Chamber and committees

I have a second question, before I come to Laurie Black. Maybe I will roll them into one, given the time constraints—I hope that you do not mind, Laurie.

A number of points have been made about support staff. The job title varies—school assistants, classroom assistants, pupil support assistants—but the role is, in essence, the same: providing support to children who have been diagnosed with additional needs. Should there be any requirement for qualifications for any member of staff who provides that kind of one-to-one support? Standard practice in most schools is to assign general classroom assistants to that role. I do not wish to denigrate those people but, in most cases, they have no specific qualifications in additional support needs. Should support staff who are assigned to help young people with additional needs be required to have some kind of qualification in ASN?

Thank you. That is all from me, convener.

It seems daft that a group of young people who were, by definition, some of the hardest to reach and engage with had—in an entirely unplanned way—finally been engaged with. It would be more than frustrating for us to lose that progress.

My main line of questioning, which is on children’s rights, is directed primarily at Bruce Adamson, but I would definitely be interested to hear the thoughts of Stephen McGhee and Linda O’Neill as well. Recently, there were issues with the Scottish Qualifications Authority’s relative lack of familiarity with equality impact assessments, children and young people’s rights and wellbeing impact assessments, et cetera. That largely predated the pandemic. During the pandemic, thanks to interventions from your office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the SQA has made a lot of progress.

I am interested in your reflections on local authorities as we went into the pandemic, right at the start, as things had to change rapidly. Did they demonstrate that they had a pre-existing level of familiarity with equality impact assessment and children and young people’s rights impact assessment processes, or was it the opposite? Was there consistency across the country? Did some local authorities demonstrate that that was already embedded in their practice?

Stephen or Linda, do you have any thoughts on the normalisation of impact assessment and the culture of children’s rights in local authorities?

That raises an interesting point about how a change in assessment might interact with the reform of the school inspection system and what role peer assessment between teachers might have as we create a new inspectorate after the current review. The committee should keep an eye on those overlapping pieces of work.

In your conclusion, you mention the potential need to move away from the SQA’s relatively demanding quality assurance processes if we were to move towards a system that had less external assessment. There is a strong cultural attachment to external assessment and verification. Will you expand on why it is not necessarily essential? If we compare that cultural attachment in Scotland to the position in other systems, does it ultimately come back to trust in teachers being perceived differently elsewhere and to trust in the system or are there other cultural factors that we would need to work on in Scotland if we were to move away from our current system of external assessment and verification?

Part of the issue is that, if we move away from exams towards some form of continuous assessment, there is likely to be an additional workload for teachers in that system. There are other opportunities in our education system to reduce teacher workload, such as changes that we can make to curriculum for excellence, if workload increases through continuous assessment.

My impression, from speaking to a lot of teachers in recent years, is that they are inclined towards a system of continuous assessment. They see the advantages of it, but the personal workload burden holds them back from adopting a system that they otherwise understand a lot of the attractions of.

I would like to return to the issue of equity in the system. I am specifically interested in the impact of exams or alternative certification models on pupils with additional support needs. I realise that “additional support needs” is a term that encompasses all sorts of needs, some of which may result in a young person finding an exam easier to access and some of which may mean that a young person finds continuous assessment easier to access.

In recent years, the response to criticism of how we support pupils with additional needs through exams has been simply to extend the length of time that those pupils get to complete the exam. On the one hand, that is understandable, and it provides those pupils with an additional opportunity, but, for some young folk with additional support needs, sitting in an exam hall for three and a half or four hours is even more challenging than it would be for any other young person. Your report did not mention additional support needs specifically. Is it an issue that you touched on at all? Did the issue of providing equity to those who have a wide spectrum of additional needs come up in the alternative systems that you looked at or in the best practice from elsewhere?

I apologise for being late. If this point has already been covered, feel free just to tell me to check the Official Report.

I will move the discussion about the skills that employers require away from the framing of academic or vocational qualifications. With either of those, we still use an individual form of assessment. As an employer, when I interview people, I am interested in their ability to work as part of a team and their skills in communicating with other individuals. Those are inherently not skills that we can assess individually, because they are about interaction with other people.

Whether in academic or vocational qualifications and assessment systems, is there best practice elsewhere for how to assess the kind of skills that we cannot assess in individual tasks? How do we assess someone’s ability to interact with other people in whatever form?

I will refine my question. You are right that local authorities are extensively scrutinised, typically by national bodies such as the Accounts Commission. My concern goes back to the points that Liz Smith raised about empowering communities. Those who scrutinise local authorities nationally do not live in the communities in which the local authorities are delivering services; that is the role of local councillors and the elected members in a council. My concern is whether councils, as elected bodies, are scrutinising the delivery of the public services for which they are responsible, and not whether we at a national level, in whatever form, are scrutinising those bodies effectively.