Good morning, can I welcome everyone to the 12th meeting of the Education Skills Committee in 2018? Can I please remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? The first item of business is the decision on whether to take agenda item 4 in private. Is everyone content that agenda item 4 is taken and private? I am entirely content to take agenda item 4 in private. gan y tygradu eich gwasanaeth, rydyn ni'n gweithio hyffordd hon i'r tyw r Earnest. Maen i chi'n fawr i chi'r gwaith i chi'n fathgen i chi, dwi'n galw i'n mynd i ddweud i chi'ch eich minsiau i ddweud, i'ch ganfawr i chi'n fathgen i chi'ch mwyaf i chi'ch gwasanaeth. normal practice? Does anybody else have an issue with that? Can I just say that if we don't get satisfaction in the private session, there is an issue that we have to be discussed in the private session? If we are going to be dealing with something in the private session, then the discussions for it should be taking place in the private session and decisions should then be made at that point. Can I just clarify, however, that we are not deciding not to discuss the issue in the public at some point in the future? Can I just clarify that we are asking if something that is in private session can be heard in private session. We're not debating it in public until we've decided if it's going to be debated in private, so can we then have the debate in private? Do we agree or do we not agree? The discussions in private will take place in private? With respect, convener, I'm asking a process question. Will the process be the same process as any other item that has ever been taken private? Will it still be afford the opportunity to members to have that discussion in public about that issue at later stage? Have we ever done otherwise? Have we ever done otherwise? In that case, that's confirmation that we can do that. I don't really understand the point of question except for trying to get it on the record. In that case, can we agree that we can have this meeting in private? Is everyone content then that agenda item 4 will be taken private? The next item of business is an evidence session on the attainment and achievement of school-aged children experiencing poverty inquiry. This is the second evidence session on this inquiry and this week we have a focus on secondary school-aged children. I welcome to this meeting Andrea Bradley, assistant secretary, Educational Institute of Scotland, Stella Gibson, chief executive of the SPARC, Finlay Lavarty, senior head of partnerships Princess Trust Scotland, John Louton, chief executive there to lead and Ellen Pryder, chief executive connect. I ensure that I say to the panel from the outset that if you would like to respond to a question, please indicate to me or the clerks and I will call you to speak and I would ask the committee members to do the same. For the benefit of those watching, I should explain that the committee has just come from an informal meeting with parents, young people, teachers and other professionals on this topic. I thank the panel for bringing along such interesting people to share their experiences with us and I can also thank all those who attended the session, some of those who are in the audience watching this formal session. We heard a lot last week on the cost of the school day and before inviting questions from colleagues. I would like to ask the panel whether access to all aspects of the curriculum should be free to everyone or whether any additional costs should be subsidised or met only for families on low incomes. Would anybody particularly like to respond to that, Andrew? The EIS is absolutely committed to the principle of comprehensive education that is free at the point of use for all children and young people. We would be absolutely of the view that all aspects of the curriculum should be open, accessible to all children and young people, regardless of the socioeconomic background from which they come. I was going to come back, but is there anybody else who would like to come? I would absolutely agree with that. Is the issue then that the clarification between what is core and what is not core to some of the costs that were talked about last week, where there was a claim that some what should be core costs were having to be met by pupils? Would you say that is because there is not a clear definition of what those core aspects of the CFA should be? I believe that it is absolutely clear what is core. If a young person or their family is being asked to pay for course materials like photocopied workbooks and so on, that is core. If a young person needs materials for a practical class, that is core. If they cannot take part in that curriculum area unless they have those materials, that is core. That is not the sort of example—there are other types of examples, which are really the type that I was talking about, but I completely accept your answer. Andrew, do you want to come back? Ileene has said that we had examples last week about children's access to home economics lessons. Am I pressing the wrong button? Sorry, our system is different from that. Children do not have access to home economics, or not having access, but there being a cost attached to accessing home economics lessons. We know from members' feedback to us about increasingly cost being attached to children's participation. For example, in art, craft and design, it is not so much that there is a lack of clarity about what is core provision and what is not. It is that year-on-year cuts to school budgets and therefore to departmental budgets have resulted in a squeeze being placed on what faculty heads and principal teachers are having to manage in terms of purchases of practical equipment and so on. Some of those costs have found their way to families rather than them being met by core funding. What Ileene has said, we would absolutely concur with, that all of those things that are essential to children's and young people's participation in day-to-day learning have to be met by school funds. The problem is at the moment that the levels of school funding are not adequate to provide for all the practical materials that would allow for the richness of experience that we want for our children and young people through curriculum for excellence. I saw figures last week that the education spending had gone up by, I think, 10 per cent. That is not what departmental heads and faculty heads are finding in terms of the budgets that they are managing. There have been year-on-year decreases in per capita budgets and it particularly hits practical subjects that do have large expenses to meet in terms of paints, for example, in art or wood, for certain craft and design lessons, so that our members are telling us that faculty heads and principal teachers who have responsibility for managing departmental budgets are having to make savings year-on-year in relation to the equipment that they purchase for lessons. We also know that in some schools there are charging policies in place to enable kids to participate and, for us, that is unacceptable. We may come back to that later on, so could I bring in Liz at this point? Thank you, convener. Could I take you into the extracurricular field? We have evidence and have had this committee over a long period of time that extracurricular activity can boost attainment considerably, particularly among some youngsters who perhaps do not have other opportunities. It seems from the evidence that we have that it is in extracurricular work where some of the cuts are most substantial, whether that is in music tuition, whether that is in sport, whether that is in Duke of Edinburgh or going on outdoor education. Would you be able to advise us as to what you think we can do, particularly in the culture of budget cuts that you have just indicated, Mrs Bradley? What can we do to try and address this extracurricular, particularly when it raises attainment? The reference that you make there to instrumental music tuition is an issue that is of really grave concern for the EIS at the moment. We know that around two thirds of local authorities have charging policies in place, so there is an inequity straight off the bat whereby in two thirds of our local authorities there are cost barriers to young people's participation in instrumental music, and we know the emotional, social and cognitive benefits of that kind of experience, and the intrinsic enjoyment that comes from simply being able to participate in music, to be able to play a musical instrument. We are unhappy about the fact that there are charging regimes in place, and we think that, as a matter of urgency, that has to be looked at in order that all children and young people across Scotland, again, regardless of the socioeconomic background from which they come, have equal access to that aspect of the curriculum in order that they can garner all the benefits from it, so much research internationally shows the benefits of it. Can I just pursue you on that point, because you have just quite rightly, in my opinion, mentioned about the core curriculum, as has Mrs Price, that there are very considerable issues there. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that we are going to find enough lot of money to make sure that the extracurricular dimension is funded as well. If that money does not come from local authorities, where else might it come from to avoid parents having to pay for it? It could possibly come from national government. I think that there has to be conversation between national government and local government. If Scotland, as a society, places value on music as a cultural benefit, then there has to be an honest conversation between national and local government about how that is going to be funded, and how it is going to be funded equitably. There is also the issue there about whether that should be a core aspect of the curriculum or whether it should be treated as extracurricular. We are currently of the view that that has to increasingly become part of our core provision, rather than something that is an add-on or an optional extra to families who can afford it. We think that there needs to be more done to scrutinise the benefits of instrumental music, tuition and participation of young people in that kind of learning, and the connection to health and wellbeing, wider achievement and attainment. If we value it, and there is lots of evidence to suggest that we should value it, we need to think about how we can meaningfully and sustainably fund that for more children and young people in Scotland. I have a final question to Mr Lavarty and to Mr Lawson. Do you believe that in terms of trying to improve the motivation and the confidence of young people, their ability to engage and attainment, do you feel that we should be putting more priority on that extracurricular facility? Our experience over many years is that there are a fairly significant group of young people in education who perhaps require some alternative. Our methods would be youth-work-led methods of engaging with that group of young people. We are currently working with 125 schools and about 2,000 young people. The numbers of young people out there who require perhaps that slightly different alternative approach, which can be done through professional youth work, and the voluntary sector does that quite extensively, or by developing the skills and abilities of the existing teaching resource, which we have found to be a particularly efficient way of doing things. We are working with that teacher to develop how they engage with that young person, how they engage with that group, in a more softer way perhaps, but using understanding the behaviours and dealing with those often quite challenging behaviours in a slightly different way. It helps them to re-engage in education and helps them to think about the different choices that they have moving forward. That alternative provision can be extremely useful, and it can target those groups of pupils and young people who are more likely to leave school without a positive destination. That has been our partnership work with local authorities and schools for over 15 years and our experience, I guess. I thank you for the question. First of all, to use a very non-jarginy PC language, it is a no-brainer. As the young person who benefited from them services myself, who is the people who caught me, captured my imagination and told me that I could be more than the collective sum of the lack of aspiration that everyone had on me because of my postcode and my surname and what my mum and dad did or did not do as it happened, it was youth work or non-school provision. I do not like to say an alternative education because it is education, and often it is educating and capturing the imaginations of a cohort of young people who are at greatest risk of negative behaviours for themselves, their families and go on to perhaps be the custodians of some of the social ills that cost the NHS and our criminal justice system and our social work provision, the greatest burdens. A young person who causes trouble in my view is a troubled young person, they have been raised like that and youth work as a sector works with something around, I think it is a bit higher because there is a lot of informality, 400,000 young people per year, that is a huge number. I do not think that it has that parity of esteem nationally. I think that we still suppose that as far as possible young people should stay at school and where that is appropriate, I support that. Youth work in schools is really important. The ability to have a relationship with a young people based on respect and not just rules are top-down power dynamic. An ability to say, we need to support you on your achievement journey as much as your attainment journey to go where that needs to go as opposed to the prescription of an outcome being set at the start of S1. For a lot of young people it is important because it is the light of Barbara Bush that said that the first teacher you ever have is your mum and dad, the first classroom you have is home. We see such a crossover as we all do, even in this committee, between what happens outside of this room before you turn up for work or put on your student or MSP hat. That affects how we feel. We are creatures of emotions and what youth work is able to do is meet young people where they are at and provide a service that fits them, which often helps to re-engage in school. I set up a social enterprise in North Edinburgh called the Scran Academy last year. We are taking school refusers, or very heavily non-attenders, and they are coming along with the work that we do based on the community. We are working with chefs in industry, we are putting them through co-offications, they are getting rehist, they are getting national threes and fours, and they feel in a sense of achievement for the first time because we respect them and work with them. That is a tale that is common in the communities that have the biggest challenges. That was true for me, and I think that there are a lot of people working very hard on a shoestring to try to do that for some of the what we call the hardest to reach young people, but something that is just complicated. Gillian, you wanted to come in very briefly. I want to enter a question to Liz's line of questioning around peripthetic specialist teachers and music that has been mentioned and of course PE, when I come from a rural area. What I have found is that those decisions are often made at local council, education committee level. You mentioned central government funding into education, but we have a patchy situation. In Aberdeenshire, for example, visiting specialists are being cut by the current administration. We are referred to as kicking a ball about by the convener of the education committee, rather than what you have described as being an enriching and access for people who would not ordinarily have access to music tuition to get that for free. Is there a case for taking the decisions around the spend in terms of those extra provision, which is so important, away from that? You asked about central government funding. Effectively, what you are asking for is ring-fencing of education spend. That is the position of the EIS in relation to how education should be funded. We would be in favour of the reinstatement of ring-fenced funding to local authorities for education, for the provision of education, so that is our position on that. That would extend to all aspects of what kids experience in terms of their education, whether it be what they get in terms of PE, whether it be their instrumental music engagement. Everything that we parcel up as education, we would want to see the funding for it delivered in that way. We have national priorities, but at a local level, if the view is different, then that impacts on those kids at that local level. I wonder if I could ask John Louton and Finlay Laffity about not narrowing the attainment gap but narrowing the achievement gap. I guess the question for our committee is, in this world of political measurement, because we all get judged on the outcomes that we do or do not achieve. I absolutely take the point about narrowing the achievement gap. How do we best measure that achievement gap and how can we show progress? We measure what we value, or indeed we try to measure what we think we understand. There is a phrase called soft skills. In my view, in my experience, as a youth worker, a practitioner and an NLP coach, they are not soft anymore. We understand the competencies around confidence, communication skills and a positive attitude—what drives attitudes. We can start to measure them. CBI are crying out for that. It is not about a lack of technical prowess or skills that make young people unable to be effective at their jobs or, indeed, any of us. Sometimes it is turning up with a willingness to work—an attitude of self-belief and confidence to get out of there and make that work. We can start to measure that on a mixture of self-evaluation for the user on that journey and feedback from professionals that are wrapped around them and understand that it is much about knowledge and aptitudes. It has to be made alongside confidence and attitude as well. I remember 15 years ago, when speaking at myself, as someone who felt like nobody expected anything of me, I started to live down to that expectation that there was a lack of confidence. Often it is the longer-term flexible interventions that can support young people to build a positive relationship. We say to young people, why do you come to what we run, but you are not going to school?  It is not about bad teaching, per se. It is about a different dynamic. It is about understanding these soft skills. Getting the kid to put down his hoodie for the first time and have a conversation with anyone in the eye is a big win. It recognises the baby steps that make that. That is what leads ultimately to when you have chief executives or leaders sitting around these committees speaking during those hours when the kid is doing well at school. There is often a positive adult relationship or a spark of self-belief through other interventions that made that work. That sits alongside when you have that rapport with a young person whose lives are often a series of biographies of failed adult relationships—often well-meaning, but sometimes ill-placed. You can get away with something more. I know that young people do stuff at what we do because of who we are and how we treat them as much as what we ask them to do. Value for money around youth work and community learning interventions offer so much to the public person in terms of hard outcomes by delivering what we still call soft skills. John Swinney says that the life skills, soft skills and whatever we want to call them are vital and do not naturally fall out of the qualification framework. We do an annual survey of the wellbeing of young people. It is called the youth index. This year, the numbers that we got on confidence, motivation and working in teams were at its lowest end for eight years. I think that it is interesting in terms of how we put something in place that sets a metric around that. Unless you measure it, does it happen? I am not sure that it does. Clearly, it is very important that all of our corporate partners are saying that skills are important and that academics are okay, but what is really important are values. What is really important to us is the ability to work in a team and the ability to be resilient when you face constant challenges and problems. We should be listening out there to what those employers have got to say. How do we address that best as a nation? Perhaps by setting some metrics for schools and headteachers to follow. I will bring you in next, but I will bring in Ruth at this point. I will go backwards a little bit. The convener opened with costs, and we have heard a weight of evidence about the impact of the cost of a school day. We have spoken specifically about curriculum materials. I would like to hear your reflections on the other stuff. I suppose that it speaks to the youth work and activity bits of it as well, because, even if that is being provided for free, barriers are getting there and there are other things that can get in the way. Just your reflections on the impact of that and what work can be done. I suppose that, specifically, we have legislation that says that education should be free. What more do we need to do in policy terms to make sure that that is the case? We went out to parents to ask them their views. The cost of the school day was a big issue, the cost of uniforms, the cost of travel. We have heard all of that. That is a massive issue. It is a massive barrier. For parents whose circumstances have changed and they find themselves no longer able to afford the school trips—we talked earlier about how we seem to have a competition in schools now to see how exotic we can make our school trips and how inaccessible those are for very many families—it really becomes a massive barrier. We are restricting the experience of young people. I have a real sense, since it is a personal view, that when we are talking about the attainment gap, very often what we are talking about is the experience gap. If young people are not able to experience the activities and the school trips, if their home circumstances are such that they simply cannot go away for that weekend or go away on that, or go to the orchestra or go to the show or even, in some cases, take part in the club, we are restricting their experience. That is an absolute fundamental. In school, there are many things that can be done because we do not have to have exotic school trips. We do not have to have school uniforms with braiding that changes every year. We do not have to have those highly individualised uniforms. I think that there is a fundamental there about how schools address the issue, because in every school in Scotland we have families who are living in poverty. That is the truth, and it may not be visible, it may not be recognised, but that will be the truth. It is not just the schemes where families are living in poverty. We have to address that as a much wider issue, but there are things that schools can do, and we would say also that there are things that parent groups in schools can do to support families who are struggling. We were talking in the informal session earlier just a little bit about other countries and how they ensure that when they have rhetoric around commitment to social justice principles, they ensure that one part of the policy framework aligns and articulates well with another part. While we are talking about how we can mitigate the impact of poverty and education, we also need to look at what happens externally to education, because the drivers for poverty life are beyond the school gates. The EIS has been saying this for well over a decade now because it has been a long-standing campaign issue of ours. We are a trade union as well as a professional association, so, as a trade union, we have concern about poverty as it exists in society beyond the experiences of children. We need to look at things such as the cost of housing, taxation, social security, earnings and all those things. We need to guard against becoming overly fixed on what schools can do, because schools cannot unilaterally mitigate the impact of poverty on young people's educational experiences. That said, Eileen's perfectly correct that there are things that schools can do and are doing and are increasingly having to do in order to accommodate the growing financial difficulty that many families are finding themselves in. Things like ensuring that school uniform policy is universally acceptable to families as is possible. Things like braiding, school logos and polo shirts are unnecessary fripperies that cost families money and bring about stigma for families that are unable to afford them. We need to be talking to local authorities and to our headteachers about uniform policy that is universally affordable. We need to talk about clothing grants as well, because we have a situation that continues in Scotland whereby there is huge variability in terms of the clothing grant thresholds of entitlement but also the amounts of money that are paid out. In some local authorities it is £20 and in other local authorities it is £120. The Poverty Truth Commission has indicated the average cost of school uniform to be £129.50 per year, so some of those clothing grants are falling far short of just what the minimum requirements are. Things like charity and fundraising events, the EIS has issued advice to members about two or three years ago that asked for all aspects of school policy to be equality checked, to be equity checked, to make sure that the number of asks around fundraising were not too great, to make sure that the number of opportunities for children and their families to participate in fundraising drives were diverse so that it is not always about families bringing in money or the same families being asked to contribute, no? Maybe four or five times in the course of a session, but there are other things that families, parents and other members of the school community can do in order to contribute to fundraising efforts. We also issued advice around out-of-school learning homework. There is cost attached to that as well. We had a survey recently on the response to which around 45-46 per cent of our members were saying that there is still an increased incidence of children being unable to participate in homework activities that had ICT linked to them because families cannot afford broadband or they do not have the hardware that allows kids to participate in that way. We really need schools and local authorities to be thinking about all those things and shaping their policy around those issues and making sure that all aspects of school policy ethos are as inclusive as possible. Ruth Davidson I do not know if there are other people wishing to come in. I suppose that what I would say is that we are very clear that this is not just about schools. However, as it is the education committee, we do hone in on that. Some of the evidence that we had last week was that what happens in the classroom, if we are talking about attainment, is the important thing. It is the thing that can help the attainment gap. I am interested to hear from other people as well. I think that there is a well-documented relationship between poverty and attainment. The Princess Trust has a charity, along with a range of others in the sector. That is what we are trying to support here. It is the focus on the 5 or 10 per cent of young people who come from backgrounds that are perhaps disadvantaged. I am just giving them a different site on what is possible and doing that in a way that allows them to think about what they can achieve and get there. Maybe using a different path and a different way of engaging with them in the classroom and within the school. Sometimes it is about taking them out of the classroom. Sometimes it is about giving them an exciting and fun experience and changing their whole thinking about what education is and what it can do for them. However, having that focus on poverty and on disadvantage is what this sector does best. It supports that partnership with teachers and with schools to get the most out of what those young people are able to achieve. There is amazing talents in there. We just need to find a different way of unlocking it. We have some of the answers, not all of them, but we can support that. I will start off by targeting my question to Andrea Bradley in terms of your powerful contribution to one of the previous questions. In your briefing note to the committee that family income is the most influential factor in children's in-school attainment and wider achievement. Therefore, closing the poverty-related attainment gap requires an honest commitment to addressing structural inequalities that emerge from policy decisions in those areas that are beyond their locus of the education system, which must equally and fully be aligned to social justice principles. 59 per cent of respondents to your survey indicated that they have seen an increase in the number of children attending their schools who are experiencing poverty. The EIS has clearly carried out a lot of valuable research into the issue. The rest of your briefing note covers important areas of education and effectively calls for a lot more resources in each of those areas. Is it the case that many factors external to education are causing poverty to rise dramatically according to your own statistics? The burden for that is now falling on our classrooms, teachers and staff and, of course, the education budget. Absolutely. While we have significantly increased incidents of poverty and all the educational challenges that that brings, we have seen reductions to all many aspects of the resources that are available to education. Even if we just think about teacher numbers and compare what our aspirations for our children and young people are and the resources that we have with, for example, a country such as Finland. Finland features very well in international comparisons around equity and excellence, but it has significantly healthier teacher-to-pupil ratios than we do, so its average class size is around 19 hours and is currently sitting at 23.5 hours. We know that there is a huge range in addition to that, such as ball statistics. We have classes of up to 33, even in the broad general education, when we are delivering non-practical subjects. There is something in there about teacher numbers. They have reduced by around 3,500 since 2007, and there has only been some recovery of teacher numbers recently because of the injection of the pupil equity funding, which again in the informal session we were talking about has been relatively short-term. It is not guaranteed long-term sustainable funding, so there is an issue there. We also talked about additional support needs. We have seen significant cuts in the number of teachers who have specialism in additional support needs provision. We know that there is a huge correlation between socioeconomic disadvantage and children who have additional support needs. While we have legislation in place that promises a lot for children and their families, those who have additional support needs, we do not have the resources in place to deliver on what that legislation promises. I have talked about rising class sizes and the benefits of that for kids with additional support needs for kids who have social and emotional difficulties. When you want to introduce creative pedagogies that are not so much about rote learning and rigid forms of assessment that allow for much more metacognition and collaborative learning, learning that is enjoyable for the young people, like some of our colleagues here from partner organisations have described. That requires smaller class sizes in order to be able to deliver that kind of experience day on day on day on day. Those are the kinds of investments of resource that are required if we really want to bring about outcomes that are much more strongly aligned to high quality and equitability. The bottom line is that the call on resources for education has largely been driven by having to cope with the impact of poverty, driven by factors outwith the classroom. Is there anything that you can give about the statistics of 59 per cent response that indicates that there has been an increase in the number of children attending their schools who are experiencing poverty? What are the factors behind that 59 per cent statistic? That was in terms of kids' appearance at school. The school policy is that kids should wear uniform, perhaps not being able to sustain wearing of uniform day on day on day, kids not being able to participate in school trips, kids not bringing homework, kids turning up for PE lessons without the requisite kit, kids not having materials at home, for example, when they were giving bits of hope what could be quite nice things to do at school, like making something, making a castle or even making a card, not having glue and glitter and the kinds of things that probably all of our children would have had at home and ready to let their disposal, not having things like that. Kids actually come into school and telling teachers that they were hungry, kids stealing food from one another at times kids stealing items of equipment from one another, kids appearing to be visibly unwell, pale and pallor, complaining of headaches, kids having unexplained absences from school, so those were all the factors that were combining to suggest to our teachers that there was increased incidence of poverty and they thought that those things were attributable to the income circumstances of the families in their school communities. Before I move on to Ross, I would like to ask Stella a couple of questions. There was a couple incidents earlier on about the talk of confidence and the stress that has been put on pupils. I wonder if you have got any comment to make about the lack of confidence that some pupils seem to have going into schools and the amount of stress that poverty seems to be leading them into in schools and making it much more difficult for them to achieve that? One of the things that I was thinking about earlier on when we were talking in our small group, we were talking about parents and their engagement with the school and I was wondering about parents' experiences of school life themselves and then rolling into becoming a parent themselves and going maybe back to the same school that they had attended and how that then impacts on their children, because they maybe do not engage well. That was just to decide, because I was thinking about that when we were talking earlier on. We provide school counselling in high schools and primary schools. I know that this is about senior schools, but we do a lot of work in primary schools as well. That really is about trying to support children and young people with the difficulties that they may be experiencing in their home life. They may be experiencing trauma, they are coming in with high levels of anxiety, aggression and high levels of stress that are coming through from their life. You spoke earlier on about what we learn from our home life and everything that we know about relationships that we learn from home. That is the area that we are supporting in school, we are supporting emotional health and wellbeing. If children are not ready to learn, there is no amount of other extracurricular activities or focus on literacy. None of that is going to work if that child is not ready to learn. I think that that is where we are with the services that we provide. Have you seen an upsurge and the necessity for your services? Is there an upsurge? What is driving that? We are now working across eight local authorities. We get inquiries about counselling on a weekly basis from new schools. What is driving the upsurge is the ability to be able to put counsellors in schools because they have schools of peff funding to do that. That is driving the requests? That is driving the requests. When we go and speak to head teachers in a group environment, you can visibly see them counting or thinking through the number of pupils that they already have who would benefit from counselling. It is more pupils than we will be able to support in a school year, but they are making the list in their heads as they are talking to us. Do you see the need for it being greater than before, or are you not in a position to say that because you can only work with what you get? I do not think that I am in a position to say that, because the schools were not in a position to put counselling in place. If we look at the waiting lists for CAMHS, for example, there is obviously a massive demand for services, but that is for the real high tariff issues. There is also a whole raft of other children who would benefit from support. If we are thinking about early intervention, counselling would be very much early intervention. What we are experiencing is that when we are starting in schools, although we talk to teachers about—or the headteachers or deputy heads—about trying to mix and match what they are referring to, they are referring all the high tariff children. What that means is that the counselling is much more longer term. We try to talk about a six to eight weeks block of counselling, but what we are seeing is that we have children in counselling for those who started in August and who are still in counselling with us. That means that the real early intervention for the children who are not at that level is not happening. We are also finishing our first year with the PEF funding and moving into the next year. As we are seeing in schools, we may have one day of counselling and are now requesting two. I have a school where there are four days and they are looking to increase to five days. Now that we are in schools, the schools can see the benefit of the counselling. We provide them with full evaluation, so they have information that they can then use when they are reporting back for the PEF funding. I say that that service is only going to grow. I am interested in your thoughts on the existing or historical financial assistant that is there. We have already mentioned school coding grants, EMAs, set nationally and free school meal policies. How has that been working in practice? For us to understand, as a committee, how we move forward from where we are now, there has been honest evaluation of what is in place, what has been successful, where have there been issues with uptake, where have there been issues of inconsistency between local authorities, what hasn't has not been successful? To start off with a broad question, what are your thoughts on those existing financial assistance packages and the difference or not that they are actually making at present? I would say that they are extremely variable. Again, one of the questions that we asked parents was about free school meals and did they know how to claim, where they helped to claim, and that there is a massive variability in the paper that I submitted to you. Many of the systems that local authorities are now adopting, which are online systems, are a massive barrier to families. In fact, we know that some local authorities have a transaction charge, so if you buy your meals for your child on a weekly basis, you will pay four times that transaction charge compared to a parent who is able to pay monthly. The reason that you are buying weekly is because you do not have the money to buy for a month, and yet you are penalised for that fact and simply getting access to online systems is a massive problem for some parents. Clearly, there are stigma issues and so on around claiming whatever it is, whether it is for school uniforms or meals or whatever. Again, we talked about that earlier. Nutrition in schools is a massive issue, and particularly in the secondary sector, we know that most youngsters bail out of school and go down the street and buy rubbish, which prepares them for an afternoon's learning. We also worry about the quality—parents tell us that they worry about the quality of what is available in school. It is back to that thing about getting the basics right. If we do not feed our children well, if they are not ready to learn because they have had a good night's sleep and they are comfortably clothed appropriately for the weather and so on, how can we expect schools to do what they can do? My sense is that we really have to look at the fundamentals and get those right before we start putting stick-in plasters and additional stuff in place. Of course, we are going to have kids who have behavioural issues if they are hyped up on red bull and sausage rolls. What else can we expect? We really have to get those things sorted and proper nutrition and supporting families. 99 per cent of them want the best for their children, but they are living in some cases under extreme stress and difficulties. That communicates itself to youngsters and they come into school anxious and worried about what their home circumstances are. We cannot wonder, therefore, that kids are unable to participate fully in school and to learn. To me, there are fundamentals that we have to address before we start thinking about all the other. I echo that in the survey that I referenced our teachers saying that, increasingly, kids were coming to school without money for snacks, no money for the tuck shop, telling them that they were hungry, teachers are buying food, bringing it to school, feeding kids themselves. The EIS policy position is universal provision of free school meals. We know that that has been a benefit to the P1 and P3s who are accessing that provision currently, but hunger does not know age boundaries. We would like to see that provision extended to all children and young people of school age in order that they can have all the benefits that Ileens has already outlined. Just to pick up on the point that was made about the issues of stigma and the issues of a lack of uptake of entitlements that people are entitled to, the charges that you mentioned around online usage. The social security committee in Parliament took some evidence around the success in Glasgow city council with automatic payments and automatic enrolment. Is that something that anyone has any experience of seeing the outcomes of and has any thoughts on? It is abundantly clear from all the evidence that we have received that the point that Andrea McLean made earlier about poverty starting outside of schools and if we really want to cause the attainment gap it needs to be tackled outside of schools as well. For the purposes of our work as a committee looking at how schools can interact with that wider network, it was mentioned in the small group next door earlier on that some schools are using peff money for homeschool link workers or various job titles for those members of staff. How can we use schools and the existing support that is available through schools and the existing staff as well as other resources to create a more effective link with the wider social security system, with wider social services, so that we are actually using the school as a hub, as a base for that wider support package that we need to tackle the poverty that children live in rather than take a sticking plaster approach once they arrive in the classroom? We know from that survey data that some schools are already developing approaches that mean that either support staff, admin support staff or teachers themselves are helping families to access their entitlements. That is good and laudable, but we also know at the same time that local authorities are having to make cuts to the numbers of support staff that they have and increasingly the workload burdens for the staff who remain with administrative responsibilities is increasing, so we have to do something about that. While it is good that in some schools teachers are able to provide that essential link or that essential support to families in order that they can access their entitlements, we know that the workload of teachers is off the scale at the moment as well, so that requires additional human resource input in order that all families can have that kind of additional support and it is universal across the country and not just where schools have just about managed to provide somebody for an hour a week who can do it. I was just going to say that schools are in some cases bringing in family support, and as you say, it is different titles, which link not just with social security but with youth work and link with the third sector locally so that it is about pooling community resources because schools sit in their community. They are not islands, they sit in their community, their families live in that community, so there is a strong case for that, but my concern is that it is short-lived, it is PEF funding, and if that is withdrawn, then that role goes. Finlayne John, I have just briefly been interested in the experience that you have where you are working with young people who are in education but outside of classroom environments, John. What your experience of interaction with the social security system, with social services, with local authorities is and how amenable and open they are, and if that varies from local authority to local authority, when it comes to working with yourself on issues such as making sure that families receive what they are entitled to? I said huge issues of under climbing, huge issues. Sometimes people's lives are so chaotic and fractured that they just do not even—I speak about this—have siblings younger than me who are homeless, they refuse to go into the drug den that we call homeless shelters, and they are in their 20s, same as me—oh, no, I am 30—anyway, similar age as me, and they are just so chaotically removed when it is your own sibling. I have the audacity to sit on a parliamentary table and speak when I know I have two brothers who are dealing with mental health issues that become the more obvious products of my mother-in-law and father's roots. They are not even climbing benefits. They do not know where to start. I think that there is a fundamental dehumanisation that happens with what we call the, ironically sometimes, the social security system, whether that is watching mum get her benefits, family allowance, child support, and that was the structure of the week. I then went to the chemist for prescriptioning them back, and now I see it with my brothers, and they are so disengaged. The people that have helped them make steps forward. They went to school from 12 onwards, so a yes school in theory should be the core hub, but sometimes those people—and I was liking it too—living in poverty is a bit like sitting on a chair that's had three of its legs removed. Every part of you tends to keep it going, so the slightest move or wind on meanda you're going to go, and you're not going to get into thinking about how to play with glitter to create a nice piece of poetry or whatever when you're surviving. How do you think about thriving? Think about culture or creativity? Why are you going to think of yourself in an asset model rather than your deficits that everyone knows you for? I think that there's something about how we inject a sense of humanity and dignity within social security. One simple way—or not simple but one obvious way for me—is that I always see the people receiving services look and sound nothing like often the people running them. There's a big class and social norms difference, even down to accents and backgrounds. There's a barrier there that we have to overcome. They feel different. I know I speak about youth work, and I get very annoyed when we use the term school and education interchangeably. It's very different. School is one critical hub of education. I think that there's an exciting opportunity for Scotland to take stock of where in reality we are and see that for me sometimes asking teachers who are overworked and stressed and all those other pressures to be able to fight poverty and still financial literacy and budget skills, understand the pressures of mum and dad and help you understand your rights post-school around benefits, be able to think about your future career options, overcome your mental health issues, which is probably the largest presenting need I see in my services, chronic self-confidence, lack of confidence, huge issues around anger management. It's a bit like asking the optician to fix your toothache. I think we need to look at the national youth work strategy of Scotland. I've had two of them. The third one's coming up. I've not been involved in that internal conversation. I would like to hear this committee think about how do we look at holding pressure for a truly innovative national youth work strategy, third-time working, maybe, around saying how do we truly recognise the myriad and menu of pathways for young people? That bottom 20 per centile to say that sometimes the classroom for them with rules focused on attainment around academia is a bit like them saying they've got toothache and you send them to the optician. How do we recognise what shouldn't be called alternative education but non-school education pathways, like what many of us run, alongside school for re-engagement for employability? I think that there's an opportunity to recognise youth work, not just as about coming out of a custard cream after school or having a game of pool or going to collect your badges. I think that there's a real opportunity to recognise truly accredited achievement as well as formal attainment and to really say that one size fails most. I genuinely think that I don't see that happening. I see a lot of places that we're called supportive learning, which is ironically very unsupportive and there's not much learning, that the dark corridors at the top of the school. I say that in the last two weeks of experience and I hate to say this, I compared it and it broke my heart because one time when I worked with young people I loved them as much as I wanted to help them and I think that's important because I know that's what I needed at that age. Sometimes they're a bit like, you know when you see a cat and dog home behind the cage, the puppy's desperate to get out, I sometimes see the absolute issues they face but they're in a very rigid system that can't help them, sometimes exacerbates the problems and it shouldn't be for them to do. We need to recognise there's a whole coalition of people ready to empower young people, whatever form they come in. We talk about young people as if they're all the same. We know a classroom has a range of different issues. We know a youth work service has a range of different provisions. The alternative school down at Spartons, the work of Helmond Dundee, I think we need to recognise through the new youth work strategy, the good to see ownership and the committee push it to say let's do something truly innovative where we understand that if schools not working much earlier we can work with them to effectively signpost young people, to get the qualifications or the confidence or the job they need to lead their life, sorry. That's a very powerful argument for having diversity within our education and valuing young people and where they are. Would you agree with me that there are circumstances where the inflexibility of school and presumption about expectation of young people means that we therefore need services that are not school? I wonder how we hold on to a commitment to compulsory education up to 16 and that we value that and not allow, frankly, some schools simply to say, you're in too hard a box for me, so there must be some provision somewhere else for you. How do you integrate what you've described very powerfully with an entitlement of young people to have their needs met within the school system? I think that we have to recognise that we don't have universal compulsory education, doesn't it exist? We have lots of young people outside school, they just don't turn up or they get put on a part-time timetable that they don't engage with anyway. I think that it comes, sorry to be soft with the first answer, is recognising and measuring and truly understanding the impact of non-school education. In a youth club Fetlar, where we run a kitchen called Scran academy social enterprise, they run a business. We get them qualifications, so I think that we can realise that schools alone don't always provide qualifications in non-school environments can do that. I think that there's also a big exercise to audit and to understand what makes youth work in non-formal learning approaches that are effective, such as relationships and other things. It's exciting stuff, outward bound stuff. How do we dovetail that into the classroom, but also sometimes recognise in the principle that maybe the classroom is not the place for the young person to be? I don't know if we have that yet. I accept that completely. That was a supplementary. Finlay, you want to come on. I think that a point, perhaps answering something that Ross asked earlier as well, but I think that where it works best, where it's most effective for us, and it's not consistent, it's not universal, is where you've got more of a team approach. You've got a group of professionals from the youth work environment who are able to mentor and educate the educators a wee bit. Bring the teachers over into that kind of hybrid space, maybe wrong word there, but giving them the skills that allow them to be youth workers, supported by professional youth workers, but done with pupil support teams help. You create a team that's much more effective and much more rounded. I support what John says about that. There comes a point when you need to do some of that outside the classroom, and it's way more effective if you do that because you get a complete burst of personal development and soft skills development, which is so much more intensive if you can do that as a group and learn from each other as a group. Can I come back to you? We're going to move on. Gillian's got a question in the same field, so I'm sure that she'll be there. Yes, so following on from Ross's questions and the very powerful answers there, I want to talk about and ask your opinion on the later stages, the senior phase of school and, as young people are preparing to leave school. There are a couple of things that were mentioned by some of the MSYPs in the informal briefing that we had about the cost of moving on from school and the cost of accessing what should be opportunities for young people. For example, fees for UCAS, fees for if they have to have remarking of their exams, any kind of barriers that might be accessing, financial barriers that are accessing, like interviews to get into college or the apprenticeships, can you give me an overview of where we are with that and if those are real issues? In relation to fees for remarks, those fees should be met by local authorities and not by individual families, so that shouldn't be a barrier to families who experience financial difficulty. The policy is that local authorities pick up the tab for any costs incurred by remarks. The point that you make about access to interviews is a good one. I think that employers need to think about that. Employers who are conscious of the needs of their prospective employees will cover the costs of transport to interviews, so there perhaps has to be a conversation between Scottish Government and representatives of employers about the need for some young people—it should be a universal provision—to struggle to meet the costs of travel and for employers to take responsibility for that. In relation to any fees with access to university education, is that something that you have heard? Our members have not fed information specifically to us about that, but I would consider that that would be an area of expense that should be covered by the local authority. Do we think that the EMA is sufficient? John, you have been talking about your area of where you are giving qualifications to young people who are outside mainstream schooling, but are they qualified for EMA if they are not in school? Young people all have a different relationship. It depends partly on what level of engagement they have with formal education. Some are full-time, some are part-time, some do not go to school at all. I do not know the exact criteria of cut-off for that. I just want to go back to the use of PEF and, indeed, the attainment challenge funding in relation to changing teaching methods or, in some ways, questions of the EIS, but I am also conscious that you mentioned PEF being used for filling teaching posts, so I would be grateful if you could give any numbers or provide any evidence to the extent of that, because I think that we are all struggling a bit to know how genuinely how PEF is being funded. I think that, Stella, you gave examples of how PEF funding was being used in some schools that you are dealing with for counselling services. Again, try to understand what is actually happening with PEF funding and what is working and what is not being so successful in terms of tackling poverty, given that that is what this inquiry is meant to be about. For the EIS, we have gathered data on that, but it is a pretty variable picture. In some schools, staff are being employed and deployed to focus specifically on literacy and numeracy initiatives. There are some people who are working on health and wellbeing initiatives. There has been the reinstatement of homeschool link workers to keep that vital connection live between what is going on in school and what is going on in the home. There have been initiatives around making sure that every kid in the class gets to go to the theatre once in the academic year or gets to go on a residential trip once in the academic year, so the picture is very variable. On the point of staff, you are fairly described, have those all been one-year contracts on the basis of the local authority? Yes, it is around 500 teachers who have been employed directly through PEF funding. They will be one-year to two-years maximum contracts. Is that the similar picture of the counselling services that your organisation has been provided? Yes, we have been contracted on an annual basis for counselling. We are now starting to see schools indicating what they want to do next year. One of the interesting challenges for us has been the whole procurement process in some local authorities. Some local authorities have been quite relaxed in terms of allowing the schools to choose what service they want to put in place. That has been fantastic. The school gets to choose the provider if it is counselling, they might have a choice of providers and it is up to them where they go with that. What we have found is that some local authorities have said that they can only provide counselling from that organisation to an amount of money, say £50,000, for example. Once they have the £50,000 mark, the school has to pick another provider. Even if the school has procurement rules in that local authority, we have agreed with them that we are going to put a counsellor in place. That then went back to the local authority and they were told that they were not allowed to do that. That is an incredibly bureaucratic process. That would cost money. Absolutely. I think that there are other issues around procurement as well, where the school has said that we want school counselling in place. Procurement does not really know how to identify who is a good provider of school counselling. We have seen situations in which it has gone through procurement, it is supposed to be a school counselling service and then we see adverts for that service where the workers, not counsellors, do not even need to be counsellors or have counselling qualifications, but that was a school counselling service that was procured. Do you think that the principle of giving headteachers the responsibility to use this money in the way in your case for counselling is appropriate, but it is being held back by rules and regulations set either in Edinburgh or in a local town hall? That is definitely an issue for us. We have come across exactly the same situation. I had a teacher who wanted to put in a kitchen so that she could be working on nutrition. A year later, she is still waiting because of procurement. Slow things up. All things do not happen. I think that it is interesting because we are now going into year 2. In some areas, they were a wee bit more relaxed about it because they needed to spend their PEF money, they needed to get out of the door and that the schools wanted counselling. There is this. We have been told that we are going into procurement next year, so we could be working in a school this year. We could still have children who will be picked up in the new school year. We might not win that contract. Is that Prince's trust experience as well, Finlay? The same battle scars. We are in about 125 schools and a historical position of local government funding for that work, which followed on from the Concordat, where we were funded directly by the Scottish Government eight or ten years ago. We are now in the hands of more than 300 headmasters. The procurement experience is hugely patchy. I think that one of the unintended consequences of all of this might be that, at least for a transition period, some organisations, particularly national organisations, are faced with losing ground rather than gaining ground with things that are clearly working. Does Education Scotland, as the principal clango of the Government responsible for pushing out good advice and so on, play a role in trying to sort those problems out? No, who knows? It may do. I think that we have, with others, opened the conversation. As always, there will be a solution here if we are collegiate about it. I think that if we can have sensible conversations about how we make what we do more visible to every headteacher, but I think that it is about procurement and how we make procurement work efficiently for everyone and not create a bureaucratic nightmare. The principle is that if Government policy is to provide direct funding through PEF to headteachers for the range of services that you are offering schools, the headteacher absolutely has to be able to make the call and get on with it. There are important checks and balances in the procurement process. While any bureaucracy that is attached to procurement has to be proportionate, let us not suggest that we just forget about procurement. We are talking about public money and sensible, well-founded rationale for the spending of public money. There have to be checks and balances around the qualifications of the people who are being brought in to deliver particular services for our children and young people. We also want to make sure that, if we are committed to social justice principles, that the organisations that are working with schools are paying fair wages to their employees and that they have health and safety mechanisms in place and so on. Procurement is important for a safeguarding perspective as well. I am presuming that your argument would be that those responsibilities that we should entirely accept is a heavy burden on headteachers who already have far too many heavy burdens to bear. If those things are all left to headteachers, when do they get done? Absolutely. Our headteachers are very anxious about additional bureaucracy attached to PEF spending, attainment challenge spending and so on. Of course, as colleagues mentioned earlier, they welcome the additional funding to schools, but it brings a hefty additional workload for them. One final question. I thought that the argument about achievements is really important. Do any of the panellists believe that there is an argument for some kind of position in schools that is effectively not a principal teacher of history but a principal teacher of achievement? Or is that already happening? Is that through pupil support already happening? Do you think that there is a better way in which we could do that in our school system? I generally do not think that I am a naive person, but Curriculum for Excellence was supposed to open up the curriculum, provide diverse opportunities and diverse pathways. We have heard from Finlay and John about their approaches. As a parent, that was what I thought Curriculum for Excellence was offering my child in secondary school. I think that there is something about the intractability of our education system to embrace curriculum for excellence and to do the things that we, as a naive parent, thought was part of that package. It should not be separate and different. That should be in every school that those opportunities are open. How that is done, a teacher of opportunity, perhaps, but we need to see particularly our secondary schools, look at curriculum for excellence and what it offered and do it, and not just do what they have always done but call it something else. Oliver, you have got a supplementary question. I just wanted to ask, just when we were back on equity funding, do you think that there has been sufficient support and training to help teachers to navigate the bureaucracy both around procurement but also to understand exactly how the money can be used and how it can deliver the best value for young people? I think that what has not happened yet is universal experiences of professional learning for teachers around the impact of poverty and what makes a difference. It is almost like cart before the horse has happened here. Money has been distributed to schools to spend on initiatives that are supposed to bring about reductions in the impact of poverty, but there has not been the groundwork done, I would argue, to best equip schools, headteachers to be able to make those decisions. We know that Education Scotland is trying to provide some advice around that. There has been some evidence gathered from other parts of the world around the kinds of interventions that might work. There are some academics who think that some of that data is a bit spurious and questionable in terms of its validity. There was a rush to provide schools with pupil equity funding, a rush for schools to come up with plans to outline how they were going to spend it. There was a lot of pressure on headteachers around about this time last session to come up with something. I think that there has been a rush at that. Although we want additional funding to schools, we are not entirely convinced in the EIS that that was the means by which to have done that. Regardless of how the funding is being delivered, whether it is directly to schools or whether it is from local authorities, there has to be enhanced and universal professional learning for teachers around the nature causes and consequences of poverty as they manifest themselves in the classroom. The EIS is going to be working quite closely with the Scottish Government in the coming years around that particular agenda. From our perspective, the most successful local authorities in terms of the pay funding and the ease of working with schools was where local authorities put together a preferred list and options for their headteachers. The local authority had informally gone through the procurement process, so they were only recommending quality services. That, for us, was where we saw the greatest impact. I wanted to ask about wider achievement and its impact on attainment. My question is more directly asked to John and Finlay. I have been particularly struck this morning, John, about the evidence that you have given us about the personal interventions that you had and the benefit that they had for you and the work that your organisation does to help and encourage young people. We know that education is not just about what goes on in the school. Learning is not just about school, it is about lots and lots of different things. Similarly, I was struck by some of the evidence that the Prince's Trust has given us about the work that it does in schools. If we accept that all the additional support and additional education that young people get has an impact and a benefit on their attainment, I suppose that the question that I really want to ask you is what can be done at national and local level to make sure that that is fully delivered and that young people are allowed to take full advantage of all those things. I think that it probably chimes a bit with Tavish's question about the role of broader achievement alongside attainment. Sometimes, they are the same thing. You can recognise great achievement within attainment, but it is not always different. I do not know, it is just something that I was thinking about. I was sitting there thinking, what is the purpose of attainment and achievement? It sounds obvious, but that recognition of self-development and personal social growth in one form or the other, I do not know if I would go as far as I have thought about it, but having a principal teacher of achievement, if you like, there are other ways of doing that. Ultimately, the custodian in a school of achievement should also be the head teacher alongside attainment. I asked one of the head teachers, if we work with a head of coming here, is there anything that they would want to directly say? They said that the bespoke curriculum, creative partnerships and recognising what we are good at and how we need to work with others is what makes us have achievement and attainment at the heart of education for our young people. I have always had a thought for a long time, Mary, about having a good quality community or youth worker in every school. You want to make sure that in and with schools, in terms of the youth work broader, non-rules-based pedagogies, are in an ability to be more innovative and try things out, smaller intents, one-to-one mentoring opportunities that the Prince's trust does so well, and I know the final reference on that as well. I think that there is an opportunity, and I know that I mentioned it with this new national youth work strategy, to really be creative with how Government works with the sector, to recognise nationally, putting in place the helpful pedestals in which we as local service providers can hook to and engage with and recognise that parity of esteem for non-school education actors and delivering that. Would you be confident enough if that was done at national level that it would filter down sufficiently to local level to ensure that it was delivered at local level? You always have to be confident, though the alternatives are not worth thinking about in a sense. If it is done in an intelligent and secure and smart way, if it is multi-year, if there is some funding alongside it to enable the sector and understanding with research what metrics and measurements work, because just because we sound good as a youth work set to the challenges to us too, we need to understand scale, we need to understand when we don't work, we need to understand how to make sure that we're compliant and ethical and capable in the same way that we would ask that of others. If it's innovative and it's supported financially, I think that there's a real opportunity if the sector owns it. Financing is the key to it. If we're listening to what employers are telling us, they're saying that these skills, these life skills, soft skills, values are actually really important to us. Currently, we don't have a metric, or I'm not aware of a metric, which is looking at how well or otherwise schools are delivering those soft skills. As organisations, we'll look at stuff like confidence, working with others, setting and achieving goals, managing feelings, reliability attendance. We'll look at those things, we'll measure them. These are the steps that young people who will be successful for us will take. I think that the idea that we have some form of metric that helps us to understand how we're doing as a nation in terms of developing these soft skills and developing these life skills could be incredibly useful in terms of how we develop our workforce for the future. It builds a resilience into that workforce. It builds in the kind of attributes that business is looking for. We can graft on the skills, we can graft on the academic. They're very important, obviously. However, without the core, without the basic building blocks and that spine, we're working from a position of disadvantage. I think that there's something that we could do differently here. That could be quite significant. Some kind of matrix that would show achievement and skill in all its forms? Yes, I think so. I think that we could be clever about how we do it. The curriculum for excellence experiences and outcomes have soft skills embedded in them, and teachers are assessing those things all the time. We've talked about measures, and we need to be careful that we're not looking all the time for quantitative measures. Teachers make qualitative judgments every day, every half hour, about how individual children are doing around those soft skill areas. Those are not easily countable judgments, they're not easily short-handed, but teachers either invert feedback to kids or through discussions with parents or on written profiles, which is really intrinsic to good formative assessment. Teachers are making judgments all the time and helping kids to determine what the next steps in their learning should be, not only in terms of what they need to learn in maths or what's the next thing that they need to do to be able to join sentences together in a paragraph for English, but what they need to do to build their confidence in accessing all aspects of the curriculum. Let's not conduct this discussion in a way that suggests that schools and teachers are not already doing those things, but this doesn't lend itself easily to simple quantitative measurement, and that's not a bad thing. If it doesn't lend itself easily, how do we enable it to do that? To come up with simple quantitative measures, do we want that? Do we want to reduce? Can you say that it doesn't lend itself easily to measuring all of that? Is there something else that you think should be done? Is there some other measure that should be taken to allow teachers to make those assessments? I think that teachers are doing that, teachers are doing that every day, but they're doing it in words, so they're telling kids how confident—I was an English teacher right, so I would talk about kids, and maybe if they were having to do something like a presentation to the class, I would talk about their confidence, maybe from doing it from the last time to this time, and their confidence would manifest itself in terms of tone of voice, ability to look at the audience, using gesture, facial expression, things like that, so you would be making comments about their confidence, but in a way that articulated it for the kids so that they could visualise it, and teachers are doing those things relative to their own subjects all the time, talking about confidence, talking about the levels of contribution that kids make, giving them the little steps that they need to take, showing them the little steps that they need to take in order to just move their confidence on from one learning activity to another. Teachers are doing those things, but it's not a number out of 10 and it's not a grade from A to D. It's words that teachers are using to coach kids. It's basically a coaching approach and encouraging the skills of metacognition so that kids can understand what it is that they are doing when they are taking part in a particular learning activity, the skills that they are demonstrating, the level of skill that they have and what they need to do to move to the next level, if you like, or to strengthen or solidify those skills. However, that is all done in words. It's done in conversation, sometimes written down in words, but it's not numbers and it shouldn't be numbers, because we know from lots of research evidence that simply providing kids with a number out of 10 or a grade from A to D doesn't encourage their future learning, it doesn't encourage it. I've been particularly, it's been quite good to hear from John and Finlay and because we all know, I think that John will agree with me on this, I'm a great believer in beyond the school gates is the real world that many of the young people that we actually are talking about live and how we engage with them and their families is the way forward and is it not the case that we need to look at different ways of doing it? I'll talk about an example that I spoke with. Fergusley Park in my constituency in Paisley might be one of the areas of biggest deprivation in Scotland and the local professional football clubs that we're nefs here based in it as well and they do a lot of work in the community in order to do things like that, but the former chair Stuart Gilmore actually said to local authority and third sector partners at one point, when are you going to stick on some staff into the club to actually do some of the work? Now, I know you mentioned Spartons school, I think it was, and I think I know what that is, but is that not the way we should be looking forward with a lot of these young men and women to be able to engage with them to actually, as you quite rightly say, John, they're not going to school anyway? So we need to find a way to get them these qualifications and find a way to design it in a way that will work for them. Yeah, I think that somebody who works at the coalface but also has worked kind of more macro within policy and national policy and when I run the youth parliament and stuff or chaired it, sorry. You can connect yourself to the aspiration of policy or you can work as you see it and there's sometimes a disjointment there. Spartons is a community football club but it's much more than that and they run a school provision or education provision out with the school but with the school for non-attenders just to answer that point. I always find it weird seeing youth workers because we talk about it like a certain cohort as a profession but in many ways we're all youth workers in a sense, we're all people who work with young people so you can cut it that way as well as that way in sectors and teachers are youth workers, we're young people, they're not kind of some just exam-based different organisation and then it's really important it's powerfully made. In terms of how we recognise without hard metrics, I think one thing is recognition. There's a whole range of non-SEQF awards out there, Druke of Edinburgh awards perhaps being one of the more obvious, John Muir award, youth achievement awards that recognise and capture achievement as well as attainment and that's really important. I think DAV is the second most cited UCAS entry after work experience for young people so we are in some ways capturing achievement in that sense. The other thing that's really important and I'm surprised it's not come up is to ask the young people themselves. I remember I was 13 I think it was and it was dragged out in Muirhouse and to give a deputation to the city of Edinburgh council and I remember standing there and I was speaking about methadone and needles in my stare and pretty hard-ed stuff which for me was normal but I remember saying I sent this, young people are the experts on young people and we know our feelings more than anyone and I hope it doesn't come across as mushy but sometimes that row of empowering young people to self-evaluate rather than be coached or observed or told and this accounts for all industries I think is something we're at risk of overseeing and actually I've never seen young people giving space and they haven't filled it and blown them out of the water and also often with political engagements it's young people that really capture the tone of things and really bring it to heart to what it's worth so I think in terms of looking at wider achievement and perception of how you're doing and achieving alongside feedback there's a big element about young people's voices themselves young people experience in poverty are the experts on that even if they don't realise it and I just picking up on John's point you know I think teachers there was one of the teachers at the informal session that we had earlier and the the point she made about the main difference between working with her sector was that young people got to choose what they did and I think again picking up on Andrea's point you know teachers aren't just about academic they are very much interested in in how they can engage young people in activity that's inspiring them so your point I think George was around football I think there's a number of different things that'll inspire young people it could be the arts it could be dance it could be music we work really closely with albin rovers rangers Celtic to give young people just a different more inspiring setting to maybe consider different things and consider them the thing though for it's a terrible term that will use her to reach families and young people is it not just the fact that you're playing in their space you know if something they want to do the perfect example I use is that mum did a cooking course for fathers in the local area and they went to corporate hospitality and done it they wouldn't have gone to the local centre and done it but they did it because it was at mum and fc you know and mom and dad sat down had a meal with the kids and everything else and it's things like that that were taught with soft skills that people are families are forgetting about as well and it's trying to find a way to just make that connection which no matter what a school or a local authority or anybody does they're always seen as the authority as opposed to someone going to put my polo shirt on you know it's yeah I think that having those different points of reference I was I was born in figures department almost a hundred yards from the stadium but I make having that point of reference for young people which is entirely different from the school and the institution particularly for the groups that I guess we engage with which have tended to disconnect or or not engage in education it's important that you get that lift and that you get that inspiration and you find a way of connecting with what turns them on it's just shows you finally as as Viggy boys get everywhere we get everywhere you cannae keep us doing job this thing can I thank George for a record amount of mentions of st Myrlen and the one championship and I absolutely appreciate this above mentions as well you're not getting a bite of back there's so many different things here but I suppose my presumption is that young people who live in poverty are disadvantaged it makes them more difficult to engage with education and they'll things external to school I mean I can that makes sense to me things external to school are huge determinants I would say that some young people may be living in poverty but they don't live in chaotic families and the danger that we conflate the two and it's simply the fact of the lack of income and there are very basic things we can do about that however I don't know who saw the evidence from the Joseph Rowntree foundation which presents us last week and they made the point that there is evidence that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are achieving better in some places than they are another so it's not just about external factors something happening in schools and within local authorities that are compounding disadvantaged because I agree schools are not on their own or education on its own then either the causes or you know the complications of poverty but they have got the opportunity to mitigate it and some are doing it better than others it would be the argument from that evidence and I wonder what you say from the point of view of the EIS and perhaps from the others as well what is your explanation of that evidence and what can we do about it because you know there is a false characterist characterization I think which says education doesn't take responsibility for any of this and that it's always somebody else's fault and I don't agree with that but you could put a spin in that evidence which suggests that it is about quality of teaching is what's happening in individual schools and individual local authorities. I think it's about a number of things John, I think it's about quality of teaching, I think it's about policy responses to the school community that you're working in, I think it's about resources and from my own experience as a teacher I taught for the biggest part of my career 15 years or so in an area of high deprivation and I taught in a department that was absolutely committed to social justice principles we taught children in mixed ability classes until the curriculum demanded otherwise so when they only only at the end of fourth year were they then kind of set if you like according to attainment you know in order to access hires and intermediates and so on and we took very great care to construct our classes or configure our classes along mixed ability lines so there was a gender balance there was balance in terms in terms of kids attendance there was balance in terms of additional support needs requirements there were mixed ability groupings within the classroom as well and what we found over time was that the achievement and attainment of the young people in the department that I worked in compared very favourably to to that to that of the kids had in other departments in the school but also across the local authority but that was down to that was down to a core of us individuals who were prepared to negotiate and argue for additional resourcing so we had smaller class sizes for a time to accommodate that mixed ability approach we had cooperative teaching for a time to accommodate that mixed ability approach and there were a core of us who worked with that way for you know well over a decade and it meant that when cuts began to be made and class sizes began to creep up and you know a year on year the additional teaching support that went into those classes diminished we had a we had a skill we had a repertoire of skills that enabled us to keep that going right and still that still the outcomes for those children just in terms of their experience and achievement and attainment English was was favourable and that kind of thing needs to be scaled up across the country needs to we need to be talking about things like that and that's why I talked earlier about professional learning and the importance of teachers having professional learning around nature causes consequences of poverty and also the kinds of interventions that that research shows make a difference for kids who are who are disadvantaged so mixed ability approaches formative assessment approaches class sizes that allow for the kind of creativity and enjoyment of the experience that has already been outlined by colleagues here these are all the factors which are expensive they are expensive but these are the factors which we know and which lots of international evidence points to as being the things that really will turn around the equity record of Scotland in relation to children's attainment and achievement. Does the EIS accept that the kids living in poverty in one part of Scotland fear better than others and your explanation of that is around what happens in the classroom? Well yeah I mean it's around what happens in the classroom it's around it's around resourcing it's around the resource interventions that are made and uh-huh with it I'm not I'm not make myself clear I don't think is the cause of the difference between a child who's living in poverty in a school as opposed to the other school because this school doesn't have as good quality teaching. No no no that's not what I said there will be better outcomes for children in living in poverty and more consistently better outcomes for children living in poverty where conscious policy and resource decisions have been taken to mitigate the impact of poverty. Trying to establish it's whether the EIS accepts the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's findings which suggest that children with the broadly similar experiences will do better in some places rather than others. Do you accept that and if you do would you be looking to try and understand why it's better in one area or another. I completely accept your issue and your argument about resources in this in general and about the whole school approach. It's all about sport staff as well as the teaching in the classroom I accept all of that but are you looking at are there other things happening in the system which means that a child who's disadvantaged in one area is doing better than a disadvantaged child in another. I think that I've outlined that there are variables across local authorities so even the things that we've talked about so far in terms of instrumental music tuition some local authorities don't allow charging for home economics for example there are different policies around school uniform from school to school never mind local authority to local authority so there's huge variability in terms of what goes on at school level so it's very difficult to say the outcomes that are particular to this locale are because of this factor this factor this you know there are so many variables there and EIS doesn't have that kind of micro data that would enable us to arrive at those kinds of conclusions what we do know from research and what we do know from what our members tell us and what we do know from our own personal experience is that when you have the correct resource interventions to support sound policy rationale that leads to better outcomes for children living in poverty okay I suppose can I then ask your view on the what is the EIS suggestion that that kind of approach is defined at a national level and expect to be delivered at a local level or what are the consequence of a policy which is driving the decision down to a school level where presumably the variables will become even greater which is your preference because you describe a very interesting model that you would engage with at a school level indeed at a departmental level should it be the case that our education system should be directing these things at a national level or at a local government level or how do we iron out these difficulties and what are the consequence of pushing it down on to schools I think that there has to be there has to be a national conversation I think about about that and about how we organise the delivery of education again I'll talk about Finland. Finland delivers its education to children in mixed ability classes so they're taught in mixed ability classes from when they start school until when they leave school they sit their formal exit qualifications at the end of that process children with additional support needs are taught in mainstream classes but they're given adequate support in order that they can access and succeed you know access the curriculum and succeed according to you know according to their particular interests and abilities so I think that we need to look at adopting a similar approach to that I'm talking about I've talked about that from my personal experience I came to that school they had been doing that in that department for a long time before I came there and they had sustained sustained positive outcomes for children who were in that who were in that category poverty wasn't a new thing in the area that I taught in you know that it's been a longstanding issue in that part of the country but but that that school or that department judged very quickly very early on that there were going to have to be different approaches to teaching those children our particular subject than had been traditionally you know the case in that school and and a lot of thought a lot of collaboration a lot of professional discussion and as I say additional staffing resource went into making that happen we worked very very closely with the additional support needs department we worked closely with educational psychologists and other external providers of support and that was what led to the success in terms of outcomes for those young people and some colleagues you know some of the colleagues have mentioned earlier about you know young people who don't engage with education in the 20 years that I taught the biggest majority of those years in that school there were very very few children and young people that I came across who didn't want to engage with education because when you put those kinds of supports in and when you make the experience enjoyable and when you show them the achievements that they're making day to day and when you've got enough staff to talk to them and to nurture them and to build positive relationships with them then their school experience is a much more positive one and it leads to better outcomes but we can't get away from the fact that that's about resource and it's about resource in terms of quality of ITE provision it's about on-going professional learning and then it's about teachers and other specialists on the ground day to day to day to support the provision of quality education for all of our children and young people okay thank you we also can't get away from the fact that the finish education system isn't just about the finish education system it's about we are just back from the murders you'll know it's about the way they approach a lot of other things so it's hard to take it in isolation and just say that's what we should do to the Scottish model much as I'm a huge fan of what they're doing in Finland but we but we have aspirations to be world leading to be the best place in the world for our children to grow up but that's not going to happen unless we start to you know look at the we should always take best practice and yeah exactly exactly okay can I thank you all for that for attending today it brings us to the end of the public part of the meeting we'll now move into private session so thank you very much in the gallery to leave before continuing