Chamber and committees

I am exercised on the issue of workforce; that is even before we get to the reduction in class contact time. As you will know better than I do, there are problems right now, before we even get to that point.

Teachers here are now the best paid in Europe; I speak as somebody who was a teacher for 25 years. They are now better paid than they have ever been. Obviously salary only goes one way, so that would be true nonetheless, but they are the best paid in Europe.

I come back to what I said earlier. I have a graph in front of me—I am not sure whether it comes from one of the witness submissions—that clearly shows the reality now, because the figures are from 2025. Physics teachers are like hen’s teeth. We have real shortages in all the sciences, in particular in physics and chemistry, as well as in biology, and we also have real shortages in English and maths. It does not take a genius to work out the reason for that. Even though teachers are the best paid that they have ever been and the best paid in Europe, teaching does not compete with other opportunities, such as those in industry, that are available to those graduates—it just cannot compete.

In my view—I will not speak for anyone else—it is clear to the children and to the teachers in schools that there is a hierarchy of subjects. The teachers that we are short of are at the sharpest end, because there are fewer of them. I think that it is fair to say that not every subject carries the same workload for every teacher, if I can put it that way. There are much greater demands on teachers who teach academic subjects. We can argue about why that is the case, or even whether it is the case, but in reality, we know that it is true. Parents and children know it, and teachers know it. It might not ever be discussed in schools openly, but everybody knows it.

If we cannot fill the gaps in those key subjects now, the prospect of filling them when we need even more of those teachers seems ever more distant. I come back to my earlier point. I know about collective bargaining and all that, and that we do not want differentiated salaries, but it seems to me that we have a choice. We can have collective bargaining to set minimum salaries for teachers so that everybody has a minimum. However, it seems to me that, if we do not go down the road of differentiated salaries in some key subjects in order to compete with industry, the only alternative—please correct me if I have got this wrong—is that we offer a narrowing curriculum, because we simply cannot deliver the teachers for those subjects.

What is your response to that? Do you agree with it? If not, why not? I suppose that that question is for all of you.

Do they all have the same workload?

Do any of the other witnesses want to come in on that?

The challenges that you have highlighted run right across the care sector and affect all age groups.

We have heard a lot of frustration, including from the witnesses, about the disjointed operations in relation to the Promise. There are multiple funding streams for various things that are all worth while in their own right. We have a crowded landscape and we need a holistic approach, which a few of you have talked about.

Audit Scotland has pointed out the data gap on several occasions. That point has also been made in some of your submissions. If we do not have data, we cannot measure what we are doing, how we are doing it or how close we are to getting to what we want to achieve. Without data, we cannot measure anything. What are the barriers to capturing the data that we need, so that we can measure what we are doing and how much further we have to go?

It strikes me that we have all these different organisations and, thrown into that mix, we have 32 local authorities. Perhaps none of those organisations or local authorities are working together and talking to each other as they should. Would a national database that tracks and monitors the progress of children through the system help?

One point struck me as I was listening to the exchanges before. I do not know whether you already do this, and forgive me if you do. Does each child in your system have a file, such that it does not matter which part of Scotland, or even the United Kingdom, they live in or move to? I am thinking about simple things such as council tax bills. If we had such a database, all the data about someone’s life, their needs and the support that they require, whether through the national health service or mental health services, would be in there. Do we, or can we, do that?

Obviously, the people who could access such a file would be very limited.

10:45

As you said, children cannot be moved out of residential care overnight. One solution might be to try to grow the number of foster placements in the community, but my understanding is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do that.

I want to go back to the workforce capacity issue, which was a big theme in Social Work Scotland’s written submission. I suppose that this question is for you, Ben, because you repeatedly talk about it in the submission. We know that there are workforce issues in a range of sectors, and the care sector seems to suffer from them at all levels. Do you have any ideas about what can be done to tackle them?

Are we training enough social workers?