Good morning, and welcome to the eighth meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee in 2021. This meeting is being held virtually. We apologise for our late start, but that was for technical reasons. The first item on our agenda today is a decision on taking business in private. Can I ask whether members are content to take agenda items 3 and 4 in private? Lots of nodding heads will mute, so thank you very much. The second item on the agenda is to take evidence from Professor Gordon Stobart, Emeritus Professor of Education University College London, on his report that provides a comparative perspective of upper secondary education student assessment in Scotland. Professor Stobart has worked as a secondary school teacher, an educational psychologist, a senior researcher in policy-related environments and as an academic. His expertise is in assessment, with much of his recent work focusing on assessment for learning. His report was published under the OECD working paper series, whereby the OECD publishes papers that describe preliminary results of research in progress by the authors in order to stimulate discussion on an issue on which the OECD works. I stress that the report does not represent the views of the OECD, but rather those of Professor Stobart. Professor Stobart, we are delighted to have you with us this morning. You are very welcome. Perhaps, before we open up our session to questions to you, I invite you to give an opening statement. Thank you very much. I am assuming that you are hearing me all right. We are. Good. The paper itself resulted from a concern about the alignment between the curriculum for excellence and the senior secondary assessment system. Something that came through as OECD was researching curriculum for excellence. In its phrase, curriculum for excellence loses power when we get into senior secondary and the exams begin. It complements the curriculum for excellence report. We chose a comparative approach as a reminder that there is more than one way to assess senior secondary pupils and that assessment systems reflect the culture in which they develop. Often, as in Scotland, those developments go back to the 19th century. There is a long tradition. One of the issues is that when we are embedded in a tradition, we often cannot believe that there are other ways of doing this. We have always done it this way. The value of a comparative approach is to say, hold on, that others seem to be able to do it differently. We can look more broadly at what happens within the Scottish system, relative to others. The Scottish system is the anchor point of the report. I look at it well within the British legacy system, which has its own distinctive features, particularly the scale of national exams between ages 16 to 18. That is fairly distinctive. Many other systems do not operate that way. I should say that, in preparing it, I was walking a bit of a tightrope, because it is a publication for an international audience, but primarily for a Scottish audience. I was trying to steer between an accessible and simplified summary for international readers, whereas the Scottish readership knows just how complex their system is and how nuanced it is and its delivery—things such as multilevel teaching and the like. Those of you who have come through the system and are embedded in the system will be saying that, at times, that is a bit simplistic. That was my juggling act. The final point that you made in introducing me was that I was asked to do it partly because of my own experience. I am not a lifelong academic looking from on high. I am an academic late developer having taught and then was head of research at an awarding body, now a dexel. I developed GMVQ, the Vocational Qualification in England, at the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, and then moved to the qualifications and curriculum authority to work on exams and vocational things. Only then moved across to the Institute of Education, where I did more work on formative assessment, including assessment is for learning in Scotland. I am trying to suggest that I do not come as this as a purist academic. I have been on the inside and I know some of the compromises that have to be made when doing any curriculum reform. I hope that this sets the scene a little bit for the discussion. Professor Stover, that was an excellent introduction. It was good to get clarity on your wide-ranging experience. Maybe I can start the questions by just asking to talk about your experience of Scotland, Scottish education and the Scottish educational landscape. Coming from England, I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Scottish educational landscape. The lighter touch comes from the heavy accountability, the heavy testing and the end of things. I have always looked at Scotland without fully understanding what goes on in Scotland. I think that I have always just said that I think that they do it better in Scotland without necessarily knowing what it was. It has come as a bit of a surprise trying to get inside the system to find out just how complex it is with the three sets, the diet of examinations, the multilevel teaching, the range of vocational qualifications and so on. That side of things has taken me some time to get my head around the details of that, but I also think that the openness and the importance that is given to education in Scotland is part of the tradition that you feel education is central to Scottish identity as well. That has come over powerfully as well. It is really good to hear that your reputation is that you saw our education system as being better than somewhere else simply because it was Scottish. We can all sign up to that on the basis of our national pride, but were you surprised by what you discovered about the complexity and all the nuances that you have just described? Yes, I think that probably the biggest surprise was the sheer volume of examinations that secondary school students go through. The complexity of the three national five, the advanced five and the higher, is that you may have multilevel teaching in small schools with students in going for different ones, where there is a slightly different curriculum. It is a complicated one to steer through as a system. It is quite difficult to capture in a single report like this, as you have said. Every time I thought I had understood it, somebody would come along and say, you know we do this, that or the other. I have learned a lot. You have learned a lot. I am enjoying your transparent honesty about what you have discovered. I am going to turn to Cocab Stewart, who is the deputy convener, who will lead the questions. Hi, Professor. Thank you very much for your introduction. As a previous teacher of 30 years, I read it with great interest. I thought that it was really helpful to have the international and the UK nations comparators and set the historical context as well. I note that other countries have been through reforms to their assessment systems and practice that have been introduced. What can Scotland learn from the other countries' journeys? You mentioned quite a few countries, so you may wish to highlight maybe one or two. I think probably a general point that most countries are going through every country, I suspect, is going through what Scotland is going through, in that our students are changing, becoming more diverse, students are staying on in education a lot longer, but they have a varied range of needs. I think that every country that I have looked at has been trying to reshape their curriculum to fit modern times and then trying to move their assessment system to get this kind of alignment with the curriculum. It is a very difficult process. I think that we have learned that. Some other traditions find it easier, I am thinking of, say, Norway, where teacher assessment has always been central to their system. They trust the teachers to do this. There are national exams, but they play a relatively small role. They only take two or three subjects in national exams, and the teachers will do that. Other systems such as the baccalaureate and the French baccalaureate are trying to widen the range of the baccalaureate so that a greater volume of students can come through who are not necessarily on an academic track, such as the professional baccalaureate and the like. That idea is a powerful one. What is the role of the teacher in all this? Along with that, what is the role of the students? How much do we take account of student perceptions? You will know that this is an ex-teacher that students have views on that, and they are the ones who are most affected by the system. How do we take account of that as well? Thanks for that. Some of my colleagues later on might drill down about student engagement a wee bit further. I want to go back to the phrase of high trust. I personally know as well that, during Covid, there was a renewed respect for teachers during that time. However, the concept of high trust in teacher-led assessment is that what factors do you think can enable such trust to develop? How might we move forward in that? I am looking at it from the point of view that there can be resistance to change. In that context, what are your views? I do not think that you can just announce it that we need to trust it. This is a gradual process, and it will require training or professional development around it as well as part of it, so it is a process. I will make the comment that we trust teachers to do the assessments right through broad general education. We trust university teachers to make assessments without too much supervision and further education. It is a senior secondary school where suddenly a great deal of pressure is put on the system. I know that that is because we are selecting, so we need fair assessment and comparability and the like. Again, other countries such as New Zealand, Queensland, Australia and Canada see that their teachers are capable of doing this and the system operates that way. I am also aware that, at the other end of the scale in Ireland, teachers do not want to assess their students, so we stay very much with exams. When reforms were introduced to try to get teachers to do some teacher assessment, there was protest and non-corporation and the like. It is a delicate balancing act, so it is to do with moving towards giving teachers more responsibility as I see it. Willie Rennie Thank you, Professor. For your frankness at the beginning, it was very refreshing. There are three sets of questions that I have. One is about the staging post of qualifications. Second one is the effect of a leaving qualification on the leaving age from either school or education, and the final one is about motivation. On staging posts, some pupils like to get qualifications in the bag as they go, rather than perhaps leaving it all to the very end of the last year and putting all the stakes on one option. We have currently got three years of NAP-5s, advanced hires. You are not making a specific recommendation, but the hint is that you want to strip it down. How far would you go? How far would you be reasonable to go and could you perhaps talk about the trade-offs on all of that? I think that we can record progress. We do not necessarily need a national examination to do it. There may be other ways. I talk about a mixed economy in which we need examinations, and I think that, certainly for university in things, I have not attempted to say that we do not need elective hires and advanced hires. It was more at the national 5 whether there are other ways of recording progress and recording what students have done with their school experience. I have found that that notion of a mixed economy on there could not substantiate it, particularly that, even at the beginning of the revised nationals and the like, there were still discussions of whether it is a step by step, whether it is a ladder of qualifications or whether we should let students select the level at which they will be leaving or continuing in education. It is all anecdotal for me that many schools go for the step by step on the grounds that we need to check on students regularly or assess students regularly as they progress through the system. However, as Mark Presley and others have commented, that two-term dash, when you move from one diet of exams to the next, affects the quality of teaching and learning. We are currently, unlike some other countries, allowing pupils to leave at 16. My family used to leave school at 14 in the past, but now it is 16 and others have gone for 18. If you are having a leaving qualification, is that not unfair? We would need to raise the leaving age, not necessarily from school but from education. Do you think that further reform on the leaving age would need to come? It is being done almost naturally. 88 per cent of students go on beyond 16. That is up dramatically from 20 years ago when most students left at 16. That was the justification for examinations at 16. The same in England. The leaving age has been made to 18 now. You have to stay in education and training or part-time work and education. When you look at France, the United States and Canada, the assumption is that students will be staying on to 18. Whether they need to make it legal, I am not sure. The encouragement is there in the system for students anyway. Probably what we have to concentrate on is making it an attractive programme for students who might not want to go a narrow academic route but might want to go other ways. If students are staying on, how do we make that a rich and useful experience for them? That is an interesting point, because often the vocational offer within schools is being prioritised and is not sufficient. Academics still continue to be the predominant in priority. Do you think that the vocational offer is good enough in schools if we are to go for this in a leaving qualification and raising the A of leaving education or training? Again, looking from the outside without understanding the actual programmes and everything else, Scotland is in a very good position because you have got the vocational and the academic in the same agency. I know that there are changes there, but they are linked, so they can be grouped together. Like many in the British tradition, there is the problem of the status of vocational. I think that Scotland has got a real opportunity there. The foundation apprenticeships and things of introducing high-status vocational qualifications suffer as part of the British tradition that vocational exams are seen as not as good as academic. The easier route is the academic in terms of progress. As I said at the beginning, I worked for developing a school-based vocational qualification that worked reasonably well. In fact, this is my personal take on it. It worked well enough that it then got absorbed, which I would not encourage, into the academic qualifications. It kind of disappeared and became an applied A level and an applied thing that did not really take off. If we have a diverse student population coming through and many of them are staying in education, we are really offering them a diverse set of routes. The issue there is the status of the routes. My final question is about motivation. Some teachers and pupils tell us that it is the focus of an exam that gets them out of a rut and makes them work and motivates them to achieve. Every pupil learns in a different kind of way. Could you talk about what we might lose if we were to move towards more assessments and away from the exam at the end of the academic year? I understand that motivation. We can say that we have got to do this in order for your exams. Again, there are cultures where there is less emphasis on this. We can say that it is an expectation that you will do this, but it also puts the onus on us to make the programme interesting, to motivate the teaching and learning and what we are doing in the classroom. It is simply to use a bit of a carrot and stick to use the stick of your exams coming up and you have got to work. Perhaps we should be thinking of more carrots in terms of the usefulness of the programme, the breadth of the programme. I use the international baccalaureate quite a lot, and there there is a really diverse set of expectations. You could say that it is an assessment and it has got exams in it, but it has also got other aspects, such as the essay, the theory of knowledge and the personal projects. Those can be built into it, so it does not need to be a narrow preparation for exams, which I suspect can become quite didactic at times. You are here to learn this, this and this, rather than engaging with students on developing ideas and their profile and doing community service, which is part of the international baccalaureate. Other things can be introduced into it as part of the assessment. There are quite a few colleagues who want to come in on the back of that very interesting line of questions from Willie Rennie. First of all, let's wind back a bit and talk about the school leaving age. Oliver Mundell wants to come in quick fire from Oliver Mundell. I was just interested that you dismissed the percentage of people who leave school early, but those are often the individuals who have been most let down by the school system. Do you not think that they have a right to set an externally assessed qualification before the education system gives up on them? I think that I will turn that around and ask whether some 12 per cent will leave that way. What qualifications do they have through the examination system? Early leavers often have very little to show in terms of exam results and the like. That would be my experience and my reading of the Scottish statistics on that. Perhaps my suggestion of some kind of portfolio, some kind of graduation thing, could take into account far more and give a richer picture, even if they are leaving of what they did in school, what were their strengths and the like. I would not see leaving exams that students are often unsuccessful in as a good way to end their formal education. Professor Stobart, you said something about culture. You seem to indicate in terms of educational opportunities that there was a cultural bias against that particular pathway, if I understood you correctly. Michael Marra wants to come in and ask you about cultural connotations here. Thanks, Professor Stobart. It is a really interesting conversation so far. I have a couple of issues regarding the cultural thing that I wanted to explore. I would suppose that I see the great successes of education over the last century really being about the integration of women, Catholics and ethnic minorities. Part of that has been—a huge part of that has been—that you have a piece of paper that says, I am equal to other people.  I suppose that the challenge—there are merits in the many areas that you talk about in terms of comparisons—is making sure that we have that robust culture around it that sees that award as having that same value. I think that that feels like part of the trade-off that you are describing. Would you agree? That is a powerful argument. Qualifications in our move to equity are an important part of that. Students can take those qualifications. Again, it was only 50 years ago that most students left school before they could even take a qualification. We know that there is an unfairness of access and everything there. The idea of qualifications as a form of producing equity is what goes into the qualifications. Do they need to be traditional? How much? I am not against traditional exams. The right point is when they are fit for purpose. What goes into a qualification? We might say that, if we are trying to level up in this way, our pen and paper examinations are the fairest way of assessing students that way. Do we not—again, we are back to the mixed economy? It may be from some groups and some ways that there are other forms of access. Those traditions that look at oral presentations, for example, or practical presentations, as part of the qualification system, become important. Do we need recognition of what students have done under common terms? The word I was alighting in, Professor, was a break-up in the feed, when we were talking over each other a little bit. That word of recognition was the one that I was going to alight on. It probably takes me to my next point. Michael, you have to be very quick about this because— Oh, yes. The culture of recognition, as it pertains to universities, so the next stage in a learner's journey for some will be to go on to university and it will be a recognition. I am worried about the assessment methodology and whether that is replicated in universities. It is essentially learning the trick of doing the exam at the secondary school to prepare someone to do it at the next stage. Do you think that we have to have a certain amount of that in order to prepare our young people to do that at the next stage, or is there a sufficient culture change in higher education to allow us to accommodate that? I think that we need some preparation. I hardly comment on the advanced hires and the hires, because I can see, in terms of fitness for purpose, if the main purpose is selection for higher education and the kinds of demands that higher education is going to make, I can see how we would justify that term, the advanced hires. We may need to look at what is in them, the content, how they are taught and things, but the idea of using them as a selective tool is not much of an issue for me. My concern was three sets of exams in three years. It is the national five. I am more concerned about fitness for purpose. I am going to go to Fergus. I think that he wants to come in on one of the questions that was raised as well. Fergus, you should be willing to learn from other countries. I think that we owe you a debt of gratitude for the work that you have done. My favourite quote about education is one that I suspect you will know very well from the famous Irish poet William Butler Yates, who said that education is not about the filling of a bucket but about the lighting of a fire. You alluded to that strand by saying that, although we want a mix of examinations and assessment, the key thing is to inspire, to engage the interests of young people, to get them enthused, to let them think that they can do this and not to avoid the scenario where they turn off because they think that it is beyond them too difficult or too boring. If we agree that that is a desirable aim in general, how do you think that we can light that fire more in practice for more young people, particularly those who, for whatever reason, become disengaged perhaps at an early stage in secondary school? I think that part of that is going to be the kind of teaching and learning offer that we make to them. I think that that pulls me round again to the vocational side of things for some students, the more practical, the more hands-on approach. I am well aware of having, again, taught in London of kids who switched off from education at an early stage, how we draw them into it and give them an interest, which is why I went on and worked with the vocational council on a school-based vocational qualification that many students seem to benefit from in a way that they were not doing from the academic exams. It is to do with our imagination about the kind of offer that we can make to students and how we can integrate them within the system. In the report, I think that I look at those systems in Australia and New Zealand where the vocational and the French are part of the qualification at the end, your certificate. For example, the French and the Irish, if you take the vocational route, you are still entitled to go to university if you pass the baccalaureate. There are alternative tracks within that that are well-defined. I am not sure how well-defined they are in the British tradition. I picked this up from reading your paper that a greater emphasis of and inclusion of vocational training at secondary school in the first few years would be a desirable option to consider. Would that be a fair representation of one of your recommendations? I think that if the schools have the resources and the skills to teach this, I think that it becomes a powerful option for students. It would be good if, again, in some of the other traditions, it is not just students who struggle with the academic, but it becomes part of academic students, as some students would like to do art and music. There are also some of the more vocationally-orientated approaches. I think that it is to do with school resources and skills and the willingness to do this as well. I am going to allow one more supplementary. I will appeal with colleagues to make the supplementaries short and pithy. Good morning, Professor Stobart. I know that there is a suggestion of removing that five exams in S4. Can I ask whether you would still anticipate that that five exams in S5 or that five exams would go all together? That could be a narrow choice for those who decide to leave formal education secondary schools at S4. I wonder whether there could be issues for discrete subject provision in S3 and S4 if we move towards removing that five. Does it have to be a binary choice in relation to moving that five? For example, could we not see that five exams more as an end of course external assessment, which should give you your course award if you pass it, but if you continue to assess appropriately through the year, you could still get the same course award? Could we not expand choice rather restrict choice? That sounds very sensible to me. Again, we may have routes through this or even there may be some national five subjects that have felt to be central and others could be teacher assessed as happens in other countries, nowhere and the like, where you take one or two exams and the rest is teacher assessment. I am in for a variety of routes to get to the same end result. I am going to turn back to Stephanie now for our next line of questions. Thank you very much, convener. Thanks for being here today, Professor, and I have to say as well that you mentioned that you are already a developer. I was not expecting to be in politics, so we are in an equal basis today as well. You did touch earlier on engagement with students. Obviously, they should be able to influence and help to shape the assessment system that is coming through there. We should provide opportunities to recognise the full range of young people's skills, experience and achievements at school. I am really interested in other things that we can learn from other countries there as far as engaging with their students. I think that every country has the same problem that not all students are fully engaged in the educational system and what can you do to engage them more or better. We have been talking a lot about the vocational side. In Norway, half the students take the vocational track. You can rejoin the school track and the university track if you wish to go that way or you take an apprenticeship that way. There are ways of doing that, again, with the student engagement. Part of that is what choices do students have. Are they funneled into what the school offers and how imaginative are the schools in terms of the evidence of where they link with FE colleges, other schools and provide a broader programme for students? It gets us back to the idea that we have now a much more diverse student body who are staying in schools much longer than they used to. How are we catering for them? Where are the resources for that and the encouragement to link with FE colleges and other things? I know that there are schools that are models of how to do that. As far as including them and engaging them in the process of shaping the new assessment system and influencing that as well, I do concern that it is quite easy for student voices to get quite lost in that as well when you have experts, teachers and public and political debates going on roundabout it there. Is there anything that we can do to ensure that those voices have parity and that they are listened to? No way, as an annual survey of students, in which the students comment on what they are getting and give their opinions, and that is sought annually. It becomes also quite important feedback to teachers on that. I may have missed it, but I was a bit surprised how little systematic research there is in Scotland on pupil perceptions and pupil attitudes. Some of the committees have drawn people in and the SQA did panel work on that. However, I did not see much of what they think should happen over longitudinal or following students that way. I did anecdotally, it was that students themselves said that they would like more continuous assessment. I am not sure that they know what that means, and I am not sure that we know what it means sometimes when we talk about it. A problem for Scotland is that, when we think about teacher assessment, we think about the regulated coursework that contributes to the exam grade, whereas in other countries, continuous assessment is just that. It is the teacher assessing over a period of time, and then you can select work from that to assess, or you can do it like the Americans with the grade point average. You do it almost every week when you look at what the student has done. I am not sure that, when Scottish students say that we would prefer continuous assessment, is it that anything is better than exams or is it that we can see the value of that? We would like our work to be recognised. That goes back to the earlier point about motivating students and whether exams motivate students, but continuous assessment might be an important way of motivating students to know that their work has some significance in where they are trying to get to. I think that, certainly, you make a really good point there about the stuff that can engagement process, which is probably what I am going to ask in those questions there. As well, something that comes across in the evidence from the students was having that bread and giving them opportunities to demonstrate their skills and their achievements at school. There seems to be a huge amount of trust in the teachers, which is really positive. If you have any comments on that, young people who have additional support needs as well, something that came through quite strongly for them was about having that flexibility built into the system that allows them to demonstrate their skills and experience as well. I know that Professor Louise Hayward will be leading the expert group and that there will be people from the curriculum and assessment board on that. I do not know if you will know if that representation reflects some ASN, because we are looking at around 30 per cent of our students nowadays who have additional support needs. I was wondering if you had any comments around encoding them or helping them to demonstrate their skills in a new system? I think that any system that is trying to take the views of students into account must look carefully and, in a sense, overrepresent a group like this that has special needs, because they can easily be overlooked in that. It becomes important because they too need to feel good about education and what they have learnt. That may take a lot of resources and effort from the system to do that. I realise that it is not a discrete group. There is a wide range of issues in that group, but I am sure that they are fully represented on any sampling of student opinions and the like. I might follow on from the subject area that Stephanie has been talking about. One of the things that she has said in her report, which you quite rightly mentioned on page 46, she talked a lot about student perceptions and views of assessment arrangements. What about the employers and universities? What are their perceptions of assessment? I cannot claim to talk for the universities and the employers. You might say that in terms of historical legacy, they have often been dissatisfied with what they consider students know when they leave school. You will hear universities say that now. They were saying it 100 years ago, as well. I have some interesting words about despairing about the maths level and the literacy of students coming through. That is almost a permanent feature, but it suggests that we need to liaise more carefully with that. That would fit in with the idea of trying to improve the status of vocational qualifications. For example, I know that employers are involved in their construction, but they are more supportive and encouraging apps of those routes. It is up to the education system to listen to that and to say, what is it that the employers are not finding in the graduates from school? What is it that universities find that they are lacking when they come? Some of that will be formal educational skills. Some of it may be the very things that we talk about in CFE, such as the capabilities, the ability to work collaboratively and to think for themselves about those kinds of issues. I have to plead ignorance of what the employers are saying and wanting. I agree with you that, as someone who was an employer until I entered politics, entering politics later on, I entered politics later on as well, and previous to that was someone who did employ people. I agree with you. I suspect that you were right 100 years ago that the same complaints that employers make about the suitability of candidates that they have turned up for interviews and internal assessments that they conduct would be about the same. Do you agree that employers and universities have a very important say in all of that discussion? They have a very important voice in this debate. Do you agree with that? Yes. Again, we are talking about alignment between curriculum and today, but we need alignment between the qualifications and where they are going. That is part of the validity of the system. Part of the struggle that employers in vocational terms feel that they have with the education system is that, if I may address this very directly with you and see whether that is accord with your experience, they sometimes feel that there is a snobbery in the educational establishment about vocational training, about the types of disciplines, skills and professional skills that they are looking for in candidates that they wish to recruit. Do you agree with that? Is that something that you have come across? I would certainly, from an English perspective, say that that is the case. That terrible saying that vocational qualifications are good for other people's children. That kind of attitude, if you cannot do the academic, is vocational. That is not the case as much elsewhere, but it is around in most cultures. It is unfortunate. As I have said before, part of my work was on vocational qualifications that wanted to be attracted to employers and to students. I think that there is work to be done there. I had the distinct impression from our earlier conversation that I would be pushing on an open door with you if I shared those ideas with you. One very quick question from me before I turn to Ross Greer, who is going to come in on the same subject. How do you change that culture within the educational establishment in terms of how they portray vocational qualifications? You have spent a career in that. How do you change the internal culture? I am afraid that the answer is slowly. Part of it is to produce good vocational routes and qualifications that the benefits can be seen. Students can be seen doing well. That is where business comes into it as well. If they have some champions from business and from higher education, I think that they still have a lot of work to do with recognising that as well and making that an entry route to higher education. It needs to come from all sides. There needs to be a mindset change within schools and parents as well. I can see why we make such slow progress sometimes with this. There is a lot to be done. We discard and discount a lot of progressive thinking around vocational training for the reasons that you have given. Ross Greer has got a short supplementary on that. Welcome, Ross. Thank you, convener. If this is a point that has already been covered, feel free to just tell me to check the official report. Apologies for it being right. On this point around the skills that are required by employers, I would like to move it away slightly from the framing of academic or vocational qualifications. I think that, often with either, it is still a very individual form of assessment that we are looking at. What I am interested in as an employer when I am interviewing people is their ability to work as part of a team, their communication skills with other individuals. Those are inherently not the kind of things that you can assess on an individual basis, because your ability to do that is about interacting with other people. I am interested in whether it is academic or vocational qualifications and assessment systems. Is there best practice elsewhere for how to assess the kind of skills that you can set someone as an individual task? How to assess their ability to interact with other people in whatever form that is in? I think that this has come so many people and attempts have been made at this. How do you get down to collaborative skills? How do you get down to working with others? Again, I would say that this has to be done through the classroom and classroom assessment rather than through any kind of exam system on this. I know that the OECD has attempted to do this with group skills and using computer-based stuff to work with others, but that always feels that I have worked any more. The notion that part of our field development and part of what we might be asking in the assessment system is that students have to do this and that they have to work together. I am aware that this is very difficult to assess when you have a group of five. How do you assess the contribution of each? I think that it should be there and that students should be learning how to do this. As an employer, what you do not want is somebody who has no idea how to work with others on how to collaborate in a group and how to be creative in a group. It pushes me back to a broader curriculum. Thank you, Ross. Ross joined us from COP26, so we are glad to have him on board this morning. Michael Marra will take us in a slightly different direction. Thanks, convener. I want to quickly, if I could, to come back to the issue that Professor Stobart raised a couple of times regarding multilevel teaching. Multilevel teaching is something that a lot of teachers have made representations to me about over a number of years, huge problems. They do not see it as multilevel teaching, essentially it is multi-qualification teaching, teaching different syllabuses, different examination processes or assessment processes in the same classroom. Are there other jurisdictions or countries that do this? Not to the same extent, I do not think. It is partly a feature of having three levels of examinations, for example, in the senior secondary school. Most will only have the one or two levels of qualification at most. I am sure that, in small schools all over Norway and the like, there may be having to do some multilevel. However, there are different syllabuses in Scotland for the different qualifications, and to put those together coherently in a classroom is quite difficult. I think that Scotland has got itself a problem there with multiple level qualifications. It takes a great deal of teaching skill to bring three groups in the same classroom through, particularly when the syllabus may be a bit different in each of those qualifications. It strikes me that if there is the opportunity to try and solve that problem or do something about it through this process of reform, then that is something that has to be grasped. The last education committee in the last Parliament concluded that something had to be done on this issue and nothing has been done. It is also a confluence of issues of resourcing, but, from your analysis, that is a structural issue as well as a resource issue. Is that your conclusion that this is partly about— I think that, I think that, I would say that, yes, that life is made a lot more difficult for a teacher if you are teaching for three qualifications in the same class, if you like. There are ways of making that more supportive of teaching and learning. I think that I would encourage that. Okay, that is very useful. I want to come on to the issue of data. I was interested in your points regarding the annual student surveys that are carried out in other jurisdictions or other countries. What do you think in terms of the kind of data that we require within Scottish education to effectively monitor a process of reform? Is there sufficient data out there? What kind of data do we need? I do not think that I have experienced the full range of data. I think that there is a lot of data. How coherent it is and how it is pulled together might be the issue. There is regional data, authority data, Government data. It is how this is co-ordinated, and it becomes the critical point at this stage. I suppose that the purpose of your paper or the methodology of it is an international comparison. One of the contradictions for us in this is that the current Government has withdrawn us from international comparative studies in terms of understanding. Do you think that there is value in those kind of studies when we are evaluating performance? Again, I go back to what is the value for students in this or teachers who make very little use of international comparison, but it may be useful at Government levels about progress. However, there are other ways of determining whether there is progress within the country's assessment system. I do not want to get too involved in that one, the politics of whether we are in or out of various international comparisons. I wonder if this is a sign of my age, convener. Could I just have a two-minute comfort break, please? Absolutely. I am delighted to facilitate that. I think that you may be waiting for a number of the rest of us as well. We will take a—we will suspend for about five minutes. Welcome back to our committee meeting. Professor Stobart, I turn now to Oliver Mundell, who is going to take us forward with questions. Thank you, convener. I am mindful that, during the previous session with the OECD, I was accused of being rude in my line of questioning. I hope that Professor Stobart will see that it is not being rude towards you. I ask similarly robust questions to them. I am leading Scottish educationalist Professor Lindsay Paterson. I have stated that your review is awful, ignorant of Scottish educational history, ignorant of current Scottish practice, failing to see that highers remain a main entry requirement for university not advanced highers. Paterson said that it is not based on any systematic comparison with non-EU countries, but rather with arbitrarily chosen group of places that seem to have been selected to make the case against exams. He also notes that he failed to discuss the unfairness of non-exam assessment, for example the unavoidable advantage enjoyed by children from less affluent homes compared to those with well-educated parents. How would you respond to those concerns? I am aware of Lindsay Paterson's work and responses. I respect his work in the sense of being concerned about equity and fairness in the system. The sample was purposive in that we chose it both within the British tradition, so four or five of that, and then other systems that we thought would be instructive here. We could have chosen other systems, but I am not sure that they would have illuminated or been useful to Scotland in the same way. We could have chosen China, India and many other places, but we tried to be representative of some broad strands there. We included the idea of not looking at a non-exam. Your point about the non-exam was that we did not look at the problems of not having exams. That was Paterson's point. It is also highlighted by the Scottish Commission on School Reform. You have said that scrapping exams and relying purely on teacher treatment would create a series of perverse outcomes, including unintentional bias for or against certain social demographic groups. For example, children from deprived backgrounds put pressure on teachers to award the grades required for university entrance, the Kulian private schools and in the most affluent school catchment areas, and resulting in great inflation caused by teachers wanting their children to succeed. You made the case against exams, but you do not touch on those issues. No, I do not. You are right to raise them. There is an issue there, and it is a cultural issue that there are cultures in which I would say that you cannot rely on teacher assessment, because there would be sufficient corruption in the system, and there would be pressure on teachers and the like to award grades. That happens in various countries, and certainly the ex-Soviet countries have had to deal with that. Those were corrupt systems of assessment and entry to university, so they have introduced very standardised exams. I do not put the Scottish culture in that position. I think that it has a strong professional workforce and is not, in that sense, a corrupt society. I accept the idea that if you come from an affluent home, you have advantages, but you have advantages in the exam system as well, and the way in which you are prepared, the groups you are prepared in and the like. I do not think that exams remove the problems of privilege. What about grade inflation? As something that we have seen right across the UK in the past two years and the argument some make, and I tend to believe from my constituency experience that that ends up disadvantageing those who face the greatest challenges. When you talk about your suite of considerations for entry to university, there are people who cannot access good quality work experience. There are young people who do not have the same opportunities to take part in extracurricular activities. There are young people who do not have access to coaching for university entry exams. Why is grade inflation a good thing for them? Grade inflation is not a good thing if it does not accurately reflect performance. I think that there is an issue here, and we have noticed it in England and the like, when during the pandemic there clearly has been grade inflation in terms of pass rates and the like. That is problematic and needs to be dealt with. That may be due to expectations around coursework and teacher assessment, and it may mean the mixed economy of a balance between examinations and teacher assessment. I think that that is how most cultures work on it. The American and Canadian is interesting in that what it does is that the teacher assessment is only a part of the selection process. The British tradition has relied very heavily on what grades did you get in the exam. The American system has more room for teacher assessment but puts other checks and balances in there. It may be that we need to think about what is it and what are the entry requirements for the next level of progress in education. I would like to challenge that. Some disadvantaged students will be further disadvantaged because of resources that are able to do work at home and the like. However, I would make the point that there is also disadvantage if they have not had the cultural access to exams and the content of exams. It is a balancing act. Many people in Scotland will look at the suggestion that we should become more likely US, which is best likely to be regarded as one of the most unequal countries in the world when it comes to access to education and think that it is a serious departure from Scottish education tradition. The aspiration, at least, is that every young person will leave school with a meaningful high qualification. I think that getting rid of that seems distinctly unskottish. I do not see how we can achieve quality of opportunity by removing the chance for some young people to sit at exams but not others. That is the question why some people are leaving school without qualifications rather than going down the approach of seeking to lower the bar for a group of young people who have consistently failed. Do you think that that is a valid point to raise? Yes. It is about the fairness of the system, isn't it? Particularly to those who are in disadvantaged circumstances. I am not sure that I realise that exams are seen as fair because everybody takes the same exam in the same thing, but not everybody has equal access to this or the same cultural background that gives them a fair chance. I am with you on the struggle to find what is a fair system here and how can we be fair to all groups in the community. For me, I do not think that that should narrow it down to exams in which many of the disadvantaged are not particularly successful who struggle with it. That might be for cultural and preparation reasons, in the same way that they might have problems with classwork. Changing the system does not change the prospects for those young people, as all I would argue. The final question was about why the OECD approached you to write the review. My concern is that they asked you to conduct a review because they already knew your views on the diminishing importance and validity of examinations are long-held and well-known and well-explored in your work. Do you not think that that creates a risk of more group think? Outside experts come in and tell us that the curriculum for excellence is a world-leading move in his groundbreaking, but people living and learning in Scotland continue to see our education system that was once world-leading being dismantled and slipping backwards. When you talk about culture, would it not be better to work with Scottish culture to recognise the importance of Scottish educational traditions and seek to improve the examination offer rather than go for more radical reform that might not command the trust and confidence of parents, teachers, young people and employers? I have a position on that, but my employment record alone would say that I am not anti-examination. I am very interested in fitness for purpose and what purpose does an exam serve. I have mentioned that, with the highest and the advanced high, they have a clearer role and a clearer purpose. The national five was my particular concern in terms of not all what justice does it do to students, which I think is your concern on that. I am reading into that that you are traditional Scottish values, but I would have thought that Scottish culture is changing. The diversity of your students, your students are staying on in education and they have broader interests and motivations than perhaps they had 50 years ago. How do we successfully engage and cater for them would be my concern about exam reform. We have got every way of doing curriculum reform. We are all trying to do exam reform to match that to align with that curriculum. I think that it is about recognising that successful learners are the people who go on to be active contributors in our society and who go on to make decisions that are important. If we stop helping people to gain the qualifications that they need to break through some of the barriers that exist, that would be a sadness. I think that that has been so powerful about Scottish education across the best part of the century. Professor Stobart, do you want to make any final comment on what Oliver Mundell has just said? I think that in the sense that we have common aims there, we have very different routes to achieving them. I would be looking forward facing trying to say how can we meet the needs of contemporary students who are very different from 50 years ago and how can the qualification system do justice to them? I think that we disagree over the role of examinations. It is a discussion that we could take further. What is the difference between an exam and a qualification, in a sense? External assessment and the kind of validity that comes from that. I will leave it there and not dominate the discussion. There are a number of colleagues who wish to come in with quick fire supplementaries on the back of that line of questions. I turn first to James Dornan and then Stephanie Callan. Professor Stobart, given that Mr Mundell's ludicrous and fairly insulting assertions about your qualifications and your history in terms of your work, can you confirm again on the record that you have no intentions of suggesting that we scrap exams totally? You have made it quite clear that there is a place for exams, but the suggestions that you are making are about where that place for exams best sits. You have said it better than I would. I am not averse to examinations if their purpose can be clearly demonstrated. I would also look at other forms of assessment. I take assessment more broadly than simply exams. I hope that we will be able to maintain a degree of good manners about that, which I think that we have so far. Stephanie Callan. Professor, you cannot make the point about the fact that there can be corruption as far as assessments exist. I just wanted to check that you are satisfied that Scotland is being robust. You know that standards were checked across teachers' approach to assessment in schools and departments across local authorities and at a national level. You feel that that is a good indicator that, if we are going in that direction, we have confidence that it will go just the way. Can I interrupt you to perhaps just reprise the question? We did lose you for a few seconds there, but it did break up your question. Can you just reprise your question to Professor Stovart? No, that is absolutely fine. It is surely about whether the professor feels that moving forward is spoken about the fact that there has been corruption as far as teacher assessment goes. I just want to check whether he feels that, in light of the way that Scotland has dealt with assessments during Covid—in other words, teachers are checking each other within schools, checking across local authority areas, checking standards at a national level too—I just wanted to check if you felt that you were confident that it would be fair and robust going forward using teacher assessment. I am confident. My reading of this is very much that Scottish teachers are skilled professional. They are asked to assess throughout the school, as I said at the beginning. We trust our university lecturers and further education. It is a system that has a large degree of trust in it, professional recognition and professional qualifications, so I am comfortable in that way. I was thinking Oliver's point about inflated grades and things. I think that this is partly the nature of the pandemic and the lockdown about how you give the benefit of the doubt and how you make accommodations for what you know your students have been through. There is clearly an element of that. However, if we were looking at more teacher assessment and continuous assessment, it does not come automatically. We need professional development, professional discussions and networks where we check. Queensland is very interesting in the way that teachers come together and bring their students' work and look at other schools as well and get a consensus about the standards and the grading that may come from that. That kind of approach checks and balances within the system. It is great to hear that you have such a high opinion of our teachers' professionalism and honesty. Thank you for that, Stephanie. I think that now we turn to Fergus Ewing. I, too, have taken very clearly from Professor Stobart's paper that he was not proposing abolition of examinations but a far more nuanced set of suggestions. I did not want to ask him what he considers to be, if you like, the benefits and disbenefits of examinations as a method of helping young people prepare for later life and develop themselves under the CFE principles. We have heard from Mr Rennie and others about examinations and potential advantages that they have. They also have adverse issues for some children in particular, but I wonder how you see overall the benefits and the disbenefits, if you like, of examinations as a method of devising a system that prepares children for later life? A lot of that will depend on the quality of the examinations and the kind of teaching and learning that it encourages along the way. If it is just the kind of grind of facts and recall, we might want to question the value of that. The comments about the advanced hire, even the student comments, were about that it makes you think more, that kind of showing your knowledge and being able to be flexible with it. That has got very positive advantages. Partly, the quality of the exam affects the quality of the teaching and learning that goes with it. I am interested in learning, so what kind of learning does the system require? There is an exam require. That is double-edged. It can be that it is just a memory job and we go through past papers and we do this. That is perhaps the risk of the two-term dash, that we are just trying to get the content in. I saw your last discussion with Beatrice. I think that there is an interest around what we mean by knowledge, that whole thing of knowledge. If it is just content, we need content, but we need more than that. How do students put together the content into ways that they understand and can apply to situations? That was a very long-winded way of saying that you are right. I am not about abolishing examinations, I am looking at the quality of examinations and I am looking at the quality of teaching and learning in preparation for them and raising the question of whether, if you are racing from one exam to another, whether that affects the quality of the learning. I think that the outcome of all this, my guiding outcome, was can the student think for himself or herself? We are trying to help students to think for themselves. Does our system do this? Does what goes on in the classroom do this? Are students being encouraged to think for themselves? The examination should not be so much about the regurgitation of facts with no underlying purpose other than the exercise of memory recollection, but the promotion of better understanding of rational analysis and the ability to think for oneself. Is that the sort of thing that examinations should serve to try to achieve rather than fact memorisation? You have put it a lot better than I have. Yes, exactly. I then endorse that. I do not know if I have put it better than that. Incidentally, I think that the WBA's Nict is quoted from Socrates, but there we are. Just a random reflection. There is evidence of what knowledge can empower you to be able to contribute to a committee meeting. He did that from memory, which is probably the object study itself. We turn now to Ross Greer for a new line of questioning. Thank you, convener. I would like to just return to some of the points that have been touched on various about equity in the system, but I am specifically interested in the impact of exams or alternative certification models on pupils with additional support needs. I realise that additional support needs—that is a term that encompasses all sorts of needs—and some of those may well result in the young person finding an exam easier to access, some may find continuous assessment easier to access. In recent years, the response to criticism of how we support pupils with additional needs through the exams has been to simply extend the length of time that those pupils get to complete the exam. On the one hand, that is understandable and it provides them an additional opportunity, but for some young folk with some additional support needs sitting in the exam hall for three and a half, four hours, is even more challenging than it would be for any other young person. I am interested in that. Your report did not mention additional support needs. Is that an issue that you touched on at all? Is it an issue that came up in the alternative systems that you looked at at best practice from elsewhere? How do you provide that level of equity to those who have quite a very wide spectrum of additional needs? I did not focus on that either in Scotland or comparatively. Again, part of my record was that I was an educational psychologist, retrained as an educational psychologist, so I am well aware of the range of needs and that just giving extra time does not do the job somehow, or an emmanuensis if there are transcription problems and the like. I think that we have to think very sensitively about that. It is even more complex an issue with vocational qualifications because some of that is, can you do this? How do you make allowances for a competence that becomes a really difficult system? I have no clever answers. What I would say is that we need to give proper attention to that and not just say we will give extra time. That is an easy cop out just to do that. Some needs a more skilled approach to how we assess that. It is increasing flexibility in the system to be able to take on diverse student needs and say that here is a route that we can use to do that. I turn to another point. I think that I am touching on some of the issues that were raised earlier by colleagues. In your conclusion, you mentioned that the need to potentially move away from SQA is a relatively demanding quality assurance process. If we were to move to a system that had less of that external assessment, there has come up early in the session. There is a strong cultural attachment to external assessment and verification. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on why that is not necessarily essential. If we are comparing that cultural attachment here in Scotland to other systems, does that ultimately come back to the issue of trust in teachers? Is it perceived differently elsewhere—trust in the system—or are there other cultural factors that we would need to work on here in Scotland if we were to move away from the system of external assessment and verification that we currently have? I think that there are strong cultural factors within this. I think that it is partly because the teacher contributions within the exam system have been the coursework that adds marks to the final grade, so the checks that go into that. My concern is that, if we are to say that we need more teacher assessment, already we have had resistance from teachers in 2016 and the light where the units were being assessed, which was just overwhelming. I am aware that any system has not to increase the burden of assessment on teachers unbearably, which is why the alternative system used in other countries of continuous assessment is that it leaves the teachers to make judgments about the quality of student work during the course. That may be a cultural shift that we encourage teachers to do. As it is done in the United States, Canada and the like, that sort of and Norway continuous assessment. I think that it is a good one. There are cultural changes that would be needed and we would need to convince teachers and parents that teachers, particularly if that is not going to be a huge amount of extra coursework, it would be more continuous, if you like, day-to-day assessment that is carried forward into it. That does not entail a great deal more work because teachers are doing that anyway. I think that we would need a shift there and you are better placed than I am to say how you would get that kind of change of attitude. I think that part of the issue here is that, if we move away from exams and towards some form of continuous assessment, there is a likelihood of an additional level of work code for teachers within that system. There are other opportunities for us within our education system to reduce teacher work code. There are other changes that we can make to correct and correct systems to reduce their work code. If it is necessary, we can increase in this area. Certainly, my impression from speaking to quite a lot of teachers in recent years is that they are inclined towards a system of continuous assessment. They see the advantages of it and the personal work code burden is what holds them back from a system that they otherwise understand a lot of the attractions of. I will leave it there, convener. I will bring in an example from Queensland where teachers get together and look at the work and that is professional development at the same time that it is a check on their assessment of their students and whether that kind of local approach would be a possibility. I think that that raises an interesting point for us in how that might interact with the reform of the school inspection system and what role peer assessment between teachers might have as we create that new inspectorate after the current review. For us, as a committee, we should keep an eye on those overlapping pieces of work. As a courtesy, I have a couple of colleagues who said that they might want to ask additional questions, so I will turn to them. James, do you want to come back in at this point, or are you content? Bob, Doris, would you like to come back in, or are you content? I am content, convener. I very appreciate the evidence of Professor Stobart, but thank you for the opportunity. Yes, I think that Bob is right. We would really like to thank you, Professor Stobart. We have put you through your paces over the past hour and three quarters, and you have given us lots to think about. It has been a robust session. It has been very honest, it has been very frank and very fair. I would just like, on all of our behalf, to thank you for your paper and for your presence in our committee this morning. The public part of today's meeting is now at an end. I will now suspend the meeting, and I ask members to reconvene on Microsoft Teams, which will allow us to consider our next agenda items in private. Thank you again and good morning.