Public Audit Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, September 30, 2021

Official Report 599KB pdf

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Section 23 Report

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“Improving outcomes for young people through school education”

Our second agenda item is to look at the “Improving outcomes for young people through school education” report, which was produced earlier this year. This is an opportunity for us to speak to the accountable officer in the Scottish Government, Joe Griffin, whom I welcome this morning. I think that this is your first appearance before the committee.

Yes, that is correct, convener.

I am sure that we shall be gentle in our approach to you, in light of that. Joining us remotely are Graeme Logan, who is the director of learning at the Scottish Government, and Gayle Gorman, who is the chief inspector of education at Education Scotland. Willie Coffey, a member of the committee, is also joining us via videolink.

I remind those who are joining us remotely that, because this is a hybrid meeting, it would be helpful if you could enter an R in the chat box function if you want to come in on any of the points. Those who are in the room can simply indicate that to me or to the clerks, and we will take your questions or answers.

I want to afford Joe Griffin the opportunity of making an opening statement before we get into the question session.

I thank the Public Audit Committee for inviting me to give evidence alongside Graeme Logan and Gayle Gorman.

As you said, convener, this marks my first committee appearance as director general for education and justice, and I am glad that this morning provides us with the opportunity to discuss a recent key review of our education system. Audit Scotland’s report “Improving outcomes for young people through school education” outlines clearly the challenges that we face in ensuring that our education system provides fair and equal opportunities to children and young people in Scotland. I thank the Auditor General for commissioning this really helpful report and I look forward to reflecting on the recommendations in it during the evidence session.

The Scottish Government understands the significant impacts that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the lives of our children and young people. Alongside our key partners in local authorities and other stakeholder groups, we are committed to doing all that we can to support our young people to overcome those challenges, both through our existing measures to reduce the attainment gap and through new policy initiative investments that we have introduced since the start of the pandemic.

I take this opportunity to record my sincere thanks and appreciation to all school-age children and young people in Scotland, and their parents and carers, for all that they have done to continue their learning and to support one another during the pandemic. I also thank our education workforce, teachers, school leaders, support staff, janitors, officers and partner services working with schools for all that they have done to support our children and young people.

I thank the committee once again. I am very grateful for the opportunity to answer members’ questions.

Thank you for that opening statement. We will now turn to questions.

In the previous session of Parliament, a recurring theme and a cause for concern was incomplete and poor-quality data. When we look at the joint Audit Scotland-Accounts Commission report into outcomes for young people in school education, the issue seems to crop up again. The sets of data that are available, which measure outcomes, appear to be incomplete. The expression used by the Auditor General is that

“there is a lack of robust data”.—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 9 September 2021; c 4.]

Our first question is this: what are you doing to address that? Are you taking serious action to address it?

I think that the Audit Scotland critique is fair and reasonable. As I interpret it, our curriculum relates to four capacities. It is a broad curriculum. We talk about developing successful learners, effective contributors, responsible citizens and confident individuals. It is fair to say that most of the visibility, the narrative and the commentary relate to data around successful learners.

Every year we have a results day—it is a regular fixture in the calendar. There is then, rightly, a focus on the academic achievements of children and young people. I think that we could do more to reflect the other three capacities. For example, we already collect health data. We regularly collect information about the wellbeing of 13 and 15 year-olds as part of our information set. We publish that information in the national improvement framework. That annual document sets out our key aims and the data accompanying it. We also draw on other sources of evidence from organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which recently published a report showing that Scotland’s young people were among the best in the world in their understanding of global issues and their responsibilities as citizens.

We need more data on health and wellbeing, not least in light of Covid. This autumn, through local authorities, we will be commissioning a health and wellbeing census that will give us a lot of rich data to better understand the rounded experiences of children and young people, particularly through the pandemic. Looking ahead, partly informed by Audit Scotland’s reasonable critique and by the OECD report that we received back in the summer, we need to do more not just to collect the information, but to make it visible and to publicise it.

That work partly lies in the reform process that we are undertaking. We are examining how it might make sense to bring the curriculum and the assessment closer together in a single organisation. That could help us to develop some of the methodologies. As the OECD report says, some of the data is elusive. It is straightforward-ish to measure exam results for successful learners, but measuring confidence is something for which we might need to develop the methodologies. Our aspiration is certainly to have a broader set of data that better reflects the structure of our curriculum.

Thank you. If, at any point, you want to bring in Graeme Logan or Gayle Gorman, please feel free to do so.

You mentioned the OECD—we will come on to ask some questions about its report shortly. You also spoke about the extent of data collection. One of the other rather pointed conclusions in Audit Scotland’s report is in paragraph 25, which bluntly says:

“The Scottish Government’s national aim is to improve outcomes for all, but it has not set out by how much or by when.”

As well as collecting more data, do you plan to address that charge in the report?

We have a sense of a political instruction to make demonstrable progress in reducing the poverty-related attainment gap in the short term and to eliminate it in the longer term. In our national improvement framework, we have a series of measures that we track annually to demonstrate whether we are achieving that.

We have not taken the view that we should set a specific date by which the poverty-related attainment gap would be eliminated. We feel that the nature of the challenge does not lend itself to that level of specificity. It is a highly complex process, as Audit Scotland has said. It relates to a number of variables, some of which happen well away from the school gates and are rooted in the community. It is the kind of complex challenge on which we need data, a sense of how we are getting on and the ability to measure it, but it does not lend itself to our saying that we will have eliminated the gap by a certain date.

To elaborate on that a wee bit, we are, nevertheless, looking at whether it might be advisable to encourage local authorities more consistently to set themselves specific aims to reduce the poverty-related attainment gap. In our national improvement framework, we currently have stretch aims at a national level, but we think that a more consistent adoption of aims at the local level might assist local authorities in understanding their rate of progress. The Audit Scotland report is quite a helpful exposition of the variation that we see.

I cannot say too much more about that, convener. The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills will be making an announcement next month about the refresh of our approach to attainment generally, but I hope that that gives you some indication of the direction that we are following.

But the Government has targets on, for example, child poverty and fuel poverty. Therefore, has any consideration been given to setting targets on reducing the attainment gap and putting a timescale next to it?

I might ask Graeme Logan to come in to recall the early days of developing the attainment challenge.

Again, the issue comes back to complexity and variability. We do a number of things in teaching and so on to improve performance in the classroom. A number of things are done in the community as well. We are very much taking a twin-track approach. However, the nature of a young person’s attainment still rests on that individual’s engagement with and response to the education system, which is a highly individual thing. To state the obvious, every year we have a different group of people sitting exams or going through the process.

That is some of the philosophy that underlies why we have not gone for a specific approach, but Graeme Logan will be able to elaborate on that and to talk about our considerations in the early days.

Good morning. I can reassure the committee that, from the outset of the Scottish attainment challenge, it was part of our thinking, and part of the conditions that were set, that schools and local authorities had to have their own success criteria and their own measures in place for the ways in which they used the additional funding to close the poverty-related attainment gap. We did not choose two or three measures at that point because of the research on the perverse incentives that that could cause. It could encourage quite a reductionist, narrow approach. As Mr Griffin said, we wanted to encourage people to think about learning and teaching and families and communities, and to take a broad approach.

We did a consultation on the measures that we should develop in the national improvement framework. As a result of that, 11 measures for closing the poverty-related attainment gap were developed, which include some of the traditional attainment measures but also a participation measure and other important indicators. As Mr Griffin said, the challenge now, in the light of the Audit Scotland report, is to develop a clearer line of sight from those national aims through to school and local level. There is perhaps agreement that we need more consistency on some of those core measures.

Thank you. We may return to some of those themes before the session finishes, but my final question for now is simply to ask whether you accept all the recommendations in the report.

Yes, we do. We have been speaking to our colleagues in local government. In the system as a whole, there has been a collective response to a very reasonable report. We are already incorporating some of the recommendations, and we plan to respond to all of them in due course.

Thank you. Colin Beattie has a series of questions.

Good morning. I refer you to the Auditor General’s finding in paragraphs 136, 137 and 138 of the report that there was not a link between spending per pupil and educational attainment. The Auditor General has listed a number of different elements. Are you satisfied that each education authority is capturing data in the same way so that it is directly comparable? I know that there is always a problem with data. However, are you satisfied that, in this case, we are capturing the same data?

09:15  

Thank you, Mr Beattie. I may ask Gayle Gorman or Graeme Logan to elaborate, but I will make a start.

We have the 11 key measures in the national improvement framework, so there is a system that ensures consistency. That means that the data that we get from local authorities on each of those measures is consistent. In addition to that, there is quite a lot of variation on measures that local authorities themselves choose to collect from schools so that they can build up their own local picture for local purposes. However, as far as the national data is concerned, the national improvement framework guarantees consistency. Graeme Logan and Gayle Gorman may want to add to that.

I think that that is probably a no.

In paragraph 138, the Auditor General has listed a number of issues, many of which are not directly to do with a student’s tuition, but one factor that is missing is the family circumstances of the individual student. All the other factors that are listed might affect students from a financial point of view, with regard to loading the costs and so forth, but we know that the family situation impacts heavily on a student’s performance. I realise that the family element is a difficult one to capture, but no indication is given of the impact of family circumstances or of what can be done by way of a joined-up approach to help students to make the best of their education.

That is a really important point. I will talk a bit about “big data and small data”, which is a phrase that is used by the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg. What that means is that there is some data that we need at a national level in order to understand the return on an investment in the development of a strategy, but there is some data that we need at a local level. An individual teacher needs to know about the family circumstances of the young person in front of them.

With regard to our understanding of the family situation as a theme and a generic issue, it is clear to us from a range of reports that we have commissioned, such as the equity report that we published in January on the impact of the pandemic and the report on five years of the Scottish attainment challenge, which is our strategic approach, and from the international evidence, that the family circumstances have a huge bearing.

I have spoken to three headteachers in the course of the past fortnight, from Dundee, Alloa and just outside Kilmarnock, respectively. They all told me exactly what you are telling me, which is that some of the funding that they get from the Government—in a number of our schools, it is left to the headteacher to decide best how she or he thinks that that money should be spent—is spent on things that help with family circumstances. That could be the provision of a home link worker to make better connections between the school and the family and to support the family in supporting the learner, or it could be something as simple as enabling the boy or the girl to play football at the weekend, which the family could not otherwise afford to do.

Through our approach to attainment, funding is being used in highly flexible ways that rely on the judgment of teachers and headteachers about where the money is best dedicated. We have had extremely positive feedback from headteachers about the impact of taking family circumstances into account in thinking about attainment and funding.

With all such things, the issue comes back to the spending of public money. How do we measure and evidence the impact of that? How do we make comparisons between local authorities to measure their performance when it is so variable?

In Scotland, we do not publish league tables of local authorities by performance. We take the view that the risk of doing so is that it could lead to oversimplified conclusions. That can be demoralising, most importantly for the teaching workforce, all of whom are doing their absolute best in difficult circumstances. We think that the effect that the publication of a league table that shows that a particular authority is at or near the bottom can have is not good.

I was not suggesting a league table.

Of course.

What I am trying to understand is whether some local authorities are better at this than others. I want to know whether some authorities are following a more successful methodology than others and, if so, how we can transfer that.

I will ask Gayle Gorman to comment as head of improvement in Scotland. We have very good information on each local authority. Education Scotland collects that information. We have an Education Scotland expert embedded in all 32 local authorities and there is a two-way flow of information. Data and intelligence about what is happening in a local authority come back to Gayle Gorman and her colleagues in the central education system, and Education Scotland provides expertise and shares best practice. We have done a lot to set up a community of best practice, including at regional level, through what we call regional improvement collaboratives, whereby practice can be shared. Within a regional entity, a local authority that is strong on one aspect can share that practice with colleagues across the region.

Gayle Gorman oversees the system as a whole, Mr Beattie, and, if you like, she may be able to elaborate.

Okay.

Thank you. I appreciate being at the committee.

On Mr Beattie’s point about how we monitor, learn about and share best practice, the inspectorate carried out a series of inspections of the nine Scottish attainment challenge authorities in 2017 and 2018. In partnership with colleagues from Audit Scotland and directors of education, we audited the work that had gone on in those authorities, to identify best practice and areas for improvement. The reports were published and are in the public domain. Local authorities then developed action plans to address the improvement agenda; there was also a summary report. We do such work regularly, as Mr Griffin suggested.

You might be aware that we announced this week that we are beginning to restart our school inspections, which were paused because of Covid. We pick up on things like how the pupil equity fund is being used in schools, and the most effective practice and how it works.

Before and during Covid, we published a series of sketch notes. They are visual representations, based on individual best practice models in schools, local authorities, community learning and development teams and elsewhere. Quite a number of sketch notes have focused on recovery. We have published a significant number of them over the past 18 months to demonstrate and share best practice across the system, because we need to learn what is working well, and, equally important, the system needs to know what is not working well, so that energy, time and capacity are not wasted.

On the inspection side, we carried out a series of national thematic inspections. We looked at themes across the country and we visited schools and talked to school leaders, teachers, parents and young people. From that work, we put together a series of summary reports to help to shape the support and direction of travel of the targeted workforce that we now have at regional and local authority level. Those people are practitioners themselves, who work directly with schools to provide support and challenge, to bring about a faster pace of improvement.

This committee looks at the public expenditure and outcomes from that public expenditure. The Auditor General’s report does not pick up the work that you described as a component of the cost per pupil, and I wonder why. You said that all those measures are in place and good practice is being transferred back and forth. There must be some measurement in there, because if there is no link between spending per pupil and educational attainment, do we know whether the money is being spent in the right place, for the right purpose?

I recognise that some of the issues that the Auditor General picked up are technical, which adds to the cost. If we strip that out, do we have any idea how much the outreach to pupils’ families—that sort of wraparound approach—is costing and how effective it is? Is it being targeted in the right way? Is the volume of expenditure enough? I am trying to grope towards where the most effective expenditure of public funds is to achieve the outcome that the Government is looking for.

Graeme Logan might say something about the review of the attainment challenge, which captured five years of data and learning from our approach.

We have different reporting requirements on the different streams of money. The attainment Scotland fund is the overall pot of money, and we have clear reporting requirements on different aspects of that. The area that is quite delegated and pretty light touch in terms of reporting is pupil equity funding, to which Gayle Gorman referred. That is a budget of £1,200 per pupil in specific parts of Scotland where levels of deprivation suggest that it is most needed.

We have a good sense of what the approaches are in aggregate and whether they are effective and ineffective, but I do not think that we can point to a particular local authority and say, “It has used that £1,200 per pupil in these specific ways,” because the spending and flexibility are delegated right down to headteacher level. Local authorities might track the expenditure.

Graeme Logan might want to say more about what five years of experience tell us and about how we audit and account for the spend.

At the same time as the Audit Scotland report was published, the Scottish Government published “Closing the poverty-related attainment gap: progress report 2016 to 2021”, which highlighted the progress that had been made on the Scottish attainment challenge and headteachers’ professional evaluation of how the money had been used and how effective it had been. Of course, schools account for how they use the pupil equity funding and what impact it has, through the school improvement plans and standards and quality reports that they produce annually and share with parents. That is important. There is also an attainment adviser in each local authority who is looking at the issue, engaging in professional dialogue and sharing good practice.

As we review the Scottish attainment challenge, we want to look at how we can further strengthen the support and challenge, and the consistency and transparency of reporting of outcomes. As Mr Griffin said, the cabinet secretary is due to set out for Parliament, in October, how the Scottish attainment challenge has been redesigned to build on the learning from the past five years, for the next five years, for which there is a spending commitment of £1 billion—it was £750 million in the previous session of the Parliament—to ensure that we make better and more intense progress across the country.

We might come back to funding and the extent to which it is additional. You mentioned the OECD report. Sharon Dowey has some questions about that.

It seems that the OECD’s report on its review of the curriculum for excellence has the potential to address many of the issues that the Auditor General raised. We understand that the Scottish Government has accepted the report’s recommendations in full, including the recommendation on improved data to deliver outcomes. In the absence of improved data, how is the Scottish Government addressing the educational outcomes of pupils who are currently in the senior phase of education and who will not benefit from future reforms?

Thank you, Ms Dowey. Some of that goes back to the question of breadth, which I covered earlier, so I will not repeat myself. It is about making sure that we collect data that reflects all four capacities and not just successful learners.

I think that you asked how we ensure that we have good data for pupils who are in the system now, pending the review. I do not think—although I am happy to be corrected—that anybody is saying that we lack data on educational attainment, that is, the successful learner part of the curriculum. We have a well-established system of national qualifications, which is presided over by the Scottish Qualifications Authority, and we collect additional measures through the curriculum levels process, to gain an understanding of progress on literacy and numeracy at different points at primary and secondary school. I do not think that we are hearing that there is a problem with that approach as currently constituted.

09:30  

Having said that, there are clearly a couple of challenges. One is the OECD view that the data is not well aligned with how with think about our curriculum. The second is the impact of Covid: we have had a couple of years of the system having to draw up an alternative certification model, and that has produced a set of results that are not directly comparable with the previous years. The Auditor General’s report sets that out as a challenge.

Every Administration in the world is grappling with that issue. It is a similar situation to the one when a qualification system changes: it is not possible to make a direct, like-for-like comparison.

Nevertheless, the results that we have are valid. They are what young people achieved in those years. In the case of school leavers, we also have evidence of their assessments from previous years, to build into the picture. We do not intend to go in and somehow try to play around with the data to try to make it more directly comparable. We do not think that that would be fair or indeed technically possible.

We have a couple of years of interrupted data—Tricia Meldrum talked about that when you met the Audit Scotland team—and I described how we are proposing to deal with it. The results are there but we have to recognise that in those two years a different situation and context pertained, and we need to treat the results with a bit of caution.

My next question is on positive outcomes. What work has been done to reduce the 4.6 per cent of young people who leave with an unknown classification? Also, what is classed as a positive destination? Does it mean going to a job, getting on a course or getting a qualification? Is any workforce planning done to ensure that courses that young people take will provide a job at the end?

On the first point, I am pleased to report some progress since you heard from the Audit Scotland team. Skills Development Scotland, which as you know runs the skills system, has reached an agreement with the Department for Work and Pensions to share information about young people going on to collect universal credit. We did not have that before, which is partly what swelled the numbers—the 4.6 per cent—of those for whom we did not know the destination. Our colleagues at Skills Development Scotland are optimistic that that can reduce the cohort of people for whom the outcome is unknown. At the moment, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, it is a bit of an unknown unknown—we do not know by how much that will reduce the figure, but it is a positive step forward that ought to plug that specific data gap.

You are right that a positive destination is defined as someone going into education, employment or training. We measure that through Skills Development Scotland, which carries out a survey asking the cohort of people what activity they most typically undertook during the year. We think that that is methodologically the soundest approach. The figures are encouraging. The most recent figure was that 92.2 per cent of young people had a positive destination, which was 1.1 percentage points up on the previous year.

You asked about people who do not go on to successful outcomes and who are at risk of falling through the cracks. We also track those people. Quite often, individual schools, who know their young people best, will continue with a close level of engagement. The careers service sometimes also does that on behalf of Skills Development Scotland. Also, in November last year, the Government introduced the young persons guarantee, through which we are looking to simplify and align the different data streams so that we have a clearer idea of who is going into positive destinations that we know about. There will be a progress report on that in November this year and, in 2022, we will produce the first set of data relating to the young persons guarantee, which will set out data on the key performance indicators. That will further illuminate the picture.

I hope that that addresses your questions.

Thank you—I look forward to reading that report.

I now turn to Willie Coffey, who, as I mentioned, is joining us remotely. Willie, the floor is yours.

I will focus on the current impact of Covid on young people and will also invite you to look ahead to what the future might look like. Has Covid changed the way that we think about education and how we help young people to make successful transitions, either into the world of work or into further and higher education? I am thinking about digital technology, which largely came to the rescue for school pupils by allowing them to study remotely and from home.

Looking ahead, will the world look the same as it did before Covid? Do we provide youngsters with the right skills? Are we matching up those skills with what employers want? Is there a job of work to be done by the Government to help employers with the recruitment process? I would be obliged if you could give us a perspective on the impact that Covid has had and how things might change.

I will invite Graeme Logan and Gayle Gorman to come in, as they are educationalists and experts, but I will first have a stab at answering your questions as best I can.

I was struck by a quote from our international council of education advisers, who have said that the pandemic has reinforced equity as the defining issue of our age. From a lot of what we have seen during Covid, we know that the impact has been differential—we have commissioned extensive evidence and we have what children and young people have told us about the impact, through Young Scot and other organisations.

We can talk more about that evidence but, to an extent, it reinforced the importance of a curriculum that is broadly based and that does not overly emphasise the accumulation of facts and academic achievement but is also concerned with young people’s progress in terms of their health and wellbeing and their resilience. If there is anything to test young people’s resilience, it is a global pandemic. What we hear from our education advisers is that the steps that we took to build a progressive curriculum have put us in quite a good place in dealing with the challenges that Covid throws up. We have talked a bit about the poverty-related attainment gap. A number of the measures that relate to that also play into Covid.

Will the world look the same in the future? I think that the realisation that young people and, crucially, their families need digital skills, access to the kit and good connections has brought home to us that we need to do more. In the Scottish Government’s programme for government, there is a commitment to the provision of devices for every young person in education. There is already progress on the number of additional connections that we made during the pandemic and that we now plan to make through the connected Scotland programme. The aim is to realise the shift to digital platforms generally and to prepare for further disruption, because who knows what lies ahead.

That is my take on it. I think that the pandemic has exacerbated a lot of tendencies that already existed, but our curriculum puts us in a strong place to be able to respond. Gayle Gorman and Graeme Logan may wish to make additional observations.

All of us in education are reflecting on and thinking about those issues. One silver lining of this horrific Covid pandemic has been some of the changes that have come about through the innovation and creativity of our workforce—our teachers and head teachers—and of young people and their families. I have been invested for years in the use of digital technology to support learning, and we saw that happen overnight. There were some bumps along the road—it was not consistent everywhere and it was not perfect, but we know from our inspection work on remote learning during the second lockdown that, my goodness, the learning curve for teachers and young people was almost vertical.

We saw a positive side. Mr Griffin has described some of the concerns and issues for deprived young people and for children living in rural communities without connectivity but, in general, we saw self-directed learning. Young people strengthened their independence and their ability to focus on self-directed learning. The focus on timetabling provided confidence in planning and reflection.

Teachers thought about their methods and delivered in a very different way. Covid changed our pedagogy, which is the word that we use to talk about teaching and learning. It changed the methodologies that we use for teaching, because talking through a digital medium is very different from sitting beside someone in a classroom and showing them something if they get stuck. Teachers and the profession learned a lot, and we supported that with our webinars and online support materials and other things.

Interestingly, children and young people challenged the methodologies and said, “Actually, we really like this.” We had live lessons, which I know parents were keen on, but young people said that they most enjoyed recorded lessons, because they could revisit them if there was an issue or a challenge, or they could rewatch a lesson with a family member or peer and try to work through the issues. Young people also liked some of the supported learning, which allowed them to work in a parallel way. Teachers’ methodology was challenged, but they rose to the challenge and they and our young people have gained skills.

Last week, during our online Scottish learning festival, I talked about the resilience, ingenuity, creativity, confidence and responsibility that this generation has taken from the pandemic. Those are the global competences that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and business leaders are looking for. I therefore hope that the world does not look the same. We must build back and move forward, rather than go back just because it was comfortable and easy. My challenge to the system in the past few months has been about the need to listen to our young people and their families about what they responded well to and to think about how we build into our programmes the things that worked positively.

Once we iron out some of the rural connectivity and other issues, the digital options will allow us to address some of the curriculum challenges, particularly in smaller secondary schools, around the breadth and depth of the offer and issues such as access to highers and advanced highers. Some of the collaborative work that was happening physically between schools is now happening digitally. I hope that, as we grapple with the issues, we will be able to move forward on some of the barriers to access to a global curriculum.

Last week, we chatted to Colleges Scotland. One challenge that we as elected members face—I think that everybody faces it—is how to move young people into the world of work. Do we need to do more with employers to understand their needs? You will know that recruitment almost dried up during Covid and it is fair to say that it has not recovered yet. On the other hand, we are hearing about the number of vacancies right across various sectors in Scotland. Do we need to do more to understand employers’ needs and to promote those needs in the education setting to assist and encourage youngsters to make positive transitions into the world of work and beyond?

Members will know that a number of years ago—forgive me, I forget the year; it might have been 2010, but I apologise if I have that wrong—Sir Ian Wood produced a report on developing the young workforce. It looked exactly at a number of the issues that you have talked about around how to get closer dialogue between young people, schools and employers. As a result, a framework was put in place that involves local partnerships that include major employers, schools, the careers service and colleges, precisely to try to better align them. Generally, we are seeing quite good results from that. For example, the participation rate is quite strong and labour market outcomes for young people are still quite strong, although they have declined moderately in the past year. I have those figures if you would like them.

Looking ahead, the young persons guarantee takes us back to the agenda of how we improve the system. There is a premium on simplifying some of the arrangements. There are a number of funding streams and groups, and, through the young persons guarantee, we are looking to simplify things behind the scene and to simplify access for the young person. However, the foundations that we have built up over a number of years are strong. They include, for example, a developing the young workforce co-ordinator in every school, so that there is someone who has a link back to the partnership with employers and who can, through the careers service, share some perspective and insight. The foundations are strong, but they could of course be improved. Those are some of the things that we are looking to work on in the months and years ahead.

09:45  

We have a further series of questions covering the poverty gap and some of the funding aspects of that. Craig Hoy will begin on that.

From an almost philosophical or top-line perspective, what factors do you believe make the biggest difference in closing the poverty-related attainment gap? What are the key barriers to making more rapid progress? Although progress is being made in some areas of the country, the issue persists, and it is clearly a stubborn problem.

I will ask Gayle Gorman for her comments as our national expert but, as a layman, I think of it as being two baskets of activity.

We look at the interventions that we need to make outside the school gates, and some of that extends way beyond the education system to how we think about poverty more generally, how we support our communities, how we think about the aspirations of communities and how they look at education, as well as addressing some material needs and so on. Every year, we set out a strong evidence base in the national improvement framework about the kind of interventions that can be made in school to engage young people with their learning, irrespective of their background but thinking particularly about some of the poverty-related obstacles that might be in their paths. A lot of that goes back to the word “pedagogy”, which is the professional skill of the teacher.

What I understand from Gayle Gorman and other experts is that the ability to form a relationship with a young person that takes account of and looks to strengthen the connection with their family background is one of the most important tools that we have. Gayle Gorman is a real expert and she can expand on that further.

As always, it is a complex picture in education. It is always the thing that we focus in on, but teaching, learning and assessment fundamentally are the drivers of improvement. The quality of teaching then drives the quality and pace of learning and the assessment of that to identify the next gaps and how to move forward. Part of that is a greater understanding of differentiation so that you meet the needs of all the learners in front of you and you are able to adapt your teaching, learning and assessment to make sure that your teaching is targeted at the right level and at the right time for those young people.

Behind that, there is also the effective use of performance data. How do we track pupil progress and the different cohorts in our classes, departments, schools and local authorities? When we see effective factors and accelerated progress, high-quality teaching, learning and assessment are combined with an effective use of data to drive improvement.

Part of that, and driving that agenda, is leadership of learning at a classroom and school level, at local authority RICs level and at national level. Leadership sets the aspiration and aim for our young people, and it sets up the culture for improvement within any establishment as we go forward.

As Mr Griffin said, another key element is partnership not only with pupils but with families and the community. To enable effective teaching and learning, you have to know your learners, their interests and their experiences. A positive thing to come out of the experience of Covid is that teachers, through the work that they have done either by physically going to young people’s homes to deliver materials or school lunch, or through an online medium, have seen into young people’s homes and been able to engage with them and their families. Because of that, relationships have been strengthened, and we all know that teaching and learning is about relationships.

The key areas are therefore teaching, learning and assessment, the use of that with effective differentiation to meet individual learners’ needs, using and analysing to drive improvement, leadership underpinned by professional learning, and partnership with children, young people and their families.

Before I go on to my next question, I draw attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which details that I am a member of the East Lothian Council education committee.

How effective do you think the Scottish index of multiple deprivation is as the measure of poverty to target additional support? Have you seen any deficiencies in the outcomes that its use has resulted in?

We were grateful to the Auditor General’s team for raising that issue. We are looking at it as part of our review of the attainment challenge that we will come back to; the cabinet secretary will talk about that next month.

The problem is that SIMD covers postcodes and there can be variability within postcodes, sometimes even within streets. We are considering the children in low-income families—CILIF—methodology, which goes right down to the household level, and whether that is a better foundation for some of the poverty-related interventions that we need to make. We have not reached a final view on that, and it will be part of the cabinet secretary’s announcement, but it was reasonable for the Auditor General and his colleagues to have pointed that out.

Exhibit 4 on page 28 of the report shows the gap between the most deprived and least deprived gaining five or more awards at level 5. I was aware of the problem in East Lothian but I was slightly shocked to see it presented in such graphic terms. When you see a very large gap with very low levels of attainment at SIMD quintile 5, are you concerned about the somewhat blunt approach of effectively having attainment challenge councils with high deprivation throughout the council area? In East Lothian, there is a very variable level of deprivation, particularly between the east and the west of the county, and it strikes me that we are seeing the product of an indiscriminate and blunt system.

To a certain extent, we could wonder what on earth is going on with the attainment adviser. East Lothian has the lowest attainment among the most deprived anywhere in the country, and the second largest attainment gap. Is that not a cause for concern? If you are looking at every child in every part of the country, that shows that the current system of funding to try to close the attainment gap is clearly not working in the areas where there is a very wide disparity between the wealthiest and those with the least.

Again, I may ask Gayle Gorman to come in. Partly for the reasons that I referred to earlier about not discussing individual local authorities, you will forgive me if I do not comment specifically on East Lothian. To be clear, we are not relaxed about the variation. We are absolutely determined that, in the years to come, there should be less variation across Scotland in the poverty-related attainment gap and equity and excellence overall. That is one of the reasons why we are reviewing our approach to the attainment challenge and specifically looking at the funding. I mentioned SIMD as opposed to CILIF as one example, but I think that the way in which we have constructed the funds until now has its source in the representation from some councils and the critique that we have here in the Audit Scotland report.

In keeping with our approach to an awful lot of what the Auditor General has said, we are listening, and we are very open to making adjustments. I cannot comment yet on the conclusions that we have reached; that is for the cabinet secretary to do, but she will be doing so very clearly in early course. I do not know whether Gayle Gorman wants to add anything about the Education Scotland approach to a council that has an issue of the kind that Mr Hoy illustrated.

I should point out that Mr Hoy’s example of East Lothian is a universal support authority, so it did not have the additional targeted support money or support from the Scottish attainment challenge.

The work of the attainment adviser and the wider regional teams supports and works alongside the local authority strategic leadership—the head of service and the director—to look at the challenge, improvement and pace of the strategic planning, and to analyse the data so that we can identify where the gaps and the challenges are, and what challenges the communities in East Lothian are facing that are reflected in their schools. We have targeted support at primary and secondary schools in every local authority where the attainment adviser and my curriculum team and curriculum and leadership experts work directly with teachers and practitioners to review what they are doing, to help them with the latest research and methodology, and to move that forward.

We also work quite closely with the improvement advisers at the children and young people’s improvement collaborative so that we use the same methodology. There is an evaluation strand and we can track the progress over time.

Particular focus goes into professional learning. As I said in my earlier answer, what makes the biggest difference is the leadership and professional learning of teachers. We help them to understand the most effective methodologies, what makes the biggest difference and where the learning can take place.

There is a team around the local authority that we support, but we work in partnership with the local authority and the regional improvement collaborative to make sure that we see where the targeted work is and where there might be challenges because of the wider issues that our communities are facing these days, not just in-school issues. We then work out a bespoke plan for every local authority that picks up on where there needs to be further support, how they can draw on the national team, and challenge and support the work that is going on in local authorities.

The authorities where Audit Scotland rightly identified a large or increasing gap are very much a focus of our work and have been for the last while. We focus on what the challenges are, how we address them and how the system can support that authority collectively.

We developed a programme called collaborative improvement in partnership with the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland. The programme is bespoke and quite innovative where the system comes together, and we have already carried out a couple of programmes where we go in and work with a local authority over a period of days or a week or so. We review the improvement work that it is doing and its focus, and then we collectively come up with an action plan to address how the system can support those who are facing greater challenges. We are planning to do about six or eight of those programmes during this academic year, targeted at authorities.

I do not want to pre-empt the cabinet secretary’s announcement, but I have a very quick question. How can we expect the £1 billion investment that has been announced to be targeted? Is it the Scottish Government’s view that that sum is sufficient in light of the pandemic?

It is difficult for me to answer that without pre-empting what the cabinet secretary might conclude and announce. I draw your attention to the review of the attainment challenge that we published in March, which has five years of data and learning. It is fair to say that our deliberations about the future structure and shape of the funding are informed by that—as you would expect—and by the Auditor General’s findings. I hope that that gives something of a preview. I probably cannot say too much more without getting into trouble.

Forgive me, Mr Hoy, what was the second part of your question?

Do you think that that sum is sufficient in light of the pandemic?

I think that it relates to what we were saying earlier on about there not being a strong correlation between spend and performance. There are so many different aspects that we need to improve. In some authorities, performance is first class and others need to learn from it, but I do not think that it is a question of a sum of money being right or wrong. It is a substantial amount of money and it is informed by the £750 million that was spent in the previous session of Parliament, so of course there is an uplift there. There are also different aspects, such as the £450 million or so that was spent in direct response to Covid.

The funding is important to some extent, but some of the improvements that we need to make and actions that we need to take are not financial. Some of this is about the performance in schools that Gayle Gorman talked about. Some of it is about support for the community, the young people and their families. Of course, that is not the sole sum of money. Money is also going in through Ms Robison’s portfolio for child poverty and a series of other measures.

I imagine that Audit Scotland will track our progress during this parliamentary session, as I am sure the committee will. As accountable officer, I am encouraged by the extent of the evidence that we have—evidence that we have published and also evidence that Education Scotland collects in the ways that we have been discussing. I imagine that time will tell whether £1 billion is the right figure.

10:00  

Thank you. I will conclude the morning’s session by picking up on that last area of discussion. We cannot pre-empt the cabinet secretary either, but we can reflect on the data in and the recommendations made by the Audit Scotland report earlier this year. One of the things that struck me about its analysis was that it said that, although real-terms spending on education increased by 0.7 per cent between 2013-14 and 2018-19, the increase was not reflected in all councils. In fact, it went on to say that there was a drop in real-terms funding for education in the attainment challenge councils, with the exception of Glasgow City Council. Most people would think that the attainment challenge fund was additional money to help those local authorities that have the biggest challenges in closing the attainment gap. Can you give us an explanation of why that was?

Yes, of course, and I will ask Graeme Logan to come in with a bit more detail. You are absolutely right that the money is intended to be additional but that is within a context of a set of highly devolved and delegated funding decisions around education that are primarily for local authorities.

The Audit Scotland report shows that the attainment challenge funding is a relatively small percentage of overall education spend. We have a system of devolved school management that allows a high degree of transparency at the local level about decisions that local authorities are making. We have good data and good information on the risk of school spending going down through that core spend and the risk of that somehow being substituted for by attainment challenge funding.

Graeme Logan can say a bit more about what we have done when we have uncovered that situation, and to what extent our review of processes intends to guard against it happening in the future.

As Joe Griffin said, local authorities are responsible for education in their areas and for the variation in education expenditure, which often reflects local factors, local context and so on. The latest data that we have is that spending on education in 2019-20 was £6 billion, up from £5.6 billion in 2018-19.

Mr Leonard referred to additionality. What we can say to reassure the committee is that, where our teams have seen examples of attainment challenge money being used in place of other funding to continue services that already existed, we have intervened and challenged the local authority on that. We have met senior officers to look at that and to ensure that the money is additional and targeted.

Of course, local authorities sign up to grant terms and conditions. They report to us annually on how they have spent the additional funding. We use that to engage in dialogue with authorities to ensure that, as far as possible, the additional interventions are targeted at the children who need them most.

Thank you. I am sure that if those local authority voices were around the table today, they would say that their settlements have also been reduced in the past 10 years and that that might be one of the reasons why overall spending has not gone up in the predicted way.

Thank you very much indeed for your evidence this morning, Mr Griffin. We very much appreciate the time that you have given up and the information that you have shared with us. I think that there were a couple of points on which you mentioned you might be able to provide us with some further detail, and that would certainly be helpful. We will await the cabinet secretary’s announcement. Will that be before or after the recess?

I do not think that we have set a specific date for it. I am looking at Graeme Logan. Is that right? Do we have a date yet?

Not as yet. We are expecting the announcement to be in October.

My guess is that it probably will be after recess. I also thank Graeme Logan and Gayle Gorman for joining us online. I am sure that we will see you again at some point in the future.

10:04 Meeting suspended.  

10:06 On resuming—