The Future of Schools Management in Scotland
Our fourth agenda item is our final evidence-taking session on the future of schools management in Scotland. I am pleased to welcome Michael Russell, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. He is joined by Jamie MacDougall, the head of educational options, and Peter Hope-Jones, who is a policy officer, both from the Scottish Government’s options and partnerships division. I believe that the cabinet secretary would like to make an opening statement before we move to questions.
The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning (Michael Russell)
I would, convener. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the topic. I have followed the committee’s work on the issue with interest. I tend to share what I think is the committee’s emerging view that the management or governance of schools will form a central part of the considerations in the next session of the Parliament. I also share the view that was eloquently expressed in one meeting by Christina McKelvie that it is results in education that matter rather than merely structures.
I will outline what I think we are trying to achieve in Scottish education. I say “we” because I believe that consensus is a vital ingredient of educational reform. To see that, we need only look at the stability that was generated by the parliamentary consensus on the national debate on education, which led to the curriculum for excellence. The curriculum for excellence is the first building block for what we want to achieve, and we are on firm foundations with it. If we look elsewhere, we can find envy of what we are trying to do through curriculum for excellence. Yesterday morning, I spoke at a seminar that was organised by the Tapestry Partnership in which a professor of education at Harvard University spoke warmly about what Scotland is achieving with curriculum for excellence and how it is showing the way.
We can look elsewhere to understand how we can improve further. The recent programme for international student assessment—PISA—study showed that, after declines in performance in reading and maths in previous years, we are turning the corner. We are performing above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average, although we want to do better. We will come on to the management of schools, which is of course one of the areas in which we can do better.
Another key issue is the quality of teaching. That is why I commissioned Graham Donaldson to conduct a fundamental review of teacher education. The committee has read his report, to which I will respond in the Parliament shortly. So curriculum for excellence is one pillar and the ever-improving professional development and teacher education is a second pillar. A third pillar is financial stability. The McCrone review in 2000 brought in a decade of stability in Scotland’s schools, and tribute should be paid to that. However, it is time to review that agreement, which is why I set up the McCormac review team, which has now had its first meeting.
If we have consensus on the curriculum, a drive for ever-improving teacher excellence and long-term financial stability, we will have three key pillars in place. Of course, we are entering a period of severe financial restrictions in public expenditure. In addition to always improving the performance of education, we must deliver education more efficiently. That is the collective challenge. We will need new and innovative ideas in Scottish education to weather the reductions in public spending but improve our performance and make the most of the opportunities that the three pillars offer.
How we do that is vital. The introduction of any change in our education system is often met with initial scepticism and opposition, so we must engage properly with communities, not least parents, pupils and staff, on the reasons why we think change is desirable and explain clearly the benefits that we hope to achieve. Without that, we will rightly be viewed as introducing change purely for change’s sake or to cut costs. Cost is an important factor—nobody will gainsay that in the present situation—but it is not the sole driving force. If we bring together the need to reduce costs with a desire to improve performance, we will probably have the right mix.
The topic of the committee’s inquiry is very much part of that. As members know, I commissioned David Cameron to review the devolved school management guidance and to submit his recommendations on that. You have already taken evidence from him, and I hope to make an announcement on that before the end of this parliamentary session. I have expressed on many occasions that I am sympathetic to headteachers requesting more autonomy. However, that must be done intelligently. As I often say, I have never met a headteacher who wants me to give them the power to speculate on the price of heating oil. However, with the introduction of the curriculum for excellence, I have met many headteachers who believe that it demands a further degree of autonomy in their schools or school communities, or within school clusters.
What you are doing is entirely correct. This is the right time to have this debate. We have seen other people participating in it, such as the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, the Educational Institute of Scotland—which made a proposal over the Christmas period to have a number of education boards—and the other teaching unions. I noticed this morning that local authorities have made submissions to you that show that, although they argue, quite rightly, that we need to protect the innovations around the curriculum for excellence, they are open to this debate taking place. It will be a vigorous debate over the next few months. It is well joined. I look forward to hearing your views and I am sure that I will contribute some of my own.
You started off by saying that results are what matter, and no one in this committee would disagree with that. To what extent do you believe that there is a correlation between management structures and attainment? That is one of the issues that the committee has been wrestling with, and we have not, as yet, got a clear answer from anyone. In fact, David Cameron told the committee that it is a conundrum, as there is no correlation between the two, in his view. Why is it that the issue is so perplexing? Do you have a view on it?
It is a crucial issue. There is always a temptation for politicians of every hue to draw lines on maps and devise new structures, because that is what people do. I am reluctant to do that. I want to be led by the evidence. I want to know that the likelihood—because one can never be 100 per cent certain—is that the changes that we make will lead to changes in performance.
We know that the curriculum for excellence will improve performance—I think that we are already seeing that. There is strong evidence, worldwide, that the continuing improvement of the teaching profession produces improvements in performance. I believe that smaller class sizes do that, but I am not necessarily going to enter into that debate with you today, unless you wish to rehearse it. I also think that, allied to continuous improvement in teaching performance, the issue of ensuring that there is stability in education by having a well-rewarded workforce in education with clear and supportive terms and conditions will make a difference. All the evidence, such as the PISA evidence, proves that that is the case.
However, there is still a question about how we organise education. To some extent, the things that I am talking about are a result of educational organisation, so we must ask whether that could be done more efficiently and effectively. It is useful to consider other systems. For example, New Zealand has a national system, which means that the schools are run by the Government without an intervening body. The Tories have turned to models that exist in Sweden and elsewhere and have asked whether those bring better results. In Sweden, actually, the answer is no. Although there are some interesting elements in the free school movement, it has not produced an overall rise in performance, even if it has produced some rises in some circumstances.
We have a lot of work to do on this issue. One area in which we have done some work and should do more—I am pushing to see whether we can publish something on this—involves the correlation between expenditure and results. Since devolution, there has been a considerable increase in education expenditure—even in the past 12 months, it has increased. Some will argue, like Liz Smith, that the correlation between the increased expenditure and the improved performance is not exact by any means. However, the question is whether the administrative system is absorbing more of the resource than it should. That becomes an issue in terms of the efficiency of the use of public resource at a time of difficulty.
The issue is being examined, but I do not think that we have the answers yet.
Is it the case that innovation and creativity could be stifled by unnecessary and inappropriate structures? Keir Bloomer suggested that that might be the case. Should we think about how we can improve creativity and innovation? I would have thought that the curriculum for excellence would go some way towards doing that. Are structures a hindrance in that regard?
I think that the curriculum for excellence does that. I spend a lot of time talking to teachers and, since I became the cabinet secretary, I have made a practice of ringing up headteachers every week—they are given a warning that I will call—and talking through some of the issues that they are experiencing in their everyday work. A regular feature of those calls is discussion about more autonomy and greater freedom to interpret the curriculum for excellence in their schools.
There is no unanimity among headteachers. There is a general feeling that they should take on more responsibility, but there is a general issue about what the boundaries of that responsibility are. There will be circumstances in which over-rigid structures will suppress creativity and innovation in schools. Some would argue that it is necessary that that happen, in order to ensure a uniformity of performance—you have to trade that off in Scotland, too.
An issue that is often raised with me by MSPs is the variation not in outcomes, because we have a national examination system, but in the number of qualifications delivered in schools—Margaret Smith and Ken Macintosh discussed that matter at a meeting with my officials. Some MSPs have questioned why one school offers six qualifications while another offers eight and have said that everyone should offer the same number.
We have a system in Scotland that enables each school to make decisions. The question is, should we extend that system? I think that Keir Bloomer’s view is that the curriculum for excellence is doing well, but could do better if there were more autonomy for not only headteachers, but the entire teaching profession. I am sympathetic to that view, but I am not entirely sure yet where the limits of that lie.
If you were to give headteachers autonomy, the outcomes could be quite long term. How would you assess whether they were delivering the outcomes? What would you do if you thought that they were going wrong?
That is one of the great problems of education innovation. It is not without risk to individual young people. If you were to develop a system that diminished achievement, you would not know that that was the case for some time. At certain stages in the past 20 or 25 years in Scotland, there have been systems that certainly did not raise attainment, even if they did not diminish it. With the curriculum for excellence, we have introduced by consensus—despite spats that have existed even in this committee—a system that seems to be producing good results and has the potential to produce more.
It might be that a number of approaches could be piloted. When I came into office, I said that I was sympathetic to that approach, but I have not yet seen much work by local authorities along those lines. I would like to see more work on piloting approaches, as I am sympathetic to trying things out and seeing how they work.
A type of guarantee might involve the leadership and management qualities of headteachers. They have a considerable responsibility as leaders in education, and we need to ensure that they are trained and supported to the highest level. By and large, that happens. I am impressed with the skills of headteachers, but I am not saying that those skills are universal. One of the ways in which we might go about making progress on the issue would be to ensure that we have developed to the highest level possible the leadership and management skills of our headteachers—and of our teachers, because there is distributed leadership within our schools.
You say that you are disappointed that more piloting has not been undertaken by local authorities. Are you aware of examples involving greater or lesser autonomy in practice?
If you talk to headteachers throughout Scotland, you will find that that is going on in some areas. For example, headteachers in West Lothian say that they have a great degree of autonomy. I do not want to say anything invidious about other authorities, but there are areas in which there is not as much autonomy and there is a feeling that there is much more restriction.
When David Cameron comes up with revised guidelines, we should seek to make the norm as devolved as possible. I am waiting for David to give me a set of guidelines that will take the issue further. After that, we need to ask whether there is anything that we can do outwith the existing set of guidelines—all that David is doing is developing the existing set of guidelines—that might require legislation, more effort, the creation of different types of organisations or the adoption of a different mindset.
11:30
A strong piece of evidence from the round-table discussion was that the biggest challenge in Scotland is raising attainment levels within schools rather than between schools. In other words, the challenge is for all departments in a school to achieve at the level of the highest-achieving department. Will giving greater autonomy to heads allow that to happen? I am not quite sure how that would improve matters.
One of the major challenges—although I am not sure that it is the only one—is to ensure that there is a constant raising of attainment for all pupils and that there is a desire to ensure that the gap in attainment is constantly narrowed. I do not know whether a lack of autonomy is a barrier to that, so we need to find that out. Certainly, I do not think that there is much correlation with spend in that circumstance. It is irrefutable that socioeconomic issues have a strong influence on educational outcomes—there is no dispute about that at all—and in so far as that is related to financial issues, then there are strong financial issues, but there are other issues that we need to look at.
We have talked about leadership to an extent already. Ken Macintosh raised the important point about different levels of achievement and attainment between departments within the same school. Do you believe that principal teachers need to be given more autonomy in how they run their departments? Do they have enough autonomy, leadership training or innate skills to be able to overcome the barriers that lead to different attainment levels within schools, which David Cameron said are 10 times more important than those between schools?
A school is a community, and the best schools are a community in which there is distributed leadership. Essentially, that means that there is very good leadership from the top. One of the things that distinguishes a good school from any other school in Scotland—I have no doubt about this, because I have visited many schools—is the quality of leadership in the school. However, it is not just the heroic headteacher model that one looks for; it is an understanding that the leadership is distributed throughout the school and that various types of leadership are displayed in various roles within the school.
There should also be an understanding that the school community makes decisions, not just an unelected or unresponsive monarchy within the school—in other words, that there is decision-making participation within the school. The school community can decide how to organise itself, and each part needs to be well led. We need to develop constantly the leadership skills of all teachers, because they are educational leaders. Even an unpromoted teacher is an educational leader. We need to ensure that they understand that leadership role and are helped to do so.
Some very good leadership training opportunities are on offer in Scotland through a variety of organisations. I am impressed by a number of them. Columba 1400 is one example; I have never met a headteacher or teacher who would say that it did anything other than change their view of the world. There are other organisations, too, and we need to make such opportunities available to teachers.
We also need to make headship as attractive as possible. We have turned a corner in that, too. The number of head vacancies is, I think, smaller; it certainly has not risen in recent years. That indicates that people are willing to come forward and be headteachers. The headteachers will usually tell you that what encourages them more than anything else is having greater autonomy, so there is also an element of that in what we are trying to do.
Keir Bloomer said that there was a culture of compliance and risk aversion. He said:
“The inspectorate in particular cannot avoid cultivating a culture of compliance and risk aversity that is contrary to the innovative and risk-taking education service that we now need.”—[Official Report, Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee, 2 February 2011; c 4627.]
What really needs to change?
The inspectorate is on a useful and important trajectory of change. I pay tribute to Bill Maxwell and, indeed, to his predecessor Graham Donaldson for that. I spoke at Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education conference last week, which reported on the first of the small school inspection changes that they had undertaken, something that I was particularly keen to see happen. The inspection took place on the island of Luing. I was told last night on the telephone that the entire community thought that it was a wonderful experience. I have never heard that said about an inspection before, so that seems to have worked.
The inspectorate’s experience of suspending activity last autumn and going into schools to support curriculum for excellence, which was Bill Maxwell’s innovation and which was very productive, has changed the inspectorate and made it focus much more on the innovative nature of curriculum for excellence. The inspectorate has made a series of proposals to continue to change the inspection process to something much more positive and supportive. In those circumstances, it will also be likely to support innovation and new thinking.
The inspectorate’s involvement in the new organisation—there is an acronym but I am refusing to use it at the moment because there are far too many acronyms in education—with Learning and Teaching Scotland, while retaining the statutory duty of inspection, will also develop the idea of inspection as a supportive and positive activity. That is extremely important.
So autonomy and leadership are clearly important for headteachers and department heads. What autonomy should they have to deal with teachers who are unable to deliver in the classroom?
We have to be careful with how we define that problem, because there is a spectrum. Through the General Teaching Council for Scotland, we have the statutory ability to deal with teachers who cannot perform and who are essentially unsuited to teaching. I am sure that you would accept that there are people in politics who are unsuited to being politicians. If people who are unsuited to teaching are in teaching, they should not be, and we need to make sure that they are not in teaching as quickly as possible. There are statutory provisions for that and they should be used.
There is the more difficult issue of those who, to be charitable, have been in teaching for a long time, for whom the spark has gone—I am not being ageist, because there are some very good teachers who are at the end of their careers and are still inspiring others—and who might not be performing to their full capability. That is a problem in all organisations. How do we motivate and encourage such people? Good leadership in schools is essential for that, and it might well be useful for headteachers to have more autonomy to decide whether people can be retired early, or to change the dispensation in the school of departments and what people do.
We also have a third problem that I freely acknowledge and which we are in the process of solving. We have a cohort of younger teachers, not all of whom have gone into schools in the past two or three years. We are in the process of getting them into schools and that will also make a difference. Often those teachers whose careers are flagging a bit are energised by the example of the highest quality young teachers. One of the headteachers I was talking to yesterday said that, in their 40-year experience in education, they had never seen higher quality young people coming into education. That is a good indication that people want to teach in Scotland. That situation will therefore change.
There is a conundrum with a small group of de-energised older teachers. It is only a small group, and I want to make that absolutely clear, because I know that there are people from the press here and I have seen terribly inaccurate reporting of this issue. There are failing teachers out there—there are also failing journalists—and we must make it absolutely clear that a failing teacher is not the norm.
Of course, there are no failing journalists in this room.
That is a good point. As Graham Donaldson said, it is not really appropriate to say that a percentage of air traffic controllers is allowed to fail: “We did quite well last year; only 5 per cent of our planes crashed.” The teaching profession in Scotland is of a very high standard but there are still issues. We all think back to our personal histories and how some people failed to get the qualifications that they needed in order to go to university, or to go down whatever avenue of life they had chosen, because they had a teacher who was unable to educate them effectively and they suffered as a result. I am talking about how we deal with that.
All this talk about autonomy and leadership is wonderful, but I am thinking about how it impacts at the chalkface and how we continue to improve standards at that level. I hope that there will be no pussyfooting around the problems. The cabinet secretary mentioned the GTCS; I am not desperately enthusiastic about how it deals with these issues. There is still a huge element of producer interest rather than consumer interest in schools and that has to be faced. Scotland has a culture of pretending that the problem does not exist and we must overcome that if we are to make a quantum leap in attainment for children in Scotland.
I will make a point about Graham Donaldson’s report. I will repeat what he said at its launch—I was sitting next to him and I heard it, although, strangely, it did not get reported. What he said was that his recommendations were only possible because of the very high quality of Scotland’s teachers and that he was building on success.
I entirely accept the point about what might be called zero tolerance of bad teaching. We should not tolerate bad teaching in our classrooms. There are people who should not be in the profession and it does nobody any good to pretend otherwise. I do not think that there is a large number of them and I do not think that we have a significant problem, but where the problem does exist—I entirely agree with Mr Gibson on this—we should solve it with dispatch.
I do not believe that that applies to a large number of teachers either, but it is an issue in some schools and departments and we have to address the matter directly.
Cabinet secretary, you raise an interesting point about what makes a good school—and it is not necessarily about management structures. We have had it put to us strongly that parents are the key driver and, to pick up on what Mr Gibson said—although “consumers” is a horrible word to use in education—parents are the people who will be choosing the school and they have a vital role to play, so it is important to consider what makes them decide what a good school is.
How could parents be more involved in the processes around the possible changes in school organisation, so that they have greater choice over what makes a good school? I am not asking about management structures, but about what makes a good school.
There is a degree of parental choice in Scotland anyway, with the system of placing requests. I think that it is a good system, and that the one or two local authorities that have been targeting school closures on schools with high levels of placing requests are just not getting it. There is a system in place, and it can be positive.
I agree with you about the absolutely vital role of parents—and I widen that out to the role of parents and children—in creating school communities that work. In the inspection process in Norway, for example, there is a statutory children’s inspection of the school, in which they say what they think of it. I am not saying that that should be statutory here, but it is certainly a positive element.
Some schools find no difficulty in getting parental involvement, and some schools struggle at it. It is not just about what socioeconomic group they serve; it is also about the nature of the school and its outreach. Yesterday afternoon I visited St Bride’s primary school in Govanhill, which is the school with the highest proportion in Scotland of children who do not have English as their first language. At the end of that visit, I was sung to by a school choir—as sometimes happens—and it was in Italian, on this occasion, even though there was just one Italian-speaking child there. It was just wonderful. There was a whole group of parents there, some of whom had no English at all, but they were deeply involved in the school, because the nature of the school was that it reached out to them and wanted them to be part of the process. We need schools that actively do that. Good leadership in schools recognises that that is part of the equation. Parents are not excluded—nor are they allowed simply to turn up.
There is an issue for every school. The one thing that we have all done is go to school. It was either an experience that we did not like and would not wish to go back to—that does happen—or we think that we are experts on it and that we can tell teachers how to do their job. There are difficulties in that, but a school that welcomes and draws in parents, that includes them as an integral part of the process and that engages them in their children’s learning should not be the exception; it should be the absolute norm.
I could go through a whole list of strategies that I have seen in operation, and part of the leadership training for headteachers is to ensure that those strategies work. I do not think that anybody would get to be a headteacher in Scotland now without some determination to see their school as part of the community.
There is a wider issue that we need to think about. Mr Gibson was laughing at that; there are some headteachers, however, who do not have that—
Sorry: it was nothing to do with education. I was thinking that even ministers of the Church of Scotland have to have a strong community input.
How we define the school community becomes an issue. There is some discussion about whether a school should be considered as a cluster of schools—a secondary school and some primary schools—but we should think a little bit more widely than that. If we understand, as I am sure we do, the importance of the early years and the getting it right for every child approach, school becomes a wider group than simply the secondary and primary schools in an area. It will engage all the parents, and even putative parents, in the community, as a child-centred, learning community. Finding out how to do that is a good thing.
It has been put to us strongly that a good school is often one that engages the parents successfully and is part of the community. Graham Donaldson’s report talks about the role of the headteacher and says that the skills that may be required in future are not necessarily the traditional skills. The headteacher will be an important force in driving up standards in schools. Some people—including me—argue that the traditional one-size-fits-all policy used by local authorities is slightly contradicted by the view expressed in the report. There may be various ways of achieving a good school, and the one-size-fits-all strategy does not really help.
11:45
I do not think that we have a one-size-fits-all strategy in Scotland, and I would not support one; but if we can agree to differ on whether we have such a policy or not, I will certainly agree with you that such a policy would not work. There is considerable variation in the ways in which local authorities manage education in Scotland. It is sometimes positive and it is sometimes negative, but there is no one-size-fits-all strategy.
Many headteachers argue for more autonomy because—in some local authorities but by no means in all—they feel constrained by a one-size-fits-all controlling factor on certain issues.
I would not call that a one-size-fits-all policy. I would not want to speak for headteachers, but I do speak to them often and I think that they feel that the limits to their authority need to be widened and that the way in which they lead their educational community needs to be less constrained.
Scotland has a strong tradition of the community being involved in education. We were the first nation in the world to have a system of parish schools and we regard education as a community activity. It could be argued that one of the differences between us and people south of the border is that we regard education as collaborative while they regard it as competitive. I am not making any judgments; I am just saying how things are. Here, education is a collaborative activity, based in the community.
However, it may well be that our interpretation of the community—which developed in the 20th century, through the 1918 act in particular—is now too large. The community is now interpreted as being the local authority area, but the original model is rooted in the idea of the community being the parish. That change may be at the root of the current difficulty. At one stage, the community is the community that a headteacher serves; but at another stage, the community is something very much bigger—a very large grouping that is too big. How can we ensure that the community basis is strengthened? Answering that question may be one way in which to consider the issue.
It might be implied that the school cluster and the wider grouping—which is pre-school and other activities—is the natural educational community. That is fairly obvious in rural areas but in the larger cities things can be harder to define. I have heard it argued in cities that people should choose their educational community—and the community may not just be geographic, it may be a community of interest. Such models need to be discussed.
That is a helpful answer. I understand what you were saying about collaborative versus competitive. However, since 1999, spending on schools has doubled and although I think that some fantastic things are happening in schools—do not get me wrong—overall attainment levels are not as good as we would like them to be. Most people would accept that, I think.
In our efforts to drive standards up, there are pillars on which we can build, such as curriculum for excellence and the Donaldson review. However, could an element of competition be added? I do not mean political competition, but if schools know about examples of best practice and have the freedom to adopt them, would you accept that that would be an important part of—
Rather than describing that as competitive, I would describe that as being willing to learn from and implement best practice. Virtually every school I go to knows that it should find out what people elsewhere are doing and learn from it. They do that, and they look outside Scotland, too.
In Edinburgh, 25 per cent of education is private and in Glasgow the percentage is smaller; but, in the rest of Scotland, that model of competitive choice does not exist. We have not developed the idea of academies, which is built on competitive choice, and I do not think that they are the right thing for Scottish education, but there are models for change that I think are the right thing for Scottish education, and that is what we are discussing.
Good morning, cabinet secretary. An issue that came up at the round-table discussion was a possible reduction in the number of local authorities. What is your view on that? Is there a link between the number of local authorities and performance?
I do not think so. I would not be foolish enough to give an opinion on whether the present number is the right number—that is outwith my pay grade, to tell you the truth.
We need to look more closely at the correlation between educational spend and performance. There is the issue of duplication. I am extremely encouraged by the work that is being done in East Lothian with Midlothian to examine how to bring together the educational administration to make it more efficient and cost-effective. That is also happening in Stirling and Clackmannan. There is lots of scope to reduce back-office costs and overheads so that administration is managed more effectively. That may not be the answer in this case, because we should be fairly careful about how we define the issues, but there is scope for spending less on administration and spending more at the front line.
That is where we are at the moment. We are not having the debate about why that is the case here. Regrettably, we are in a position in which we are asking people to do more for less. I will not blame anyone—I usually do, but I will not do so on this occasion. How we do that is part of the debate, but it is not the whole debate.
At the round-table meeting, Professor Mongon said:
“According to all the international evidence, the structural question is a second-order question.”—[Official Report, Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee, 2 February 2011; c 4618.]
I agree with him. If you have been following the committee’s deliberations, you will understand that my position is that the child, not the structure, should be at the centre and that we might be looking at the issue the wrong way round.
An observation that I have made is about not so much bad teaching but a lack of aspiration. We still hear about kids who have an aspiration to go to university, for example, being told by the teacher, “You’ll not be able to achieve that.” I wonder whether there is a link between the Scottish cringe factor when it comes to success and the issues that Carol Craig has written about, such as our not showing off. Is that still inherent in the system? Is it part of what holds children back?
Where that exists, it does hold children back, and it is greatly to blame for some of the problems that we have had in the past, but I see less and less evidence of it now. Part of the process of the nation growing is the growing of confidence in young people and their growing ability to put themselves forward.
I had a conversation this morning about some members of the civil service who had gone to three different schools to talk about careers. They had gone to a private school, where they encountered a group of young women who were very confident in talking about their careers, then they had gone to a state secondary school, where they were somewhat disappointed by the fact that the children were not of a forthcoming nature. As good civil servants who wanted to have evidence-based policy making, they went to a third school, which was another state school, where the young people were in their faces in terms of how they projected themselves. Therefore, the situation is patchy—it depends on the school and the young people.
We are seeing growing confidence and a growing ability to recognise that a confident-learner approach is what we need. Curriculum for excellence is extremely important in that regard. The word “confident” is there in the four capacities; this is about confidence.
I think that you are right. I am seeing less of the cringe factor, too.
I want to ask you about the holistic approach to child development. I have mentioned all the other influences on a child’s life that can affect their attainment. If the option of a break with local authorities comes up, how will we remedy the issue of shared services and ensure that a holistic approach is kept in place for the child? Some of the best measures for children that I have seen have involved a local primary school working really well with the local child protection team and the local health board, not only in safeguarding children but in ensuring that they have the right environment in which to grow and develop. It is by developing young children through such support that we will get young people who are confident learners as they go into adulthood. I hope that you can give us an insight into how early years ties into that.
The inspection process for children’s services, which I think is through its second cycle, demonstrates that there has been a great improvement in children’s services.
We are all united on the concept of partnership delivery. I am not predicting a different structure for schools, but if there were one, partnership working with health, social work and children’s services would have to continue, and indeed might improve, because there would be a greater focus on individual school communities and perhaps therefore on individual children. I do not anticipate any threat to partnership working. I am not sure how much partnership working is enhanced by everyone working for the same local authority. There are issues there. There have traditionally been difficulties in drawing in different parts. If you discuss the issue with any school, depending on the local authority you will find different parts of different local authorities reacting differently. I do not anticipate that changing.
The focus on the individual child is where it is at. The welfare of that child and the opportunities that it has from cradle onwards are of massive importance. We have to remember that the great advantage that we have in Scotland—I constantly go back to it—is that we are a small country. The numbers are not overwhelming. Therefore, it is possible for us to operate in a much more personalised way than would otherwise be the case. We should cleave to that as a major opportunity.
One of the organisations that came before the committee suggested having a child development service, for children from ages one to three, to build emotionally confident children and break the cycle of poverty of opportunity and expectation. I do not know whether any of your scoping exercises are considering some sort of formal process for child development that ties in all the partners.
I am convinced that the process for the early years is one of education and not merely—I do not use the word “merely” pejoratively—care. The best results come from seeing the early experience, in the earliest years, as being an educative process, although not a formal educative process. That is the type of focus that we need to have, and I want to see a great deal more of that.
The evidence that the committee took in its round-table discussion, which I think we all found extremely helpful, suggests that there is not the same appetite for radical change in structures in Scotland as there is in England. From your discussions with stakeholders and headteachers and so on, what kinds of structural change do you think might fit the current Scottish context? You have mentioned that East Lothian and Midlothian are sharing services, which is a reasonable approach. We have heard a lot of different suggestions, but my sense from the round-table discussion is that there is not a great embracing of any of them in particular. The cluster idea is the one that is perhaps closest to taking forward the idea of giving greater autonomy to headteachers, involving the local community—while keeping the local authority where it is needed—and building a much more steady-as-you-go approach. Is that, rather than something more radical, where the structure in Scotland might end up?
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We should be careful not to conflate the words “appetite” and “need”—I am not entirely sure that they go together. I referred in my opening statement to the importance of seeing what change is necessary and persuading people that it is necessary. The appetite for change might not exist until there is recognition that change is necessary.
However, no one I know is wading into this saying, “We need to do this, this and this.” The EIS argued at the turn of the year that it would like to see 10 regional boards. That is an interesting contribution, but it strikes me that having 10 regional boards is not that different from having 32 local authorities. There are some other issues there.
Nobody has said to me that they want to see an entirely national system, such as exists in New Zealand where the Government runs everything, although that would be an option. Nobody has said to me that the present situation is entirely satisfactory and should simply be left. Therefore, what you are doing is an important part of the process. We are having a debate about what would be useful.
There is some evidence that headteachers regard a strengthening of their autonomy as being important to their achieving what they need to achieve, especially given the demands of the curriculum for excellence. We did not anticipate this, but we now know that the curriculum for excellence demands a change in teaching and teacher training as well as a change in teachers’ terms and conditions and how we employ teachers. It may also demand some change in the way in which we deliver education, which is what we are now working towards. If the curriculum for excellence is our foundation, we must bear that in mind at all times.
There is a spectrum to be considered. Nothing happening is probably not on that spectrum, as there is now a general desire for change—even the evidence from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities indicates that there is some need for change. I do not find the idea of a single national educational service attractive, and I am not sure that there would be many takers for it. I have had discussions with people in New Zealand who talk about its advantages, but they also talk about its disadvantages. Somewhere on the spectrum there is what we might call a rebalancing of the structure, which is what we need to debate—and what better time to have that debate than when an election is due and people can put forward their ideas fairly?
Kenny Gibson talked earlier about the thorny issue of bad teachers. I agree totally that bad teachers should not be in our classrooms—they should be out of teaching and doing something else, as the price that is paid for their bad teaching is paid by the children. In conversations that I have had with headteachers—especially secondary school headteachers—about the need for more autonomy and their frustration at their lack of power in their schools, they have raised issues around staffing. At the same time, some of the reticence among unions and others towards change in the existing structures is partly the result of fear about staff terms and conditions and so on suddenly being in the hands of an individual teacher.
You say that there is scope for a shift on the autonomy of headteachers. Are there certain things that you believe will always have to remain with a local authority, a regional board or whatever?
I cannot imagine our moving away from national bargaining on teachers’ salaries and terms and conditions. The Balkanisation of that would be foolish, in my view. The college sector does not have national terms and conditions, and I am on record as saying that that is a disadvantage. I know that some—although not all—college principals disagree with me. We would see that writ large if every one of Scotland’s almost 3,000 schools had a different set of terms and conditions. That is not on the table and I cannot imagine that it would be discussed.
Nevertheless, there are issues of the deployment of staff within national agreements that might be better decided by discussion and negotiation at the school level rather than by local authorities. There are also issues of hiring and a school’s priorities that might be better decided at that level. Some schools are already in that position; others may want to get there. Within the debate, there are areas about which we would say, “No, that is not a place where we’re going.” However, there are other areas about which we would ask, “How would that help?” Some people might argue that it would make no difference, but I have heard teachers arguing that they would like the flexibility to decide what to do.
That is great. Thank you.
That concludes our questions to you, minister. Thank you very much for your attendance at the committee.
I will see you next week and look forward to it. Thank you.
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Meeting suspended.
12:05
On resuming—