Curriculum Review
We move on to item 3, under which we will take evidence from the minister on the outcome of the curriculum review, which was published, with his response, on 1 November. The committee agreed at its meeting on 29 September to await the outcome of the review before finalising the terms of reference for its inquiry. The minister is here at his own invitation, as it were, to give us some background on that. There has been a slight reshuffling of chairs, and we have with us the minister, Philip Rycroft, Colin MacLean and Gill Robinson. We have lost one or two of the other officials; there is a smaller team this time.
I invite the minister to comment briefly.
I am conscious that the committee has been considering the issue for some time but, as members know, I have made some significant announcements on the matter in the past 10 days or so and there was a debate on it in Parliament last week. The announcements that I made are wide ranging and far reaching. They address the heightening of expectations in our schools; the opening up of much more space for teachers and headteachers to operate in a greater atmosphere of trust; and the opening up of more choice for pupils in a variety of areas, including what they learn, when they learn and which exams they sit.
At the heart of my announcement a week past Monday are three linked issues. The first issue is the curriculum review, which is central to all that we seek to do and is a key liberator of the changes that we are trying to make. Linked to that are two other measures: the abolition of age-and-stage regulations; and decisions on assessment and testing. Those measures support the direction of travel of the curriculum review.
As you will be aware, the curriculum review followed on from many representations made by professionals, parents and others. It also followed the national debate on education, in which a large number of professionals and parents took part. That debate identified the problem of clutter in the five-to-14 curriculum—we knew about the problem but the national debate confirmed it clearly. Teachers feel pressure to teach across all the guidance that we issue at the expense of reasonable depth of learning and challenge for young people. We also heard concerns in the national debate about too much assessment and testing in the system and we heard that perverse incentives were beginning to apply because of the testing regime, with narrow learning around tests instead of the broad approach that we want.
We know from our wider evidence that, particularly in secondary 1 and 2, there are significant problems with children disengaging from the learning process, not feeling challenged or stimulated and not seeing relevance in their learning. Because of that, they lose motivation and drop out of learning. We also know that there has been something wrong with our science curriculum for a period of time. Inspectors have pointed that out and, in international measures, our performance in science is not as good as our performance in English and maths.
The curriculum review group, which is chaired by Philip Rycroft, has been sitting for nearly a year. It is important to recognise that a wide range of people and bodies are represented on the group, including HMIE, teachers, parents, businesses, teachers' unions, education academics, Learning and Teaching Scotland and others. That is a wide range of people with quite disparate interests. I mention that because it is important to know that the outcome was unanimously agreed by that group of people and there was no dubiety about the direction of travel.
The curriculum review document and my response to it should be seen together. The document puts forward the case for change and, for the first time, sets out in a clear, diagrammatic way the focus and purpose of education and the principles of future curriculum design. My response accepts the conclusions in full, triggers a series of actions for a further systematic review of the curriculum and sets a timetable for that work.
The review and the changes to the age-and-stage regulations, assessment and testing provide a recipe that will give teachers much more freedom than we have seen before and will free up time for them to design learning and to become more engaged in the particular needs of their pupils. That approach will potentially give pupils more choice and, for the first time, we will have a curriculum continuum from three to 18 instead of the current situation in which we have the three-to-five curriculum, the five-to-14 curriculum, standard grades and highers. We will immediately go on to examine in great detail the science curriculum; to thin out what currently constitutes five-to-14 guidance, with particular focus on expressive arts and environmental studies; and to consider the content of the S1-to-S3 curriculum. We will still have a broad curriculum for S1, but we will try to design a new one in light of the new objectives and design principles. We will also allow pupils to make choices earlier so that they can get more focus on and relevance into their learning; commission new skills for work courses; and try in general to get more pace and relevance into that period of education.
I want to make it clear that this is not simply a job for the Executive. We are going to facilitate the teaching profession's wide engagement in the forthcoming process; it is not a case of ministers sending down tablets of stone from on high for people in schools to follow. We are creating the framework, principles and objectives and making it clear that we want to engage the profession in designing the detail of learning. After all, that is their professional skill, and we need to utilise it.
All the changes will be implemented from 2007 onwards, so we will need to do a lot of work as we systematically go through the curriculum. As part of that work up to 2007, we will examine how standard grade fits with the new national qualifications system. I have no intention of throwing out the good work that has been done and the time that teachers have invested in standard grade. It has many good features that we want to retain, but we need to ensure that it meshes properly with the continuum of learning and progression in our new national qualifications. We will decide what we want to do by 2007 after detailed conversations with the profession.
Those are the highlights. I and the two learned doctors on either side of me are more than happy to answer any questions that the committee might have.
I will ask Wendy Alexander to kick off, because I believe that she has some questions about the purpose and broader context of the review.
I thought that I said that I was going to pass on that question.
In that case, I will kick off myself. The key purpose of freeing up the curriculum is to give teachers more time to teach and their pupils more opportunities to learn. As you rightly have pointed out, minister, the major complaint from teachers over the years is that the curriculum has not allowed that to happen. However, I wonder how it will happen in practice. It is all very well to set out aspirations, but it will be extremely difficult to fulfil them. After all, if people make gaps, things come along to fill them in. How will you manage the process to ensure that teaching time is freed up effectively?
I will say a few words about that and then ask Gill Robinson and Philip Rycroft to tell the committee about the curriculum review group's discussions on this matter.
We need to take two levels into account. Although we did not intend the five-to-14 guidance to be prescriptive, it is widely acknowledged that it has become so. It provides schools with considerable detail, particularly on the broad areas of expressive arts and environmental studies. The work and the curriculum review that we have been carrying out confirm what people have been telling us for a long time: we simply have to thin out that guidance and assess the current five-to-14 curriculum against the broad principles that we have now established in "a curriculum for excellence" on the purpose of learning and the attributes and characteristics that we are trying to allow young people to develop. We will involve professionals in that detailed process.
Even under the new guidance, teachers might feel that they want to teach across all of the curriculum, but there will be much less content than there was before. That will open up some space and take the pressure off teachers who currently feel obliged to teach everything and who fear that they would be criticised if they were not doing so. It will help to make sure that we capture what is important for five to 14-year-olds to learn and allow more space to pursue those items of learning in a way that has not been possible hitherto.
There will be a similar mechanism for S1 to S3 but it will have other components. We have to consider what we currently teach in S1 and S2 in particular and test that against the principles that we have set out for curriculum design and the objectives of the curriculum. That is a task in which we will actively engage the profession. I refer in part to the changes in age-and-stage regulations and to the dispositions that we want to adopt. We want to make sure that in S1 and S2—but in S1 particularly—there is still a broad curriculum.
S1 and S2 have two purposes. One is to complete the five-to-14 curriculum; the other is to help people to decide what they might want to pursue in later study in school. The exercise is about opening up choice for people.
In the past, we have erred because we required those choices to be made only at the end of S2, and it is becoming increasingly evident that young people could make some choices earlier and begin to narrow the range of subjects that they study in S2 while studying them in greater depth and gaining confidence. They need to study the things that they want to study in order to become engaged.
Examining the content of the S1 and S2 curriculum against those principles would be one mechanism of thinning things out. By allowing some young people to choose earlier and to narrow down what they do in S2, we could open up space for other things, such as consolidating literacy and numeracy in S1 and S2. I have seen schools in which that is already being done. In those schools, young people are working on a much narrower set of studies but working in depth on their weaknesses in literacy and numeracy. That freed-up space could be applied to other things, such as music, dance, drama or enterprise education. Alternatively, there could be more vocational courses. That is the other big change to options in S1 through to S3. New skills for work courses are being designed. Young people will have the chance to consider that option and to look at links with colleges, in order to move to doing bits of their education in college.
A range of things is happening. Through those broad mechanisms, we are examining how we thin out the curriculum and create more space for the kind of things that teachers have been telling us they need time to do so that they can engage more with young people's learning. That is the broad overview, but Gill Robinson might want to say more.
Gill Robinson (Scottish Executive Education Department):
Looking at what we have proposed for the primary school area, at the end of the process of engagement with teachers we would have a considerably slimmed-down set of guidelines. At the moment, as members will know, teachers have an extensive pile of guidelines. The existing guidelines approach every part of the curriculum in the same way so there is the same level of detail across the board. The curriculum review group pointed out that that is not necessarily the best way to do things. Some areas such as numeracy and language need very specific outcomes, but there are quite a lot of other areas in the curriculum in which teachers need guidance on broad outcomes rather than on very specific and precisely defined outcomes. That is the means by which we will be able to give teachers much clearer guidance and build into that scope for flexibility and depth.
On the question of doability, I do not want to leave the committee with the impression that the review group did not think very hard about how all this would be implemented. We have given you some of the detail of how it would be worked through in the curriculum. However, it is important to reiterate what the minister said about the process that we will adopt and the involvement of the profession. We have to make absolutely certain that any changes that we put in place will work in the classroom, and we are doing that by working through those changes with the profession.
I point you to what we have been doing on the assessment is for learning programme, on which you might have picked up feedback from teachers. We pick up a lot of feedback and there is a great deal of support for the way in which the programme has been implemented and for what is happening in classrooms as a result. The principle that we adopted was to work the programme through the classroom to ensure that the changes we put in place and the development of techniques would work. That will inform everything we do on implementation.
I thought that last week we had a fairly good-quality debate in the chamber. Some members had experience in the classroom and others had experience as parents and their contributions were constructive.
Teachers knew what was expected of them in relation to standard grades and highers and there was good guidance on subject development at secondary level. Having been involved in teaching over the years, I am interested in how we transfer the principles in guidelines, which often end up occupying a dusty corner of a staffroom, to operational activity in the classroom.
I am interested in two fundamental issues. Peter Peacock and I discussed how we should interact on the issues that might emerge from the work of the Cultural Commission. Last week's interim report touched on the idea of creativity and the use of imagination in schools. First, how do we move from the rhetoric to the reality, and how do we ensure that we do that equitably? The other compelling issue is how we get a sense that we are making a positive impact, which will depend on the level of volunteer and parent activity and the social and economic environment in which schools operate. How do you see the curriculum review impacting on the experience of those who are in primary 5 at the moment and will be in third or fourth year in five or six years' time? How will pupils' experience of schooling and education in 2008, 2009 and 2010 differ from pupils' experience now?
I will ask my officials to come in on the detail of that. One of my strong impressions since I have come back into education in the past 18 months through my present job is that, because of all the pressures on the system through guidance on the five-to-14 curriculum and the focus on standard grades, we have squeezed out of traditional school life a number of things that used to be more available, such as sport, drama and music. If pupils do not choose one of those subjects as their route of study, it will not be part of the school environment for them. That has cost schools' character—what a school is, its statement of what it does, what it believes in and how it helps the creative aspects of young people's lives. Part of the purpose of creating space is to allow those subjects to come back into school in a much better way.
We also know that in schools that have created more choice earlier and which have placed more emphasis in the curriculum on music or sport, the kids are better motivated and, as a result, their learning and their engagement in school improve all round. The issue is not just about creativity, but about other factors that help the learning process.
I will have to think more about how we ensure equity across the system as a whole, so that young people do not lose out on future options. I presume that in part that will come from the new guidelines that we produce about how schools might want to apply the new space that they have.
The experience of a child who gets to secondary school in three or five years' time will be different from the experience of a child in secondary school now in several ways. There will still be a broad curriculum in S1, because we need to allow pupils to experience learning and decide what they want to do, but a child could be asked to make choices about their future study a year earlier. That will have implications for what children study. They might study fewer things in greater depth or they might use the space to have more choice and to include enterprise education, sport, music, drama or community involvement—a series of options would open up.
A child will have more choice about going into vocational study as well as academic study. Those will be seen not as alternatives; rather, they could be seen as a new mix of study that pupils would not otherwise have had. That will mean more choice. Children will have more choice to begin to plan their route to college or to do more work-based learning than they have had in the past. If they choose to sit standard grades, they might choose to sit them a year earlier than they would have sat them traditionally. That will not apply to all children, but it might apply to quite a number of them. If a child decides to sit standard grades a year earlier, that will open up an extra year to have space to study for highers and to consider the options.
I have spoken to young people and have listened to what they have been saying, and I have also watched young people being interviewed on television over the past 10 days. They have been saying that we have got the system upside-down. They point out that they have four years in which to do standard grades, which are much less important than highers, yet only one year in which to do their highers. We ought to be opening up more space for pupils to do highers. If we did that, several things would happen. Children could sit the same number of highers, but take a year longer to do so, and they might well get a much better-quality pass as a consequence, which would open up opportunities for them in future. Alternatively, they could choose to do the same number of highers, or one or two fewer, in the one year, and then do another group of highers later. They might wish to sample other forms of learning, which could open up space to do more of the things that schools are doing around community engagement, community involvement, community enterprise and so on.
There is potential for children to experience a much wider range of choices. I believe that they will experience much more challenge and relevance in their learning in S1 and S2 and that they will become much more engaged as a result. A series of things might happen to a young person that are different from what they would experience in today's system
Aside from the matters of choice and timetabling, if we are to be successful in developing a curriculum that takes seriously the purposes that the minister has been describing, much of what happens in classrooms will change. That is because many of the things that we are considering following the purposes of education consultation need different teaching and learning approaches.
The member mentioned engaging with teachers and how to keep them on board. The proposals are about a combination of structural and curricular design steps, but we can start right away in the classrooms. Teachers have been coming to terms with the documents over the past few weeks and we have had indications from them that they see the proposals as making a strong and quick impact on how teaching and learning approaches are considered. That is because of the purposes that are being spelled out, which are very broad and emphasise aspects such as learning to learn.
As well as changes to the curriculum, there are changes to assessment, which means that there could be new ways in which teachers and young people can engage with each other about their learning. Another set of changes that we would hope for would result in young people being clearer about the purposes of their learning and about their achievements, and they would have greater motivation as a result of that.
I want to pick up on that last point. The minister read out a list of the people who have been involved in the curriculum review group. Absent from that list was somebody who could directly represent the pupil perspective. We have a fundamental problem in the system, in that youngsters, particularly boys, switch off in the early years of secondary school. We also know from a recent Careers Scotland report that there is a strong correlation between educational achievement and having career goals—people who know why they are in school and who have a vision of what they are going to do beyond school and of why the subjects that they have chosen are important to them.
There is a need to realign pupils' expectations and needs with the teaching that is provided and the learning environment in school. We want to bring about that fundamental change. The committee is considering the motivation of youngsters. Will you tell us how, rather than focusing on teachers' perspective on the process, you are engaging young people in the process, listening to them and investing that in what we are doing?
The national debate, which began to set the agenda and established the points to which we are responding, involved a wide consultation. We can get detail for you on young people's involvement in that process.
We have also run a series of discussions with young people throughout Scotland through our assessment is for learning programme. I have received the minutes of those meetings and reports from officials about what young people were saying at them. They are saying exactly the kind of things that I have been reflecting. Some young people—boys in particular—are bored by S1 and S2. Some of them find that S1 goes over what they did in primary 7, so we need to ask why that is the case. Part of the reason is that some teachers have taken the view that they need to reconfirm where a child is in their learning before they move on, but many kids are at the required stage of learning and need to move forward. Some pupils feel that they are standing still.
By S2, pupils certainly know what they do not like and what they are not engaging with. They know what they find really difficult, but they also know what they want to do about that. They want to be given more support for the work that they need to do on numeracy, literacy and so on, but they want more choice so that they can say, "I hate chemistry. It doesn't engage me," or whatever—I apologise to Elaine Murray; I have revealed a personal prejudice from my schooldays. Pupils know that, but they also know that they love physics, and say that they would love to get into that subject in much more detail and develop a greater depth of understanding.
Opening up such choices for pupils earlier in the system allows the kind of engagement that we want to take place. Pilots are being run and teachers are reporting to us that where such options are made available to young people, they respond extremely positively. Pupils are showing that they are perfectly capable of moving forward a year earlier than we have given them credit for in how we have previously structured the curriculum. They are finding more relevance in their learning, they are enjoying it more and, because they are doing that, their performance is improving.
I have met kids in classrooms I have visited in the recent past and they have told me about their experience of having those choices earlier. They are thriving on it. Some of them find it challenging and we need to provide them with extra support, but generally speaking they are thriving on it. That is the spirit in which we want to move forward with the proposals.
I will consider Adam Ingram's point about how we engage young people more as we move the agenda forward. We must continue to get their perspective as the consumers of the service. Pupils are highly perceptive; they know what they want and they understand a great deal more about all this sort of stuff than we give them credit for. We must keep that engagement going.
I notice from the Careers Scotland report that kids respond best to one-to-one discussions about where they are going in life and what they are looking for. Should not we focus resources on that to try to help children to reach an understanding of what they want to do?
That is absolutely right. You will find in the detail of the documentation that we have published in the past 10 days that we are putting at the heart of the learning process good-quality conversation between teachers and pupils—and, wherever possible, pupils' parents—about the nature of children's learning, the direction they want to travel in and how we can design learning increasingly around their individual needs. That is a major challenge for us all, but we want to do that.
There are real fears in the teaching profession about how the proposals will impact on teachers' work. There are also worries that we will end up with personal learning plans that are rigid and inflexible, and that teachers will end up filling out bits of paper sent out by the Executive or by local authorities. I want to make it clear that we have deliberately changed the emphasis in our documentation. We are looking for good-quality personal learning planning. Plans are, per se, a consequence of good planning, but how teachers record a plan with a young person will be a matter for them; it is not a matter for me to prescribe from the centre.
From the assessment is for learning programme, we know that young people are perfectly capable of recording much of the information and setting out their aspirations, understanding their direction of travel and setting themselves objectives for their learning with their teachers. That works, they respond to it and they manage their learning more effectively. That is one of the ways in which we try to create in young people the capacity to manage their learning and become more effectively engaged in it throughout their lives. We want to ensure that that notion is right at the centre of what we do.
If children want to learn subjects such as Chinese, Japanese or Russian, or even Gaelic, Spanish or Italian, and no teachers are available in the school concerned, could consideration be given to videoconferencing, or to harnessing the white heat of modern technology to extend opportunities?
I will be happy to quote Harold Wilson back at you for many years to come.
The answer to your question is yes. There are several factors at play here. Technology has moved on enormously, and it will continue to develop in the next few years. In a few years' time, the things that we aspire to today, such as broadband capacity and the devices that we use to communicate, will be taken for granted. Falling school rolls mean that, in some parts of Scotland and for some schools, holding together courses at the senior level is becoming much more difficult. Learning and Teaching Scotland is exploring how we can use modern technology for more effective learning. As it happens, because of questions about the viability of the Gaelic medium for secondary units, there is a specific project on Gaelic-medium education to consider how learning can be provided electronically to a much greater extent. That will give us a much greater insight into electronic learning across a range of languages and other subjects. So the answer is yes, we need to ensure that harnessing technology is central to our thinking about the future.
Is not distance learning very much used in the Orkney and Shetland islands? Similar methods could be applied to great advantage on the mainland, when young people feel that they are not being given sufficient opportunity to follow their choice of curriculum possibilities.
Absolutely. There are good examples of that, not just in the islands. Argyll and Bute Council's mainland schools and island schools are doing quite a lot. We have connections between schools in Scotland and in other countries in relation to using modern technology for learning. A range of exciting things are happening, which open up possibilities that would not otherwise have existed.
How will "Better Behaviour—Better Learning" fit into that? What are the implications of McCrone for reducing guidance teams in schools? What implications will there be for personal learning plans, and whether there will be the staff to engage one to one with young people to talk about their aims and objectives and what they want to choose within the broader choice that they will have?
I am waiting for a review of guidance, which I expect to receive almost any day, which will allow us to reflect on the central place we want pupil support to continue to have in our system. Guidance is part of that, but it is not just guidance teachers who should be involved in those conversations, but teachers in the round. Philip Rycroft mentioned the assessment is for learning programme. Some of the work that is going on there, including how we are managing that programme—exploring new practices with teachers in classrooms—is allowing teachers to have conversations that they did not have before and is allowing young people to manage their learning more effectively with teachers.
All that exists and I want to keep developing it. In recent times, I have seen some excellent practice in pupil support and guidance in schools and we want to ensure that that existing excellent practice is much more extensively apparent throughout the education system.
Will there be a proposal to put more resources into those teams to build them up? As you know, in some schools, pupil support is recognised in one integrated department, but we have not reached the stage of integrating the departments in other schools. Therefore, resources and the number of staff can differ from school to school and from local authority to local authority.
There are two points to make about that. More resources are going into the system and the commitment to increase the number of teachers to 53,000 will have a wider impact than just on maths and English in P1 and on reducing class sizes. Resources from that pool will also allow people to make advances in pupil support.
Linked to that, and to our devolved school management policies, is one of the things that I have been talking about in the past 10 days. We must try to ensure that head teachers and their teaching staff have much more discretion to configure their schools. Again, I have seen good examples recently of schools who have dedicated staff for pupil support, which did not happen before. That is paying real dividends for the schools as communities.
More resources are going into schools in the round and I want head teachers to decide where their resources go rather than dictating from the centre. Each school is different and has different requirements in different periods of its history. We need to have flexibility at the local level to build services.
One of the secondary schools that I visited recently is a stunning example of what can be done. The staff had clearly recognised that groups of their children who were high achievers and required to be stretched even more needed particular pupil support, and the staff had built that in. Equally, there was a large group of young people who had traumatic lives because they were caught up in family circumstances and simply could not learn as a result. A resource had to be attached to supporting those children through all the challenges in life to allow them to learn and to make progress. There is stunningly good practice out there, which we need to ensure is applied more widely.
I ask one question about language, because language—by which I mean foreign languages and not English language—does not feature much in the documentation. One of the notable failures in the UK in general is that we have not created a society in which people have a facility for foreign languages, in particular European languages. That is in contrast to some of the vocal people who visit from abroad.
That is linked to people's aspirations and interest. Again, I speak from personal experience when I say that nothing turned me off at secondary school more than French.
Ditto.
Although I can read French, I certainly cannot speak it with any facility. I am sure the same applies to most of my fellow countrymen. Have you given any thought to the need to be able to converse and engage in the language of another country, and the need to provide our people with a facility for modern languages, especially in the context of new countries entering the European Union and the importance of trade and enterprise? We might build on the Gaelic experience, which shows that if one is bilingual at an early stage, it makes it easier to have a facility for other languages later on.
My sentiments are exactly yours. I have frequently been ashamed because of my lack of language skills, both in English and more widely. That was particularly the case when I was a member of the European Committee of the Regions and attended meetings in Brussels as part of the UK delegation. I always felt ashamed of our nation's inability to speak other languages, when the ability of people from other nations to speak our language was tangible on every occasion that I visited.
Having a facility for languages is good for young people. In the modern Europe in which we live, the more that young people have a facility for other languages, the more they will succeed in the competition for jobs.
The evidence is that where young people learn a second language early in their lives, their ability to pick up a third or fourth language increases, as you rightly imply. There seems to be further evidence that exercising the brain in that way has wider consequences, so there is a huge amount to be said for language learning.
We have tried to develop such learning in recent years and we have moved the situation on further. The best thing to do would be to send you a note about the precise nature of young people's entitlement to start learning a language by P6 and to so many hours of further learning beyond that. More young people are engaging in learning another language in our primary schools as a consequence of that measure.
As I recall, parts of Scotland are experimenting with language immersion, which involves teaching through the medium of another language, including, but not limited to, Gaelic. A range of things are happening. Last Monday, I was in a French class in a school and discovered that I could understand more French than I thought I could, although that was still not very much. My experience of French at secondary school was the same as yours—the way that French was taught discouraged me from learning. Now we have hugely innovative ways of teaching languages and the resources are there to help the uptake of those new methods. We need to keep focused on the issue and to move forward in a spirit of giving young people the opportunity to learn rather than forcing a subject on young people who do not have a facility in that regard or who are not engaged by the subject, as we did in years gone by.
But that does not arise specifically from the curriculum review, does it? There is nothing additional in what you have outlined.
There is nothing additional, but there should be the opportunity to rethink many of our approaches as part of the process of identifying future design and the characteristics of what we want young people to experience.
One of the exciting things about the curriculum review is the recognition that space has to be created for people to learn skills, whether they be the skills of language learning or any one of a range of academic and vocational skills.
The section of the Executive response that deals with new courses in skills for work talks about developing new courses and assessment. Who is leading that work? The document also says that piloting will begin next year, which tends to suggest that some of the work is progressing quite well.
Yes. We have been working closely with colleagues from around the system, particularly those in the Scottish Qualifications Authority, which has a responsibility to help us to develop courses and so on. We recognised a while ago the need for the work that you mentioned and we hope to be able to trial some courses next year.
I emphasise that we need to learn what works best in the context in which we are working, how courses can best be designed, what appeals to young people, what can work effectively in a school and a college context and so on. We will explore those issues through the trials that we will run next year. We will build on what we learn from that process.
The courses are not about producing mini-plumbers, much as we might want to have more young plumbers. They are about giving people around the ages of 14 to 16 experience of broad areas of work, whether that be in the construction industry, the care industry or whatever, so that they understand the dynamics of those sectors, gain an understanding of what work is like in those sectors and can pick up some of the communication, team-working and problem-solving skills that are associated with work in that area.
The title that we have chosen for the initiative, "skills-for-work", was chosen deliberately because we want to expand people's work skills to give them a secure foundation for their later experiences.
Is the pilot likely to be rolled out across the country or is it concentrated in certain local authority areas?
We will have to develop that with the SQA. We do not have precision on that point yet. However, the initiative will be thoroughly tested.
I thank the minister and his officials for their attendance. This has been a long but useful session.