Chamber and committees

That has to be carefully recorded and dealt with.

I am going to go back to a point that Simon Cameron made about public service reform. I do not know whether you will be able to answer this question, but I am interested in what you might say. There are challenges with the Promise: we have about three years left, time is racing by and we still see gaps and pressure in the system. Meanwhile, the conversation about public service reform is already taking place. If that reform process could give you one thing that would bring you closer to delivering the Promise by 2030, what would that be? I know that that is a really challenging question.

Absolutely.

When we look back in 2030, we will want to see how far we have come and to feel that we have made real progress. Progress has been made, but I do not know whether we are in that position at the moment.

Should some of the solutions that you are talking about to fill the gaps not be implemented before we reduce class contact time? Otherwise, we will have hugely problematic gaps that schools cannot fill, which will impact pupils.

[Inaudible.]

Despite the comments that Stuart Bain made about greater professional development and higher morale in the profession—I am sure that you would say the same—do you think that, certainly in the primary sector, where there are some very young children, this might be a step too far?

I am interested in the comments that Sheena Devlin made about how teachers will manage the school day when there is a lack of continuity because of the extra time for primary teachers. It struck me, as you were speaking, Sheena, that we have been here before, because we already have a lack of continuity—if you want to use that expression—as a result of primary teachers being released for McCrone time under a previous agreement.

I might have got this wrong—I am not from the primary sector, so please correct me if I have—but there are primary teachers who might, for example, have the last two hours on a Wednesday away from their class to do some preparation or development work, and another member of staff, such as the assistant head or the headteacher, will take their class for that time. We have some experience of that in the primary sector. Do you not think that it might be a good idea, if the proposal goes ahead, to use the experience and expertise that the primary schools have built up to help inform how best to manage the situation as they go ahead with the new reduction in class contact time?

We are considering the reduction in class contact time and its implications for the workforce. However, as Katherine Sangster said, we already have problems with recruiting teachers to rural and island areas.

I will stick with the primary sector for a moment. You have talked about incentives. I understand that a golden handshake is available whereby, if a teacher indicates that they are willing to go to a hard-to-reach area—let us call it that—they are given a payment regardless of whether they are then called to go there. That is what I have heard anecdotally—I would not say it in a court of law, but that is what I have heard.

It strikes me that the real problem is that the cost of living is particularly high in rural and island communities, because of the proliferation of holiday homes and second homes. You talked about tied housing, but many people who come out of teacher training, and indeed established teachers, want to put down roots: they want to buy a house and raise their family there. A tied house does not give them ownership.

In the interest of solving the problem once and for all, would it be worth while piloting a system for recruiting—and, we hope, retaining—teachers in rural and island areas that are short of them, through a different salary structure? Might that be the way to go? You are giving newly qualified teachers more than £2,000, but that is not a huge amount when we consider the costs of moving, the disruption and their commitment to the long term. Would it not be better to pilot a different salary structure whereby the teacher would know that their salary would help them to live reasonably well—perhaps as well as they could if they lived in an urban area where the cost of housing was much more competitive than in an island one? It is all about supply and demand, and I do not think that offering tied housing and a £2,000 payment even touches that.

My point is that you are already doing those things, but they are not working to the extent that you and everybody else would like them to. What else can you do? Of course, unions would not support that proposal, but I am thinking about the perspectives of communities on islands and the children who need teachers who are not there. Are there other things that you could do to bring teachers to islands?

10:15

It is not unreasonable to think that the reason, for example, people with a physics degree are not going into teacher training for physics is that it is not as attractive as other opportunities. I am thinking about salary, because it is a motivator. Salary also reflects your objective value, I suppose, in society and in the workplace.

The number of teachers in the teacher training pipeline is the source of the problem, and we can tackle it at source by making it more attractive and making it competitive with industry. Understanding that those people are perhaps more valuable than teachers of other subjects because there are so few of them—it is supply and demand—is basic economics.

If I have a skill that very few other people have, relatively speaking, in a school, I am at the top of the tree—I am special. On the other hand, if teachers of subject X are 10 a penny, that is a different situation. We cannot ignore that. It might be an uncomfortable truth, but we cannot ignore it.