May I welcome everyone to the 17th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2018. Can you please remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices onto the silence of the duration of the meeting? Apologies, which we have received from the convener, James Dornan, explain how I am, in all powerful position I am today, with a delight to welcome Clare Adamson as James Dornan's substitute. The first item of business is a declaration of interest, following a change of membership on the committee, I welcome Gordon MacDonald to the committee, and I will take this opportunity to thank Ruth Maguire for a valuable contribution to the committee's work. I invite Gordon MacDonald to declare any relevant interests. I have no relevant interests to declare. Thank you very much for that. We can move to agenda item 2, which is to allow the committee to agree whether to take today's review of the evidence on its inquiry into young people's pathways in private. Are members content to take this review and future reviews of the evidence in private? The substantive item on today's agenda is our first evidence session on young people's pathways. The basis for this inquiry includes a survey of 900 young people that provided detail on their experiences of considering which options to pursue in the senior phase of school and beyond. The committee agreed, based on the survey responses, to hold a short inquiry into progress made against two recommendations made in 2014 by the commission for developing Scotland's young workforce. Those recommendations relate, in the main, to the provision of vocational pathways and careers guidance in the senior phase of school. Today we will hear from one panel of witnesses from organisations involved in the delivery of those recommendations. In future weeks we will hear from Sirian Wood and then from Education Scotland and Skills Development Scotland, which are key delivery agencies on those recommendations. We will then hear from the minister for employability and training. A less formal work to inform the inquiry will include a delegation from the committee visiting Shetland next week. In addition, the convener held a focus group with a young women lead programme last week to hear their experiences. I thank the young women for sharing their personal views to inform the committee's work. A write-up of the discussion is in paper 2. I welcome to this meeting Michael Cross, interim director of access, skills and outcome agreements, Scottish Funding Council, Ewan Duncan, professional officer, the Scottish Secretary of Education, Teachers Association, Jackie Gilbrath, vice principal, strategy and skills, Ayrshire College and representing Colleges Scotland, Alison Henderson, chief executive of Dundee and Angus Chamber of Commerce and representing Scottish Chamber of Commerce Network, Terri Lannigan, representative of the Association of Directors of Education Scotland and Dr Gil Stewart, director of qualifications development, Scottish Qualification Authority. Given the size of the panel and the size of the committee, we have a logistical challenge apart from anything else today. I thought that it would be useful, given that you all have very distinct roles in developing your workforce, if you could very briefly set out your organisation's role and think about the one thing that you must really feel you want to say to the committee in case we don't manage to get it through all the range of questions that we are going to be asking you today. There is one core point that I think would be helpful. When we go through to the questions, it will not be necessary for everybody to answer every question, so I appreciate the time that we do not allow that. If we could just start from Jackie Gilbrath and move our way around. Hi. First of all, I welcome the opportunity to give evidence to the committee on behalf of Colleges Scotland. I work at Ayrshire College and Ayrshire is a region that has a significant challenge in terms of the economy, employment and providing opportunities for young people. Developing the young workforce and all of the policy that sits around that is a critical ambition in terms of enabling young people in Ayrshire to have positive futures. The Colleges role is that we work in partnership with schools, with the developing the young workforce regional employers group, with the local authority, with the chambers of commerce employers, to ensure that young people from all stages in school, including from primary, have exposure to what colleges do in vocational opportunities. The one burning point that I want to make is the critical role of partnership, shared ambitions and shared goals of all those partners in achieving the very ambitious aims of the DYW agenda. Good morning. I also welcome the opportunity to be here. ADES, obviously, is a membership organisation, but we have officers in every part of the country, every local authority, who have front-line responsibility for delivering in partnership with colleges, schools and others, and employers, obviously, the DYW agenda. I have been a member of developing the young workforce programme board since its inception, and ADES is fully committed to what is a very ambitious agenda. The one thing that I want to stress is that we are just past the halfway point in a seven-year programme. It is a seven-year programme of significant ambition. If the aims of the DYW programme are achieved and the recommendations in the Wood commission report are overtaken, we will have successfully transformed Scottish society, the relationships between schools, employers, colleges and the preparedness of our young people for the world of work. That is an agenda that Scotland has been struggling with all the time that I have been involved in education. I think that for the first time, we are seeing real progress towards achieving the goals. On behalf of the Scottish Chambers Network, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to come and give evidence. We are, as a network, a strong supporter of the developing young workforce initiative. The majority of chambers are involved and heavily engaged in the delivery through those regional DYW groups. It is a national priority of ours to help to engage employers into the young people in education, but also to bring them into work at an early stage with employers. Through engagement with chambers, it is clear that there is positive, increasing momentum throughout DYW activity. Foundation apprenticeships are one that is beginning to bubble away. Levels of engagement with employers and local authority partners continue to improve. We recognise that there is a lot of proactive work being done with agencies, and the partnership working is absolutely key to delivering this as an agenda that we have all bought into. What we would like to see is increased consistency of delivery and practical issues such as timetabling and transport in addition to broader challenges around perception are some of the issues that we have highlighted, but there are some really good practices going on that we can learn from. A key barrier to overcome is that we must drive the uptake of those senior phase pathways. I would like to see sustained independence of the regional groups, which continue to support all that work that has been done in partnership. We are delighted to see such employer engagement and helping to grow it. Thank you very much for the invitation to be here today. My name is June Duncan. I am a professional officer with the SSTA, which is a professional association and trade union representing teachers in Scottish secondary schools. Prior to taking up my role as a professional officer, I was a guidance teacher for a number of years. The point that I would like to make is that secondary teachers and particularly guidance teachers, I think, are at the heart of developing the young workforce in schools. The SSTA would welcome a long-term commitment to help to add time and guidance staff to secondary schools. There is a risk that too much of a focus in learning simply for work can reduce its value and diminish its impact. The challenge in schools is to prepare young people who are versatile and resilient, compassionate and risk aware, communicative and honest, and most of all ready for the uncharted territory that lies ahead of them. The best schools are strong teams where the focus is on the whole child, not simply on the future worker. Unfortunately, reductions in school leadership, reductions in local authority leadership, reductions in support in schools such as school nurses, the removal of homeschool link workers, the removal of pupil welfare officers who are responsible for attendance—all those reductions in removals mean that those teams around the child are shrinking and less able to provide the kind of focus that is required to make developing the young force recommendations a reality. While money may not be the answer, people and time are certainly necessary to help to prepare young people who are well-rounded and broadly educated. Our role is to provide, as you well know, school qualifications, the national courses, but we also have a much broader remit to provide vocational qualifications. SQA offers over 1,400 vocational qualifications, and last year there were 160 odd thousand enrolments for those vocational qualifications, and 122,000 people achieved different types of vocational qualifications. The nature of those qualifications varies depending on the point that a learner is in their journey throughout their life, so we have qualifications that are appropriate for younger people entering into employment or considering a particular route into employment. We have vocational qualifications for those who are progressing through their vocational careers, through perhaps an apprenticeship training programme or a programme at college, national certificate or HNCs or HNDs. We also offer a wide range of workplace competence qualifications called SVQs. We offer over 500 of those who support the modern apprenticeship programme, and there are over 35,000 people achieve SVQs in 2017. In particular, around the DYW agenda, we have worked very closely with Skills Development Scotland to assist them in the development of the new foundation apprenticeships at ACQF level 6, and we have worked with the relevant industry partners to do that as well. That has been a very positive development. We are also working with the SDS who are considering whether there is a need for further pre-apprenticeship-type programmes at ACQF levels 4 and 5 to cater for a broader range of young people who might not be at the level for entry into foundation apprenticeships. We also have a big team of regional staff who support both schools individually, but also regional staff who work with the DYW groups, local authorities and schools to help them to understand what type of qualifications might be appropriate to support learners in their region. We keep those qualifications up to date by constantly reviewing if things are changing in particular industries. We work with key employers in Scotland to do that, and we very much pride and are very proud of the vocational portfolio that we have on offer. Also important to this agenda is the range of soft skills-type qualifications that we offer to support the broader skills that UN made reference to that are very important for young people entering the world of work. Thank you. Good morning, convener and committee members. Thanks very much for the opportunity to represent the SFC at this morning's session. Very briefly, we are the organisation that supports challenges, funds, Scotland's colleges and universities. We do so in line with strategic guidance that the Scottish Government provides us on an annual basis. In the Developing Young Workforce programme, our role is essentially to work with other partners and use our own outcome agreement regime to support colleges in growing vocational provision. If I were to leave one message with the committee, it is essentially to repeat that that Jackie gave. We ran a session for various partners at the turn of the year to examine successes and challenges in DYW and the solutions. The consensus view was very much that this is a partnership effort that demands collaboration at every point in the system. That was a useful capturing of the breadth of expertise that we have in front of us. I want to ask specifically about the KPIs 10 and 11. Stephen McCabe from Council of Education said that, despite some of the progress that was made in the DYW programme, I am clear that we have simply not made enough progress in relation to addressing inequalities issues relating to gender, disabled and care experience young people. Before I ask specifically about that, I wonder if you have a view and note that one of the things that regards great progress is the levels of youth unemployment. I wonder to what extent you have in your organisation looked at a definition of a positive destination, because I am concerned that some positive destinations are actually zero-hours contracts with very little guaranteed work, very little training and very little opportunity for career progression. I have raised this with the minister and I wonder if you have a view on how we might define a positive destination to exclude that kind of very insecure and I would regard this exploitative work. I do not know who wants to kick off. Happy to sort of, as an employer and as someone who works with over 650 businesses in Dundee and Angus, I would say that the positive destination statistics are something that I have long felt would warrant a closer look. My point of view would not be that I am hearing so much about the zero-hours contracts, although in certain industries that is definitely a challenge, but we have heard from young people who have bounced through various training programmes that would have been classed as positive destinations, but they are bouncing through those and they are not leading to college, to an apprenticeship, to an actual job. I would echo what you have said. Of the gender or the looked-after children scenarios, we in Dundee and Angus have an apprenticeship ambassador programme, and that is going in and talking to S3 pupils about all sorts of different imbalances. It is beginning to really bear fruit. Before young people at S3 age met with any of those apprenticeship ambassadors, many of whom are girls, their thoughts of being an apprentice or even knowing about apprenticeships were very poor, and the stats go from 37 per cent to over 75 per cent of them keen to be an apprentice and look at different career paths. I just want to see some specific definition of positive destinations before I go on to do this more general question about equality. If I could just say very briefly, as a guidance teacher for people came to me saying that they were considering moving into employment, I'd be asking the questions about this particular employment that you're thinking about. Does it offer training? Does it offer career progression? Are there some kind of qualifications that will be underlying this work that you're going to be doing? I think that if we're going to think about positive destinations, particularly careers, we need to think about jobs that actually offer some kind of training progression qualifications. Not the zero-hour contracts where you go in and wash dishes when the employer needs you, but something that actually gives you the opportunity to develop as a person. Can I then specifically ask on two key performance indicators? On six, increase the percentage of employers recruiting young people directly from education to 35 per cent by 2018. In fact, there's been no change. The figure remained at 32 per cent between 2014 and 2016. The second one, which is Romans in Dec. 11, increased positive destinations for looked-after children by 4 per cent points per annum, resulting in parity by 2021. It says here that it's not met. The number of looked-after children in positive destinations was 71.2 per cent in 2015-16. A total increase of 1.9 per cent points since the baseline figures were recorded in 2012-2013. What do we need to do in both of those areas to see some more progress? One of the critical things here is how we work with employers. In the region that I work in, there are significant challenges in the economy in terms of jobs that are available for young people who leave in education. The employers that we work with are much more proactive about how they deal with that. For example, last night, we had the ceremony for our first cohort of foundation apprentices in engineering. One of the companies is their GE Caledonian in Preswick. They are taking a really proactive approach to working with young people from early secondary and primary right through the school with the college to identify talent. In the process of recruiting modern apprentices from the college and in supporting foundation apprenticeships, they have offered a full-time job. A modern apprenticeship to one of the foundation apprentices who was successful last night and a further two foundation apprentices have got full-time apprenticeships now at UTC. All of the others are now doing HNC, aeronautical or mechanical engineering courses at college—all positive destinations. However, the critical thing is the employer's spotting talent at an early age. He met a first-year pupil of young women at an event that they were doing—an awareness-raising event in schools—and spotted that that young woman had the skills and the aptitudes to work in that industry. They will be working with her as she goes through school to encourage her to take a career in that particular company. The key thing is how we work with employers to identify that talent and to overcome those barriers where they are gender-related or other equality issues. The final thing I would say is about care experience young people. It is critical that when care experience young people come through schooling to college that they are fully supported to sustain their college course, which will absolutely help them to sustain employment when they reach the end. That is an area that Ayrshire College has been really committed to and has been really proactive in. We have seen significant improvements in the attainment and retention of our students who are care experience because we have targeted that support and supported them through their college programmes. I think that that is really critical about the employer engagement. Except that it is not reflected in the figures. Does that mean that you are an outlier and you are doing stuff that other people are not doing, or is it simply not coming through the process yet? Well, it may be back to the point about that we are halfway through the programme and there is still time to go about the figures being reflected. Again, it is a long-term programme in tackling gender imbalance in key industries. That is not something that is going to happen in two or three years. That is why we work with primary schools and we have a thousand young people over the next two weeks coming to the college to engage with employers on STEM-related activities. We are investing that time and energy now, but we will not see the benefits of that until about four or five years down the line. In relation to KPI 6, we have to remember where we started from. The Wood commission report made reference to the fact that employers in Scotland had got out of the habit of recruiting directly from schools, so we were starting from a very low base. While we have fallen slightly short of the target that is referred to in KPI 6, we have made progress and I think that there are a couple of things that will really make a difference here. The employer-led regional groups, which were a key recommendation of the Wood commission, have got a very big role to play here. They have been set up, and they are now all operational, but some of them have only been operating for quite a short time. I believe that they will have a key role in increasing the engagement of employers with this agenda. I also believe that the second thing that Alison made reference to earlier that will make a difference is the growth of foundation apprenticeships, which of course require schools and local authorities to work with colleges and employers directly to deliver those. I made reference in my submission that ADES, along with Skills Development Scotland, is holding a national event on 29 August on foundation apprenticeships, where what we will be trying to do is to exemplify the best practice that is out there just now and to address the issues that still exist, issues of retention, issues of timetabling, issues of perception of the foundation apprenticeships among parents and among young people. There are a number of things that I think are in train just now that will have a big impact on the engagement of employers over the next year or two. Michael Cross. You have heard from both Terry and Jackie on the operational realities of the position, particularly in regard to, I suppose, the care experience of young people. From the perspective of the funding council, we operate on a series of outcome agreements that we develop with both colleges and universities over the course of a year and which defines, in short, what the state gets for its investment by way of outcomes. It is important therefore that we reflect the points that you are making in our outcome agreements. Indeed, we target improvements in attainment for care experienced people, for care experienced young people, for those who are suffering from disability and for those who suffer from economic disadvantage. We need to have that strategic framework properly in place to support the activity that Jackie and Terry are describing on the ground. We have done that. Alison Henderson. With practical things. You could be looking at specific partnerships that the DIY teams could put in place with schools that particularly look after care experienced young people. We have some successful partnerships that are maintained in our schools. There is something about the guidance and support that young people get when they are looking at university as opposed to looking at some of the other routes. We could be more proactive in supporting young people to think about direct employment routes and apprenticeships. The description of foundation apprenticeships has been difficult for some parents and young people to get their heads around, and that has been a definite challenge. As we measure schools on exams and other measures such as that, it can be counterintuitive to what we are trying to do from an outside perspective into helping the schools to be able to direct resources to that, and that is what is needed as direct committed resources to support the young people to look at those opportunities. I was very struck by the point about foundation apprenticeships. Having taught standard grade it was difficult for me to separate that all from the very good young people who came through foundation and had still had aspirations or other things, but it was seen as a very different kind of qualification in the level that hires at. Claire Adamson. Thank you, convener. I just want to put on record that I am actually very share of CERC, which might be relevant to our discussion this morning, but the thing that I really wanted to get to is that, in terms of KPI 6, there would be 16 recommendations for employers to come on board. If that engagement, however successful it is for engineering companies in Eurydian or whatever, is there any analysis that has been done of sectoral challenges, about getting into particular sectors such as the IT industry, such as some of the emerging businesses and biomedical sciences, and just what you see are the challenges in increasing the number of employers that are actually engaging in the process? I will answer that, but if you do not mind, could I just maybe say something about the disability thing first? One of the things that developed in the Young Workforce Regional Group in Ayrshire does, along with the college and other partners, is that it holds seminars for employers to raise awareness with them about what works with the Scottish Commission on Learning Disability, about the benefits of employing young people who have got disability and what support there is available to do that. They have done that now for a series of events over the past couple of years, so I think that that is really important. On your point about the challenges getting into different sectors, I think that that is a challenge. For example, in Ayrshire, we know that there is a burgeoning industry in Glasgow, in the surrounding areas and in other parts of Scotland, in terms of digital, and we have offered some of the digital foundation apprenticeships, and we hoped to offer them both this year. However, there have been challenges in terms of the number of employers in Ayrshire who are digital employers, so in terms of that, the young people in those foundation apprenticeships are getting access to the high-quality work experience that they need. We have a challenge because that particular industry is not well represented in Ayrshire. We are using different means to achieve that by inviting employers from other parts of Scotland to come and speak to young people and to give them other experiences. However, it is a challenge, and I think that it depends on the regional economy and where you are. I just wanted to comment on the digital challenges, but there are also good examples of good partnerships with employers to offer digital opportunities. Dundee and Angus runs such a partnership with Code Academy using MPAs in software development, and there are other examples around the country. There is also the work that we have done with Code Clan around higher-level professional development qualifications in software development. There are also new developments, as there always is in digital, around cybersecurity, and we are also looking at the whole area of data science to broaden out the range of pathways in that key industry for Scotland to grow economically, the digital industry. There are challenges, but there are some successes, and I suppose that it really does depend on the opportunities in your area. The key to that is that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to that, because the labour market in different parts of the country varies significantly. If you are in a big city, it is likely that you will have major players in the private sector who are employers there and employers have very significant numbers. I myself was director of education in West Dunbartonshire, where the biggest employer by far was the council, followed by the NHS, and you had a couple of medium-sized companies, but most employers in the area were not just SMEs, but one in two people operations. There is a significant challenge in getting that sort of organisation to engage with this process, and it has to be seen as a benefit to the employer as well as to the young person. That is the trick that we have not quite managed yet in engaging in that part of the Scottish economy. It is also important that it looks slightly early in the process. I am looking at the CELSA's report from June 2017. It notes that looked after children with the most positive outcomes are those who are in foster care rather than other care settings, those with fewer care placements in the year and those who have been looked after for the whole year rather than just part of it. We are looking at the end process, but we need to look earlier into a child's education and see how well are we catering for those young people when they are being cared for. How can we improve that part of it so that when they are ready to move on into employment they are more fit for it, rather than experiencing some of the chaos that they might have had through different care settings earlier on in their lives? I was struck by a point that Terry Lanagan has just made about the difficulty with SMEs. I have only got one or two members of staff. How difficult is it in rural areas for employers to engage, for example, with foundation apprenticeships then? I think that there are very specific challenges in rural areas. Again, I think that the employer-led regional groups have a real job here to do in terms of the engagement with rural employers. I personally have never worked in a rural area, so I do not have direct experience, but I know from talking to colleagues that there are very particular challenges in rural communities. In particular, one of the challenges that has been highlighted to me is that some communities are significantly distant from the nearest college. There are technological solutions to that, which the Western Isles in particular have taken on board. However, there is no doubt that there are specific challenges in rural areas. You have talked about how difficult it is for small companies to take people on. In the vast majority of private businesses in Scotland, there are less than five employees, so I understand the difficulties. Why do you think that it is the likes of hairdressing firms that take on 900 apprentices a year or have 900 apprentices? They are usually one- or two-men businesses. Is it about changing the mindset of small employers more than anything else? I think that it is, although I would have to say that I am not an expert in hairdressing. I do not know why hairdressers are more proactive in this agenda than others or perhaps others do. I do not know if I could surmise about the hairdresser issue that it may be that it is an easy qualification and that there is a route in there that is quite straightforward. Our chamber is a small business. We have only got eight employees. We have taken on a digital apprentice, but it has been difficult to work my way through the frameworks and work out what I am going to train that young person in. If it is a hairdressing, it is quite straightforward. With our DYW area, we have the region, the city and the rural area. We are not finding it difficult to get small employers engaged in this agenda at all. Where apprenticeships work well is where it is on-the-job learning. We are not necessarily tying that young person's training to a physical space in a college, but it is connected to their school and to the employer, who often is very close to that school anyway. We have got 48 strong partnerships across our whole secondary school remit in Dundee and Angus. A bigger problem is transport for young people getting to an employer in some of the rural areas than it might be for them to get to their school or their college. I am not sure if the hairdressers out there are watching us. We are clapping for their job to be described as easy. The challenge of trying to end with my hair, would probably suggest that it is beyond most of us. I think that there is a broad issue sometimes about hairdressers and those kinds of businesses. They actually are businesses and they are sustainable businesses and they could be quite important in the high street and so on. Anyway, I think that Jill Stewart wants to go in and then we are going to move on to the next section. I just wanted to comment on the traditions of different industry and where they have traditionally got their workforce from and I suppose that it is relating it to the hairdressing point. I think that there is a tradition in that industry of taking people on and training them in the workplace, maybe using a training provider to help with different skills development and knowledge development. That is a tradition that is strong in that industry. There would be different traditions in different industries. Construction is very much about apprenticeships and a bit of college training provider support, but on-the-job development is a strong programme. There is engineering, some apprenticeships, but much more about HNCs and HNDs taking on people from degree programmes. I think that it is about trying to change mindsets of employers about the benefits of bringing young people into their businesses at an earlier stage. It gives you an opportunity to work with those young people, see what they are like and see some of the talent that is there in our young people. It can be a lightning for employers and open their eyes. We have our own apprenticeships within SQA and we have some wonderful young people who have come in through that route, some of them being care experienced as well. Can we move on to senior phase vocational pathways, Ross Greer? On the vocational pathways within the senior phase, there are about a dozen local authorities in Scotland who have that as an option within 100 per cent of their schools on paper. Get to what that means in practice in a minute, but to look at the other end of the scale first. In Orkney it is 20 per cent, in Fife it is just under 40, in Argyllwm but it is 40 per cent. Accepting what we have just discussed around geographical challenges, though they are not absolute barriers, in Shetland it is 70 per cent, the western is already being mentioned. What progress is being made, given that we have already discussed being halfway through, what progress is being made in those areas where only a very small proportion of the young people in those schools have that as an option? I was struck by that table and I think that there is possibly a flaw in the question. If you look at that table it says, for instance, that 60 per cent of schools in Weston-Bartonshire only are involved with this agenda with colleges. I know that that is not the case, I know that it is 100 per cent, but the difference is that having invested very significantly in school buildings, a lot of the vocational space is now within the schools itself, so it is delivered by college staff in the schools, but that is not what the question asks about delivery in college. I think that there are further questions to be asked about that particular table. I had similar questions about that table. My assumption is that that table is based on senior phase vocational pathways in schools and not the totality of what colleges and schools work on in vocational pathways. For example, in my college, 70 per cent of the courses that we deliver for school pupils are below SQF level 6, and that does not get counted in that table. Although some of the schools in Ayrshire may not be doing it as much in the terms of the senior phase vocational pathways, they will be doing significant amounts with us and other things. For example, with the DYW regional group and with the princes trust, we deliver 30 courses to half of the schools in Ayrshire on SQF level 4, and that is really critical. It is critical to get young people on SQF level 2 and SQF level 3 and SQF level 4 moving towards vocational pathways so that the senior phase and vocational pathways and senior phases are really open to them, and that is absolutely critical and that is where we invest our time. Unfortunately, that table is not really giving you the totality of colleges like my own, like Glasgow Clyde and others. In fact, probably most colleges across Scotland about what they are actually doing. We have got staff who go into half of the schools in Ayrshire, work with S4s who are at risk of negative destinations, work with them in the school throughout the year to try to ensure that they get a positive destination and, by and large, they do by moving on to college or other things. That does not get counted in that table, and that is critical because we do not want foundation apprenticeships to be only available to those young people who would be achieving at SQF level 6 anyway. We want young people to come through S1, S2 and S3 to understand that there are possibilities, and here are courses that are steps along the way. You have round this issue. Mike, I would be interested in your point of view on this in particular, given the SFC's responsibility for ensuring that the collaboration happens. Is there more consistency across the country than that table would indicate? I think that the point is a footnote with three asterisks that notes Jackie's point about the provision that is sub SQF level 6. There is a wide range, as Jackie has been saying, of provision that colleges are supporting schools to deliver that is not captured by this table. Using SFC data to try to capture what is happening in school settings is quite difficult, and I think that that is less than comprehensive, I would have to say. Just to turn to what that means in practice for individual young people as opposed to on overarching school level, we receive a lot of anecdotal evidence of what you might call railroading, where vocational options are nominally an option, but it has been decided long before the young person is informed that that is the option for them. It is less about giving the young people in the school a choice about what route they want to take and more that it is essentially being decided for them. Again, there is inconsistency there and it is anecdotal, but I would be particularly interested for you and Alison, and I suppose that Jackie, from a college's point of view, is that the reality is that are we getting towards that point where those are genuinely options, choices for young people as opposed to something that is decided on their behalf? Having been heavily involved in the choice process for quite a number of years, at no point would I tell a young person what to do in terms of their choices. I would advise them, I would encourage them, but we would also speak to their parents as well. We would take into account what their career aspirations were, what their achievements were to date, and we would give them some quite reasoned ideas about what they might consider choosing. It would also depend a little bit on what the entry qualifications were, what the opportunities might look like for them after that particular course. They might feel they are being railroaded, but perhaps what they are being given is strong advice, which would be a good choice for you, but there are other options. At no point would I say that a young person would ever be railroaded into doing a particular course of study, but sometimes they would be encouraged to think quite strongly about it. You mentioned parents. Are parental perceptions or invocational options changing? I think so, yes. There has been a lot of work done in that by the colleges and by schools, my own children at school, the school frequently has information nights, where we can go in as parents to hear a little bit more, and there will be a representative there from Ayrshire College who will come in and speak to parents about what those courses look like, what the foundation apprenticeships look like, and it is building up that body of information. I think that what would be helpful would be to hear from some of the young people themselves who have been through their courses or through their apprenticeships for parents and for the young people too in classrooms, particularly when they are making option choices. That is something that we did not manage to do when I was teaching, partly because of a lack of time, partly because it is sometimes quite difficult to identify who would be a good speaker from time to time. We managed to get school leavers to come in and speak to those making choices to help inform them when they are making their decisions, but the best advocates are often those who have experienced it themselves. I think that a critical thing here is about communication, and it is about what you know. Again, back to employers. If employers are advocating this and respected employers are supporting this, parents will come on board. What we are doing with employers in Ayrshire is that they are giving off their apprentices' time to do exactly that, to speak in schools, to meet parents and so on. The really important thing for me is that in schools at the moment, I worry about the school leaver destinations and how they are portrayed, because the reality is that most young people leave school and go on to college, but the way that the school leaver destinations figures are reported is that most young people go on to university. That is not the case. 40 per cent of young people go on to college, some do higher education qualifications, some do further education qualifications and about 26 per cent go straight to university. For me, it is about helping teachers, helping parents, helping others to understand that college is a route for many different ways to get to where you want to get to, and celebrating the validity at the earliest stage. Critical here is how teachers and lecturers, colleges and schools can share in professional development—we talked about it earlier in the cafe—to raise awareness, because many people who work in schools have not had the experience of the college sector and do not know about the rich diversity of qualifications that Jill spoke to. It is critical to remember that the majority of young people at school do not go straight to university, and the colleges can help them to get there. More importantly, it can help those who choose not to go there to achieve the aims that they want to achieve in life. I want to stick with choice, but looking at it from a slightly different angle, do you feel that the reduced subject choices and pressuring on the timetable is pushing some vocational subjects out of people's reach and making it practically difficult for them to pursue them? I must say that I am not a fan of the reduction in the number of subjects, and I think that a broad education is very valuable. The narrowing of subjects early on in a pupil's career has not been helpful. I think that there are problems with that, but one of the advantages has been that schools have been able to align their timetables. You will find that, in some parts, particularly in Ayrshire, we have colleges offering school courses on particular afternoons each week. That means that young people, instead of missing some of their subjects that they have chosen to study in school, are able to know that, for example, a Tuesday afternoon is a college afternoon, a Thursday afternoon is a college afternoon, or it could be used for volunteering or for work experience or for other purposes. In some ways, the reduction in options has enabled the synchronisation of timetables right across the whole of Ayrshire and the college. On the other hand, it is a narrowing choice. There are occasionally problems where a child perhaps wants to do a particular college course, but it is perhaps their best subject. For example, if they are choosing hires, that is perhaps their best subject. They want to do a college course, but they cannot also do their best hire. They are then stuck, they are trying to choose between the two, so there are issues there. We have to remember that curriculum for excellence is predicated on a broad general education up to the end of S3. Although it might look as if the choice is narrowing in the senior phase, if you dig a bit deeper, you find that that is not the case. There is evidence in those papers that youngsters are not being denied the opportunity to get to follow vocational qualifications because it is continuing to grow year on year that both the number of courses and the number of youngsters accessing those courses, if the problem was, as you have suggested, then that would not be happening. The second thing is, and it is building on a point that Ewan has just made, the advantage of having, if I think back to the age of standard grade, where you had generally speaking eight subjects in S4 and a maximum of five in S5 and S6, making a total of 18 overall. The most common pattern now is six subjects in S4, although some do seven and some still do eight, but then up to six subjects in S5 and up to six subjects in S6 are possible in the timetable, making a total of 18. The advantage of having six, six, six, not the number of the beast, but having six, six, six as the pattern means that the increasing number of schools that are doing this can timetable S4 to S6 together, which actually increases the choice available because you can timetable across the different year groups. It makes some courses more viable because you get a greater number, and it also, from the schools that are doing it, there is a report that the motivation and behaviour of S4 pupils has improved where they are actually in classes with fifth and sixth years. I do not think that the situation is, as you described it. The other thing about this is that by reducing the number in S4, you actually increase the possibility of youngsters accessing college, because there is a bigger block of time for each subject. In the eight subject models, where typically you had three periods for a subject, it often was not possible to timetable a college course in S4. I am interested in what you said. Does not seem to match up with the reality that pupils certainly within my constituency talk about, but that perhaps comes into some of the challenges in being in a more rural area? Surely you must accept that I am pleased that people are getting more vocational opportunities, but it creates another problem at the other end for some students. I was recently at the Rossland Institute and Vet school, and they are matching up with what young people are saying that they are not able to take then all of the academic subjects that they need if that is their choice. You are not able to take three sciences, for example. They are having to drop sciences and take crash hires later on. Sorry, could I answer that? First of all, it is not necessary to take three sciences in one year to go into medicine or veterinary medicine. Many schools do timetable for three sciences. It is easier if you are a bigger school, but the other factor here is the effective use of consortium arrangements, which allows for a wider choice. You might not be able to do the three sciences in your own school, but you can do the third science along the road. With respect, again, that is far more challenging in rural areas, but there is no access to transport. The digital solutions that you mentioned have not certainly arrived. There are always going to be additional challenges in rural areas where schools are further apart. However, let us remember that the choice in S5 and S6 where you are talking about the higher courses for those high-tariff subjects has not reduced. Ten years ago, those choices were there and now they are not. We might be interested in what actually happens at a stage where people are competing for places at university, whether having three sciences is an advantage and it makes it more likely that you are going to secure a place when there is a reduction. That is maybe a discussion for another time. I am afraid that we do not want to have quite a lot to get through, but we need to do more pup at the end of this time. We will do that. George Adam. I would like to follow on to the timetabling side of things. When I was in the committee at the last session, we visited a school in Edinburgh, a secondary school that covered an area that had a cross of people from different demographics and poorer to richer backgrounds, but it got to a stage where it had to think radically about timetabling. It was only when it got to that very difficult stage where it said, because parents were trying to find other schools for their children to go to, that they had to make that decision and sit down with everyone, the teachers and everyone else and say, we need to do something different here, we need to be radical. They had a flexible timetable that worked around the local college and worked around the various courses and businesses with the access that they had. How do we get ourselves to that place where we have that flexibility in school? It gives that option to the younger person to be able to say, I want to do that here dressing course, I want to be involved in that. In my case, you would go to West College Scotland and you would do that. How do we get to that place where you are already doing that in the senior stage? I would just follow best practice. One of our schools in one of the nicer parts of Dundee has done some really clever timetabling on a Friday afternoon to get their pupils to choose some electives around careers guidance, around practical skills and employment, and they have worked with the college going in and they have done a barista academy, for example. Looking at some of the sectors that are prevalent in Dundee, hospitality tourism, digital skills, the school has been very clever, but it has taken a lot of hard work by a teacher that just believes that D-by-W is the thing that they should focus on, and he will then talk to other schools, but it has taken a long time for other schools to pick it up. I said at the outset that the SFC, together with Scottish Government learning director officials, had convened a series of workshops around the course of the year to talk about D-by-W progress, successes and challenges, and timetabling featured both as a success and the challenge. I would like Terry to comment on what he thinks the outcome of this has been. We subsequently wrote together with Government to college partners and to local authorities to encourage them to explore the many areas where joint timetabling is working and see what lessons can be learnt from that. We have tried to create, once again, a strategic mandate to allow partners to collaborate in such a way as to allow joint planning of both provision and timetabling. I wonder if you can say that that has been working or not. I think that Mr Adam raises a real issue, but I think that it is an improving situation. Essentially, what requires to happen is that timetablers need to change their mindset and headteachers need to change their mindset. The traditional approach to timetabling, especially in the senior phase, is that you offer a child, a young person, a menu, and you will literally choose courses from each column. If your choice does not fit that, then it is tough. When I was working with headteachers and timetablers, I argued that that had to change. You had to start with the individual young person, so you had to identify what they saw as being their plan for their journey through the senior phase. You had to look at how you could accommodate that. That involved not just timetabling on your own, but talking to other schools and colleges and coming up with a system that could maximise the choice for young people and maximise the number of young people who could get the choices that they wanted. It is a challenge, because it is a much more difficult approach to timetabling, but it is possible. As Alison Johnstone said, there are many good examples of that across the country where people, often along with colleges, have ripped up the timetabling and said, look, that is not fitting for this group of young people. That is what we need to do. I think that it is about exemplifying good practice to make sure that that rolls out more consistently across the country. You could also observe that, from a guidance teacher point of view, that adds significantly to the work of the person who is supporting the young people and making their course choices. If we are going to do it like this, we perhaps need to look at how schools are resourced to enable them to be more flexible and to seek out those opportunities. Before we had the UWS principal, Greg Mahoney, and he was talking about university, and it might be because of his institution history that he comes from that perspective. He says that a lot of his success stories are not necessarily people who have finished higher education, but it is back to destinations again. It was effectively people who ended up in a positive destination from university but ended up in a vocational side of things. That might be specific to that institution because of its history, but is that not maybe another way of looking at flexibility as well of people going down one stream but then all of a sudden there is something else for them at the other side? One of the challenges that we find as teachers is that we nurture the young people through their six years of secondary education, then they leave and we record their destinations. We do not really know what happens afterwards. A lot of impact takes place in school, but we do not really know what that impact has been until many years later. There is no way of tracking that. We think about the different careers that people have in their lives and the choices that they made in school. They perhaps would have had particular things happen or choices made, but we do not know what impact that is. To be able to reflect on that by knowing what has happened five, 10 years after school might help teachers to inform their practice as they support young people. We need to make some progress now. I would like to ask the panel's view on the differing set of targets that have been floated for foundation apprenticeships. I want to take you through the timeline of figures for foundation apprenticeships. In 2016-17, the Government guidance to SDS said that there was no target. In 2017, the Government guidance said that, during 2017-18, they would provide funding for 3,000 new foundation apprenticeships. In 2018-19, the Government said that there would fund 2,600 foundation apprenticeships in 2018-19, and the SDS supported 1,245 in 2017-18. That would help towards the target of 5,000 by 2019-20. The SDS then went on to say that the target was 5,000 by 2019, and in the guidance letter of 2017-18, it said 5,000 by 2018-19, and then went on to say that it was 10,000 by 2020. I am interested in the panel's view on the impact of those differing targets and what your understanding of the target is. I am quite clear, as a member of the Diwethe W program board, that the target has always been 5,000 by session 19-20. I can see that there are discrepancies in some of the figures that you have given, but I do not think that there is a contradiction between the target of 5,000 by 2019, because it is often measured by the entries, which would be 2019. The measurement is 5,000 entries to modern apprenticeships by 2019-20. I do not know where the other figures have come from. The Government said that it would support 3,000 new foundation apprenticeships in 2017-18. In actual fact, 1,245 were delivered. Have you a view on why there was a massive discrepancy in what was predicted and what was actually achieved? I cannot answer that question. I think that that is one that you would need to put to schools in Scotland. Can anyone answer that question? Jackie? I am happy to offer a view from a practical point of view. Michael Todd told on about outcome agreements for colleges, and part of those outcome agreements are about increasing and intensifying. It is the word that is being used in what we do with foundation apprenticeships. We work really hard because we believe that there are good qualifications and good frameworks for some young people. My personal view is that foundation apprenticeships are brand new. Introducing new qualifications is a huge task. I know that from talking to parents, to employers, to young people at school, that it takes a long time for them to understand that this is a new, chunky and respected qualification. In Asia, we saw a slow start. As I said, our first cohort of engineering foundation apprenticeships was celebrated last night. At the start, there was a cohort of 10. We are now getting a current cohort of about 30 to 40 foundation apprenticeships. We plan to increase it next year. However, those increases are based on what we can achieve with the schools, with the amount of knowledge that is out there at the moment. From my point of view, they are very ambitious targets, but there is a practicality about—if any of us remember around the table—I think that there are some people of ages with me around the table—there have been many changes in qualifications over the years. Where people understand qualifications best is where they have sustained over a number of years. What we have to do here is get to that point where foundation apprenticeships are sustaining over a number of years. Then, I think that you will see a significant increase in the numbers, but I am not able to comment on the inconsistency of the Government's targets. I think that that is part of the problem. When those were brought in, there was a lag of information about what level they would be at and what it would mean for employers and colleges working together to try to encourage the intake of those. We are still seeing some real slow numbers in Dundee Nangas in terms of teachers talking about those as a qualification and encouraging young people in. We have a big education to do of parents, of teachers and generally everybody to persuade. Also, would you take a foundation apprenticeship as opposed to a higher?  Foundation apprenticeships require a work placement with an employer. That takes time to establish in a local area. I think that that would probably be underestimated at a national level how long some of those partnerships would take to set up. It has moved at different paces and different areas, different local authorities. For instance, I was out last week speaking to a local authority in the central belt and they were talking about strategically that they now had partnerships with about 10 or 12 local employers, clear regional economic priorities in their area and now they are putting in place the foundation apprenticeships. Best practice from across Europe tells us that it is this combination of vocational skills with a significant work placement with an employer that provides the best vocational experience for young people and helps to make them successful but they are not easy or quick to set up. Scotland has underestimated the amount of time that some of those take to set up, as well as the communication and engagement and because, as Jackie said and Alison have said, they are a new qualification, they are a new programme. It takes time for people to say, what is this?  Is that a good choice for my son or daughter to take in his parents' way? These are good qualifications, they will give them credit into a modern apprenticeship, they will also give them broader understanding of the world of work and employability skills and the types of attitudes that are needed in work and so on. Then has the target perhaps been too ambitious to say 10,000 by 2020? Has that been too ambitious given what you have said about the lack of understanding and the kind of base work that perhaps should have been done when the foundation apprenticeships were established? I think that that is very difficult to provide. I think that you have to set ambitious targets for people to aim towards. You also have to do that partnership work. In collaboration with the figure, you have to ensure that everyone is on board and everyone understands what a foundation apprenticeship is and what it could lead to. Yes, absolutely. What you tend to see with adoption of new qualifications is that things do start very slowly, I am a scientist so I am doing an exponential curve here, they do start very slowly until people understand what is it about, the deliverers understand what I have to put in place and so on and the end users, the young people and their parents and carers understand what is involved. Is it wrong to say ambitious targets? I do not think so, I think that there are lots of steps being put in place to try and address some of the challenges. I think that it is good to have an ambitious target. Any views on whether it is an achievable target? I think that it is achievable. It is ambitious, but I think that it is achievable. I do think that we have now got a situation that foundation apprenticeships are in every college region, they are in every local authority, and they are offered by 70 per cent of secondary schools. We are reaching a critical mass and I made reference earlier to the conference that ADES and STS are holding. In August, the aim of that is to try to take it to the next step where people see what the timetabling and other issues are and are willing to take on the challenge of it, because I certainly believe that it is an ambitious target, but it is one worst trying for, and I think that it is achievable. How have those targets arrived at? I am not aware of any work that has been done to identify the number of young people for whom they might be appropriate. Just going back to Ross's question earlier, I take to find ourselves in a situation where we are shoehorning people into doing apprenticeships simply to meet targets far better than it is what young people want to do and what is right for them and what is appropriate for them. We need to be careful about using targets and not to allow the targets to lead our thinking, but to work out what is best for the young people. I suppose that it is a boundary between ambitious and unrealistic but sounding good. I think that we need to move on. We are going to move on now to careers information guidance team. I am going to ask Liz Smith first. I wonder if I could ask Mr Duncan a question about his careers guidance. As Mr Greer earlier rightly referred to the fact that we have taken quite a lot of evidence from young people who do not feel that the careers guidance is very comprehensive and very readily understood. That is also a theme that was flagged up by Professor Jim Scott when he was looking at the subject choice issue and leaving that aside just now. One of the concerns that he had is that he identified that a third of schools that he did not feel were meeting the Scottish Government guidelines through local authorities about what parents need to know. As you mentioned earlier, Mr Duncan, you felt that one of the problems was the difficulty of resourcing that in schools. Could you tell us, as somebody who has been experienced in the guidance sector as well in your present role, at what stage in school do you feel that we have to make a really determined effort to give the youngster all the comprehensive advice that we are looking for and what else do we have to do to ensure that they all get the information that allows them to make an informed choice and not be pushed in one particular direction? I think that the issue here is that a lot of this falls onto the shoulders of the guidance teacher. The role of a guidance teacher is to get to know the young people in their caseload very well. That can be quite a challenge when you have a low number of guidance teachers and a large number of pupils. Laterally, I was working with a caseload of upwards of 260. You can imagine that that is quite a large number to get to know really well, along with her families too. The getting to know them process would actually start before they even came to secondary school. It would begin in the transition process from primary 7, and we would be speaking to the primary school teachers. From that point onwards, we were speaking to them regularly, we were advising them, we were encouraging them to think about careers and what might be right for them, that there is a regular dialogue that goes on. There is no single point where you sit them down and say, right, it is time to make a decision about a career. You would only do that if it was getting to a point where you know that they are very close to leaving school and there seems to be no decision on the horizon. It is not something that you would say, right, hard crunch, we do this now at the beginning of fourth year or at the beginning of fifth year. It is something that has to be a regular focus of PSE all the way through secondary schools. We need guidance teachers who are well trained, who are well informed, who know what the options are out there, what the pathways look like. Guidance teachers are very busy people. We are not only focused on careers, there is a lot of crisis management that goes on in secondary schools. When it comes to UCAS, for example, one of the things that came out of the report was that a lot of young people felt that schools were only focused on UCAS. That might be an impression that they get, because I think that UCAS takes up a lot of our guidance teachers' time. I know in the months between September and November when UCAS is at its peak.  The downside of that is that you have less time to support other pupils in your caseload. I would argue that what we actually need is to broaden out the number of guidance teachers that we have in schools and to give them more time and better training to enable them to offer careers advice frequently, regularly and effectively. Thank you very much for that, Mr Duncan. I entirely agree with what you have said. I think that there are some people who feel quite strongly that perhaps the later years of primary school can be very important in addressing the perceptions and the some of the ambitions and aspirations that young people have. Do you have any suggestions about what could be done to ensure that that is a better process in terms of opening up the world to youngsters in primary 6, primary 7? I think that there is real value in getting people working with youngsters in primary school, not just in terms of guidance, but right across the whole curriculum. I know that some schools have been very imaginative where secondary and primary schools have collaborated and primary teachers have gone to work with youngsters in primary schools and primary teachers have come to experience what happens in secondary schools. I think that that is a very worthwhile process to start talking about careers in the later years of primary school. I think that it would be very valuable too. What does a college course look like? What does it mean to go to university? What is an apprenticeship? Getting away from just people who help us type approach to jobs and careers advice, but having for example representatives from SDS careers officers going and speaking to young people in the later years of primary school, they build that familiarity. One of the things that we frequently encourage young people to do through secondary school was to self-refer to the careers officer. We also did some pretty proactive work in identifying who needed to be seen by a careers officer, but for young people to feel that they are somebody that they can pop in and have a conversation with in terms of getting good quality, very focused and informed careers advice, I think that that familiarity is important and it maybe needs to begin quite early on. Can I just follow that point up? I was on the same visit to the Roslyn Institute a couple of weeks ago, which is doing outstanding work with primary children as well as secondary children. One of the points that was put to us by some members of staff is that some schools are unable to get their children to the Roslyn Institute because they are unable to afford the bus transport that is required or whatever. Can I ask whether the SSTA is getting a lot of information fed back on that particular aspect of resource problem? We frequently hear from teachers about shortage of resources, not simply about transport but just about basic things like paper and pencils and textbooks that there are shortages. You have to cut your cloth and schools have to make hard decisions at the moment. We are in a position where there is resource shortage in all areas, so if you have to think about, right, do we pay for a bus to go somewhere or do we pay for jotters or perhaps IT that allows us to move forward with national testing, you have to make hard decisions in a school. My final question, convener, is to Dr Stewart. Janet Brown, when she was here a couple of times in recent committee sessions, acknowledged that there have been some issues about the national four qualification and that the recognition of that national four qualification, both amongst parents and employers, is not particularly strong on a universal basis. Have you got a comment to make about that national four qualification just now, whether there is on-going work to look at it and whether, in the light of the discussions that we are having about other pathways, perhaps national four should be reformed? National four is currently being considered by the Government's curriculum and assessment board. We have to think back to why national four, the debate is around whether or not national four should be internally assessed or externally assessed and because it is internally assessed, there are perceptions about its credibility and so on. That is the debate that has been going on. What the group has been doing is that the Scottish Government has been gathering further evidence about stakeholders' views about national four. There was already a considerable body of evidence gathered from a variety of sources from parental organisations, SQA did two rounds of field work with schools and the one at the end of 2017, although it asked the views of teachers and senior managers in schools what they thought about national four and the views were quite mixed. We did run focus groups with young people that were doing either national four only or a combination of national four and national five and the young people themselves said that the majority of them were quite happy with national four being internally assessed. The Scottish Government has been gathering further views, has gathered further parental views and there are still perceptions from parents about the credibility of national four. Interestingly, the work with employers, employers were not concerned by the fact that national four was internally assessed probably because employers are used to vocational qualifications, all of which are internally assessed and rigorously quality assured. What is emerging is a body of evidence about different stakeholders' perceptions and what the curriculum and assessment group, as I understand it, will be doing in June to consider that body of evidence about perceptions and think about a communication and engagement strategy with different stakeholders. However, the ultimate decision on that would be the Scottish Government's decision and the Deputy First Minister's decision. I want to follow up on the question around careers advice, but I have to say first of all that I am quite concerned that young people's feedback was dismissed so quickly by Ewan Duncan when it came to UCAS firms. My experience as a former college lecturer, I often had students coming to me saying that they felt that throughout their school life they felt pressured by their parents and their teachers that university was often the be all and end all and that college was often seen as a second choice. I certainly had feedback from young people, some of the MSYPs in a forum that I chaired, that apprenticeships have a very long standing, as opposed to an old-fashioned perception amongst parents. Teachers have been something that they did when they could not achieve anything else. We need to listen to young people's voices around that. I would like to ask the panel how we can engage young people and parents in looking at those pathways in a way that they are equally valued. That is part of the challenge of the whole DYW programme. It is a historical thing in Scotland that we have tended to value academic qualifications in university entry above all else. Changing the culture of anything is the most difficult thing to do. One point about the feedback from young people is that I would argue that the situation is definitely improving and that the balance is beginning to shift to more of an equal view of vocational and academic qualifications. One of the things that struck me about the SPICE survey was that 26 per cent of respondents were over 21. They will all have left school before the DYW programme started. Many of the youngsters in the middle category, 29 per cent, will have left school either after it started or in its first year. Only 36.1 per cent of respondents are currently at school. I would not dismiss the views of young people. We should be careful about interpreting those figures, because some of the youngsters that were young people who were responding to that left school seven years ago. We have to take the lesson and work hard at it. The only way to change people's perceptions is through exemplification, through showing people that those qualifications are valuable, through getting young people who have gone on to modern apprenticeships, to come back into schools and to talk about the value of that experience and of selling to parents the idea that those qualifications are not just for those who are not academic but are valuable for everyone because of the life skills that they involve. Just very briefly, I think to echo a point that Terry made earlier, but to endorse what he said, more people are doing them. More young people are undertaking senior phase pathways. They are growing very quickly, delivered by colleges with schools, so more youngsters are taking up the opportunity. To be dismissive of young people's views, what I was saying was that that was not my experience in the work that I had been doing in school that we had worked very hard to make everything equal and level. It is certainly not to suggest that college qualifications were, in any way, inferior. There are different qualifications. Teachers are in the business of trying to encourage young people to get the best qualifications possible. As I was saying earlier, by getting to know them, we would hopefully get to a point where we can advise them and say, think about this, have you thought about university? However, at the end of the day, it has to be the young person's choice and that has been my approach. Maybe it has been different elsewhere. All of this is teachers because we can do the education with the parents and with the young people. However, if teachers are not bought in or are finding it inconsistent, they will not take that message. I would like to see more connection with teachers and the DIY activity in general because we do lots of support work and lots of project work with young people. Often the teachers, because they are stretched, will go off and do something else rather than partake in that DIY activity. It could be exposing teachers to the world of working and employers because many of them will have been teachers for a long time, have gone in through university and have experienced some of the new roles that there are within businesses. The other thing that I would say is that we have inconsistencies in schools with DIY leads or DIY being bolted on to somebody's day job. That is really not great because the DIY person in the school needs to be an influencer. I would almost take that career's guidance and spread it broadly. Every single teacher should know that DIY activity inside out and should be able to talk about the broad range of future jobs that there are and the skills that are needed for that. Have the DIY person be an influencer rather than a doer rather than a person who has got to make the project activity work? I have just opened the door for another line of questioning. It is about the suitability of teachers who have been in teaching a very long time to actually be a lead person in careers guidance, given that they have taken a particular pathway themselves. They have maybe only ever been a teacher and it takes quite a lot of work to be up to speed with what is out there. Do we think that maybe that model needs to be looked at? It is important to be making the best use of the resources, expertise and experience that is in the system. There is an important role for colleges, college lecturers and other college staff to work with teachers, schools, parents and young people to raise awareness. That is certainly the experience of, I would say, all colleges in Scotland. Do we do as much of that as we can within the resources that we have? There is maybe something there about freeing up the colleges to do more of that because college lecturers are dealing with employers all the time. They understand the industries that they are training young people for. They understand the needs of employers. It is really important to tap into that. The other thing that is important is to be aware that aspirations vary. I think that there is a really big job for all of us to do about validating aspirations. Most people's aspirations are not to go to university. That does not mean that that is a bad thing. It is not a deficit thing. I really think that that is a critical thing that we need to start doing. The reality is that when I look at Ayrshire, I can only speak about my college. I have worked in it for five years. The majority of our students, have you asked the majority of our students about why they came to college and was it their first choice? They will say yes. The majority of our students came to college as a first choice. Their parents would have seen that as a positive aspiration. Some of our students came as a second chance. They either did not get to university or their adults who were returning as a second chance. The critical thing is that, regardless of if it is their first choice or if it is a second chance opportunity, it is at high value, it is a world class and it is on equal footing with those who choose to go through universities. There is a really important thing about getting that message out and using the careers guidance resource across the system to try to tackle some of those negative perceptions. I certainly agree with all of that. You have put your finger on a very important point about all teachers engaging with that agenda. I take you in this point that guidance teachers are overworked. The DYW programme board has always been very clear that the success of the DYW agenda at school level depends on all teachers engaging with the agenda. For instance, we are seeing part of the work that they do through the prism of employability. Whether you are teaching biology, English or technical education, part of what the teachers should be thinking is the employability aspect of that, not in a narrow sense but in the skills that you are building up for people. I think that we have quite a way to go there, but the DYW leads in school should be trying to inculcate that sort of attitude amongst all teachers. That is a good point about teachers perhaps not having a lot of other experience of industry. In the past there were opportunities for teachers to have industrial placements, but in the modern times we are very short of backfill opportunities to release teachers to go and see what is happening in a local company. It is very difficult. I know teachers in the past who had opportunities to go and visit local chemical works. They went out and visited art galleries and worked there for a while. More recently we have seen some politicians engaging in apprentice for a day. I do not know if anybody hears me on part of that, but that would be a great opportunity for teachers to go out and be an apprentice for a day just to see what it is like because that is the kind of experience that you can bring back into school in Jews. There is not very much time or opportunity for teachers to engage meaningfully with employers and you might snatch a few words at a careers fair or you might reach out to people that you know who are employers, but to experience it is quite difficult. Now there are some teachers who have had careers prior to teaching. One of my colleagues was a theatre nurse. I worked in finance before and another teacher was a chemical scientist. There are lots of people who have had other careers and they bring that into the classroom very successfully, but for those who have not had that opportunity, we need to look at ways of engaging them in what employers are looking for in young people. You cannot learn it from a powerpoint presentation. You need to get out of the inexperience of it, I think. That is about employers. As I mentioned before, I taught in college and actually trying to get work placements for students was like the poison chalice of the department because it was so time-consuming and we often find that employers are very reluctant to take on. That was college students, so I imagine that it is the same. It is true of school pupils. You mentioned some of the things that have been done to encourage employers to get involved. Have any of you had any experience of shared apprenticeships or shared work experience, so that it allows very small employers to share an apprentice? We have seen in Dundee and Angus some innovative ways of looking at the work experience programme. I think that that is the problem. If it is a one-size-fits-all, it is a weak in an employer. It can be difficult because you might get a young person that on day two goes, this is not for me and that is not good. We have seen an employer like GSK, for example, a massive employer, but what they do with that weak is they put the young person in different departments so that they get to try out lots of different careers. We have a really strong shared apprenticeship programme that is driven by the college in Angus. That is a construction one, but it is different construction employers. They might take a young person for four weeks or 12 weeks or six months, and those young people are getting a real good shared experience across a number of different firms. We have got to allow the experience that I talked about earlier of our school with the timetabling on a Friday afternoon. They allow their young people to go and find two and a half hours every single Friday from the start of term to the end of term to go to an employer, and we had a young person in doing that. That changes their thoughts on their future work paths. We are going to have to move on, Richard Lochhead. Earlier on, a couple of the witnesses referred to the challenges that are facing rural areas. In my area of Murray, only 16.1 per cent of people are between the ages of 16 and 29, compared to a national average of 18.5 per cent. We have less young people. In terms of committed leavers, we have 45 per cent of young people who are committed leavers compared to 40 per cent nationally. We have less young people, and a bigger portion of young people want to leave, so that is not a good combination of statistics. On how, when it comes to careers advice, we adapt to local circumstances, how do you take those kinds of situations into account without going overboard in terms of steering too far in one direction? Ultimately, it is up to any pupil where they want to develop a career or education. I do not know the specific answer to your local circumstance, but I go back to something I said earlier, which is that each area, each local authority, has to address the subject taking account of their own circumstances, their own demographics, their own labour market information, and to try to make the careers advice as bespoke as possible. As to the particular circumstances, I cannot comment on Maria myself, I am afraid, but I think that that is how it has to be. The expertise will be in Maria to address those issues. I mean, it is not quite stark in Ayrshire, obviously, but we do have rural areas. There are parts of Ayrshire, for example, in the thinking of Dum Ellington, where it is challenging for young people to engage in college programmes because of the distance between the school and the needless campus and the bus services that are there. That is a challenge, and it is one that we are trying to find a way around. Part of how we are trying to deal with that is to offer more opportunities for us to deliver in the school or with the school, but the value of a lot of that is about the young person coming into a different environment, a vocational environment, and having the facilities. It is one that we are struggling with, not to the same degree, obviously, in areas such as your own. I know that the funding council has a view on rurality. We do not fall into the rurality aspect of it, but I know that there are particular challenges. The number of young people engaging in vocational pathways from those schools with our college is significantly less because of those challenges. That might be just an area that we need to reflect on as a committee, that there is a whole area there that is not... Just ask a thought question to Alison Henderson in terms of engagement with employers. I know more and more employers that I speak to are very concerned about skills gaps, and clearly, in terms of Brexit, there is going to be even more skills gaps potentially. Is there now a lot of evidence that employers are wanting to work more closely with schools to plug those gaps? I think that there is. I think that you can only see in every regional group in DYW activity that there are employers that are significantly interested in engaging. Some of that goes to helping young people to look at the careers that are in their area and to stay, because the earlier you get that engagement, the more they are likely to look at that employer down the road and say, okay, that might be a fish processing factory, but actually they've got HR advisers and they've got finance people and they've got managers that manage people, so it is about uncovering the local jobs that exist and actually encouraging as many employers as we can to get engaged across all sectors and all sides of business, but we're seeing it. And the final question is, I know that making money in life is not everything, but in terms of some of Scotland's most successful entrepreneurs, they do live in rural areas and they've not necessarily had a university education, yet part of the theme and the debate that we have here is the pressure that people face to go to university. In terms of mentors and opening young people's eyes to the potential success that you can have in life without having to go to university, as I said, many of the most wealthiest people I know in Scotland are self-made and they didn't necessarily go to university. Are we putting a lot of effort into having people like that being mentors? Yeah, that's happening. Again, there's a couple of practical examples, so in Dundee and Angus we've got an apprenticeship ambassador programme. I know that other day by day regions are looking at doing that, but there was a very successful No Wrong Paths social media campaign that came out of Glasgow and others that showed that you might not have actually gone to university. I think that we do have to seriously get employers to stop putting degree essential on job applications and person specs, because it's not, I don't have a degree, I didn't go to university and yet I've been reasonably successful, so we do have to show people that that is genuinely a path. I would just maybe recommend that you look at, I'm a professional advisor to Scotland's enterprising schools. It's worth a look at their website. They do fantastic work across the country in developing entrepreneurial schools and young people. Not just in secondary schools, but in primaries and nurseries as well. They involve entrepreneurs in mentoring and helping schools, so it's an interesting website and a lot of information there. I think that the DMI group along with the college and others have done some great work in Ayrshire, I'm sure, across the country and identifying employers just like that. People like Sir Tom Hunter do great work in encouraging young people. I suppose one of the advantages that we have in a lot of the engineering companies in Ayrshire, they are managed and run by former apprentices themselves who are in as an apprentice, who haven't got university qualifications or if they had, they developed them when they were in work and they are real inspirations to the young people and to our students and young people in schools and we use them to talk about here's what I've got to and here's where I started, and that really helps people identify with that. When I served on the education committee in session 4, my world of work had just been introduced as a software tool for young people. I'm just wondering if you have a view on how effective that piece of software has had in better equipping young people to make informed choices about their future. Just at extensive, my pupils, I think it's gone from strength to strength. When it was first introduced, it was fairly basic, but it's now a very useful tool. It's not just a website, it is a suite of tools for people of all ages. It's not just aimed at school pupils but it's something that people can use at any point in their lives at any stage in their careers. From that point of view, getting young people familiar with it is fantastic because it means that as they move on from school into other stages of their lives, they can go back to it. If they have an online account, they can go back to things that they've stored. There's a CV builder tool, there's all sorts of opportunities for analysing your skills, identifying your strengths, exploring employment options, thinking about career changes, there's information about interview skills. There's a lot on that website. It doesn't replace one-to-one guidance. That's not what it's about, but what it does enable you to do is to have a better quality conversation. For example, you might encourage young people—or what I would do—to look at my world of work, to think about their skills, their abilities, their qualifications, perhaps what they're doing or what they need to do, what they're interested in, and then that would become a very useful conversation starter because you would sit down and say, right, what have you been thinking about, what have you been finding out from my world of work and other sources, let's talk about it now, where are you going, what are your aspirations. I think that it is very useful and helpful. I just wanted to comment, as a parent of a young person, I found my world of work really helpful because my son wanted to do something that I didn't know anything about. I found my world of work quite useful for me to look at first of all and think, oh right, that's how things work in that sector, but then to structure a conversation with him around that. As a parent—that's a comment as a parent—I thought it was a very helpful resource. As you said, it doesn't replace face-to-face support, but it is a useful resource that identifies career structures within different industry sectors. It relates those to apprenticeship programmes, to HNCs, to HNDs, to degree programmes and so on, so I think it is a useful resource. I noticed that there was a question about the possibility of creating digital exclusion. It is optimised for use on mobile phones, so it's something that anybody with access to mobile phone can use. It doesn't rely on people having a laptop or a desktop computer or a connection to a wired internet. It can be used anywhere that you've got Wi-Fi or mobile data. We were talking about the challenge of changing the culture and parents' perceptions and what you said was really interesting. Do you think that enough parents are engaging and are aware of the website? Do you think that the SDS roll-out of the ambassador programme of getting youngsters to talk about the website to parents' night, etc. I know that about 160 schools have done that. Do you think that that will be helpful in raising the profile of the website with parents? I think that those sorts of things have to help to raise awareness. I don't know if you might have a comment on that. Absolutely. As I was saying before, it is the experiences of young people that have used it that are helpful. When we were talking about apprentices before, when you get apprentices to talk to young people about being an apprentice, they understand it better. When you get young people to talk about how they have used my world of work or parents to talk about how they have used my world of work, then it builds that bit of momentum. People understand how they can use it too. From my point of view, one of the things that I would do with pupils is to say to them, right now, go home and show your parents' website and discuss what we have been doing here, that would be a homework task. It is not something that you have to go when right. It is an experience. Gordon, last question. One of the other aspects of the website is the marketplace, which allows employers to use it as a matching tool, if my understanding is correct, for work experience and so on. How do we encourage employers to engage more, especially bearing in mind the earlier conversation about small employers being reluctant to take on young people? Last time, we engaged with the local chamber of commerce, I think, and that was where a lot of the work experience opportunities came from. I am talking two or three years ago now that I was involved in that, so I haven't got up-to-date information on that. I can certainly talk about employer engagement with marketplace. We have seen it being not so popular from an employer perspective. Teachers are keen to use it extensively and it works well for them. I think that where it works well for an employer is if they know what they want to deliver. When we were looking at our DIY regional group creation, we were saying that we almost need a menu for an employer, so I could do an inspirational talk and offer a work experience. I could take a young person as an apprentice, but marketplace does not do that quite so well, as I know that I have an hour and a half talk that I could deliver on chemical engineering. It works very well when employers have a very clear thing that they might want to deliver, but they are not so sure that it is not quite so obvious to an employer that is not sure what they would use it for. I have one little bit on my world of work by way of supplementary. My anecdotal take on that is not quite as glowing as yours is. I must confess from pupils. I wanted to make a specific point or question out of it. It is all very well if you have got a laptop or a tablet or a PC at home, but lots of kids do not have that or do not have access to it. Can I take it from your answers earlier on that you accept that face-to-face inspirational talks or discussions are at every bit as important as another website that kids meant to get to? Yes, definitely, undoubtedly. One of the things that I started off by saying today is that the challenge in schools is that guidance teachers who have that job of bringing it together with all the pieces of a young person's jigsaw need every tool that they can find to help to facilitate good quality discussion. It is important that young people are taking a bit of responsibility themselves. What you cannot do is to force them down particular routes and say, I think that you should be a whatever. What you want them to do is to look at the different ideas. When young people who have investigated my world have found other ideas, a young man who was a very keen rock climber decided that he wanted to be an aerial rigger, so he was taking his skills, his passion and his confidence in being at height and turned it and he found that through my world of work. He was an idea of something that he could do that fitted in with his interests. Good, thank you. I want to ask a couple of questions probably to chiefly of Terry Lanagan given you mentioned at the start that he'd been involved in this area right from the start and you mentioned specifically the importance of cultural change and I hate this word but transformational, so I've just used it, I hate it. The cultural change in their same schools. It's about leadership by headteachers principally, isn't it? It's about leadership at various levels. Certainly the headteacher has a key role to play as do college principals, but other staff, the DIY lead in each school, individual teachers, I think have a very important role to play, but there's no doubt that the vision of the headteacher and the way in which they choose to push the DIY agenda is at the heart of us. Thank you. The point that many committee colleagues have made this morning about recognising that many schools still push an academic route, despite what may be said about learned guidance, former learned guidance staff and that kind of thing, is still prevalent, so how do you think those barriers have been broken down over the first three or four years of implementing this programme? I suppose that the first thing to say about that question is that we must be careful that we don't go too far and undervalue the academic route. For some young people, university degree is the best thing that they can do and the evidence is still that their chances of long-term high-quality, highly-paid employment are far higher if they have a university degree. It's important to bear that in mind. However, I think that one of the pressures that schools have been under for many years is that sort of competitive element around exam results, positive destinations, etc. I would like to think that the DIY agenda moves us to a more collaborative approach where the young person is at the centre and what we try to do in schools is to deliver the advice, guidance and opportunities that are best suited to each individual. It's about schools knowing their students and knowing what is best for them. The other aspect is that what might appear to be best at one point in a young person's journey is not always going to be best. I've got a niece who's got a first-class degree in law from Glasgow University. She runs a restaurant and is very happy doing that. People change their minds and I think that it's about developing the whole person and about seeing the young person in the round. That's the key to this. I wonder if I could ask Michael Cross to relate to that question. What is the funding council doing to answer that point about target-driven policy? Does the funding council have a role in breaking that down into a more subtle approach, if I can put it that way? Mr Scott, we're charged with delivering a series of objectives by the Scottish Government. We need targets in many instances for that. However, the regime that we operate and Jackie might want to either confirm this or take issue with it, the regime that we operate through outcome agreements is about the relationship between the funding council manifested in an outcome manager and the college. That ought to be a consensual, not a didactic relationship. I hope that we strike the right balance between ambitious targets that move Scotland's economic and skills agenda forward and giving colleges space to deliver. Jackie Gilbreath, do you think that the young person is at the centre of this debate? I think that it is, but I think that school leaders, college leaders and employers have their own set of priorities and tasks that they have to get through. It's about negotiating through all of that what resources we can allocate to make this happen. For example, we're meeting all Ayrshire head teachers in a couple of weeks' time just to have that strategic discussion because it requires all of us, colleges, schools and others to free up resource in order to make this successful. Schools, colleges and others have limited resources, so the only way to make it work is if we agree our own shared targets, not necessarily just the big targets that come from Government, what we think is practical and a regional sense and then allocate whatever resource we can to achieve it. I think that's back to the first point that I made really, it's that partnership that's critical and head teachers have got an absolutely critical role to play in this. In the first two years of developing Scotland's Young Workforce, there was specific funding, which I guess all of you would have had some ability to to either be part of or pitch for that went. My experience of Government policy, when there's no money identified with it specifically, then it's called mean streaming and then everyone's responsible for it and no one's responsible for it. Do you feel it's still working effectively or should there be dedicated—I mean, you and Duncan mentioned the pressure on guidance staff, which is something very familiar to all of us who go into schools all the time. Where does this fit in along with everything else? I view, Mr Scott, that that has not happened with this particular initiative. The funding was always going to be for two years and people knew that, so it was about setting up and testing out certain things. However, the programme board has always been quite clear that, as far as the school side of DYW is concerned, it's an integral part of curriculum for excellence. It goes a long way to delivering the skills for work agenda, which is at the core of curriculum for excellence. I think that the reason why it has continued to be driven in schools and local authorities is that everybody sees the value of this agenda for Scotland's future and for individual young people. I have not heard anyone argue against the agenda that has been pushed through DYW or against the work that the Wood commission did. That's very unusual in education. The commitment to that is definitely on-going, regardless of the removal of the funding. We now have a publication and a process called the learner journey. How does developing Scotland's young workforce fit into that? Is there a danger that, once again, teachers see yet another big publication coming through that has great ministerial import? Sorry, are we not still meant to be doing Scotland's young workforce? How do these things fit together? I was involved in the learner journey work and, to me, it's seamless between the two. Any process or any document that tries to describe the process of a learner journey has to take account of the workforce aspect of that agenda, the transferable skills that young people should have, and I can see no contradiction or tension between the two. That's very much our view. This is about the fluid system that's focused on the learner and resource being allocated accordingly. That's how we see it. A resource? A resource being allocated. Results? I think that this ties together the whole education and skills landscape of which schools are a key part. It talks about more work-based learning in the senior phase of school. It talks about how we can shorten learner journeys. I think that it is very much in keeping. It's broader, a broader kind of scape piece, but it very much builds on the DYW agenda, quite clearly for me. It's not another initiative, it's part of that broader landscape of education and skills in Scotland, which is vital for our economy to thrive in the future and our people. I get all that. When do hard-pressed headteachers and teachers have time to read yet another publication? That is always the challenge in schools. We are bombarded with information, and that was a big part of the bureaucracy review. There was simply too much out there for teachers and headteachers to try and read and to try and keep abreast of all the new developments. If you keep it to one side of A4, you might have a chance. Thank you very much for that. I thank you all for your evidence today and the great discipline with which you provided it. Educators know how to keep to time, which is very much appreciated. I am sure that there will be things that you have wanted to say, or that there might be information that you think would be helpful. Please feel free to come back to the committee with any further—I think that we spoke Jackie—about some figures of any other comments that you may not have had the opportunity to make during the course of the session. Thank you very much for your attendance. I really appreciate the amount of time that you have spent with us this morning.