Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Official Report 806KB pdf

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Education (Improvement Plan)

The next item of business is a statement by John Swinney on the Scottish Government’s improvement plan for education. The cabinet secretary will take questions at the end of the statement, but there will be no interruptions during it. I encourage and exhort all members to keep their questions short. The opening two questioners will get additional time but, after that, all questions should be succinct, where possible. The same goes for the cabinet secretary’s answers.

14:23  

The Government has today published data from the school census; statistical information on the achievement of curriculum for excellence levels by children and young people at school, local authority and national level; and the 2016 national improvement framework evidence report.

I will take the school census first. The statistics for 2016 tell us that there were 253 more full-time equivalent teachers than there were last year, of which 160 were directly funded by the Scottish Government’s attainment Scotland fund; that class sizes in primary 1 to P3 are the same as last year and are broadly static across primary school; that the pupil teacher ratio remains unchanged for the third successive year at 13.7, in line with the Scottish Government’s agreement with local authorities; that most children are achieving the expected curriculum for excellence level for their stage, based on teacher professional judgment, with all young people expected to have achieved at least third level by the end of secondary 3; and that a record 666 school buildings are in the top condition category of “good”, with 84 per cent being in good or satisfactory condition.

I very much welcome the rise in teacher numbers compared with last year, the fact that class sizes are broadly stable and the fact that the pupil teacher ratio has been maintained. That is all good news, particularly when Parliament considers the teacher recruitment challenges that are being faced in some areas of the country.

The statistical information on the achievement of curriculum for excellence levels by children and young people at school, local authority and national level has been published today for the first time. That data has been produced in direct response to last year’s recommendation by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that we develop

“a more robust evidence base available right across the system, especially about learning outcomes and progress.”

The information illuminates where excellence already exists and where there is more to do to target resources where they are needed most and to ensure that children get the right support at the right time.

As this is the first time that we have gathered such data, it is being published under the official label of “Experimental Statistics”. As with many new data collections, it will need further development before its accuracy and quality can be guaranteed. It is clear, for example, that some issues remain with the consistency of teachers’ professional judgments across different local authority areas. Most notably, it is clear from the S3 data that there are differing approaches to the assessment of third and fourth levels. Education Scotland and local authorities have a vital role to play in providing the support that is needed to deliver greater consistency in that area. A national programme of moderation activity is under way to build a shared understanding on those questions.

Even if we take those inconsistencies into account, the data shows that significant improvements are required in some local authority areas and that significant challenges exist in delivering the progress in literacy and numeracy that we seek. I encourage parents to consider the school-level information that is now available and to discuss it with their child’s school.

The data provides a basis on which to build our knowledge about how children are progressing at school, but the variation in some of the data highlights the value that standardised assessment will bring in providing teachers with nationally consistent data to help to inform their professional judgment.

Today’s data reinforces the messages that we took from the programme for international student assessment results and is consistent with what we know from the Scottish survey of literacy and numeracy. Most children and young people progress well through the school system but, for some, overall performance drops and the poverty-related attainment gap widens.

There is much to be proud of in Scottish education. We need to remain focused on and committed to curriculum for excellence and we need to continue to implement the reforms that we are putting in place. That is the course that we established after the publication of the SSLN data and it is the course that we intend to continue to take.

It follows that the “2017 National Improvement Framework and Improvement Plan for Scottish Education”, which is the third document that I am publishing today, reinforces that approach. The vision, key priorities and drivers for improvement that we identified in January this year have stakeholder support, and they remain as true and as important now as they were then.

The improvement plan sets out what we need to do at all levels in the system to deliver better outcomes for our children and young people. It brings together in one place all the improvement activity, from the delivery plan that I published last summer to the curriculum for excellence implementation plan that was published in the autumn. It takes into account the information that is published today in the evidence report and sets out our plans for improvement. It will serve as the single definitive plan for securing educational improvement, as it provides absolute clarity of purpose for all who are involved in education.

To drive improvement for children and young people, we need a shared understanding across all parts of the education system of our key strengths, the key challenges that we face and the actions that we are taking to deliver improvement. I encourage everyone who is involved in school education to make the priorities of the national improvement framework a reality in their school.

Teachers have a key role to play in closing the attainment gap and are central to achieving our vision of excellence and equity in Scottish education. I am committed to ensuring that we have the right number of teachers with the right skills in the right places to educate our young people. We know that the quality of teaching is a key factor in improving children’s learning and the outcomes that they achieve. I want teachers to have the time to teach, plan their working lives and reflect on their professional learning needs. I want teachers to be able to enjoy their jobs and I want teaching to be seen as an attractive and rewarding career choice.

I have already moved decisively to free teachers to teach by removing unnecessary bureaucracy and workload. We have set out clearly and concisely what teachers should and should not focus on. However, I will continue to take all possible measures to lessen workloads, tackle bureaucracy and enable more time for learning and teaching, for the benefit of all.

As part of that work, Education Scotland will release next week its new websites, which will radically streamline the level of guidance, resources and materials available to teachers and other practitioners to support improvement. That equates to a 90 per cent reduction in volume, and all materials have been reviewed and updated to meet current needs, which will enable teachers to have ready access to the support, information and guidance that they need.

I recognise that some councils still face challenges in teacher recruitment, as do universities in recruiting teaching students. I am focused on addressing any barriers to the recruitment of teachers and will work with our partners to address issues of staffing supply and capacity at a national level, while maintaining Scottish teaching as a graduate profession. On 30 November, I announced a package of innovative new routes into teaching, which will be ready for an intake of students in 2017. It includes accelerated routes, more distance learning opportunities and an increase in joint degrees that combine primary teaching with specialisms such as chemistry.

We will build on last year’s successful recruitment campaign to encourage more people into teaching, with a particular focus on hard-to-fill subjects and areas that have difficulty in recruiting. We are also continuing to support teachers’ professional learning through further investment of £1 million in 2016-17 in masters level learning. I assure Parliament that, in considering any new routes into teaching, I will work with the General Teaching Council for Scotland to ensure that quality is assured and that the next generation of teachers is qualified, skilled, motivated and ready to teach.

I have visited many schools and spoken to hundreds of teachers and children since I took up my post, and I know that in Scottish education today we have hundreds of thousands of good pupils being taught by tens of thousands of good teachers in thousands of good schools. I want to build on that, and I invite everyone in the chamber to join us in that effort. For all of us, there is a moral imperative to deliver excellence and equity, and we have the clear policy framework in place to deliver that approach.

The principles of curriculum for excellence are the right ones. Throughout CFE’s development, there has been unanimous agreement in the Parliament and across the education sector that it is the right approach. In its review of curriculum for excellence in 2015, the OECD recognised the strong, powerful and enduring characteristics of our curriculum; commended the bold reform that we are driving forward; and urged us to continue on our reform journey. Our international council of education advisers has further endorsed our approach to education and has provided advice about where we need to improve. We are on course to deliver those improvements through our current actions.

The collaboration in our education system is one of its great strengths and it is essential that we work together to deliver the improvements that are required to make Scotland’s education world class. There is much to be proud of in Scottish education but, with pace and urgency, more must be done with every single one of our teachers around the country, with our professional associations, with our parent organisations, with Government agencies and with our local authority partners to ensure that we close the attainment gap in education that has for so long blighted our country.

I thank the cabinet secretary for prior sight of his statement, which follows the publication of statistics this morning that are proof—further proof, I may say—that the attainment gap is as wide as ever, despite the promises that the Scottish Government has made.

Can the cabinet secretary tell the Parliament exactly why some of the top-performing local authorities can get around 70 per cent of their S3 pupils to level 4 in curriculum for excellence, whereas many other local authorities that have performed well in the past can get only very low numbers to level 4? If that is because their structures and CFE implementation timings are so different, why is that happening? Is that not more evidence of the problems that the Scottish National Party Government has allowed to develop regarding the delivery of curriculum for excellence in the middle to senior year phases?

Does the cabinet secretary agree that many parents have a right to be very angry about those differences? Does he accept that the long-term decline in teacher numbers in secondary schools is a big part of the reason why so many schools are finding the delivery of CFE in its middle and senior year phases so very difficult?

First, on the attainment gap, the statistics that were published this morning confirm what we have long known—the existence of the attainment gap and the fact that it becomes more acute as young people proceed through the education system. That is precisely why the Government is taking the steps that it is taking in such a focused way to tackle the attainment gap.

However, for completeness, Liz Smith should recognise that the data that PISA published last week confirms that the progress that was made in the early part of this Administration to close the attainment gap has been sustained. For completeness—I am sure that Liz Smith would want to make sure that her point to Parliament was made completely—I make that point.

The second point is about differential performance between schools and between local authorities. In that regard, with the greatest of respect, I think that Liz Smith got the tone of her question entirely wrong. The statistics and the data demonstrate the need for us to be focused on a culture of perpetual improvement. That is what drives my thinking about Scottish education, and that is why the information has been published—to enable us to have a focused discussion about how we can deliver progress.

The data demonstrates that there are areas of the country that can deliver stronger performance than others, and schools within local authorities that can deliver more progress than others with a comparable background. It is vital that we focus on the improvement journey to ensure that all young people can experience excellence and equity in their education.

This point gets to the heart of one of the fundamental contradictions of Liz Smith’s arguments on education. She argues for variability and flexibility amongst schools, but when the schools exercise that flexibility and variability, she comes to the Parliament and asks me to lay down the law and stop them doing so. I invite Liz Smith to reflect on the fact that she has put forward an utterly inconsistent proposition in her arguments today.

My third point is that I would have thought that a day such as this, when the number of teachers in our schools has increased and some of the increase is because of the direct investment of the Scottish Government through the attainment fund, would be a day for Liz Smith to welcome the fact that there has been a growth in teacher numbers across Scotland.

I thank the cabinet secretary for early sight of his statement. I welcome the increase in primary teacher numbers, but I remind the cabinet secretary that we are still 4,000 teachers down and he has a long way to go to reverse the damage of the past 10 years.

That is surely the message of the attainment data, too. A quarter of children leave primary school unable to read at the expected level, a third fail to achieve the expected numeracy levels, and the attainment gap between the rich and the rest rises at every stage. That is a measure of 10 years of SNP failure, as were last week’s PISA results.

We have an improvement framework, an implementation plan, a delivery plan, a governance review and, now, a performance improvement plan. No doubt there is a delivery performance framework review report in the pipeline. What we need is a promise to stop the cuts and an apology to children, parents and teachers for the past 10 years. Can we have that?

First, on teacher numbers, I am glad that Iain Gray got somewhere close to acknowledging the fact that teacher numbers have actually gone up today. That is welcome. It is significant progress that Mr Gray was even able to acknowledge that. He managed to get further ahead than the Conservatives managed to get today.

However, I make the point to Iain Gray that much of the reason why the teacher numbers have increased is the stance that I took in my former role to protect teacher numbers despite the protestations of many Labour local authorities that wanted to reduce teacher numbers further. I would not allow them to do so. Perhaps Mr Gray will get some clarity and consistency in his party’s arguments. When I meet local authority leaders from the Labour Party, they moan about the way in which the parliamentary Labour Party agitates about teacher numbers when they want to be given a free hand to reduce them. Perhaps Mr Gray will get that point straight.

Mr Gray explained the P7 data accurately; the data he put forward was correct. Again, for completeness, I would have thought that Mr Gray would have then looked at the achievement levels at S3. What young people are able to achieve in S3 at the third and fourth levels combined is 86 per cent in reading, 86 per cent in numeracy, 87 per cent in listening and talking, and 84 per cent in writing. As an illustration of young people progressing through the education system, I would have thought that that would have been a more complete measure to put in place.

Mr Gray referred to a series of documents. If he was listening to my statement, he would have heard me say that I have consolidated into one document, as a simple reference point for everybody who is involved in education, the measures required to be taken on improvement. That is what is called focusing the agenda to make sure that we can unite around progress and improvement. That is exactly what the Government is focused on doing and that is what we will deliver for Scottish education.

I call Patrick Harvie to be followed by Tavish Scott. Please can we have succinct questions and answers from now on.

The Government has said that it does not want to return to crude league tables but, as it moves ahead with standardised assessment, is it not inevitable that data will end up being used in that way? Does that not stand in contradiction to the goal of trusting teachers to know who in their class needs a bit of extra help?

On that last point, I do want to trust teachers to make those judgments in the classroom because that is the only place where those judgments can be made. However, I also want teachers to be well informed by reliable and consistent mechanisms of assessment in making that judgment. That is what standardised assessment is all about.

I certainly value—and I think that teachers will value—the information that is now available on comparative performance, which helps to identify how improvement can be strengthened in individual schools. That is what this agenda is about. I am not interested in crude league tables and I have not presented the data in that fashion. I am interested in giving the information that can drive an agenda of improvement within Scottish education. The parents and pupils of Scotland would expect nothing less of their Government.

Is the Government’s answer to the international figures that were published last week, which show that Scotland’s educational performance is falling, the national standardised assessments for pupils that the cabinet secretary has talked about, and reform of schools and local government, but not of the Government quangos that, along with ministers, have had responsibility for policy and implementation for curriculum for excellence for the past nine years? Did not the OECD conduct a review of curriculum for excellence rather than an evaluation? Finally, in the improvement framework that the cabinet secretary has just talked about, I can find 30 new improvement activities. How is that consistent with the points that have been made about simplification and easing bureaucracy?

Mr Scott has looked at the governance review material and he will have found that, in it, the Government poses questions about the role of all the bodies that are involved in education, including Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority. It is a comprehensive review of governance in education.

On Mr Scott’s point about responsibility for implementing curriculum for excellence, I totally acknowledge and accept the Government’s role in its delivery and implementation, but one of the points that is frequently missed in this debate is the one that is made in the submission to the governance review that was published last week by the Educational Institute of Scotland. The approach to Scottish education has always been a partnership approach in which professional associations, local authorities and professional bodies are all involved in discussions about the delivery of curriculum changes and educational improvements. I am prepared to accept my share of the responsibility as a Government minister but I point out that that responsibility has been exercised in a collaborative fashion across many organisations in Scotland.

The final point is about the OECD review and how that relates to the improvement framework. Mr Scott is literally correct to say that the OECD carried out a review and not an evaluation. The OECD told us that we needed to get more data to enable us to undertake the evaluation, which is precisely what I was doing with the publication this morning of the school-based assessment approach.

The OECD also said that we must take a number of steps to strengthen Scottish education, which is what is in the improvement plan. Some people are criticising me for applying far too much pace to the reform agenda in Scottish education. I make no apology for that because we must get on with taking the necessary steps to improve Scottish education. The improvement plan enables us to do that.

I remind members that I am the parliamentary liaison officer for education.

As a former teacher, I welcome the moves to reduce workloads and bureaucracy and I am sure that the new Education Scotland websites, which streamline guidance, will be welcomed by teachers. Will the cabinet secretary outline how Education Scotland will monitor the uptake of the guidance, resources and materials that will be available to teachers next week?

The reduction in the volume of material has been at my request to ensure that the materials that are available to enhance educational development around the country are visible and compelling to members of the teaching profession. I hope that the reforms in that respect are of assistance.

On monitoring uptake, Education Scotland tracks significant use of the materials, which will also form part of its dialogue with schools on encouraging and improving educational practice around the country.

The most recent guidance that I issued to schools was in August and Education Scotland was able to advise me from the data that was available of the significant level of interest in those materials from the teaching profession. I look forward to that being replicated in relation to these reforms that we are undertaking.

The cabinet secretary referred to the scheme that he announced on 30 November. For clarity, will he advise the chamber how many of the current teacher vacancies he expects that scheme to fill?

With an accelerated or fast-track route into teaching, what measures will be put in place to ensure that new teachers are sufficiently qualified, given that teachers have already expressed concern that there is not enough focus on literacy and numeracy in the current teacher training?

On Mr Thomson’s first question, my expectation is that approximately 200 places will be filled by the new routes into teaching that I announced on 30 November.

On Mr Thomson’s second question, the approaches to encourage a swifter route into teaching will be designed by the colleges of education, which are independent educational bodies that are not controlled by the Government. The colleges have to design those courses to the satisfaction of the General Teaching Council for Scotland. The colleges need to produce graduates who will be able to satisfy the standards that the GTCS would expect for proficiency within Scottish education.

It is entirely in the hands of the GTCS and the colleges of education to ensure that the individuals who emerge from those particular routes meet the standards that we would expect.

Although the news that so many young people are achieving their expected curriculum for excellence level is welcome, we want a world-leading education system, with more schools and local authorities supporting young people to achieve beyond their expected level. In my roles as a constituency MSP and as convener of the Education and Skills Committee, I would appreciate it if the cabinet secretary could outline to me what evidence he has that that is happening.

We have put in place a framework of data that will enable us to see, on a sustained basis, the progress that young people are making. More data is more visibly available than has ever been the case in the past. We will be able to see the progress that young people are making at a school level and that will help to inform the steps that are necessary to improve performance at a local level. The data demonstrates some significant variation in the performance of different local authority areas; that should be the subject of and the focus for improvement, and the national improvement plan is designed to assist in enabling schools to tackle performance and to ensure that young people fulfil their potential.

There are almost 72,000 more primary pupils with additional support needs than in 2007. A better understanding of the individual needs of pupils is, of course, welcome, but in the same period, the number of learning support and additional support needs teachers in primary school has decreased by 31 per cent, a fact that the cabinet secretary did not highlight in his statement. He said that he is committed to ensuring the right number of teachers with the right skills in the right places. When can children with additional support needs expect to see that commitment fulfilled?

As part of the Government’s agenda to ensure that we get it right for every child, we focus on the needs and requirements of individual children as they present themselves in the system. As I have discussed with Parliament before, we have a presumption about mainstreaming, but we are looking to ensure that the correct judgments are being made and that the educational situations for young people are appropriate to meet their needs.

I add that between 2007 and the current period, there was a significant change to the legislative framework in relation to children with additional support needs, which broadened significantly the definition of young people with additional support needs, so that there will be a much broader range of such needs than would have been the case under the previous arrangements that Monica Lennon set out.

I take the opportunity to thank the cabinet secretary and his ministers for recent visits to my constituency to see first hand some of the innovative work that goes on in the schools of Coatbridge and Chryston. I ask the cabinet secretary to outline how many schools have been built or refurbished since 2007-08 and how that compares with the number under the previous Administration and to explain what impact he expects that to have on attainment.

More than 600 schools have been either rebuilt or refurbished since the Government came to office in 2007, which has delivered the type of improvement and enhancement in the learning environment that young people experience the length and breadth of the country. Well over 80 per cent of young people are now being taught in either good or satisfactory educational environments. That is testament to the investment that has been made by the Government.

The cabinet secretary said in his statement that the data shows that significant improvement is required in some local authorities and that real challenges exist in delivering progress on literacy and numeracy. That is definitely a statement that we agree with. What will the cabinet secretary do in practical terms to give that support to local authorities and to local schools?

The Government has set out the steps that we consider to be appropriate in improving performance within education in the national improvement framework and we encourage all local authorities to take those steps forward.

Secondly, the Government has made available to a wide variety of local authorities in Scotland resources to assist in closing the attainment gap; we await the conclusion of the budget process on Thursday to give us further information on the delivery of assistance to a wider cohort of pupils as a consequence. The Government is focused on ensuring that we play our part in strengthening performance in educational achievement at local level in Scotland.

Thank you. That concludes the statement. I point out that, despite my exhortations and encouragement, there are four members who did not get in. I ask all members to reflect on that. Please ask a question—there might be one sentence beforehand, but then a question. I am sure that the minister is also listening to that encouragement.

We move on to the next item of business.