Chamber and committees

The Children’s Commissioner for England commissioned a really strong piece of work on that. I do not know whether committee members have seen the report, but it is a brilliant piece of work with very strong recommendations to Government.

I will be meeting our Children and Young People’s Commissioner with Ms Don-Innes tomorrow and we will raise the issue with her in our discussions. As the member will know, it is not an issue that she has been pursuing. I have been keen to engage with the Children’s Commissioner for England because I was so taken by her work on attendance. She links it directly to improving outcomes for children and young people, which is her job as children’s commissioner.

That is a fair point, which I am happy to reflect on after the meeting. I suppose that it goes back to the central ethos of PEF, which is that it is for each headteacher to decide which interventions to introduce in their school and, to that end, it is not for us to provide direction. Some people have views about campus cops but, if they were to be funded from a justice budget line, would they be in every school? What would that look like?

In my introductory remarks, I tried to make the point that we need to think about school funding in its totality and in the round post-pandemic. PEF spend is 1.8 per cent of education spend, so it is a tiny amount. I accept that I am here to be accountable for PEF and for SAC, but a lot of other funding is going into education just now. I do not know whether we have the same level of transparency on how that funding reaches those who need it most. That goes back to Pam Duncan-Glancy’s point about Audit Scotland’s report on additional support for learning. I am intrigued about how it tracks the spend because, although we are protecting ASL spend nationally, it is not necessarily getting to those who need it most.

I want to reflect on Mr Greer’s point about how we can work on a cross-Cabinet and cross-portfolio basis. I know that PEF is being used to fund campus police officers and I do not want that to stop that, because the purpose of PEF is to free up headteachers to make decisions for their schools. PEF is also a protected budget line, which they guard very closely. The next step would be to review school funding in the round and consider what would go beyond SAC and PEF in the future. Decisions on that will be a matter for the next Government, but I think that all political parties should be looking at the issue. That is my homework for everyone.

Yesterday’s announcement from the University of Dundee was deeply concerning. The committee may be aware that Mr Dey and I wrote to the university yesterday. I am more than happy to share a copy of our correspondence with the committee. We also wrote to Universities Scotland to seek support for the university in order to respond to some of the challenges that Mr Rennie has set out.

Mr Rennie will recognise the challenges that ministers face around the additional investment of £15 million that the Government committed in the budget, in that we need to be very careful about the Office for National Statistics classification and the role of direct Government intervention.

Yesterday, Mr Dey and I met the chief executive of the Scottish Funding Council, and urgent advice is coming to ministers on what we might be able to do next. I am not currently able to share that with the committee because I do not have it, but I expect to receive it before the end of the week. Once I have received that advice, I will be more than happy to write to the committee more fulsomely to set out the Government’s next steps. I am aware that there have also been requests for ministerial statements on the issue. It may be that we will be able to share more detail about any action that the Government might be able to take once we are in receipt of the advice.

It is a deeply concerning and worrying time for the University of Dundee’s staff, given the extent of the proposed job losses. We have been very clear in our correspondence with the university that every effort will be made to protect jobs, given the quantum of the proposal, which is not palatable.

The decision making around that pre-dates my time in office, so I might ask my officials to speak to things that have not worked. In my experience, the move was welcomed. Some local authorities took the view that they were missing out—to be blunt, they were missing out on the funding, given that we had nine challenge authorities—and we had to respond to that ask. The move was welcomed at the time.

David Leng has already spoken about some of the issues with tapering and the additional support that we provided. If you look at the funding that is going to local authorities in the round, you will see that record levels of investment are coming from the Government. I spoke to the funding that has been protected for education in relation to teacher numbers and ASN, and it is important that we protect those budget lines, although there is probably a debate to be had on the extent of ring fencing of education spend.

The approach was broadly welcomed. I will bring in officials on the question of what did not work well, because it pre-dates my time in my role.

Yes, but SAC cannot do all that on its own. We need to be mindful that the attainment challenge in itself is also about responding to the societal challenges that we have spoken about, and that there are other elements of support that families need in order to help us to close that gap.

Miles Briggs has raised the subject of attendance, which has been a real challenge in our schools after the pandemic in particular, although members will welcome the fact that there was a slight improvement in the most recent dataset, particularly on persistent absence levels. I agreed with officials to introduce that measurement the year before last, I think, because, until it was introduced, we did not measure persistent absences from school over a long period—of 20 days, I think—at the national level. We need that granularity in the data.

That dataset demonstrates the point that has been made on variance across the country: there is variance by year group. The thing that struck me most when I was first appointed to my role was the existence of challenges in relation to attendance at certain transition periods. Whether in primary 7 or S3, there seemed to be a drop-off in attendance. We have been considering that. Education Scotland undertook a deep dive on attendance, about which David Gregory may want to say more; however, more broadly, PEF is being used to respond to some of the challenges of attendance across the country. In the school in which I last taught, in Edinburgh, PEF is being used creatively to support families.

Legislation requires parents and carers to send their children and young people to school, and that is for good reason, but a cohort of young people are struggling with the formality of going back to formal education. For many, that is really challenging. We therefore have to put in place the necessary supports. To take Keith Brown’s point on nuance, that will depend on the pupil, the school and the teacher. I have sat in primary schools and listened to headteachers talk about the individual work that they do to support a young person to come back into school, which can take many months. PEF is supporting some of those interventions. More broadly, there has also been support through the virtual school headteachers network, which has helped to keep young people engaged in school if they are not physically able to attend.

However, I accept that the issue is a challenge. I announced in the Parliament very recently that we would have a national marketing campaign to encourage an improvement in attendance. I hope to say more on that in the coming weeks. We cannot make progress on closing the poverty-related attainment gap if we have challenges in attendance.

All those things are interlinked. Across the country, PEF is being used to improve attendance. Every local authority has a stretch aim, which is linked to the SEF and is focused on attendance. They are all signed up to driving improvement on that.

David Gregory may want to say more on the deep dive that Education Scotland undertook.

She is relatively new to the organisation, convener.

That is correct. She has been leading on a number of changes, which the committee has been broadly supportive of, in relation to getting the organisation ready for the change to qualifications Scotland. Although there will be some continuity in the move across to qualifications Scotland, there are still some relatively fresh appointments. I spoke to the members who joined the board just before Christmas—five appointments were made at that time.

Although there is continuity, the body needs to operate, and the order is needed to give it the powers to do so and to fulfil functions in relation to the 2026 exam diet.

The alternative would be for the Government to sit still, which I am not sure is acceptable to Scotland’s parents, teachers and young people. We must reflect on the real urgency for reform of our qualifications body, which has been expressed by stakeholders and by the committee. The committee backed the general principles of the bill at stage 1, which is important.

Absolutely, convener.