I welcome everyone to the 14th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2018, and I please remind everyone present to turn on mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting. We've received apologies from Joanne Lamont and I welcome Kezia Dugdale to the committee as a substitute member. The first item of business is an opportunity for Kezia to declare any relevant interests. No relevant interests, chair. Thank you very much. The next item of business is an evidence session on the attainment and achievement of school-age children experiencing poverty inquiry. This is the fourth evidence session on this inquiry, and this week we have two panels. The first panel has a focus on services provided outside of schools. I welcome to this meeting Martin Canavan, policy and participation officer, Aberlour childcare trust, Sheila Young, director of Scotland, Home Start UK, Jackie Howe, lead officer, LearningLink Scotland, Graham Young, head of national activity centre Scout Scotland and Susan Hunter, senior development officer, policy and research, YouthLink Scotland. I should say to the panel from the outset that if you would like to respond to a question, please indicate to me or the clerks, and I will call you to speak. For the benefit of those watching, I should explain that the committee held an informal meeting with front-line professionals on this topic earlier this morning. Can I thank all those who attended the session? Some have heard in the audience watching this formal session. We've a lot to get through today, so I ask that both questions and answers today may be succinct. Before I invite questions from my colleagues, I would like to ask the panel about early intervention. In the context of support in our families and low incomes, what does early intervention look like for your organisations and how does it support attainment and achievement? As you probably know, Home Start focus is primarily on 0 to 8, most Home Starts actually before birth to 5. I think I would refer back to the Government's own National Parenting Strategy from 2012, which I quote from research says, parents are the biggest single influence on a child's educational aspirations and attainment throughout life, and there's multiple evidence that working with families directly in order to enable their children to get everything they need in terms of their social, emotional and behavioural development is the key to tackling the attainment challenge. So it's not that we don't think there should be work done with school-aged children, but it's quite clear that parents and the home learning environment is incredibly important right from birth and throughout a child's school career. So for us, our work is focused on those early years, focused on working with parents on a one-to-one basis primarily, although we also run group work, to make sure that parents are able to do what they need to do with their children to create that positive home learning environment. And there's nothing new in this. I mean, I think the Marmot review in 2011 said that families rather than schools have the greatest influence. So our work really is designed for that. Okay, thank you. Jackie. I just like to add that parents are much more likely to get involved in their children's education at the early years. I think if you can capture them within, with their children's education, but also for themselves, then they're more likely to stay with the educational process throughout that duration. Okay. Aberlour, we support families for a number of reasons. We offer holistic needs-led family support. We work with children, young people and their families. Often this is the result of parental substance misuse, parental mental health concerns, domestic abuse, parental learning disability or sometimes a combination of any of those. We do a lot of work in early years. I'd like to echo the comments about how important it is supporting families in the early years. We recognise that parents are often the first and main educators of their children. Therefore, in addressing attainment, the need for ensuring that we have robust holistic family support right at the early stage of a child's life and throughout that early stage, joining making sure that they're school-ready is really, really key.  We're a membership organisation of national and regional and local authority youth services. The early intervention doesn't have to mean the early years. There are always opportunities to intervene at times when professionals, practitioners, volunteers recognise that something's changing in the lives of a young person and knowing how they can best support that young person in negotiation with the young person themselves. The youth work is well placed to offer alternatives for young people to learn where formal education might not work best for them. We have to recognise that 85 per cent of a young person's learning happens outside the classroom. It's not to say that that happens within youth work all the time, but youth work has a place to play. We work with nearly 400,000 young people every week in Scotland at accessing youth work opportunities. I'd like to echo that. Scouts Scotland is a voluntary led organisation. We work with 40,000 young people in Scotland, and we do it through the help of 11,000 volunteers. Early intervention is often about access and ensuring, particularly in some of the communities that this panel is focusing on, that, first of all, we're able to get the provision up and running, and secondly, that our young people are able to access it. We've got an evidence-based programme. We've evidenced impact along different areas of that programme, so, for us, early intervention is really about access. Before we go on to George, I appreciate everybody. I did ask for everybody to answer there, but don't feel that you have to answer every question, just answer if you think it's relevant to you. Thank you, convener. Good morning. I would just like to carry on from where the convener left off with early intervention and family support. One of the things that Nancy Clooney, the head teacher from Delman, brought out last week, was the fact that she created the community. She went out proactively and created the community. She didn't have a parent council, but she created the community. She said that if you need happy families to get happy children, she saw that there was a life out with the school gates that she had to be part of. My question would be, do you think that that kind of leadership is what most schools need and does the school need to be the one that leads it, or can it be led by someone out in the community working with the school? Does it have to be the same all over, or are there other ways that we can do that? I really think that there's room for both. I think that the really important point that was made in the informal session by one of our volunteers is that a lot of parents have had negative experiences of school themselves. Professionals, even the great community inclusive ones like Nancy, have a really tough hill to climb in terms of reaching some families. Volunteer-led models often work very well. It doesn't mean a volunteer couldn't work out of a school, for example. It doesn't have to come in the preschool phase, as home start does. But as my volunteer this morning said, volunteers are seen as of us. They are us, not them. She mentioned families flying into a panic as soon as a formal letter arrives, even if a letter offering them help. When we're talking about poor families especially, poor families are not necessarily poor parents, by the way, but the circumstances they live in work to create the sorts of stresses that undermine good parenting and sometimes they don't have a foundation. To echo that, I think it was a quote from someone from the Violence Reduction Unit, as we know, is doing some brilliant work in this area. If you don't have a good role model sitting across from the kitchen table, you're already disadvantaged. I think that a lot of parents haven't had that, and they're very suspicious and distrustful of teachers and of professionals. Volunteer-led models are incredibly important, so I would argue that there's space for both. Schools need to get more open, more accessible, more engaging, but they might need to link up more often with organisations that are experienced in supporting volunteers to do that community level work. I'd like to echo what she said about it being both. Certainly partnership is the key. Nancy, last week in her session, illustrated how proactive she has been in going out and creating that community, as you mentioned. I think that there's lots of headteachers that would be able to evidence and highlight a similar approach, but equally there's also a lot of headteachers in schools that maybe aren't quite as proactive. Therefore, where there are opportunities for those that are providing services within the community or other key stakeholders to try and be champions for that family support and try to make that contact and make those links with schools, that needs to be supported. The point that was made during the informal session earlier on this morning is that there is a lot of expectation on headteachers in schools at the moment around people equity funding and what assumptions are about what is happening in their communities and the expectation that they will be able to go out and find the organisations that are providing services to support families. There's a lot of really good work going on throughout communities throughout the country, provided by the third sector, working with families. There are already really good relationships and existing relationships built by those workers, by those services, with those families in those communities. I think that there's a real opportunity for schools to be able to build and develop on the foundations that are already led by those organisations, by that work that's going on. I think that partnership has to be the key in how we support schools to identify the best family support that's going on. Again, just to add on to that, the committee has talked about procurement in previous sessions. I don't want to raise a slightly dull process point, but a lot of this is around the ability to commission well, good commissioning, a commissioning process, so that for headteachers or other members in the community who are in a position to do so, when they're considering the needs that are out there, that they're able to take in all evidence, including research, consultation with parents, consultation with children, most importantly, to make an informed decision on what services are required. Sometimes that might mean purchasing a service, but sometimes that might mean working in partnership to develop a new service. Sometimes it's just about better signposting to what's already out there and supporting what's already out there, so there's a process element in all of this as well. I was just going to echo a little bit about what's already said, but the importance of that good partnership work, if you can involve both community and the schools, then it adds to the kind of vibrancy, the creating of a learning culture. Although schools are expert in school education, a number of different organisations around the table and elsewhere are expert in engagement, I think that collaborative work is the way forward. Can I let there's a couple of small supplementaries that want to come in? Mary and then all, very brief. I have a very brief supplementary, and it's specifically directed at Martin. It's something that you say in your submission, Martin, when you talk about literacy and numeracy being prioritised over health and wellbeing in raising attainment. You also talk about the poverty-related attainment gap, and we should focus on all policy areas, not just education. Harry Burns in the submission he's given us talks about the intergenerational pattern of poverty. He also mentions the skills based curriculum, which produces a grid-grind pedagogy of poverty. I'd be interested in whether or not you agree with that analysis by Harry Burns and how we can encourage schools to take that wider look at attainment, not just on the skills that children have or young people have on their whole health and wellbeing? I would absolutely echo and support anything that Harry Burns says, because he's far more qualified than me to comment. I think about understanding and recognising the wider health and wellbeing, or in relation to the point on some schools prioritising literacy and numeracy. It's a simple fact that it's easier to evidence improvements in literacy and numeracy for schools. It's quite obvious that, from an education point of view, that would be where schools would feel more comfortable in looking to seek additional support and to provide evidence for that. I think that we did talk about wider achievement in the informal session earlier on. Tavish had asked a question of the panel that was there. I think that there is absolutely a place where we need to understand what it is that we mean when we are talking about attainment versus achievement. What achievement, in some respects, even though it may not be academic achievement, means for some of the children and young people that we work with in our schools. We spoke a little bit about some of the anecdotal examples of some of the work that we do in Govind, for example. We were working informally with the school in supporting some of the young people there to access opportunities around practical, key transferable skills and the impact that has had on them being able to remain in school, not to be excluded, and therefore the opportunities that affords them after school, even though those young people specifically are not necessarily going to achieve academically. I think that we maybe need to have a wider conversation, partly as a result of maybe this inquiry, in relation to what we mean by attainment versus achievement. What will the achievement of some of those young people be in terms of their contribution to their communities, even though they necessarily have not attained academically, if there are wider achievement opportunities in schools? I should say that although it is not a formal declaration of interest that I am a Cups Scout leader in Tumfrissure, the point that I want to go back to is the point that you were raising around commissioning of services and buying in services in schools. In the informal session, there was a suggestion that there is huge variation across Scotland in terms of what headteachers are aware of and what is being offered in different schools. If you agree with that, what do you think we do about it and how do we go about replicating good practice? Thanks for that question. I think that this is an issue that you think are hearing increasingly from our members about how are they known by headteachers. Previously, before PEPH, particularly large national youth organisations, built relationships with local authority. They would have potential endorsement. They might have agreed a match funding arrangement of charitable funds with local authority funds. The school might have contributed some money as well once they wanted to have that service or programme in their school. That landscape has completely changed with PEPH. Now, youth organisations are having to have that dialogue with individual headteachers. I am now asking them to be effectively business managers on how they utilise the resource. One of the feedback that we have had directly from headteachers is that they feel that third sector organisations are marketing and are on a sales pitch. What third sector organisations want to be is collaborative partners. They want to make impact on learners' lives. They want to improve experiences of education for young people. We have a shared goal. That is not about the money, but about creating impact and change and improving outcomes for young people. There needs to be greater involvement of third sector and other national youth work providers at the planning stage, at the identification of the need through school improvement planning, through addressing and coming up with something jointly involving children and young people, involving parents, what exactly collaboration is meant to be. Collaboration is not the purchase of a service. Collaboration is about the shaping of a programme that will lead to improved outcomes for learners. I just wanted to say that we run a programme of big hopes, big futures, which is about reaching children just before school to boost their ability to flourish in school, mainly working with children identified by school likely to be at risk. We have national level funding for some of the architecture around that, but working at local levels, I just want to echo what you just said, that it is really difficult working with individual schools because of the timescales that they work on on their capacity to get something started alongside our capacity and have to talk to quite so many different people. That is going to limit both the roll-out of that and the reach of that, but also limit the evaluability of it. How do we evaluate something when it is happening rather sporadically? I think that that is a real problem. It is an opportunity for the regional improvement collaboratives to invite the third sector into their meetings, into their projects, into their planning. That could be one way for the schools to engage with the third sector. Just to follow on from what Sheila Young said earlier on to my question, and probably follow on from what Jackie Howie said as well, was the fact that Nancy Clooney last week kept talking about her teachers. She had to get them to change their attitude. They had to work a different way, and she was not blaming her staff. She was just saying that there was different ways of dealing with things, and she had to do that. Is it not a case that I have been involved as a councillor in my time here? I know that there is great work happening with the third sector throughout the country. How do we find a way to get this to marry up with the organisations? I know that Jackie made a suggestion there. How do we get the third sector to be working with the local authorities and the schools and to make sure that we get over the attitude of the school gate? That is where it all stops. I was going to say that there is a real bonus for cross-sectoral professional learning. If you can invite third sector, local authority sector and even college sector in to look at specific issues, perhaps around STEM, that is a big area where there is a lack of familiarity and knowledge across the sectors. The cross-collaborative professional learning can build trust, build a weirdness and understanding. I just want to say that it is really important to recognise that some schools put extra pressures on families, albeit unintentionally. There are probably 31 home starts in Scotland, and I doubt that there is a single one that has not been working with a family who has experienced the school, for example, requesting money for the cost of the school day's stuff for activities or perhaps excluding a child for poor behaviour rather than working with that child. That is an issue, and we do want to work more closely with schools. Homestart Glasgow South, for example, runs creative play sessions inside the school during the school day or immediately after the school day, which involves parents, but teachers drop in and see that type of work. I feel that teachers have such a tough job. Not everything can be dealt with in school, but they are not necessarily trained to deal creatively with the kind of social-emotional behavioural difficulties that some of these children who are way behind the curve experience. Of course, that is why we will always argue for better quality family support before children reach school, but absolutely, home starts and other organisations need to be working across that barrier. Being in school is a great thing. I would also say that my children were lucky enough to go to a primary school that was a bit below capacity and a free classroom was given over as a drop-in space for parents. That made that school instantly a more welcoming place for parents to hang around, to get to know the school staff a little better than you can and two parents evenings a year. I, as a parent, albeit educated very well and all the rest of it found schools very intimidating places, and we have heard from a volunteer this morning about how parents feel. So there is something about making schools more open, which I think has been made more difficult with more stringent child protection, to be honest. The primary school that my children went to in Scotland, I was physically locked out of the building. I never went inside, except for parents evenings. That is not a great way of breaking down those barriers. Thank you, Susan. You wanted to come in. I think that just a direct response to George, around what we could be doing is actually around not othering the third sector and other education practitioners. Youth work does not exist to support schools. Youth work exists as its own professional entity. I think how that is presented in leadership, whether that is from yourself as parliamentarians or through Government officials and policy, that we talk about all professionals who want to make an impact on young people's learning, that education is not just school. Recent documents talk about teachers and other professionals, teachers and other educators. That automatically creates a divide. We are all in this together. We all want to improve the lives of young people. Maybe a change to the rhetoric would help to break down some of those barriers. Okay, George. I will move on, Martin. I would like to come back to Shilla. Your submission made some very powerful points around the benefits of early years, early intervention, taking on board the points that were made that not all early intervention is in the early years. I am wondering what the impact of the pupil equity fund has been around that. Directing funding through schools is obviously at the stage past early years. What impact has that had so far that you have seen on the success of intervention in early years? Has it had a cascade effect and strengthened it or has it perhaps moved focus further up? I think that it is too early to say, but I can give you some examples of where it has not been helpful. We have had schools tell us that they are not allowed to spend money with organisations that are providing support pre the school age start, which is apparently not the case, but that is what they have been told by their local authority, so they say. We have had schools that have wanted to join together in a cluster so that we have place-based funding, so we would like to do the place-based work, have been told by their local authorities that that has now breached tendering limits, so they will have to go to a full tendering process. I have also been told that that should not have happened, but it has happened. What I think the most obvious and immediate impact is is that, though we are very proud of having 31 local home starts embedded in the local community, so all do work slightly different ways themselves, we do not really want to have to find out what the micro rules are in every area in order to be able to work effectively with a cluster of schools. Frankly, we do, as I said, in Glasgow South, we work with one school doing creative play that came before PEF money, actually. We are perfectly happy to do that when it is feasible, but when we are talking about specially training a member of staff to run a specially trained group of volunteers to do a particular kind of intervention, it is not very cost effective to do it for four children in one school and three children in two towns away, that is not really a viable way of going ahead. We think that, at the moment, the likely outcome is a greater fragmentation and atomisation of effort, and, as I said earlier, therefore limiting the ability to evaluate. That is so important. We have to show what works. Will you come back in on that? You are saying that there will be an atomisation of the services, but there would not be, if I am wrong here, if the local authorities were given the right information about how they could spend a PEF money? It could still happen, because, obviously, it is at a head's discretion and a head is at a head's permission when they know about it. It does not have to happen as a point of making. No, it does not have to happen. On the wider point, if the goal that people act to fund is—not always early intervention, but if we are talking about the prism of early intervention here—if the goal is early intervention to close the attainment gap and you have a funding model, it would be interesting if your thoughts represent the third sector. Is a funding model that works exclusively through schools the best model, or would more direct models that involve yourselves, rather than the issues that have been highlighted by having to go through individual schools? What model would you like to have seen? I think that the picture around the funding model for PEF has presented us with a fairly inconsistent picture across the country. As evidenced in the earlier sessions and some of what has already been discussed this morning, where there are good relationships with schools, where headteachers are quite proactive and understand about issues that are happening before and beyond the school gates, PEF is a really, really good model, where those existing relationships and community relationships are already in place. As we have already mentioned, where there is a need to support teachers to support schools more to recognise what is happening, PEF does not necessarily present or provide the best model because it could result in money being spent on things that maybe do not work and are not evidence to work. What is essentially a very valuable resource could be otherwise not used as best as it could be. One example that I would use would be the experience that we have in one local authority, and I am not going to be specific here, but just to raise it as a concern, I suppose, around where PEF has been used, is that it has been used in some schools that we understand to bring in campus police officers, for example. We are not entirely convinced as an organisation in terms of the work that we do and the needs of the young people that we work with, that campus police officers are a particularly good use of PEF funding. That is not to say that there is not a role for police in schools, that is not to say that there is not a role for excellent focus programmes of work provided by police in schools around things like anti-social behaviour, but when it is uniformed to police campus police officers patrolling school campuses, we are not entirely sure that that is an appropriate use of PEF funding. However, what we are seeing there is that the schools that have decided to take that approach and use PEF for that purpose are highlighting the inconsistency that we have already heard this morning in the informal session. Some local authorities or local authorities or local schools are taking a very prescriptive approach to how they spend that money, specifically focused on individual children. In some schools where police are being brought in to provide campus police officers, there is a much more general approach that this will be for the wellbeing of the school, as misplaced as we believe that understanding of wellbeing is that it is for the wellbeing of the school generally and not for a specific group or individual children. That highlights that there is a real inconsistency around how understanding of PEF is being interpreted and applied and used by different schools. Where teachers are engaged and supported to use the money in the best way they can, it is evidence to work and that is excellent, but there needs to be more guidance either through the Scottish Government or local authorities to ensure that money is being spent appropriately. We have just been told that the local authorities are involving themselves too much and giving wrong information, and you are saying that maybe they should get involved more because you do not like the way that some schools are spending the money. Wherever that is coming from, wherever it is coming from the Scottish Government who have provided the national operational guidance, and actually the operational guidance, as Sheila has already mentioned, says one thing and maybe some of the schools that you are working with have interpreted it a different way. It does need to be flexible and the whole point about PEF is that it is providing autonomy to headteachers so that they can recognise and understand locally what needs are and spend their PEF allocation appropriately, but what we maybe have already evidence this morning is that maybe not all headteachers are best placed to make that decision because of any number of reasons, maybe they do not understand what is happening in their communities. Or not doing it in a way that certain groups like? It sounds very mercenary to say that it is not being spent in the way that the third sector would like it to be spent, but I think that most people sitting around this table would agree that maybe uniformed campus police officers are not the best use of PEF. I am not going to put it to your vote, but there is a good reason why campus police are in some schools and not in others. I think that that could benefit the education system. Sorry, Rossa. That is still your gig. Sorry, my apologies. Just a brief comment. I would not want folk to have the impression that campus police officers, community police officers, are patrolling schools in a somewhat... I think that there is maybe a bit of a misunderstanding about what they are doing when they are in there and I think that we would probably want to be careful. There is a lot of good work that goes on. The work is happening in communities and there is absolutely a role for community police in schools, but we think that from what young people, specifically young people, we work with have told us, where some of those police are being funded to provide services in schools through PEF, that that is not necessarily going to impact positively on their education, specifically those that are on the fringes of education. I think that other panellists want to respond to the original question, which was some time ago. So you were asking about where might PEF not be the best fit for sexual role. I think that the point made earlier about PEF can work for literacy and numeracy programmes, but it comes to health and well-being programmes, I think that it becomes much more challenging. This is where schools may want to pool resources together. We heard examples of a cluster of schools wanting to purchase a counselling service and, again, reach some procurement threshold, so the whole process was kibosh. But one of the areas that we are particularly interested in is around the provision of summer programmes. It may be that the school wants to purchase one or two places for specific young people with identified needs. That is where national youth organisations can make that provision, but it is very difficult for them to do that through PEF. Actually, there needs to be still space for national funding that national organisations can bid in for directly from Government, but still meets local need. I think that there is a disconnect currently around understanding that national organisations actually do provide local services, and that disconnect there is an anomaly as well. To say something about the pattern of funding, which can be very short term, so, as I said here at the moment, over half our network is on one-year funding deals, and over 15 per cent of them do not even know what funding they are going to get for this current financial year that has already started. Working in partnership with schools or anybody else on a basis that makes sense is made very difficult when you are in that uncertain funding. It is just to echo that point about national-level funding being a backbone that helps local work happen really, really well. I have one brief question about poverty proofing, convener. Okay, you were going to ask a question about scouts as well. Yes, that is the poverty proofing. Grym, I am interested. We have discussed poverty proofing in schools quite a lot as a committee and had some really compelling evidence about it. It has been mentioned this morning. The scouts I suppose are, I would imagine, quite a good example of a third sector organisation involving large numbers of young people. I am wondering what steps you take to poverty proof your service within the context of being a largely volunteer-led service that relies on various funding sources. Over the past few years, we have been working a lot on trying to evidence impact. As an organisation, we try to be as inclusive as possible and we work to try to reflect the communities that we deliver our service in. Through that learning, we feel like we are developing a model that is able to develop provision, particularly in areas of deprivation or harder-to-reach communities, but also rural deprivation as well. I have evidence around that as well. In Scotland, it takes the form of local development officers, which target specific areas. Our issue more is that we know the model works, but we cannot create enough provision quickly enough. We have about 4,000 young people on waiting lists. Those are in areas where there is already provision. The organisation is looking for opportunities to fund the model that we know works. It is also a model that is very cost-effective. Most of what we deliver is through volunteers. From a public first point of view, it has its benefits. It also has its benefits because it is often a sustainable model.  Against some other services out there, we think that that is good value for money. Just another point that I wanted to raise is that the attainment gap has been described as an experience gap. As a universal service out there, one of the things that the scout programme does is that it provides its young people with a wealth of experiences that mirror to a certain extent curriculum for excellence. There are real benefits in getting that programme into areas of deprivation. When we talk to our young people, we do surveys with our young people every year. What they are telling us is that they are not getting enough opportunities for extracurricular activities or informal education. What is really interesting about that data is that young people on free school meals are saying more than their counterparts not on free school meals that we are not getting access to the extracurricular activities that are out there. Young people on areas of deprivation know that they are not getting the access that is out there. That is a really interesting point to make. For us, it is about that we have a model, although we know works, but we just cannot get it into the communities quickly enough, I suppose, and that is where that really is in our organisation. Just to say that youth work, which we obviously include in the Scouts, is very much the principle about inclusion as one of our core values. To poverty proof is almost in the heart of every youth work organisation. As much as possible, they would want to provide services that are free at the point of access. That includes providing young people with experiences to travel overseas, if that is funded through Erasmus or other funds, where there is no cost directly associated with the young person. We have examples of summer programmes where young people are being fed, taken swimming, so they can have a shower, provision of personal hygiene products. All of those things create a zero-cost experience, but are positive and have a high-quality experience for young people. I am going to move on, Graham. When you are coming back in with something else, you can bring it to Tavish. The achievement that we discussed earlier on relates to Graham and Susan's points. National policy is attainment, not achievement, discuss. National policy includes achievement if you look at curriculum for excellence. Curriculum for excellence at its heart is everything that education should be for young people about personalisation, about choice, about personal achievement. All of that language is in there in curriculum for excellence, but there has been this slide towards attainment. Our concern is that what gets measured gets done. That is a really difficult place to be, because we know that, for many young people, achievement is about their sense of self, their self-worth, their contribution, their confidence. Nothing to add to that. That says it all, really. One thing to add. If you listen to young people themselves, they are also saying that for them achievement is incredibly important. There is something around choice. That is often the goal dust around what will end up leading to attainment. It is young people choosing themselves and being motivated by themselves around a certain area, whether it be outdoor learning, STEM or a plethora. That is what education ultimately needs to capture. When I mentioned £550 earlier on, that was to create a place. Scouting is free. There is a slight membership charge, but that would never come in the way of any child accessing it. I would very briefly make the point that, ultimately, what is our ambition for our children and young people? Do we want them to grow up to be happy, healthy, contributing members of our community? I would say yes, we probably all do. If that means that some of them will achieve academically, that is fantastic. However, if others are achieving in a wider sense but are still managing to move on to grow up to contribute as members of our community to do the things that make them happy and healthy individuals, I think that achievement needs to be considered as important as attainment. Given the pressures that we have placed on schools, and we are potentially about to place even more pressures on schools with headteachers, charters and so on and so forth, teachers are under enormous pressure to achieve attainment, not necessarily achievement. How would you like to see that rebalanced or is there some development policy that you would like to see in this area? I can say what I would not want to see is that I would not want to see a notion that we have some twin track. Children who enter school behind the curve go down some sort of vocational route, and that is what we accept as achievement. What I would like to see is—it sounds ridiculous, but more like an education that I benefited from where things that were non-academic were rated within the school just as highly—sport, for example. Someone was talking this morning in the informal session about the cost of the school day. I happen to know from first time experience how expensive it is to support a young person who wants to achieve in sport to a reasonably high level, and you see dropouts all the time from children who come from poorer backgrounds because their parents cannot ship them around, they cannot pay for physio, they cannot do this, they cannot do that. Schools can be a huge place for that to happen, but that reflects back into academic achievement often. When people feel they are doing well in one area, they start to do better in others. It is really important to remember that there are a lot of young parents, people who might actually be in education but have actually become parents at an early age. They get a huge sense of achievement when they get their parenting right. Schools that are discouraging of young people to come back if they have had a child while they are still at school age have just got to end. We have got to make sure that education is back to more of a lifelong thing, that people can dip in and dip out when their life allows them to do it, and that they are welcomed. I think that there is too much pressure on school, but I think that there is almost too much pressure on every organisation that is trying to provide for people who are struggling at the moment. My view would be that it cannot all happen in school, it has to happen as a mix between in and out of school provision. The third sect has a big role to play in that, but I also think that we have to recognise as a society I mentioned this morning how so many families that we support come back and become volunteers for home start. That is a huge achievement for them, a massive achievement. People are on a lifelong journey, not everything has to happen in school, but where that journey starts well, which is with the parents, it is likely to end well. I think that that is the important thing to see, it is a continuum, not just what happens in school. One final question, convener. Now that is in high school and low, it has 900 kids and we have now one full-time youth officer worker in that school staff setup. Is that an experience that you see across Scotland? Are there enough youth workers as part of school teams across Scotland? There is probably a growing picture of that happening, particularly local authority youth work staff being aligned to schools. There are still some challenges around what the role of that youth worker is. For some, they are seen very much as part of the school staff team. For others, they are still staff coming into the school. There is still a journey to go on, but there is definitely a emerging practice that is outstanding. The work in Shetland, Aberdeen City and Aberdeen Shire have really fantastic youth work in schools provision. It is looking at bringing some spotlight and some evidence around the impact of that, how teachers feel about having a youth worker in their school, the value it brings to young people's wellbeing, the experience of pupils and parents. I think that there needs to be greater study around the impact of that, but one youth worker for 900 pupils is not going to go far. I also remember that youth work is an offer for every young person. One of our members' networks was a youth worker who said that he used to go into the school with the project with the idea and that it was open to every young person. I now go into the school and I am given the group of young people. It is very hard that youth workers have voluntary activity. Young people choose to be part of a youth work experience, and that might be to improve outcomes for them, and there may need to be that nurture and that referral, but it is about a relationship and it is about a choice, so that those principles and values need to remain there. Thank you very much. Ruth, you had a brief supplementary. Thank you, convener. I just wanted to ask Graeme Young, just on a practical level, for a uniformed organisation, even buying a uniform is a barrier. If there are trips away, having suitable rucksack or suitcase to go, so even if you are funding trips and doing things, how on a practical level do you encourage families for whom that might be a barrier to have those experiences? Uniform is never a barrier, so if it is something that does not work in that local setting, there are different ways around it. It might just be that they wear a neckie instead, and the neckie might be something that they receive when they come through the door. In terms of the uniform, there is no stigmatisation. In terms of going away on trips and outdoor adventure experiences, which are core to the scout programme, we run a grant fund centrally, and that can be for individual groups. It is also for groups who are starting, so we make it able for them to go away. This year, we will be introducing a travel fund, because travel is one of the costs that our members are telling us, and it is one of the barriers for them to go away. That might be a wider point that we have talked about in the P7 residential quite a lot over the past little while. You can go away and it will be a much cheaper experience for a parent and carer. For example, with scouts—it is a good example—we will often camp in tents. Camping in tents can cost as little as £5 at a campsite. In terms of the equipment that is required, we have stores of equipment that will make it accessible. In terms of the skills that are required to set up a camp, we can train our volunteers, parents and teachers. Making those kinds of experiences accessible is probably one of our strengths as an organisation, and it is never a barrier, particularly in areas of deprivation. Schools could learn quite a lot from the way that we would manage, particularly the outdoor experience. You can also go down to your local park. There are different ways of doing it. I oppose what is a difficult question, but it is an important one. I would argue very strongly that some of the best educational experiences that anybody can have are nothing to do with exams. They are outside the classroom, yet it is very hard to measure that. It is hard to define it, and never mind measuring it. However, you have spoken volumes this morning, both in private and in the formal session, about the worth that that is, especially to youngsters who might not feel that they are very valued. If you feel that we have to do more to recognise those achievements and whether you think that awards and certificates can help to do that, I cite the example that we have at the moment that the committee is grappling with it. There has been a big national debate about national 4s against national 5s, and that national 4s are not particularly well recognised because there is no exam at the end of it. It is all part of this thing. How do we reward those youngsters who have achieved, in some cases, extremely well? It might be a low level, but that is very important to them. How do you feel that we should be rewarding? I think that the most important thing is that a young person is able to articulate what they have achieved. Whether they are given a certificate or any other means, the most important thing is that the young person could tell somebody else that they can now do this. I have had this experience, and as a result, I now have this skill, I now have this knowledge, and I now have this confidence. That is really important, because that is what employers want. An employer wants somebody who can say, yes, I can do this, and I can show you how I can do it. There is a bit of a process with employers, with further and higher education, of how do you measure and value beyond the certification. Youth awards are very valuable at helping to give young people those milestones for them to remember what they have achieved. I think that that is an important way of using youth awards, so that when a young person over their learning journey can look back and say, oh yes, I did that. In my youth achievement award, this was my challenge. We went camping, and those are the skills that I worked. I worked as a team, I worked with people, I set up a camp, I cooked food. It is using them as an aid for helping young people acknowledge and recognise their skills. Just on pursuing that point, do you feel that we have to do more with employers who, at bottom level, are often looking for your grades and your exams, particularly in a highly competitive world? What do we have to do to persuade them that a lot of the skills that are not related to academic attainment are as important in the world of work than those that are achieved in the classroom? I think that there was a CBI report that described all the skills that employers were looking for. The youth work sector said, well, that is what youth work does. I do not wish to push all employers into the space of just wanting to look for qualifications, but I think that the landscape of learning journeys is really variable now.  There is much more diversity in that, and I think that that will take time. It is a societal change of people recognising that there are multiple routes to learning and to achievement. I think that there are two very positive examples. I worked for standard life for a time, which took up the challenge posed by the Edinburgh guarantee and brought in young people without classic qualifications and did some of that pastoral support as part of their learning inside the workplace. I think that there are those kinds of interventions of brilliance, so there was no award scheme attached to that, but it was an employer recognising the benefits of doing that. I am also very interested in the way that the TIGAS organisation, which is an effectively an apprenticeship middle agency, has picked up on the fact that the apprentices that they have been working with often drop out of work even though they have had all the right training. They have picked up on the work of Suzanne Zidike and the whole adverse child experiences ACs agenda, because they have recognised that those young people are suffering from experiences earlier on, which they have not had adequate support to work their way through. That is an incredibly positive development, because that message is going to get to more employers as a result of an organisation like that taking it on rather than just us who focus on the early years. I would like to say something about the growing up in Scotland study. The data drawn from that has shown that 11 per cent of children are known to have social and emotional and behavioural problems. That is 94,000 children in Scotland. Because we know that, we also can know when that situation changes. Generally speaking, those children with those kind of challenges change dramatically not because of an external award or certificate, but because of an adult they have a relationship who they respect and care about, so something good to them. Remarks to them on what has happened that is good. I will give a little example from home start practice. We sometimes use something called video interactive guidance, where we video a parent interacting with their child. We play back only the good bits, the bits where the child responded to the parent's attention. By doing that, what we are showing that parent is that they can do a good job. They are doing a good job, but maybe not all the time. Younger people, children respond to that just as much. When we talked about school and what can happen in school, the notion of the trauma informed teacher, the teacher who understands that the relationship matters. It is not just about there is a lot of controversy over things like golden time, where you reward a child by giving them extra playtime in the afternoon, because children with poor behaviour are excluded from that and play is exactly what they need. The notion that you look someone in the eyes and say how well they have done, even if their achievement is well below par for their age group, that matters. It really is simple, but it takes time and it is all about being human. I was going to mention a bit of work that the SCQF did. They work with schools and help badge and level courses that are non-accredited, but they also work with employers to help level jobs. You can put an SCQF level at a type of employment, so that might help an employer to see out with a accreditation framework. They also work with trade unions to help the trade unions to negotiate fair employment issues. There are those approaches. Okay. Martin, sorry, you wanted to come in as well. Just very briefly, I just wanted to echo what Sheila said there about the importance of relationship-based support and how important that is for many of the children, the families and the young people that we work with. We know that poverty often does not just represent financial poverty but poverty of opportunity and skills but often poverty of encouragement from anybody, any close individual that they might have in their life. Where that support encouragement comes from a teacher or somebody else that they might have a really important relationship with, that is absolutely key, recognising their achievements and recognising when they have done something well and recognising any successes. There is definitely an opportunity to think about how we can better recognise what some of those achievements are, either formal or non-formal. There are a number of awards that many of our young people work towards, be they saltwater awards or achievement awards and all those other. We have even developed, in partnership with the Scottish Mentoring Network a couple of years ago, we developed a bespoke award for mentoring for supporting some of our young people to become peer mentors through the SQA. There are opportunities to develop further opportunities, certificated awards that give a sense of encouragement, support and achievement for many of the young people that we work with that maybe they have never actually had before. I think that most of the points that I was hoping to cover have moved on. Like Oliver, quite a lot of what I'd asked has already been covered, but I want to pick out some of the issues around collaboration with the schools that some of you have highlighted and your submissions in particular. Some of the submissions have said that you have issues around school workers with little or no respect for parents or carers or the challenging circumstances in which some families live. I think that that came from the learning link submission. Schools have been wary or close to working with external agencies, that was from youth link, and the lack of awareness of what youth work is. I wonder if you would like to take the opportunity to elaborate further on some of your experiences. The schools can be amazing places. Just a recent example, we had one of our projects worked with a really enthusiastic headteacher to engage parents who don't normally come into the school around two different types of projects, but it fell down where one of the teachers was not on the same wavelength as the headteacher. The teacher had had a poor experience of the parents concerned because the parents had had an inappropriate behaviour when coming into school. It was just a lack of understanding about the challenges that the parents face in coming to school and to being able to negotiate. Some parents who have had really poor experiences of school just don't have those negotiation skills, so if their child is penalised, criticised for their behaviour, they get angry. Relationships break down. We have learnt from that in establishing different ground rules and ensuring that everybody is on board prior to the start of a project. Even with goodwill, things can break down through lack of understanding. Do you feel that some of your organisations can be the link between the parents who have a nervousness of coming into a school and the school itself so that you can be the facilitator there? Absolutely. The project that I am talking about, the parents didn't attend the school. They didn't come to parent meetings, they didn't come to drop the kids off, they just didn't come to the school. It was a really good project at getting folk involved in the school who didn't normally come there. I think that there is definitely a bridge there. Parents who feel as though they have had poor experiences of education themselves are less likely to attend, but if they can actually get a good experience of education as adults, they are more likely to invest in the education of their kids and more likely to try and engage as peers. I think that the teachers learned a lot from that as well, which is really good. It is not a criticism of that teacher involved because she had a challenging journey with the children, so it was a learning journey all round. I think that that is where the partnership works, rather than it just being an end of it and there being no communication between the school and the families. There is an on-going attempt to build relationships there. Definitely external agencies who can do school-based work perhaps outwith the school environment as well can act as a very good bridge. There is a challenge, and it is maybe some of the points that I have already made around the recognition of youth work as part of the family of community learning development as a professional practice, with a code of ethics, with professional competencies, with a value base, with its own clear purpose and outcomes. There has just not been space and time enough that it is starting to develop of understanding the professional roles that youth work can play. There are challenges, as David Scott earlier said, about youth work being in schools. It is really difficult when there is that bell ringing every 55 minutes. That is not how youth work works. Youth work is about a relationship. It is about the time that the young person needs. It is about being in a place that the young person wants to be. There needs to be recognition that youth work, as professionals, can deliver learning experiences in a whole range of contexts—yes, in schools but also in the rider community—at evenings, at weekends and during holidays. It is not a service that can always or should be aligned to a school. It is about aligning to the needs of learners. There is, again, in the youth league submission, a lack of awareness of what youth work is. Do you think that, given that the PEF funding, a lot of the schools are dipping their toe into engaging with outside organisations because they have got this funding, it means that this is going to become that there is going to be an incremental change and a deeper understanding of the value of youth work? Is that funding there? We hear from our members that when a school leader gets the value and what a youth worker does, when they have a positive experience, they will want more of it. We are trying to find, as those people who have all the early adopters, that we are on that curve. We are trying to get everybody else on that page that youth work is a good thing. I know that the outcomes of youth work are there, but it is not necessarily about having a programme. It is about creating an experience, a learning opportunity that is negotiated with the young person and being okay that not knowing what specific outcomes or changes might happen and being brave to take those risks. I think that, in the informal session earlier, we talked about being risk averse. It is not about saying that if you do A, B will happen. It is about saying that, if you leave the young person where they are, probably nothing positive is going to happen. If you take a chance and involve them with a youth work agency or youth work practitioner, something good will likely to happen through that negotiation, through that recognition of the young person and the practitioner as partners in the learning journey and seeing what route that will take. We had an informal session with some youth workers a couple of weeks ago. One of the issues that they brought up was how youth work could be the key to getting school refusers some kind of positive educational experience and maybe even providing a bridge for them to re-engage with schools. Has that been your experience? Absolutely. The CLT practitioner that she spoke to will come from within our membership. One of the comments that was made in the submissions that was in the paper was that it is not about rewarding young people perceived to be bad young people with good experience. It is about saying to young people that we need to invest in them and give them good positive experiences in order to help them to learn, but we have to do it without stigma. We cannot have the base for the young people who do not want to be at school. We have to do this in a way that is free from stigma that is inclusive and that values young people as individuals and contributors are something to give, not just to young people to receive. I have a particular interest in the experiences that I have looked after young people. I am looking at you, Martin, in particular, but I am sure that all the panellists will have something to say about that. I appreciate that time is short, but I am looking for comments on the impact of multiple placements on looked after young people in terms of their ability to achieve at school, being taken out of the classroom to attend children's hearings and children's panels and the relationship that that has with their continued attainment. Also, if you do not mind, maybe something about how those experiences become even more challenging when a young person hits 16 but wants to stay within the education system, the additional challenges that they face at that point. I will start then, Charlie. We know the statistics and the outcomes in relation to education for that particular population of young people for looked after children. We have a dedicated educational hub, a nurture hub, attached to some of our cluster of residential children's homes over in Fife. They do some excellent work for children who are otherwise because of their circumstances, because of their experiences of early trauma often and the impact that that continues to have. They are helping them to achieve in a wider sense. Some of the things that we have talked about already this morning in relation to wider achievement is exactly some of the work that we do with that particular group of young people that we work with, those looked after and care explanation people. In relation to your point about the multiple placement breakdowns or multiple moves in terms of fostering placements and what have you, we move from fostering to residential, there is no doubt whatsoever that that will have a fundamental impact on their wellbeing, their development and ultimately how they are able to achieve and attain. If you do not mind me interrupting it, I guess the point of this inquiry is around the theme of collaboration. We have identified the problem. What is the solution? How can we make sure that we break a cycle of where kids are pulled out of class to go to a hearing and that impacts on their attainment because computer says that this meeting needs to take place now? That is a really, really difficult question to answer. We clearly need to look at the way that the entire system is provided and supported. What you say is true, not just in relation to that particular group of children in terms of children's hearing systems and the prescribed appointments that they need to attend and what have you. We also find that it is similar for children who are referred through CAMHS in relation to mental health concerns having to be pulled out of school to attend clinical appointments during school hours and missing essential points in times at school that they might otherwise enjoy and the stigma that goes along with that. They are similar in terms of the stigma that young people in those circumstances end up feeling. There needs to be some collaborative approach to how we do that better. I cannot give you the answer to that just now. I would love to be able to. It is a really complex and difficult area. Maybe it is something that the care review will be able to identify and address. It is not my area of professional expertise, but I am an adoptive parent. I have to say that I do not understand, given that the school day is relatively short while a lot of this stuff could not start in the afternoon. As someone who has been interested in volunteering for children's panel, it would be a hell of a lot easier for someone like me to do that if the timing was shifted somewhat.  My children had meetings to attend. One of them was at primary school when they moved in. It was difficult and it created that element of they did not want to be marked out as different. I really think that there must be some practical solution on timing on this. Just for the sake of clarity and for the official report, are you therefore saying that if we were to change that, we could improve the attainment or the achievement of looked-after young people? We know very clearly at home start that young people, children who already feel marked out as different and perhaps expected to fail, usually fulfil that to some degree unless some interventions are made. All that I would observe from our practice and my personal experience is that the more that a child feels included along with the rest, the less that they carry around some sense of stigma and shame, the better they are likely to do. I am trying to get it on the record. I would like to point to an example of some of the work that we are doing up in the Highlands. Over the past couple of years, we have been developing a pilot service that is working with families and their children who have been identified as at risk of being accommodated, who are looked after at home but are at risk of being moved out of authority. Where social work capacity and traditional approach to supporting those families has ultimately not always produced the best outcomes and children have ended up moving into residential or foster accommodation. We have developed a model up there where we are working with the whole family. Much of what we talked about this morning in relation to family support is working on a needs-led basis. Individual work with the children, individual work with families is working with the families together as well. At times—this is crucial—at times and in places that suit them and suit their needs out of ours at weekends when the family is comfortable, when the family needs that support, not Monday to Friday, we are already seeing, in a relatively short space of time from that bit of work that we are doing up there, a significant impact in terms of the number of children who are now not being accommodated or being moved out of authority. In fact, it is not only on our own evidence but the authority has come back to us and said that we recognise that this X number of children would have been moved out of authority unless they had received the support that you have provided them with. Changing our approach in that sense to that group of children and those families has had a fundamental impact on whether or not those children will end up in the care system or in residential fostering care.  Inevitably it will have an impact because they are not being moved out of the community, they are not being moved away from their school and they are being able to be supported to continue it. There has not been an empirical study done into the impact on their education per se but the benefits of them just remaining at home, remaining with their family, remaining in the community, remaining in their own school where they have relationships friendships, that is clear and beneficial to them. Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of the first panel of witnesses. I thank you all very much for your attendance today. I will suspend for a moment or two to allow the witnesses to change over before continuing. The second panel today is focusing on the role of local authorities and I welcome to this meeting Linda Lees, lifelong learning strategic manager, City of Edinburgh Council. John Butcher, executive director of education and youth employment, North Ershire Council and Dr James Follie, performance analyst, youth and communities North Lanarkshire Council. If you would like to respond to a question, please indicate to me or to the clerks and I will call you to speak. There is no need to touch consoles and there is no need to feel that you have to answer every question if you do not think it is relevant to you. Again, I should reiterate that we have a lot to get through today, so I ask that both questions and answers be succinct. Richard Scott, would you like to start? Thank you for coming to give evidence today. Clearly, our inquiry is looking at the impact of poverty on the ability to learn. I really want to turn to Dr James Follie in the first instance, but I welcome any other contributions in connection with holiday hunger because I very much welcome the new focus, additional focus on holiday hunger. We have also had a good written submission from Lindsay Graham, who is an expert in food education and has been doing a lot of work. You have done some great work, yes. I said that she has done some brilliant work, yes, Lindsay. Sorry. Lindsay has done some brilliant work, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry, I can't hear you through the microphone there. Highlighting how important this is, is an issue. North Lanarkshire Council clearly are doing a lot of good work on holiday hunger, so I very much welcome the announcements that you have been making about dedicating a lot more resources towards this. Can you speak to us about why you are doing that as a council, the trends in food poverty that you are experiencing as a council, the causes of that and also how you think we should now tackle that as a country? Yeah, I mean, what we started with was a lot of anecdotal accounts when topic of poverty is raised. Usually the first thing that people who work in the private community is raised with me is the topic of the growing incidence of hunger being a problem, especially like head teachers, teaching professionals across the board raise this every time we bring up the issue. They thought it was having a significant impact on the ability to learn of their pupils. The specific project for COP 365 came about in response to a conversation with our assistant chief executive and one of the head teachers in one of our most deprived communities, and she was being asked what would actually make a difference. She said, I think partly in jest, that the best thing would be if we could run a boarding school during the holidays. Everyone kind of knew what she meant by that because essentially what it meant was people were coming back from the holidays with a significantly deteriorated ability to learn and it would take several weeks to get them up to speed and back learning properly again. There's a lot of evidence that's come out in the past about learning loss, particularly in America, I have to say, where they have that extra long summer holidays, where our summer holidays are slightly shorter and therefore there's that difference, but there's a lot of evidence that suggests that not just that there is learning loss during the holidays but that learning loss is disproportionate amongst those on the lowest incomes. Obviously you've got the rising incidence of food banks, you've got growing awareness of food poverty as an issue and unfortunately I think what you've got is a tendency where lots of anecdotal evidence starts to come out and then you start getting evidence such as the number of people attaining food banks, you get polling evidence and so on. I come from an academic background myself as is indicated and academic turnaround times are quite long in the sense that sometimes a problem is identified and it's four years down the line until we've got the proper academic evidence about the causal links. So when it comes to food poverty what I know is there are, I believe, according to Lindsay, eight PhDs under way about the impact of learning loss and so on during the holidays in the UK. There are six research projects under way as well but we're still very much at its infancy and our pilot project and our plans to extend it is also a research project in the sense that we are trying to do a bit of action research and find out how effective this can be. Your submission says that North Lanarkshire claimants will lose roughly £78 million per year, due to post-2015 welfare reforms. That's a phenomenal amount of money for one local authority area and is that a driver in terms of your concerns about on-going child poverty and the need to focus and hold longer issues? Oh, absolutely. We are about to get universal credit rolled out in our area. I know it's a big anxiety for our financial inclusion team. This is part of my point about the recentness of a lot of this sort of stuff. The EIS survey that was done on it was suggesting that a lot of these problems have intensified in recent years. I did a survey amongst, I was speaking to 50 teachers in our local authority yesterday and I said, hands up, who thinks that the problem of hunger has intensified since 2015 and they all put their hand up. So this is something that has been widely recognised. As I said, we need more research on it. We need more research to validate the link between learning loss, hunger and attainment in the end and we are working with academic partners on that. However, as a matter of the fact that food to me should be a fundamental human right, I think that it's something that we need to do. Okay, thank you. My final question that we can bring in other witnesses as well is addressing holiday hunger, which I think absolutely must be a big priority now for the Scottish Government, but also the UK Government is responsible for the poverty in the first place that are causing the rise in child poverty. We have schools that should remain closed for a large part of the year when they are on holiday. One of the themes is that we should open up the schools and use America in terms of what they are doing as an example to follow. Clearly, our schools have a huge burden and lots of responsibilities as things stand at the moment and to add in tackling food poverty and opening up and serving meals, which sounds a very laudable thing to do. Clearly, that would be an additional burden in itself. How do we involve the rest of the community to deliver that service? What shall we forward in terms of getting the resources to deal with this issue? It seems to me that because the UK Government's policies are causing poverty, there is more pressure on the Scottish Government's budget to deal with the fall-out issues and pick up the pieces. That just loads on more and more pressure on local government budgets. I absolutely value the project that is going on in my colleagues' authority in North Lanarkshire. They are not the only authority, however, who are tackling this issue. In my own authority in North Ayrshire, we have had tackling food poverty for a number of years now. It is a very targeted response in our authority because we have targeted communities that require it. Food poverty is crucial. We do not want children going to school who have not had a breakfast, for example, and who may not eat from a Friday to a Monday having a proper meal, because that clearly impacts on their ability to learn. However, it is not just about food poverty for the initiatives that we run. It is about social isolation and learning while those holiday breaks are on. It is also about involving parents in there, so it is a targeted community response. In terms of your point about schools opening, I firmly believe that schools are absolutely rooted and should be rooted at the centre of their communities. They are arguably an underused community resource, and therefore we need to open our schools at all times for a whole variety of things. It is important that our teachers get involved in that, because quite a number of them do in my own authority. They come out during holidays, they come out during breaks and they are involved in those. However, it is also about encouraging people who live in those communities to contribute to their children's learning to get involved as part of a family learning initiative when these holiday clubs or food clubs are on the go. I think that that is really important as well. I absolutely agree with everything that has already been said. We and Edinburgh are in an interesting position right now because we are developing our first projects to look at holiday hunger. We will not be calling it that because, thinking about the children and the young people and the families, they do not want to go to something that is called holiday hunger. We are looking at that. We are thinking about calling it Discover so that we are encouraging young people to discover new activities, to discover learning to cook together, to discover family learning, to discover their own communities and to discover trips. It is very much a partnership approach that we are taking. We have not started yet, but a lot of the learning that is already being gleaned from other local authorities is very important for us. I would echo that the importance of involving the community, the third sector, parents, teachers and also PSAs, because often PSAs know the children very intimately and they live locally. It is quite important that we have that very hybrid mix of people involved. The other thing is that we are not looking just at a summer holiday. The Christmas holiday is a really important holiday where children often go back to school very distressed and hungry for a number of reasons. We are looking at using an adopting improvement methodology to start in October. We will do a summer holiday programme that she will evaluate and learn from it and start with each next holiday so that by the time we come to the longer next summer holiday we hope that we will have something that is really engaged with a lot of partners, a lot of our own staff, because we have very experienced staff who also, like the third sector organisation, know these families and know these communities extremely well. It is a very interesting point for us at the moment because we are about to start and we definitely want to be looking out to other local authorities to learn what they have been doing as well. I would completely echo all those comments about the fact that we cannot do it alone as local authorities. We are looking to work in partnership with other groups as well. It is something that we are going to be investigating for the future. The first thing that we want to be able to do is maximise our own use of resources. The only caveat that we have put to this is that if we take Finland as being the model of an education system that many people around the table would like to look to, they would be able to roll out their free school meals in the post-war situation when Finland was not a particularly rich country. Therefore, that might be a question of longer-term investment. We need a political consensus for that investment, and that might be something that is worth considering. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I should probably declare an interest that I was a North Ayrshire councillor between 2012 and 2016. In our first evidence session, Daniel Mason said that 10 per cent of schools in England have managed to narrow the gap. When I asked her how they did that, which was the obvious question, she spoke about the focus on what goes on in the classroom. Obviously, would you sing alleviating, eliminating poverty outside? I am not minimising any of that work at all, but I wonder whether there is a specific focus on what goes on in the classroom, where there can speak to steps that your local authorities are taking. In that same evidence session, Jim McCormack said that North Ayrshire was bucking the trend in terms of SIMD and performance of young people. I wonder if Mr Butcher would talk to us about the professional learning academy, which seems to be one of the differences in that authority. Thank you. Yes, North Ayrshire is unfortunately the second highest level of child poverty in Scotland behind Glasgow. I used to work in Glasgow as head of education there, so I have experience of the two highest levels of deprivation for child poverty in Scotland. I firmly believe in partnership, and let me not discount some of the evidence that you have just heard, because it is really important. I want to come back to some of that later if I can, particularly around the police involvement. However, I firmly believe that our future is based in our children's learning, because our teachers are our most valuable resource, our support staff in our schools are our most valuable resource, and everybody that interacts with those young people is our most valuable resource, and therefore we should be investing in them for the future. One of the things that we have done in North Ayrshire is that we set up the professional learning academy. The professional learning academy has our most qualified, best teachers, best staff there working that are drawn for a number of agencies, not just teachers but also speech and language therapists, early years workers and psychologists, and their prime function is to increase the capacity of our schools to work with our teachers on literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing strategies in the best way that they possibly can to get across what works. The difference between going for training at the professional learning academy and training that I used to go to as a young teacher or you may have experienced is that there was very often very little follow-up to that, so you went to something, you learned something and you may or may not have implemented it. The professional learning academy follows that up, so if you go for training and you go for staff development, you then are followed that up with coaching and mentoring, so that you implement the practice that you have learned in your class, and that's a key plank of our attainment challenge work. It's not the only plank because we've got nurture, we've got working in relation to data analysis, to leadership and to family learning, as well as schools counselling initiatives, and also rooted in that is working with partners from a range of agencies. So what difference has that made? Huge difference. With over 50 per cent of our learners in SIMD 1 to 3, we have a significant challenge there. We have evidence that we are closing that attainment gap without bringing the top down, which is equally as important because the easiest way to bring the attainment gap down was to forget about your top learners or your high achievers, where we're doing both because we're working with the University of Glasgow in relation to our high achieving learners, and indeed I spoke at that conference last week. But our targeted approaches have made a significant impact, and I maybe give you some of the figures. We've closed the gap in primary literacy by 5.3 per cent, in secondary literacy by 16.2 per cent, and in 14.1 per cent between SIMD 1 and 2, and those in SIMD 3 and 4. Numeracy has improved by 2 per cent in terms of closing that gap between SIMD 1 and 3 and 4. In terms of, you've talked about soft analysis earlier on, in terms of things that are difficult to measure, we have a nurture initiative as we brought from Glasgow, which had a significant investment in nurture. We've seen a 73 per cent improvement in the developmental strand and a 75 per cent improvement in the diagnostic strand. Of course, we don't forget early years, because we've seen a 5 per cent improvement in individual learning for children in the early years in terms of their developmental milestones. Significant improvement. I'm sorry, you could always send us those figures. Yeah, I can. I've got those. Thank you for that full answer. I'm really interested to hear from other panel members, what specific classroom interventions to support teachers are happening in your local authorities and how you measure their successes? I'm not a quality improvement officer, so I don't have the absolute detail of a lot of the support and challenge work that is going on with our schools. But what we are doing at the moment is definitely taking a real focus on quality of learning and teaching and putting in place a suite of frameworks to support headteachers and their teachers to improve quality of learning and teaching for all learners. The first framework that's just been launched to schools is the framework for equity. One of the things that's not happened yet, but we'll be asking schools to do, is to really understand their own schools equity profile and set authority and school stretch aims. There'll be professional learning and support and challenge going along with that for schools. That's something that I can share with you. I was brought in specifically to deal with the poverty-related issues in relation to the classroom and so on. I'm coming at it from the opposite angle of what you were talking about it, if you see what I mean, because we already have a large suite of interventions around the classroom that we're in place. I was brought in specifically to look at what we can do about the rest of the social environment when it comes to the attainment challenge. At one presentation I was at recently, I heard an estimate saying that in terms of the attainment gap, 15 per cent is to do with things that happen inside the classroom and 85 per cent is to do with other issues, if you know what I mean, other sociological issues, and therefore that was why I was brought in. Now I can get for you the detail, if you would like, in relation to what we are doing and what impact it is having. I'm sure that it's available. Unfortunately, I'm just not particularly qualified to answer the question, to be honest. I just want to be clear, both of those things are really important. I think that it would be interesting to receive that by the letter. You're good, thank you. Okay, thank you very much Ruth. Tamish? Thank you very much, convener. Can I ask all of you, particularly someone who's a performance and analyst, can you give me three examples of how you measure achievement? Because we had a debate earlier on, and I don't know if you were in earlier on, but as a committee, we're very interested in how we do that, given that's one of the biggest challenges in education policy. Do you measure it, and if so, how? I unfortunately have only been in my job currently for a week, so it's not somewhere I'm particularly in. I'm still dealing with the club 365 and so on right at this minute. I know what we are trying to do is we are trying to incorporate more qualitative analysis into what we are doing in terms of measurement. We are going to be doing more using the benchmarking tools in order to try and improve our performance. Unfortunately, I don't have a detail on that, but I'm happy to get it to you. That would be great, yes. I wonder if the two councils would have any measurements. The real answer to that is that we have a whole suite of needs that we gather. Give me three, I don't want a whole suite. I'll give you three. Outdoor education, we talked about, you heard the importance of outdoor education. We measure that all of our primary sevens, for example, we are one of the authorities that are lucky to have an outdoor education resource on the island of Arran. Everybody gets an outdoor education experience, plus a certification for being part of that, and that's fully recognised. It's really valued by those children, parents or whatever else. We measure the number of children, for example, who do Duke of Edinburgh's awards. We also measure the number of children, for example, who are involved with outdoor education trust. We pick up on examples in relation to a whole suite of John Muir awards, for example, that would take that, or external college courses that happen in that, or community involvement, that recognises a whole range of wider achievements for children. Would you be able to give the committee just some detail on that in writing afterwards? Yes, we can gather some of that for you. Specific on how you measure achievement, if that is that. Thank you. What does Edinburgh do? There's always this question about whether we value what we already measure or what we actually measure. We might need to shift some of the dialogue around starting to measure what we value and think about what we value. Achievement, there is some measurement around accredited awards, youth achievement awards and things like that, but we need to be considering wider achievement slightly differently. Outdoor learning is certainly one. There are accredited awards through that, but, again, the actual individual achievement that young people might feel and experience and be able to drop on is not, I don't think, talked about quite enough across the sectors. I'd also suggest that learning instrumental music—there's a whole poverty issue around that as well in terms of some authorities charging and others not—but the achievements that you see when young people stand up and play an instrument, learn an instrument, that's not an easy thing to do, that can be measured certainly through SQA and RSAMD qualifications, but there's something about achievement when you're just standing up and playing an instrument in front of your peers and the positive feedback that you get from that. I think that it's an area that actually needs a lot of debate. Totally, but if I get your job title right, Ms Lees, you're the lifelong learning strategic manager, so as part of your job to come up with a better way to give your elected members, ultimately, a thoughtative advice about how all those informal education and other measures are working to deliver achievement? Yes, and recently I've been quite involved with CLD. My job has changed fairly recently, and I've been quite involved with CLD looking at the inspection. One of the things that we are recognising that we may be not done as well and are definitely looking to improve on is how we do measure wider achievement, but not only within our lifelong learning service but how that is shared with schools and also how some of what's captured within schools is shared, because I think that there are certainly situations that we've noticed where young people are doing achievement awards that are out of school that are captured within schools, so at the moment a lot of the measuring is captured through school and we need to improve that dialogue between the learning that takes place out of school and in school, so that's something we're working on. I'd like to come back to the cost of the school day, and I've heard numerous examples of the impact of not just the obvious costs such as uniform blazers braiding, appropriate footwear or PE kit, but smaller costs that are still problematic, non-uniform days that we have to bring to the collection, etc. I'm interested from the local authorities' perspective about where the decisions are ultimately made on this. There's mention in the papers around guidance that's given to head teachers and I'd be looking for a bit of information from yourself about where the balance is. Who ultimately makes a decision? What's the difference between a local authority instructing schools to make sure that they're poverty-proofed in this way and where they're giving appropriate guidance to head teachers with the intention that head teachers will, of their own volition, implement it? The one and five raising awareness of child poverty. This is a project that was launched in 2015 and used a lot of evidence and research to think about how it was that we could set up focus groups, training, train the trainers, and provide support and guidance for schools. We've got a number of publications that have been launched, the first of which was Top Tips for Schools. It's not just thinking about swap shops and things like that for pupils, it's thinking about how to use the language slightly differently so that you're not, through the best will, coming up with the wrong type of language that actually does that stigmatisation anyway. I don't have the exact figures, but quite a number of our secondary schools and a number of our primary schools have actually been involved in training. Many teachers and third sector partners across the city have been involved in conferences. We've trained a number of trainers and I think it's about 19 high schools and 57 primary schools have actually got a named person within their school who is responsible for raising awareness of child poverty within the schools and within the staff. Those publications, Top Tips for Schools, making education equal for all is another one-in-five publication that's gone out to schools. We're linking those in with other planning, like children's services plan and things, so we're making sure that our schools understand the kind of language to use as well as lots of ideas about what they can do to help reduce the cost of school day. Just before others come in, sorry, just to follow up on that, are you finding that guidance in that sport that it's being consistently implemented within the schools that you're working with? Is there a level of inconsistency between the 1957 that you mentioned or within them? I'm not the person who's actually directly involved in delivering the training. It is being evaluated. I would say that it is being well used. Anecdotally, there is very, very good feedback and there definitely are some statistics that I don't have in front of me at the moment that could be shared. I thought when this paper on this was excellent and we did give some good guidance on it. It's something that we're looking at. We've got an officer member working group within the council that deals specifically with poverty proof and the cost of the school day. It involves the trade unions, councillors and officers like myself. It's out of that that several of our initiatives have been launched. We took an early decision that we were going to deal with period poverty before it was in the programme for government. Obviously, we had club 365. We've had a number of other initiatives as well on a smaller scale. What we are looking to do is to launch some training in conjunction with the child poverty action group, because they're about to bring out a toolkit for dealing with this that's going to involve teachers, pupils and parents in thinking these things through. We did a survey—I think it was us and EIS together—based on their document. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but what we found with that was that there was a lot of evidence of good practice already on going in the schools. Some great things were going on. One thing I think of off the top of my head was in terms of reducing the stigma. One school, instead of having second-hand uniforms or things that could be quite stigmatising, had rebranded it as a sort of green, eco-friendly type initiative. It's just a small scale of things like that that we started to pick up. What we know about that is North Lanarkshire, we don't need to say, has got problems of deprivation across the board. There's already teachers who have years of experience in dealing with these things, and some people deal with it tremendously well, but they're dealing with it on an ad hoc basis. What we're trying to generate with our process is to get all those good examples of good practice and generalise them across the board. There's a lot of people uncertain about a lot of issues, because they're dealing with the problems every day, but if you think someone is suffering from hunger, do you want to be referring them to a food bank or a social worker or anything like that? It's a very sensitive thing, because clearly some people take an implication from it that you're not able to look after your children or whatever it is, and therefore we need guidance in terms of teaching the teachers we might be less experienced with these issues, how to deal with it. That's going to be partly bringing in people like child poverty action group, but as I said, it's also about we already know it, we just don't know that we know it. There's things happening that are good, and we just want to get those across to people as much as possible. To answer Mr Greer's original question, I suppose the issue is, unfortunately in my authority, poverty is an everyday part of life, and I don't necessarily need to instruct any of my head teachers to be able to be sympathetic to the poverty that exists in their communities. They all know it, they see it every day, they touch it, they smell it, they feel it, they experience it every single day, so they are very aware of the cost of the school day for our children and young people that goes across everything that you talked about from uniforms to attending trips and whatever else, and we try and minimise that and support that in every way we can, so we don't need to necessarily be directive around that. However, in my own authority, like my colleagues here, we have anti-poverty strategies, we have our fair for all strategy in North Ayrshire, which aims to deal with the consequences of poverty for all North Ayrshire residents, and it includes economic strategies, it includes work in relation to mental health and wellbeing, partnership work with our integrated health and social care partners, but it also includes work that we do with our children and young people, and that's led to the development of what is really an innovative children's services plan, which I would encourage you to read from North Ayrshire, which is written from the perspective of young people and it makes a series of promises to those young people and families about what we can and can't achieve and what their expectations should be of us, and it's an interesting way, and the issue is not just producing those documents, it's about transferring it into actions, and I think our schools and our communities are trying really hard to do that. We were the first authority to introduce strategies to tackle period poverty. All of our schools have free sanitary products in our secondary schools, and we were the first to do that, including our PPP schools, so really we are working hard to do that. Very quickly, one of our clusters, certainly across the city, a number of teachers were reflecting that they did not necessarily know what information to pass on to parents when they were asking about poverty, and so a document has been created about the financial support information that's been given into every school, and they can just be handing that out to parents about where to go, but one of our clusters, we put a welfare officer into the cluster and they have been giving appointments to families within all the schools in that cluster, and through that income maximisation, that cluster, the 47 families that have actually been involved in accessing those appointments, have maximised their income to the tune of around 150,000 for the families, so that's an important piece of information for schools that's having an impact. Just to say that there is a role for other services like the financial inclusion side of things in our council, we've done some great work in terms of reducing the number of food bank referrals, which they managed to cut substantially in the space of a couple of years, just by making it the first port of call that when someone is being referred, that they should try to maximise their income first by making them aware of the benefits that they're entitled to rather than being referred to food banks. There is a danger that food banks do become a permanent part of our welfare state, and I think it's something that a lot of people would like to avoid. It's fully just said about how North Atlantic have tackled period poverty, and he maybe knows that I've been campaigning on this ever since I've been elected. In my area of Aberdeenshire, we have hidden poverty, and stigmatisation is something that you mentioned, and you've all mentioned that teachers and schools and local authorities are keenly aware of it. In my area, it's harder to recognise. How important is it that initiatives around period poverty and the provision of products around that, that young girls don't have to put themselves out there and ask for it, that it's freely available, and I know that that's something that you prioritise? I mean, it's a double stigma that we're dealing with here in relation to the fact that there's all the stigma around poverty that we know already exists, but also that you've got the taboo subject of women's reproductive health, which is a major problem as well. For us, we want to introduce this, not just that the products are going to arrive, but that we are going to be introducing education for the schools, for teachers, for parents and everyone else in relation to the fact that this is normal, this is not something that should be seen as a problem or unsanitary or whatever it happens to be. So we want to change attitudes and values with the policy as well as just providing this for the very extreme examples. I mean, obviously, there's the extreme examples, like you've probably seen in the film I, Daniel Blake, with that terrible case that was in that, which was based on real instances that had been reported. In North Lanarkshire schools, you have got these products in the bathrooms available. They don't have to go and ask a teacher or a nurse for those.  When I said what we are introducing in this service in the beginning of June, and yes, the instruction is going to be that these are freely available in baskets. We considered other delivery models such as the free vending machines and so on. Eventually, we did decide that baskets would be the least stigmatising option, particularly for people who might be transgender or whatever. We wanted to keep these things as open as we possibly could. And yes, we do not want to have a situation where people have to go and ask for their products 100 per cent. Miss Martin, we already have these in all of our schools, in all of our secondary schools. We have had them for about eight months now. To answer your initial question, we saw some issues of them in about the first week. We went through a significant amount of sanitary products for about the first week or two, and then that settled down. There was a nobility value in that as all children explore things. We use vending machines. The vending machines are free for use, and they have a range of sanitary products. As I have said, they are non-stigmatising. They are in the toilets. People go and get them when they want them. It has been a terrific success in our schools, and I would encourage other local authorities to do exactly the same thing. I want you to ask about PEF funding. Throughout our evidence sessions, we have heard some evidence on different uses of PEF funding. From buying supplies for school to this morning's example of purchasing police officers to patrol the campus, which is not something that we would want to encourage in any way. We also heard this morning that PEF funding could potentially be used in a more innovative way, working with other educators in the third sector to help to raise the wider learning attainment. Is there any evidence across your local authorities that that is happening? Do you encourage that more innovative use of PEF across your local authorities? If you do, could you give us an example of where it has worked? I will pick up on that first of all. I will turn to this year's campus officers, because we have heard quite a bit about that this morning. I would be the first to say that my colleague earlier in the evidence session was probably referring to my own authority. We have campus officers in some of our schools, and I want to clear up some of the— Was PEF funding used to provide— Some of those schools chose to use part of their PEF funding to purchase some campus officers. The rest is funded by Police Scotland. That is their choice. We heard a lot of evidence from the third sector about breaking down and encouraging partnerships. One of the key partnerships is encouraging it with Police Scotland and breaking down some of the barriers between Police Scotland and local authorities and children and young people.  Perhaps in responding to me, you could perhaps make it clear how the school evidenced that using PEF funding to provide campus officers raised attainment, because that is what PEF funding is for. Campus officers do not control schools, as is the bottom line. They do not actually wonder about the schools in their uniforms. They are involved in Duke of Edinburgh's awards. Campus officers take some of those clubs. They are involved in wider achievements that Mr Scott asked a question about earlier. They are involved fully in the life of the school. They encourage young people to be part of the school to get into school in the morning. They work with parents to break down those barriers between Police Scotland and schools and to encourage those parents to send their children to school to get that involvement. There is a long history of campus officers both in Glasgow and in my own authority. They are not there to police the schools. They are there to be absolutely a key partner in the schools. Commander Main, who is the divisional commander in Ayrshire, is working really hard to make policing in Ayrshire a trauma-informed police force. That is about understanding adverse childhood experiences for every police officer in Ayrshire who will understand that. They will understand the impact of those adverse childhood experiences on those children. Therefore, when their officers are working in schools with young people and with their families, they will understand the impact of those. They will get a more constructive, more engaging and more productive set of policing there. They will gain intelligence. I think that that is a fundamental part of the importance of being partners in this initiative. I can understand the breaking down barriers. I genuinely struggle to see how having officers in a school can raise attainment. However, if we could perhaps do that. Can we not just concentrate on one aspect of PEF because what it seems is that the headteachers use PEF for all sorts of different things and it is not for us to pick one that some people might not like and then decide to do it? I am sorry, convener. PEF is used for a whole range of things. The guidance allows headteachers to be innovative and they should be innovative in how they use their PEF funding. They can use it in any way that they choose that will help them target young people who require to be supported to improve their attainment and achievement from the lower SIMD deciles. That has included work in relation to wider use of community-based resources, involvement of community learning and development in the work that they do, and the involvement of youth workers. They have used it to buy in school counselling sessions in relation to supporting health and wellbeing. They bring in additional curricular resources in relation to that. There is a whole plethora of how PEF funding is used, but it is all used appropriately by headteachers at their discretion and choice to use it for their own particular circumstances in their own communities. Could other witnesses perhaps give examples of where PEF has been used in an innovative way to raise attainment? Dr Foley, Mrs Lees? There are a number of schools in Edinburgh that are using their PEF very innovatively. I think that one example that I am sure that our attainment adviser could share with the committee is a school out in Western Hills, where the primary head has really got to know her community. However, she has also taken a very creative approach and tried to give her children that wide range of, I suppose, what you might describe as middle-class experiences, but always tied that back into learning and teaching, and always tied that back into literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing. The experiences that she brings into her school involve arts and cultural organisations, outdoor learning counsellers, a whole range of different professionals, and some of that is done through a negotiation with the local authority, because, again, sometimes we have a quality of students role to play in which organisations may really deliver exactly what that headteacher needs. Rather than being a very binary thing between the schools and an outside provider, there is an element of that negotiation with the local authority as well, but certainly the impact on attainment in that school in particular. I have not got the figures, so I am sure that they could be provided, but it has been a very interesting example of using PEF money well to bring about very different experiences that are linked directly back to learning and teaching for those children. I was brought in specifically to deal with the cost of the school day type initiative, so a lot of the PEF funding initiatives that are fed back to me tend to be relatively small scale things on the basis of the cost of the school day type initiatives. They tend to be headteachers who are buying in spare uniforms, spare gym kits, people who are running small scale lunch or breakfast clubs and so on. We are currently undertaking a review, which I will be involved in, of our best examples of best practice when it comes to PEF, which I am happy to share with the committee whenever that is published. What I would say is that I know that there are anxieties about how exactly you are allowed to spend PEF, the procurement frameworks and so on and so forth that do exert some sort of psychological pressures around this sort of thing, and that has been shared with me as well. I do not know if there is anything that can be done about that, but it is something that I would like to share. Just on that last point, Dr Foley, the procurement issue has come up quite a lot over the last couple of weeks and also in all the ways that you can spend your PEF. We had been told on a number of occasions that, for example, you could not hire teachers, the fact is that you can, using PEF money. We were told that there was obstacles with procurement and how small schools could not work together to buy in services, but we were told again that you can. It seems to be that it is not the rules that are stopping this. It is the guidance from the local authorities that is the feedback that we have been getting that are stopping this, and why would local authorities be working in different ways for this? Mr Butcher, you seem to have come in. I have heard all those things as well. The fact is that you can get whatever teachers you want using PEF. The difficulty for some authorities is the lack of teachers, and you can get pupil support assistance, you can get whatever you want with PEF, and that should not be a barrier to it. There are some procurement rules around purchasing from, for example, in my third sector colleagues who were here earlier. Procurement has to do that, but in my own authority, schools are clubbing together to make bids, and procurement will support. Procurement is going out of their way to support those bids. Sometimes that is a bit of a slow process and it is a slow burner, but it is actually getting to grips with that now. I think that one of the fundamental issues around PEF that was never considered when it was given was that, if you look at the history of education, unlike, say, for example, social work, who have procured services from the third sector for years and years and years enough, relationships with Aberlau or Bernardo or whatever else, education has no history of procurement, and there was some feeling when PEF came in, suddenly all our head teachers would know how to procure. Well, that actually does not exist, so it will take a little bit of time to work our way through that. In my own authority, procurement is working hard to support our head teachers, and we have given them very little guidance except to be imaginative and to get what you need to think to close the attainment gap. Does anybody else have any comment on that? Two of the things that certainly Edmund did at the beginning of PEF was to look at the equity, the raising attainment, the learning and teaching and bring in speakers like Sue Ellis to talk about that, and then the other thing that they did was to look very carefully at those issues of HR and procurement and provide guidance and support for teachers, head teachers, about those things that they were less familiar with. Those were two strands that we took in the introduction of PEF. Just very briefly, convener, we had a very interesting discussion in the informal session this morning about the value of breakfast clubs because it was seen that the early learning evidence is very much that that is the important meal of the day for so many youngsters. I am conscious of time, convener. Would your local authorities be able to provide us with some examples of the successive breakfast clubs? The short answer is yes. I think that it is what long established that getting up in the morning and getting to school, having something to eat before you are actually—it is part of that readiness to learn to do. I can see the evidence. It would be very helpful. Thank you very much. In that case, I thank you for your evidence this morning, and I now close the public session. Thank you very much.