Frank Volec est professeur de l'économie à Stanford University. Il a des fonds de spécialisation dans l'organisation solidaire et la théorie écologique. Il a recentement travaillé sur ces méthodes pour introduire la compétition dans les industries infrastructures comme les communications télécommuniques. L'électricité, l'eau, la delivery et les services postardaires et l'assistant sur les impacts de ces policiers de compétition sur le consommateur et l'économie. Frank est also chair of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for Electricity Supply. He is a member of the Emissions Market Advisory Committee for California's Market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Aller-Once. He has an impressive list of publications, I will not detail here. So today we present work on the role of financial market participants in improving wholesale electricity market performance. Welcome, Frank. Thank you very much, Claude. That was far too long an introduction. I asked for a very short one, but Claude refused. Okay, because I like as much time as possible to talk. Okay, so what I'd like to talk about is essentially a much maligned group of participants in energy markets in general and electricity markets. And these are what we could call purely financial participants. This is sort of why I think they're at least the popular public view of financial market participants or you could say as traders. They essentially, you know, they buy something, they have no intention of consuming and sell something that they can't produce. All they do is, you know, attempt to buy low sell high or they can essentially sell first buy back later, short sales, which are even worse. These are typically, you know, turned at least in the press, speculators, and, you know, the big issue always is that these financial participants are taking money away from producers that produce the product and consumers that purchase the product. But this is the sort of popular view. This is a recent article in the New York Times that essentially talked about how, you know, as the power grid is becoming overworked, there are traders making lots of money. But I think the important point is what I have here in print in italics is that none of these profitable trades that these traders are doing are necessarily riskless. They all involve the traders taking on risk. Here's another one for those of you who might find of interest. This is actually a website that was started by one of the traders that sort of run afoul of the political process and decided that they wanted, they were going to fight it. What they did is they set up this website where they essentially sort of are pleading their case in the court of public opinion because, you know, for those of you who know anything about American sports, you might know about Tom Brady and the whole deflate gate. So in other words, the idea being that it's a similar thing here is that FERC is sort of the, if you like, the commissioner of the NFL and these guys aren't too happy so they are trying to go to the court of public opinion on this. What I really want to try to say is, look, these financial participants are no different, I think, from any other participants in the sense that they are basically doing what we'd like them to do which is trying to make a return on investment, serve the fiduciary responsibility of their shareholders and at least the way I like to think about it is that, look, just like essentially designers of buildings and aircrafts don't need to worry about gravity, we as designers of markets need to worry about essentially the so-called laws of economics which is, you know, think of as just simply the incentive constraint and regulators that deny the existence of this law sort of do so at their own peril. And, you know, I think that oftentimes what we're attributing is these undesirable outcomes are really not, you know, nefarious behavior but in many ways the result of a poorly designed market. A well-design market, and what we're moving towards, at least I think throughout the United States, is a fairly well-designed electricity market is that trade financial participants exploiting these profitable opportunities I think really can deliver benefits and that's the purpose of what I want to talk about today is essentially one such example of this. It's coming from the introduction of what's called convergence bidding or if really I think the more appropriate word but certainly politically incorrect word which is virtual trading and it's virtual trading because you're trading, if you like, virtual megawatts, you're not really trading megawatts that you know you're going to be able to deliver because remember what I told you about traders is they sell something they don't produce and they buy something they don't consume so clearly they're not going to do anything but just trade differences between the various markets and so the first is is that what I want to talk about is really the idea of the within the context of the California electricity market but this is true of a number of other markets introduced there are what are called multi-settlement markets and these markets are essentially where you can buy firm financial commitments day ahead which you can then sell back in real time and in February of 2011 California implemented convergence bidding and so what I'm going to talk about is based on paper on my website that looks at this question so the idea that we really want to look at is this idea that in these kinds of markets where you have risk neutral traders you get this relationship if you have zero transactions cost but in most of these markets and in particular the other thing that's definitely true about these virtual bidding markets is that these are if you like politically unfavored markets and so a lot of costs get layered on to the convergence bidders and so if what you're doing is making an assessment of whether or not this relationship holds there really is both an explicit as well as I think implicit cost of trading and so the real idea of whether or not profitable trading opportunity exist is whether or not if you like the absolute value of the difference between those two things is greater than the round trip transactions cost not necessarily that expectation is zero simply because there are per unit costs and so one of the things that makes this I think an interesting paper is recognizing the existence of trading cost and then what we're going to do is essentially assess whether or not when you introduce this new product virtual bidding did the sort of implicit cost of acting to essentially exploit this difference between day ahead that's the forward price and the short term spot price S did the cost of exploiting that fall and so that's the one thing we want to look at the other thing we want to look at is the idea that one of the things we think about with forward markets and multi-settlement is that the forward market is setting up the spot market to essentially clear if you like in as painless a manner as possible you would expect that the variance of the real time prices should reduce as a result of the convergence bidders I mean the way I like to think about what convergence bidding is doing is really just the classic information aggregation what we're doing is we're allowing all these financial market participants to effectively provide their input as to what they think the least cost way to dispatch the system in real time is whereas before without the financial market participants we were essentially saying those that own generation or serve load can make these guesses but with the introduction of the purely financial participants you're giving them this ability to provide their information their specialized knowledge so we'd expect both the variance real time prices as well as the variance of the difference between day ahead and real time prices because remember in a multi-settlement market if real time looks just like day ahead we should have almost zero variance and then finally the other is just the fact that there are systematic differences in this price difference across time so the other thing we're going to look at is just did this to the auto correlation in that price process and then the other thing we want to look at is essentially the efficiency of market outcomes since one of the things that certainly I will in full disclosure say that I was a shameless advocate of virtual bidding as a member of the market surveillance committee of the California ISO and this was the reason why it's because of this idea that you're giving all participants the opportunity to have an input into what is the least cost way to dispatch the system so the question is is that do we see that in terms of market outcomes meaning do we see a lower cost of dispatch as well as essentially less if you like heat energy being used to provide the electrical energy that actually comes out of the grid so in order to set the stage for this I need to give at least everybody some background on U.S. wholesale electricity market so the two things I'll try to explain at least briefly are essentially what we'll call multi-settlement as well as essentially locational marginal pricing which I know in Europe is absolute evil but in the United States it's considered the sort of market design of choice in fact all U.S. markets are essentially LMP markets at the moment so essentially what happens in the LMP market is you take all of the unit specific bids from all the generation units at all of their locations and you minimize as it says right here the as bid cost to serve demand at all locations in the transmission network subject to all relevant operating constraints transmission ramp rates you name it whatever constraint you want to put in it's solving a large optimization problem the LMP is essentially the if you like the optimized value of the objective function how does that change as a result of withdrawing one more unit of output at that location and what we get from the day ahead market is essentially schedules of generation units and prices and those schedules are as I said firm financial commitments which means you get paid for what you sell in the day ahead market regardless of what you do in real time it's just that it has financial consequences come real time as we'll discuss so then between day ahead in real time in most markets you're able to essentially revise your offer curves based upon what you think might be the changes in system conditions and then you run the process in real time so you essentially determine you do five minute dispatch every five minutes within the hour in real time to essentially what you're again doing the same thing you're solving that same optimization problem you're updating the transmission network for effectively the conditions that exist in each of those intervals just like in the day ahead you used your best guess of what you thought the real time conditions in the grid would be and then what happens is is that the hourly real time prices then are just simply the arithmetic average of the 12 LMPs that occur in that hour ok so and you know as you said the hourly real time prices are certainly more volatile than the day ahead prices simply because of you know limited flexibility but also you know in part market power sorts of issues as well so as I said the way that the settlement works is that you get paid but if you don't cover it with what you scheduled as a generator you're on the hook so if I only produce 30 I gotta buy 10 out of the real time market to replace the schedule that I had of 40 from the day ahead market similarly for the load serving entity alright so and so what happens is that you know what I can do is essentially as a generator supplier is I can play day ahead versus real time differences and this is what was at least initially called implicit virtual bidding if I as a supplier think that the day ahead price is lower than the real time price then what I'm gonna do is probably you know bid higher in the day ahead price or just withhold my output not even bid it in to the day ahead market and then sell it in real time or similarly if I'm a load serving entity and I think the day ahead price is more expensive than real time then what I'll do is I may not schedule all my energy I may not bid it all in in the day ahead and just purchase in real time and you know what this did was create some significant reliability consequences which essentially you know there would be times certainly in a number of markets where you know a significant amount of energy would be delayed until real time the operators would get a little nervous so virtual bidding was essentially introduced as a way to essentially say look if you expect that those two prices are gonna be equal you should just bid your energy in to the day ahead market because you know there's no advantage to you delaying which market you bid into virtual bidding is a way to essentially achieve that at the first stage so how does virtual bidding work well what you do is you as a virtual bidder you can submit a generation bid just like a physical generation unit you can submit that at any location in the grid that you want and you'll be treated in the day ahead market just like a generator but if you're taken in the day ahead market then there is a financial commitment that you will be a price taker in the real time market to essentially purchase that power you know back in the real time market similarly if you submit a demand bid in the day ahead market you'll be treated just like a load serving entity but what you're then going to be required to do for the amount that you sell is you're going to sell that back in real time and so what you can see is if I if I put a debt bid in the day ahead market I'm increasing demand at that location which is likely to increase the price if I put an ink bid in the day ahead market I'm going to increase supply at that location which is going to presumably depress the price both of and you know for the reason that I'm doing that is because I think I want to essentially sell at the real I want to exploit that price sorry exploit that price difference so the other thing about explicit virtual bids is they are identified to the system operator as such so in other words I as the ISO I see these virtual bids come in when they clear I know that they're virtual bids and I know what's going to happen to them in real time and the other is is that financial participants can virtual bid anyone that wants to can virtual bid there's some problems in most of the US markets in the sense that the public utilities commissions that effectively regulate the retail side of the market tend to frown on the retailers that are serving load to virtual bid which has some problems but for the most part if you want to set up shop as a virtual bidder and trader you post your bond and you can do it ok so why would we expect virtual bidding to reduce these sorts of trading cost improve price convergence well the first thing is essentially I can only implicit virtual bid as a generator over the range of my generation unit ok and they can only implicitly virtual bid where I own a generation unit ok similarly the way it works in California is that load serving entities can only bid within the range of their expected demand I can't bid into the day I had market a demand level that's far above my demand the system operator will certainly prohibit me from doing that or at least and so you know effectively the other thing that's true is that in California is you as a utility you only bid at your service territory level rather than when you bid at the node level and so what this really does is prevents load serving entities at least in California from implicitly virtually bidding at load nodes so in other words generators could implicit virtual bid at generation nodes in the early days before explicit virtual bidding but load nodes couldn't so we might expect that if you like the cost the transactions cost associated with virtual bidding at load nodes would be higher traditionally rather than the transactions cost associated with bidding at the generation nodes initially and we'll investigate that one empirically as well ok so the other is is that why would we expect that it would improve market performance and this just simply has to do with the fact that what we discuss which is if there could be long start units I want to make sure that long start unit gets on I can essentially to make sure that long start unit gets committed as a generator I could submit a deck bid at that location to essentially make sure that the demand level is high enough so that long start unit gets committed as opposed to a short start unit that effectively would excuse me be more expensive to run in real time set a higher real time price and so what we could expect is and as well it's just the fact that I think the important thing to remember you know in an LMP market there are thousands of constraints you know and one of the things that we think markets do a very good job of is solve very very complex optimization problems and believe me this is one of the one of the most complex optimization problems I can think of which is essentially how to most efficiently dispatch a system in real time and we could think of that you know what the virtual bidders are doing is through if you like just their desire to exploit this location or price differences they are presumably yielding a dispatch that is lower cost than would be the case if they weren't trying to do that ok so the two things we're going to investigate is essentially this idea of closing the gap reducing this trading cost and you know as I said it's not equal to zero but it's equal to the value less than this trading cost and so we'd expect that you know more accurate scheduling the other thing and we would expect from that is both this implicit trading cost that we talk about to fall as well as we'd expect this variance of the real time and the day ahead prices to fall then the other thing we'd expect is that this sort of dynamic to be working is that the virtual bidders that essentially are good at essentially anticipating where real time demand and supply is needed they're going to be rewarded with profits and they're just going to create this incentive for them to essentially produce the least cost mix of demands so we're going to look at both this improved price convergence and market efficiency for California so what do we do we use the hourly prices and first we'll just do it at the lap level because essentially there are three laps in California these are essentially the service territories of the utilities and each lap price is computed as essentially the nodal load weighted average of the LMPs in each of the firm service territory and then I'm going to present some summary results for the nodal levels just to show you that what we did at the lap level is very representative of what's true at the nodal level and as I said all generation units are paid their nodal price there's you know over 5000 nodes in California so and this is essentially the lap levels of each of the sing so the different colors San Diego Gas and Electric Southern California Edison SCE Pacific Gas and Electric these are the various locations of the nodes and so think of it as what you're doing to get the lap price for PG&E as you're taking the weighted average of all load nodes in their service territory for SCE you're doing the same thing so what we've done here is essentially computed the in each of these graphs just to show you is for each hour of the day we've computed the average sample average over that two year period a year before the implementation of virtual bidding versus and then a year after virtual bidding we've computed the hourly average before virtual bidding and then the point wise 95% confidence interval on that price difference so right here is the price difference for the first hour, the second hour and so on and then over here is the same thing and the thing you can see is that there are certainly large deviations of the 95% confidence interval over here they get a little better this does it for Southern California Edison you can see it gets a little better for them as well San Diego you can see it gets a little better that's pre versus post explicit virtual bidding but if you did the test of whether or not all these means are zero in other words just the standard 24 dimensional check true the statistic would be lower but you know I think this really points to the fact that that's the wrong way to think about it because there are explicit trading cost as well as implicit trading cost associated with essentially trading this difference and so the right way we think about it is to say okay let's think of it in terms of essentially an economic model and the economic model goes like this as we say okay there's a trader and he's got access to these 24 assets so think of this as the vector of price differences across hours of the day and what he does is he essentially he has expected trading cost which is essentially the portfolio weights times the mean of those price differences those portfolio weights can be positive or negative positive means buy one sell the other negative means sell one buy the other in terms of real time versus day ahead and then what we have is essentially the trading cost the trading costs are assessed on the absolute value of the position that you take and then C if you like sort of is the trading cost and then what we have is essentially just the fact that we're going to impose the normalization that the sum of the absolute positions that you take is equal to one and therefore what the trader wants to do is essentially maximize expected profit so the idea that we're about is to say okay let essentially this guy a star equal to the expected profit maximizing portfolio given the vector of weights and what we're interested in is saying is that is essentially the different between that expected profit maximizing portfolio C greater than zero versus the alternative that it's not okay and so this you might look just like a sort of application of the delta method but the problem is is that this function is not differentiable so essentially the conventional delta method doesn't work but what it turns out to be is essentially directionally differentiable and there's some recent work by that essentially shows how to compute the at least an estimate of the asymptotic distribution of that and what we do is essentially employ their method which was essentially turned into this essentially numerical derivative based approach by Hong and Lee so what we come up with is essentially two values which is what we call is we use this distribution to say okay what's the smallest value of this implicit trading cost that causes us to reject the null hypothesis that a profitable trading charge exists the other one is that we can compute is the largest value of C that causes not rejection sorry of the null hypothesis that no profitable trading strategy exists right so in other words if this inequality is satisfied then no profitable trading strategy exists and so what we come up with is essentially those values using this procedure the other thing we do is as you can see we consider a pretty simple trading strategy which is based only on essentially the sort of mean of the price difference vector but the interesting thing is that we then look to see if there's auto correlation so one of the things important to bear in mind is that remember when you're submitting your bids for the next day in the day ahead market the real time market for today is operating so essentially there is first order auto correlation in the price difference vector meaning the price difference between the day ahead price and the real time price for today and the price difference for the real time price the day ahead price for say tomorrow there is first order auto correlation that you can't exploit simply because when you're submitting your bids that still has not been resolved and so essentially what we expect is there to be first order auto correlation but beyond that we want to see whether or not there's any remaining auto correlation to be exploited and so we have this test of whether we go out to in our case we go out to lag 10 and we essentially find there's very little evidence against the null hypothesis that essentially once you get past the first order auto correlation that you know should be there because you can't exploit it there is no exploitable auto correlation in either before or after in sort of the lap prices which makes sense given that pre essentially the implementation of this load we're able to effectively implicit virtual bid at the lap level you might expect that they were doing quite a bit of it ok so what we do is we as we said we compute these implicit trading costs that we talked about here and the only thing that I think it's important to see is that you can see both before versus after virtual bidding they fall meaning that if you like a product certainly reduced the implicit cost of trading and arbitrage in these price differences this just shows what the two distributions look like the purple being before the whatever that green color is being the after then the other thing we look at is we say ok let's look at the distribution of if you like the difference between pre versus post for the cost so in other words we can use those two distributions that we got the distribution of the trading charge before the distribution of the trading charge after and we can compute the distribution of the difference between seed pre minus post and what we can do is then construct a test of whether or not the null hypothesis that essentially the trading charge before minus post is greater than zero and what we find is essentially for San Diego Gas and Electric and Verus CE we certainly reject the null that essentially this is true and we don't reject this null which is and in both cases if you like in PG&E we don't reject either which would say that at least we have no evidence against the null that trading charges fell after the introduction of convergence bidding ok so then the other thing we looked at we talked about is this idea of the variance so what we do is we say ok we've got the variance covariance matrix of the day ahead versus real time price differences and our hypothesis test is that the difference between pre that variance covariance minus post is a positive semi-definite matrix essentially this just amounts to a multivariate non-linear inequality constraints test of the elements of the 24 eigenvalues and what we do is we is essentially moving block bootstraps approach to do that and what you can see both ways so we first do it pre minus post the positive definite matrix post minus pre is a positive definite matrix and these are essentially the p values and so what you can see is for pre minus post in all cases for the price difference we can't reject the null that essentially pre minus post is a positive semi-definite matrix and for real time price we also can't reject it and then for essentially the other way all of them we can reject it at a 0.05 level except again for San Diego gas and electric there appears to be the p value is certainly bigger than 0.05 so it certainly is consistent with explicit virtual bidding reducing price volatility ok so the other thing we do is this idea that we talked about we do things at the nodal level and at the nodal level you can see that we say ok post explicit virtual bidder falls after the introduction of virtual bids the generation node indicator negative meaning that we said remember we said that at the generation node we expect the trading cost to be smaller and then the other thing is we expect is that after we introduce explicit virtual bidding you can do it at any node so that the gap should close and what we see is essentially exactly what we'd expect where you can see that post explicit virtual bidding the trading charge falls that's the minus 2.527 and then after you implement it you can see that the gen node and the post explicit virtual bid coefficient are not statistically different their sum is not statistically different from 0 which means that after you implement explicit virtual bidding there's no systematic difference between the cost at gen nodes versus load nodes ok so in the interest of getting to this I'll skip to here so what we did here is we're looking at market performance so what we did is for each hour we compute the total variable cost to essentially operating all California ISO generation units using the price of natural gas the spot price of natural gas for that day we took the total amount of heat energy that was used to produce that power including the cost to starting up the units in terms of heat energy and then we had total starts and then we said ok we're essentially the composition of how the output is being produced so we're controlling for in-state renewables imports, natural gas prices and then we run that sort of non parametrically so everything in the Z is essentially done non parametrically and then we have essentially in the W's just things that include our day and month of year fixed effects and then essentially in some specifications X is just this indicator that says pre versus post explicit virtual bidding and we used essentially Robinson semi parametric estimation procedure with the crossvalidating to choose the age and what we get is roughly about for the same composition of output, roughly 6% less energy is used pre versus both explicit virtual bidding and then total cost is roughly the same the interesting thing is that this is not small small potatoes roughly about 30 million dollars annually in terms of savings of total variable cost of operating and a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions so traders are not only cost efficient but they're environmentally friendly so in this this shows how essentially the effect differs across hours the day and the big thing that I think is interesting is that certainly one of the things that the ISO operators talked about was essentially this idea of managing the so-called morning ramp and what you can see is that is that the big savings appear to be coming during those early morning hours of the day relative to the later hours of the day so this is basically the end is to say that what we've got is essentially looking at how has financial market participants benefited market performance essentially it's by essentially reducing that cost of implicit trading cost associated with trading the difference between day ahead and real-time prices which has then led to essentially this lower volatility in real-time lower volatility in the difference between day ahead and real-time and then moreover this reduced cost of dispatching the system reduced amount of heat energy needed to essentially produce the same composition of output in California so financial market participants can benefit market efficiency I think in a market design to allow them to do that ok thanks


The first item of business this afternoon is portfolio questions, education and schools, and I'll call question number one from Richard Lochhead. Can I ask the Scottish Government what action it's taking to encourage people to take up teaching posts in Murray? Cabinet Secretary, John Swinney. Presiding Officer, we're taking a number of actions to encourage people to take up teaching posts in the Murray area. We're supporting the University of Aberdeen with their distance learning primary initial teacher education course to enable partner local authorities, including Murray Council, to develop existing staff as teachers while continuing in work. We also support the University of the Highlands and Islands, who are offering initial teacher education in secondary subjects at Murray College. We welcome the General Teaching Council for Scotland's recent initiative of working with Murray Council to recruit teachers from its military and wider community. The scheme allows qualified teachers to be provisionally registered while the under-go top-up training to enable full registration as teachers. The Scottish Government launched a successful recruitment campaign last September to encourage more people to become teachers. We will be extending and developing this campaign this year. Mr Lochhead. Can I thank the cabinet secretary for the attention that he's given to this issue and also for his detailed answer? I certainly agree that the more homegrown teachers we can have in the Murray area, the more it will help the situation greatly. At the moment, Murray has 39 secondary vacancies and 18 primary vacancies to fill by next term. There seem to be specific issues facing some of our more rural areas in the country. There are two specific issues that I'd like to raise with the cabinet secretary first. I think that that's a case for reviewing the way in which newly qualified teachers are allocated. There's a situation in the Murray just now where quite often when the council calls the NQTs to let them know what school they're going to be going to, they're then told by the applicant that they've actually failed their course and, therefore, they should not have been called in the first place, perhaps as a way in which we could address that. Secondly, when it comes to the recruitment of permanent teaching posts, quite often when the teacher who's applied for the permanent post is phoned with any of the school they're going to, they're told by that teacher that they've actually accepted a post in the central belt of Scotland and they will not be taking up their position in Murray. I wonder if there's any way in which we can tie down the applicant to the original commitment that should be greatly helpful. Finally, can I invite the cabinet secretary to visit Murray and meet some teachers and, indeed, the education authority and myself? I'm grateful to Mr Lockhead for his inaugural brief question to me as education secretary and I look forward to many other brief ones in the future, Presiding Officer. On his last point, I'd be delighted to come to Murray. I'm taking particular time on a weekly basis to meet with teachers and I'll be very happy to do that in Murray. Mr Lockhead will appreciate that the requirements of my presence in Parliament these weeks are kind of restricting that but I will endeavour to do that as soon as I possibly can do that. In relation to his other two questions, in relation to the allocation of newly qualified teachers, I will explore the specific suggestions that he has made to me. I would say in relation to the second question that, obviously, members of the teaching profession are free to take up posts where they choose to do so. What we have to do is to make sure that the employment prospects and opportunities are as attractive as possible in all parts of the country and the measures that I set out in my original answer were designed to give particular encouragement to the development of homegrown teaching professionals in the Murray area and I'll continue to explore other alternatives to taking that forward. To ask the Scottish Government how much it has invested in building or refurbishing schools in South Lanarkshire. Joe Smith. Presiding Officer, through the Scotland School for the Future programme, the Government is undertaking significant investment in Scotland's school of state. In South Lanarkshire, the Scottish Government has awarded funding of up to £11.6 million for the replacement of Spittle primary, Burnside primary, Halfmerc primary and West Main's additional support needs school. Thank you Cabinet Secretary for your answer. The cabinet secretary will be aware of the calls for a new secondary school in the halfway area of my constituency. Does he agree with me that with 107 schools built or refurbished in the area since 2007, more than any other local authority, the issue in South Lanarkshire is not due to a lack of government investment in schools and will he raise this issue with the council when they next meet? The decisions about the investment that is made in the school of state are fundamentally for local authorities under the Education Scotland Act 1980, which contains the statutory responsibility for individual authorities to plan and manage their school of state in order to deliver education services. We will of course take forward investment programmes and the schools for the future programme as an example of that, where the Government makes available resources to encourage the refurbishment of schools. I will certainly consider the points that have been made by Clare Hockey in relation to the opportunities to deploy such investment in the South Lanarkshire area, particularly in the halfway area of the member's constituency. We attach a significant premium to ensuring that we invest effectively in the school of state to ensure that young people are able to be educated in a quality learning environment, and that will remain the commitment of the Government during this time in office. Daniel Johnson Thank you, Presiding Officer. I think that we would all right across this chamber welcome all investment in schools. I would like to ask the cabinet secretary what discussions or engagement that he and other ministers have had with City of Edinburgh council regarding finding capital investment for the way for schools that the City of Edinburgh council has identified, including the Liberton high school in my constituency, which is the only high school in Edinburgh southern, which has, within the last 10 to 20 years, not received any refurbishment or indeed a new building. Can I just say for guidance there that normally the question would be specifically about the South Lanarkshire? In this case, the cabinet secretary is still free to answer it. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Obviously, there is a rigorous process of assessment that is undertaken about the quality of the fabric in individual schools, and that assessment drives the judgments that are made about investment priorities that are taken forward by local authorities, often with support from the Government. Obviously, I will consider the points that Mr Johnson has raised in relation to Liberton high school, and as the Government formulates its further investment programmes, we have set out already a range of investments that are made under the schools for the future programme, a programme that involves £1.8 billion pounds worth of investment, and that will see the programme either constructing or refurbishing 112 schools within Scotland. We have a major programme of school investment on the way, but I am very happy to consider the specific points that Mr Johnson has raised about the City of Edinburgh and Liberton high school in particular. Question 3, Willie Coffey. To ask the Scottish Government how it will ensure fair access to universities for young people from every community. Minister Shirley-Anne Somerville. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Fair access to higher education for those in our most deprived communities is a key priority for this Government. We have legislated on access, invested significant additional resources in additional places, and have consistently challenged universities in the wider system to do more. That has delivered progress, and in 2014-15, 14 per cent of Scottish domiciled full-time first-degree entrants were from 20 per cent of the most deprived communities. That is up from 11.2 per cent in 0607. However, we do recognise that we need to do more, and the commission on wellbeing, on widening access has set out an ambitious plan to achieve further and faster progress. We are determined to advance that agenda and will announce further details soon. Closing the attainment gap is not the end of the journey by any means, and ensuring equality of access for youngsters from every community in Scotland to some of our high tariff university courses such as medicine, law and dentistry is still a fight to be won. In the absence of any national data showing which communities successful student applicants actually come from, will the minister consider requesting that kind of data to be provided to us so that we can plan how best to deliver that equality of access to university courses that we are seeking to achieve? I will certainly take that under advisement and have a look into that issue for the member. I think that it is very important to realise that Scottish universities increase and operate a very contextualised admission policies, and it is not just straight down to grades, so we have to look at a number of issues when we are looking at widening access and the applicants and successful people who go to university and who do achieve a place. I am happy to look into the point that the member has raised. Can I ask the minister in relation to the 2030 target for widening access that the Scottish Government has set? Is it the Scottish Government's intention to provide more university places in order to make that achievable? I do not think that that is as easy as looking at expanding the system. It is not a straight forward answer where we increase the number of places that widening access will necessarily follow from that, if only in many ways it was that straight forward. We have to look at the money that we have already invested in the additional places that the Scottish Government has done over the past years, but the commission itself has raised that there is a structural unfairness about what is happening in the current system, and we need to address that. Simply adding more places on to what is going on just now will not deal with widening access and will not solve the problem. To ask the Scottish Government whether the full £750 million pledged for the Scottish attainment challenge will be given to headteachers to spend on their individual schools' priorities. We will allocate £750 million through the attainment Scotland fund during the course of this Parliament to close the gap in educational attainment. As well as investing £50 million each year in our established area-based approach to raising attainment, we will allocate the additional £100 million that will be raised each year from our local tax reforms to schools. The allocation will be based on the number of children in each school who meet the eligibility criteria for free school meals, and headteachers will be able to invest the extra resources and ways that will have the biggest impact on raising attainment in their schools. The Scottish attainment challenge focuses on the key issues of literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing. We will continue to target support to more than 300 primary schools in our most deprived communities, and last week I confirmed that we will expand the reach of the challenge to involve more local authorities with significant levels of deprivation and extend the scope to include secondary schools. Donald Cameron, I thank the cabinet secretary for this answer. Given the recognition of headteachers' leadership, does the cabinet secretary agree with school leader Scotland, who said last week that much more of school's budgets should be controlled by headteachers to allow that to be directed towards local priorities? I generally agree with that point of view. As a matter of fact, I am seeing school leader Scotland immediately after question time today for a discussion, and I was delighted that Jim Thullis from school leader Scotland participated in the education summit that took place this morning at Craig Royston high school. The Government is committed to ensuring that schools are able to exercise, and headteachers are able to exercise, much greater discretion about the way in which they make choices about the priorities in their schools to ensure that the potential of every young person in Scotland can be fulfilled as a consequence. The cabinet secretary was very clear that the bulk of the funding is from the council tax changes that the Government intends to make, but he must know that the fiscal scrutiny unit of this Parliament has said that those resources will accrue to local authorities and that no mechanism exists either to pool those resources or to redistribute them according to eligible pupil numbers, as he described. Can he explain how he intends to make good the promise that he has just repeated? I will set out the detailed thinking of the Government in this respect when I set out the delivery plan to Parliament before the summer recess. Just because arrangements do not currently exist, it does not mean to say that those arrangements cannot be put in place to make it happen. I want to assure Mr Gray in Parliament today that the Government's commitment will be to allocate that £100 million each year in the fashion that I have described in my answer to Mr Cameron, and to make sure that we take forward an agenda that enables us to direct resources to the areas where they are required the most to support and to drive the process of improving pupil attainment. I would be grateful if the cabinet secretary could tell me what measures will be put in place to ensure that the funding will be invested for the purpose of increasing attainment and not to be redirected, but to be assumed into other budgets. My answer to Mr McMillan is much the same as my answer to Mr Gray. The Government is determined to make sure that the resource meets its required purpose within local authority areas in Scotland, that it is there to support the improvements in numeracy and literacy and health and wellbeing for young people and to assist us in closing the attainment gap. If the Government is giving a commitment and is elected on a mandate to fulfil that commitment and undertake that approach, I think that members have the right to expect of the Government to take forward as we formulate our plans in this respect. I will share more details on this with Parliament as we explain the details of the delivery plan, but our commitment is clear to concentrate those resources in the fashion that I have set out to Parliament today. Tavish Scott If the criteria for the attainment fund is, as the cabinet secretary has described, namely free school meals, does that mean that attainment funds will go to every school where the children are so eligible? That would be a fair conclusion to draw from what I have said. Maurice Golden To ask the Scottish Government what plans it has to enhance education and skills for a circular economy. A recent circular economy strategy making things last sets out our priorities to explore the scope for a skills academy for the circular economy, to review skills and investment plans, to identify circular economy skills needs in specific sectors, and to support a cohort of circular economy teaching champions in schools. Thank you, cabinet secretary. I welcome that on skills. Will the Scottish Government explore the inclusion of the circular economy across key subject areas in secondary and tertiary sectors? I want to give a helpful answer to Mr Golden, because I personally and the Government value the importance of the circular economy. Indeed, my colleague Richard Lochhead, when he was in government, made particular strides to develop the strategy and to apply it. I am very supportive in principle of the encouragement of the circular economy, but I want to put in a note of caution, which Parliament is going to hear from me quite a bit over my term in office. I cannot be expected to put everything into the curriculum, because, if voices in Parliament are saying to me that we need to provide clarity and simplicity, Parliament cannot also ask me to put everything into the curriculum. I have made it very clear publicly that I intend to declutter aspects of the curriculum and the bureaucracy of our education system to enable teachers to focus on attainment, but, in so doing, I ask for a bit of patience and understanding from Parliament that I will not be able to exceed to every request to add every new thing into the curriculum, because the history of Scottish education is that we are very good at adding things into the curriculum, but we are hopelessly bad at taking things out of the curriculum. To ask the Scottish Government what recent discussions it has had with the EIS regarding its ballot for industrial action. I met the Educational Institute of Scotland on Saturday at their annual general meeting in Dundee. I reaffirmed my commitment to empowering teachers and reducing unnecessary workload, a commitment that I have also given to Parliament. As part of that, I have taken early action to reduce teacher workload, and I will continue to do so. I am grateful to the Deputy First Minister for his answer, although the EIS acknowledged that, if they end up in industrial action, that dispute will be with local authorities. The remedies that they are seeking are with the SQA, a body of the Scottish Government. Does the cabinet secretary acknowledge the central role that the Scottish Government has and that he has in preventing or potentially resolving any future dispute? I suppose that my answer to Mr Harvie is a bit of yes and a bit of no. I acknowledge that there will be aspects of the increase in teacher workload that have come about as a consequence of the measures taken by the Government, Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority, but there have also been additions to teacher workload from local authorities and within schools. If there is to be a sustained effort to reduce the bureaucracy with which teachers are wrestling and to simplify the environment with which teachers are operating and to operate with greater clarity, that will not be achieved just by the actions of the Scottish Qualifications Authority. That will be achieved by the actions of a range of players, including local authorities, schools, school leadership and the actions of the Government. I am absolutely determined to tackle the issue of teacher workload because I see it and the concerns about it as a significant impediment to my efforts to focus the teaching profession on the attainment challenge. I will do everything that I can within the Government to tackle the issue, but I also need local government and I need the school leadership to be participants in the process into the bargain. That is why all the different interested parties were participating in the summit on education this morning. Jenny Gilruth Can the cabinet secretary outline how standardised assessments will impact on teacher workload? Presiding Officer, the standardised assessments are designed to be a replacement for existing assessment within the school estate. There will be a range of different types of assessment undertaken within schools. Standardised assessments are an approach that is designed to give us the quality of information, the reliability of information to drive teacher judgment about the performance of young people and then to inform us and support us about how we can encourage and support the development of educational performance by young people in Scotland. The standardised assessments will not add to teacher workload, they will replace existing provisions and, as I said in my earlier answer to Patrick Harvie, I will be making strenuous efforts to reduce unnecessary teacher workload to enable teachers to focus on their core purpose of improving attainment. To ask the Scottish Government what the results of information gathered by local authorities on school children show about their career path aspirations other than attending college or university. The information is not held centrally by the Scottish Government. Schools take a variety of approaches to help teachers and careers advisers to plan for a pupil's future needs and support in terms of career aspirations. We are committed to maintaining an all-age career service in Scotland to maintain and improve the quality of that service. We are implementing the recommendations of the commission for developing Scotland's young workforce in our youth employment strategy. That includes the introduction of careers advice earlier in school and the publication of the career education standard 318. The standard sets out the entitlements that a young person can expect to receive to help them to consider their future careers and emphasises the importance of helping them to build their career management skills. The Scottish Government will be well aware not just of the growing attainment gap but of the emerging skills gap in Scotland and the growing view that the Scottish Government is not providing the training for the skills required for the workforce of the future with not-enough apprentices or training for bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, etc. As the shortage of skilled workmen and women is already contributing to the economic slowdown in Scotland, what is the Scottish Government going to do immediately to address that problem? There is a very significant issue in the question that Mr Scott has raised. The Government is really important that we invest in our education system in a fashion that enables us to generate the skills that are necessary for our current employment and economic needs. The Government through Skills Development Scotland has put in place a comprehensive set of skills investment plans that are designed to engage with each industrial and business sector to identify future needs within individual sectors. If I were to cite one particular example of a particular challenge in recent years, we would be digital skills, where any of us might not have to be a sophisticated digital participant to understand the enormous change in digital activity that has taken place in the course of the last two, three, five years. It is essential that we have skills investment plans that adequately foresee changes in the economy and equip our institutions to satisfy that demand. The skills investment plans that have been developed, which are very strong propositions, are designed to engage with the industry to identify skills requirements and, crucially, to get higher and further education institutions to align their provision to support those skills investment plans. The final point that I would say to Mr Scott is that, of course, the Government has significantly increased the number of modern apprenticeships. There were 15,000 per annum when we came to office. There are now 25,000, and I think that the statistics have been published for this year. I am just confirming that the statistics have been published. I was fearful that I had committed a statistical obscenity by releasing them formally to the Parliament, but the new modern apprenticeship statistics for last year are out and the Government exceeded its target of 25,000. Of course, we are committed to increasing that target to 30,000 during the term of this administration. Question 8, David Torrance. To ask the Scottish Government what action it will take to increase early years' learning and childcare. Mr Mark Dynald. The Scottish Government has already extended the hours of free early learning and childcare by nearly 50 per cent from 412.5 hours a year in 2007 to 600 hours from 2014. We have started to make this more flexible and accessible, and we have extended this entitlement to over a quarter of two-year-olds. We will go further in this Parliament and almost double the number of funded hours for all those children currently eligible from 600 to 1140 hours per year from 2020. Quality will be at the heart of this expansion, and we will ensure that it is delivered flexibly to meet the needs of working parents as well as young children. This programme is not just about increasing hours, it is about helping to close the attainment gap both through supporting parents to work, train or study, and through providing young children with a strong foundation for their learning journey. I thank the minister for that answer. A gap exists in early language skills between children from the most unleashed advantage backgrounds. Every child in Scotland deserves the best possible start in life. Can the minister confirm whether any future investment will be used directly to tackle this issue? The answer is yes. Although it is worth noting that results from a recent growing up in Scotland study showed that vocabulary in three-year-olds is getting better, we recognise that there are challenges to be faced. We also recognise that parents have a key role in supporting their children's speech and language development from the start. We have recently launched the new Read, Write, Count campaign, which builds upon Play Talk, Read and the Bookbank campaigns. We are also examining how we can include, for example, book bug materials within the baby box, which will obviously be given to every newborn child in Scotland. That is about ensuring that we take the opportunity wherever possible to encourage parents and families to read with and to their children because we recognise that that has a significant impact on increasing literacy and vocabulary in children before they get to school. Monica Lennon Thank you, Presiding Officer. Can I ask the minister to explain how a significant increase in fully trained early-year nursery teachers will be achieved? We estimate that up to 20,000 additional staff will be required to deliver our transformational expansion, and we are working with key partners, including Skills Development Scotland, the Scottish Funding Council and local authorities, to plan for this. We are committed to ensuring that all nurseries in the most disadvantaged areas will benefit from additional graduate with early and earning expertise from 2018. Obviously, as part of the plans taken forward as well as the infrastructure requirements, there are also the workforce planning requirements, and that will form a key part of the delivery plan that we bring forward to the Government. Tavish Scott Thank you, Presiding Officer. I wonder if the minister would accept that, in rural and island areas, there is a particular challenge around delivering the entitlement when many communities simply do not have existing childcare provision, and what is he doing and what is his Government going to do to make sure that provision is met, given the entitlement that is being laid out? I recognise the point that Tavish Scott makes. Obviously, we have to ensure that provision is available within communities, and that is going to involve working with a range of stakeholders. That is why I emphasised flexibility in terms of not just availability but also in terms of provision. That is something that is forming part of our thinking as we bring forward the delivery plan and develop that. I am always happy to hear from members as to what suggestions they might have. Obviously, I am not representing a rural area myself. I perhaps do not have the same knowledge and understanding that Tavish Scott might have. If he has any constructive suggestions that he wishes to write to me with, I would be more than happy to receive them. Question 9, Kenneth Gibson. To ask the Scottish Government to what extent it considers the adverse intergenerational social economic factors impact of an educational attainment and what steps it will take to mitigate those over the next five years. The Scottish Government recognises that, where poverty has persisted across generations, it can have a significant impact on a child's educational attainment. That is why the Scottish attainment challenge is supporting communities in schools with the highest concentrations of pupils living in deprivation. By 2017-18, we will also provide funding to schools based on the numbers of eligible children in each school who meet the criteria for free school meals. We must ensure that every child, no matter the background, has the same chance in life regarding the background. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. He will know that parental support is vital to ensuring that young people reach their full educational potential, and that the support of parents encourages their children, assists with homework and an increasing number of higher tutors after school. How can the attainment gap be closed rather than simply be reduced in such circumstances, given that so many children who are not realising their full potential at this time do not enjoy such support? The measures that I have set out in my original answer to Mr Gibson are designed to try to address the very real point that he raises, where there is a need for intensity of support to enable young people to achieve their potential. I saw a very good example of that this morning at Craig Royce in high school, where I met a young man who came from a family where there had been persistent intergenerational unemployment. However, the efforts of the school to focus on that young man's needs, to open up opportunities through a partnership with the business community, enabled that young man, who had a very difficult educational background, to gain access to full-time employment. It was a thrill to hear that success of intense school leadership being deployed to support the opportunities for that individual. I do not, for a moment, present this as an easy challenge to be overcome, because the circumstances that Mr Gibson raises are very demanding circumstances to overcome. However, I think that with the focus of the attainment fund and the attainment challenge, we can provide the necessary approach in particular schools to ensure that young people are able to fulfil their potential. Question 11, Jenny Gilruth. To ask the Scottish Government what percentage of head teachers in five secondary schools is female, and how that compares with the overall figure for the rest of Scotland. Cabinet Secretary. I said that 16 per cent of head teachers in publicly funded secondary schools in Fife were reported as female in September 2015 in the annual teacher census, compared with 40 per cent across Scotland. Jenny Gilruth. Can I thank the cabinet secretary for that response? Madras College in St Andrews is the state school in which I went to. It has never had a female head teacher in its history. Nationally, women make up 63 per cent of the secondary teaching population and, as the cabinet secretary has just said, 40 per cent of the head teachers. Would the cabinet secretary agree with me that, given the predominance of women in the secondary teaching population, local authorities such as Fife Council have a duty to ensure that the number of women in senior leadership positions in education is more reflective of that and, indeed, of wider society? Obviously, the appointments that are made to individual schools are a matter for local authorities as employers, but I accept the point that Jenny Gilruth makes that the percentage of female head teachers in five secondary schools is lower than could be expected. Fife Council will be able to explain the basis of their experience and the data in that respect. It is worth noting, however, that, although females are still underrepresented in promoted posts, the position has improved significantly since 2003. Principal teachers up from 48 per cent to 61 per cent, deputy head teachers up from 36 per cent to 54 per cent and head teachers up from 18 per cent to 40 per cent across the country. I recognise the specific issues that are raised by Jenny Gilruth in his question. It is important that, as part of our leadership development work in schools, we are encouraging all those of talent to be able to exercise that role in school leadership. I will reflect on the points that Jenny Gilruth has raised in how we might reflect those in the approach that we take to the development of school leadership. Question 12, Joan McAlpine. I ask the Scottish Government when it will next meet the management of Scotland's rural college. Minister Shirley-Anne Somerville. I am planning a schedule of visits to Scottish higher and further education institutions over the coming months, and I am keen that that will include Scotland's rural college. I thank the minister for that answer. There have been concerns locally about the SRUC's uncosted ambition to relocate the Barony campus to the Creighton farm in Dumfries, potentially losing valuable hands-on training opportunities in land-based industries. Those concerns have been raised by the previous RACI committee and by myself in Parliament and with the previous cabinet secretary. Will the Government work with me to ensure that land-based education in Dumfries and Galloway is not compromised by SRUC decisions? I understand the member's concern, given the importance of agricultural skills to the economy in Dumfries and Galloway. I am pleased to note the commitment that was made by SRUC in January to continuing delivery of land-based education and training in the region. I also recognise the work that has been going on between Joan McAlpine and the previous cabinet secretary on the issue, and I would be more than happy to discuss that further with the member and representatives of SRUC. To ask the Scottish Government what role breakfast clubs play in closing the attainment gap and what support it provides to them. Some research studies suggest that breakfast club provision can contribute to raising attainment. We also have substantial anecdotal evidence to suggest that breakfast club attendance helps children to engage positively with learning. Scottish Government provides local government in Scotland with an agreed package of funding, and it is the responsibility of each local authority to allocate the total financial resources on the basis of local needs and priorities. Local authorities have flexibility to use some of the funding to provide services, such as breakfast clubs, if they choose to. I thank the minister for that response. Does the minister agree that there are a range of ways in which schools can use programmes beyond the classroom, such as breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and other support, that will not only provide real help to children and make it easier for parents to work, but crucially help to raise attainment in the classroom as well? I absolutely recognise the point that the member makes. Schools across Scotland are using a range of programmes, both before school, at lunchtime and after school, to engage children and young people in learning and ensure opportunities for extracurricular learning. They are available to everyone, regardless of their background, to help to raise attainment and close the attainment gap. There are a number of initiatives that are being directly supported by the Government through the attainment challenge, and we will ensure that good practice that emerges in the challenge is promoted and shared widely across the country. The first ministerial engagement that I undertook was with the Deputy First Minister when we went to visit a breakfast club in Edinburgh, so I am very cognisant of the role that they and other out-of-school activities play in supporting children and closing the attainment gap. This is the case, and there is evidence that breakfast clubs and access to breakfast clubs can help to close the attainment gap. We do not simply be more straightforward for the Scottish Government to ensure that local authorities have resources and the obligation to provide a breakfast club in every school. I think that the important issue here is to ensure that what we do is identify and prioritise need where it exists. There are already a number of schools out there who are running breakfast clubs where they have identified locally that the need exists, whether that is through parents who require that support in order to enable them to access the workforce, or whether it is an issue around children who are coming to school without a breakfast and the impact that going through the school day without a breakfast in them can have on their learning. The funding is available to local authorities, and that is clearly demonstrated by the fact that there are breakfast clubs that exist out there. Where it is identified that that is a priority, that is obviously for schools and local authorities to take forward in the first instance, but if Ian Gray has evidence that that is not being taken forward in areas where it is required, I am more than happy to receive that from him. Richard Lochhead The minister may be aware that there are some food businesses in Scotland that support local breakfast clubs, and I wonder if it is worthwhile, minister, to speak to the private sector and our food sector about giving more support to breakfast clubs out of Scotland to make sure that more children can have those advantages. Minister I think that Mr Lochhead bringing his experience from working closely with the food sector brings an interesting point to the chamber, and it is one that I will be more than happy to reflect on and see what more we can do, particularly to encourage that not just children receive a nutritional and healthy breakfast where that is being provided, but also one that promotes the produce that is often available not too far away from the schools in which they attend. Question 14, Rhoda Grant. To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to support families' access in children's services. Our national parenting strategy ensures that parents are valued, equipped and supported. We are expanding early learning and childcare for young children and providing opportunities for additional support for families and parents. If a child is at risk of becoming looked after from August onwards, local authorities will make family group decision making and parenting support services available to eligible children, pregnant women and their families who want those services. Once a child is looked after, we have ensured that local authorities have statutory duties to meet the needs of a child, including the provision of parental support where that is judged appropriate. Rhoda Grant The minister will be aware that cuts to council budgets have a direct impact on children's services. He may also be aware that this is threatened service provision by action for children at Hillcrest in the Western Isles. This uncertainty impacts on children and their families using those very valued services. Will he ensure that councils receive adequate funding to protect children's services? As I highlighted in my previous answer, this Government allocates funding to local authorities, and local authorities are able to determine their priorities within the funding envelope. I am not familiar with the individual case that Rhoda Grant has highlighted, but if she wants to write to me with more detail, I will be more than happy to look into it and provide her with a more detailed response in relation to that specific case. To ask the Scottish Government what targets it has set to measure the impact of the Scottish attainment fund in West Scotland. The information that we will collect as part of the national improvement framework will give the most detailed picture ever of progress across the country, including in the west of Scotland, helping us to tackle the attainment gap between children from the most and least disadvantaged backgrounds. We want to see significant progress in doing so within the term of this Parliament and to have substantially closed the gap within the next 10 years. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer, and I welcome the announcement made by the cabinet secretary for education last week that Renfrewshire Council will now have access to greater funding to tackle educational inequality and raise attainment after the local authority was categorised as a challenge authority. However, the statistics do not paint a good picture. In 2008, the Scottish Survey of Mathematics and Core Skills saw 60 per cent of pupils in S2 performing well or very well. By 2014, the same survey saw the number of S2 pupils performing well or very well drop to 40 per cent. In light of those figures, and with Renfrewshire Council now being a challenge authority, can the cabinet secretary confirm whether Renfrewshire Council will receive its portion of the £11.7 million first-tronge funding, which was announced in July 2015 that challenge authorities would receive? I think that that is inviting me to undertake retrospective public expenditure, which I do not really think is something that Parliament believes is within my gift. I have just announced the expansion of the challenge authority programme to include Renfrewshire. I am glad that Mary Fee welcomed that, because we have acknowledged the challenges that exist in Renfrewshire. I look forward to working with the schools in that authority area to try to tackle the issues that exist and to ensure that we do all that we can to close the attainment gap as it affects the young people concerned. The challenge authorities increase and, in particular, to see Renfrewshire being included. Could the cabinet secretary further outline the reasoning behind this decision, along with what support is available to secondary schools and attainment challenge areas? The rationale behind the decision is that the levels of deprivation that have been wrestled with in Renfrewshire did not, in the original tranche of the decision-making, qualify the authority to be included. I have since taken a decision to expand the range and the scope of the challenge authority programme to enable Renfrewshire to be included and to provide the resources that will be able to be used to tackle the attainment gap. That will be the focus of the efforts that we put in place to apply to both primary and secondary schools and to ensure that there are comprehensive reports taken to enhance the opportunities that prevail for young people within Renfrewshire. Thank you, cabinet secretary. That brings us to an end of education questions.


Bonjour, hello. Shall we get seated and start? It's been great to meet here for the first time, so thank you OE Global for this great opportunity. And so I'm going to talk about how my space story and what we're doing in OER are interconnected. Okay, so a word about multilingualism. If openness is about breaking barriers, one of the key barriers we have is language. It matters. I participated in an OER conference in Nant Ahia. It was a very great opportunity to share our ideas and experiences. Lots of good feedback and people saying how pleased and almost shocked they were that they were able to present their papers in Arabic or in Spanish. And for them, they're saying for the first time that's ever happened to them. And how excited they were by that. This conference has been great so far and I got so many stimuli from everyone that it was incredible how many things I'm bringing on and I'm going to build on them. But the best thing for me is really about just getting the chance to reconnect with people and catch up and move on a bit from that sort of hellish couple of years that people have had. And to actually be here now, having that kind of congress again, catching up with people, seeing familiar faces. Very, very special. It was amazing and very inspiring. Lots of really great conversations both within the auditoriums, within the classrooms, but also outside of it, just connecting, reconnecting, forming new acquaintances and getting back home with amazing ideas, hoping to implement them all in the coming year. The sessions are always, always fascinating what people are doing. I'm anxious to get home and connect to connect, connect to connect and rid you and do some more learning. Just to echo the thanks to you for all the hard work in making the conference accessible to people who aren't there physically. I have been enjoying having my Twitter open and just following through the various forums whilst I'd love to be there. I don't feel excluded sitting here in my cold little office here at the bottom part of South Africa. I believe that if we're actually going to save ourselves, we have to embrace OER and be fully committed to a world that is open, has open access to knowledge and technology and, of course, space.


Hello everyone, my name is Zafra. So today I'm here to show you how to make ice cube paints. So let us begin with our exercise. All you need to have is a mold, it can be a chocolate mold or maybe ice cube tray, three bowls of water, one paper to test, some twigs or maybe you know some kind of toothpicks, a paint brush, paint and newspaper. All you need to be doing is when you put water in your bowl, take any three paints of your choice. So I am taking green color here, I have taken red and I have taken black. So I will pour in very little few droplets in fact of the paint in the water. Then I add in some black color to it in the other bowl and some red color. This is a very fun kind of an activity for children, it keeps them engrossed, it gives them the excitement to learn a new thing. So what we will do next is mix our paints, mix it really well. Once it's done you can shift the color, mix it really well and last we mix the green color, mix it well. Once we are done mixing the colors, we will add the colors into the molds like this. Let the children do the mixing, let the children pour the paints into the mold. We are done with green, we add in some black. Then we add in our red color, so we are done with mixing of the paint, adding it to the other molds. Now we add in the sticks to our, since the popsicles are not available, ice cream sticks are not available in the market for the time being. You can use any toothpicks or you can add in, you know you can pour pieces of foil like this and add it to it. This will help you make your work easier. And then we put it ahead, I already made a batch earlier and I had kept so that you know, freeze it so that now I can show you the tester of it. So let the ice melt for a minute and then you can start with your painting. So this is how the tester looks like. We take the black next, this is how it actually looks like. This is how the paint looks like. So let your children do the painting, you can actually draw and give them or you can ask them to draw and then they can do the painting. So it's a very fun loving activity for the children and it's a very creative activity. So all you need to do is to build your excitement. In the night you can set this and in the morning they can do their painting. So I hope you really enjoyed making and seeing the video. Have a nice day. Thank you so much.


If you do five new friends a day and you're putting yourself out there that you're the hardest working agent out here And I'm here to help you buy and sell property when you get ready to is there anything I could do to help you today If not let's stay in touch if you're doing that for five people a day and have a great conversations You're going to sell a lot of property


How to Create, Carry Out and Review Uriya Fel Lesson. A good teacher will bring their own passion, style, and experience in every lesson. Some teachers may have a great deal of teaching experience, while others may be new to the role. The teachers with less teaching experience may find great benefit in putting time and effort into their preparation through lesson planning. How more experienced teachers may be able to naturally feel their way through a lesson, perhaps even the syllabus, and found upon lesson planning as being too rigid or structured, for a new teacher I believe it is a necessity to achieving their success. What is the aim of lesson planning? Lesson planning acts as an aid in planning the learner objectives for the students, how the teacher will achieve these objectives and the timing of their flow of the activities and phases. Essentially, the lesson plan will be a working document for the teacher to use as a guide for the lesson to keep it on track and remind the teacher of what they are attempting to achieve. It should not be too rigid but instead allow for modifications and flexibility, allowing the class to have a natural flow if the students are taking longer than expected or enjoying a phase and it makes sense to extend that phase at the time. Importantly, the lesson plan also provides a teacher, their employer, and other teachers a record of both what has been taught and what is planned to be taught. This is excellent for the teacher or employer to review for both feedback and future planning, while also providing another teacher with the tools to take a lesson for in the absence of the regular teacher. This is particularly important as it ensures students are able to continue their syllabus in an orderly fashion, but also in a similar style they are familiar with. How to write a lesson plan When writing out a lesson plan it is best to use a template initially, as this will provide both the requirements and structure needed for a successful lesson plan. It is important to remember that the lesson plan is the plan only, not the word for a word script, so it should follow a structure the teacher is comfortable with and can maintain with future lesson plans. Within this structure, the teacher will build a smooth flow of activities and a balance of skills that fit together well and keep with a time frame. Again allow this structure and flow to have the flexibility, as mentioned before, to modify the lesson and encourage a natural feel. Once completed, to assist in the success of the lesson plan it is important to practice the lesson plan then review it ensuring all the aids and materials needed are present, the equipment is set up and works in the classroom is clean, tidy and safe arranged how is desired. Basically, the teacher needs to be completely ready for the students before they arrive, feeling relaxed and able to build rapport with the students as they walk in the class, making the students relaxed and comfortable. It is best to source a template, an example template in IDTT-09 Unit 9 of lesson planning, or build a template that the teacher is comfortable with, as this will support ongoing structure of the lessons and also make writing the lesson plans far more efficient. The lesson plan template should include the 14 elements listed in IDTT-09 Unit 9 of lesson planning to cover all the requirements of writing a successful lesson plan. Lesson plan structure 1. Learner objectives, what the students will learn 2. Personal aims, what the teacher wants to achieve 3. Language point, this is the theme of the lesson, it is important this fits with the flow of your lessons the syllabus 4. Learning aids, list the aids and materials required for the lesson 5. Anticipated problems and solutions for the students, list issues students may find problematic and the solution to these issues 6. Anticipated problems and solutions for the teacher, list issues the teacher may find problematic and the solution to these issues 7. The procedure, these are the activities listed in order to achieve the learner objectives 8. Face, this is the engage, study, and activate, ESA, strategy 9. Timing, the teacher must give each activity in the procedure list an amount of time it will take to complete, enabling the planning of the total length of the lesson 10. Interaction, just breaking up the lesson into different interactions including teacher student, student student, and student, working alone 11. Class level, English language ability 12. Number of students, how many students will attend the class? 13. Date, time, location, confirm the time, date and location of the class 14. Teachers and observers aims, list what the teacher and, or the observer aim to achieve 15. Lesson revision, to assist in the teacher's growth it is very beneficial to go through the exercise of self evaluation after each lesson by reviewing each element of the lesson plan and analyzing if goals were achieved, anticipations accurate, what worked well and what are the areas for improvement. This will assist in both the teacher's own growth as a teacher and also the constant improvement of the lesson plans. As the lesson plans improve they will be able to bring a series of lessons together to create better flow and a fantastic learning experience for the students. Also, the teacher will be able to ensure your lesson plans follow the syllabus and achieve all the students need to achieve within the time frame the teacher has to teach them. Do you want to acquire new teaching skills? Take a TEFL course. Lesson plans are essential for new teachers and still beneficial for even the most experienced teacher I believe. The lesson plan assists in many aspects of teaching and will continually improve teachers' lessons, as they grow and develop their own style. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll-free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today.