I welcome everyone to the 16th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2018. Can I please remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? The first item of business is an evidence session on the attainment and achievement of school-aged children experiencing poverty inquiry. Before we start, I would like to put in record my thanks to everyone who attended our meeting at the Muir House Millennium Centre in North Edinburgh last Wednesday. All the members that attended found the discussion very useful. This meeting is the fifth and final evidence session on this inquiry, and we have two panels today. The first panel is Education Scotland. Can I welcome to this meeting, Gail Gorman, chief inspector of education and chief executive, Elizabeth Morrison, strategic director, Louise Turnbull, HM inspector and interim assistant director and Gail Cotland, attainment adviser Education Scotland. I should say to the panel from the outset that if you would like to respond to a question, please indicate to me or the class and I will call you to speak. Ms Gorman, I understand that you would like to make a short statement. Thank you. Good morning, colleagues. I really welcome the opportunity to discuss this topic with the committee. As you know, the issue of poverty and attainment is a priority for everyone who works in education. I am joined today by my three colleagues who work directly in this area and will be able to give you first hand evidence and test to me about the work that is going on across Scotland. Improving attainment is at the heart of the new role and remit. We are rolling out for Education Scotland, and both our curriculum specialists and inspectors are focused on this key priority work across Scotland. Our inspectors are discussing PEP planning and impact with school leaders who are aware of how to monitor and gather robust evidence on the interventions and the impact of outcomes on Scotland's children. In some cases, our school leaders are indicating early evaluation of the implementation, showing positive impact on children and young people, and we are gathering, through our inspections, evidence that we are reiterating in our inspection reports. Through a wide range of channels that we have support for teachers in schools across Scotland, such as GLO, the national improvement hub and our interventions for inquiry, our curriculum teams are gathering evidence from schools and practitioners, sharing those examples of interesting practice so that we can spread best practice and impactful work across all classrooms in Scotland. There is still a gap between the progress that is being made by those living in Scotland's least and most deprived areas. Tackling the poverty-related attainment gap is an issue for every school and every local authority in Scotland and one of the highest priorities. We recognise, though, that education alone cannot solve this deep-rooted societal problem. Effective partnerships, multi-agency with health, social work, NHS, community learning and other third sector organisations are essential, and we are seeing more and more of that as a coherent package at school level. Education Scotland will continue to improve the reach and impact of our work. There is a team of named attainment advisers for each local authority currently. Those will be working more collegiately across teams in regional improvement collaboratives to share best practice, to share learning and to connect schools about the impact of working in this challenging area. Through all those activities, we will continue to prioritise and improve attainment, reflecting our new vision for education Scotland, working for Scotland's children with Scotland's educators. We welcome this opportunity to discuss this important area with you this morning. A couple of things. We have a lot to go through today, so I ask that voted questions and answers today be succinct. That was nothing to do with your statement, by the way. Before I invite questions from my colleagues, I would like to ask what today have you seen the best interventions in school to support children who experience poverty? What have you been doing to help to roll them out? I know that you mentioned some of that. We are gathering lots and lots of evidence of best practice across Scotland. There is no one element that will, in itself, in a unique way raise or attainment and reduce the poverty-related attainment gap, because it is about the best support at a local level. What works in one school with one group of children and young people may not work in another. Some of it is transferable and some of it is not. What we are looking at is international evidence, Scottish evidence, the impact and feedback that we are getting from our attainment advisers, who are able to recommend and to share what is working well across Scotland. That has to be tailored and made bespoke for the children and young people in each individual context. However, my colleagues who are involved in PEF could tell you a little bit more about that. As Gale said already, it is about those local responses and schools working with their partners to identify a really clear rationale for the different interventions that they put in place. We have many examples across Scotland of things that are happening. For example, in Labrart High School, the staff there have worked to use their PEF funding alongside their NIF support team to look at the national improvement framework. It is a team of people who have specific roles with the national improvement framework, as well as a team of people who are working within supporting PEF and the development of PEF. They have been looking at a multi-layered approach. That multi-layered approach has looked at interrogating the data that they already had, identifying what their gaps were and therefore identifying the needs, and then working together with their partners to identify the interventions that they feel will make the biggest difference. They have looked at training their support for learning assistance to be able to deliver high-quality support in English and maths lessons, small, targeted support alongside training older learners in peer support, alongside staff training of pedagogical approaches in learning and teaching and how they develop that. In addition to that, they have also appointed a welfare officer to improve attendance, so that multi-layered approach is looking at the needs of their local authority. The impact that they have had in relation to that are really strong outcomes in relation to wellbeing for their learners. Highly effective approaches to inclusion, equity and equality. In their recent inspection, almost all of their young people said that they were well supported and that they were able to achieve. That is a good example of PEF. A lot of my colleagues will be asking questions around about PEF later on, so I would rather not dwell on it at this stage. What I will do is move on to the rest of the committee. Richard, do you want it to come in? Can you just give us a flavour of what you believe to be the impact of poverty on education in Scotland in terms of special attainment? The impact of poverty on children across Scotland? Yes. What is the view of your organisation? Sorry, I am not quite clear what you are asking about education in Scotland and what we are doing, or are you asking about the impact on children? The impact on children, what is education in Scotland's view of the impact of poverty on children? That there is a significant difference in our results and our data across Scotland would show us that while there is significant improvement in areas and that children from our most deprived areas are making rapid improvement, accelerated progress, we would call it, and we have seen a significant improvement in core areas there. There still is an attainment and achievement gap between our most deprived children and those with least deprivation. We are saying that there is an impact in terms of the vocabulary gap, in terms of their core skills around electricity and numeracy, and their confidence in approaches to learning. We are beginning to see that impact. Over three quarters of head teachers reported recently that they are feeling confident that the work in this area of the Scottish attainment challenge is beginning to have impact. Over 90 per cent of head teachers are saying that they feel that they are going to see significant impact in the next five years. We do see it in terms of attitude to learning, willingness to learn, the ability, the vocabulary gap, but we are seeing significant impact beginning to move through the system as this becomes a core feature of school improvement plans across Scotland. My colleagues want to talk about specific examples that show how that is moving forward. In my work as the attainment adviser in West Dunbarton, I would like to speak to you about the approaches to learning through play. This initiative has been funded by the Scottish attainment challenge and focusing mainly on the vocabulary gap for children in that area. All early years, workers and primary 1 teachers received extensive training in word-away. It was focused on the key words and used a research-based approach to developing literacy. As a result of that, there was a 100 per cent increase in performance in the children living in SIMD 1 and 2. To involve the families, they introduced a text messaging service whereby they alerted the parents to the word of the week. As a result, there has been a statistically significant increase in the results of their assessments. My final question is about the inspections and duties in that regard. A lot of the evidence that we have had from other witnesses is that poverty is rising and having a greater impact over the past few years. We have had lots of teachers and other organisations giving us evidence about that. When you are out inspecting the schools, are there any trends that you have identified or have you come across those kinds of issues? Thank you very much for that. When we are out in inspection, we do see the impact of poverty. Gail has described how we see the impact of poverty in terms of attainment achievement. Across Scotland, we are making significant progress in closing that attainment gap. We are seeing an emerging positive impact of the work that is being done through the Scottish attainment challenge, but inevitably, when we are in inspection and we are looking at the attainment, we see the gap. We know that it is there and not good enough, but we are working very hard. We also see a lot of very, very hard-working teachers right across Scotland who are really making a difference for children and individual young people and supporting them to achieve and attain as highly. We are also seeing the impact at the other end, because we are seeing more of our young people from areas of deprivation going on to university, which is really, really positive. We are seeing more of our leavers from areas of deprivation going on to positive and sustained destinations, and we are seeing the impact at Scottish credit and qualification frameworks at levels 4, 5 and 6, where the attainment gap is narrowing. Yes, we do see it, but what we are more pleased with is that we are seeing the progress that is being made to address that. If I could just add in inspections what we are seeing is an increased use of performance data, so looking at children's performance data and the use of pupil tracking, where schools are becoming much more familiar with the strengths and weaknesses in a child's learning so that they can then target the next step in learning. We are seeing school leaders use that much more effectively to target intervention and resources, and that is becoming a recurrent theme across the past 18 months through our inspection reports. We are finding that in terms of improving attainment, using teaching and learning approaches, we are much more focused, much sharper in terms of also evaluating when to stop doing something, so looking at the impact on learners pretty early on, trying an intervention, seeing the impact of it, being aware of it, monitoring it, evaluating it, and, if it is the wrong thing, adjusting it to meet the needs of children and young people. There has been a real significant focus in the classroom activity that we are observing and the senior leadership discussions and their understanding of individual pupil progress. I will ask one very brief question on the inspections. You said that you find all those great teachers doing great work, which I have absolutely no doubt. Did the inspections show that? Did the inspection reports show that? One of the pieces of evidence that we found in another piece of work was that inspections seem to concentrate on the negative as opposed to the positive—what you still need to achieve as opposed to what you have achieved. Given what you have just said and which we all are aware of, are the inspections starting to show that? On inspection, we see a lot of strengths in inspection. I have mentioned the very hard work and the impact that it is having on learners. What we would say is that people sometimes focus unduly on the negatives. We naturally identify areas for strength. There are lots of areas for strength in terms of what we are seeing across Scotland in terms of leadership, in terms of the experience that young people have, the wider achievement, which has been a real progress in Scotland, the opportunities in the senior phase to do Duke of Edinburgh's awards, to do modern foundation apprenticeships, so we are seeing a much wider—we recognise all them. Naturally, everybody can improve and we identify areas for improvement. I really meant the report as opposed to the inspections that the report highlighted, the good work that is going on as opposed to sometimes concentrating on the negative. I am happy to move on. We have a lot to go through today. If I could just come back briefly on that, I am aware of the time. If we think of the sample of 120 national improvement framework schools that we sampled last academic year between August and June, 92 per cent of the schools were evaluated satisfactory or better. That is for raising attainment and achievement. We are celebrating that. In each inspection report, we clearly have areas of strength and areas for development, because inspections are about an improvement process. We want to emphasise the paperwork and the discussions. Fundamentally, the evaluation that had teachers send back to us following an inspection talks about the quality of the professional learning that has taken place during that process, as being one of the best in their career. It is highly evaluated. It is part of that improvement dialogue that those discussions would take place. We certainly want to celebrate, as Liz said, the quality of the hard work that goes on every day in classrooms across Scotland. One of the things that has become clear during our inquiry is the importance of teachers' understanding of how poverty impacts on pupils and their attainment and achievement. Can you set out for the committee what materials Education Scotland provides in that way? What programmes are professional learning programmes for teachers on that topic? I will kick off with an open statement. My colleagues will be able to go into some of the detail and specifics. As across Scotland, many of our colleagues have as well, we have very much been talking to all schools, school leaders and teachers, particularly around adverse childhood experiences and the impact of those on children's learning. There has been significant professional learning and CPD across the country, at local authority level, at regional improvement collaborative level and from Education Scotland, to bring together the professionals, social workers, health workers, allied health professionals, to bring together their professional knowledge to upskill education teams around the impact of trauma, the impact of chaotic lifestyles and some of the issues that children and young people bring to school with them, a significant and important factor in supporting their attainment and achievement. We have done significant work on that with a range of conferences recently, which are hugely oversubscribed jointly with the NHS, Education Scotland and NHS, looking and working with teachers and practitioners at how you work collectively to address those issues and make teachers more aware of some of the challenges that young people face on a daily basis. My colleagues can say a little bit more. Thank you very much. One of the things that I want to focus on is that Education Scotland as an organisation is moving away from creating masses and masses of stuff that we are putting on a website that is not meaningful. As an organisation, we are moving towards working alongside with teachers, with other practitioners in the classroom, so it is very much working on the ground, if you like. Gail is a very good example of that. We roll up our sleeves and work with teachers to improve outcomes for children and young people. Having said all that, we have a wide variety of information on our national improvement hub. Some of that is gathered as a result of inspection processes and is good practice. We also share a lot of information from some of the very good work that is happening in our local authorities. An example of that would be that Edinburgh City Council did a one-in-five project that was really focused on the one-in-five children in Edinburgh City Council who were living in poverty, and they produced a very helpful document, Tips for Teachers, to support teachers directly looking at and working with children who were living in poverty. We are able to share that nationally, which means that every teacher in the country has access to that material. In addition to that, you will be aware that the Scottish College for Educational Leadership has also become part of Education Scotland, and all of its programmes, the framework for educational leadership, the teacher leadership programme, all have elements that address teachers' understanding of poverty and the impact that poverty has. We have already mentioned a lot of national support, but we also provide a lot of that support locally through the role of the attainment adviser, and the attainment adviser is a very unique role, because those colleagues who work in that role work both in the classroom with learners and with teachers, they work in the schools with head teachers and senior leaders, but they also work strategically with local authorities to develop that shared understanding of the impact of poverty, but also in that hands-on way, as Elizabeth has already said. The attainment adviser role is a crucial part of supporting closing the poverty-related attainment gap, and that role will change and be different depending on where different people work, but there is that real focus on developing understanding and career-long professional learning as part of that, and I will pass over to Gail to give you a specific. Without doubt, working in schools with head teachers, teachers and children is by far the highlight of the role of an attainment adviser, and in my work in Western Bartonshire, I work alongside the improvement team. I have a very clear role in supporting the improvement team, and I also work in individual schools and across all the schools in Western Bartonshire. It gives me the opportunity to see how well the interventions are working, to hear what people are saying on the ground and to hear what teachers are saying, and to share with those people the national messages. It also gives me the opportunity to identify the good practice that is going on in Western Bartonshire and that opportunity to share with the other attainment advisers at team meetings. We have also presented at national events to celebrate the success in Western Bartonshire, so working on the ground with teachers and children is by far one of the highlights of the job. Liz, George, can I just remind you that we do not need every member of the panel answering every question because we have a layered approach across Scotland? No, and I do appreciate that, because we have got an awful lot to get through. Just one question just now, convener. Can I ask the panel's opinion as to whom a head teacher is accountable when he or she makes the decision about how to spend peff money? Money for a peff was designed to go to schools and to work entirely at local level, and so school head teachers and classroom teachers as well are best placed to make the decisions about the choices that they have. Accountable is what I was asking. They are accountable to the children and families that they have within their school. They would be accountable in terms of best value practice to a local authority, but peff funding—we have very clear guidance that was produced that went out to schools to support their work and to make sure that they are making local decision making. Sorry to interrupt you, but can I just be absolutely clear? The guidelines come from yourself or from local authorities? There is a combination of guidelines because some local authorities have been asked by head teachers to work collectively to help them with some of the challenges around procuring, working and gathering the resources that they wish to buy. If there are a number of schools that they want to take part in that, others local authorities have provided best practice models such as Western Bartonshire and others. There is also guidance that has come out from Scottish Government on funding as well as the peff case studies and the approaches that we have put out, because what we are wanting to do is to put some information in the system for schools to learn from best practice and to make those decisions at a local level about the children and families that they have in front of them. That is entirely the focus of peff funding—money for schools for local decision making. That means that there are quite a lot of lines of accountability. I would just like to ask one of the questions on—we have had to pass for a couple of years now of the attainment challenge. Can I ask sounds a simple question? Probably not, because of that. However, what have been the challenges that you have faced over those two years? How did Education Scotland address them? What have you learned over that period that you can take forward? Thank you. As you said, we have faced a number of challenges. As you know, we are in a very good position now in that we are recruiting a number of staff. However, we have had to move staff around, and that has been a challenge to us. We have been very fortunate in that we have just given or issued contracts to 10 new attainment advisers who are permanent appointments, which will really help to support us going forward. We are recruiting in the next few weeks. Gail and I are going to be interviewing a number of people who have come with very high application forms, so we will be interviewing those candidates. We hope to be able to point more. However, we have had a challenge with ensuring that we come together. However, as an organisation, we took a collective responsibility to come together to ensure that we met the Scottish attainment challenge and ensured that every authority had a name person that they could refer to. In terms of the progress on the attainment challenge over the last couple of years, what we have seen was a scaling up in terms of people's engagement with the programme. There was a lot of information that had to be given at the beginning, a lot of confidence building around the approaches and how to develop that, and the expectations of schools. Over the piece, we have now seen that confidence and some of those challenges around what are the expectations, how will that be measured, what are people looking for, where are the gaps in our school, the knowledge, the teacher's subject knowledge, and the understanding of the expectations and the focus around it. That was one of the areas that we developed at the beginning and is now gaining momentum and moving forward quite confidently. Louise, you might want to talk about some of the work that has kind of grown and emerged over the last two years. Yes, absolutely. There are always on-going challenges in education, but, as Elizabeth already said, it is about how we have worked together as an organisation. One of the big things that has been a real success of that is the increased focus and collaboration. Schools and local authorities have been supported to collaborate within their local authority to support each other, to provide that challenge as well as that support, but also that collaboration between the attainment advisers and the local authorities, but also that partnership with the Scottish Government. The attainment adviser has been a pivotal role in being able to support that collaboration and to develop and extend collaboration with partners. That obviously takes time to develop and embed, but we are really now beginning to see real impact in those areas. As we move forward into new regional models, then that collaboration is as important and, if not more. I am sold on attainment advisers in the areas across Scotland, but one of the things that I want to say is that where is the join-up between the actual front-line education and the attainment adviser? How is their role, how is education's role, Scotland's role and the attainment adviser's role? We had Nancy Clooney in from Domarnock primary. She was dynamic, go get them, created a community herself. Not everybody is going to have that same personality, not everybody is going to be that same person, but how do you, as an organisation and the attainment advisers, who I think would be key in that, how do they become that link that gets that expertise from likes of Nancy and others that work in the industry and make sure that we get it not uniformed but we can get that kind of delivery throughout Scotland? As I said, we are in this very positive situation at the moment where we are recruiting. One of the things that will be key when we get our 10 new people in and we are hoping to recruit probably another 10 people from this round of recruitment, when we get these people together then the induction will be absolutely critical. We have plans for an induction process so that we actually build on some of the excellent practice that we are seeing with Gail and Weston-Bartonshire. We challenge our new people to come together, but we are also looking at it in terms of working as teams across regional improvement collaboratives so that we take a blend of skills right across the collaborative and people who maybe primarily work with one local authority will be using their skills and experience and sharing that right across the improvement collaborative. I think that we are in a really exciting and dynamic situation to do that. What we also need to do is build on the experience that we have with our current attainment advisers and look at some of the ways that they have worked. For example, you mentioned some of the challenges and one of the challenges that we have had was to do with consistency of teacher professional judgment. We have done a huge amount of work and attainment advisers have done a huge amount of work in terms of getting groups of teachers together to look at moderation, to bring samples of children's work and to share that right across so that we get a real solid understanding of the standards. Captured in that practice, how do we share that and how do we support people to do that? Obviously, we cannot be taking one thing and transferring it somewhere else, but what we do is we use our national improvement hub as our online resource to be able to capture some of that practice so that people can learn with it from each other. The attainment advisers are critical people in gathering that expertise and experience. We then share it as Education Scotland nationally and the attainment advisers work together. We come together regularly to be able to build on those examples and to be able to signpost headteachers and schools to that good practice and to be able to make connections so that somebody can go in and visit Nancy and learn from Nancy and have those conversations with her. We have a role there in connecting people to be able to share that experience. First of all, I hear what you say about the good things that are happening, but I am very struck between the gap between what you are saying about how well things are and all of what is going on here as a committee listening to teachers, parents and in our own communities. I think that there is with respect a gap there and I do not know whether maybe you are constrained in what you can say about Government policies since you are implementing it and inspecting it, but I would say that the experience that we have had of speaking to professionals who are working in education and families that it does not feel that way. You are talking about having 10 more attainment advisers at a time when there are fewer teachers, fewer support teachers and support staff in schools. I wonder if you are aware of that gap between what you think is going on and what is being said within the education community? I am interested. I am out in schools on a regular basis and I continue to be out in schools on a regular basis. I do not recognise the conversations that you are reflecting there. The evidence that we have in conversations and discussions with my hard-working colleagues is that they are absolutely focused on children and young people, they are dedicated to that and they are working very hard to make a difference. Relaxed education, I am suggesting that they are not given the support that they require to do their job. That is certainly not what I would recognise. I think that there is a need for further support and professional learning. That is why we are developing a new and enhanced education Scotland in terms of an offer for children and young people and their teachers. We want to continue to do that, but that is why the focus that Liz mentioned earlier about working directly in schools with people like attainment advisers but others, we are widening our curriculum team, we are widening the support for teachers around literacy and numeracy to enable that front-line support to be there. With respect, people are not saying that I wish we had more support from education Scotland. They are saying that I wish we had more staff and support staff in the schools. I will raise a question about PEF. Again, with respect to Louise Turnbull, I was interested in the example that she gave of PEF funding, but I would have regarded those things as mainstream in my job 20 years ago, that there would be somebody who was a home links teacher, somebody who supported individual young people who trained staff to be aware of special needs. Do you share my concern that, potentially, what we are seeing is PEF funding substituting for what would in the past have been mainstream provision? In terms of PEF funding, what we are seeing is that schools are making local decisions about where they feel they want additional capacity and additional reach. That varies from one school to another. In your inspections, you would explore the reality. If there were a reality that people were using it to substitute for a loss of funding, that would come out in your report. If somebody decides that they are going through PEF funding to fund something that, in the past, was funded through mainstream resources, you would highlight that and say that it was unacceptable? We, in our inspection framework, are looking at the impact on attainment and achievement for children and young people, and that is what we would be reporting on. That is not what I asked you. You asked me if, in an inspection, we would report on whether they were using it. What we would be reporting on is its impact on children and young people's attainment. It would not be for education in Scotland inspection teams, because they would not know the previous capacity of the school. They would know whether there is an effective model being delivered now and a strong model of leadership and capacity to improve, which is what we would look at. We would establish that it is good practice to have support staff supporting teachers with young people and additional support needs. There is evidence for that. We know that. That was not in the past in a school funded by the local authority. That stops. The PEF money is used to put somebody in to do that job. Is that an acceptable use of pay for money? As I said, it is about the local context for the headteacher. Therefore, we would be looking at what is the suite that is offered for those children and young people. How does that fit from the offer that they are getting in terms of their local authority funding, local decision-making and democracy processes around funding per capita and additional support funds? That would be the local process that takes place. Inspection is focused on the role of the school, the capacity of the leadership to improve and raise and improve attainment achievement for all Scotland's learners. That is what the inspection process would look at. It is clear that education Scotland is incapable or unable—not incapable is the wrong word, my apologies—is unable, because of its role, to comment on the impact of Government policy, funding local authorities and what is happening within our local schools. You follow Government policy and then you inspect it. We are about improvement. Education Scotland is an improvement service. It is about supporting Scotland's teachers and learners to improve outcomes for children across Scotland. Through our inspection, we are looking at—and inspection is part of the scrutiny process for improving outcomes for children. It is not our job to focus on policy delivery through inspection. We are very much clear that that is an independent process about improvements in the school, improvements for learners and an improvement journey, as well as the other suite of opportunities that we use around spirit. My last point is that it would not be possible for you to say that you believed that the best way of securing improvement in our schools is to resource local authorities in a different way. You would not accept it. It would not be for me to comment on that. That would certainly not be for me to comment on. Okay. Gillian Rennie, then Tavish. Thank you very much, convener. I would like to talk about teaching approaches and what you have found out. We have a situation where PEPF funding has been given to schools. Of course, as you rightly say, it is up to the head teacher and the school team to decide how to use that funding. However, speaking to some people, particularly in the third sector, who have been involved with schools, there is a concern that PEPF funding might not be used in the most appropriate or best way, might not involve partners, or that a head teacher might have very traditional views about teaching and learning. How do we approach that?  However, when PEPF funding has been used in a way that is not tackling attainment, how do we deal with that? Recently, there have been around seven PEPF events around Scotland, bringing together head teachers, deputy heads, third sector and other partners, where there have been a series of workshops run of best practice from schools that are sector led. Many of them feature third sector partnerships or joint multi-agency work with social work or other agencies. That is certainly the model. On the line on Twitter, there has been a national every day for the last 100 days, a tweet about a school that they are doing with PEPF money, many of whom are beyond some of those traditional methods that you might be thinking of. It is about looking wider, particularly to support some of the community work that is going on. However, my colleagues are able to give some examples of what is happening with that and how we are addressing it. I am going back to your point about improving learning and teaching. In my experience in West and Batonshire, the head teachers are totally focused on using their PEPF money to raise attainment and to narrow the poverty-related attainment gap, but they are using it creatively and in an innovative and exciting way, not only for the teachers in terms of their professionalism, but for the children and involving parents. One of the examples from West and Batonshire was celebrated at the national event from Levenvale primary, where they used part of their PEPF funding to provide a residential experience for families, focused completely on developing literacy skills, and parents and children were involved all weekend in learning together, both indoors and outdoors. The parents were completely involved in all aspects of that work and, through effective partnership working with the family support worker, they reported that the relationships with the parents had significantly improved. The family support worker said that she made better connections with the families than she would have achieved in a year. Above all, the parents gained confidence in supporting the children at home with literacy. Copies of the books were provided for every family, and, as a result, this year, we are seeing a significant increase in using the school library by parents and children. Obviously, you are working very hard in West and Batonshire. Across the whole of Scotland, of course, we might not all be at that stage. What is the role of Education Scotland in ensuring that there is best practice and giving support to schools that are maybe just not really—we heard a few people saying in some of our focus groups that there was a bit of nervousness about how to spend the money and who to go to, and they did not want to spend it in one area if it was not going to work and almost feeling accountable to the community about how they used that funding. What support do you give them? Do you directly suggest partnership working? At the PEF events, we launched an education Scotland guide to working with the third sector that we had written in partnership with third sector colleagues, which was about how to work—a guide for headteachers and senior leaders about how to work and how to engage and who to contact to support their PEF and the range of activities that would be available. We launched that and shared that at the PEF events, but we might see more. I was going to mention the work in terms of the Education Endowment Foundation, and I think that you heard from a representative at one of the previous committee meetings. Scottish Government and ourselves invested in the Education Endowment Foundation, and we now have a Scottish version of the teaching and learning toolkit on our national improvement hub. That gives a very simple way of—it is very easy to access for teachers that they can look at various interventions that are international, which are Scottish and increasingly Scottish, so that they can actually look and see the impact of a particular intervention and look at the cost of that intervention. With that, they can very easily see if I use my PEF money for this, what sort of is the likely impact for the amount of money that it is going to cost me. We have promoted it very heavily at the PEF events that various people have mentioned. We had somebody from the Education Endowment Foundation actually speak at all the PEF events to actually raise awareness of that. We also have the team advisers when they are out working with schools, they are encouraging staff, they are actually using it with staff in schools, so that they can actually make informed decisions about their spending. We need to be clear that spending needs to be based on a clear rationale for why they are going to spend it and what their self-evaluation is telling them about the needs of their local context and the needs of the learners in their establishment. I just want to ask about some of the traditional practices around school education that you might find that have a negative effect on families. For example, families that have a lifestyle that single-parent families might be struggling to keep down a couple of jobs, whatever for whom they are having to go to the school at a certain point, would have a serious impact on their day and cause considerable stress. Things like homework, interventions with the school to get the parent in at a point that is very inconvenient for them, given that they are all those things that can cost the school uniform, all those things. Those very traditional schools can be quite set in their ways about how they do things. What is the role for Education Scotland in getting them to identify and look at different ways of working that might actually support families more that are maybe struggling with the effects of poverty rather than actually adding to their worries? We have done a lot of work as Education Scotland, both locally and nationally, on developing not just parental involvement but parental engagement in learning, because we recognise that that has a significant impact on children's learning. One way of being able to support families with that is the development of family learning. We have done a lot of work in relation to working with third sector partners to develop family learning approaches. Education Scotland has pulled all that together with some case studies in a review in December 2016. That pulls together examples of family learning approaches that have been happening across Scotland to be able to support that discussion. As Lizzy said already, the EEF and the materials that are there, it is not about lifting an approach, it is about providing that evidence-informed decision making that schools can then make to decide on the best approaches to support them. As a result of the work that we have been doing around family learning, we recognise that further support was needed. We have recently launched a family learning framework that supports schools to work with their partners and with their parents and their communities to develop a range of approaches, what those approaches might look like, how those approaches might be developed and created in partnership and how they might go about evaluating that programme and that work. We absolutely recognise that we need to support that, and we have a role in doing that through some of that work that I have just described. Those traditional approaches that might have the negative effect that I have just mentioned, are the sort of things that are picked up by attainment advisers and by inspectors when there will be areas for development? While we are on inspection, one of the things that we look at is how schools identify barriers to learning, how they overcome those barriers to learning and how they work with their families to do that. That is something that we would look at as part of our inspection processes. I want to follow that on. I suppose that there is more of a traditional approach as to some of our more thoughtful schools about non-formal education, the points that you made in your introduction, Gail, about youth work, about the pupil in the round, not just the formal education. The thing that Headteach has said to me repeatedly while we have been doing this exercise is the difficulty of accrediting non-formal education in the system so that that helps children and young people who would especially benefit from that, i.e. Duke of Edinburgh and some of the other things. What work has Education Scotland doing with SQA to the Scottish Qualifications Framework to bring some of those things into that system so that schools can then see it and use it in a way that should be helpful to the learner and to the young person as much to all of us? That is something that we have fundamentally committed to working in partnership with the agency, as you mentioned, because we know the significant role in aspiration and confidence that can give to our most vulnerable learners, but Liz can give you some detail around some work on that. It is an area that I am particularly passionate about because I think that we have to recognise the wider achievement in a more formal way. I think that over a number of years we have worked with the awards network to ensure that that information is being captured. When we introduced insight with the new qualifications, one of the things that was really positive about that was that, as well as capturing all the very good results in terms of SQA attainment, we also captured all the awards that our Scottish credit and qualification frameworks levelled so that, if a provider and providers were supported to go through the levelling process, so if a provider was supported to go through the levelling process, it became part of the Scottish qualifications and credit framework, and therefore it was reported in insight. That is exactly the point that Ted Teaj has been making to me. That is still quite a limited choice for schools to take up. If I just go on, what happened was that there was a debate in December 2017 where young people—it was part of the year of young people—really wanted all their qualifications recognised, all their achievements, all their awards. We have been working with the awards network Skills Development Scotland to see how we can capture that so that we can capture everything. What we have is that there will be an online learner account of which each young person will have, which will capture everything. The work is under way. It is at an early stage. That is very nice. You will keep me right, but the review of youth awards in 2015 said that Education Scotland and your point about the awards network should extend the use of awards and make sure that they are registered or recognised. Is that what is going to happen? We have done a lot of work in that area, working with the awards network to ensure that as much as possible is recognised. We have done a lot of work promoting the Duke of Edinburgh, for example, which is not at the SQF level, but will be recognised under the new online account. Schools are still judged, as you rightly said, on insight. What I am being told is that Ted Teaj will not put money into that, peff or any attainment money or anything if it is not part of insight. I can quite understand it from a headteacher's point of view. I, as a headteacher, get no benefit for putting it on, despite all the good things that it does for young people. I do not say that this is easy, but are you trying to close as it were that gap? Through the network of support that Liz was talking about, we are working with a lot of the partners who are seeking to have that recognition so that they can get that and it can be registered and then added to the accreditation portfolio and be used and celebrated. It should be anyway. It is sad that it is not, but the reality is very much as you described. We are doing that. We are having on-going dialogue with SQA and other partners, and we would continue to advocate wider learning and the parity of esteem around that wider learning piece that is really important. That is really helpful. Thank you. I just wanted to also ask, convener, if I may, in your submission to the committee, you gave us the measures of the attainment gap for which, if I count them up, there are 11. Am I getting this right? There are 11 different measures of the attainment gap. None of those relate to this issue. You will give me a good reason as to why that is the case, but is there a good reason? Should we not be measuring this as well? Well, health and wellbeing, of course, is part of our criterion, and much of the work that you are describing would certainly be part of that. We are capturing—one of the issues is because of some of the issues that you have raised is about how we capture that information nationally. This is about looking at national measures and national outcomes, and so it was looking at the suites of what we have, but certainly not to undermine the importance in central. One of the central measures is around health and wellbeing of young people, of which wider achievement plays a significant role. The 11 measures—how are they practically used? Do they go down to headteachers, or are they just national stats that people like us obsess about? What difference does this make to a school, is really what I am asking? The basket of measures that we recognise is that we cannot use one measure to be able to close an attainment gap because, as we have just outlined in a lot of things that we have talked about and the conversation that you have just had, we are looking at literacy, we are looking at numeracy, we are looking at health and wellbeing, we are looking at learners as they move into formal education and the learning that takes place there. There is a wide range of things that need to be taken into account of to look at that closing of the poverty-related attainment gap. The 11 measures that you are referring to are the Scottish Government measures that are outlined in the national improvement framework. What we are doing is working with schools to identify the appropriate measures for them within their schools and with their learners to identify the impact that the work is having. We have been specifically looking at, through school improvement planning and through PEF planning, what is the rationale first of all, as Liz mentioned earlier, of particular interventions, and then what is the desired outcome of that intervention? What is it as a school that you want to be different and by how much and how will you record that and how will you measure that? We have been looking at school measures, school sets of measures, and one of our team advisers in Dundee has been working particularly with a group of headteachers around that to identify a range of school measures. Participation, evaluation, looking at attendance and inclusion and exclusion statistics as part of that, but also looking at fundamentally, if you put that intervention in place, what is the outcome and what will you do to measure that? We have been doing a lot of work with schools to support that work. That will feed into those national measures because that will feed into teachers' judgment of correctness and excellence levels, for example, which is one of those 11 measures, so it will increase the robustness of that and it will increase the confidence in those judgments. We have to look at it from both ends of that spectrum. What will support learners in the classroom and what will gather the national information? Thank you. On money, on attainment monies that are available, 23 local authorities do not get any attainment monies at all, so I guess what you are arguing is that all those schools in those areas just have to get on with an attainment adviser. I take a point that you have appointed an attainment adviser in each of those 23 areas, but they have no extra money to do any of this, do they? Well, pupil equity funding goes to 95 per cent of all schools across Scotland. No, I am talking about the attainment fund there. The pupil equity fund is part of the overall attainment Scotland fund, so the Scottish Government has £750 million in attainment Scotland fund over the length of Parliament. Some of that money is through challenge authorities and schools programme, and some of that money is through pupil equity funding. It all comes from that one pot, but I think that it would probably be in a position to say that Scottish Government colleagues would be better placed to discuss the money side. We focus on the education and the improvement side of pupil equity funding. You cannot have one and not the other, can you? Our focus in education Scotland is looking at how we support schools to make the biggest difference, to make the educational improvements and to choose the right interventions to make the difference for them. One of the parts of the programme, there are three layers, if you like. There are the very targeted local authorities that have the Scottish attainment challenge money. There are then the 74 schools that are not in those authorities and the universal offer, which is about the attainment advisers and training events, access to networking and collaboration and some of the support work that will develop over time and is already in some areas developing through the risk. The universal offer, while yes, entirely not funded currently, has the funding for the staffing for the attainment advisers, some of the work that has gone on for the conferences and events that have happened locally, as well as the collaboration work that has now been underpinned regionally. So, there are three tiers of the system, those two and then the universal offer. We have that national role to be able to gather, as I have said already, some of that practice and to be able to share that widely so that everybody across Scotland has access to examples and materials and support to be able to take forward that work. OK, thank you Oliver and then Ross. Thank you, convener. I just want to return to that point where you are saying that 95 per cent of schools get peff funding. In my constituency, which is much more rural, it is not 95 per cent and there is a number of small schools who have very little discretion. Given that rurality and poverty often go hand in hand, it limits people's opportunities. How are those schools meant to deliver some of that best practice? Rural deprivation is a country like Scotland, a significant element. There is lots of work that has gone on both nationally and locally, looking at what are the indicators of rural poverty, what are the unique factors around it and how do we, as an education community, come together to support practitioners in those situations and to make sure that they get the same level of support? If they get no peff funding, headteachers in those schools have far less discretion to deliver the local solutions that you are talking about. Some of the work that the Association of Directors of Education Scotland and Education Scotland and others have done is to look at what are those indicators, how could we classify the indicators of rural poverty and how could we use them to look at the application of peff funding and advise around a greater share across rural communities? The model is not right at the moment. It is based on free school meals, which is the only indicator available as a national statistics that was able to be used. However, there is on-going work, and there has been a committee discussion—not this committee—a committee discussion, and I will look at what we can do around that to reflect the whole of Scotland within peff community. There has been significant work, so this year the peff funding, more money has gone to more schools across Scotland, but there could be further work done to look at that and to reflect rural poverty and rural deprivation, because significant parts of Scotland are in that community. Moving on, overall, you have enough data around peff funding and entertainment challenge to really understand what works that we have heard today. Lots of good examples of good practice, but is there research and detailed analysis to back that up, or do you just take anecdotal examples of good practice and put them into case studies, or would you drill into it and see what delivers the most change? It is, of course, an evaluative process. It would not be based on anecdotes. Education Scotland's approach is evidence-based, evidence and research-based, to drive improvement. That is the nature of educational improvement cycle. We are looking at that. It is pretty early days, particularly around the peff funding, if you are talking about that, because, if we look at the interventions that people are putting in place, it is about when we will see the impact of that intervention and children and young people in the communities. We are getting emerging evidence of that, and we are gathering more of it. There is an evaluation strategy as part of that, but it is, in particular at the moment, not consistent and certainly something that we are looking at gathering the evidence of. We are certainly focused on. It is picked up through our inspections and we will continue to do that.  We will wait to see that delivered in terms of impact, but Louise might want to say more. You mentioned their inspections. Given the scale of reforms and the number of different things that are going on, do you think that you are doing enough inspections to get a clear and accurate picture of what is going on in different schools across different parts of the country? We are using a sampling methodology, as I know that the committee is aware. We are moving to increase our number of inspections to 250 next year, but we have done that. That is our main focus activities. It is part of a range of scrutiny activities. One of the strengths of Scottish education is that scrutiny is sector led. It is about self-evaluation. It is about headteachers and local authorities and others taking part collaboratively in that process. We are, as Liz mentioned, recruiting further inspectors to add to that, but that is to add to our suite of to allow us to do thematic reviews, where we will sample, say, we looked at mathematics across Scotland. We will do a sample across different layers in the system, schools, teachers, headteachers and parents. We will look at what is happening there. We will bring that back. We will use evaluative methodology to reflect that back into the system and drive improvement further forward. We already do significant numbers of inspections every year, and we are increasing that as we move forward. Also, because we have attainment advisers in each of the authorities, they produce and contribute to a quarterly report of the activities that are happening within that authority. Increasingly, that is more and more evaluative, and we are seeing signs of impact within that. We get a very comprehensive view quarterly of what is happening in each local authority through our work with attainment advisers, who are the people who are very often working with practitioners on the ground in classrooms, so we get it from them. Throughout our inquiry, we have heard about a huge variation in disparity between different local authorities and different schools within local authorities, and some of the schools that we would expect, based on their demographic, to perform in the same way and they do not. What are you doing to pick up on that, and how do those evaluations that you talk about identify where things are not working well? It depends on how we identify that. For example, if we were to identify that through an inspection activity, we would work to support the school. That might be brokering support with another school, it might be revisiting that school, it might be putting in some of our staff to support, it might be asking attainment advisers to support, so there is a whole range of information. We know that schools can be different, we know that within schools they can be different. We also have to remember that improvement is statutory responsibility of the local authority, who have to secure improvement in all of their schools, and we might work with the local authority to enable them to do that. Is that a patchy provision or a postcode lottery in effect of how schools are performing? That would not be how we would relate to it or recognise it. It would be about looking at the improvement journey of a school and the community that it works with. Some are facing significant challenges in terms of the community and some of the deprivation and the poverty issues. Others are facing different challenges around the quality of education that they provide, so it is about the cycle of improvement schools going through and across cycles of improvement, and we would want to be there working in partnership with our colleagues, working in partnership with the people in that institution to make sure that they are supported on whatever their next step of an improvement journey would be. Schools, by their nature, reflect the communities that they serve. They all aspire to be the very best that they can be, and our job is to support them and their colleagues to ensure that we have that highest outcome as possible for excellence and equity for all children. Education Scotland sets out a number of entitlements for all young people under Crick and Fraxons that could stuff like personal support to enable them to gain as much as possible from the opportunities that CFE can provide. Forgive me if I misunderstood your answer to John Lamont's earlier question, but if, in the course of an inspection, you are unable to conclude that the entitlement to personal support is not being met due to understaffing or underresourcing, how are you effectively inspecting against those entitlements? That is not what I was representing. I was representing that the focus is on attainment and achievement and the leadership of that on inspection, the quality of teaching and learning and the focus on our quality improvement indicators. Of course, if we felt that learners' needs were not being meant, we would comment on it. We have a duty to comment on it. It is one of our core quality improvement indicators, so we would very clearly be indicating that and do comment on that in inspections. You are able to clearly indicate that the needs are not being met because of understaffing, if that is indeed the case. If that was to be the case, it would be about what is the school doing to rectify that, if anything, what is the mediation that has gone in place and what is the impact of that on learners. That is our focus, the impact on the outcomes for children and young people. To be completely clear, there are school inspection reports in existence at the moment that make reference to understaffing or underresourcing as an issue. What we talk about is the impact on learners. That could be for a number of factors. If you cannot identify what the factor is, how can we make the improvements? We will, in talking about areas for development and areas for improvement. There are school inspection reports out there that identify understaffing and underresourcing. I would need to go back and talk to colleagues about that. What there will be is comments about improvement in terms of the learner journey, in terms of consistency in learning, in terms of the quality of the curriculum, whatever the particular impact of that happens to be. Under the core quality indicators, which are very clear in terms of the criterion, because it is a shared and open transparent framework, we would be very clear about identifying what are the issues, the risks and the successes of the work in that area. I think that, as Gail said, we would need to go back and talk to colleagues. What we also have is a summary of evidence inspection findings. So, while it may not make it to the actual letter of the report, then there is a whole summary of inspection findings, which sits behind the report, but that is open as well because we published that summary of inspection findings for anyone to look at. It is possible that it is not in the report, but there is a comment in the summary of inspection findings. It feels that you are doing this with one hand tied behind your back, but to move to a separate element of it, we, during the course of a previous inquiry, took a substantial amount of evidence on the link between poverty and additional support needs. The inspection regime has come under some criticism in the past for a lack of focus on additional support needs provision within mainstream schools. What work have you done to address that to ensure that inspections are taking account of that and identifying whether or not additional support needs are being met effectively? On every single inspection, that is an area that we have looked at. It is a really key area. My personal background is in additional support needs, so it is an area that I am particularly passionate about. On every single inspection, we look at one of the quality indicators, which is about ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion.  That is right across, and that would pick up additional support needs. We look at additional support needs in terms of individual children. We might take an individual child in a secondary school and follow that child throughout the school day to see how their needs are met in different curricular areas. We would also work with the support staff and the guidance staff to see what things adjustments are being put into place in classrooms to enable that child to access the whole curriculum. We would look at what support the school is doing. We would look at, for example, in a secondary school, are there meeting alternative assessment arrangements for the SQA examinations so that all those are put into place? Every single inspection would look at additional support needs. I understand that that in theory should be the case, but do you recognise the criticism, such as that from, perhaps, Kindred, as an example of an organisation who has made it, that that is not consistently happening, that inspections are not consistently picking up the quality of additional support needs provision? That is not something that I would recognise when my colleagues are out on inspection. At every inspection, we would look at additional support needs of the children in that school. I am very interested in that question. I want to follow-up from the questions from my colleague Ross Greer on the issue about what you are able to say in the context for the lack of support for young people. If you go in and identify that a young person has not been supported adequately and, indeed, enabled, and others have said that some young people have got half days, theoretically full-time, but they have got half a day a week or a day a week. If the headteacher says to you, I understand that we should be giving this child more support, but I am unable to because I have not got the staffing or resources to do it. I understand that you want to say that you need to give that young person support, but does the inspection report reflect that when the headteacher tells you, I would love to do that, but I cannot do it because I have not got the appropriate resource? I think that that is a really interesting observation. We have, as you mentioned, part-time timetables. If we were to find a school where children are on part-time timetables, we would have a discussion with the school. We might very well have a discussion with the local authority who is responsible for that child. We might also be able to point the school to alternative arrangements. We have mentioned work with third sector, and we have seen some very good work across Scotland where young people with additional support needs are being supported to achieve and attain. I understand that this is not about specific individuals, but if you are seeing a pattern within schools where those needs are not being met, yes, there are individual things that you might suggest to school to do for those individual young people, I suspect that the staff already thought of those things. If the school tells you, or the schools tell you, or there is a pattern of schools indicating to you that they are unable to do what they would like to do to improve the learner's journal for the individual child because they do not have the resources, would that be reflected in an inspection report, or would it be something that you would feed back to the Scottish Government and the Cabinet Secretary and your private advice to him? That would probably be a combination of all those, because it would be reported and discussed with the QIO who attends the feedback meetings at the end of the inspection process. The quality improvement officer and the local authority would normally attend those feedback sessions where any issues like that would be raised, and certainly we have an area lead officer for local authorities as well. If there was a pattern, as you were saying, that was beginning to emerge through inspections, that would immediately be highlighted to the area lead officer to bring to the attention of the local authority and for there to be dialogue and discussion about it. It would be on a range of layers, a range of layers that might be reported through the school inspection report. If the local authority says that it is because we are not getting off money, what then happens? We would be gathering evidence, and certainly that would be the information that we would be feeding back, A, on the chief inspector's annual inspection report, that those trends are emerging. We would also be feeding that back to Scottish Government colleagues around policy and discussions about improving the system moving forward. Okay, thank you. Just before I bring in George for the last point, two things from that whole session. One is that earlier on, Gail Cotland was talking about the best practice in Westin Barton. What would be the role of the attainment adviser if some of those schools weren't doing using the peff money in the way that you had described to Gillian Martin? Would you feed that back? Where is your role in that? Within Westin Barton, there is a very clear focus on improving. But not necessarily you individually, but an attainment adviser in their local authority sees practice that is not of best practice. What happens then? It does not have to be your answer. As we have outlined already, it would be for local decision making. The role of the attainment adviser first and foremost would be to understand the school's self-evaluation and the rationale that it developed for particular interventions, to look at, as we have talked about already, the outcomes and the measures that are already in place, and to provide that support and challenge to be able to prompt headteachers and teachers to think critically about the difference that an intervention is making. We would be able to support those schools, if there was evidence that that intervention was not making a difference or was making a negative impact, the role of the attainment adviser would be to support that through challenging conversations. We would clearly, in our guidance, say that if you have started something and you are monitoring the progress of that, and it very clearly shows that that action or that set of actions is not making a difference, then absolutely stop that action and let's refocus and we would provide our support in that area. As Liz has already mentioned, we pool together information in our quarterly updates through what is happening across all the local authorities. As an organisation, we would be able to pick that up through that process, but we also have regular discussion with attainment advisers. If there was a pattern emerging, as we have mentioned earlier, then we would be able to be alerted to that and to be able to use our area lead officer and other networks to be able to support that. The very last point is about the inspections and the underfunding or the lack of staffing and stuff. I take it that your first port of call would be to the local authorities who are responsible for staffing and the schools. The last point is that one of the things that we have heard as parental involvement is obviously one of the most important things in raising attainment. However, the problem or the challenge that we have is the fact that there are a lot of parents out there who have a negative experience with schools themselves. I am looking at some of the stuff that Education Scotland provides. You have got a parental engagement toolkit and also a parent zone. My kids are now adults. If my kids were of school age, I would not go near that adult zone. How would you engage with parents and how can you make that relevant to the parents so that you can ensure that they are involved? I absolutely recognise your point. That is why the local activity is really central. From my experience, the best place to have parental engagement is between the teacher or the head teacher and their local community and the parents that they work with, because they formed a relationship. There is obviously a shared child across from the educators and parents, so they are able to have local discussions. A lot of our materials are about guidance and support and drawing on best practice for local head teachers and teachers and others to work with locally. It would be about opening up the school to various events, going out to community events and running. There have been lots of activities that have been going on. There are maths and munch activities that have been going on. There have been pizza and electricity activities that have gone on that are about engaging different parents in different ways. Those who might not be your parents should come to the front door of the school for the very reasons that you have stated. There is guidance and creativity happening out there about locally at school level. To provide the guidance, to celebrate the best practice and to make those connections, but the delivery at local level is very much an interaction between the school and the parents that they serve. That is fundamentally where that relationship is really central, in terms of supporting family engagement. Some of the family learning work that we have provided and some of the guidance around that will facilitate that. Will the team and officers possibly provide some support for head teachers? They do in some cases, but please. One of the really big successes of recent years has been the focus on family learning. I think that we were in a position where, with how good is our school for, we introduced a new quality indicator that was on family learning. I think that that really then focused schools' attention towards family learning. I think that one of the drivers within the national improvement framework is, as you have been talking about, parental engagement. One of the key levers within the Scottish attainment challenge has been about families and communities. We have got a real drive from different perspectives and different lenses towards focusing on how parents can support their children more effectively and on family learning, on how we get intergenerational learning and on how people learn together. We know from our reports that that is an area that is developing very well. Gales mentioned a couple of those. Gales, do you have another example? Yes. What we notice in Westin-Bartonshire is that the interest in developing family learning alongside school improvement is very prevalent in head teachers' discussions. One of the successful interventions in Westin-Bartonshire has been a step-up four-year project whereby the team has worked very hard to overcome the barriers for parents. They have made sure that there was transport available to the venues. They have made sure that there was food and that there were creche facilities. It was an effective partnership between primary teachers, highly trained and the best methodology for mathematics, working alongside a dance specialist. It was a creative approach to teaching mathematics. The aim for family learning was about giving confidence to parents in supporting their children in literacy and in numeracy. As a result of that, the data showed us that there was an increase in confidence from 10 per cent to 87 per cent within a year. Across Westin-Bartonshire we are seeing head teachers sharing the same terminology now. The first one was called a beyond the bell activity. We are now hearing that across schools. What are we going to do beyond the bell and how are we going to involve families and the community? I thank you all for attending today. That brings us to the end of the first panel of witnesses. I will suspend for a couple of minutes between panels to allow the witnesses to change over. I welcome to this meeting John Swinney, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, Fiona Robertson, director of learning and Graham Logan, deputy director of strategy and performance of the Scottish Government. Thank you for coming along today. I understand, Cabinet Secretary, that you would like to make a short opening statement. Thank you, convener. I welcome this opportunity to discuss the committee's inquiry into the attainment and achievement of school-age children experiencing poverty. I start by reaffirming the Government's commitment to improving Scottish education and closing the poverty-related attainment gap. That work is part of the wider getting it right for every child agenda. We want every child, young person and family to be offered the right help at the right time from the right people. That is a broadly-based approach that is drawn together by the contribution of various policy areas, including health, justice and housing, for example, and the focused approach of the Scottish attainment challenge represents the education aspect of this agenda, which is set within our national improvement framework vision to deliver excellence through raising attainment and the achievement of equity for all within Scottish education. We have committed to putting £750 million into the attainment Scotland fund over the course of this Parliament and to support schools and local authorities in tackling the attainment gap. We are providing £120 million of pupil equity funding on an annual basis. This money goes straight to schools for head teachers to spend on supporting children and young people affected by poverty to achieve their full potential. The approach that we are taking with this funding is designed to empower schools with the means by which we can address the challenges of the poverty-related attainment gap. Naturally, the approach that is taking will vary according to individual circumstances of schools around the country, which is for them to make a judgment of what is appropriate for the needs of their pupils. Over recent weeks, we have seen a range of different approaches to utilising pupil equity funding shared widely across social media channels as we encourage consideration of the most effective interventions for improvement in performance. We have already seen the impact of the Scottish attainment challenge and the pupil equity fund. It is making a real difference in classrooms across the country and impacting on the lives of children and young people. The recent attainment Scotland funding evaluation showed the positive impact that it is having on schools in Scotland's most deprived communities. The national improvement framework is now giving us more data than ever before, enabling a deeper understanding of educational strengths and weaknesses at all levels of the system. Our consultation on a framework for assessing our progress in closing the poverty-related attainment gap has established a broad consensus that a single measure cannot describe the attainment gap properly. It has also confirmed general support for a package of indicators and improvement goals that builds on the range of measures that we already have in place. There is great strength, convener, in Scottish education, but we must do more for those children who are affected by poverty. That is why we are investing the funds that we are investing in the attainment Scotland fund, and I look forward to considering the conclusions of the committee on the subject for the information and value that they will have for forthcoming Government policy. I just remind everybody that we have a lot to go through today, so if you can have questions and answers as succinct as we possibly can, I will start off with Richard Lochhead. Thank you, cabinet secretary. In terms of one of the motivations for the committee to have this inquiry was a recognition that it is not just what happens within the classroom, the impacts on closing the attainment gap, it is what happens outside of the classroom as well. I am interested in how the Scottish Government has increased its understanding of the impact of rising poverty in Scotland, the causes of that poverty and the impact that it has on your policy intention of closing the attainment gap. The first thing that I want to say is that the poverty-related attainment gap has been a very persistent feature of Scottish education for many years. What the Government has decided to do as a principal focus of our policy programme in this parliamentary term is to do as much as we possibly can do as part of what we recognise to be a longer term journey, perhaps of the order of 10 years, to close the poverty-related attainment gap. That level of priority is significant in policy terms because what it signals to a wider grouping of ministers beyond just my responsibilities in the field of education and skills is the point that Mr Lochhead makes about the importance of other areas of government being actively involved in supporting the work that we are involved in. For example, the measures that have been taken forward in the delivery plan under the Child Poverty Scotland Act that was recently passed by Parliament is a really important step in trying to identify what are the wider interventions that we might make, for example. Another example of that is the work that we are taking forward on adverse childhood events, in which, a few weeks ago, I hosted, along with a range of other ministers, a discussion at Bell Houston Academy of a whole range of stakeholders who are involved in addressing the issues of adverse childhood events. Without doing so, we will not address the obstacles to learning that will affect young people who go through such an experience and the same rationale extends to young people who experience poverty. Within Government, there is a broad understanding of the significance of policy concerns of that type around poverty or around adverse childhood events or other significant impediments to the ability of young people to be able to learn as part of their education. Finally, Mr Lochhead raises the issue of the pattern of poverty. Obviously, there are wider implications and wider factors over which the Government does not have control, where the policy framework of the United Kingdom, for example, the emphasis on welfare reform, the reductions in benefit entitlement and some circumstances will undeniably contribute towards making our challenge ever greater. However, what we have in place now is a policy framework that is clearly focused on addressing the substantial issue that Mr Lochhead raises with me. A lot of evidence that you have indicated has shown that, if anything, the trend is going the wrong direction in terms of poverty in Scotland. Many of the witnesses have pinpointed the UK Government's welfare reforms as the key reason behind that unfortunate trend. Therefore, what are you able to do as Cabinet Secretary for Education to explain to the UK Government, for instance, that their policies are impacting on the attainment gap in Scotland's schools? The debate at the moment seems to be that education is devolved and welfare reform is reserved, albeit that we are now getting more powers in Scotland. Therefore, people are not identifying the link between those two responses to closing the attainment gap. There are two points that I would make in response to that. The first is that clearly the Scottish Government makes very active representations, both publicly and privately, to the United Kingdom Government about the issue of welfare reform. We certainly set out on a persistent basis our concerns about the welfare reform agenda and the implications that that will have for children and families within Scotland. That is communicated in a range of different ways. It will without doubt be communicated by the finance secretary in the communications that he makes to the chancellor about forthcoming spending decisions. That will be a constant feature of our discussions and dialogue with the UK Government. The Scottish Government makes every endeavour to say to the UK Government that we would encourage them to take a different course of action, and that has been demonstrated by the contributions that we have made to this debate over time. The second point that I would say in response to Mr Lochhead is the opportunities that we have within the Scottish Government to use our own policy instruments to try to address that. That is not cost-free, because we are now spending before the acquisition of our new powers in the field of social security, about £130 million trying to ameliorate some of the effect of the welfare reform changes that are made by the United Kingdom Government. However, we have an opportunity through the work that we are undertaking on the implementation of the social security legislation to put in place measures that will more adequately reflect the policy approach within Scotland and complement our devolved responsibilities where we are able to do so within our powers in relation to social security. That combination of trying to encourage the UK Government to take a different course and use the responsibilities that we have to try to effect the situation is the approach that the Scottish Government would take. My final question is that you clearly have a great deal of sympathy for yourself, because you are going to have lots more calls on the budget to deal with the fallout of poverty caused by UK Government welfare reform policies, and the Scottish budget and education budget can only go so far. However, we have heard many good ideas from witnesses about what influence Scottish Government policies can have in tackling poverty and closing attainment gap. I want to raise with you the whole issue of halty provision of food and breakfast clubs in schools. There are many fantastic initiatives across the country to help our children to be fit for learning, because they can have a decent meal, particularly when the schools are not meeting in term time but over the halty period. I hope that you have had a chance to see the evidence witnesses, but is that something that you would be willing to explore further about how you can spread that best practice across Scotland? I am very pleased to encourage consideration of those options. I visited St Francis primary school in Dundee some weeks ago, and one of the examples of how pupil equity funding was being used where St Francis primary school had put in place, essentially, halty provision for a combination of play, food and learning for young people over the summer break. When the school was able, because of the collection of data within the school and the performance of young people, the school was able to show to me the attainment of young people in the period of August to December before they introduced the summer holiday play, learning and food proposition, with the August to December after they had done so, and the impact on the learning of young people was remarkable. They attributed that to the constancy of nutrition and play, and the development that comes out of play for young people and the opportunity to enhance learning and teaching. There is just one example of an individual primary school undertaking that. We have completed a series of pupil equity fund events around the country in all parts of Scotland, and we have been using those occasions to highlight examples of best practice. That is one very good example. We have seen a proposal coming in for the Scottish attainment challenge for the Challenge Authority programme for 2018-19 from North Lanarkshire Council, which is a very interesting proposal that we have supported and that we are jointly agreed with North Lanarkshire Council, which will see young people having access to nutrition during the school holidays to support their wider learning. It is a very good initiative from North Lanarkshire Council, and we are very pleased that the Scottish attainment challenge is being used in an imaginative way to extend the impact and the capacity of education to transform the lives of young people in poverty. I was going to return to a point. I understand that the cabinet secretary was watching some of the education Scotland evidence around pupil equity funding, particularly whether or not the current model serves rural communities well. Obviously, in my constituency, there is a large number of primary schools, particularly small primary schools, that do not get any peff funding and therefore may lack the flexibility and discretion to introduce measures that they know would work in their schools. The key point here, and I think that I have rehearsed some of those arguments with the committee previously, is the decisions that we have taken around the allocation mechanism for pupil equity funding. There are essentially two choices available to us. One would be to use the Scottish index of multiple deprivation, the other is to use eligibility for free school meals. I opted not to use the Scottish index of multiple deprivation because, as a measure, it is very good at identifying substantive groups, groupings of poverty and areas of poverty. It is not very good at identifying individual instances of the presentation of poverty. The eligibility criteria for free school meals give us a more comprehensive presentation of the prevalence of poverty. That results in about 95 to 96 per cent of schools receiving some funding from pupil equity funding. What I have said to the committee before is that that is the most comprehensive mechanism that I have available to me. I am very happy to engage in dialogue about how we could find a more comprehensive mechanism, because I accept fundamentally the point that Mr Mundell makes, which is that, in rural communities, the prevalence of poverty may be more difficult to identify, and in smaller schools there may be a reluctance of families to come forward and say that they are eligible for free school meals, because it is perhaps slightly more obvious in a school of 20 pupils than it is in a school of 200 or 300 pupils. I have openly said that I am happy to engage in that discussion. I have not seen mechanisms so far that would provide us with a more comprehensive approach than the one that we are taking, but I remain open to consideration of that point if there is such evidence emerging. To me, a very obvious solution to that would be to have some mechanism that allowed head teachers in those particular schools to bid in or to identify within their own pupil base where they believe that there are issues of underlying poverty. That expertise already exists within some of those schools. The broader problem for me is that there are schools a matter of miles down the road who are getting very large amounts of PEF funding. We are now in a position where some parents are taking decisions around which school they would like to send their children to, based on the opportunities that are available because of PEF funding in other schools that are not available to all pupils. Does that not create a different type of inequality within those rural communities? I am not familiar with the data of that type, but I think that the fact that pupil equity funding is reaching 95 per cent of schools in Scotland indicates substantial coverage of the country in relation to the extent that it covers the prevalence of poverty in a very wide number of locations in the country. As I said, I am very happy to consider ways in which we can demonstrate the broadest possible coverage that we can. The suggestion that Mr Mundell makes is that there would have to be a range of eligibility criteria to determine which schools could apply for certain amounts of funding. One of the policy points that we have accepted in principle is that, if we want to close the poverty-related attainment gap, we have to target increased resources to make a difference where that poverty presents itself. If we accept that policy point in principle, we have to have a policy rationale for some other mechanism to determine eligibility. One of the lessons that I take from pupil equity funding is that it has been very beneficial in empowering schools to take decisions that make a difference about the experience of individual young people in those schools. What we will certainly give consideration to is what is the degree of flexibility over wider budgetary arrangements that might be suitable for headteachers to exercise some of the flexibility that Mr Mundell talks about. On that flexibility point, throughout the inquiry, we have heard mixed messages from different organisations from third sectors from some people involved in the education profession around how much flexibility exists. In some local authorities, there is quite a lot of direction, given to headteachers, there is quite a lot of scrutiny over the individual decisions that they make. We have heard from Education Scotland now that they provide guidance, but they do not really have a role, and it is meant to be very localised. However, that does not always seem as if their decision-making powers lie solely with the headteacher. That is a significant issue. The guidance that has been issued in this respect is guidance that has been jointly agreed between the Government, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland and Education Scotland. There is one central piece of guidance that should provide the necessary framework for decision-making by individual headteachers. That is pretty clear. On the whole purpose of pupil equity funding, it is a condition of grant. If I see practice that it is not working within the spirit that I am about to talk about, it is a condition of grant, so the money can be held back. On one occasion, I have held money back from a local authority because I was not satisfied about exactly the issues that Mr Mundell raises. The spirit of PEF is that headteachers must decide, in consultation with their staff, their parents and pupils, what is going to make the biggest impact on their schools. Certainly, as I go around the country, I see very good examples of that happening. If there are examples where that is not happening, where people feel that they have not got the flexibility, then I would be very happy to hear about them, because that is not in the spirit of it. It is most definitely not in line with the grant conditions that matter to be applied in relation to how that is deployed. The condition of grant when we distribute the money to a local authority is that it has gone off to the school and the headteacher and the school community have got to decide how that is being used. If that is not people's experience, that is a breach of the condition of grant, and I would want to know about it. Thank you. Thank you. Do you want to come in very briefly on that point? Just on that point, convener, Mr Swinney, you have been very clear indeed that the PEF funding goes direct to schools and that the responsibility for making the decision rests with them. We have also been very clear as a committee that there are very good examples of how PEF funding is improving the situation that we are all trying to address. Can I just be very clear about the lines of accountability for how that money is spent and how you measure the effectiveness of it? At this morning's panel, we had a little bit of doubt as to whether the responsibility lay with the headteacher to be accountable to parents and young people and the communities, or whether it lay with their regional collaborative being involved or local authority being involved. In answer to a question to Julian Martin, I thought that there was a bit of a doubt as to exactly who was responsible if there was any problem with it. You have just said yourself that you personally would want to know if there was a situation where that money was not being used appropriately. That seems to me that we have got to be careful about this desire to allow headteachers to have far more control, but at the same time there is the implication that the central government or local authorities might actually be prepared to step in and say, no, do not spend the money that way. With the greatest respect, I think that Liz Smith misinterprets my answer to Oliver Mundell, because my answer to Mr Mundell was essentially making the point that PEF is designed to be spent according to the decision making of headteachers through their engagement with teachers, pupils and parents within their school community. The decision making power is to how to spend the money rests with the headteacher. The hard public finance accountability for the spending of the money rests with the local authority because they are the recipient of the grant. Why is that the case? I judged that that was administratively more efficient to send the money to local authorities with the amounts for each individual school for the local authority to do the public finance accountability rather than to create two and a half thousand administrative systems in two and a half thousand schools for the handling of what can be in certain circumstances quite substantial sums of public money. In public accountability terms, the local authority is the one who will be held accountable for that by Audit Scotland. We have had discussions with Audit Scotland and local authorities about those arrangements, and those arrangements are satisfactory. The lines of accountability are very clear that the decision making power rests with the headteacher in the school community. They may choose to collaborate in certain ways with other schools, with the local authority, with the regional collaborative on certain things, and that is entirely at their discretion. When it comes to the assessment of the public finance accountability requirements, that rests with the local authority. Can I just pursue the logic of that? In answer to Gillian Martin, are you saying that the local authority holds the overall say on how well that peff money is being spent? No. Can I clarify who you believe has that final responsibility and the line of accountability for the actual spend? That is why I have answered the question in the way that I have answered it. Decision making power, control, responsibility for how effective it is spent rests with headteachers. That is the shift of thinking that goes with peff. We are saying to headteachers that here is some money to use in a very focused way to close the poverty-related attainment gap. You have got to make the best professional judgment you can about how those resources should be spent. However, in public finance accountability terms, I suppose that there is a judgment about whether the money has been spent on the purpose for which it was intended. That is the best way to express it. That rests with the local authority. There are a number of questions about the peff, cabinet secretary. If we could just make them as concise as possible, we would have a lot. It is George first. Good morning, cabinet secretary. Much of the debate during this inquiry has been how peff money is spent. It is probably summed up in a quote from Martin Canavan, from Aberlour, who said that there is a real inconsistency in the understanding of peff and how it has been interpreted and applied in different schools. It works well where teachers are engaged and supported to use the money in the best way they can. On the whole, cabinet secretary, how do you use the Scottish Government or Education Scotland's local authority? How do you work together to ensure that that is what happens and that supports everyone? That is essentially drawn together through the work that I take forward through the Scottish Education Council that I have established. It brings together all of the players that I need to have round the table to create a consistent direction in Scottish education. That brings together our local authority partners, the leads of our regional improvement collaboratives, the local authority chief executives, directors of education, schools of education, crucially parents and pupils and the professional associations. I try to use that body to create the consistency of direction. One of the areas where I feel that we have a real strength just now is that we have a very clear consistent policy direction on how we take forward those aspects of education. All of that dialogue is designed to inform the support that is put in place at local level to support individual schools and that will essentially be undertaken through the collaboration that is supported by the regional improvement collaboratives and also by the work that is undertaken by local authorities with the active participation of Education Scotland with its role to improve the performance of Scottish education. The support package is there and I want to make sure that it is very visibly there for schools, because it is through the enhancement of learning and teaching, through the enhancement of leadership within schools, through the enhancement of family and community involvement that we will have the biggest effect in closing the poverty-related attainment gap. Cabinet Secretary, obviously there are different people. We are all different, and some of the examples that we have had in evidence here is Nancy Clooney from Delmarnock Primary. We all loved her dynamic total dynamo when she came here, but not everybody is Nancy Clooney. She literally took a community by the scruff of the neck and said, I am going to create a community here within my school as a centre of it. That is fantastic and it works here in Delmarnock. How do you see that we can probably take that best practice and share it throughout the country to make sure—because she, Peff Funding, was one of the things that she said, I want some of that, this is what I am going to do with it—how do we get that kind of dynamic personality, but how do we get that same kind of thing throughout the country? The first thing is that we need to ensure that we celebrate and promote evidence to best practice. If we have examples that are clearly having an effect on closing the attainment gap, I want to make sure that they are widely understood within Scottish education and that the regional collaboratives are there to help us to do all of that. There is a much wider sharing of achievement and best practice throughout the system. I am very pleased with the way in which local authorities have embraced the concept of regional collaboration and are now working very actively to ensure that that makes a greater impact on individual classrooms. The second area, and this relates to the question that is put to me by Nancy Clooney, is about the enhancement of leadership within education. There are a number of ways in which we support that investment in leadership. The Scottish College of Educational Leadership has now got a much stronger presence within our system as part of Education Scotland, so the real strength of educational leadership can be supported and enhanced around the country. The second aspect is the work that we are undertaking through Columbia 1400, which is a third sector venture in which the Government and the Hunter Foundation fund a leadership development programme through Columbia 1400, in which cohorts of about 20 to 30 inspiring headteachers work with Columbia 1400 to develop stronger leadership skills. I spent some time on one of those programmes last year, which I found a richly rewarding experience. In talking to headteachers and aspiring headteachers who are involved in that, they certainly fed that back to me, and the evaluation supports that as well. The investment in leadership is very important, and we need dynamic people like Nancy Clooney. I reassure Mr Adam that there are other people like Nancy Clooney in other parts of the country who are demonstrating that vibrant leadership. What has helped that process is that pupil equity funding has given a means and a flexibility to enable that to reach a new level, and Scottish education is benefiting as a result of that. I want to raise an issue around people equity funding. In my sense, there has always been innovation in Scottish education. Some people are now getting the opportunity to fund these innovative ideas, and some of them are things that perhaps have fallen by the wayside in the past. I am sure that you would agree with me that you would be concerned if pupil equity funding was being used to substitute and fund something that would have been resourced through mainstream in the past but has been cut. I want to give you a particular example, which is that you will be aware that Dundee City Council has ended its in-school swimming lessons. I have a separate argument. It is not my place to decide whether that is a wise move or not, but a Dundee City Council spokesperson said that her teachers have been given the opportunity to explore how swimming lessons can be delivered through the pupil equity fund and leisure and culture Dundee's family swimming initiative. Do you think that that is an acceptable use of public pupil equity funding? No. Does that mean that, if that were done, it is your responsibility then to go in and say that that is not a condition of grant and remove the grant? I am interested in the process. That is exactly correct, because if I can put some background, my officials have spoken to Dundee City Council. I suspected this would emerge in our conversations this morning. The City Council in dialogue with head teachers has looked at the provision of swimming lessons. Swimming lessons are very important, and it is a life skill that is important, but it is not prescribed within the curriculum. What we prescribe is two hours of substantive physical education per week for every pupil. The view that was taken within Dundee was that, to obtain a 20-minute swimming lesson, young people were missing out on learning and teaching for two hours. At a time when we are pressing to enhance learning and teaching, the judgment was locally that that was not the best way to use two hours of learning and teaching time to get 20 minutes of swimming lessons. That is a judgment that is there to be made. What is not acceptable—we have made this clear to Dundee City Council, and this point is accepted this morning—is the guidance that Johann Lamont has read to me that, if a school wants to use pupil equity funding to go and do that, that would be acceptable, because it is not. I hope that that helps to put into context where the issue has come from, but also what the judgment would be about the utilisation of pupil equity funding for essentially a replacement of a service that was there before. I wonder whether you regret the ending of the Scottish Government's swimming lesson fund that was directed towards deprived communities and regret the cuts to local government, which meant perhaps that the local authority is meant to do that. I do not know whether that is an issue, but can you maybe explain to me if there were another example of this where somebody looks as if they are using pupil equity funding in a particular way that you do not think is within the spirit or indeed the conditions of the grant? Can you talk me through the process because you have said that it is about the school and the head teacher in the community? Is it about the local authority—I presume that you just mean really in accounting terms—to manage the money? Where has the judgment been made, because you have now said that you have made a judgment in that decision? Even if the head teacher wanted to do it, it would be unacceptable. What is the mechanism for both that judgment being made and being relayed to the local authority and to the school? All of this is set out in the guidance, which makes it quite clear that people equity funding must be used for additional purposes, not replacement. The point comes back to the condition of grant, which is that anybody considering how to use pupil equity funding must be mindful of the condition of grant and the guidance that goes with it. Ultimately, we are relying here on the professional judgment of head teachers. That is the shift that I want to see taking place within Scottish education. We have leading professionals in whom we trust the responsibility to lead the education of our children and young people around the country. My judgment is that if we are trusting those individuals to lead the education of our children, we should trust them with a degree of budgetary flexibility over their schools. We provide guidance for that, and we provide the supporting assistance to enable head teachers to make wise and considerate decisions about that. What I would say is that there will be some things that are done under pupil equity funding that will not work. I accept that, and we have to learn from that and move on to better use of the funding. However, I would make a distinction between something that is a breach of the condition of grant versus a judgment about something that I might look at and think, well, I am not sure that that is the best way to do it. However, if the head teacher thinks, well, that really is what my children need, I would tend to take the view of who I am to say, well, okay, I know better than you. I will make this the final point. I appreciate that you want to move on.  I used to have this. I used to have X number of learned support staff, but cuts have meant that I no longer have them. In that sense, it would be substitution to use pupil equity funding. Would you reflect on what those professionals are saying, and perhaps what we need to look at? It is how we mainstream resources through local authorities to schools. They can do the things that they want to do that they believe are their core business, but are no longer able to do, and are perhaps tempted to try and use pupil equity funding to support something that they know works, because it has worked, but they can no longer do it. I think that there are a number of points to make in response to that, and some go back to some of the points that Johann Lamont made in her earlier comments to me. I accept that there has been a period of financial constraint within the public sector. I was the finance minister here for many years. I know the budget inside out. I know the financial pressure. We were simply addressing the challenges that came to us by the austerity programme of the United Kingdom Government. Clearly, we have taken other decisions that have resulted in significant increases in expenditure on education, which have come through pupil equity funding, Scottish attainment challenge and, through the welcome steps that local authorities are taking to increase expenditure on education. All of those factors will play into the decisions that head teachers will make about pupil equity funding. What I certainly think is really refreshing about the period that we are in just now is that head teachers have responded with enormous enthusiasm to the opportunities of the Scottish attainment challenge and pupil equity funding, and they are giving very thoughtful consideration to how that can be best used to meet the needs of young people. Only game in town is the only funding that they can access, and they can see the gaps in their own provision. I think that our experience as a committee is that that is what we are being told. People know what the challenges are, and they are working up with under the constraints, but I accept innovation as an opportunity to try something that does not quite work. I urge you to look at the more significant question, which is the inhibitions on teachers and support staff to do what is the core business because of more than financial constraint and a significant lack of resource. If we look at the position that you have seen for the past two years, real-terms increases in funding allocated by local authorities to education are very welcome. We have put in pupil equity funding in the past. We are now in year two of pupil equity funding and we are just going into year four of Scottish attainment challenge funding. We are seeing that general increase in resources that are taking place. For me, the point that Johann Lamont makes is that there has always been innovation in Scottish education, and I accept that. What is different in character about the impact of pupil equity funding is that we have given a signal to the headteachers around the country that we want them to really think creatively with their school communities about what is going to make the most profound impact on young people. Certainly from what I see around the country, schools and headteachers are responding to that challenge, and Scottish education has been strengthened as a consequence. I want to pursue the revenue point a little bit further. You presumably read the spice briefing that was helpfully published the past few days about the reductions in monies available to local government over previous years. When you say a general increase in resources, did you mean the £750 million that you introduced your remarks with this morning, or did you also mean and include that spice briefing, which factually explains the position? What I mean is about the combination of funding such as pupil equity funding or the general allocations that are made through the budget process that are resulting in a real-terms increase in the resources available to local government, which is a feature certainly of the 2018-19 budget of the Scottish Government. Let me go back to the £750 million. You said that it has been available for this whole Parliament. Is it therefore not possible to allocate it now for that whole Parliament, rather than the year-by-year allocations that you have undertaken so far? Well, if we allocated, for example, the pupil equity funding for the whole of the Parliament, we would be locking in no change to the eligibility for free school meals school by school. If I was allocating it right the way through, I would say, for example, I would just take the allocation this year and say, right, that's what you're getting for the next for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. What that would not give me is any flexibility to take into account the fact that there may well be movement in the eligibility for free school meals around the country. Will our teachers be recruited on long-term contracts? I think that anybody, I think that the commitment that the Government has given to the availability of pupil equity funding as part of the Scottish attainment challenge over the duration of this Parliament should enable individuals to be recruited for that length of time. Why then did the EIS tell us in an earlier session that there are 500 teachers employed directly through PEF, but they're all on either one or two-year contracts? In my judgment, I think that it's a fair conclusion for anyone to look at to say the Government's given a commitment to £120 million of pupil equity funding for this, the next and the year after it would be a reasonable and considered public policy decision to recruit those teachers in a longer-term contract. So you're saying that teachers are getting it wrong then? They're not putting those teachers on three-year contracts, which you've just suggested they could do? I think that it's a reasonable conclusion to come to that with the constancy of that funding those individuals could be recruited and given contracts for that period. Fair enough. Your guidance, therefore, I presume to every headteacher you meet when you're going around Scotland is please recruit those PEF teachers on long-term, sorry, not long-term three-year contracts. Well, I certainly think that that would be a reasonable conclusion, yes. So why do you not think they're doing it? Well, individual judgments will be applied, but I'm certainly not going to criticise people for doing that. What I'm saying is that there's a continuity of funding that people can rely upon for the duration of this Parliament. That's fair enough, but if there's a continuity of funding, then that zooms by definition. There wouldn't be that much change in our individual schools allocation over the course of that three-year period, would there? Well, I think that in the light of that information, it would be reasonable to recruit teachers for that length of time. So, therefore, there isn't much, there isn't much going to change in allocation to an individual school, is there? Mr Scott asked me two different things here. Given the technical argument why I can't lock down the precise sums of money, because I'm quite sure that if I was to do that and schools were to lose out, I would hear all about it because of movements of population. I'm trying to respond to the actual circumstances of schools' experience. Secondly, there is a commitment from the Government for that constancy of funding over that period, and I think that a reasonable conclusion to draw from that would be to appoint teachers for that length of time. I don't necessarily disagree, I just puzzled as to why my idea is to allow that. As we often find here, Mr Scott and I are in violent agreement with each other when it doesn't quite sound like it. Okay, one final attempt, as usual this morning, given that we're after, I suppose, assessing your policy prescriptions as to how they might affect child poverty, given that we've been as committee told that child poverty is rising, which obviously is worrying to a great extent. Do you think it's appropriate—well, let me put it this way. Primary teachers are telling me, is the right thing to do—or they're asking me the question—to test at five-year-olds numbers and reading skills of kids who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, in other words, who are living in poverty? They say, could we not have some more flexibility to get out of a testing regime when there are much better things that we can do with our group of five-year-olds? Do you think that that's a reasonable argument? I think—obviously, I'm very sensitive to the argument about P1 assessment. I acknowledge the debate that's gone on about this point. I'm taking very careful and close interest in it. I'm listening to what people are saying to me about this. There have been over 400,000 Scottish national standardised assessments undertaken so far. I'm hearing some feedback about the P1 assessments, but I'm not being inundated with that, but I'm very open to the question. I think that we've got to get this into its proper context. The P1 assessment, if properly handled, will be a pretty straightforward experience for a child, because it's not presented in exam circumstances like the Scottish Qualifications Authority specialising. It should be done in a very relaxed environment in the classroom. It shouldn't take any longer than 40 minutes, as an experience. That's once a year. I don't say that in any way to trivialise the issues, because I'm very alert to those concerns. One of the reasons why we want to do this is to help to inform teacher judgment about where young people's educational development needs the greatest amount of support. It's to inform the professional judgment of teachers about how they can then deploy their professional skills. What it will help us with is to assess how much progress we are making year by year in closing the poverty-related attainment gap. All of us accept that the earlier we can make an impact on the poverty-related attainment gap, the better. That's why we're expanding in learning childcare. That's why one of the key aspects of the measurement framework for the closure of the attainment gap is the evidence that emerges from the 27-month vocabulary check that's undertaken by health visitors. That's an indication that we want to try to identify as early as possible what are the needs of children so that we can address those needs so that by the time they get to doing the primary 4 assessment, for example, we don't find that we've got a bigger gap to try to close than if we had been able to identify and inform the judgment of teachers about what would be effective in that early stage. What was interesting, when I viewed the roll-out of the standardised assessment, I did so with a group of teachers. We worked our way through the P4 assessment and then we were shown the information that gets portrayed about each individual child coming out of the assessment. The teachers in the room with me were aghast at the fine quality of information that it highlighted about the strengths and weaknesses of young people as they navigated their way through the assessment. They viewed that as high quality information to inform the hope that they would then do in their teaching practice to make a difference to those young people. That's why we're doing this, to give teachers the information to better inform their steps to close the poverty-related attainment gap. I am very happy to acknowledge that I'm sensitive to the issues that have been raised about the P1 assessments and I'll listen carefully to the feedback that we get after this experience. Just one final point on that. I'm being told that teachers in busy, growing classes of five-year-olds, often in 30 and so on as a fourth, are having to take an hour, not 40 minutes on an hour, to deal with particular children who are disadvantaged because, by definition, they may need more help. That's the point. I can take all the rest of the argument. I think that there's something in the round. They have a different debate about national testing per se, but particularly for young children where it's just the challenge to have them in the class. Never mind to deal with a test. I'd be very grateful if the cabinet secretary would reflect on that, because I think that there are some weird issues there for teachers and, by definition, there for parents and for the people themselves. I'm very happy to take those points on board. I think that the specific point that Mr Scott has raised laterally on the impact on disadvantaged children is something that educational professionals should take into account and the judgments that they take about how they proceed with their assessments. I have a couple of brief questions, because a lot of what I wanted to ask has been covered. I want to briefly come back to the question that Tavish Scott asked about recruitment of teachers using the additional funding that schools get. I want to be really clear. Is the guidance that the head teachers get on how they can use the funding the same guidance that is given to local authorities? I have evidence of a head teacher wanting to recruit a teacher and being told by the local authority that they are not allowed to do that. The guidance that's available for the implementation of pupil equity funding is guidance jointly agreed between the Scottish Government, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland and Education Scotland. I think that's all the players involved. The local authorities are able to, if there's particular local dimensions that they feel need to be highlighted to schools in their area, they can do that in a complementary fashion, but not a contradictory fashion to that guidance. If a head teacher wants to take a teacher, the local authority should not say to them that they are not allowed to do that. That's correct. That's correct.  If a head teacher wants to employ a teacher, using the funding, it's perfectly all right. That's very helpful. The other concern that has been raised around PEF is the lack of knowledge and support that's available for head teachers through the procurement process. It was raised in evidence by North Ayrshire Council, and it was also raised by Aberlour that head teachers, when they are given this funding, are almost automatically expected to be able to navigate their way through the procurement process. Would you say that that's a fair reflection of head teachers? How will you make sure that they are properly supported when they go through the procurement process to make sure that they get the best value and the best use of the funding that they're given? That is new territory, so inevitably there's new ground to be covered by individual head teachers in acquiring the skills that they need to have to take these decisions. We've done a series of events with head teachers. We did them in the spring of 2017, and we've done them again in the spring of 2018 to discuss all the issues arising out of pupil equity funding. Those have been really well attended and involved discussions with head teachers around the country. Obviously, one of the reasons, the decisions that I took was that I didn't want to send out 2,500 bank transfers to individual schools, because that would then involve those schools establishing financial systems, which I suspect if I had come to this committee, the committee would have said, wait a minute, there's too much bureaucracy at school level. I took the decision to channel it through local authorities, but what comes with that is that there must be an observation of local authority procurement procedures. That support from existing local authority procurement arrangements is available for individual head teachers to make the decisions that they make. I can quite understand that there might be a nervousness as head teachers are going through us, because it is new territory, but I think that the support is there to make sure that head teachers are well supported. I would like to bring the conversation away from Peth. A lot of people have been talking about Peth to the impact of poverty on educational attainment and the root causes of that. First of all, I have explained that we have been in a lot of focus groups. I have probably been about five focus groups with various stakeholders. In every session, the stakeholders have said that there has been a noticeable increase in child poverty as a result of UK welfare reforms. Obviously, we are feeling the impacts on that and our education system, we are feeling the impacts of that on our wider society. The UK Government is clearly saving quite a lot of money with our welfare reforms. Has the Scottish Government been given any additional money to mitigate the impacts of child poverty on attainment? We get the funding allocations that come as a consequence of UK funding decisions, but, if the UK welfare bill reduces, the instance of poverty increases unless there is a consequential investment in public services in England that then generates a financial benefit for the Scottish Government through the Barnett formula, then no, we do not get any benefit from that. We have a situation in which we have more children that are going without food over the weekend or overnight and are coming to school hungry. As a result of welfare reforms or a situation in the household where they cannot be fed, there is no extra money as a result of that coming into Scottish Government in order for us to be able to address that in our schools. I want to ask you about the universal policies. We have talked about PEF, but there are Scottish Government universal policies that are actively targeting the poverty-related attainment gap, first of all, early years provision, and what might look like a micro impact of poverty, but it has a big effect, which is the incr