Chamber and committees

I hope that it will be brief, convener.

On the point that a couple of you have made about local authorities top slicing your budgets, I presume that, for local authorities, the theory behind doing so is that they are able to recruit quality improvement officers and others who can provide additional value to you. However, it does not sound like you feel that you are getting a lot of additional value from what authorities are spending that top slicing on. Is it fair to read that into your comments?

Peter, go for it.

Convener, is there time for one more question?

It sounds as though the most important response is that of the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills and the minister, which have been broadly pretty warm. You certainly seem optimistic about that.

What do you detect the response from within the system to be? Part of your report is—entirely fairly—pretty critical of elements of the system and of how they communicate and interact with each other. Part of the discussion with the previous panel of witnesses was about the issue that overrides a lot of education reform at the moment—that might be an unfair way of putting it, but you will get what I mean—which is that the people who have been responsible for a system that has come under a lot of criticism are then responsible for changing that system. If they do not buy into and do not accept the premise of the need for change, we can end up with a rebranding exercise rather than the more fundamental changes that are required. What responses have you picked up from those who are involved in delivering the system as it currently stands?

James, you have said that you are somewhat heartened by the fact that the Government has not just rushed into a response to your recommendations. However, your overarching recommendation is that this should be seen as a coherent package rather than a pick ’n’ mix. How concerned would you be if the Government did not accept your recommendations in full? If the Government takes a more selective approach to what it wants to take forward, how could that be managed?

I will use that answer to pose a question to others on the panel. What is the role of the profession in the new body? A lot of the criticism—which also predates the pandemic and has included reports to the committee—is that the current SQA has been hostile to the feedback and input of the teaching profession. How could we structure the new organisation and what could the governance arrangements be in order to address the concern that, at the moment, teachers are not heard or respected by the body?

Greg Dempster, do you want to come in on Education Scotland? I do not mean to cut Pauline Walker off if she has a comment on the NQB.

I accept that time pressures and workload are the major concerns, but the awareness point has also come up quite a few times—not just in relation to Education Scotland. In a lot of the reviews that have taken place recently, the feedback from classroom teachers is, “Well, nobody asked me for my input on that.” As far as the people who were running the reviews were concerned, they distributed all the material to local authorities and schools, but it had not filtered down. Is there an issue with the structures that our national bodies use to communicate directly with teachers? Does a structure for enough direct communication not exist? Does communication go through too many layers of filtering?

Quite a lot has been covered already with regard to how inspections could work, looking at the new inspectorate aspect of reform, and we have talked about the qualifications and assessments themselves. However, I am interested in the panel’s perspective on what the governance and structures for the new qualifications body could look like. What would address the issues that are regularly cited with regard to how the SQA operates as an organisation?

I will put essentially the same question on Education Scotland, which is being reformed rather than replaced. What organisational, structural and governance reforms would address some of the issues that you have been talking about?

I direct the Education Scotland question to Greg Dempster; I suppose that you have less locus on the new qualifications body. I would be interested in hearing from Peter Bain, in the first instance, on governance structures for the new national qualifications body.

Pauline Walker, I will direct the question to you, if you do not mind, although that is somewhat arbitrary. Communication has to be two way. A lot of criticism of Education Scotland has said that it produces huge amounts of resources that teachers did not ask for. Some are good and some are not, but they are fundamentally not what teachers were asking for. How do we create a structure in which the work of Education Scotland, however we rename it, is being directed by what teachers say they need? If we want bottom-up communication, what structure do we need to put in place for teachers to be the ones who direct the work of the body that is supposed to produce resources to support them?