I welcome everyone to the fourth meeting of the Education and Skills Committee. Can I please remind everyone present to turn off mobile phones as they can interfere with the sound system? Agenda item 1 is item in private. The next item of business is to consider taking item 8 in private where the committee will be discussing its work practices. Are we agreed that we will take item 8 in private? Agenda item 2 is to take evidence on the Children and Young People Scotland Act 2014, part 4 and 5 complaints, revocation order 2016. I welcome John Swinney, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, and Government officials Hannah Keats, Better Life Chances Unit, Elizabeth Blair, Solicitors Food, Children, Education, Health and Social Care. Good morning, and I invite the Cabinet Secretary to make opening comments. Thank you, convener. The primary purpose of the revocation order is to revoke the Children and Young People Scotland, part 4 and 5 complaints order 2016, which was passed by Parliament in its last session. The original complaints order was made under the powers in sections 30 and 43 in the 2014 act. Those specify that Scottish ministers, made by order, make provision about the making consideration and determination of complaints concerning the exercise of functions conferred by, or under, parts 4 and 5 of the act. As parts 4 and 5 of the act had been intended to be commenced on 31 August this year, the complaints order had set out the complaints process relating to the named person service and the child's plan that would have commenced with the other provisions in these parts of the act. On 28 July, the Supreme Court ruled that the information sharing provisions in part 4 of the 2014 act were incompatible with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and that changes were needed to make those provisions compatible with the article. That decision took place during the parliamentary recess but required urgent action. As a result, I wrote to the Parliament, and indeed to yourself, convener, setting out my intention to suspend commencement and introduce the necessary commencement partial revocation order with respect to parts 4 and 5 of the act as a whole. As a result, those parts of the act did not commence on 31 August. As part 4 and 5 did not commence, it is therefore necessary to revoke the complaints order. Clearly, a complaints process cannot be in place when the duties under those parts of the act have not been commenced. No consultation has taken place on this order and there are no additional financial implications arising from the order, and I'll be happy to deal with any questions. Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. Does anybody have any questions? In that case, we now move on to item 3, which is a formal debate on motion S5M-1327, in the name of the cabinet secretary. I will remind everyone that officials are not permitted to contribute to the formal debates, and I ask the cabinet secretary to move the motion. Does anybody have any comments to make in that case? I will now put the question to the committee. That motion S5M-1327 be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The committee must report to Parliament on this instrument. Are members content for me, as convener, to sign off for a very short and factual report? Agenda item 4 is to consider the name to persons training, qualifications, experience and position, and the child's plan, the Bracket Scotland Revocation Order 2016, brackets SSI, 2.16-234, the end brackets. That is a negative instrument that will come into force unless Parliament agrees to a no motion to annul has been lodged. Do members have any comments on this instrument? Thank you very much. I then move on to item 5 on the agenda. The committee is seeking an update on the named persons policy as a follow-up to the ministerial statement that was made to the Parliament by the cabinet secretary last week. We will move on to questions from members shortly, but I understand that the cabinet secretary wishes to make a brief opening statement. I will leave my comments, as I said to Parliament on Thursday, convener. I am quite happy to answer questions from members this morning. I will start off by asking the first question. Highland local authority is often mentioned as an area where a similar scheme to named persons with a single point of contact has been in place now for a number of years. From what reports have been that it has had very positive outcomes from it, better work and practices, less children and care, etc. Given that, why do you think that there has been a difficulty in getting across what I am sure you consider to be the potentially positive returns from a named persons scheme to the public? Also, given the latest legal judgment, could you confirm what advice has been given to local authorities who, like Highland, have already started to nominate named persons and put arrangements in place for them to be a single point of contact? There are two points in the convener. The first is in relation to the public understanding and acceptance of the named persons concept. I think that there has been a very active political debate around the contents of named persons, and that is always a contested debate. I disagree fundamentally with many things that have been said in that debate that have been marshaled in opposition to the concept of the Supreme Court name person policy. What I set out to do in the statement that I made to Parliament last Thursday was to set out what I consider to be the proper context in which the named person policy has been developed. That context is the policy approach that has been shared between a number of different administrations and supported by many parliamentary committees and reflected in the thinking and the priorities of the Christie commission that we should have a significant emphasis on preventative interventions to avoid difficulties emerging and become serious challenges for individuals in our society. That comes through the thinking around for young people getting it right for every child. For me, the challenge is to get across a message that is that the named person, as a point of contact to provide assistance and support to individuals who may face difficulty, is a policy approach enshrined in the ethos of getting it right for every child, and we have to stress the advantages of that to individuals within Scotland. That will dominate the communication and dialogue that I take forward in that respect. The evidence is strong on the effectiveness of the approach to the named person concept. I recounted in my statement to Parliament last week the reduction in referrals to the children's panel and the reduction in the acceleration on intensification of cases as a consequence of that intervention, and that evidence justifies the approach that has been taken in policy terms. In relation to the question of the existing legal framework, the provisions of this part of the children and young people's act have not been enacted and have not come into force. Therefore, it is important that any provisions that any schemes that are taken forward must be compatible with the existing legal framework in which such schemes must operate. I set out to Parliament last Thursday the requirement for such provisions to be embedded in the existing legislation around the Human Rights Act and Data Protection Act 1998, and that any public authority must design a scheme that is compatible with that approach. That would form the guidance that the Government has issued in relation to those questions to any public authority. It was just to pick up on the Highland experience. Is there evidence that in the Highlands there is the same kind of opposition that some people are expressing over the national roll-out of the new person? Clearly, there have been comments and contributions to the debate across the country on that question. I do not think that the Highland area will have been in any way exempted from that. However, I think that what has been clear from the Highland experience, if we look at the data, the number of referrals to the children's reporter in Highland dropped from 2,335 in 2007 to 744, a drop of 68 per cent, which is a remarkable reduction in the number of referrals. I attribute that to the better alignment and the better connection of public services that is driven by the name person policy context, and Highland has been the pioneers in that respect. I think that there is a substantial advantage that is demonstrated by that data, which shows the performance of that initiative. Cabinet Secretary, you said in the chamber and you have repeated it this morning that any current practice has to be in line with the data protection legislation and the human rights of 1998. Are you wholly confident that any local authority that had already implemented the name person policy, including the data sharing aspect, has not acted unlawfully? Yes, because all local authorities must act within the law. Secondly, when it comes to the overall arching aim of this policy, the Supreme Court said that it was benign and perfectly legitimate. You also say that it does not require any current policy change. Surely that cannot be correct when one aspect of the policy has been ruled unlawful? I think that the point that Liz Smith misses out in that question is the fact that we are putting all those provisions into statute as new provisions. The point that I was trying to get across in the statement last Thursday is that, essentially, the Government was advancing a new legal framework in which the policy was to be delivered. That requires to be compatible with all the requirements in the test that the Supreme Court applied to this particular legislation. It is that legal framework that has to be compatible. When it comes to the individual requirements of the existing arrangements, they must routinely be compatible with the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act to enable them to be able to operate satisfactorily. Cabinet Secretary, this morning we have just revoked part of the children and young people's bill for the time being. Surely that is because part of it has been ruled unlawful. Does that not signify that there has to be some aspect of policy change? No, that is not my reading of the Supreme Court judgment. The Supreme Court judgment essentially indicates that there is a requirement and I explained to Parliament why I think that the Supreme Court has this in its mind. There has to be a requirement for the information-sharing provisions to be set out in accordance with law. I accept that the provisions that we have tried to put in place for the Children and Young People's Act do not fulfil that test because some of the definitions that I accept are material in this debate and discussion are not specified in law. They are specified in guidance, and they do not have the authority of law. I have to make sure that they have that authority of law. What the Supreme Court has also said to me is that it is important that we make all of the connections in the legal framework and set them out in accordance with law and not essentially leave those connections to be made by members of the public. Again, that is what we must do. I think that the point at which the Supreme Court has anchored its judgment on, and the point of greatest significance in my view, is its argument that the provisions need to be set out in accordance with law. That is the challenge to which the Government has got to respond. As I explained in Parliament last Thursday, that type of analysis, that theme of analysis, if I could call it that, has emerged clearly from the Supreme Court's judgments that post-date the passing of the legislation in 2014 by the Scottish Parliament. Thank you for that. I pick up two points. The first concerns, comments that the Supreme Court made about proportionality was not just a ruling about the data-sharing aspect, they made comments about the proportionality. They say that it is often likely to be disproportionate, and therefore there was a concern that the name person policy might be intrusive and disproportionate because there was a lack of clarity in the law. Could you tell us how you think that could be addressed? I think that that is largely the same issue that I have referred to, that it is necessary for that to be specified in law. I would take the view that the guidance that has been offered addresses the issue of proportionality. That would be in my position before the Supreme Court judgment, that the guidance that has been put in place essentially reassures people about the question of proportionality and when it would be appropriate for certain things to be done. The Supreme Court has said that that must be specified in accordance with law, so that is part of what I think is the job of work that has got to be done here, so that members of the public, as it is not so much that we can be clear, the members of the public can be clear about how the question of proportionality will be handled, and in accordance with my answer it will be handled in accordance with law as a consequence of the provisions that we bring forward. Does that mean, cabinet secretary, that there is an acceptance now that the concept of wellbeing is a problem? It is a nice concept that everybody moves towards, but it is actually not defined properly, and it is certainly not defined in law. Would you accept that because we made that move to wellbeing instead of the definition of welfare, which is more common in Scots law, that the threshold for intervention was seen to be much lower? Therefore, the professionals who were dealing with name, person and policy were unsure of the territory on which they found themselves, and they were not sure whether they should intervene or not intervene, because wellbeing, I have to say, I would be struggling to define it even given the scenario and all the related information guidance that goes with that. The logical conclusion, cabinet secretary, would be that you would have to define wellbeing in law. Could you tell us if that is the intention and how you would go about doing that? I think that there is a lot in that question, if I can take time and care to try to explore different parts within that. First of all, and the committee will forgive me if I go over ground that I have already rehearsed with my parliamentary statement, but I think that it is important that I do it for completeness. I completely disagree with Liz Smith about it being wrong to insert wellbeing into the judgments, as opposed to all being about welfare. The Supreme Court judgment is crystal clear that the framework around welfare and child protection in law in Scotland is crystal clear, and they codify it very helpfully for us all in their judgment. The welfare provisions in law are clearly expressed to the satisfaction of the Supreme Court, and that should give members of the public anxious about child protection issues and a lot of confidence about our legal framework. However, that is not the intention. If that was our intention, there would be no need to proceed with a name person policy. A name person policy is about, in my view, a lower threshold. It is about taking a preventative intervention. It is about identifying the support that is required to assist young people if they are facing difficulties within our society to make sure that that is available at an earlier stage, so that intervention can be delivered to avoid some of those difficulties having more serious implications for young people within Scotland. Welfare is a very significant and serious intervention, and we know what it means, and we know what it looks like and it is tabulated. Well-being is about making sure that we intervene as early as possible to try to avert problems becoming more serious. That is why I, in answer to the convener earlier on, anchored my view of the role of the name person policy within the Gyrfrig agenda. For me, there is a lower threshold of activity that the name person must be focused upon because it is about identifying issues that may potentially, if unaddressed, become more serious for young people. That brings me on to the question of definition. This is where my last answer to Liz Smith was trying to address the issue about threshold. I accept that wellbeing is defined in guidance. We define it in guidance, but I accept that that is not in law, so that has to be set out in a fashion that will be robust and that will pass the test that the Supreme Court has applied to us, that the provisions must be set out in accordance with law. That will therefore give a clearer legal framework within which the name person policy can be deployed consistent with the Children and Young People's Act 2014 and in accordance with the judgment of the Supreme Court. For me, the arguments around the role of the name person are about ensuring that they can be available to support families, to make the connections that are required, to provide the support and the intervention that is required, but that will be about an awful lot more than welfare. It will be about supporting the wellbeing of young people within our society. I thank you for the detailed explanation. Where I have a very strong difference of opinion on this relates to the fact. If you listen to those practitioners who are getting very concerned about the implementation of the name person policy, is it because you are accepting that there is a much lower threshold and therefore wellbeing is a determining factor? The expectation, because it is obviously a universal policy for every child, the paperwork that goes with that and the assessment that is based on the scenario indices and all the accompanying guidance is so substantial because that threshold is so low that the case work has increased. How would you address that? Particularly as you have given a commitment to reduce teachers workloads in the parliamentary process. I do not see the necessity for a cottage industry of bureaucracy to be created around about that. What is essential is where there is the requirement for support, that that has to be clearly tabulated and understood to enable that support to be delivered to a young person. However, the idea that we have to create a bureaucracy and understand the unease of it is not just about practitioners, it is about some of the debate that Liz Smith has fuelled as part of the wider political debate. There is no part of this policy proposition that I think is necessary for there to be vast bureaucracies put together in summarising an assessment of every single child in the country. That is not the point of this policy. What this is about is about trusted public servants who we trust every single day of the week with having a role in the nurture and development of our children, be they health visitors or teachers. Every single minute of the day, we trust those people to exercise those responsibilities. We are simply saying that, as part of that, those individuals are empowered to require support to be available to assist young people if they require it. Not everybody, because not everybody will require it, but some people will require it, and I want to make sure that young people get that support as early as they possibly can do so that we can avoid the accumulation of difficulties that can undoubtedly happen for young people. That is why I take a different view about those points and why I do not. I tried to address this point in my answer to Mr Johnson in Parliament last week. I do not want us to think about named person as some compartmentalised extra responsibility. The teachers and the health visitors that I talked to in the country are looking at this stuff, looking at their caseload, looking at the young people that they are interacting with all the time to assess what are their needs and their requirements. The named person simply enables those individuals to be empowered to deliver as early as possible what those young people require. I think that the direction of questioning that we have heard so far, neatly encapsulates the situation that we are in. We have heard quite detailed questions from the Smith about the legal aspects, but we started with the convener's line of questioning, which is about perception. To my mind, while we are here and we have a pause because of the Supreme Court judgment, actually the situation that we are faced with and that we need to address is one just as much of public perception and trust as it is one of a legal matter. I welcome the comments that you made in your statement about an intense period of engagement and that the Information Commissioner and the Children's Commissioner will be leading that review. I would like to ask you a little bit about the scope of that work. Will it be confined to the legal points raised by the Supreme Court, or will it be seeking to address the wider points around public confidence and trust in the system? The question of public trust and confidence in the system is a point that I accept unreservedly, and the importance of tackling that is a point that I accept unreservedly. I do not think that that is the responsibility of the Children's Commissioner or the Information Commissioner or anyone, apart from my responsibility, so I accept that responsibility. It is important that ministers are able to properly and fully build public confidence in what I think is the correct policy. For that reason, I set out to Parliament last week why I think that that is a justifiable and appropriate policy and I incurred it within the GERFIC agenda. I take on that responsibility and it is for me and for other ministers to make sure that that is fulfilled. In relation to the substance of Mr Johnson's question about scope, what I have in my mind is that I will, as an absolute minimum, address properly and fully the issues that are raised by the Supreme Court judgment, because I think that it is important to retain that in perspective. The Supreme Court has said what it has said about information and data sharing. It has not said anything else about the scheme. That is the provision that it has put in place. That is its requirement, so I have to address that. As part of the work that I will take forward to build public confidence, I will be mindful of what will be helpful in trying to build public confidence. If there are changes to the scheme and other provisions that are advanced, I will give those consideration, as I have indicated to Parliament, to be the case. Can I ask what the scope of the Children's Commissioner work will be? Is that something that will be published and what is the framework and timeline that this work will be working to? As I said to Parliament, I will undertake the dialogue along with the Minister for childcare in early years in the course of the next three months. That will form and frame the decisions that the Government then takes about the implementation of the scheme thereafter. I will draw on the input of the Children's Commissioner and the Information Commissioner. I am not commissioning them to do anything. I am not entitled to commission them to do anything. I will invite their input and draw on their expertise. From their respective specific policy interests, they have got a lot to contribute to this discussion. I will listen carefully to their thoughts, as I will to the contribution of many of them. Where are the two points that come together very clearly around data sharing? In particular, the court made suggestions in paragraph 107 about the nature of the information sharing and suggested that legally binding guidance as important legislation should be provided on when people are told that information is being shared and when consent should be sought. In particular, that brings to a head of people's concerns. As a parent myself, while I support the policy principles of this, that was my nagging concern about things being shared that I do not know about with authority. What do you see the direction and the solution to this and how will that be communicated and to what extent will this be a voluntary system? If I have one area where I feel that there is a lack of clarity, it is about how voluntary participation and communication with the name person be and how binding will their actions be on parents? The first thing that I say in response to Mr Johnson's question is that his reference to section 107 essentially brings out some of the issues around consent. I consider that to be a material issue that has to be addressed as part of satisfactorily addressing the Supreme Court judgment. To go back to his previous question, what is in scope? I consider that to be in scope for the work that has got to be undertaken. Mr Johnson then asked me to go on to set out what I consider to be the answers to this question. If the committee will forgive me, it is slightly premature for me to be providing all of the answers when I am about to embark on a three-month intensive dialogue process to establish exactly how that might be undertaken, but I do not say that to be flipping. I have to give this due thought and consideration to make sure that those issues are properly addressed, because I want to address them satisfactorily in terms of whether the Supreme Court is responsible to take immensely seriously. The final point that I would say is a general observation about the named person policy. The Supreme Court makes the comment that it is possible, within the provisions that we had put in place for members of the public, to not participate in the named person policy, but they make the point that it is not perhaps as clear as it could be. That is part of the difficulties that we have had around the communication of the policy and the acceptance of the policy and the fact that it has caused unease among some members of the public as part of the wider political debate. I consider those to be issues that are very much in scope to be addressed as part of the work that I take forward. Finally, can I just pick up on some of the final comments that you made in response to Liz Smith, in particular about not wanting to create a cottage industry of support? I take on board your points and I agree with you that our teachers and our health visitors—indeed, everyone who works with children—needs to be focused on their holistic wellbeing and supporting them in those terms. However, in the discussions that I have been having with teachers and health visitors, it is not just about the concern about what might happen, but about where the policy has been implemented. There already is a substantial amount of work that has been created. I have been talking to teachers and schools where teaching assistants are working full-time on dealing with the information coming in. Likewise, talking to health visitors, the automatic triggering of information from nursery schools when certain situations happen at nursery means that they are going to have a substantial amount of information coming their way when health visitors, as I understand it, have no administrative support. While I understand that the holistic nature and intent behind it, and in many ways I agree with it, the reality is that bureaucracy is created, work is created, and we need to resource that. I might say that, just because we do not wish to create a cottage industry of support, does not mean that that work is not already being created in quite a substantial way. I reiterate what I said in my response to Liz Smith that I have no desire to create a cottage industry here, and that would be very much in my mind as to how we take forward the implementation of the policy and its delivery at an operational level. Let me just try to work my way through some of the issues that are relevant here. Our health visitors and teachers are part of their role and responsibility to be looking out for the wellbeing of young people over whom they have a duty of care. That is what they are doing every day of the week. That is what I see in schools, that is what I see health visitors doing around the country. We are not asking health visitors and teachers to do anything here that they are not already doing in terms of looking out for the wellbeing. In fact, it is probably not the most precise parliamentary term, but members will understand the point that I am making. What we want to make sure that the name person has at their disposal is that, when they have a concern and they want to do something to make sure that their child receives the support that they need to receive, they are able to get that support, that there is a point of contact where they can go to obtain that support. That is not always clear within the system. I made the point to Parliament last week that members of the public come to me to ask me to get the public services connected for them, not to say how wonderfully connected the public services are often. I accept that, if I mandate in the system that there has got to be, let us say, a weekly report filled out on every single child in a school about their wellbeing, I accept that that will be a cottage industry of bureaucracy. I am not going to ask for that to be the case, but what I want to make sure is that there can be proper opportunity for professionals in whom we already place our trust to support and nurture our children are able to have access to the resources and the support to make sure that we address the needs of young people. Cabinet Secretary, you mentioned the rather extreme position that is sometimes taken in relation to name person. A few minutes ago, you partly answered my question that I was going to to be asking, which is that many of the elements surely of name person are already in place, as you correctly said. You have teachers, health visitors and so on that perform in support of children and would carry out any reporting of anything that they saw that was not up to what they would expect. Surely the name person is simply adjoining up of processes of putting in place of good practice. It is that, but it is also the empowering of individuals who are key contact points with young people, with the ability to connect the public services to deliver interventions that will support those young people and address their difficulties. It is essentially a resource that is available to individuals and families to support them in their times of difficulty and to ensure that those needs are adequately and fully addressed as a consequence. Will there then be a need for an escalation process within each council to be able to accommodate the issues as they come up? Undoubtedly, there will be measures that need to be taken in individual circumstances to meet the needs of young people. Quite clearly, there might be a need if a name person is finding it difficult to make the connections of services that are required. There may be a need to seek further support within organisations, but crucially, the name person policy will empower individuals in the front line of our public services to be able to fulfil that role. The escalation process, presumably, would not be new. It should be what is in place already. Teachers and others involved with children should be using it already. Presumably, that is not an additional requirement. Do those processes already exist within public authorities and would be followed as part of the process? What after the engagement exercise will be in law that is not currently in law? It is a difficult question for me to give a comprehensive answer to, but what I have to do is to make sure that the provisions that the Supreme Court believes need to be codified in law are the ones that are codified in law at a very minimum. I would consider that to be the information sharing provisions, the definition of the approach to wellbeing and the definition of circumstances and arrangements around the necessity or otherwise to obtain consent for any particular intervention. Those would be three elements that I could foresee being in law, but I have to be mindful of the test that the Supreme Court has placed. If I go back to the thinking behind their judgment, which is that these issues need to be codified in accordance with law, I have to be mindful of the need to satisfy to address that. Those three areas that are currently in guidance or in future, at some stage next year, will become law. There may be some areas that come up in the context of the engagement exercise that you are undertaking. You have not closed your mind, as you said to colleagues. Can I ask a couple of specific questions about the Supreme Court judgment? In paragraph 84 of the judgment, it said that there is no statutory requirement qualified or otherwise to inform the parents of a child about the sharing of information. Presumably that is exactly your point, that one will be taken care of by. The other one that I asked you about last week is 95, which, as a parent, as Daniel Johnson was a parent, was the one that gave me most concern in which the beginning of 95s about parents will be given the impression that they must accept the advice or services that they are offered. Their failure to co-operate will be taken as an evidence of risk of harm. I must confess that that is the one that gives me the most worries, not just as a parliamentarian but much more as a parent. Will that be addressed, Mr Swinney? I think that this close 95 of the judgment essentially relates to a point that has been a material point in the debate up until now, as to whether or not it is possible for families to decide not to engage with the name person or not to pursue those issues. I have expressed the position that I believe that the existing provisions that the Government and Parliament put in place enables that to be the case. Obviously, the Supreme Court in their analysis questioned whether that is as clear as it could be. I come at this discussion from the point of view that I think that families must be able to say that they do not want to participate here. That is a point of consent that is important. If that is not clear and I take from clause 95 that the Supreme Court does not believe it to be clear, then that has to be addressed. The final question that I really wanted to ask is, when the three aspects and others that you may or may not choose to bring before Parliament at some later stage become law, I am sure that you will recognise that if you are a pupil support teacher in any of our secondary schools, then it is a different thing altogether from the voluntary structure that used to be the case in Highland that, as you rightly said, has been effective. I have had those discussions as well and understand that. I have a son at a school in Highland, so I know about that, from it being in law. It is manifestly different from pupil support teacher because they are sitting here with a statute on their desk, which they must then implement. Is that not in all the codification that we are now going to have to go through because of that judgment? The point that I take you making about the cottage industry of bureaucracy is a different thing when the cottage industry is driven by law, as opposed to the ability to say that we are not going to do that, because we make those arrangements work perfectly well because it is a voluntary structure. Is that not the bind that we are now all in? I do not think that that is the case at all. I think that the opportunity of the response to the Supreme Court judgment that is available to us is that we can address the issues of clarity so that we have in place a framework that is easier to understand and more comprehensible by everybody who has to operate the system, be they a teacher or a health visitor, or be they apparent to have clarity from a parental perspective of their rights and the wider framework in which this is operating. I take that, but I suppose that does therefore logically mean in the context of Liz Smith's very earlier questions that the definition of wellbeing and all the related factors that come in under that are therefore going to have to be crystal clear, or are we not going to have another court question about the clarity of that stage, because that is the bit that many see as most uncertain. I do not agree with that last point that Mr Scott made, because I think that the definition of wellbeing is clear, but I accept that it is not in law. That is the difference. Colleagues might not think that it is possible to define wellbeing, I think that it is perfectly possible to define wellbeing. We define many, many things in life, but the wellbeing of our young people and our children is, to me, something that is perfectly definable, but I accept that it is not in law. That is the hard point that the Supreme Court put to us. It does in relation to the comments and the questions that Liz Smith raised earlier on. It is. Well-being is different from welfare. We know what welfare looks like. The Supreme Court has done an excellent job in setting out what welfare is and what is triggered by it. It is defined, but I suppose that, to be consistent about this, the Supreme Court is able to do that because it is defined in law. That is the point that I am accepting. It has not been addressed by the children and young people at 2014, and it must be addressed to satisfy the Supreme Court. Ross Thomson, followed by Joe Allan. Thank you very much, convener. It is just for a point of absolute clarity. Is the scheme that was introduced in Highlands in 2008 exactly the same as the scheme that would have been introduced on 31 August this year? No, because there is a particular legal framework that accompanies the children and young people at 2014, which was not enforced in 2008. As it is a no, why have the Scottish Government kept using Highland as the example for all local authorities across Scotland to follow in particular? For a number of very good reasons, not least of which the application of the scheme in Highland has reduced the number of referrals to the children's reporter for children in the Highlands from 2,335 in 2007 to 744 in 2013, a drop of 68 per cent, and there has been a sustained reduction of 15 to 20 per cent in the number of looked-after children. I think that that is because Highland has been taking an early intervention approach on those questions. Like many things in Scotland, good ideas happen in one part of the country, and they do not always happen in all parts of the country, and they do not always get implemented on a systemic basis, but improvements in the support and nurture of children of that magnitude are benefits that I think need to be shared across the whole country and required across the whole country. Following on from Liz Smith's line of questioning on whether local authorities have been acting lawfully or not following the Supreme Court judgment, I see that a number of local authorities are proceeding. Still, some have taken their guidance off their websites. There still seems to be a bit of confusion in some local authorities.  What steps is the cabinet set going to take to provide clarity to local authorities? Much as though it has been alleged for many years, I do not run every local authority in the country. At this moment, Tavish Scot is not allowed to make sedentary interventions. Local authorities are self-governing bodies that must take their own decisions. We provide guidance and we have done so, but each local authority must take its own decisions. Finally, cabinet secretary, as part of the engagement process that it is going to be, will you invite professionals along like Maggie Millard, SBTC and even know-to-name person to be part of that engagement process and consultation? Will you be attending any sessions with parents and practitioners to hear their concerns? Yes, I will be attending events personally. As will the minister for early learning and childcare on Saturday, I will be meeting with the national parent forum for Scotland. I am not quite sure what they will want to discuss with me, but I will certainly be happy to discuss this issue and any other issue with them on Saturday. It is part of my on-going engagement with the national parent forum, so I will be very active in this discussion. I will be listening carefully, I will do that personally and I will absorb the points that are made to me. In relation to other organisations, I am going to engage as widely as I can, but I am not making a disrespectful point here, but I will make it fascinating. Know-to-name person does not want to have the named person, so there is a bit of a fundamental policy disagreement there. I am very happy to engage with people who will accept the principled arguments that I set out to Parliament last week about why we have gone down this route. I am very happy to engage with people who will respect the democratic will of Parliament because Parliament has legislated for this and we should not forget that point. Mr Thomson, I hope that you will forgive me if I do not engage in conversations about people who want to make sure that we do not have a named person policy. We have a fundamental disagreement there. The Supreme Court set out the areas of our legislations. The part of the challenge of those who took the legal challenge to the Supreme Court was to bring this policy to an end and they failed. The Supreme Court did not support them, so I have got the weight of the Supreme Court on my side on that question and I have got the weight of Parliament on my side on that question. What I do not demur from it anyway is the need to adequately, properly and fully address the issues of the Supreme Court judgment. I am very happy to engage widely about all those questions, but I think that Mr Thomson will understand my perspective that I do not see the value in discussing the question in principle because I have made it very clear to Parliament and I have parliamentary authority to support me that this policy will be implemented. I appreciate your answer and response. As a general reminder, I know that a named person represents the weight of parental opinion. Will there be a consultation paper at the end of the three months? I will give consideration to what follows at the end of the period of consultation. Obviously, there will be proposals that will have to be set out to Parliament and I do not yet know what form they will take, so I will reserve my position on what shape and form that will take. I am interested in your position saying that you are not going to have the discussion with the question in principle or recognise that you can promote that principle. However, I would say to you, in all seriousness, that there are people involved who are concerned about the named person who have their children's interests at heart. They are not maybe actively involved with the organisation, but they are genuinely concerned and need to be persuaded. I am not sure, with respect to you, that they will be persuaded by an argument that says, well, we have decided this and we cannot be shifted on it. I know that there are people who are genuinely concerned, people who are fought every day for their children, people with children with disabilities, who are concerned about that. I am not sure that closing the door to that conversation with them will help a policy that, in principle, I will probably in large part support. I wonder whether—I suppose that the question that I am interested in now—if I make the point first—I worked in this kind of—this is what I did before a community, when some might say that I worked for a living. Therefore, I get absolutely the need to recognise early the signs that there are problems and intervene early. However, I am being told by people who work in schools, by third sector organisations who work in our communities, people who work in social work, that the supports are not there in the way that they were in the past. My concern and the question that I put to you is, to what extent have you assessed the reality that the named person will be able to access supports? Classroom assistants are not there in the same numbers, attendance officers, home links teachers, behaviour support, education support and support within communities for children's organisations to work with families. Those are not all reducing because of financial pressures. We could end up having an academic argument about how you ensure that children are identified in order to access supports, but the supports are not there. First of all, I think—I will just try to address the early parts of John Lamont's question. I have to look at this issue and I have looked at it very carefully. I have to be mindful of what the Supreme Court judgment actually said. It raised particular issues that we have to address, but it tested the entire legal framework and judged that there were a certain number of issues that we had to address and the Government will do so. If the Supreme Court had said this contradicts basic rights, there would have been a very different situation today, but it did not say that. Having tested that in the last court in which it could be tested in the United Kingdom, we have the ability to take forward the legislation. That is what Parliament has decided. Parliament has legislated for this. I support it. I have no reason to believe that there is not a parliamentary majority to support the legislation today. Regardless of that, the legislation has been passed by Parliament and I have a specific challenge to address the issues of the Supreme Court. I am not taking an arbitrary stance in the points that I am raising with Ross Thomson. I am simply making the point that, if there are people who are a campaign organisation that is implacably opposed to a named person, I am not sure that I see the value of a conversation between them. However, the people that John Lamont is talking about are probably the same people that Daniel Johnson is talking about, who are parents who are looking at this and thinking, wait a minute, what does this represent? I am not certain about this. I have to win the argument with those individuals and I have to be persuasive to those individuals. I cannot do that by saying that I am not sure if we are going to have a named person. I believe in my heart that this is the right thing to do because I believe, for many of the same reasons that John Lamont, although with very different personal experiences before we came to Parliament, for many of the same reasons, and for the body of my constituency experience as well as a member of Parliament over the past 19 years, this type of policy intervention will help to improve the wellbeing and opportunities of young people in our society. I have to make that case and I have to make it in a persuasive way and accept that responsibility. That is what I accepted in my answer to Daniel Johnson. The second part of John Lamont's question is material in all of this. If we are saying to young people and their families in Scotland, look, if you have difficulties, this person will be appointed contact for you to be able to access the resources to be able to support you. We have got to be able to deliver on that. That is an obligation that we have. That is why, in very challenging financial circumstances, we have taken the decisions that we have taken to try to support the provision of wider interventions to support the closure of the attainment gap through the attainment challenge, for example, and that is what dominates a large number of the other responsibilities that I carry as education secretary. Some of those issues will be challenging for us. We saw in the data last week, which was discussed at First Minister's Question Time last week, the substantial rise in mental health referrals that have taken place among young people. I accept that the waits for mental health service interventions are too long, but part of that is explained by the fact that we have had a 30 per cent increase in one year in mental health referrals. That is a factor and a trend that we have got to properly and fully address as a Government to make sure that young people can receive the support to which they are entitled. John Lamont asks a fair question and puts a fair challenge to me that it is important that we have in place the support that can address any issues that are raised with us by, as a consequence of this policy approach. Does that mean that you would consider looking at more generally local Government budgets? It is not just that an increased mental health referral is being discussed. I would contend that early intervention with some of our young people would prevent those issues then being referred to as mental health issues, because it may be circumstances in the family. Would you commit at least to looking at the extent to which the services around a child, which I believe fundamentally make a difference in terms of closing the attainment gap, but critically are also important in terms of the issues that you identify, that there is an exercise in actually looking at what is happening in our schools and in our communities. Third sector organisations have already flagged this up to me around the resources that are available to them to work with in our communities with families that need support. Would you commit to reviewing that? If you look at that with some rigor, I think that it will then mean that we need to redirect resources towards local Government that have been directed away from it. I look at all of those questions habitually. They are part and parcel of the work that I take forward. I accept that the fulfilment and the potential of every young person in Scotland is not just determined by what goes on between nine and half past three in school. It is a much wider set of interventions in which local authorities will be significantly involved. Those are questions that I look at on a sustained basis, which are reflected in the Government's policy agenda. We continue to look at those. The cabinet secretary has talked a bit about the policy that has run out in Highland. I know that some of my colleagues have mentioned that as well. I think that it is very encouraging to hear that the results of that have led to less referrals to the reporter and less child protection referrals. That is the point that is leading to less state intervention, which is one of the criticisms of the policy. If the policy gets approval of Parliament and is ruled out across the country, the results will be similar in other authority areas. I think that there is an important point in my answer to Johann Lamont, which is about the fact that earlier intervention has the potential to reduce the long-term demand on public services. That is what the Highland data suggests. In terms of the sustainability of public services, exercising the name person policy responsibility and intervening at an earlier stage potentially reduces the caseload and the volume of activity that is required to be sustained in the medium to the longer term. There is a real benefit arising out of that approach, and that is one that I think is a product of the good example that we have seen in Highland. I could also come back in to follow up on a point that Tavish Scotland made as well. Tavish raised possible concerns about whether parents and families could opt in and out of the name person scheme. If it is the case that people can opt in and out, what would be the process then for individuals who have opted out whether there has been an identified level of risk by the primary sector, so would that not just lead back to the child protection process being initiated? Ultimately, to address that point, we will have to look at the questions of consent that the Supreme Court has properly put in front of us. As part of that, that will codify the approach that we take in relation to the participation of individuals within the name person policy. There is a—Mr MacGregor, we have conversant with this from his former role before he came into Parliament—his employment as a social worker before he came into Parliament. There is a very clearly codified approach to child protection, and the Supreme Court marshaled that for us in their judgment. Obviously, if there is an assessment of risk, that is tangibly undertaken within the child protection system and appropriate action can be taken within that context. I am anxious to make the distinction between those interventions. Child protection interventions are very much about interventions at a high level of risk. What the name person policy is about is about being an early intervention resource that is available to young people and their families to seek assistance to try to remedy issues before those become more challenging issues for those individuals. If we can strike the right balance in all of that, it will have the effect of addressing the point in Mr MacGregor's earlier question, which is about the opportunity to reduce the long-term demand on public services because we are intervening earlier before problems become more acute. As a final point, convener, I thank the cabinet secretary for bringing up my previous employment. In my own experience, which was quite a number of years working in the child protection front, I think that that legislation will be of great benefit if it is approved through Parliament. I suppose that at the point that I was picking up on from what Tavish Scott had made, I probably did not phrase it right, but I was raising a concern if that part of the legislation is not there, rather than raising that as an outrage criticism, but I think that that is just the point. Thank you, convener. I am really interested in the work that we have done around engagement with public petitioners and those who might have concerns. You have alluded to the concerns that parents have. You might have had some misleading information around the whole tabloid journalism and that is an issue that we will have to deal with. No one in their questions has talked about advocacy for children. One of the things that I hear most when we are talking about child protection is the lack of advocacy for children. There are children out there right now who have a named person and who rely on that named person, whether it be in the Highlands or whether it be in all but named person, such as a guidance teacher. How are you going to engage with those children and give them the reassurance that that support is going to be there during the process and that their views are going to be taken into account? I think that that is what has been lacking this morning, when we are talking about getting the engagement with the children who are going to be affected by the legislation. We have a number of different organisations in Scotland who are tremendously well connected with young people in Scotland. As part of my plan, I want to work with those organisations to try to have some of that dialogue. If the Scottish Government wheels up to have a consultation with young people, I think that it might be more productive if we do that under the auspices of other organisations. I have yet to come to specific proposals about that, but I will discuss that with some of the very good organisations that we have that foster and encourage dialogue with young people in Scotland to make sure that we can have this conversation and understand fully and properly their perspective. That is just as important in the exercise as it is to have the proper and effective engagement with parents and other stakeholders as part of the process. Back to my other point about the sub-tabloid journalism around this, it has certainly been very damaging. I have to declare a certain amount of interest in my husband's guidance teacher. As I said, he is effectively being a named person. The language that has been in tabloids around such states is very offensive to a lot of people who are doing very hard work. What message have you got for people like my husband, such as guidance teachers and people who have already been named persons who have been subjected to that kind of language? Obviously, I made clear in Parliament last week what I consider to be the debilitating effect of some of the commentary on the individuals who we rely on every day of the week to provide nurture and support to our children and young people in Scotland, and we rely on them every single day of the week to do that. I very much value the contribution of those individuals. I appreciate that it has not been a pleasant experience for them to see their work labelled in this fashion. I commit myself, as I said in response to Mr Johnson, to trying to change some of those attitudes and perspectives as a consequence of the leadership that I give to communicating what I think is an extremely valuable and important policy for supporting the wellbeing of young people in Scotland. Just a final question that you may not have an answer for yet, but one of the things that came when I was speaking to people about this, who were supportive in principle of this but just had some niggling concerns maybe coming into what Mr Scott was saying, and what Fulton was saying about whether you can opt in or opt out for a named person. I personally agree with Fulton that I do not think that that is an ideal situation at all. However, if a child has an issue with their named person, if a child wants to change their named person for whatever reason, they are not comfortable, is that something that could be looked at as well? That is possible within the existing scheme that was legislated for. That is possible for it to be done. Indeed, I think that I answered the question from Mr Scott on one of the earlier occasions that this was discussed in Parliament or maybe an intervention actually to clarify that that was in fact the case if families wish to have a different named person for some individual reason. That can be taken forward as part of the existing framework. We will finish off with Richard Lochhead. Just to ask about the plans for communicating with parents. I have been contacted by several people over the last year or two as a constituency MSP, and people have genuine concerns that need to be addressed. Others tend to couch their concerns and wider concerns, but the SNP Government has a range of issues, perhaps. There is some hysteria out there and misinformation as we are all aware. How did the Government plan to communicate in a clear, articulate, simple way that people can understand with parents as to what the truth is? As a long-serving experienced former cabinet secretary, Mr Lochhead will understand that that obligation rests pretty firmly on my shoulders. I have accepted through this whole process that we have a significant challenge to build public confidence in this policy. I intend to do that, because I think that it is the right policy, but we need to explain the arguments for the named person, the resource that it will represent to families and young people within Scotland and the advantages that it conveys for those individuals. Obviously, we are communicating that in an atmosphere when many other much more negative messages are being communicated. That is a challenge for the Government to address those issues, but I am reassured that Mr Lochhead will be done energetically and emphatically by ministers. In that case, I thank the cabinet secretary and his officials for a very useful session this morning. We will suspend for a few minutes to allow the next panel to take the seats. My business is a panel on attainment. This is the third of six overview panels following on from the two panels on skills and post-16 education last week. These sessions will inform consideration of our future work programme. A new overview will end with a session with the cabinet secretary. Before welcoming witnesses, can I begin by putting on record my thanks to all those who organised and took part in the meeting that we held in Stirling on early years in school education on 30 August? The committee spoke to a number of people with a real breadth of personal experiences, including children and young people, parents, teachers and support staff and people working in community initiatives. Meeting those people has proved a valuable insight and context for this overview session. Today, I would like to welcome Lindsay Law, vice convener of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, Graham Logan, strategic director of Education Scotland, Jamie Petriehead, teacher of the Broomhouse primary school and Paul Clancy, head of secondary education and D-City Council, which I understand is one of the nine challenge authorities. We are going straight into questions, and I would like to start off by asking you a question regarding yesterday's governance review. I wonder if the panel has any comments on how the review will impact on the attainment. Can we start with you? I read the cabinet secretary's speech. At SPTC, we welcome the statement that no child will be forced to fail at 11 and we won't move to selection into grammar schools. We think that that's the right choice. We think that the OECD report that shows that Scotland has an inclusive, comprehensive education system is the right thing to continue with. We know that the data show that there is an attainment gap, but we don't often take the time to express what that means and think about what it means from a parent's perspective. To put it another way, if you live in Scotland and you are poor, your children are likely to do worse at school than children from families who are richer. If you have a daughter, she's likely to perform more poorly in maths. If you have a son, he's likely to perform more poorly in literacy and in reading.  The cabinet secretary says that poverty is not destiny, and we agree with that statement, but sadly for too many children in Scotland just now, poverty is shaping their destiny. It's wrong. It's a waste of potential of child after child rooted in equality, in equality in our society. A parent would naturally turn to school for answers. However, the quality of teaching in schools is clearly not the underlying issue when you have children in the same class as other children who do not perform as well, boys in the same class as girls who don't attain the same levels of reading. That is one of the reasons that we are resistant to gathering national attainment data to either publish school league tables or enable them to be created, because it's a very blunt instrument that doesn't allow parents to truly see the work being done in schools. I think that this is a great opportunity for us to all engage in a constructive debate about what is the best way of supporting education in Scotland as we move forward. If we think of the vision of excellence and equity and really making the breakthrough that we want to make here about that cycle of poverty impacting and attainment, what are the best supports and surrounds around schools? I think that it's a great opportunity for schools and for teachers and for all our partners to really think fresh about what is the best support. If we think of the engagement between teacher and pupil, what is the best support around that drive, improvement and to make the breakthrough? I think that it's a great opportunity and I hope that we'll have a very constructive, lively debate about the way forward in Scotland to support improvement. From a head teacher's perspective, from a school in Edinburgh, I think that the statement about schools having more power to make decisions within schools for what their requirements are is a very welcome statement for us. At schools, we spend all our time thinking about how to get children included and how to raise their attainment and get them into positive destinations. It's our core business and it's what we do. It's encouraging to hear that we're going to be part of that wider debate and how to make that happen in schools. I welcome that part. The part about poverty shouldn't be what defines a child as a very important part of that. In my particular school context, we have a number of people in poverty who show a lot of at-student skills within school and it's how we can work together in clusters to put them in a positive destination. That's my view. Good morning. I would agree that it's timely that there's a review of the governance arrangements for education in Scotland. It's a small country. I think that we have quite a complicated system. In my view, when you look at the number of parties involved both at national level and at local level, I'd particularly welcome the idea of trying to increase parental work within schools and parental governance arrangements for schools. We've worked very hard over the years to involve our parents and they are involved to a certain extent, maybe more in some schools than others. I think that the whole idea of bringing parents more into the centre of what actually goes on in the life of the schools will be important. I also want to make a comment on leadership because I don't think that it's just the autonomy of schools. Schools have, through curriculum for excellence and devolved school management, quite a degree of autonomy now. What's important is the leadership and making sure that the leadership is there to actually use that to take things forward. I think that we need to look at bureaucracy to ensure that teachers and schools are concentrating on the things that matter and we need to make sure that we have a leadership system that builds practitioners and headteachers so that they are able to lead. It's not just systemic change, we require cultural change so that communities, parents and headteachers together are empowering young people and systems. It's not just systemic, it's going to be something to do with the culture. I think that we have things within our systems just now that allow that kind of autonomy, although it's not always taken. Although there are examples where it does happen in Scotland, that's something that we need to have more widespread. I welcome back, I cannot wait on stage, but Daniel? First of all, thank you very much for coming along and providing us with your views. I think that the challenge around attainment and the sort of equality and equity issues for all the children, I think, go to the very heart of why so many of us are here and certainly I think the point about your background not determining your destiny as fundamental. I think that there's three elements to that. One is recognising the issue, secondly is understanding it and having the right measures in place, and then lastly making sure that we've got the right resources in place to tackle it. I'm sure that other members in the committee will talk about the measures, but I would quite like to talk about the resource. It takes a broad range of approaches and a child-centred focus to tackle those issues. Critically, I think that it's not just down to teachers. I think that the broad range of staff and support staff in schools are vital and important. I'm just wondering if I could get just some initial reflections on that point from the panel. I absolutely agree from our evidence on working with schools and local authorities that this requires all partners around children and families to work together. In fact, some of the innovative practice that we're seeing through the Scottish attainment challenge is teachers working alongside, for example, speech and language therapists in the early years, family support workers, our partners in community learning development and the third sector. I think that the best plans that have emerged from individual schools and from local authorities have taken that very joint, joined-up approach to look across the services for children. If I can just give you one example, we know that children coming into primary 1 aged 5 have a difference in their actual words. Between the most and least deprived children in Scotland, there's an average of a 15-month difference in their vocabulary. Through the Scottish attainment challenge, we've got some schools that are radically looking at the curriculum in primary 1 and 2 and changing that to be much more literacy-rich to close that vocabulary gap as early on as possible so that the gap doesn't continue to widen. We're also seeing speech and language therapists working in classrooms with primary 1 teachers, so I absolutely agree that we need all partners to work together. That's some of the early insights from the attainment challenge in localities across Scotland. We are seeing that happening. Again, to pass on Graham's point, for us in schools, it's very interesting that the early-level curriculum for excellence starts in preschool nursery year. Pre-school nursery year is not a compulsory part of the education system. We spend a lot of time in schools making sure that our parents understand that they need to get their children to all their nursery sessions because they're already in preschool starting that curriculum for excellence process of which we're then asked to determine whether a child has achieved the level at the end of primary 1. For our children and our parents, sometimes it's a challenge for them to get their children into nursery every day for every session. We generally find that the children that do come in for every session have far more opportunity to succeed as they go through the school rather than if they're missing a good part of nursery education. They've missed a lot of what they need to be able to do when they move into primary 1, therefore in primary 1 they're already falling behind slightly. We have intervention programmes. We as schools always look to many different partners. Within my school, we have a partnership with the health service in a programme called word boost. That is precisely to address what Graham Graham is saying. It's well known that a lot of our children that come through from poverty you've put it in the context of 15 months. For me, I quite like the analogy that it's two million words that they've heard less than a child who has read to from birth onwards. That's already a massive gap that we are trying to fill in schools. We have lots of programmes that we put in place to do that. In order for those programmes to work, we have to upskill the teachers. Again, with the nature of teaching being as it is, we're asking our staff to be skilled in lots of different areas. Sometimes the concern for me is that within that, we're asking them to be skilled in this area, it's how do we get a system within initial teacher education where teachers coming into the profession can see how these skills are transferable in other curricular areas and other parts of education as well. I think that it's a really good question in terms of getting the resource right. It's a fundamental point for us. I think that the attainment challenge has provided an opportunity to bring in a bank of resources in an immediate way to respond to those problems. What's been interesting for me, as I've looked at that, is the balance between what we require on the teaching side and what we require on the support staff side. I was really interested in some of the evidence from RAPLOCH where those who were providing the evidence were talking about the extension of teachers' role into the social sphere. I understand what they're meaning. They're talking about moving away from just traditional teaching and picking up other aspects of nurture and care. I suppose that the question that we asked in Dundee was that it doesn't always have to be teachers to do this. It's getting that balance between teaching staff and support staff right. Predominantly, our aim is to ensure that teachers are well trained so that they can concentrate on the role of teaching. They've certainly got to nurture, they've got to show care, but let's concentrate on the pedagogy and the teaching and work co-operatively in anorganised way with extended ranges of support staff within our core provision to be able to provide those other areas of coverage. I think that that's been the issue over the years. We've brought support staff in and the voluntary sector, the third sector, but it's often just been at the margins and we've not been able to sustain it into the core because the funding hasn't been there for it. It's only been there on a temporary basis. If you want to get that balance right for producing good sound social health and emotional wellbeing, it's getting the balance to support staff, the skillset right between that and your teaching staff, and then making sure that it's funded as part of the core. So, certainly within our attainment challenge bid, which we were successful in receiving, it's mostly on the support staff side that we've strengthened areas. So, it's speech and language therapists, it's school and family development workers, and again I picked up from the Ramp-Loch evidence that families wanted to have key workers, family workers, people that they could rely on so that the answer to this is not just more teachers, it's high quality learning and teaching but balancing it properly with support staff resources that are funded as part of a core organisation. The support services that surround families and go beyond education are really vital in helping parents and families engage with education. The barriers that poverty raises are not always immediately apparent and don't stop at the school gate. In fact, they start well before. It's hard to read to a toddler if your own literacy is challenged. It's hard to provide a child with quiet space to do homework if your home is cramped and damp and unsafe. It's hard to provide food in the school holidays if you don't have free school meals and school holidays become a challenge to be dreaded rather than an enriching time for children. It's hard to provide extracurricular activities for children if you can't afford it, and travel times increase to those activities if you don't have a car. Those are all things that are outwith the bounds of teachers to solve but absolutely need to be addressed to allow parents and children to engage with education. If the school asks for money and the parent can't provide, that becomes a barrier to a conversation between the parent and the school because we still have a stigma associated with poverty in this country. That stigma creates a stereotype that creates anxiety and causes parents and children to disengage with school, so the entirety of support surrounding a family is absolutely crucial in allowing a parent and children to engage with school. That's really interesting. It's great to have such a coherent set of responses. Paul Clancy, you made a very good point about the need to be balanced and having sufficient resource specifically in terms of additional professionals in the school to support the work that the teachers do. Maybe I'd just like to follow up on that with both Lindsay Law and Jamie Petrie as people who are right in there. I hate those cliches, but at the coalface, not that children should be going anywhere near coalfaces. Do you feel that that support is there right now? What do you feel the direction of travel is, and where would you like to be in that level of non-teaching professional support in schools? It's definitely there. It's the case of sourcing and finding and having access to it. Within my school, we have play therapy, art therapy, we have parental groups, we've got burnardos, we have all the services that we can possibly engage with. I suppose that the key ethos for schools and certainly for schools like mine is that every single person that works in that school, particularly the teachers and the staff that work with the children in the classroom, need to know everything about that child, everything about their needs, everything about what will make them be able to achieve and attain at school. Once we've got that ethos within the school, it's then the professionals that can tell fairly quickly if something is not right in that child's education, whether it's any part of the scenario wheel, whether it's nurtured or safe. The teachers then have the confidence to act upon that, and then when they act upon that, it's then knowing which services are available for them. I think that my concern about having lots of different people in the school, when we look at our pupil support assistants for whom they have a significant responsibility to work with children for whom education is challenging and can, as a result of that, be violent, they can be quite difficult to manage. Those are people that are earning a very small salary for the job that they are doing and I do fear that we're putting an awful lot of responsibility onto them. However, if we were to put the teacher in that position, it would mean that they would have to go into the class while the teacher nurtures and supports the child at that given time, when there's a crisis going on. I do think that we have got a lot of services around schools that are accessible. I think that the difficulty is that each school has its own context and what might be seen as a challenge at one school might not be a challenge at another school. Therefore, we have a responsibility to ensure that all children are included. I know from my own experience that some of the things that the children at Broomhouse have done in the past would be catastrophic in a different school, not that far away, but yet we manage it and are able to manage it because we know our children well and we know the services well. In a way, there's an inequity of expectations in school of what children come with. If we're going to be fully inclusive—which I absolutely agree with and I agree with Paul Clancy—we need to have more resources in school, because what we're tending to see is that a small percentage of our children take up a significant amount of teacher management and pupil support assistant time. If we're going to raise attainment for all, my concern is that amount of time being spent on that small percentage that really requires it. What's the effect of having on the other 95 per cent that don't require it but perhaps aren't getting as much of the service that they deserve to have as well in order to make their attainment continue to improve? That's the challenge. In terms of services, yes, we know about the mental health service and how the waiting lists are extensive. I don't know if there's a fast-tracking way of doing that because children go through crisis at different times. There are many children who suddenly go through a crisis and you have to react to that there and then. To put in a referral for them because they've just had a serious trauma in their lives and to have to wait nine months for it or to put in their referrals for other things, that can be too long for those children. During that time, they're struggling to engage with mainstream education where we want them to be, but we also have the challenge if we don't have them in mainstream education, where are they? Are they in a safe environment when they're not in mainstream education if they're out of school? Yes, we have a number of services. I do think that those services maybe aren't as extensive as they have been in the past, but I guess that's for us to creatively work out ways to use people to the best of their abilities and use those services to train and upskill the people working in schools to be able to deliver part of that service. I think that parents who don't engage often do so because of their own experience of the education system and the social service system in this country. There's a barrier there that needs to be broken down because they may have a distrustful relationship with authority based on their own experiences. It's vital that that's broken down to allow them to see that teachers and authorities have the best intentions for their children and want to work with them to enable their children to achieve their potential. All parents really want to have discussions with the school about what's my child's potential, are they achieving it, and what can I do to support them achieving that. I think that in the early days of curriculum for excellence, a new curriculum, unfamiliar to parents and with teachers coming to grips with it, many teachers and schools would admit that that tracking was a work in progress and probably wasn't where it is today. I think that the impact on parents then is that they weren't equipped with the correct information to understand where their child was and to fully support them, and for parents whose own literacy was perhaps more challenged, that was even more challenging to understand a whole new set of what to parents sometimes feels like jargon. Talking to parents in plain English about standardised assessment, what does that mean? What does it mean for the child? What's the plan for the child? How can you help us? It's really important to parents. I think that we all agree that closing the attainment gap is a good thing. However, over several years now when we've been talking about attainment gaps, I've never actually been as clear as I should in terms of the targets that we should be using to measure that. How do we measure progress in this? Which targets should we be using? Thanks, Mr Beattie. At the senior phase end, we have very clear data in terms of national qualifications and other awards, so we can see very clearly how individual young people, how schools, how local authorities are performing in relation to raising standards for all children and closing the gap. If we look further down the primary school level, we haven't had a nationally consistent approach to this in order to look at the attainment gap and, in particular, poverty-related attainment gap. That's why, with the national improvement framework, there's a commitment to look at the children attaining curriculum for excellence levels. We've got a very clear framework that children should achieve the early level in literacy and numeracy by the end of primary 1, the first level by the end of primary 4, the second level by the end of primary 7 and so on. I think that one part of the story is the progress in literacy and numeracy using those levels. Some of the other measures, some of the things that we see through profiles because, under curriculum for excellence, young people have a profile of their achievement, which looks at all the achievement that they're attaining beyond literacy and numeracy, so how they've contributed to school life, for example, through community work and volunteering, for example, work that they've done in terms of being responsible citizens for the environment, for improving their locality. At individual child level, there's very rich evidence and data of what they are achieving in the round, and what we're trying to do nationally is be clearer on progress in literacy and numeracy through the curriculum for excellence levels. However, when the OECD was with us last year, it was really clear that one of the strengths that we saw was children's confidence, their engagement, their wider achievement, and through curriculum for excellence, there's a broader and richer experience than there has been before. The challenge for us now is to make that consistently strong across Scotland. If we're talking about, for example, academic achievement that you can measure by the number of certificates, a lot of what you're talking about is much more subjective. How do you get a consistent target or consistent data coming back where a lot of it is subjective? I think that you have to identify what data you want to look at, and, as I say, with the national improvement framework, it is focusing on literacy and numeracy. Remember that the curriculum for excellence literacy and numeracy levels are very broad. It's not just about basic and reading and writing. It's looking at literacy across the curriculum, literacy beyond school, etc. Those levels are broad, and they include quite a lot of skills and achievements. However, I suppose that the challenge is how much of that data would you want to collect nationally and why? We don't want to cause perverse incentives here. We don't want to narrow the curriculum as well. What we want to be assured of as an individual child level is getting that broad, rich experience. Is that getting recognised? Some of the really simple ideas that we've seen in the attainment challenge are schools and areas of poverty thinking of things such as what are the 50 things that every child would experience by the time they leave primary school? That can be things like going to museums, etc. Things that other children would take for granted. We have to be very clear that we've got the data for the senior phase, and that isn't just academic. That looks at vocational qualifications, and it looks at wider awards as well. What we're trying to do now is look at the progress through curriculum for excellence levels in primary school. Are we satisfied that we've got consistent measures in place? We do it at the senior phase. We have the qualifications, we have the achievements awards, we have vocational qualification evidence. What we're working on is to look at developing that through the primary sector as well, and that's why the national improvement framework was introduced. This year, for example, for the first time, there will be the collection of those broad curriculum levels that I mentioned in literacy enumeracy. That data can be looked at in terms of SIMD banding, so we can look at the difference in attainment of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, so that we'll be able to see on that particular indicator how well children are progressing in literacy enumeracy. It's really important that we look at this in the round, and we'll look at the context of each individual school and how it supports schools to tell their own story of how they're helping children to overcome the impact that poverty has on attainment and achievement. As a headteacher of a school, the question that I asked the teachers throughout the year is, are those children making progress? If they are, how are they making progress and what's your evidence of that? Education Scotland has given a lot of guidance and moderation and significant aspects of learning that we work with children, but within a primary school, a big part of the ethos is about achievement rather than attainment, although attainment is a significant part of that. For us, if children can feel the sense of achievement, whether that be because they attend a judo club or they want to meddle in ffencing or that they are part of a debating team, whatever it may be, they are made to feel that that is a valuable experience for them. What we learn in schools is that more that children feel that they are achieving things, the more likely they are to engage in the other aspects that lead to the attainment, which will then lead to the national examinations later on. Through the guidance of Education Scotland, we have a very clear system to prepare our children for skills for life and skills for work. We recognise that not all children will necessarily go to university. It is about finding what children's skills are and finding the right places for those children to be able to develop those skills so that they can go off into a positive destination. We start that very early in nursery and primary school, and then we have good dialogue with the secondary schools to pass on that information so that, hopefully, when children go up to secondary school, they are not feeling that they are somewhere where they are out of their depth. When they are out of their depth, their esteem goes right down and their learning suffers as a result of that. My question is that we have attainment measures that we have to follow. My attainment measure is that a child from the start of the school session that you have had in your class has made progress up until the end. What kind of progress is that? So that we are not boxing children, I worry that children that come into schools with far less literacy and far less numeracy, if we test them too much, we are automatically putting them in a box for failure from day one. That is not the right thing to have for a four or a five-year-old. That does not help their self-esteem. It does not help their journey throughout school. There needs to be an understanding that, as professionals, the majority, if not all teachers, go into their school every single day with the best will in the world to help those children to raise their attainment, to give them a positive destination. That is what they do. We need to recognise that, and we need to have confidence and faith in our teachers. I think that it was Gillian Martin who mentioned our husband being a guidance teacher and how the tabloid pressed us at times. Obviously, he has felt a hard time with that. I think that in schools, we are being told that we have to raise attainment all the time. I think that there needs to be a recognition that every single school and every single teacher in Scotland has that very purpose, but perhaps the perception out in societies that maybe we do not have that purpose and we do, we absolutely do. That would be something that I think schools would very much welcome. I think that parents would welcome. It would give our teachers far more confidence because they are, to quote your phrase that you did not like on the cold face, they are the ones delivering this every single day with passion, enthusiasm and driving commitment. There are a number of things in place. We know where our children are. It is just how do we benchmark that against other people. We cannot, because we are told that schools are very individual places with a selection of different people who are very different perhaps to the people in a school that could be 300 yards away. However, with the best will in the world, that school is doing the best that it can for the children there. The point that John Swinney made in his paper about cluster working is vitally important. In our context, we have four schools in my cluster. They are very different schools, but we purposely learn from each other. We have our teachers working with each other, moderating with each other so that we are coming to common standards of what the curriculum should be and able to then go back to our schools and say, yes, we are on the right track with that, or actually, no, we are not. This is something that we need to develop further over the coming years. We are. In terms of attainment, the teachers knowing the children inside out is the best form of deciding where a child is in their journey through education and then passing on that information through the profiles that Graham mentioned. The same theme of questioning that Colin Beattie has been asking about. Mr Beattie, I get what you have just said, but I cannot get as particularly apparent, if I may say, as a primary school child, but what I cannot get is how that is consistent with the national government's desire to have tests, and they have been calling them tests, at primary level, right through primary school level, and then be able to do comparisons because, again, that is what Mr Swinney has been saying in Parliament a number of times. That is not consistent at all with the point that you have very fairly just made about we cannot benchmark one primary school against another. I have not been partied to what those tests are, so I cannot comment on them, but I am assuming what those tests will be. A lot of the standardised testing that is currently used in schools was created before curriculum for excellence came out. Therefore, what we are asking children to do in terms of standardised testing is not necessarily fully reflective of the curriculum that we are delivering. On the assumption that those national tests that are coming out will be entirely based on the curriculum for excellence experiences and outcomes, then the assumption is that, as all teachers, we are tasked to deliver the experiences and outcomes in our own creative way, but we are tasked to track whether those children have achieved them, whether it be at the end of first level, early level, second level. Therefore, those standardised tests that are going to come out will hopefully be more of a reflection of what the curriculum for excellence is in real terms rather than what standardised testing was previously. Standardised tests have to include teacher judgment, and that teacher judgment is individual to that class. How, then, can we, looking at this from a parliamentary level, see a comparison from one school to the next? Because teacher judgment does not allow that to happen, does it? Well, teacher judgment is based on what the teachers are delivering to the children, which is consistent throughout the country. The experiences and outcomes are the same in Inverness as they are in Edinburgh as they are in Glasgow. I think that I could pick an argument on that one, but anyway, go on. Again, it is trusting teachers that they are following them. I guess that is back to Paul Clancy's point about the leadership in schools. That is the robust systems that each individual school has to ensure the quality of the education that is happening in line with Her Majesty's inspectorate that comes in to either verify or to offer support to schools when they come into schools to assess and check what position the school is in delivering the curriculum. Do you think that, after the national framework has been in place for a couple of years, we will see statistics—well, you will tell me, but at what point will we see statistics that allow us to compare school performance against school performance, because that is what we keep being told that we are going to be able to see? Again, that is a debate that, as a headteacher of a school, I am not hugely qualified to put my— I think that you are very qualified, if I may say so. Well, you are going to put my least qualified person here. I suppose that if you are asking me, do I want my school to be compared to another school? I do, purposefully, just because of the way that I am, I am interested in what my local schools attainment results are, because we have that conversation as a cluster. If one particular school has a real strength in a particular area, then we would not be using our professional skills particularly well if we did not then go in and say, right, well, what is it that you have been doing that allows that to happen? As headteachers in schools, we have the autonomy to be able to do that, and then we can take the best ideas from other schools. If it is going to be used as a tool for parents to decide where to send their children, that is a whole different matter. Again, going back to what Lindsay had said, as a headteacher, it is very much my job to absolutely manage and support our parents to know exactly what the curriculum is, to know exactly what inclusion is, to know exactly what GERFEC is. That is our role in school, along with our partner agencies at Education Scotland, who have put out a huge amount of work, the parents' zone, who have put out a huge amount. It goes back again to the inequality of people being able to access that due to their literacy. Again, from our context, we need to get parents into school more and talk to them in terms of the language that I cannot remember, which Member of Parliament asked Mr Swinney to ensure that parents got it in a language that was for parents. That, I suppose, comes back to us. That is our role to do that, because if we do not do that and share that correctly with our parents, then, of course, they will never understand. That comes back to the leadership of schools, and most schools that I work with have parents in an awful lot more than when I was at school. My parents were never in school other than a parent's evening. Now, you will find that it is a very common place in most schools to have parents in quite regularly, which is good because it builds their understanding of what the curriculum and inclusion is and where their child is. I will go back to Mr Beattie's original question, which was to do with the measures that you might use in terms of determining whether you have closed the attainment gap. I think that you will need some long-term measures, medium-term measures and things that are happening on a term-by-term basis. The senior phase results would be traditional examination results along with positive destination measures. They are important measures to show that, in a long-term way, you have made a change and that the attainment gap has been closed. We will be looking to those, but they are obviously long-term measures, but they remain important. For me, another important set of measures would be what happens when a child starts their education, because we know that if they are not school-ready, it is very difficult to get them to catch up to other young people who are. We know what they need to be. We know in terms of where their language development needs to be and where their co-ordination needs to be and their experiences that they need to have had. The issue is not just measuring it, but ensuring that it happens. That is the trick, because we have so many young people coming through who have not had those experiences, and it takes so long. It is an uphill battle to try to bring them to where other young people are. I think that there needs to be whether it is fully defined. Health visitors have very clear measures that they use for children as they reach certain parts in their life journey. There maybe needs to be something round about that starting point that we can say, we feel this child is ready. I think that it is not maybe missing there, but it needs to be fully defined. I think that Graham is right in terms of literacy and numeracy. That needs to be measured in an on-going way. For me, that is the actual core that determines a young person's progress throughout their primary career. Parents have an absolute right to know in a standardised way, based on national operation, where their child is in literacy and numeracy. I do not think that it is too much to ask that we can say that this is where they are in their numeracy journey. That is what this means, and that is what it means across Scotland. If we say this, this is what it means, and we should be able to establish it in very clear language. I think that we have gone a long way in trying to define what that is, but I would accept that there is a journey to go, because you have thousands of teachers that are going to be using a mixture of standardised assessments in their own judgment. There is a bit of work there to get a common language. We have been through this before, from 5 to 14. There is some journey that needs to happen to get us to that point, but I think that there is an absolute entitlement for parents to be able to be told that this is where they are in the numeracy journey. It is by mapping that literacy and numeracy. I think that Graham mentioned the achievement journey that actually happens as they go through school. That helps us to keep an eye on the attainment gap itself. Where that is tight and it is close together and there is not too many big gaps, you will find that by the time they are getting into the senior phase, they are ready for the examinations. It is not too many measures, it is getting the right measures at the right times. For me, at the start of the school journey, literacy and numeracy throughout the school journey, with the examination results, with the positive destinations at the end, is the long-term measure. Those are the key things with an absolute guarantee that we are talking with a consistent language. That requires some work. William, you have a short supplementary question. Very short supplementary question. Just based on what Jamie was saying about measurement, is it incumbent on us as parliamentarians not to be so obsessive about the stats and to look at the whole picture of what achievement and attainment actually is? Is there anything that we can do to help to reflect what is happening in schools in a way that is not just boiled down to numbers that we beat each other over the head about in the chamber? That would be lovely. I have to say in praise of the inspection process. The inspection process does look at achievements in school. It looks at the school ethos, at everything that a school is. It does not focus itself on the attainment. Of course, it looks at the attainment because we are accountable for our children and we have to make sure that they are making progress. The majority of times when a child is not achieving what they should be doing, the parent will know about that. An intervention programme will be put in place with the parent as a partner, and other agencies that are required will also be in that process through the child's planning system. There are two ways of looking at it. I suppose somewhere along the line, somebody needs to be able to say that education is getting better in Scotland. For me, I think that when I look at the teachers that are coming into education now, the skills and knowledge and expertise that they are bringing in compared to when I started as a teacher 20 years ago, it is far higher—the use of research, the use of creativity, the use of risk-taking, the opportunity for teachers to actually take the experiences and outcomes and deliver them the way that they want with their children. That is a key part of that. It is not about the teacher in the school saying that this is what we are going to learn. It is about the children being involved in that process, which is helping with their emotional literacy and everything else that builds a bigger picture. All of that is significantly better than I can ever remember it being, which is a real positive for me. As Graeme says, you walk into any school and talk to a child now. They will talk back to you with confidence.  For some reason in schools, because we have that caring ethos and high aspirations, which is a hugely important thing for us, the bigger picture is that we are doing everything that we can. Teachers are working incredibly hard to make the best for their children. I suppose that, in my perspective, our attainment is not as high as somebody would like it to be or it is not at the national level. It is not far off it, which is really quite good for Broome House. We do not need to be slated for it because we are working absolutely to our maximum to give the best to those children. I suppose that it is just for our Government to have confidence that that is what we are doing. The inspection process does do that with us and it supports us if it is not quite right, which is good. I urge extreme caution in comparing school against school and setting communities against and encouraging parents to look at that data and then decide to make an upheaval in their life to move school. In the cabinet secretary's speech, he talks about identifying successful schools, but the reality is that schools in deprived areas are doing other things. They are working very hard. Primary school teachers are finding clothes for children or finding food for children when they come in in the morning. That is time that is taken away from attainment in literacy and numeracy. We should be very cautious about using literacy and numeracy attainment to define the success of schools. I have no doubt that the vast majority of parents across the country have one thing in mind, and that is successful and happy children. It is wrong to assume that a school that has low attainment is not a successful, well-led and happy school. I agree with what Jamie McLean was saying. The inspection model, which has been redesigned, looks at achievement and attainment. It evaluates the breadth of experience that young people are offered, the quality of their achievement, and that is equally valued along with some of the other attainment measures. To go back to Ms Martin's point about not just picking out sets of data, we agree that we have to judge the system on a balanced range of different measures and indicators. Picking out one criteria or measure costs per verse incentives, and it can be damaging. We are currently working with parent organisations and others to develop a parent zone that will have a page in each school, which will tell the story of that school using a whole range of evidence and information so that you will get a real flavour of that school in the round, what it is offering, how well it is doing. As a country, that is what we want to move forward with, not just picking out individual measures, but telling the whole story of the school and looking at its success in the round. I will move on to Ross Greer, but before I do, can I just ask that both the questions and the answers are shorter? We have an awful lot to get through within the next hour or so, so let us try and keep it succinct and answer the questions. Going back to some of the answers that commit to Daniel Johnson's questions, Jamie Greer observed that a small number of pupils take up quite a large amount of resource and time, which is right. Resource deployments will obviously have a huge bearing on how we cause the attainment gap, but to use another coalface-like buzzword, there is a bit of a postcode lottery going on when it comes to identifying young people with those additional support needs in the first place. In Renfrewshire, 15 per cent of young people have been identified as having additional support needs. It is 35 per cent in neighbouring West and Bartonshire. I do not think that there is actually a 20-point gap between those two groups of young people. From your experience, is there a consistency and is it happening early enough in identifying young people with additional support needs or are there issues there that are going to prevent us from deploying resources correctly? I think that children's needs are identified from a very young age, from the health visitor birth. When they move into nursery years, the nursery staff are very skilled at identifying if children have needs. At all stages, those needs are discussed and strategies are put into place for those children, and that continues throughout the school. There is a consistency within a school of working out where the needs are. In terms of nationally, I do not have the answer to that. I do not know whether you have made more or yourself. I would say from parents' perspective that parents are the foremost expert in their own child. Quite often, we hear from parents who say that their voices are not listened to when they have asked for a diagnosis and they struggle to engage with that support. I think that parents' voices should become louder in that discussion. The experts should listen to parents when they say that they feel that there is a problem with their child. I think that some parents are telling us that that is actually not happening universally across Scotland at the moment. Just to go back to Mr Greer's question, as Jamie and Paul have said, there is earlier identification. Paul mentioned the 23-month health visitor assessment. For example, what that shows is about developmental issues, early literacy and what we are working on the attainment challenge is that information being shared with nurseries and early learning providers and schools so that health and education are working together to intervene as early as possible. You are right in that there are different ways that additional support for learning is classified in different local authorities. I think that that is something that colleagues in other parts of the Government are looking at, that consistency, if that is the gateway to other support. I would also agree with Lindsay in that the progress that we are seeing through getting it right for every child and the best practice parents are fully involved in that planning process, their concerns are listened to professionals working together around the family and around the child. The challenge is making that consistently strong across the country. My experience is that we identify the young people. I think that parents play an absolutely critical role there and we need to work better, but for some reason it is not always recorded. I think that it is just to do with the way that systems are interpreted. The young person may be receiving additional support, but it might not be classified as additional support needs. There is quite a lot of variance across Scotland in how it is captured, but that is not to say that they are not getting the support. There probably is, I think, a need to look at that and try to regularise that across the country. The spirit of short questions. Do you think that making support for learning posts, a promoted post, would be a welcome development in this area or would that not perhaps be necessary? I think that, in some respects, we require support for learning expertise. It comes from teachers, it will come from educational psychologists, it will come from allied health professionals, but more and more we are actually looking upon classroom teachers as being able to work with pupils with a whole range of needs. A lot of the expertise that is required is at ground level, so I cannot make a call there in terms of payment, but I would say that the way that we currently do this is that we say that the classroom teacher is every bit as important as anyone else because they have got to work with the young people with the needs and more and more that is happening at the co-faces that we have been speaking about today. On that point, there needs to be a recognition of how much time Garfec takes within a school's hourage in a day. I am by no means one of the most deprived schools in Scotland. I have 43 children who are on the Garfec cycle. To put that in a context, to go back to what John Swinney was saying about unnecessary bureaucracy and teacher workload, any child that is on the child planning system, which is where we have the parental involvement, we have the other agencies, we have a whole team working around that child, that takes the class teacher to write a report about the child, it takes the class teacher to attend the child's planning meeting, it takes the class teacher to take the strategies out of that meeting and implement them into their classroom. What we have also got to recognise is that those are the same class teachers that have to plan for curriculum for excellence at the same time. If you were to ask me if there was a wish list, I think that there needs to be more resources put into schools to support the implementation of effective Garfec. We do it effectively within the structures that we have within our school, but what we have to recognise is that, when we are doing that, that is taking away our capability of putting in more resources into delivering the curriculum for excellence and all aspects of that. That is something that we have to take seriously. We are asking teachers, you know, that in one of my classes, just to give you an example, we have seven children, all who have individualised programmes for their daily life in a classroom. So each of those seven children require the teacher to have something in place for those seven children, but there is also another 23 children who do not have anything that is still deserved to have exactly the same amount of the teacher's time put into making creative, progressive, exciting, challenging lessons. That is where the whole workload issue can become an issue for teachers. Thank you, convener. Do you believe that the measure of free school meals is the best one in terms of identifying children who require help? I think that this is a real challenge for allocating potentially additional resources, because under the Scottish attainment challenge, we are working at Education Scotland with local authorities and the Scottish Government to allocate funding for targeted areas where there are high levels of children living in poverty. What we have been using today is SIMD data and looking at SIMD bands 1 and 2. That is not the perfect measure. No measure is perfect, I think, because it is really difficult to develop simple clear criteria that will identify poverty in all parts of the country. For example, in Scotland, we have a lot of rural poverty, which postcodes would not help to identify free school meal entitlement and would not necessarily capture either. I think that we need to continue to look at what measures we can use to identify children, particularly with the Scottish Government delivery plan talking about moving to pupil equity funding across a lot of parts of Scotland. We have to try to develop criteria that are simple and clear, so that public and parents and others can understand that capturing poverty is effectively as possible. However, it is a really difficult thing to do, and we are looking at other countries. We have our colleagues in ADS, Association of Directors of Education, and we have strong views on that. It is really challenging to find a set of criteria that are clear and fair that will accurately identify poverty. For providing a satisfactory criteria, given that there is a lot of public money about to be invested in the attainment fund? I think that for that, the move to the pupil equity funding element of the attainment challenge is scheduled for from April next year. What we are working on is a framework to be published in December. Our contribution to that framework will be the educational strategies and so on to give schools guidance. I understand that that will also set out the criteria for the allocation of the funding. What is your understanding of the announcement that has been made that the money that would be provided for the attainment fund, which is raised through council tax, is that your understanding that the allocation of that would be done by central government? The current aspects of the Scottish attainment challenge are the challenge authorities and schools programme. The money is allocated from the Scottish Government to local authorities, and the schools programme also goes through local authorities. They submit plans that we scrutinise educationally. We have a set of criteria that we use to judge the educational merits of those local plans. We have worked with our academic partner at Glasgow University and others to do that. On the mechanism for the money going from the Government, I do not know the final position on how that money will be physically transferred. I am not sure if that is what you are asking. Would you accept that that is a very important decision that has to be made? If you come up with an acceptable criteria by which you make the judgment of which children need help, not only do those criteria have to be very clear to everybody in education, but there has to be a clear model of funding that will allow that allocation to take place. Yesterday, we heard that there could be some kind of regional structure, as well as local authorities and the central government. There are issues about how that money would be allocated. I am interested to know, in terms of a headteacher, how would you like that decision-making process to take place? I think that that is something well above my pay grade to make that decision. The headline was that schools will get £100 million. The reality is that, yes, I think that, like any headteacher, if you gave me money directly, I will use it effectively, but there has to be a system in place to know that that is going to happen consistently throughout the country, otherwise we are in a risk that money could go into schools and not be used effectively. We do have to have justification as to how we want to spend that money. I guess that the criteria that we are given currently from Education Scotland makes it very clear what the expectations that funding should be used for and that that funding does need a level of somebody being able to look over it and say, yes, that is an acceptable way. I can see why you are doing that. That is not devaluing my judgment as a headteacher. That, for me, is just another quality assurance process that keeps my confidence that we are going along the right lines. Will you and Mr Logan, when he says that the SIMD has not been particularly satisfactory as a model and that, obviously, some research is going on just now to make the criteria a bit fair? Mr Logan, did you not say that it wasn't perfect, which is a slightly different response? There is no perfect measure in the world, really, for capturing this accurately. SIMD has worked in terms of looking at the data that we have, and it draws an arrange of data, but we are keen to get the best possible approach to this to identify both our urban and rural poverty. Just to be absolutely clear, am I right that the research that is currently being undertaken involving some international studies is looking at models other than SIMD? At how this is done in different parts of the world, the Scottish Government position at the moment is obviously SIMD, and there has been talk about free school meal entitlement as being the criteria. There are a lot of varying views on that, and I think that a decision will need to be taken. What I am saying is that I do not think that there is a perfect model for this anywhere, because how do you genuinely identify poverty in individual households? It is a real challenge to do that in a consistent way. On your point about the allocation of the funding, I think that what we have to be absolutely assured on is that that leads to additionality. When the money is used in schools and local authorities, it is providing additional interventions and additional support for children. I think that that will be a challenge for us to ensure that the money is leading to additionality for children and their families. A brief supplementary on Liz's line of questioning. It is even in the SPICE briefing paper where Education Scotland says that the new funding will reach around 95 per cent of schools in Scotland, so it is to ask if you can give me clarity on who is the 5 per cent that will not be receiving it and where are they? I think that the policy decision around the criteria is still something that is under way. Some of those illustrations, where if you use free school meal entitlement, you can model what that would mean if you use SIMD. There are different models around showing ways in which the percentage of schools that would reach. If you look at SIMD, what we are talking about with that funding is an amount of cash per child following the child. If you use free school meal entitlement, you can work out exactly how many schools that would involve and how many children. If you use SIMD 1 and 2, you can work that out. There are different examples out there. I think that when the framework is published by the Scottish Government in December, it will outline the educational strategies, which is the focus of the team that I am working with, to look at all the different evidence on what actually works to improve literacy and numeracy and health and wellbeing for children living in poverty. It will also, I understand, outline some of the wider issues about policy decisions around the allocation of the funds, the accountability and so on. I am interested in the whole question, first of all, around assessment. It seems to me that what you do is simply describe the attainment gap by testing. You are identifying, I think that Mr Clancy said, the right of the parent to know, so they know where their child is. However, that only describes it. The action that you take to close the attainment gap must be something very different from that. I wonder whether you have a view on—I get that individual schools with the same kinds of profiles at one school will attain more than another. At one level, assessment of that might be identified whether there is weakness in practice in one school against the other. However, on the bigger picture, do you think that the focus on individual schools will help to close the gap or to simply confirm that the gap exists? What needs to be done at local authority level? For me, local authorities' role is to ensure the quality, to ensure that the targets are right, that the schools are being properly supported and that there is leadership in those schools to be able to take the schools forward. Whether it is within a local authority or an extended educational regional approach, it is the same principle. It is to share good practice and to bring schools together. Evidence-based research and evidence-based work that is shown to be successful can be replicated. That is the role of the authorities to provide the leadership and to ensure that there is leadership in schools. That is key. It is to bring the schools together to share the practice and to ensure that that is disseminated and shared. It has to happen on an individual school basis. In fact, I would argue that it needs to happen on an individual pupil basis, looking at what the pupils' needs are and where pupils realise potential should be. Comparisons are helpful to a certain extent, but the real work happens with the individual young person ensuring that they reach what their potential is. Surely, if the focus is on the individual rather than on the school, the emphasis by the current Scottish Government's approach, which is about the school and about leadership, is probably missing quite an important element of all of that. Would you not accept, or do you have a view on, that if children bring to school with them a range of issues and challenges, it will not simply be the school that is going to be able to address that. Putting a child's needs in the context of all the services that the local authority provides, whether it is housing, social work or whatever, makes sense? Absolutely. For me, schools play a fundamental part in the operation of the authority. I know that some people see that there is a difference between what is called the local authority centre in the schools, but schools are part of the local authority. We have really moved a long way towards schools being seen as community assets working within a community with community resources. I think that that is one of the things that GIRFFEC has really brought about. It has placed schools quite centrally into that range of support that is there. If anything happens in terms of whatever the changes might be through the governance review, we have got to ensure that schools remain full partners in the GIRFFEC community-centred approach along with the other services. They cannot retreat back to just being educators, just being the deliverers of literacy and numeracy. They must remain in that high ground because it is in that role in the co-ordinating position that they have through named personal league professional. I know that that is being debated, but what is set out in the legislation plays quite a central role in assuring that those resources are brought to bear because they are with the young people five days a week from nine to half past three. They are operating with the parents. They are pivotal parts of a community asset. Wherever we go with the governance, I think that schools need to remain firmly impeded within the GIRFFEC operation across services. The logic of that position is that regional educational boards do not really address that. We have got something ready there that fits that. I ask Mr Logan in his question about directing resources. You said that schools need to prove additionality, but what you said earlier was that in some of our schools young people arrive at school where there is already a gap. Is it not the mainstream core function of education to address that gap? If that is a core mainstream function, why do the resources have to prove additionality? Is that not the core business and the funding should be directed to those schools in order to allow the schools to address that problem? Yes, that is absolutely core business of schools, as Jamie and others have said. Every teacher I meet is entirely committed to doing that. Of course, all the core funding that goes into schools is identified for that. What I was referring to was the additional money on top of all the core funding that comes through the Scottish attainment challenge. That is to enable us to try out new and innovative ideas to make the breakthrough that we need. All the commitment and all the work that we are doing is helping, but that additional money needs to offer something extra in terms of extra support for children. With respect to what it is showing, is that the core funding is inadequate in those schools? It is trying out innovative new ideas that are providing space for us to try different things. It is there to complement and enhance and to enable us to do extra work with children. Surely you must accept that the core job in some of our schools is more difficult to deliver if a child is coming 15 months behind a child of its peers from a different set of circumstances. The funding should not be challenge funding, it should not be additional funding. The innovative stuff that works in any walk of life is extra money, but that is not a strong argument at the level of delivering on education budgets. You should factor in at that stage that the core funding for those schools needs to be higher because the gap is so significant when they arrive in school itself. I think that there is a range of things that can be done in every school that is dealing with children coming in with different needs. The focus that we have been looking at educationally on this argument is around how learning can be enhanced, how learning can be organised to help children. The example that I gave earlier in relation to your question about the 15-month gap is that some of the schools that we are working with are changing the curriculum in primary 1 to offer a much more literacy-rich and play-based experience to reduce that gap. Our focus educationally on this is looking at the ideas and the strategies that make the difference in literacy and numeracy. The whole funding models are a different issue, probably not one for me to comment on. Our focus is looking at educational interventions and educational additionality through the networks that we have created in the attainment challenge of bringing teachers and head teachers together to look at what works, to work with Glasgow University as our senior academic advisor and to share the practice through the team that we have established of attainment advisers who are working out on the ground with teachers and head teachers to look at what is working and to share that practice. A big additional amount of support and focus on what actually works and what strategies are making the most difference to children living in poverty. That is the focus of the work that I am involved in at Education Scotland. I think that every school deals with the same set of problems. Every child has its own challenges, but the attainment gap tells us that there is a distinct problem in some of our schools because of the challenges that children bring with them into school. I think that there have been a number of issues and strategies that you have talked about. In your written submission, you talked about the impact of significant cuts to th