Good morning. Can I welcome everyone to the 16th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017? Can I please remind everyone present to turn on mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? I'm very keen that the business of the meeting goes ahead as normal, but before we begin, I would like to add this committee's support to the statement made by the Presiding Officer, the First Minister and other party leaders yesterday in the chamber in relation to the terrorist act in Manchester. Given our role as dealing with the future of young children, I also think that it would be appropriate for us to have a moment of reflection for those who were injured and lost their lives in that dreadful event. We've received apologies from Tavish Scott MSP, who is on a Commonwealth parliamentary association visit. The committee has one piece of negative subordinate legislation to consider today. The sublegislation that the committee has to consider is on the academic awards and distinctions university of the Highland and Islands, Scotland Order of Council 2017, brackets 2017, slash 146. Does the committee have any comments to make on this instrument? I have any comments to make, but I do think that it's a very welcome development. The seven or related issues have been before this committee many times and I know it's been a very detailed process and I think that it's very good news that the committee should note. The second item of business is our third evidence session of the committee's inquiry into teacher workforce planning for Scotland schools. Today we will hear from a selection of organisations on the teacher workforce planning advisory group. For the first panel, I welcome Alan Armstrong, strategic director of education Scotland, Cathy Cameron, policy manager of COSLA, Greg Dempster, general secretary of the AHS, Martin Fairbairn, chief operating officer and deputy chief executive of the SFC, Dr Morag Redford, chair of the Scottish Council of Deans of Education, John Stortot, representative ADES and Jim Thewlis, general secretary of the SLS. A standard, I'll kick us off with the first question, which is, how best can we link workforce planning at a local level with the national setting of ITE targets? Would anybody like to begin? I'll set the ball rolling on that, convener. Last year, for the first time, more of the local information was used in a very productive way to try and inform the process. One of the issues is the vacancies count. For a number of years, that vacancies count has been increasing, but there was never a formal or robust way of actually putting a number on the vacancies, because you have to interpret what a vacancy is, when is a vacancy a long-term vacancy, or a long-standing vacancy, and at what point of the year do you actually do this? A survey was done, and it was causally carried out. One of the issues would be to make that more robust, and maybe even to try to get it to a state where you can put a number on it and add that number into the intake. Just now, it's used as background intelligence, as opposed to fundamental and central to the model. There's also the issue of supply teachers. Again, for a number of years, the ADES view on the group has been depleted. You have already heard of the difficulties that that creates in terms of time in the school, pressure on teachers and head teachers and so on. Again, I think that a more rigorous and careful look at the supply pool, who is in the supply pool because there are different types of teachers with different attitudes in terms of how much work they are prepared to do. Some authorities have permanent supply pools, and every two years they might well be refreshed. They'll go into full-time permanent posts in a school, and they've obviously earned the right to do that, and the pools would be supplemented again. All of that I would put in the category of the real formalisation of the local intelligence. Instead of informing the model, I might try to bring it much more into the model by a more robust, more rigorous look at those issues. I think that there is also a full account of new demands, because there are continually new initiatives, whether it is STEM, model languages in the primary school, the pupil equity funding, attainment challenges, all those issues. There are always curriculum changes, curriculum developments, and it's not always clear how those will even curriculum for excellence. For example, it changes the pattern of subject choice in secondary, and it changes the nature of the curriculum. There is a more detailed account of how those impact on schools, on the ground, how they are timetable, and what it means for the number of teachers, and indeed the types of teachers and the subjects. I think that those are some areas where we could make more robust and more informed local intelligence in terms of the national planning model. That is a trick. We have a national planning model, and the actual staffing is managed and delivered locally in each of the 32 authorities. The issue is how you marry those two things together. I think that I will come back to that later on. Can I just ask one question based on that? You said how to interpret a vacancy. Why is that a different thing?  There will be vacancies. Some of them will be filled within a week. Some of them will be filled within a month. Some of them may be longer than that. It is trying to define exactly what a long-term vacancy is, because those are the ones that presumably need new people to fill rather than existing people. It is just to do with the churn. It is a big system, and there is a lot of movement. On any one day, the number of pupils will be different. On any one day, the number of teachers will be different. On any one day, the number of vacancies will change. Is there any work being done to create a process that would make that much more simple? Because it does seem a very complicated and murky method. I would not say that it is murky. It is certainly complex. Maybe Kathy from COSLA who has been working on trying to get that data. It is a question of timing as well. When do you actually do it? I agree with John. It is a complex exercise. When we agreed with the Government to carry out this survey last year, it was done at a time when we were coming up to the teacher census when the information was gathered from councils roughly towards the end of September. What was decided was that in order to try not to place too great pressure on councils to gather this information, we would carry out that exercise at roughly the same time so that it did not require gathering the information twice. It was a complex process. It took some time to gather in all the information. In retrospect, probably some questions were not asked in quite the right way. As with everything, there is always scope for refinement and reflection on these things. When we are going to carry out that exercise again, one of those things will have to have early conversations about so that we can get the right questions asked. Thank you. Can I just be quite clear about this? Is there a definition of vacancy rate that you accept as being adequate? That is one of the issues. It is how you interpret, if you are asked, how many vacancies you have and how long have you had them. There are different interpretations about what is a genuine vacancy and what is just a post that is just about to be filled. I think that there is still some work on getting a definition that you can ensure that the data that is put in is absolutely robust and consistent. When there is a publication of vacancy rates across different local authorities, are they using different definitions and different measures? They have never been asked in very specific hard detail how many vacancies you have at this point of time in the way that the pupil census has done. It took many years for the pupil census approach to be so firm and robust that there was very little possibility of misinterpretation and the same process would have to be gone through for the vacancies. When were you done for the first time last year or this exercise to try to establish what the vacancy rate was? It was something that Ades had been pushing for in terms of making sure that we had that bit right before we embarked on trying to plan for the new teachers. When we are given vacancy rate statistics, are you saying that they are not accurate? I do not know whether accurate would be the answer to that. It depends on who filled in the form, how they interpreted what the vacancy was and when you have got many different people putting in different data, the issue is how you make sure that the answers that they give are robust and reliable. The point at which they do them is also important. Do you want to ask a question? Let us not get hung up on this one issue. There is clearly some work that still needs to be done around that. I am just wondering what work is done where a school for example may have had a computer science teacher and that is a vacancy, but they decide that they are not going to find somebody. That stops being a vacancy, it just stops providing those courses within schools. To what extent are local authorities or schools managing out vacancies by simply redesigning what their staffing is, because that must then have an impact on recruitment for teacher training. Anecdotally, my sense is that we lose specialist teachers in primary school and in secondary school there is a narrowing of the range of staff that a school might have. Is that captured anywhere? Is that an issue that your group has been looking at? It is not captured anywhere. I am sure that there will be examples in secondary schools, maybe Jim might want to answer this, where a headteacher has to plan in the knowledge that there are certain subjects that they may not be able to get a teacher for, if a teacher leaves, for example. There will be some examples of that. I do not think that there is any data on it. Do you have a goal? If there may be an imagine this, but a school may not offer, well, we know that certain schools will not offer certain advance hires and so on, but presumably there are core subjects that all secondary schools have to offer. I wonder whether you have a role in ensuring that diversity of specialist teachers in primary and secondary school is helped by your actual workforce planning, because, otherwise, it is feeding off itself. You cannot get somebody to stop running that course. You do not look for that teacher, so we do not train up teachers in those subjects. I will take it that there are two parts to the answer. The first being, and it is going to list this point, that the vacancies and what vacancies are, and whenever the survey is conducted, will change from day to day. A vacancy today might be filled tomorrow, a further vacancy might arise tomorrow for circumstances which perhaps we knew about or out with our control. There is an issue there in that useful information through the survey which was conducted, but that survey is only as accurate as it can be on the day in which it is conducted, so that fits into that part of the discussion as well. Again, to answer the question, will schools remove subjects from the curriculum because there is not a teacher available? Yes and no again, and it is not entirely down to the whole notion of having a teacher available. There will be other reasons for that, but sitting within that and within the complex pattern to answer the particular question you ask, there will be schools where the curriculum has been adjusted or will come to an arrangement with the school which is down the road to share the teaching of a subject on account of not being able to get a teacher at the particular point in time where the curriculum needs to be delivered. That is particularly pertinent where a teacher disappears or moves out of the school for whatever reason, sometimes during the term, when you are part way through a course and there are ways in which you have got to start to engage with, as I said, school down the road to make sure that local university, for example, to make sure that aspect of the course gets delivered. Okay, move on. Thanks very much for that. Liz, you've got a question now. Yes, I have. It's not unrelated to this, because last week when we heard from Lawrence Findlay that we had an interesting discussion about whether councils should be more active in looking for local people who might become teachers rather than hoping that people who would like to become teachers would go through the usual process. I would be very interested to know your views on this and the related point is whether, in terms of the formula that we're using to workforce plan, do you think that that's the correct one or do we have to make more adjustments to it? I think that it does relate to the first question very much the point that Mr Dornan made about local information. I think that the points that Lawrence made last week about making sure that the training places are where the gaps are is very important and I'm not sure that's something that's been totally cracked yet. As an advisory group, we have pushed for a reallocation of places, but that is not something that can be done in one fell swoop. It needs to be done gradually just for universities to respond and have enough people there to train the teachers. Does anybody have the map? In terms of the current methodology of the model, I think that if we look at the information that we have in terms of where it's working and where it's not working, two particular challenges are the rural aspect outside of the main urban centres and, secondly, in relation to some specific subject areas. I think that some of the things that we've been doing over the past couple of years where, for example, John was touching on, we've been engaging more with local authority intelligence, both in relation to, as I say, specific subject areas and rural pressures is the way to go, but I would caution care to say that the way that you take that into account is through an arithmetic modelling type approach. A lot of the issues that we're seeing are down to very specific circumstances and some of the initiatives that we've begun to undertake are addressing those things rather than trying to come up with a perfect model that's going to land you on exactly the right number of teachers in five years' time, say. Which is an interesting point. Are you suggesting that we're too tied to a fairly rigorous arathmetical model and that we should open that up a little bit more? The point is well made. I think that we've got to be careful to look at the journey that we have moved with the model. The model is much more sophisticated than it was. It's much more, to call it an arathmetical model, yes it is because that's what models are, but it's informed by research. It's becoming increasingly more informed by research at a local level. There is still a bit of that journey to go in relation to better information on the back of more expansive research. We're going to start to look, for example, at, as we did in the past, an age profile of teachers, which was a fairly blunt way of looking at it because the landscape changed and the pension arrangements changed, for example. Then you start to look at a different way of identifying where the gaps might arise in four to five years' time. In a more sophisticated modelling landscape it might well better inform that kind of long-term view of what we bring it into, the number of people we bring into the profession and perhaps starting to inform in advance areas of which there might be a shortage later on. If the longer-term view of a sophisticated planning model enables you to get more detailed information to an extent, you start to address the local and geographical issues, but there needs to be something underlying that as well that is going to identify the specific challenges that, for example, exist with in north-east rural Scotland in relation to teacher numbers per se and particular curricular areas in the demand model. OK, thank you, Daniel. My line of questioning follows on from this. Fundamentally, this is a supply and demand issue that you are tackling, a supply of teaching professionals compared to the need for them in the schools. Are those two elements modelled separately? I am slightly concerned that you are talking about vacancies. The vacancies are the delta between those two. What do you have as a national planning model? It looks at the data at a national level in terms of the number of teachers that we already have, the number of people who are qualifying to become teachers and the gap that is projected to exist in any particular year. Added to that are all the refinements in terms of lever rates, returners, all the issues that affect the population of either the students qualifying or the teachers in the system in a particular year. There is an attempt to come up with a number that is either a surplus or a deficit. In recent years, it has been a deficit and that number informs the intake for the universities. However, in terms of what is happening on the ground, it is local authorities that manage and determine the staffing levels in schools, and they do it by different methods. They have different staffing formulas in different authorities. That is what makes it complicated. You have a national approach, but you have local staffing and local different ways of staffing schools locally. In your answer, you outlined the modelling of the supply of teachers and hinted there that the demand is down to local authorities. What attempt is there or what methodology do you have for modelling that demand? You looked back in previous years and you are able to see what happens to the profession in terms of the stay-on rate or the retention rate within authorities or the return rate. You can look at the age profile. You are modelling the future based on usually looking at a three-year or a five-year rolling average from the past. It is a bit like stocks and shares. You are trying to predict the future based on the behaviour in the past, but no statistical model can account for the behaviour of individuals or the behaviour of the employers. I totally understand the individual point, but what you can do is talk to local authorities and find out what their forward plans are. To what extent do you get that information for local authorities about not what has happened in the past three years but what they are planning to do in the future three years? That is what the partners provide, COSLA and ADES. That is local intelligence. One of the issues would be how you take that local intelligence and make it more robust. It would be difficult for any authority to predict in three years' time how many teachers they would require. That is a challenge and looking at it as a demand and supply system. The universities in providing teacher education programmes would normally plan on an annual basis, which is the way that the committee responds using particularly the one-year PGDE qualification to raise and lower the number of teachers to enter the workforce at the end of the year. The university planning cycle does not allow easily with the local authority planning cycles, which is one of the challenges that the new advisory working group will need to tackle. That is confusing supply with demand. I totally accept that modelling supply is difficult because it is about individual choices. You do not quite know whether people will leave the profession or not and there are various things. I would have thought that demand is really based on two things. One is the number of children you want to teach. The other thing is how you want to teach them, what subjects and the class sizes. That should be relatively predictable because we know how many children we want to teach in advance because there is a five-year lead time for them reaching primary school. Is that not a more straightforward thing to model? You still have the same variables of... When a teacher wants to retire, for example, very often they do not tell the authority until the two months before they retire. Is that the supply side of the demand side? That is a demand. If that teacher leaves, the authority has a demand for a teacher. It is difficult to predict that precisely. There are at least a couple of authorities that have a threshold model of staffing. Not to 15 would be so many teachers and 15 to 20 would be so many other teachers. One pupil either side of that threshold is one teacher more or less. If you multiply that across big numbers, you only need to get the teachers wrong by one or two and you have a difficulty. You could ask authorities to do that and they could do it. Whether it would be more accurate than doing it at a national level would be the question. It could be done. Local authorities are not modelling what their future demand is. They are not asked to do it as part of the teacher workforce planning group. Do you think that they should be? That might be one of the issues. That is for the group to consider. That is one of the things that might formalise the local intelligence and bring it more into the mainstream of the model group. Before I move on to the next questions, myself and my colleague Drith McGuire met a number of teachers last week. Ruth will ask some questions that we agreed to ask. One of the questions that seems pertinent given the discussion was that one of the teachers was supported by many others and the question was why are schools still run by education authorities? Would anyone like to take that one on? I do not want to be flippant, but maybe that is a political question rather than a question for anybody. You must have an opinion if it is a good thing or if you think that it is the best way to deal with it or what if I saw what I mean. Certainly, from Ade's point of view, we would not have an opinion on the politics of it. What about John Storrell's view? I am not here as John Storrell, unfortunately. I am here to represent Ade's, but our view in any look at the governance structure would be to ensure that all the functions that are required to be carried out at whatever appropriate level are carried out and in 1996 local government reorganisation, as a EU, we took our job is to ensure that whatever the politics were, the structures were, that all the functions that protect children, that ensure quality education, that all those are ticked in terms of functional analysis of the way the system works. Does anybody else? Is there any surprise to you that we believe that schools should remain part of education to control for the simple reason that there are so many other complex areas within schools and the pupils that they work with that require other services to be part of that engagement, social care for example, housing, economic growth I suppose as well because that can govern how a community changes and what educational requirements are required as a result of that. From that perspective, and I agree with John, it's a political question and that's the view that we would hold. Can I just remind the panel and everybody else that I'm asking a question that was asked of me to ask. Okay, thank you. Ross Greer. Just looking at the subject-specific issues that we have with recruitment, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on what targeted efforts could be made in the professional sectors from which you can draw the people with those skills. Most typically, it's STEM subjects that we discuss in this regard. I certainly have personal experience of the techie department at my old school being at one point significantly staffed by engineers who have essentially taken early retirement and done that for the last decade of their career. Is there more work that can be done on this targeted approach to recruitment in the subjects that have acute shortages? It's been referred to earlier, the kind of grow your own approach that Murray talked about started in Aberdeenshire with anybody at Aberdeen University. I know that the University of the Highlands and Islands are looking at that much more local approach. We've got people who live and work in the areas. Can we re-convert them into teachers? Indeed, you'll know that's been done recently with limited success in the oil industry for Aberdeen. I think that a lot more needs to be done and can be done to try to look at the resources that we already have. There's always a temptation to look at resources that you don't have in my experience, and it is quite important to see if we can convert either existing teachers or existing staff employees. There are many employees and councils who work with children already. If they have a degree, could they convert to teaching? There's also a wider job about a recruitment programme. I know that the Scottish Government has already embarked on a recruitment programme for teachers. The big issue is that we need to make the job more attractive in every way for teachers if we're going to tackle the issues. The shortfalls are significant in areas such as technology, such as home economics, computing, religious moral education and PE. We need to focus on those shortage areas. If we're talking about modelling, trying to model how many teachers we need for individual subjects is almost impossible to do. The issue that Johann Lamond raised is an issue. You do get a circle thing, you can't get the teachers, so you don't offer the subject, therefore it becomes less popular. Some of those subjects, such as PE and home economics and technology, it's important that that doesn't happen that we do continue to run them. I've reinforced the point that Jim made, that a number of schools are operating within authorities in consortium with each other, so there will be a strategic view of timetable and secondary subjects, and if there is a real difficulty, there will be efforts made to try to fill that gap in whatever way is possible. The whole notion of long-term planning, under what you're picking on there, is the current and topical issue related to the teacher supply at the moment. That over time has varied and that over time has changed given the shift of the economy for no other reason. You know, you pick on an issue which is a real-life issue for schools and for us as a group. Two aspects to it, I think, might well hear from General Teaching Council in your next session, of the specific and targeted approaches that are being taken at the moment to obviate the things which you have identified for us. But there is obviously a need in the longer term for the profession within the profession. If we're going to influence people to see that teaching is a worthwhile profession to pursue, we're perhaps in the best position ourselves as teachers to be able to do that. And we are critically aware of the important task within developing the young workforce, for example, to say that teaching is a realistic worthwhile option to look at in relation to your future career. So there's kind of a long-termism part of it and a short-term part of it to start to look at what are the specific things just now. But within the model that we're trying to promote and develop to ensure that the supply part of this actually looks at the demand part in a much more positive way. The pathway is very important for attracting people into the profession and to ease that pathway so that you can move from industry or from a second career to a third career in teaching at different points in your career pathway as an individual at any age. And certainly some of the creative work that General Teaching Council has been looking at in terms of easing the arrangements for that, I think that you'll be able to discuss later. But also the ways that the universities have responded with the new pathway routes into the profession should help in the longer term. Universities have had quite a lot of success in recruiting. There's been to these new programmes. Although the oil industry one in Aberdeen wasn't quite as successful as we thought it would be to start with. There's also a lot of local work going on, particularly in my own institution, the University of the Islands and Islands. We're working directly with local authorities and recruiting locally. And our experience from that would be that there is a need to, within the national system, to look at the local information and local need, but for that to be recognised within the way that national planning is done. Just a small point here about creating incentives for people to come into teaching later on. I mean, I don't know if there are figures for the models of back in the day when you started teaching when you were 22 and you were lucky to get early retirement at 55 or whatever. I presume, as in all working lives now, people are doing different things. But what are the incentives that you can build into teaching to people to take the risk to come out of another job and go into teaching at a later stage? One suggestion, for example, where there's a shortage in STEM, we should have pain incentives. Is there a view on pain centres for differentiation by subject for teachers? Secondly, have you looked at the possibility of, if somebody has a lot of experience in industry, they don't come in at the same level as somebody who's just graduated, but you can actually bring them in at a higher point in terms of the pay scale? Is that something, A, that you're looking at and, B, something that the profession and yourselves would contemplate? I think that those are decisions for local authorities themselves to make. In terms of incentives, there are some offering what our exposure called golden hellos to people and effectively holding people to remain for a minimum number of years in the teaching profession. But what that has to be looked at in the context of there is an agreed pain conditions package for teachers. If there are incentives then they are offered at a local level based on the ability of the councils to support that. Obviously, if there is a need or a pressure in relation to particular subjects such as STEM, that will be a focus. But there are some examples already in the existence of that activity taking place. Some of it is not about direct pay incentives, but it would be perhaps support for other something like housing, for example, so that they're not direct pay, but in kind, I suppose, support. There wouldn't or is not having conversations specifically saying actually we need to have a differentiated pay scale. We need to have a means by which somebody will give up a well-paid job in industry to come into teaching and not be expected to be on a salary scale of somebody who's just come out of university at 22. Are we looking at that, both in terms of drawing on that experience and the stages in people's career and specifically on recognising if we don't... I don't think that local authorities should be competing with each other, but if you're competing with sectors that are going to pay relatively well, how do we get... If it matters, are we willing to pay the extra money to get STEM subject teachers into our schools? There is already a bit in the terms and conditions that allows teachers to be paid higher up the scale based on previous experience, but I don't know how much that's used. For some of the examples I've seen, there are... Yes, the recognition is about the quality of the learning and the CPD that the individual is undertaking in order to demonstrate that they are meeting the standard that's required. Councils individually will look at that in the context of each person who's applying for a post. Greg's correct that there is provision within that in the scale, but it does sometimes cause confusion about where people can start and what they think they're entitled to. However, there are methods within the current system that allow that. It appears that it's possible that we do it, but it doesn't get done. Is that a kind of broad answer? No, it doesn't get done. I think we don't know to what extent it is used and that has come up before on other issues, but there is some discretion within it. I suppose if the EIS were here they'd say, well, there's an obvious answer to attract people from a higher salary into teaching. I know that. It's limited to what extent authorities can work within the scheme to make it attractive to people coming from the tech industries and the science industries. In addition to that, as Cathy says, and our authorities have tried generally to put incentives to get teachers in. I think that the bottom line is that they're finding that there aren't enough people applying for the jobs that they have. That's the bottom line. I think that we could maximise all the discretion and power that we have and I think that we would still have a shortfall. I'm expecting that to get better over the next few years, given the work that the Teaching Workforce Planning Advisory Group has done, because don't forget that in most of the degrees there's a four-year lag between turning on the tap and the water coming out the other end. Dylan, you wanted to come in briefly. A small supplementary to the discussion that's been had because remuneration isn't the only incentive for people. There's more and more people wanting to work part-time or for any kind of flexibility around their work in life that might attract people who maybe don't want to apply for full-time posts. Traditionally, I get the impression that people who wanted that flexibility used to go into supply, but they're not doing that so much. Is there anything that really could be done there in terms of recruitment that it's advertised that you could have some kind of flexibility around your working but stability at the same time in terms of a contract? There are vast numbers of primary teachers on job share contracts or part-week contracts. It's not uncommon at all. It's very, very common. It's actually one of the complexities for workforce planning to get a handle on the impact of that because if you've planned on the basis that a set proportion of teachers are going to come out at the other end of the training and they're going to fill full-time posts but quite a number of them end up on job share or part-time posts for whatever reason their personal reasons dictate that they want to do that then all of a sudden your numbers can be quite a way out especially if there's a chain, a transition in behaviours over time. I think that's a really important point and it is a growing feature of the workforce and it does actually add to the complexities and I know in some authorities they're quite worried about the numbers significantly increasing and therefore the difficulties that that means in the school for actually managing twice the number of personnel than they would previously have had to do but it's certainly in the figures and national figures you can see increasing and the reports locally are that it's becoming more and more popular. The workforce is changing and the nature of mobility in the workforce is changing there's just less capacity for people to move these days they're much less willing to move and you heard some of that from the students themselves in terms of where they expected the jobs to be or the other placement to be so it is a changing demographic. Can I just ask some information about some of the graduates coming out of particularly the PGDE programmes a lot of the people coming into the PGDE programmes would actually be defined as career changers. The average age of entry to PGDE programmes is now 25 most entrance to those one year programmes have considerable work experience in a variety of areas so in relation to the discussion about a variety of conditions when going into work the majority of PGDE graduates would already have other work experience and would perhaps expect to be also considered within any measures that were introduced. Okay thank you for that. Liz you've got a very quick supplementary one clarification on related to what Dr Redford's just said do we have reliable statistics about the number of teachers who are coming in from different routes including those who may come from industry or with bursary support from elsewhere do we actually have reliable numbers about that? That information would come from you would have to ask the universities for that but universities collect that he says statistics so it's collected on an annual basis. Okay thank you very much. Claire, you want to talk more about flexibility? Yes thank you convener and I do want to pick up on the point that Gillian Martin was making there about flexibility I think you said earlier in the session John Stoddard that we need to make teaching more attractive and Ken Muir in response to looking at flexible training that is crucial when attracting new people into teaching however some of the evidence the committee has heard runs very counter to that although you were talking about flexible contracts, job sharing and so on we've heard evidence about lack of flexible working opportunities lack of job share opportunities and comments that teaching is less flexible than other professions and I was keen to hear what the panel's comments were on those issues As I said earlier certainly from my membership head teachers and principal teachers and primaries, nurseries and special schools particularly in the primary sector there are vast numbers of job shares and part-time contracts in the teaching staff much less so for head teachers and I'm not sure if that was the evidence that you heard there are very few instances where there are head teachers job sharing Is there a reason for that? Certainly I know a fair number of head teachers who have requested reduced hours or job sharing and they've been turned down and I can only relate that to the fact that local authorities are struggling to recruit head teachers so they would be struggling to fill the other parts of the job Does anyone else have a comment on that particularly with head teachers? Again, Greg and I come from different sectors and have a different perspective on life but in this occasion very similar in relation to the way in which the flexibility of the workforce has developed and expanded over the past 15 to 20 years I can't think of a secondary head teacher who is involved in a job share partnership but below that level just a bit at every other level within secondary education there will be job shares that's deputes down to through the whole system So that does run counter to some of the information committees had I'm really keen to explore then what the rationale would be with the concern about the number of people applying for head teachers that we are saying if you are part time we're not interested in you Big question there's a lot in there there is already an issue of supply of head teachers head teachers are visible to the rest of the school community they are your recruitment pool for your next group of head teachers they're seeing people working in long hours seeing budgets being reduced they're seeing staffing in terms of management time or management posts being reduced so the job at the moment is probably becoming less appealing so it would be difficult for a local authority to say yes to a job share because they're not going to be able to fill the gaps so I can see it from both sides of that Can I just add I just did a report for government and selection of head teachers and I think you included the reference to that report in your papers and we interviewed a lot of deputes and a lot of head teachers we didn't come across any evidence that people weren't applying because it wasn't flexible, it was more the kind of reasons that Greg's talked about in terms of the demands on the job the accountabilities of the job to children, to parents, to the authority to government sometimes the stress of not having enough cover to allow them the management time to do the job it was really the stresses and strains of the job and sometimes a lack of support to actually carry out that job some of them found it quite a lonely job in terms of support in terms of both the mentorship and that side of things but also budgets and support staff and so on around the school so they saw the job as more difficult and demanding and some of the deputes thought that they had reached depute head teacher there wasn't a huge incentive to become head teacher and when they saw the demands of the job personally I think particularly in women's case to look at it and think well that's a step too far in terms of all the demands and stresses and why would I put myself and my family up for that stress I have to say I find that quite an extraordinary statement Mr Stoddor to signal out females as looking at jobs in a particular way what I meant to say was that sometimes men just see it as a competition and they take it as a challenge sometimes women in my experience of speaking to all these people took a more kind of life whole life approach to it the additional stress and anxiety is not worth struggling sometimes that's a personal view sometimes men take those decisions without necessarily considering the full implications and see it as a competition I think we'll move on from that although I am keen to know why the door seems to be closed to part-time or job share if local authorities don't advertise these posts as being flexible then how do they know there's no demand for deputy head teachers to apply for a part-time or a job share head post? I would say they know that there is demand because people do ask for it I know of many members I've spoken to who have been asking their local authority for just that but they haven't been enabled to do that so it's the local authorities who are closing the door on that option? I also would add that you'd heard the evidence from Isabel Marshall in your first evidence session and her description of her reasons for deciding to leave the profession in the first quarter this year we had 17 members who stepped down from headship or left the profession altogether and it was all in response to workload issues looking at the same period the first quarter last year we only had five members doing that and none of them were talking about workload as the key driver were other issues in those five cases and that's just from cases that have gone to my area officers who have been supporting people making that decision Can I ask just very briefly about the other end of the profession then because we did hear about the probation year being inflexible too have you got any thoughts on how that could be made a more attractive part-time job share for particularly people who are maybe coming through with the PGD qualification? There's an option just now you really would need to ask the general teaching council but when students graduate and go into induction year they can choose to do induction year and take a one year post with a local authority and through that are supported or they can choose to meet the standard for full registration through a flexible route which entails working a set number of days within schools there isn't the support system with that because they're not connected to the structures that a local authority has to support teachers on an induction year programme so there is an option at the moment the universities don't really have any further information about that the students leave us and go out into induction year and we do joint work during induction year with local authorities because that's part of the teaching qualification it's not just about what you do in the university setting it's about the induction year and local authorities and completing the standard for full registration I suppose it's an area nationally we could explore in relation to offering other routes to complete the standard for full registration we can ask the next panel the same question Claire okay thank you very much Joanne you want to come in it's on this question of how difficult are we meeting it for people to we've already said there are people out there who could be good teachers who've got great experience but they're not 22 and they're not just coming out of university they're not in a position to do placements wherever at 90 minute thing they might not even want to take the risk of losing a salary for a year in order to train and I wonder what work you've done to look at making the year of teacher education more flexible because I was quite surprised it feels just like what it was like at Jordan Hill I mean genuinely it feels like you've got placements and you do stuff in university now rather than in college but the pressure around you have to make the placement in particular place is not flexibility around your caring responsibilities or what income you have it feels to me it still presumes that somebody is 22 years of age with family support that will allow them to focus and go out in placements so I wonder what work has been done considering how you factor in people's caring responsibilities or whatever into placements how could you change the year's education and are there any means by which you could train as a teacher while keeping your job that is that you could do it part-time flexibly remotely There are two routes currently that you can do that University of Aberdeen has run it's what's called Delight programme with authorities in the north and east particularly Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire, Murray and Highland where local authority employees are supported to career change and they complete the Aberdeen University programme I think over a period of 18 months and that's a structured part-time taught programme University of Dundee last year introduced a similar programme in response to local authority requests and is working currently with Perth and Kinross and Angus Both those universities are going to expand those programmes to offer them across the country University of West of Scotland has run a particular programme with Dumfries and Galloway that I don't have full information about that programme but I think has involved staff being released for a year My own university has worked very closely with Cawrlyn and Angeline Shear over the last year where the Cawrlyn and Angus have supported both their own employees and other people living and committed to living on the islands to complete a one-year PGDE programme The authority chose to offer financial support you heard from one of our students earlier and that person when they successfully complete the PGDE year has agreed to work with the authority in induction year and I think for one year beyond There are a range of through the new routes into teaching there are a range of other programmes where we are looking at condensed telescope programmes that will bring new teachers into the workforce on a faster route The universities would be particularly keen that some of that range because there were 11 different programmes I think 13 of you include the new programme you heard about in University of Edinburgh the oil-based programme in Aberdeen The universities would be very keen that we evaluate these routes and the success of them and look to learn from that and then look at what you've referred to as the traditional model On the question of placement which did come up a lot in the evidence that we got from people who were in the initial teacher education that that becomes a burden on a block not so much actually being in the school with staff was the question about the consistency of mentoring because the pressure is on staff but just simply that thing about not being given lots of notice not being all that suitable and you're not going to be able to drive or you've got caring response you've got to get children to school yourself I mean do you evaluate from your students their concerns about that and does that then get fed into the process of how it doesn't feel like a difficult job to me to have placements that meet the pressures that students are under and I wonder if that's an issue that's come up to you We haven't set my last year being particularly clever as perhaps you're hinting at in the way in which we engage with students and the placement experience We have moved very definitely towards a system where placements schools do not cannot opt out of being a school in which there will be a placement it is assumed now that schools will be opted in so it takes away that part of the negotiation or checking within the university that said that a school doesn't accept people on placement it is now accepted that schools will take people on placement unless there are pre-identified special circumstances if for example principal teacher of the biology department has been absent for a particular period of time we wouldn't perhaps want to put a student into that so that should change the emphasis and perhaps introduce into the system the flexibility, the greater flexibility that you're looking for in relation to being able to match a student who cannot drive to a school which is within their local area as opposed to just let's pick it off the list because those are the only schools which are on the list there'll be many more schools on the list now than ever were before You would also categorise by if we're actively trying to encourage people who have already got a working life and have got families to go into teaching because we recognise there's a shortage why make it difficult for them that they can't manage giving that they're older and they have family responsibilities I think it factors that particular part that individual difficulty experienced by a student whether it be at a 22-year-old or a 41-year-old enables the university to have a significantly greater degree of flexibility and the ability to match if not target the particular demand requirement circumstance of a student into the schools which they have available to them The universities and the local authorities have been working closely with the GTCS who managed the SPS system for us this past year and a number of refinements including that key one about more schools being automatically available for placement have been made and it's actually quite rare for students to end up to have to be asked to travel a considerable distance and I think it's really important that you know that the universities work very closely with students they listen to them they respond to issues that are raised about placement as we do to any other aspect of the programmes that they're following I think it was significant it was definitely a theme across the evidence that we got that that was something that felt that wasn't factored in and it created unnecessary stress on what's in a particular stress for time anyway I wonder just very briefly if a school has to opt in and has chosen not to and we're now saying you've got to opt out do we know what factors are taken into account and why people might do that it would be specific factors within that school or certainly in the sector within individual departments within that school but specific and identified thank you Ross just coming back to this issue of mobility particularly in the region I represent in North East where as you know there are shortages in teachers we've heard from trainee teachers that there's a tendency to gravitate towards a central belt and take positions elsewhere and we've heard about some of the local incentives you've mentioned them yourselves we've had the Golden Hallows help with rent, help with housing but when I asked this last week Lawrence Finlay from Murray Council said that he would actually favour some local flexibility purely because of the risk of local authorities trying to outbid each other so I was wondering if you could talk to me about what you think some of the risk is about that competition with local authorities and what sort of national scheme could be beneficial, what would that look like say something before maybe my colleagues jumping about the risks side of it I think there is a real need to make sure that people are trained in the right places there has been previously a structural unemployment problem within teaching workforce and there have been people in the central belt without jobs and they're not willing to travel meanwhile there have not been enough people in the north-east or highland or Dumfries and Galloway and the situation I think has maybe worsened a little bit and then there are issues about supply all over the country at the moment but the evidence that you were given from both panels that you've seen already it was very clear and the students weren't willing to travel they were talking about you go to somewhere that you're familiar with and I think that's absolutely right so the local knowledge about the number of the demand for teachers in a particular area should feed into how many training places are in each university sorry I think what we'll end up with both in terms of the teacher workforce planning and the individual initiatives will be a national model supplemented by local partnerships with the, like the north-east consortium with a group of authorities and the university trying to fill particular needs for their particular areas I think that that's the way it will pan out and I think that Greg's point is worth reinforcing the figures in research tends to suggest that if you trained all the people in the places where there was the demand and if you were able to match that in terms of a geographical structure to it, we would have much less of a difficulty and the other thing I think I would like to make the committee aware of is that there are a lot of demands on schools in meeting the demands for these places so a school in the central bit, in the central Glasgow requests from one university might cover the four-year course and from other universities all to be in at the same time so it is actually quite difficult to meet the demand for places generally but to meet everybody's individual needs in terms of where they want them is quite a demanding challenge for universities and for the schools themselves and certainly when I worked in Aberdeen I found that the universities tended to gravitate towards the city in the centre of the city as opposed to Aberdeenshire and Moray because it was more convenient and there were cost implications about sending students and tutors all the way out to the far-flung places of Scotland so there are a number of factors about how we try to structure the system so that we are training the people in the places where they are likely to end up because that's what the research tends to show that most student teachers end up in the areas that they trained in. I think there's some evidence from within Scotland in terms of some let's call them financial incentives we've tried to use that has got the effect of encouraging people who are not originally from a rural area into a rural area there's certainly evidence from down south around about this that it's not effective that although you might get people to move into an area initially they will bluntly take the money for that period but actually the retention if they're not originally from that area can be pretty poor so I think John's right starting further back in the process and thinking about people in an area and encouraging them to think about career as a teaching probably would be the more sustainable approach to take in other words it's not just money necessarily it's also thinking a bit more in a more sophisticated way about how you tackle some of these issues Sure, of course Thank you very much for that I would like to pick up Dr Redford just in one of the answers that you gave earlier you talked about the scheme in Aberdeen about getting those who are made redundant in oil and gas into teaching which I presume is the transition training fund you said that hadn't been a success and you're right, the numbers are being really low in terms of those who are going into the teaching profession in particular why do you think that is and what do you think could have been done differently or could be done differently? I don't have detailed information about it but I understand that it was perhaps the people who some of the people who came into the scheme did not have a full understanding of what they were about to undertake in schools and the initial experience in schools wasn't what they thought the career they thought they were going into so I think that they are the main reasons why some people began the programme and dropped out but John might have more information Sorry Across the north of Scotland we've seen the number of registered supply teachers fall so in Aberdeen City there's actually been a 30% drop in the number of supply teachers with many older teachers making up the majority of supply teachers What do you think is putting them off? Do you think it is because of changes in the curriculum? Do you think it is to do with the greater workload which we've spoken about already, particularly in relation to teachers? Why do you think it is that we're seeing such a fall in supply teachers particularly when we need people in the classrooms given the level of vacancy? More general point Mr Thompson which is that over the piece I think I would argue through the various bits of work we're doing in the advisory group we're getting more accurate over time in the national picture in terms of the total requirement for teaching versus the total number of teachers some of you may remember that almost literally seven or eight years ago we had an opposite problem and we've already touched on that where we had arguably too many teachers and there was a huge concern about jobs there so rather perversely by getting more accurate therefore if you like roundabout the edges and supply teaching is one of these bits that's roundabout the edges there is naturally going to be less people available for that part of the market if we can call it that and there's other aspects I think in relation to supply which I'm not so well qualified to comment on but there is that general thing the more precise you get about your predictions then roundabout the edges it'll become much tighter but to say there are other aspects and other colleagues can come in and round there's always been you need at least 10% more than your planned workforce in order to have enough to cover that day and February when everybody gets flu but of course it's a very tricky act to pull off because you'll then have teachers who are on the supply list who'd much rather be doing more work or more regular work or more guaranteed work or full-time work hence a number of authorities have permanent supply pools that refresh every two years so I think the lack of supply is just a symptom of the fact that there are fewer people available for work as teachers so that pool went down in the same way that the supply of teachers went down and in many cases when jobs do come up they're also being in part filled from not maybe the group of staff that you talked about who may have retired and are happy to do it there two per week but there's another group who are looking for full-time employment and traditionally 20 years ago that was the route in for many teachers into full-time employment many people started that way in order to get their foot in the door then get some experience and a reputation and then had a full-time job but you can see that there's a huge balancing act to be done there if the government get it slightly over then you'll have lots of complaints as you did about teachers being unemployed and being trained for unemployment and you can hear the headlines and remember Michael Russell answering that question on a radio phone-in programme but if you get it wrong the other way and authorities can't staff their schools then it makes it difficult for them to fulfil their statutory obligations to provide education so it's a very fine balancing act and it is I find it amazing how close the government manages to get the figures but it's a tricky one Jeremy Puthers wants to go on There are two points John has just put a top on one of them it's related to the make-up of what the supply pool was maybe 10 to 15 years ago and John has quite well described the whole notion of young people coming from initial teacher education finding themselves on the supply pool fulfilling a function within the supply pool for schools but also gaining from that the experience which perhaps would lead them into a job move the system on a wee bit to a point in time where there were growing teacher shortages these people were then gradually incorporated and assimilated into the system the other part of the supply pool make-up was who had retired and who still felt it was something to offer to the profession and over that period of time did that through coming on to the supply pool and supporting schools in that way again run it forward from 10 to 15 years ago the demography is such now that these people no longer feel that they are able to do that and in a period where there are teacher shortages the system diminishes the supply pool in terms of people coming in people who perhaps return to teaching and put themselves on to the supply pool certainly become incorporated into the system and at that point the elder members of the supply pool have decided life holds other things for me other than going into being a teacher every day so hence we are and perhaps the cyclical situation that we are in just now because I know we've already touched on sort of a GTS criteria and the flexibility of that would you agree that it should be made more flexible to allow more highly skilled individuals who maybe have some experience of teaching whether that's been abroad, whether it's been in languages whether it's been through youth work to come into teaching and therefore do you believe that a teach first style system would be one option of doing so don't believe that the teach first structure offers the same depth of learning and establishing a professional identity and development of skills in its structure that it's used in England and Wales where teach first employees are based in schools and in recent years have then completed a postgraduate certificate on a part-time basis while teaching the council of deans feel quite strongly that the model that we have developed in Scotland the one-year PGD particularly the one-year PGD qualification with its halftime in university establishing the learning and professional reflective skills that you need to be able to respond to different teaching situations combined with half of the time in schools working with experienced practitioners is a stronger way to develop the workforce it also is a way to bring people into the workforce and retain them in the teaching workforce the statistics of people retained after completing teach first programmes of work are much lower and the teach first programme itself is premised I mean its original development from teach America and other programmes in other countries is about the development of management and entrepreneurial skills and the focus in certainly the programme established in England and the programme that has been stopped in Wales was very much about providing some community experience and then people leaving the teaching workforce the universities believe our national challenge is to bring people into the workforce and retain them there and in particular in relation to teach first there was an advert in the garden last week from Price Waterhouse Cooper looking for people, graduates who had completed two years with teach first and they could then go on to a career council of deans very focused on working with our partners across education in Scotland to bring people into teaching as a career for a longer term Morag's touched on a piece of evidence around about teach first I'm conscious just looking at the committee's deliberations and so on I don't think there's been much yet looking at other countries, other jurisdictions quite an interesting little booklet of a colleague passed to me the other day as a research study by the Higher Education Policy Institute that looks at the past 20 or so years of development of teacher education and training in England and some of the developments in England I don't think sit very well with Scottish approach to things there's a lot in here I think that it's helpful just to reflect on if nothing else to avoid doing the wrong thing and teach first is covered in here partly I can send a link to this booklet that would be helpful to the committee and there's certainly evidence in there which is helpful I don't have a booklet about education in Barbados I'll see if I can find something I'd like to look at the retention issue a lot of the teachers we've had in here maybe the one that's been mentioned leaving a lot of the issues around it's been about bureaucracy workload and I have noticed in conversations with a lot of teachers that even though there might be moves from for example Education Scotland to get rid of bureaucracy or have a less onerous inspections regime that doesn't seem to be filtering down to teacher level and I would like to ask you what you think is a large arm there is it too much of an expectation on head teachers on their teachers maybe to carry out practices in a certain way or is it directors of education perhaps having expectations on their teaching cohort perhaps start from the education Scotland perspective the writing that teacher shortages did feature in the workload review that we carried out although actually the prime emphasis of that was on curriculum planning assessment and reporting of course teachers and local authorities and head teachers took the opportunity to raise teacher shortages and expectations on head teachers as we've heard for other duties all of which leads to less time for leadership or for preparing for learning and teaching since we wrote that report Deputy First Minister has written to all local authorities to stress the importance of taking action and we've followed that through with our area lead officers and we've been collecting good practice now that's on the website as ways of actually trying to tackle some of the issues that get in the road for teaching every day and give you some examples of that tracking and monitoring just where young people are and what reports for parents can take a lot of time and we have some good examples of that now from different local authorities who are sharing that and we have that on our national improvement hub so I'm again to see the local authorities responding taking our report very seriously and beginning to collect good practice now agreed by all the partners in the local authority including the professional associations that this is actually reducing workload so we're seeing some moves on the teacher level because we heard from a couple of people who've been in front of us that for example going back to inspections that although inspections are less about going around with a clipboard as they were and more about encouraging good practice and about working with schools to improve rather than just a judgment situation that in a lot of schools people are still finding them very stressful in terms of the preparation and lead-up to inspections because there's expectations been put on them by the local authority or by the people running the school one point to say if you're relating certainly head teacher retention to inspection it tends to be more of an issue following an inspection rather than in front of an inspection that's another matter I prefer not to more of a flipping comment let's say by inspection and the inspection regime I think that as you tend to have hinted at has changed and changed quite remarkably over the course of the past five years it would not be it would not be the process now it is not the process now that it was certainly in the first inspection as a head teacher that I went through and that was maybe 15 years ago the exercise is very much an exercise in sharing it's an exercise in understanding yes there will be challenges made to the school but there will also be support made to the school and the regime is much much more flexible and much more responsible and it would be a response now than it ever was to tie in the inspection process to teacher retention I would be struggling to find a link in there there was just one example of workload I suppose I was using that as an example of one of the areas where you're trying to get rid of the unnecessary workload at a top level but it's not filtering down that was one example that was highlighted I would have the same concerns as Jim about making that link in the sense that it's a sample model so inspectors are only coming through the door of a primary school about 11, 12 years every 11 or 12 years so it's not an on-going big issue for schools however the lead-up to inspection is a stressful experience as you would expect and it does create a lot of additional workload as schools try to present themselves in the best possible light at all levels and the inspectorate have been doing try-outs of short notice inspections so two days notice and that's something that as an association I'm very much welcome that's something we've had and feedback from members for a long time and have been presenting to Education Scotland as a potential direction to take and there were try-outs there were some difficulties around about those try-outs that the inspectorate are trying to overcome and hopefully we're going to be seeing more of the short notice inspections in the not too distant future and I know that there are different issues perhaps in very large establishments or some secondaries but in terms of workload issues what our members tell us the top seven workload issues for them are reduction and removal of class cover so head teachers are spending in primary schools a vast amount of time covering class because there's a shortage of teachers second is that they would like more management time or protected management time or a greater management team because in a number of authorities they've seen the number of hours of management time reduced the number of personnel in the management team reduced and I think you had some information previously about the number of joint headships that were cropping up around the country and is that a decision made by the local authority in terms of that structure? yes and it's different in each authority and it's not until you get to 3rd place that it's reduction in bureaucracy that comes through and then after that it's proper support for additional support needs pupils right thank you jolien con thank you I'd also like to look at some of the issues around retention of teachers because obviously that very much affects the workforce planning Julian Martin's already mentioned about workload and obviously teachers see the environment they work in as being overly bureaucratic but there's other issues as well including for example around salaries especially in the early years do you have any evidence that salaries are causing a difficulty with retention of teachers particularly in those early years? that is point of view I don't have that evidence I looked at a couple of authorities just in preparation for the meeting today and there doesn't appear to be a problem with retention rates and when you look at authorities that have a less retention rate and you look into the reasons why people leave often it's to get a job nearer to where they where they live so the main reasons for people leaving would be retirel or to get another job elsewhere and all authorities would have some system for exit interviews and so on can I just clarify what you said you said there's not a problem with retention rates no I say I don't have adage doesn't have information that there is a problem that's not to say that there isn't one we must have some statistics some figures that back it up that there is a retention issue I'll give you a wee bit of help there I think we organise across all of the university sector a couple of surveys that look at retention of graduates or graduate destinations I should say and in relation to teacher education within six months of graduating it's around about 98% of people who have been students are in the teaching profession we also do one that looks a bit further out to about three and a half years after graduation there are significant problems the further you get out trying to contact the pool of people who have been through an education program whatever area it is so that's around about three and a half years out with the caveat I've already given it's around about the same percentage it's around about the 97, 98% so it looks high although I do caution the further you get out the more difficult it is to be sure of the accuracy of the statistics I think the other really fact would be to look at the absence rates which all authorities do in very detail and treat it seriously and it's not it's actually quite positive for teachers compared to other professions and to other council workers so you're looking at three, four per cent average or slightly below average seems to conflict a little bit with some of the evidence that we've been taking another issue which was brought up it was about lack of promotion the change in the structure flattening of structure and lack of available progression as there used to be through the years is that a valid reason at a certain point in a teacher's career that impacts their willingness to carry on I think that it's an issue for the profession and it was noted in the report that was done on head teacher recruitment there has been a flattening of the structures and the differentials certainly between deputy head and head teacher do not encourage or incentivise enough people to go on and take that step and in fact in a large school as a deputy you can be earning more than you are in a head teacher of not much smaller school so there are issues about the structure and the opportunities for promotion whether that encourages people to leave the profession I don't think that there's any evidence for that and people saying that they want to leave or that they're unsatisfied with their jobs and actually resigning of course is a huge step between those two things and in these circumstances you would have to be very determined to resign a post in teaching so there's a number of nuances in there about getting to the bottom of how people actually do feel about their job but I think that the evidence shows that people are not as satisfied as you would want them to be in a workforce-like teaching where morale is very important and that's not to say that there aren't the energetic teachers brilliant teachers everywhere but generally you do hear negative views about the pressure, the stress and the difficulty of doing the job without all the resources that were previously available so that in the last time you could have conducted a survey to say that teachers were reasonably happy I think was not long after the macron and the teaching profession of the 21st century and that was in 2001 2002 it was 2006 it was fully implemented but these things have been in education for 40 years and these things do come in cycles and I was looking at it yesterday they come in 20-year cycles where you do get some attempt to really structurally address the dissatisfaction and it goes back up to good and then over a period as pay and conditions and the economy declines you get more dissatisfaction all the teachers we spoke to quoted the complexity of additional support needs within the classroom as being an issue because obviously teachers can't be an expert on everything have you had any feedback on that is that a reason for having retention issues down the line a premise I don't think there are significant retention issues the figures don't tell me that there appears to be two different things one is that we get evidence saying that the teachers are thinking of leaving blah blah blah but there doesn't seem from what we're getting from you is that they may well say that but they don't do it earlier just to emphasise the statistics I was quoting was about recently graduated teachers so within six months and three and a half years I think some of the other evidence information input the committee has received of course is about the teacher workforce throughout the whole of its career and these are two different things but again we don't seem to be getting from any other witnesses any evidence to suggest that there is a problem with retention Greg are you going to now prove me wrong well as I said earlier in the first quarter this year there was a report and it was those are the ones that our area officers had supported so there may be more that I'm not aware of but they were all quoting workload it wasn't the pay it was the workload that was the issue but that workload affects people's decisions about applying for headship so it's not retention but it's recruitment into headship where that's an issue and pay is also an issue there because as John said all those things are arrived at for school leaders if you're in a a larger school as a deputy why would you take on the role of a headteacher for less money so there is a problem with financial incentives as well as the workload issue Dylan, do you want to come on? I just want to add to that to develop the discussion a wee bit further John picked up the notion of TP-21 and what it put into the system in relation to support and financial support and financial remuneration for the profession there is no doubt that there has been an erosion of teacher's terms financial conditions over that period of time and it sits there in the middle of any discussion in relation to retention and attraction of people into the profession it can be made attractive it's not something that I would suggest it would be a major thing in relation to getting people in here by comparison with other professions which they are choosing another part related to this is very much related to job sizing toolkit and the fact that it is used to differentiate pay grades within senior leadership, within schools in Scotland it wasn't particularly fit for purpose in the year 2000 and the system has changed significantly since that and much of what is expected of senior leaders within Scottish secondary schools is not captured in any way by the job sizing toolkit and the thing that John picked up in relation to differentials why would you become a head teacher if a financial incentive did not exist for you to do that if you are a deputy in a large secondary school would you move and the issues are related perhaps to geographical issues to a small rural secondary school where by dint of the job sizing toolkit you weren't going to be financially rewarded and you had to do with all the upheaval of moving yourself from a comfortable place in the central belt of Scotland to a rural environment which might be very attractive to you but financially it is not worth your while in doing that with the job sizing toolkit that is trying to run a 4G phone on a first generation SIM card that's where we are with it okay, thank you very much for that just to make some clarification about the job sizing toolkit the toolkit was designed some years ago prior to CFE I think there's acknowledgement by those that use the toolkit and by those who train council staff the use of the toolkit that it's not as it's not foolproof for the reasons that I've just set out it doesn't take account of the changing landscape in terms of CFE the increased number of subjects that might be taught but at the time when it was developed it cost several million pounds to develop and I don't think anyone has the budget to change that because if you change one aspect of it you have to change everything else within it so I think, I hear what others have been saying about that but there would be a financial disincentive I think at the very least unless someone can come up with that that volume of resource to change it then I think it's unlikely it'll change in the near future who could you want to Yes, thanks Just on the point around retention is there an issue of a lack of a career progression structure short of management that very quickly if you want to progress your career within teaching you have to move into management because there simply aren't the promoted posts before that point That's probably the case the chartered teacher under the Macron attempted to resolve that issue in doing that so it is a job where you often have to give up the expertise that you have as a teacher in order to take on management responsibility and I don't think there's an easy solution to that I know that in the Macron report there was a kind of hint or suggestion that you could award short term additional payments in a way that the structure in teaching in England what successfully did where you could get an additional responsibility payment for a year, two years and these could be at different levels in order to develop a curriculum reward good practice and so on but that wasn't accepted it was seen by some as who would decide who gets them and would it be fair and would it actually reward practice or how would you administer and manage such a reward system so I think there are issues there about how you keep the best teachers in the classroom I again, personal anecdotes but I think it is relevant I do sometimes hear of excellent teachers and their way out is to become a guidance teacher that's their way into management and I always think it's a real boss because the people I know are the last teachers and then they create a vacancy in a shortage of subjects that's very difficult to fill so there are structural issues Is the charter teacher system still operating and do you have a view on why it failed because I think that senior teacher kind of role kind of did that you get a bit of extra responsibility but the balance of your time was very much focused in the classroom Has there been any work done on why it failed? Maybe Jim could answer that I know why I think it failed As do I It kind of fell by the wayside because it ultimately did not fulfil the function that it was intended to do in the first place which was to recognise good practice and reward good practice and have it promoted within the school and use it within the school what it eventually became was an exercise to go through to get yourself more pay There is an opportunity out there within I would suggest what Scottish College for Educational Leadership is doing to start to look at one or two of the kind of things that have been suggested through here and to move it on perhaps a wee bit from Ross's original question who talked a bit into management to start to look at into leadership role within schools which could be recognised and acknowledged and financially rewarded within the structure of leadership which is developing within scale and within the scale leadership framework The universities were very much involved in the charter teacher programme and it involved a development of a lot of masters based programmes focused entirely on practice and the universities would feel quite strongly that aspect while we have continued to offer those programmes the ending and the closure of the charter teacher scheme meant that teaching in Scotland did not reap the full benefits of that going on and coming back fully into practice and it's an area the government have continued to support the development of masters level learning for teachers who are then through the work they do within university based programmes able then to lead developments within school and within their clusters and contribute in a stronger way to curriculum and other developments within school and that was an aspect that was beginning to come through in the group of graduates who were working in schools within the charter teacher programme and finally Ruth Maguire has a number of questions from the teachers agreement As a convener mentioned we had a focus group with teachers last week I probably want to put on record our thanks to them for their frank and open discussions that we had with them it was very valuable we asked them the teachers what questions they would ask you some of them just now and the first ones are for Cosla and Addis and the question is what planning do education authorities have for long term leave like maternity leave or in anticipation of people taking planned retirement John has already made reference to the fact that those who wish to retire for teaching are only obliged I think to provide about two months worth of notice in terms of their intention to retire so that can create issues in terms of making decisions on recruitment and work force planning maternity different prospect and obviously I think those who are considering are indicating that they plan to take maternity leave offer that information at different times depending on their individual circumstances I suppose the other factor in that is whether or not they decide to take a full year's leave at the other end or decide to come back earlier and that's very much a personal decision so all of those factors will have to be borne into but undoubtedly communication from the teacher to the school to the education authority is key to all of that and I'm sure there's always better ways that that can be done to encourage clearer work force planning as a result I suppose you're setting out what happens but what planning do local authorities and education departments do because you do particularly with a take on board your point about the two months notice for retirement but for maternity leave you off and have a I would imagine a longer lead up to that I tend to work very closely with head teachers in the staffing staffing is a big responsibility and indeed authorities will have dedicated at least one person sometimes a whole staffing section sometimes that's within the service sometimes it's within corporate personnel so part of a head teacher's anxiety and worry will be staffing so there'll be regular visits to schools just to look at those issues and the head teacher would be the first if somebody's gone off on maternity leave or if there's an idea that somebody may or may not retire albeit they might not formally inform the authority to the last minute which is understandable and they'll plan on that basis and they'll begin the search as soon as they know that a vacancy is about to arise and they'll do it from within their own staff they'll do it from within their own contacts if that fails they'll be a wider search and quite often in the staffing round those kind of issues are tackled before you start filling posts with probationers and new people so there's a staffing timetable that starts with P1 enrolment and goes all the way through to August ending up with the actual staffing in the school so those are dependent on how much notice the head teacher in the school gets but that planning would start early and they could be drawn from locally they could be drawn from the supply pool and if there's a permanent supply pool you can do it that way but often those known planned vacancies are filled before you get into your probationer teachers that you would take some of those and then wider advert so there's almost like a set of Russian dolls of internal and wider internal across the authority before you go to external and try and fill those posts okay on the topic of recruitment as well one of the questions that they pose was why are they required to use the My Job Scotland portal the example that was given was a small school that wanted to hire a support assistant and posting in My Job Scotland resulted in 300 applications for a job which meant the recruitment process was pretty onerous for that My job was set up principally to help councils cut costs in terms of advertising particularly in teaching but not restricted to teaching posts My job team in Coslam monitors this on a fairly regular basis and advertising I think and I'm looking at a document that I received from a colleague last week that savings are significant in relation to this in terms of both print and online costs the posts are not depends on the type of posts it is My job has an engagement with tests for example on unpromoted posts and that's taken down in additional costs so there's an opportunity there to further expand the range of which posts are advertised other posts done through other online sites where there's no additional cost and the point that I'm trying to make is that we're trying to save councils money by taking it on through the portal we've also trying to develop a supply portal to tackle some of the other issues that we've already discussed this morning and to look at that in terms of post recruitment and regularly booking supply teachers for different posts but it was done because it was a cost saving to councils because the advertising costs through the print media were becoming unsustainable Okay, thank you The next questions are for Education Scotland and I'll just use their phrasing, this is not mine do Education Scotland and SQA communicate with each other Yes, we do Yes, there's a lot of very regular meetings naturally it happens in different forums nationally where we have local government partners run the table here and often with SQA at various meetings but also we have direct links through our team of curriculum experts so our science expert would be very closely connected to the science senior team I suppose my question would be why would a teacher think that you don't communicate well with SQA Yeah, I'm interested to explore that There's not something you would recognise No, there's not something that I would recognise from our discussions Another thing that came up was about the documents that are issued to teachers and it was mentioned by one of the panel members as well The question that the teachers have posed here is do you consider that the documents issued to teachers suggest Education Scotland to treat teachers as professionals? That is absolutely the intention ever since curriculum friends started the documents that we provide in an example I'll go back to the links with the SQA in there that where there's a major change in any qualification be it computer science that could be changing because of the revised experiences and outcomes or science in the past then the materials that we provide are aimed at the professionals they are not telling teachers what to do far from it, it's giving illustrative examples of the kind of approaches that can be taken so they're not prescriptive Is there a way that teachers can feed back to you how they are received? Yes, we actually have groups if we have a programme any programme of support for literacy, numeracy there's always a feedback loop in there if there's a development that we have on-going then there's a feedback loop but of course there's a general enquiries email address on the website where anybody can Okay, thank you Thank you very much for that that brings us to the end of the first panel so thank you all for your attendance and you're answering quite a number of questions I'll suspend for a couple of minutes to change panels welcome everybody back and we'll now move on to the second panel and I welcome Ken Muir, chief executive and Ellen Doherty, director of education, registration and professional learning both from the GTCS I'm going to start by just asking Daniel Johnson to begin the questioning on ITE So you'll no doubt be aware where we've been spent the last few weeks looking at the quality of teacher education and I think our wider examination looked at curriculum for excellence role and accreditation what are your reflections on how teacher training needs to adapt to curriculum for excellence and what are the lessons learned and how does that inform your accreditation process Yeah, I think I would go back to my previous experience as chief inspector of education with Education Scotland where we had the responsibility with Education Scotland, the legal responsibility to undertake the review of initial teacher education programmes at the ministers behest and I think we're talking now best part of about six or seven years ago where the universities were approached by inspectors to look at their readiness for curriculum for excellence and I think in this two stage process that we undertook initially they were not as well prepared as we might have hoped for but at the second stage which was about nine months later they had shown significant improvement and I think what we have seen is a genuine attempt at the university programmes to meet the needs of curriculum for excellence a very complex and wide range of needs that teachers require through their initial teacher education programme so I would suggest that the universities have come a long way that's not to say I think that the teacher education programmes necessarily cover wholly what is required in order to deliver curriculum for excellence successfully but I think we recognise from the schools the implementation of curriculum for excellence that there is still a way to go in teachers understanding the philosophy and the thinking behind curriculum for excellence in order that it can be implemented successfully so in our evidence we focused quite extensively on literacy and numeracy do you think that's one of the areas that we need to have renewed focus I think it's important for committee to understand that the teacher education programmes so for Scotland are credits they do it on a six year basis I think a lot of the programmes that were being referred to by witnesses in the previous hearings were programmes that we probably accredited the best part four, five, six years ago we have a fairly significant programme of reaccreditation coming up in the coming session I would have to admit I think that the focus on literacy and numeracy perhaps even health and wellbeing digital literacy is prominent when we accredited those programmes that many students coming through the system have experienced last year because of our expectations and the feedback that we had from universities themselves there was a strong sense that we needed to major much more during the accreditation process on the likes of literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing and digital literacy and committee has a copy of the questions and the areas of policy in fact on accreditation that we submitted as part of our submissions to you and you'll see that literacy and numeracy health, wellbeing, digital literacy in particular feature much more prominently and in this last year this last academic session we have accredited a number of university programmes and in some of those we have commented on the need for them to focus more on aspects of literacy and numeracy and some elements within the Crickham for excellence area I think we also I think encountered concern that perhaps what the faculties were teaching was learning about learning rather than really helping student teachers develop technique is that a balance that you think needs to be looked at again? When we are accrediting programmes we are looking for a balance of practice and I think it's important to understand that particularly where we have a one-year postgraduate programme it is in fact one year but it is then followed up with an induction year a probationary year which is wholly based in a school funded by the Scottish Government where the probationers receive a salary which builds on the placement experiences that they would have had in their single postgraduate year so I think what we are looking for when we are accrediting a programme is to try and ensure that there is enough scope for teachers to understand the complexities of teaching because we know it is not an easy job that we folks sitting round this table will be teachers previously who know that but at the same time have enough opportunity to develop that theory into practice and to be supported to do so through the teacher induction year which is the probationary year in a programme within Scotland in order to prepare teachers as best as possible for becoming fully fledged teachers I've just got one last question so you've pointed out that you're responsible for accreditation and that's obviously being looked at again for a number of institutions convinced on a six-year basis do you think it's a weakness that you're responsible for accreditation but for not then looking at the implementation which rests with Education Scotland brought under one body? I think there's certainly a disjoint there the university programmes before they come to GTC Scotland for accreditation go through an internal university accreditation process so there's a QAA oversight of those programmes as I said ministers can request HM inspectors to undertake a thematic aspect review of an element of teacher education general teaching council on doesn't have that statutory responsibility I think in fairness I would say that we do work very closely with the Scottish council of deans of education and what was previously the STEC which was Scottish teacher education council in taking feedback on the success or otherwise of the implementation of the teacher education programmes but there is undoubtedly a disjoint there between having a body that accredits but not necessarily having a quality assurance role in the implementation Thank you very much Daniel Mr Muir may I declare an interest as a registered member of GTCS Mr Muir one of the concerns that we've had given previous panels is about the workforce planning issue and the fact that students have raised concerns that there is a lack of consistency in some of the delivery of the programme and we've obviously heard this morning that there seems to be some real issues about definitions of that workforce planning in terms of the numbers and what they actually mean Were you surprised to hear the evidence that came particularly from the body that we had two weeks ago who made pretty strong criticisms that for some workforce planning in terms of student trainees it wasn't really working very well were you surprised by that I was and the general teaching council do take feedback from students and I have to say that I was surprised and I think our evidence would have suggested that there is a degree more positivity within the students than perhaps committee heard. I'm not denying in any way that the issues that were raised were perfectly valid issues but I go back to the review of the impact of the Donaldson report teaching Scotland's future that was published last year and there's a specific question asked about the extent to which students felt that their initial teacher education programme adequately prepared them for moving into their probationary year. Now the figure of 92% response to that ITE year either having been effective would seem to suggest that there are, whilst there are undoubtedly individual teachers and students who have some difficulties with the system that it's a system that in the main produces teachers who are as ready as they can be and as you've heard before from witnesses it's called initial teacher education for a reason it is initial teacher education and I think particularly where there is a near postgraduate programme then it is very difficult and it is a demand on the universities to try and include as much as they can in a practical sense and making the link between the theories of teaching and learning and the practice in order to cover the full gamut and additional support needs that Mr Beattie was referring to earlier I think it's a good example of that when you look at the range of additional support needs that are confronted with in schools now to adequately prepare a student teacher for that whole gamut of additional support needs it is a big ask it's not to say that it shouldn't be touched on and it is touched on undoubtedly within initial teacher education programmes but I think that we have a system which yes it could be much better and I think there is certainly inconsistency as the content analysis report on the coverage of aspects of literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing to some extent I think that's how you measure what is literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing which maybe gives some of the reasons why there's such variation but I think what we have done within the general teaching council for Scotland with the accreditation criteria is to be able to identify literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing digital technology as something that does require more profile within the teacher education programmes and from what we have seen in the five programmes that we have accredited this year although we are giving some recommendations to some of those programmes to improve that generally I think that has been taken on board positively by the universities could I just follow up on the concerns that we had that the quality of some of the placement experience was very variable notwithstanding the fact that many students were very positive about that placement there were other students who were making the case that they were simply used as cover that they were used more or less to make the coffee and that they didn't have a quality experience if I'm right, one of the changes you've made in the GTCS is to move from an opt-in system to an opt-out system could I just clarify whether that opt-out will refer to an individual school or whether it will refer to individual departments within that school because if I understood matters correctly a couple of years ago we had problems with a lot of departments who were not accepting trainees and that's been part of the issue about this quality of experience could you just clarify that for us and Ellen may want to say something around this but I might just start off by saying that student placement system the general teaching council operates on behalf of a partnership it's a partnership between the schools the local authorities and the universities we operate the machinery it is for those partnerships between the schools, local authorities and universities to ensure that the information that goes into the system around the students where they stay where they're travelling from whether they get public transport or travelling by private transport whether they're looking for a denominational school it is a requirement on those partnerships to make sure that there are sufficient placements and that all of that data is accurate before it comes to the general teaching council we simply crank the handle when those ingredients if you like have been put into it and what comes out are the placements now there is a student placement management group which has got representation from all of the stakeholders we also have a user group which is largely made up of folk who operate the system at the sharp end there are certainly a number of students who find out relatively late because I recognise that as being one of the issues that they are being placed in a particular school where we've got four-year students coming in in their first year and where we've got one-year postgraduate students coming in to teacher education they may not find out that they are eligible to come on to that course or receive their SQA results the SQA results come out at the end of the first week in August the first placements that some university programmes have in place take place at the end of August that gives us basically a two or three-week window for the universities to feed the information into the system and for the placements to be identified for the schools then to confirm that those placements are still valid for the local authorities to confirm that they're content with them and for that information to be sent out to the student concerned so I think we've made fairly substantial steps on the back of last year to improve the system so that folk find out as early as they possibly can and one of the changes this year that the management group have made is a set of 18,000 placements for the whole year at the beginning of the year last year we divvied it up by term and that caused more problems probably than it solved but effectively the system if the data, if the ingredients coming into our machinery are accurate and there are enough placements agreed between the schools, the local authorities and the universities and these are prerequisites before they come in then we can produce perfectly valid placements which agree within the protocols that have been set and I know travel time has been an issue in some folk complaining about the amount of time I was wanting to come back on that It's related to to this problem about accuracy of data I think that the bottom line that we're obviously concerned about as a committee is that we have a shortage of teachers and there are people out there to teach but for one reason or another they feel that there are constraints within the system that are preventing them being in the classroom and this morning I was concerned from the previous panel that nobody's quite able to explain exactly why these barriers are in place what I'm driving at is that what do we have to do to ensure that all those teachers and those who want to teach are actually able to do so in your opinion where is the blocking in the system that is preventing more people coming into the teaching profession and ensuring that we get them into a very good job where are the blocks? Well I think the committee itself has heard evidence around the status of the teaching profession I think that that is an issue I think some of the negativity that is in the press and media around teaching is certainly a block I think that there is a need to look at greater flexibility that was picked on earlier on to allow folk to have more flex in terms of how they train to become a teacher a good example of that would be the teacher induction scheme that we have which covers the probationary year there are blocks within that in that it only is allowed for those to fulfil it on a full-time basis and it is only home-funded students who are eligible for it we know and GTC Scotland has been doing a lot of work over the last two years with jurisdictions in other parts of the world to try and encourage teachers to come to Scotland we know from the survey that we did and members have got a copy of it the UK Cord research into those who have lapsed from the register last year one of the reasons for that is that folk were unable to secure a job in Scotland or had been trained in Scotland being an overseas student and then the immigration and visa requirements meant that they couldn't then continue their job so I think that there's something around greater flexibility in allowing folk into the teaching profession to better meet their needs it's no longer the traditional model of a student that you fulfil a four-year programme we need to look at ways in which we can offer more flexibility for teacher education programmes and also for folk who wish to change career who want to come into the teaching profession because again that's never really been a major issue where we've had a surplus of teachers in the past I personally think that there are issues about immigration and they're not helpful but I think there are other issues too we do have teachers who are perfectly well qualified and very experienced from other jurisdictions who would like to teach in Scotland and we want to encourage that and you know there is anecdotal evidence out there that some schools are finding it very difficult to get these people accredited and I'm just interested to know I mean I know you've done quite a lot of work already to try and prove this but you know we're in a situation of teacher shortages and I think it's absolutely vital to see up those who are properly accredited and I think it's absolutely right that it is a properly accredited profession but that they are able to teach in Scotland. I know that Eileen and her team have been doing a lot of work on the registration of teachers to try and increase that flexibility and she may want to say something around that. I think to just going back to any other point you made there there's also those who would want to return to teaching I'm always interested to hear particularly those who around year 5 have decided it's time to have their family which is absolutely great it's keeping a number of children of Scotland schools up the way that we would want them to be but actually that maternity leave can turn into a career break and the curriculum moves on and teachers then don't want to feel as if they don't know so one of the barriers is what is available to support them to return to teaching and these are people that the Scottish education system have already invested in and so we need that support Edinburgh University has already designed a return to teaching programme which is now going to be disseminated nationally and I think that's a way of bringing what we have is already some resource available to us for them to come back I think too in terms of the diversity in Scottish teaching that's important and that includes those who work abroad or work out with Scotland as well and there is a qualification framework that is there underpinning the work of the GTC I would say to committee is quality the children of Scotland really deserve the very best so part of our job is to identify that quality and look at qualifications or to help people on their way to coming into the profession so as Mr Muir has already suggested we have moved on as an organisation moving away from just the full registration that you would expect from a university finally to looking at the qualifications that people are bringing from out with Scotland and giving them provisional conditional registration which means that they are coming with some of the base requirements but there is a learning gap and we are setting up programmes for professional learning to allow them to be in our schools but to maintain that quality at the same time so we now have a full range of registration categories full registration, provisional registration for probationers provisional conditional registration for those who are coming from abroad as well and that includes provisional conditional registration for those who may wish to move from the college sector into the secondary sector and that is a way that we have moved to help those who in college bring STEM expertise and committee has heard this morning there is a shortage there to take that expertise particularly in vocational education subjects and to help the school system so we are actively looking not at a deficit model but we are looking at what people can bring we are looking at that as learners and we are actually looking at quality My last point how many possible teachers potential teachers are on your books just now who are awaiting accreditation because they have come from another jurisdiction Please I think that we can supply definitive numbers of that because they change day and daily and happy to provide that committee but I'm able to say that from January this year throughout the number of registrations that we have had to take forward is about 452 It will be helpful to get that Thank you Claire, you I wanted to ask a question specifically on some of the information that you gave and replied to Liz Smith about placements and student placements and the difficulties that we heard about in terms of people being told quite late in the piece where they were going How long have you been running education and postgraduate education throughout Scotland? In terms of the student placement system? Yes This is our third year of it How long have universities known when SQA puts out their exam results and people find out when they're going to university at the start of August? How long has that system been in place? I think what I was talking about were students who are awaiting confirmation that they've been accepted for a teacher education programme How long has that system been in place because from my understanding it's quite some years different to many other applicants for university programmes who wait until the SQA results come out at the beginning of August to know if they've been accepted for a programme that might start in September The issue with the student placement system is that the placement patterns that universities have some of those placement patterns this coming year will start on 29 August 30 Why? It's a good question but one of the questions that we ask of the programmes that we are now accrediting under the new accreditation criteria is do those programmes allow for them to be contained within the student placement system in a way that is practical and doesn't create the kind of difficulties that we've had in the last few years but what would be needed in order to change that would be a different placement pattern a different time of placement starting within the universities There are some universities that don't start their placements until September and one in particular doesn't start their placements until January but I think that would be more a question for the universities in terms of what it is they are looking for in their programme and how they balance up the delivery of the theory with the practice on placement Surely if you're the organisation that has the oversight of that why then are you allowing universities to have placements at the end of August which are just logistically impractical when other ones are able to schedule their programme that they have three, four, five months leading? I wouldn't say they're impractical I think for some individuals it is but as I said the things that we are asking the universities now when we're accrediting the programmes now that we have the student placement system is that very issue is it feasible given the placement pattern that's being expected within this programme is it feasible that it fits into the student placement system in a way that it doesn't create difficulties or some of the difficulties that we've had in the past To make the point that concerns about late notification weren't just for the first term it was actually throughout the student experience so I wondered whether I wondered whether in the process you're recognising the change in nature of a student in initial teacher education that is that maybe folk who are older and have got family response are these factors properly fed into except you're just running a machine to whether it's effective or not so late notification is a huge difference if you've got family responsibilities or whatever then if you don't and I wonder whether that flexibility across the student body is allowed for in the process I think when the system operates there is always the opportunity when we produce the placements for the universities or the schools to reject that placement and often when we find that universities reject placements it's because of personal circumstances so we're not we're not at the initial stage of putting the ingredients into our machinery asking about whether they have, for example, caring arrangements or if they have family circumstances If that does not make and that feels that you're building in a delay then if I've got a young family to be able to do a placement that involves an hour and a half travel in both directions by public transport it's just physically not going to be able to do it surely it must be possible if you want me to come into teaching as an older person with the experience to minimise the barriers given that we already had evidence that people have to give up their jobs they have to have no salary for a year or whatever unless in one special programme are you looking at developing a system that is as sensitive as that rather than at the next stage you haven't said well I can't do that which creates a lot of tension and stress for everybody involved I think that there are a couple of answers to that one is there is flexibility in that the universities who know the individual students can reject the placement that's been offered and can put in a placement that's more appropriate to the needs of that individual the system doesn't do that from the off I think we could certainly look at it and as I say it's been something that the management group that's overseeing it has considered because we do recognise that when placements are rejected it tends to be for those very personal family related circumstances in terms of the travel time again that's been agreed that 90 minute travel time protocol was agreed with the universities as being an appropriate time the average travel time for students using SPS is 28 minutes and that's not to say there aren't some for whom they're much closer to the 90 minutes but I think it's something that the programme management group is aware of and as the organisation that turns the handle then we would be as keen as any to make sure that the placements are as sensitive as possible the other issue that I thank you for that I think it would be worthwhile reflecting on these concerns cutting out slack in the system because you wait until somebody rejects it when they know at the beginning what they're capable to say but I wonder do you monitor closely this question of mentoring given it's such a significant part of the course that you're effectively mentored in schools there's some evidence not that folk were criticising staff but they just recognised it so much else going on it's very difficult for them to do that job properly and have you thought about proposals to protect the mentor role so that it is such an important change I think in the experience of teachers that they have got a proper mentoring role over probation but is that something you're looking at? Absolutely Mr Muir referred to the recently accredited programmes that have a lot of attention in the probation year clearly there's time set aside which is formal for mentoring in the student year not so much so and in looking at the programmes we are actively asking the universities how are mentors being decided for students in school and equally making the point that mentoring is a particular role and that the individuals who are chosen to take forward that role to be able to lay those foundations very strongly at the beginning we have got some work going on with some of the universities where in fact they've developed modules to support mentors both for students and probationers over the piece so that that quality of mentoring is actually improved across the piece so we're actually working on that and we know the influence that that can have to a good beginning Thank you very much Ross of time but going back to your comments Ken on additional support needs we absolutely agree that with the incredibly broad spectrum of needs that there are there that every teacher cannot get that full gambit of knowledge in their initial teacher education but from the evidence that we've had so far the level of inconsistency between universities and between courses on this is incredible we shouldn't take anecdotal evidence as gospel but there was one bit that came to us where they said that it was simply an optional module in the fourth year which seemed completely inadequate surely it's your role to ensure that there is at least a higher minimum standard that all these courses are reaching it is and we try to do that through the accreditation process and one of the things that we do make very clear when we are accrediting programmes is that if there are any electives or options or modules that are not part of the mainstream programme then they need to look closely at whether they should in fact be and additional support needs is a good example and if you look at the criteria you'll see very clearly there's a strong expectation that those programmes contain enough of a baseline of coverage of additional support needs so that teachers when they're going out into classes either students on placement or in their probationary year are getting enough experience and support to try and deal with at the very least areas of additional support needs Do you recognise that a lot of the evidence that we've received has been indicated that that's not happening not consistently? I think it's perhaps not as consistent as it might be I think that's been shown in the content analysis report and certainly in some of the evidence I think we need to remember that as I said the initial teacher education in the probationary year is really just the beginnings of a career for teachers and we need to look perhaps more closely at how those newly qualified teachers are supported beyond the probationary year because as a teacher myself there would be youngsters coming into my classrooms who brought particular difficulties that I wasn't exposed to either through teacher education or in my probationary year so there is something about that on-going engagement that teachers have in their own professional learning to understand and see in a practical sense how they can deal with some of the youngsters who are bringing increasingly complex needs into the classroom Thank you very much Claire, do you have more questions? I was just very briefly about flexibility we'd heard from our last panel about flexibility in the probationary year and I wonder if you could perhaps comment on how you see your role in terms of ensuring there is some flexibility to retain some of the teachers who like John Llewont have been talking about perhaps more caring commitments or other commitments outside of the profession I think we are certainly considering that in terms of where we can support teachers I think the nature of the teacher population is changing and those who are coming into teaching is changing and therefore we need to be more sensitive to that so you all know the design of the probationary year at the moment that we are reflecting on could that be delivered on a part-time basis could it be delivered more flexibly over a two-year period in areas that we are looking at Equally to for those who do probation you can go in and do the induction year which is the standard approach but for some circumstances don't allow them to do that and they go the flexible route which takes a longer period of time to do and with less support we are very aware that the inequality of the experience there and there is a significant piece of work being carried out at the GTC to equalise that both in terms of mentoring and in terms of support those individuals get to retain them into the profession and make sure we maintain the standard I could just add one of the projects that we are involved in just now is an EU project on distance learning based ITE programmes because I think we recognise particularly in some of the rural areas where it's more difficult to access teacher education that we perhaps need to look a bit more at distance learning as being a mechanism particularly for the theory aspect of initial teacher education and Ellen has been doing some work on this European group as part of this project to look at what are the ups and what are the downsides in moving to distance learning within ITE programmes and that certainly would open up some of the flexibility that we know is required within the system now Finally Ruth, you've got a couple of questions from the teachers These are questions from the teachers in our focus group The first one is why is the amount of paperwork or online work increasing to verify teachers' actions The suggestion was that teachers should be trusted to meet the standard and subject to peer assessment and line management rather than I'll take this one What's being referred to there is the requirement to have a teacher's professional learning signed off every five years as part of a professional update and that was something that was required of us by the Scottish Government and we've worked very closely with the professional associations to make this a success and it has been a success It's a system that requires teachers to log in to an electronic system and record a professional learning and to consider the impact of that professional learning That is no different from any other profession in terms of what we're expecting of teachers We have an annual evaluation exercise that we undertake on professional update and what we're finding is that and we do investigate all of the queries that come in that concerns that are expressed and very few of them are around the system itself that we operate Very often what we find is that it's perhaps the broadband width or it's the infrastructure within the school or within the local authority that doesn't allow them to access their myGTCS account as readily as they might I was in a primary school in Glasgow a long ago where a head teacher said to me at the beginning of lunchtime I'm just going to switch on my computer and access the internet by the end of lunchtime Now these are the kind of issues that teachers face We get it in the neck in GTC Scotland because we operate the system it's a bit like SPS in a sense but the truth of the matter is when you investigate why teachers have found difficulty with the system it's very often not because of any bureaucracy or anything it's getting logged on to the system not one of our system but it's one of the internet broadband width etc which covers other aspects of life as well I'm not sure how that answered the question really because there's a question why don't you trust us There was elements of that I suppose what is your reflection on them using peer assessment That's a slightly different question On the area of trust part of our role in the general teaching council for Scotland is to support and promote teacher professionalism embedded within that is the value of trust and we absolutely feel that the profession should be trusted it perhaps should be better understood in terms of the complexity of what it delivers for youngsters, for communities generally and the general teaching council absolutely place huge amounts of trust in the teaching profession and part of Ms McGuire's question was about professional learning we are trusting teachers to engage meaningfully in professional learning and keeping their skills up to date to meet with the changing needs that youngsters have Just to fall on from that How do you make it clear to the teachers that you trust them because there was coming across in that focus group that Ruth and I met that they had this feeling that they were treated like children and not like children that's not fair but not like professionals and how do you get that message across to them that what you've just told us is how you feel about them Well hopefully don't feel that because of anything that the general teaching council for Scotland does I mean I think there is an issue a wider issue in the system about professional trust in teachers and part of our role is actually to encourage the public to have trust in the quality of the teachers that are teaching children in schools these days but I think there is a wider issue about the extent to which society at large views teaching and has absolu