role for guidance or a national framework within which teachers would be not so much told what to do—obviously, that would demotivate them—as given access to the best practice that has been promulgated.
To what extent does that happen already? Perhaps the minister will comment on the pupil support and inclusion network, which was flagged up earlier in our inquiry but has proved elusive when we have tried to find out anything about it. What are his hopes for the pupil support and inclusion network? It might even be the holy grail of motivational guidance that I asked about. What will the inclusion network achieve? Is there any other mechanism by which the Executive leads or supports motivation within schools?
There were several dimensions to that question. On the pupil support and inclusion network, I suspect that we had best give the committee a note about precisely what the network is and what it does. However, as I understand it—Ruth Campbell will keep me right—the pupil support and inclusion network mainly tries to bring together people from around the schools system, from the voluntary sector and, beyond that, from other forms of organisation. The aim was to bring those people into a network to try to open up their understanding of what each does and to help them to provide opportunities to schools.
When I go round schools, I find that I often act as vehicle—a very inefficient one—for sharing ideas because I say, "I saw such-and-such in another school. Have you tried that?" Very often, I get a blank expression and people reply, "Oh, I had not heard of that." The idea in question might be, for example, a Barnardo's project in Edinburgh or it might be about how to bring back to school the kids who are on the margins, such as those who are or are just about to be excluded. Other examples might come from work that is carried out by organisations such as Fairbridge. I cannot share that information around the system, but HMIE and other people including local authority advisers and directors of education can network to ensure that such information is shared.
I am pretty clear that we have not done enough of that kind of thing and that we need to do more. The key is to provide opportunities for human interaction. Many things can—and will—be put on databases or published in good practice documents but, as well as continuing to do all that, we must also provide more opportunities for sharing. The continuing professional development commitments that came out of McCrone will in part allow many more such opportunities in the coming years, compared to what happened in the past. In part, it has to be about what works in certain situations within subjects or within the management of a whole school. More opportunities will be required and we hope to be able to provide them.
Among the things that we have done on pupil behaviour during the past 18 months is provide opportunities for round-table discussions with relatively small groups of head teachers, one or two of whom make a presentation about what they have tried and what works for them. The others use that to share and explore how they might do things in their own schools. We need to create more such opportunities because there are not enough of them in Scottish education.
Does that mean, however, that we will issue lots of national frameworks and guidance on how to do things? No. What we are doing is more about creating opportunities. That said, we are doing big things about pupil motivation and engagement that do take the form of guidance. The curriculum review is the best example of that. One of the explicit objects of the curriculum reforms is to improve motivation and engagement, which is why we have structured the reforms as we have and are trying to be more focused about what we do while trying to give teachers the opportunity to use their professional skills. We are very clear about motivation and guidance and what helps to contribute to that in the form of guidance for the system.
While we are on the subject of the curriculum review, members will have seen the framework. I will read from the principles for curriculum design. The first one is headed "Challenges and enjoyment". It states:
"Young people should find their learning challenging, engaging and motivating. The curriculum should encourage high aspirations and ambitions for all."
That is one of the absolute founding principles of the way in which we will carry out the detailed work of the curriculum review. The new guidelines will reflect that so that motivation, engagement and enjoyment are bedded into everything in the curriculum and the learning experience will provide the national infrastructure or framework that will support the rich and different learning experience in different parts of the system.
I welcome what you say. The curriculum development work, the determined to succeed initiative on vocational education, the schools of ambition programme and the leadership programmes are all designed to address the issues that we are considering. Perhaps the one thing that is missing is somewhere that teachers can turn if, for example, leadership breaks down. What do teachers do in the absence of leadership? We do not want them to be floundering so it would be useful for them to have somewhere to go.
Last week we took evidence from Fairbridge in Scotland, Spark of Genius and others and it was quite clear that they did not know how to evaluate themselves against anyone else. It would be good to have such a framework.
You make a good point. I was speaking at a recent conference about my experience and about bits of things that I had seen in schools. A head teacher asked why I do not create a website of good practice into which they could dip. Part of the schools digital network will help to create just such a repository for that information, hopefully in such a way that it is interactive.
I will say more about the comments on enterprise education. There are structural initiatives, such as eco-schools, which is a fantastic and amazing programme that really motivates kids and gets them involved in aspects of learning in which we did not necessarily get them involved in quite the same way previously. There is guidance about how a school can become an eco-school and the factors that give rise to more motivation. Very similar things are happening in enterprise education in the structured approach to how it is rolled out. There are such frameworks at that level but there is not yet enough about Mr Macintosh's other points.
There is something in what Mr Macintosh said about self-evaluation. As part of what we expect of local authorities when they are considering performance improvement, they have to help to benchmark their schools against schools in a family group of like schools elsewhere in Scotland. They can compare how their school is performing with a similar school elsewhere, and they can ask how schools are achieving things that they are not, or why their school is achieving more than similar schools. The aim is to help the process of professional evaluation of schools' performance and to allow schools to set their own targets and make progress. The self-evaluation approach is a large part of the inspection process, although it needs to grow in the future.
I have a final point on which you may wish to comment. I welcome your evidence about the whole system, given that we are looking for evidence about the numbers that are involved and about ways of evaluating different programmes of motivation. However, we are in danger of overlooking the children who attend school and who are not the most disengaged, but who are there in name only and are switched off. We provide a lot of support for children who are at the bottom end, but the children who attend school and do not truant—
They are there in body, but not in mind.
Exactly. Our systems do not seem to pick up on such children.
That is a good point. In my opening comments, I said that there is, among the majority who are performing well, a group of children who could perform better—teachers tell me about them constantly. One admirable feature of teachers is that they get annoyed and angry when they know that a pupil has potential, but they cannot quite find the key to unlock it, although they try. Many discussions go on in schools about how to capture and engage individual pupils.
Last summer, I visited a hugely impressive project at Jordanhill School, where there is a summer school that the University of Strathclyde runs specifically for young people who, around the end of second year, show signs of not reaching what their teachers know to be their potential. They are assessed as being able to reach a certain level—for example, they could do standard grades at credit level—but it is becoming obvious in their third year that they will not achieve that. Clearly, motivational factors are involved. By the end of the summer school, the kids are engaged again. They are hugely enthusiastic and highly motivated because of that new and fresh experience. The outcomes of the project are still to be fully researched, but the anecdotal evidence is that the kids go back to school better off as a consequence of their summer experience and begin to perform to their potential and get better qualifications.
Recently, the head teacher of a school that I visited told me about a girl who was clearly able, but who was disengaging and becoming troublesome. She was a brilliant singer and a wonderful musician, so they did a deal with her such that she would get to sing a bit more and produce a compact disc provided that she gave a commitment to certain classes. That worked brilliantly—she is now singing beautifully, composing and creating good music and is much more motivated and sticking in at her lessons. There are hundreds of examples of teachers using a repertoire of measures to try to engage kids more. Teachers need to keep doing that and we need to keep allowing them to do it.
At the root of the curriculum reforms is the aim of creating space for a more individualised approach to learning to suit individual circumstances. We should not keep kids in learning situations from which they will not benefit and in which they are not engaged; we should allow them to engage more with their enthusiasms in life and what might interest them, although we must ensure that they cannot opt out of the core elements of learning, which are literacy and numeracy. We should not underestimate the myriad measures that are being used in schools to keep people engaged and to stretch and expand them, widen their horizons and keep them enthusiastic. However, we need to keep working at that to find new and exciting ideas.
The evidence to the committee shows that one of the challenges of modern teaching is that kids experience sophisticated stimuli outside school, including ones that involve technology. One can understand why kids disengage when their experience in school does not match their experience out of it. I was in a classroom recently in which an electronic white board was used to teach a French class. The engagement that resulted from using technology interactively—the experience was similar to that which one would get with a computer game at home—helped to motivate the kids. A lot of work is being done, although we need to continue to focus on the issue.
We must take care to ensure that nothing in the system maximises the chances of kids of falling out of it. From our work on the curriculum review, we know that there is a loss of pace in learning in S1 and S2 and that kids begin to disengage at that age. As a result, we are deliberately looking at the S1 to S3 experience to find out how we can configure learning in a way that keeps pace and richness and that gives kids the opportunity to explore interesting things. Such an approach will maximise the chances of engagement at systems level. Kids can fall into and out of being engaged and motivated; however, as I have said, we know that there is a problem in S1 and S2 and the curriculum review very much focused on fixing that situation.
The approach that is taken at Jordanhill School, which I visited last summer, is very worth while and matches some of the points that have been made. If any committee members are interested, we could certainly set up another visit.
I want to ask about home-school links, because home is an extremely important factor in pupil motivation. The HMIE report entitled "The Sum of its Parts?", which came out at the end of last year, indicated that although the integrated community school model has a lot of potential there are difficulties in embedding best practice throughout Scotland. However, this morning, we heard evidence that integrated community schools are about to be rolled out and that new things are happening as a result of better children's services funding. How is the Executive responding to that HMIE report?
You are absolutely right to highlight the importance of home-school links and to point out the variation in practice throughout Scotland. We can provide the committee with statistics but I can point out, for example, that some local authorities have one home-school link worker for every 30 schools, while other authorities have one per school. Such variation is a result of individual schools' circumstances and, to some extent, their geography. Nevertheless, this is a real issue that must be addressed.
A good home-school link worker can make a profound difference to the ability of the very youngest pupils—or of any child, for that matter—to engage in a school. They are a very important resource; indeed, I think that over time they will become more and more important. For a start, such links ensure that parents, particularly the parents of kids who are not fully engaged, have an enhanced role in the educational experience. I have seen some fantastic practice that shows that home-school link workers are making a colossal difference to the motivation not only of pupils but of parents, and to the support that parents can give. Clearly more needs to be done on that front.
Of course, on your point about integrated community schools, one feature of a good integrated community school would be good home-school connections that involve more than one home-school link worker. However, although I have seen enough fantastic examples to know that such schools can really work well, the model is just not working in enough places. When we rolled it out, our expectations were too lax. We need to be more explicit about what we expect from an integrated community school and about what integration means. HMIE is helping in that respect. For example, it is about to publish a document that might be entitled "How good is my integrated community school?" which will give people a self-evaluation tool.
Moreover, the concept of integration is also caught up in the new excellence standard and the six-point quality indicator scale that we are about to introduce. Can schools be excellent if they are not integrated? The answer is that they probably cannot.
We still have to overcome huge cultural barriers between the different professions that work in and around schools and, over the next few weeks, members will see some things about the planning and delivery of children's services in the round that point to more rather than less integration.
We will have to redouble our efforts to ensure that we are explicit about what is expected. What do we mean by "integration"? What are the modern expectations of how to support children and take a holistic view of their lives? That implies much more integrated working in all our schools in the future. The teachers and head teachers whom I bump into are up for that. For the most part, they want that to happen. Where we have seen success it has been very good. We must ensure that it is applied more consistently across the system.
The Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association was critical of aspects of communication with parents about their children's achievements or problems. Do you have a view on whether communication with parents is a problem and, if so, how to tackle it?
Yes, I have a view. We want to improve and extend communications. Connecting teachers with parents when there are concerns is not without its challenges, given the time that is available, particularly in secondary schools. However, good teaching and management practice determines that the quicker the teachers connect with the parents to address a child's problems, the more chance they have of engaging the parents and sorting out the problems. Lots of teachers and head teachers spend a lot of time with parents trying to resolve difficulties as quickly as they can.
We are interested in exploring in our discussions with people in Finland how they structure parental involvement, because parental involvement seems to be at a higher level there. For example, parents appear to be entitled to a certain amount of time with teachers each year. Equally, it is expected that parents will be available when teachers want to talk to them. We are interested to see how that works.
We have much further to go in involving parents in schools effectively, not just in a representational sense, but in a direct sense in supporting their children's learning. That is partly about having much more effective feedback. Going back to assessment is for learning, I believe that learning improves when there is good feedback and when that feedback is supported effectively. That must be one of our key objectives.
Careers Scotland's research indicates that pupils with clear career goals focus better at school and achieve more of their potential. According to Careers Scotland, the other side of the coin is that too many people down the years have fallen into their careers with limited awareness of their own potential and of the opportunities that exist. Indeed, as a lot of our visits and the evidence that we have received have shown, there is a lack of self-confidence. People need to have the skills to plan their careers. There appears to have been a big gap in that area in schools. Will that feature in your plans for curriculum reform, because it is an obvious area in which we can do a lot of work?
I am slightly hesitant, because I am not an expert on when the optimal time is for a person to begin to focus on a particular career or a range of careers, as doing so might narrow their learning. I need to take more advice on that. However, I completely agree that, where there are clear goals and support and where expectations are high, a person will perform better. That underpins our assessment is for learning programme. It is all about people having ownership of their learning, setting goals and managing their learning much more effectively. Clearly, that has implications for particular career directions and interests. It is also part of personal learning planning, as opposed to the personal learning plans process that we are engaged in promoting. It is about pupils setting objectives for themselves, working at the routes that they have to follow to achieve those objectives and having high expectations of themselves.
As part of our schools of ambition programme—we have yet to decide exactly how we push this forward—we want to examine whether there is a way to strengthen engagement between the careers service and schools, primarily to address some of the questions that have been raised. We want to work out the optimal relationship between schools and the careers service. Can we strengthen that? Can we ensure that the right advice is provided at the right time to help with motivation and direction? There will be more discussion on that area, which we wish to focus on.
I have two brief points, the first of which is on parity of esteem. Given that the issue is wide ranging, I do not expect to receive an answer now. It has several ramifications, such as how it is supported, the measures involved and examinations. Perhaps you can come back to us with some documentation or input on the subject and explain how the matter should be taken forward.
It seems to the committee that parity of esteem underlies many of the issues that we are dealing with, such as motivating young people and making sure that there is almost an automatic choice between different strands that may traditionally have been regarded as being academic or vocational, or involving soft skills. We need to strike a balance rather than taking the traditional approach, whereby a person wants to be a doctor or lawyer, for example, as if those are the top jobs. Is there a view on how that whole agenda can be tackled across the board? I accept that that is not easy. Can you give us detail of any work that is being undertaken?
You raise a very interesting point. I was in Brussels the week before last and it was fascinating to meet representatives of other countries and to discuss the impacts on our systems of vocational learning versus academic learning, if that is the right way in which to characterise what is happening. Other countries in Europe take a different approach from ours and have more parity of esteem between vocational learning and traditional academic learning.
It was also interesting to note that, in some countries, the vocational and the academic are separated so that, at school level, people have the choice to undertake vocational work and academic work and can move between the two streams of learning. In some ways, our recent schools-colleges review seems to represent the target that some countries want to achieve. Yes, we have much more to do to make it clear that choosing vocational work is not a lesser option. It is a different option that suits particular people and their circumstances. It also suits our societal needs. More needs to be done about that.
I believe that—this is perhaps slightly more controversial territory—something can also be done about parity of esteem in respect of how we recognise traditional attainment, examination results and achievement.
I think that we have dwelled a little too long on certain things. What I was trying to get at was whether the Executive was drawing together particular strands. It would be helpful if you could write to the committee about that.
Yes, I will do that.
My second point is that, when you were talking about community schools, I was struck that there was no mention of external voluntary organisations. The Boys Brigade, the scouts and the guides, as well as smaller organisations, are all voluntary bodies, but, as I have said many times, they undertake much of the agenda relating to leadership development and motivation activities out of school. Sometimes, those bodies seem to be working in a parallel universe to schools. Have you considered supporting and encouraging those mainstream organisations, as well as others, that lurk around school communities but are not regarded as full parts of those communities? We must bear in mind that crossover lessons can be learned.
Absolutely. During the past few days, we have discussed the role of the voluntary sector in respect of wrap-around services in schools and helping to connect the school to wider community services and to activities such as sport, music, arts, drama and enterprise. It is becoming increasingly clear that some voluntary sector organisations offer services that provide schools with unique opportunities to re-engage kids who are at the margins. Some super work is going on with kids, some of whom are very damaged and completely outwith the system. Because of the impact of voluntary organisations, those kids are either getting back into learning or are learning in a new context and making progress in their lives. The voluntary sector is uniquely skilled in such matters. Some interesting new private organisations that offer projects for excluded kids are also emerging through the system.
On the wider leadership development front, several schools support the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme. They also recognise opportunities that are provided by scouts, guides and other organisations at which the leadership potential of young people can be developed. There is a clear role for the voluntary sector. Ruth Campbell has been trying to connect voluntary organisations to schools, helping them to realise that potential and to make it available to schools.
That was essentially the point that I was making, as I had thought that that did not happen. I had thought that there was a parallel universe problem.
We seem to have no further questions. We have probably exhausted ourselves from this morning's activities. I thank the minister for attending this morning at what has been a useful session.
Before we finish, we have two further brief items on the agenda. Agenda item 2 is to consider the issues that have been raised in today's evidence on our pupil motivation inquiry. At our meeting on 22 June, we will have the opportunity to discuss an issues paper from the clerks. If people want to raise anything for that paper, they have an opportunity to do that either now or by e-mail subsequently. Does anyone want to say anything about that at this point?
I think that many of the issues are obvious from the questions that we have asked. We will leave that issue for now.