Chamber and committees

I understand that completely. I have a meeting scheduled very soon to discuss the matter with experts in the field, because I am keen to see it progressed. The dyslexia passport will be an important way to support educational transitions and lifelong learning.

I do not have the exact figures that you asked for. They are probably in my briefing pack, but in the interest of time, I will write to the committee with that information.

Different things will appeal to certain individuals or drive their decision making about specialising, and I am not in the business of compelling anybody to do it. The Government’s responsibility is to ensure that there is sufficient funding for the provision of additional support, noting what I said about the extent to which that need has grown and the fact that every country is trying to match funding with what we want to achieve.

Developing continuing professional development is a good example of what we can do. As I said, we spent £1 million on that, and it has been really popular. Lots of individuals from right across the profession have come forward to engage in the training in order to upskill. The staged intervention model is another way of supporting teachers. I also come back to the point about making it as straightforward as possible to transfer from one part of the profession to another, for those who want to do that.

There are headline ways in which we gauge attainment, and I am always interested in how learners with additional support needs are doing. For example, on results day this year, I was interested to understand how children registered as having an additional support need had done in their exams. Likewise, I always look behind the data to see how children who are care experienced have done. We can use those big annual statistical outputs.

Equally, I have been looking really closely at the prominent reasons why young people are being registered as having additional support needs. Scotland has a very broad system that captures everything from lifelong requirements to bereavement, having English as a second language or having emotional, social or behavioural issues. It is a very broad system, and we are watching carefully to see where patterns emerge. For example, the biggest registration category just now is emotional, social and behavioural concerns or needs, while the fastest growing is having English as a second language.

As we develop the staged intervention model, we are also carrying out a data improvement exercise, which involves looking at how additional support needs are observed and registered in different schools and different classrooms, and at what that means for young people. I would like to get to a position where children who do not need to be registered are not registered. If a child who has bereavement is supported and moves on, they need not still be registered as having an ASN. However, I want the children who are registered to have excellent support: ultimately, that is my goal.

There is an underlying commitment to extend the number of apprenticeships to 150,000. As with the significant changes to childcare, we are conscious of the need to review the picture. To achieve growth on that scale, we need to look at rates, at how relationships are managed and at how things are worked through. We have also committed to the apprenticeship accelerator grant. I am conscious that it must be attractive to industry and that it must be competitive so that companies will do the important job of taking on apprentices.

Equally, we need to ensure that the rates are proportionate, as you said, and that they are in the right place to allow us to achieve the growth that we want. This afternoon, Alyn Smith will be sworn in as the new minister with responsibility for tertiary education. This will be top of what he and I will work together on. We will consider the review of rates and the expansion, in particular.

Adam Reid, do you want to add anything?

10:00

I agree, and Scotland’s education system is doing well at achieving that balance right now. We can see that, under the new Prime Minister, England is wrestling with questions related to the balance of what its education system is pursuing.

Our exam results during the past two years show that national 5, higher and advanced higher attainment has gone up across the board and that there has also been a 121 per cent increase in the number of young people getting awards in vocational studies such as construction, childcare, journalism and personal finance—all the vocational subjects that are preparing young people for the world of work.

There has to be parity of esteem, and we want to ensure that our system is capable of allowing children to achieve excellence in either of those routes—whatever they want and whatever suits them best. Lots of children will do a mixture of both. I want to encourage parity.

The dynamic that you have expressed is very live and is at the top of my mind as we are thinking about the three-year guarantee. Exactly as you say, the offer is a response to a concern from newly qualified teachers whom we want to encourage to be in the profession—and we want to encourage others to come through—but who face uncertainty in the first few years of their work, as well as things differing across council areas, which we need to remember are the employers here. The offer is about providing certainty and shoring up the future teaching workforce.

However, I am very aware of the concerns, as you have described them, from established teachers about capacity. We will have to manage our way through those, and we will have to take cognisance of the points that are being raised with me by established teachers.

I believe that we can do both. We can offer certainty and better planning, including life planning, for our young teachers, as well as provide opportunities and support for established practitioners. I say that because there are other dynamics at play. When we roll out the reduction in class contact time, as we are doing now, that will create the need for more teaching positions across both primary and secondary.

Just now we are trying to drive uptake through bursary and recruitment campaigns for hard-to-fill subjects, so I take comfort from the fact that we have work to do to fill teaching spaces, and that will be increased by the reduction in class contact time, which means that we can support newly qualified teachers without that having a detrimental impact on the existing workforce. We have to be able to do both.

I will very much take the advice of you and other former teachers on the issue. What you said reflects the conversations that I have been having with teachers, as well as with pupils. This is anecdotal and just my experience of having met people, but it is no exaggeration to say that I have not yet met a pupil or a teacher in schools where mobile phones have been banned who has said that the ban has not been positive for learning and teaching.

We are complementing that anecdotal evidence with a consultation. As the director of education was just reminding me, we have already had about 5,000 responses to that consultation, which is really significant. Therefore, we are gathering views in that way as well.

On the particular question of enforcement, it has not so far been raised with me that schools that have taken a fulsome approach have had exceptional difficulties with enforcement. Most of those schools reflected to me that there was a bit of pushback at first—we all recognise that this is a big change for young people—but, once it was understood what was required and everybody was doing it, it became like other things that people are required to do in class.

For example, I remember that when I was in school I had to sit down, take my jacket off, not chew gum and not talk when the teacher was talking. Although the mobile phone ban is a big change, we just need to get to a point where phones do not exist in the learning environment, in the same way as other things happen when people follow those other rules.

I have seen how some schools have managed enforcement, and success has been closely linked to taking a whole-community approach to the development of the policy. Those schools went out and spoke to teachers and the community and they involved young people in shaping what they intended to do. Everyone then has a stake in the policy when it is introduced.

The reflections that I have heard so far have been that, when such preparatory work is done, the policy has not led to massive resistance from young people. In fact, many of them are saying, “I’m so glad I don’t have that constant distraction.” Even if the phone is in a person’s pocket and they are not reading what it is saying, if it is buzzing, it will be distracting them from what they are doing. In our behaviour in Scottish schools research, the main issue that secondary teachers raised with us was disruption from mobile phones. Therefore, I am quite committed to the policy.

That brings me to your first point about exceptions. Much like the need for flexibility with breakfast clubs, I understand that there will also need to be flexibility with mobile phones. For example, if a young person is managing diabetes, they will need to use their mobile phone to address their blood sugars. Equally, a young carer must be able to contact home on a different basis from other children. There will be exceptions, but my expectation, hope and intention are that there will not be so many that they undermine the core approach of drawing a line in the sand in relation to mobile phones being in our learning environments.

It is difficult to break it down to only three outcomes, given the breadth of the portfolio, but if I were to name only three, I would go to three points in people’s lives that the portfolio affects, starting with early child development. In recent years, we have seen some trends that are a little concerning in respect of early child development and speech and language development. I am interested in the extent to which that is linked to devices, the Covid effect and other factors affecting parents and carers. If we were able to improve those statistics and outcomes in the formative early years, that would be very helpful.

As you asked me to give three examples, I would then look at school-age education. The overhaul of our curriculum that is under way will drive better attainment for young people, better workload management for the teaching workforce and better outcomes generally. Public service reform will do that, too.

I suppose that we could then turn to post-school education. Although we already have good positive destination statistics in Scotland, with 93.5 per cent of learners being in a positive follow-up destination nine months after leaving school, and, for example, higher youth employment and lower youth unemployment than in other parts of the United Kingdom, I would like those aspects to improve, too.

I cannot really narrow it down to three examples, but I have picked three stages in a young person’s life.

I do not underestimate for a moment what you have said about the vastly different circumstances into which a child can be born or that they may experience as life goes on. There will always be challenges and difficulties in our society that can have a bearing on our young people. However, the First Minister has made the eradication of child poverty a principal objective of the Government. The aim is not to reduce it or to tinker around its edges but to eradicate it. I take my lead from the First Minister in that regard, and I am committed to working to close the attainment gap, difficult though that may be. I am not short-sighted on that at all. By working towards that goal and striving to achieve it, we will get closer to doing so. Of course, this is not just about statistics; it is about improving children’s lives.

Eradicating child poverty is an objective for the whole Government. I have this incredible tool in the comprehensive education system, and I must ensure that it works as effectively as possible, alongside Government support, to create a level playing field. We will not achieve equality of outcome, but we must strive for equality of opportunity. Our work to reduce the cost of the school day, bold interventions such as the Scottish child payment and our work on the Promise aim to provide strong relational support for families as early as possible, helping to create a level playing field for young people. Difficulty will ever be present in our society but, as a Government, we have a responsibility to try to bear down on it as hard as we possibly can.

I do not want to take up too much time on each answer, but there is really strong evidence that aspects of the poverty-related attainment gap are closing. Our achievement of curriculum for excellence levels data speaks to the gap in literacy and numeracy, in both primary and secondary education, being at a record low. I also mentioned the positive destinations that young people move into after leaving school. The latest figures show a two-thirds reduction in the poverty-related attainment gap over time, which is brilliant. I also put on record the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service data from this year, which shows that more young Scots are going on to university than ever before, including more from deprived backgrounds than ever before.

Those are just three ways in which we are already arresting the rise in the poverty-related attainment gap, although there is more to do.

Clare Hicks, the education director, can come in on that, but it means making clearer the aspects of a certain subject that a young person ought to know or be being taught at a certain stage. What that means for maths will be different from what it means for art—there will be varying specificity—but it is about setting out what young people ought to be being taught and what progression there ought to be through the levels. I do not know whether Clare Hicks wants to expand on that.