Chamber and committees

Professor Stobart has raised the issue of multilevel teaching a couple of times. An awful lot of teachers have made representations to me about that over a number of years. There are huge problems with it. They do not see it as multilevel teaching; in essence, it is multiqualification teaching—teaching different syllabuses, examination processes or assessment processes in the same classroom. Do other jurisdictions or countries do that?

That is useful.

I want to ask about data. I was interested in your points on the annual student surveys that are carried out in other jurisdictions and countries. What kind of data do we require in Scottish education to monitor effectively the reform process? Is there sufficient data?

More data in this area would be helpful. I know that the equity audit was not quantitative. We need to see more information on the area so that we can assess, in the kind of work that you are involved in, whether the current policies and spending priorities of the Government actually address what has become a far greater problem in terms of the level of need.

That brings me to two specific areas. One is around pupil equity fund spending. I would like colleagues from the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland to comment on the availability of that money and the transparency of how it is allocated in different areas. As a councillor—which I will continue to be until May—and as a member of the Scottish Parliament, I find it difficult to find out what that money has been spent on and to what end, at a local and a national level. It would be good to hear some comments on that, after which I will turn to the question of school buildings.

I appreciate that. With regard to spending on ventilation, £10 million was recently allocated to recording the amount of CO₂ in classrooms so that teachers would know whether to open the windows. Has Audit Scotland or the Accounts Commission looked at the question of whether school buildings are now prepared for the pandemic that remains with us and how public spending is being used to adapt them in order to prevent infection?

Fergus Ewing’s line of questioning was useful. Across the United Kingdom, we have the Barnett formula, which delivers an additional £14 billion of spending to Scotland, specifically to provide services across our broader geographic area. I suggest to the Accounts Commission that it would be useful if the piece of work that it is doing looked at the school building programme that was provided by the Scottish Government via the Scottish Futures Trust to see what the match-up was between the aspirations of the policy and how it was delivered.

Kaukab Stewart made a point about private finance initiative building schemes and other such models. It would be useful to ensure that work on that includes non-profit-distribution models and all the various forms of private finance initiative that the Scottish National Party has used since it came to power in 2007—I know that Audit Scotland has previously identified those models as being forms of private finance initiative. It would be useful if the committee could see the full scale of those models.

I have to say that I am slightly worried by those answers. After all, we are talking about £1 billion of taxpayers’ money, but at times I have found how it has been allocated impenetrable. I have seen the Education Scotland reports, which are case studies of best practice that might be copied elsewhere, but the fact is that practice across Scotland is hugely variable. Moreover, going back to my learned colleagues’ earlier comments, I think that there is very little about how we tie all this up with the outcomes. As politicians and policy makers, we need greater granularity on such matters; we need to know an awful lot more about what the money is being spent on and how it is delivering change for some of the most vulnerable young people in our society. At the moment, it is pretty difficult to find that sort of thing out.

I have one last question to ask, if I may, convener.

I have a question for the Auditor General about his report on education that was produced prior to this year’s Scottish Parliament election. The report concluded that the equality gap in education remained far too wide and fell far short of the Scottish Government’s aims. We have been living through the pandemic since that work was done. As far as we can tell, there has been huge disruption, the impact of which has been very unequal and has affected some of the most deprived and least privileged groups in society.

Do you have a sense of whether any work is being done on the impact of the pandemic on the sorts of outcomes that you looked at in your report?

Are you aware of any work to quantify the general impact of lost learning across Scotland? I understand your description of how local and national education authorities reacted to deal with the immediate impact of the pandemic. Do you have a sense of whether any work has been done to assess the longer-term impact on children and young people?

That is fine. Thank you.

We will wait to see the correspondence—