Chamber and committees

I will quickly ask Kay McKerrell about the aim of the Promise. Obviously, it is about allowing children in those settings to feel loved, safe and respected. With all the detail from freedom of information requests that you put into your report, we can measure things such as health, attainment and employment, but we cannot really measure that feeling of love and we cannot even define it, according to the Promise. How secure are we in being able to achieve that as an outcome? Are we getting the process right? Are we asking enough questions of care-experienced people?

10:15

Several different funding streams go into the Scottish attainment challenge. We have pupil equity funding, strategic equity funding and care-experienced children and young people funding. They all have different decision makers and slightly different philosophies. Given that, how do we ensure that there is an aligned outcome? What are the metrics that we are striving to achieve? How are we ensuring that each pound is spent effectively?

09:00

I want to ask about the curriculum improvement cycle. I have gone through the draft document that came out in June, and I think that the policy is a bit of a Trojan horse for sneaking knowledge back in after you removed it in 2010. We need to be careful of the workload pressure, as I know from my teaching experience.

As well as having started teaching in classrooms 25 years ago this week, I have been involved in curriculum design, and something on page 33 of the document concerned me greatly. It says that knowledge that is presented in education “is not neutral” and it refers to embedding an “anti-racist curriculum”. I want to raise a concern about that, because I think that having any political ideology embedded in a framework in that way can be extremely damaging. We should not have political ideology embedded in such a way. Doing so also implies a dichotomy: if you put anti-racism elements in there, the opposing racism elements exist as well. We should be careful about that, because that can cause inherent division, and I would not want to see that in schools. I think that it is a flawed design element, and you might want to review that page. It also implies that children might be inherently racist and need it educated out of them—I hope that my inference is not true.

Can you explain why you do not think that a neutral education is achievable? Do you agree that we do not need politics in education?

To clarify my point, I note that, when you have one, the other exists, and that causes division because it suggests that, in society, the two are very prevalent. If that is embedded into every aspect of curriculum design, I would be careful of sowing that into such a deep and profound experience for young people.

How would you embed the act of decolonising the curriculum? That question might be more for Clare Hicks. You cannot sanitise history. I suggest that we should learn from it and not remove it.

We want to focus on the curriculum for excellence, how it is being delivered and where some of the shortfalls are, particularly around the structure of the curriculum itself. I have a particular interest in that, given some of the previous work that I have done.

The national curriculum that is used in England is much more knowledge based, which is similar to the Scottish system that we used to use. We have gone to a more skills-based approach, which needs to be integrated as part of the curriculum. However, we need to assess what is working in schools such as Jordanhill school, which has done a good job of embedding knowledge back into the curriculum. It is about looking at where we can get merit from analysing that success.

However, we can assess progress and performance in schools only if we have the appropriate surveys and assessment structure in place. It is about understanding how we measure where our children are and what level they are at. There is possibly a need to look at ages and stages, which, when I have investigated it, is an area that seems to be a little bit loose. It is sort of the case that a child gets to their level when they get to it, which is fair enough. However, we need to be able to assess that as well as our international performance—that goes to Duncan Dunlop’s point—so that we are able to critique where we are and how we are doing, because that will give us the feedback that we need to improve. How we can potentially improve on that is one area.

Another area to look at is joining the dots up an awful lot more. Our education system tends to be quite siloed, and people who are going through it need to see clear pathways. Although there needs to be flexibility to switch pathways, I would ask whether we can look at horizon thinking. Can we look at joining up the structure, so that when people progress, there are no cliff edges and there is clear progress? That might be going into further education opportunities, apprenticeships or university, but there should be an end goal, a career and an experience outside in life that people can embrace because they have chosen the correct options as they have gone along. When I went through that experience, I thought, “I have finished school, now what? I have finished university, now what?” It did not seem very joined up, and we could do better in those areas.

On apprenticeships, we need to look at how we ring fence the funding for that and ensure that it is spent in the correct way. That might mean looking more at enterprise and commercial opportunities and perhaps ensuring that there is the opportunity to look at professional development in universities. Perhaps there could be a year in a university or college course when people were out working—doing a practical, physical job or a job in a professional sphere—to get experience and explore future work options. It is about joining up those activities.

STEM is important, but perhaps we should call it STEAM, because we want to include the arts and we want to encourage critical thinking. This is about how people think, rather than what they think, and how they can use that in life. It is about giving them the skills to be creative and explore innovation. Perhaps that means weaving innovation into our education system more, so that we are really thinking about the opportunities. As Scots, we are great at coming up with creative and innovative ideas; we just need the space to be able to do so.

I have a postgraduate certificate in education in primary school teaching with a specialism in geography. I taught in England under the English curriculum for about two years and then did supply teaching. I am also a shareholder, director and a person with significant control in an e-learning company that has existed for the past eight years. Prior to that, I was an instructional designer, which was about educating large organisations globally, mainly at the corporate level. My work also covered some academic areas, including teaching doctors at postgraduate level, and teaching for some schools, including things like maths in America in a Texas maths programme.

On positive destinations, it is excellent that we have raised a few issues around youth education outside of schools and how we support our youth. I had an experience in a local shopping area, where young people were cycling bikes around a shop. I approached them and asked whether there was anywhere else that they should or could be. They talked to me for a while and, from what they expressed to me, I felt that they did not have any positive role models and did not have anything else to do. They had asked for a bike park nearby and they wanted something to put their energy into. I felt that they were possibly getting into a bit of trouble because they did not have a positive destination or somewhere that they should be going. Youth education is particularly important, and it might address some antisocial behaviour issues, so that is something to look into. Role models in different areas of society are really important for young people.