Chamber and committees

Mr Rennie is asking me to make a guess about something that will happen in the future. That is not my responsibility—

The overall PTR is 13.3, but I do not have the ASN figure in front of me. When it asked ministers to appear today, the committee did not provide us with a detailed breakdown of all the areas that it wished to cover. However, I am more than happy to write to the committee with any of that detail.

I will address Mr Greer’s point before I bring Graeme Logan in to talk about the changes that we have made to the SNSAs and reflect on the points that he has made.

Mr Greer talked about significant additional reporting being required. I am so old that I remember sitting around this exact table with Mr Greer in the previous session of Parliament and talking about these exact issues. The workload that we talked about then was associated with local authorities doing many different things in relation to how they measured attainment.

We must remember the rationale behind the SNSAs. I accept that there was a lot of debate about them at the time, but the rationale was to have a consistent approach across the country. We have heard today about what inconsistency does to children, young people, parents and teachers, so it was important to have a consistent approach to gathering that data.

However, regarding Mr Greer’s point, I am aware that some local authorities have kept their own reporting mechanisms in place in addition to using the SNSAs, which has resulted in an increase in workload. We have reflected on that through some of the changes that we have brought forward for the SNSAs. I will ask Graeme Logan to speak about that in a moment, but I do not accept the fundamental point that the broader workload is being driven by asks from the Government.

I am happy for Graeme to talk about some specific details of the SNSAs, but I will first reflect on a crude example from my experience in school some time ago. Classroom teachers are often asked to do administrative tasks, and my department used to have support once a week for data entry. For example, someone would deal with the administrative aspect of pupil reports, taking that task off my desk, which was really helpful in freeing me up and allowing me to do more planning, marking and other things during my free periods.

There are ways in which local authorities can drive workload, but they can also assist with it. The budget, which Mr Greer’s party voted for, provided extra funding to support ASN and extra teachers, which we know will make a difference, and some of that funding can be used by local authorities to alleviate teacher workload.

I will bring Graeme in speak about some of the substantive changes to the SNSAs.

I obviously do not have that detail in front of me; I would need to go on myjobscotland to collect it. It is important to recognise that many ASN staff are now employed using the PEF money that I mentioned in my answer to Ms Dunbar.

Mr Rennie raises a wider issue that he has written to me about as part of his constituency correspondence. The situation varies by local authority area. The issue of teacher recruitment practices was one of the first that I raised when I was elected back in 2016, because we have 32 different approaches and I do not think that that is a great way of supporting our teaching profession.

In a debate that we had a few weeks ago, there was a line in the Labour amendment about having a national list of supply staff. I am all for supporting that, and we agreed with the Labour amendment, but we now need COSLA to work with us on delivering that in practice. We see too much inconsistency in how local authorities use contracts and a huge overreliance on probation. We should not divorce the issues of permanency and short-term contracts from that of having a centrally funded probationer scheme. I have committed to reviewing that because, to my mind, we are seeing too much churn in the system, particularly in primary schools. That is not good for our early years teachers, it is not good for supporting them and it is not good for retention.

We need to work with local authorities to encourage them to provide permanent contracts. The budget settlement has been part of that process. The other part of it, which I alluded to in connection with pupil equity funding, concerns the four-year funding streams that the now First Minister committed to when he was cabinet secretary, to give local authorities clear sight of the funding that was coming, so that they could create permanent or longer-term posts, which Mr Rennie asked about.

There are significant challenges for our whole workforce just now, but that issue is not unique to Scotland. Last year, the United Nations published a really helpful report that talks about the precarity of employment that exists across the education landscape in many different countries, which we are seeing across the United Kingdom.

The situation has been partly driven by wages. It was right that we awarded the profession the good pay rises that we awarded it, but that means that local authorities are now having to look at other budget lines. We need to re-evaluate how we fund the totality of the teaching workforce, which was another point that came out of the debate that we held the other week.

You never know.

Yes. I broadly agree with the member’s point. I remember the work on reducing bureaucracy, which I think was led by one Michael Russell back in 2014, because I was a principal teacher at the time. I remember running a department meeting in which we were broadly re-evaluating general education, looking at all our units across the course and considering senior phase arrangements. At the end of it, I thought, “We have to reduce bureaucracy.”

We have to look in the round at what we are asking our classroom teachers, headteachers and principal teachers to deliver. I am really keen to talk to the professional associations about what we mean by unnecessary workload at the local authority level. I was discussing the issue with officials earlier, and there is very little that the Government asks for at national level that drives teacher workload. Much of it, certainly in my experience, is driven at local authority level through things that the professional associations might quite rightly argue are not about learning and teaching but more about administration. There is a body of work that we need to undertake.

I recently discussed revisiting the reducing bureaucracy agenda with the NASUWT. That speaks to the work on reducing class contact and teacher workload to create the time that is needed. Many of those tasks should not necessarily be for the working day of classroom teachers. They are driven at local authority level. They differ across the country in terms of reporting requirements, what systems are used, how information is inputted and how often it is required for each and every class that teachers teach. We do not have a national approach to that, which has been a key theme of today’s discussions.

I will bring Graeme Logan in to talk about the specifics that we ask for at national level. Anything else is being driven at local authority level. However, I accept the point that Mr Greer raises about reducing bureaucracy more broadly.

I am happy to engage with Mr Greer on the substantive points in the paper that he submitted some two years ago. More broadly, however, any engagement on teacher workload that has me at the table must also have COSLA there, because we are not going to change things if we do not get local government in the room. I am happy to be here and to give evidence for as many hours as the committee will have me, but if COSLA is not part of those discussions, we will not effect change in our classrooms.

As I said in a response to Mr Rennie earlier, as part of the budget agreement, we got an agreement from all local authorities, through COSLA, that they would work back to 2023 levels. I am really pleased that the deal was made. It was made in good faith and it involved a lot of extra public money, including for teacher numbers and additional support needs, so I cannot believe that any local authority in Scotland is taking that additional money from central Government and planning to reduce teacher numbers, having signed up to those conditions and to making meaningful progress on reducing class contact time.

We are engaging with a number of local authorities on the substantive issues, but our understanding is that the budget deal remains absolute and that local authorities will, in good faith, work back to 2023 teacher numbers. If they all did that tomorrow, I could deliver on reducing class contact time in primary schools, because we know through our independent modelling that we would have enough teachers to do that. These things must not be divorced: when we talk about teacher numbers and reducing class contact time, it is really important is that they sit together. Having a sustainable workforce will help to reduce class contact time, which will allow teachers to engage in reform.

Is there a specific area of the education brief that you are interested in?

I am scheduled to meet the group’s members shortly. You raised this matter with me in the chamber and I am scheduled to meet them in the coming weeks, I think—before the end of the term.