Chamber and committees

I am not disagreeing with you. I am just trying to get your impression. I come from a similar demographic.

Silvia, every time you mentioned poverty, I was getting worried, because I thought that all my questions would be answered before I got a chance to ask them. All the written evidence that you have given shows that there is an attendance gap between poorer and better-off communities. We have discussed a few issues, but let us think positively. What could we do to remove some of the barriers and make things easier? What could the Government and local government do? I do not always succeed, but I am always trying to find ways to fix things. The Government already does a number of things on the poverty side, and it has a couple of policies in this area, but what else could we look at?

In many cases, those programmes offer softer restarts.

We will always hear stories of people who come from backgrounds such as mine, or from the sort of area that I come from. People will say, “Oh, they’ve been a success in life—they’ve gone on to university.” I can think of a colleague of mine who ended up going to St Andrews, of all places. We always hear those stories. Where are the role models for that kind of scenario? Do role models, such as the teacher who is supportive, still make a big difference?

I do not even remember what I did wrong, but I still remember this one time, in primary school, that the headteacher took me in and said, “George Adam, I’m very disappointed in you.” I can still feel the hurt at this point, because I respected that headteacher.

There is still a role for the positive role model, is there not? How do teachers and headteachers do that while dealing with all the other pressures that they have on a day-to-day basis?

I was just going to say that I remember my guidance teacher from second year. She maybe did not guide me into the career that she had thought of for me, but she made sure that I did not make a complete mess of the last two years of school.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess?

If we use Glasgow as an example, you have got East Renfrewshire on your border, where the attendance rate is 93 per cent. In Glasgow, it is 89.2 per cent. Is that difference due simply to poverty? Is it because of SIMD figures? We all know that SIMD figures are, in effect, determined by streets. People out there think that it is about vast areas of poverty. However, when you look at it, you see that it is basically streets that are the difficulty. Is that the cause of the big difference between Glasgow and East Ren? Is it just poverty, or are there other factors?

With regard to the practical difficulties that poverty poses, are young people not going to school because of issues of transport, clothing, food or housing? How much of the problem is health related? You have already mentioned anxiety. How much do those factors prevent a young person from going to school or affect their experience at school? Are those factors worse in parts of the country that experience poverty than in the slightly better-off areas?

Public service reform is happening at the moment, and, no matter how you look at it, there is an opportunity to look at a better service being delivered at the end of the reform process. That might mean a strategic view of education being taken in a region. Whatever it ends up being, public service reform is an opportunity to look at these services. Barry Syme and Helen Waggott both raised the point that it is a community issue rather than it being about just the school itself, but a lot of the time, the issue is left to the school to deal with.

I have an anecdote about my local football team, St Mirren, which has done a lot of community-based work. One of the chairmen asked me, “When are you going to second a social worker to St Mirren?” I thought that was madness, until I actually thought about it and realised that that takes the social worker away from the message, “I’m from the council. I’m here to see your child,” to a situation where they have a St Mirren polo shirt on and they are saying, “I’m here to talk to you about how I support your family.” That goes back to what Barry said about third sector organisations being supportive in these things.

Football will not be the be-all and end-all for everyone, but for some families, that has been the right access route. I think that Spartans in Edinburgh has also done a lot of good work, including courses for young people to access school by turning up there for a different programme. We need to continue those programmes, so is it a case of looking at things differently and asking whether we can use those approaches? Throughout your evidence today, you have all talked about partner organisations and stakeholders working with you. Can we design things in a way that engages with young people and their families, whether through football or anything else?

It needs to be a place that they want to go.