Education, Children and Young People Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Official Report 611KB pdf

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Interests

Good morning, and welcome to the sixth meeting in 2022 of the Education, Children and Young People Committee.

We have received apologies from James Dornan. I am delighted to welcome Natalie Don MSP, who joins us as a substitute member for the first time today. You are very welcome, Natalie. I thank you for being here and invite you to declare any interests that are relevant to the remit of the committee.

Because I have not sat on the committee previously, I declare that I am still a councillor on Renfrewshire Council.

Thank you.

Oliver Mundell, do you want to say something?

Before we begin taking evidence, I wish to raise a point and seek your clarification, convener.

Oh.

I suspect that I am not the only member of the committee who has been concerned by reports that, after more than a year, the Scottish Government is still withholding from publication the draft version of the report that it received from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last January and its response to that report.

Furthermore, I have heard that a parliamentary statement on the report by Professor Ken Muir is now planned, and it has been reported that senior leadership at the Scottish Qualifications Authority and other education bodies have already seen an advance draft of the report. I am not aware of that courtesy having been extended to this committee. This looks like a repeat of the situation with the OECD report, in which unaccountable organisations that are currently failing our young people are extended an opportunity to review and perhaps influence the findings of those reports without any checks and balances.

Having been a member of the committee for a number of years, I believe that it is insulting that such documents have not been made available to the committee and that the practice of excluding Parliament and denying us the fullest opportunity to exercise our scrutiny function diminishes the work that we do. I find that unacceptable. I believe that we should urgently request those documents.

I know that we will discuss our work programme in private today, but I am increasingly concerned that too much of our education policy is decided behind closed doors, not least because of the culture of secrecy and lack of transparency at the heart of the Scottish National Party’s approach. It is important that the public knows that the committee is alive to those issues and that we are taking our job of scrutiny seriously. Ideally, I would like to see a decision taken to move today’s discussion of our work programme into public to allow this urgent matter to be addressed. If that is not possible, convener, I would like your assurance that the matter will be put on the public agenda for next week’s meeting.

Let me consider what you have said. Bob Doris has indicated that he wants to say something. It is only fair that I allow him the same privilege that I have allowed you.

I will speak briefly, convener. It is for Mr Mundell to make whatever points he seeks to make at the committee, but I am conscious that, when the committee first met at the start of the parliamentary session, we said that we would work collegiately and across parties and would challenge the Government as and when appropriate, and in the strongest possible fashion, when we had to. We said that we would seek to work constructively with the Government and across the committee.

I am therefore disappointed that Mr Mundell has made a set-piece statement that I consider to be grandstanding. There have been many opportunities to raise those concerns within the committee before now, including in private session earlier this morning, when you, convener, asked if anyone wanted to make us aware of anything that they might wish to raise at today’s meeting. No member took that opportunity.

I am keen for the committee to work collegiately to decide how best to respond to Mr Mundell’s comments, but I am very disappointed by the idea of ambushing a committee at the start of a meeting when he has had many other opportunities to put this to members and to work collegiately. I find the tone unhelpful and overtly party political. That is not the way that I want the committee to work.

I perfectly understand the sentiment behind your words, Bob.

Willie Rennie has now indicated that he wishes to speak. To be fair, having allowed two colleagues to speak, I do not think that I cannot allow him to do so.

Oliver Mundell has a point, as there has been deep frustration that the Government has not been as open as it should have been over the OECD process. It is important that that is highlighted, that the committee takes a direct interest in it, that we have a public session on it and that we seek evidence from the Government and appeal to it to give us the additional information that we have been asking for for months.

It would be wrong if the media scrutiny on the issue was not replicated with scrutiny by this committee, because we have a massive responsibility, so I would like to have a public session. However the matter was brought up, it is important that we take our role seriously, actually scrutinise the Government and seek the openness that teachers and pupils deserve, so I would like to have a session on the issue at a future committee meeting.

Thank you. Ross Greer also wants to comment.

If the reports of the SQA attempting to limit the damage to its reputation in the OECD report are true, the SQA did not do a very good job of it, because the Scottish Government has decided to abolish and replace the SQA.

On the question of how we take this forward as a committee, I absolutely agree that there is a need for substantial public parliamentary scrutiny of the process. I would prefer that we discuss how we are going to do that as a committee in the normal way, through our normal work planning procedures. If we decide at our work planning discussion after the public session of today’s meeting to move forward with public sessions, we will do so and they will be on the record. However, I do not like the implication that the way in which parliamentary committees go about their normal work planning—in private, so that we can flush out the issues collectively and decide how we will go about things publicly—is somehow a behind-closed-doors process that lacks scrutiny in and of itself. That is the normal way that Parliament functions. I am quite sure that, as a result of our private work planning meeting today, we will make decisions about what we are going to do in public about this—as we would have done regardless of what has just happened this morning.

Thank you for that. Michael Marra is next.

I have a lot of sympathy with all the contributions so far. In terms of the core of what Mr Mundell says, I think that the early pre-amendment drafts should be published and they should absolutely be in the public domain—we should be able to have a look at them.

I also agree with all the other comments about how the committee should work: we want to work together collegiately. However, we need to find a way to tell the Government that we want to see those publications and see them quickly, and that we want to be able to understand the process of amendment and the influences brought to bear on the publications. How we do that is the question, but if we can come to a resolution on that, we want to be pretty clear that we should see those publications as soon as possible.

Right. This is not an agenda item for today. Bob Doris made the point that I asked in the pre-meeting session whether there was anything that people wanted to raise in the meeting and there was no mention of this item.

My response to all of this is that we should consider it further when we meet in private later this morning. Everyone has had a fair chance to make their views known, and I think that that is my role as the convener. Having said that, we should consider the matter further in private later this morning, and we should now move on to our agenda items as planned. I hope that members all agree with that.