Hello, and welcome to the eleventh meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee in 2022. I would like to give a very warm welcome to Ruth Maguire, who is joining us this morning for the first time as a member of the committee. I would also like to welcome Graham Day, who has also become a member of the committee after previously participating as a substitute member. Welcome to both Ruth and Graham. Ruth and Graham are replacing Fergus Ewing, Graham and James Dornan. On behalf of all the members, I'd like to thank James and Fergus for their contribution to the work of the committee this session. As Ruth McWire is joining us for the first time today, our first item of business is to invite Ruth to declare any relevant interests. Ruth McWire Thank you, convener. I'm very much looking forward to contributing to the committee's important work. I have no relevant interests to declare at this time. Thank you very much. The second item on our agenda today is an evidence session for our Scottish attainment challenge inquiry. This morning, we will be taking evidence from representatives of the trade unions. I'd like to welcome Greg Demster, the General Secretary of the Association of Head Teachers and Deputies in Scotland, and AHS. Andrea Bradley, the Assistant Secretary of the Education and Quality, the Educational Institute of Scotland, the EIS. Mike Corbett, National Official Scotland of the NESUWT. They are all joining us remotely, so I have an iron and monitor here when you wish to contribute or try to get you in by keeping an eye on the chat function. Also to Jim Thewlis, who is the General Secretary of the School Leavers Scotland, who is with us in the committee room. You are very welcome, chairman. Jim Thewlis I would like to be school leader, Scotland. What did I say? School Leavers Scotland. Did I? Oh, right. Okay, that was something different all together. All right, okay. I thank Greg. School Leaders Scotland. Apologies. So good morning to you all and thank you for your time. Let me begin the question now, if I may, this morning with a very simple question. In relation to the Scottish attainment challenge and the associated funds that flow with it, has it worked? Greg Demster. Thanks, convener. That's quite a big question to start off with. Given the objective of the Scottish attainment challenge and the Government's objective overall to be closing the poverty-related attainment gap, plainly that has not happened, so if that's what you mean, then no, it hasn't achieved that objective. Obviously, we are not hugely far along this road of having the attainment challenge and the people equity funding. In the main, members welcome the people equity funding and agree with its purpose. We could see from the Audit Scotland report and other publications that there was progress beginning to be made on that agenda. As always with those things, it's not quite as crisp and clear as yes or no. Andrea Bradley. Is it working? Has it worked? I think a bit like Greg. I suggested that the ambition is absolutely right and correct. It's right and correct that the Scottish Government has the ambition that it does and that there has been the cross-party consensus around the objectives of the attainment challenge. They are absolutely shared by the EIS and its members. It's too soon to say whether it has worked because it has to be a long-range, long-term endeavour. It is simply not possible to close the poverty-related attainment gap with all the structural inequalities that we have in such a short space of time. In terms of the kinds of initiatives that have been started and developed through Scottish attainment challenge funding, I think that the jury is out of it in terms of the effectiveness of them. I think that in some areas they have been effective in other areas perhaps less so and certainly EIS members report a bit of a mixed picture in terms of the overall impact of Scottish attainment challenge funding and endeavour, including the PEF component of that. I think that they see some examples of really good practice having emerged supported by the funding and in other places maybe more dubious or less reliable approaches adopted. I would say that probably what has been missing from a lot of that is a really effective way of evaluating impact across the short, medium and longer term. That is something that we have to think about as we continue on this rightful endeavour. At the moment, it is probably not realistic to ask the question anyway, has it worked? I think that we can say, has it been working? Have we seen any elements of success that we can build upon? The answer to that is yes. There is a lot to learn from what has been working. I think that there is a lot that needs to be done to share the experiences around what has been working among teachers. We need to create opportunities for collaboration among teachers in order that we can make further progress and for that to be more universal. I think that there is some opportunity now in the fact that the framework has been adjusted such as to include all 32 local authorities, whereas originally there were only nine authorities included within the attainment challenge, albeit that PEF money was being distributed to almost all schools over the past few years. With the new framing of all of that, there is opportunity for us to do more and differently. I think that it is really important that we seize and grasp that to the best of our ability. You raised a lot of really good points, which I am sure that we will pursue during the next seven and a half years. In 2019, the EIS commissioned a survey of teachers, and apparently in that survey only 26 per cent of teachers thought that the attainment challenge funding and PEF was making any difference to the most deprived children and young people. I think that 26 per cent is the number. 31 per cent said that they had seen no difference and 43 per cent said that they basically did not know. Three years later, would that still be reflective of the views of the members of the EIS? We have not gone back to them so recently with that question. We asked a more general question of certain cohorts of our members about the impact of stack more generally. We were getting more insight from that series of questions into the strategic decisions that local authorities were making, so it was more about what local authorities were doing at that level. However, that data around PEF was concerning for us. It seemed to point to the fact that too many teachers were being left out of decision making at school level about how PEF money should be spent. From our point of view, we see that teachers are the experts in terms of being able to assess the needs of young people, knowing the kinds of interventions to put in place in order to support them. However, critically, across too many schools, too many local authority areas, teachers have not been involved in the decision making processes around which young people will be included, what the nature of the interventions should be, how that will be evaluated and how to build progress after an initial series of interventions. Certainly, when PEF money was first being dispersed by the Scottish Government, we wrote guidance for our members about the importance of them being involved in decision making about it. We are not convinced that that data would suggest that, as yet, we are not there yet in terms of the processes, structures and cultures around collegiate decision making with regard to PEF. I think that, where you actively seek and involve teacher expertise, you are likely to have stronger outcomes. Certainly, you are likely to have teachers much more in the know about how the money is being spent and how effective or not that spending has been. If you look at a very simple level—for example, Professor Lindsay Paterson of Edinburgh University's judgment, he would say no, because, as he rightly pointed out, Scotland raised low-state status of students less than in England and depressed the achievements of high status. On that measure, perhaps, the gap had narrowed, but not in the way that we all wanted to. I suppose that there is also a question about attainment and narrow focus. A lot of recent work in relation to potential education reform talks about looking at the four capacities of CFE—confident individuals, effective contributors—and the focus on attainment, perhaps, taking away from that side of things. There is, perhaps, somewhere in looking more broadly at things or measuring the right things, in the first instance. However, I do not have any doubt that everyone around the table today will know that they have examples of good practice. Some of the issues are about having time for teachers to share that good practice, where it has been evident. Again, building on Andrea's point, time for teachers to properly get involved in planning, to properly engage with research and reflect on what may or may not work properly. Again, that is acknowledged in various reports that we have had, such as on the fact that schools cannot be left on their own to sort out the poverty-related attainment gap. We welcome the references to collective agency that has been in recent reports. It has to be a multi-agency approach. However, in itself, that raises challenges about teachers having the time to engage with those outside agencies, because teachers are undoubtedly the ones who are at the sharp end and may have the best ideas, but they need the time to get those acknowledged and to contribute. I am going to come back to something that you just said and get the response of the other panellists this morning to it. First of all, I think that I will go to Jim Thulis to give him the opportunity of the answer to my original question. Is it working? Thanks, convener. I make the point that perhaps he did not ask one question, he asked two questions, and the answer is slightly different. It is important that we make the difference in that answer. Is it working and has it worked or not the same question? Has it worked? No, it hasn't. I do not think of the opportunity to see it fully through to understand if it has worked. Is it working? Yes, I think it is. The response is very much based on evidence, which is anecdotal. I think that we have been thrown hugely sideways by what the virus has done to the school environment and the school ethos over the course of the past two years. It is important that, within what we have done now in terms of restructuring, the way in which funding is going to be taken into schools, the way in which it is going to be used within schools and the way in which the evaluation of its impact is going to be taken forward, that we start to look at it now in a more coherent way. It has been good and it has been useful for schools and it has had an impact on young people and young people's learning. I think that we have got to start to look at it now as something that is more longitudinal. To start to answer the second question that she asked, is it working but has it worked? We start to get closer to the has it worked part of it. I think that in terms of the has it worked part of it, we have also got to be very clear in our understanding of what does that mean? What does working mean? What are the intended outcomes of this? We started off within this in all good faith in relation to looking at young people and young people's literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing. Two of those we have done kind of well on because the way in which we measure those and the structure in which we do that already exists. The health and wellbeing will come back to in a moment because we have not really looked at that in the sort of detail that perhaps we could have done. Given what the virus has done, how we should now be looking at that very much more in depth and much more carefully because it has a serious impact on all other aspects of learning and young people's development. I think that that is something that requires a huge teasing out. I start to look at it in a way in which we can understand process as well as outcome. We start to look at it more longitudinally. We start to look at it in terms of the way in which we use and understand the data which is there. Then we move away from the anecdotal more to get some sort of understanding of what is actually happening in relation to the journey towards the desired outcome. We become much more refined in the way in which we use the funding which is there and the way in which we put processes based on data into schools. Then we have a more clear idea of what outcome is and answering the question, has it worked? We get closer to doing that. If we look at stuff which is more measurable in relation to the way in which we look at input and define output on the basis of the process which takes us from input to output. We are at a place at the moment where we could have been much more towards answering the has it worked question. The virus has not helped us in that sort of a way. Having looked at what we have done and identified the areas in which we could do it better, then the report which we have here and the structure in going forward is much more useful in relation to enabling us to become clearer on what we see working, not working, could be working better and in relation to literacy, numeracy and more importantly health and wellbeing starting to position the activities and the actions which we are taking to target what we want to have as an effective output. Jimi, you have raised a lot of issues and I know my colleagues in the committee will want to come back to you on quite a few of the points that you have raised. I want to just refer back to what Mike Corbyn said. He quoted Professor Lindsay Paterson in an article in the TES in which he said, inequality also fell in England mainly by raising the low status students while also raising high status students. Scotland raised low status students by less and depressed high status students. It may not be reasonable to describe it as better progress towards equality of outcome in Scotland than in England. That was, I think, part of the quote that Mike Corbyn was referring to and then Mike also asked the question, is attainment to narrow a focus? Can I ask you first of all Jim to respond to the quote from Lindsay Paterson and also answer the question that Mike raised, is attainment to narrow a focus? I would suggest that attainment is to narrow a focus, yes, in particular when we start to look at the health and wellbeing aspects of this and the way in which young people learn within the school environment, the way in which young people exist within the local environment outwith school. If we are going to start to engage as I think we should be doing, we must be doing with local community and local community support and input to school to start to look at the holistic development of young people, then the focus on attainment is to narrow a focus to an extent. It's the easy one and I suppose in starting this you start with what is easy and what is doable, what we're now doing is starting to move into the areas which are more challenging and it's right and proper that we do that to start to understand within the four capacities of curriculum for excellence just exactly how the three capacities which we kind of haven't looked at start to be unwound a bit in relation to the way in which the school environment operates within the local circumstances in which it exists. Is Lindsay Paterson of a point? I think that Lindsay Paterson does have a point, yes. Okay, thank you. Andrea Bradley, your comments. So like Jim has said, we would say that the focus on attainment is too narrow and particularly in the context of recovery, it just doesn't hit the nail on the head in terms of what is required in terms of support of the young people whose communities and families have been hardest hit by the pandemic. I think that it's misframed in terms of their needs at the moment and arguably always has been. Even within that relatively narrow focus on attainment, albeit that health and wellbeing sits alongside that but it's had less of an emphasis over the years than literacy and numeracy have. Even within those already pretty narrow measures, there's a really narrow focus, for example, within literacy because the assessment of literacy doesn't take account of all of the skills and knowledge and experiences that young people would be developing in the course of their learning on literacy. It focuses on a very, very narrow range of them. We have had concerns about that. We think that there should be a much more holistic approach and even thinking about attainment to focus solely on literacy and numeracy for many young people is the wrong way round because the way that they will learn best will be in subjects that maybe don't obviously have literacy and numeracy at the forefront of the learning experiences, albeit that they are invented within them. That has always been a concern of ours about the framing of that. I'm sorry to interrupt you. In relation to Lindsay Paterson's comment about his comparative statement, the Scotland raised low-state of students by less than depressed high-state of students, has he got a point? I would like to see Lindsay's evidence for that. Certainly from our perspective, our members are very much focused on the terms of the mission that are to raise the attainment of all and reduce the poverty-related, for us it should be achievement gap rather than attainment gap. I'm not sure that there's evidence to suggest that there's been a depression of overall attainment as we have been working towards that particular endeavour. Okay, and lastly, and then I'll turn to co-cub Stuart, the deputy convener. Greg Dempster, your response to the question that I asked and also Lindsay Paterson's statement. I would agree with what Jim and Andrea have already set out around about the focus. In terms of Professor Paterson's statement, I'm not sure what data sets he's referring to in making that statement, so, like Andrea, I would like to see a little bit more about that. Something that I would add is that the attainment challenge in pupil equity funding is a small part of the overall system. It sits within a much wider spend on education, and what we often hear from members—and it's an attention point in this—is that they are faced with reducing core budgets at the same time as having money in place for PEF and SAC. Perhaps that spend is guarding against a depression of outcomes for the disadvantaged pupils in a system that is seeing a reduction in overall spend. Greg, there are lots of points there, and it's a fascinating discussion, but I'll have to turn to co-cub Stuart. I want to look more specifically how headteachers involve teachers, parents and pupils when they're deciding their priorities for allocating the funding of the attainment challenge funding. I suppose I'm going to start with Greg Demster, if that's okay. Have headteachers had enough support or training from local authorities so that they are well informed and well equipped to make decisions about the additional funding that's been provided? With any question about local authorities, there are 32 different varieties, so the experience in different parts of the country will be very different. I can't give you a clear sort of researched response to that question in the sense that we haven't been asking members about that aspect of it for at least the pandemic period. I can't give you a full answer on that. I know that school leaders are always extremely pressed for time, extremely stretched in terms of workload, so any help that they can have to signpost quality interventions that they can then engage with their staff about and talk about would be appropriate, and our situations are always welcome. There was quite a lot of work at the start of the attainment challenge and Perth funding being available to signpost resources that did just that, but I know that Andrea has been looking much more closely at school experience, so perhaps she can give you a little more. Thanks, Greg. I suppose where I'm coming from with this is that headteachers are promoted through being teachers and coming through the skills of being expert leaders of learning, and then coming into being financial wizards in a sense and making best use of that and being accountable for sometimes vast amounts of money, so that scrutiny and the responsibility has to be supported. I suppose that was where I was going, was that where they get enough support and was that the best use of their time. You mentioned about any additional support by headteachers being pressed for time. Have you any thoughts on what that kind of support would look like? Always, when we do a workload survey with our members, the lack of management time available in schools is an issue that comes to the fore, the lack of protected time for school leaders. If you're in school and you're being pulled away to support individual pupils on a one-to-one basis, or if you're being pulled into cover classes, that obviously follows up time that you could be using to look at interventions on a more strategic level or the data within your school to pinpoint areas for action and improvement and looking at research and evidence about what might be able to address those gaps. Over the years, we've seen a number of areas where local authorities have reduced the management hours available in schools or the number of management posts. Clearly, that has a huge impact on capacity to undertake the work that you're talking about. It's a constant message that we get from members about the lack of management time, so that is clearly something that we would seek to have addressed to enable them to take forward their schools as effectively as possible. Thanks, Greg. Can I go to Andrea and Mike, please? I know that, having worked in schools extensively myself as well, we want to make sure that money is used for additional staffing because those are the staff that are in front of children and the contact between experts and children is going to help them directly. However, there was evidence that I saw where that additional funding was used to increase principal teachers, for instance. I want to drill down this bit about extra management time and the value of money for that versus the extra experts that are in front of pupils and increasing that pupil teacher contact, which I believe is certainly a good way of increasing attainment and achievement. Andrea, do you have anything to say about that? In the research that we did in 2019, we were asking members how they saw the PF money being spent and, certainly, recruitment of additional principal teachers was one of the actions that was cited by quite a significant number of members. I suppose that the question of the utility of that is dependent on what those teachers are doing. If it is someone who also has a considerable amount of time spent in the classroom but is also leading the professional learning, if you like, in the school or the learning community with regards to equity and the kinds of interventions that will make a difference, that is probably a good model. If the time is being spent solely on management strategic activities but that is not being able to make an impact at classroom level, that would be a model that we would consider to be flawed. It is very much down to the balance of time being spent by those individuals, what their remits are, the size of their remits and how realistic their remits are. I think that Greg's point about management time is absolutely crucial to all of that as well. People who are in strategic roles or who have leadership responsibility for key initiatives within a school or a learning community have to have the time to be able to design that, to collaborate with colleagues around that, to then work on the implementation. I think that quite often what happens in education is that there can be really good plans devised, really creative and thoughtful plans devised but the lapse comes at the point of implementation because there simply has not been the time for proper communication and collaboration among colleagues to allow those plans to be fully impactful. I think that we are talking then about not just the numbers of principal teachers or the amount of management time that senior leaders have, we are talking about the numbers of teachers that there are to carry out the work as well to actually make the difference in the classroom in those close interactions with young people. We see class sizes as being absolutely crucial, fundamental to this endeavour, to closing the poverty-related attainment gap, achievement gap. Thank you, Andrea. Mike, is there anything that you wanted to add to what Andrea has said? Yeah, thanks. I am actually going to refer to, we did a resnap show survey just over the last three weeks of members and there are other things I might refer to later but one of the things was when they were asked about the effective solutions for tackling the issues around, you know, tackling the poverty-related attainment gap. The top four things that came out were more support services for schools such as CAMHS and educational psychologists, more support staff in the classroom, more teachers and tackling unemployment for parents. I think that there is an issue here about what is really national and should be funded nationally and what should be funded locally perhaps through the people equity fund Scottish attainment challenge money because it is much further down that list when you start to see things like breakfast clubs which I know that is how some of the money has been used in the past and used very effectively. So I think that there is an issue worth consideration there about how much of the funding via here, via this initiative, should be spent on for example employing more teachers or teachers in promoted posts etc. Although having said that and others have touched on this, the evidence that we have of things working well is anecdotal but I have seen in the local authority area that I used to work for, East and Bartonshire, some very good work where they have used some of the money for promoted principal teacher posts and that has allowed time for some of those principal teachers to focus on smaller groups of children. It is pretty complex but I do think that some of those things that our members seem to be saying would be helpful, really linked to national areas and I think that there are a lot of other potential initiatives that maybe the money would be better spent on locally but it is finding out what those are and sharing a good practice that I think is vitally important. I can briefly go back to the point about head teachers and how they involve staff. Again, it is a patchwork picture, some are very good, some do not seem to involve their staff or pupils at all and sometimes they are well intentioned to have good ideas but we again would be saying that there needs to be much more involvement of classroom teachers in the planning stage and the decision making about how funding should be spent. Thanks for that, Mike. Just to finish off, can I bring Jim in? Jim, how can head teachers be supported to evaluate the effective use of the additional funding and to be empowered enough to stop doing the stuff that does not work, to keep doing the stuff that does and to consider doing different things as well? Thanks for that. I will come back to that in various ways but to that in one or two points that have already been made. What we are talking about here is funding in equity and the delivery of equity at school level through the variety of strategies that are there. I want to make the point now that trying to deliver equity across 32 local authorities is just impossible because we are all starting off from different starting points. There are 32 different staffing formulas across Scotland and there are 32 different funding formulas across Scotland. Depending on where your school is and which local authority it is, the number of staff whom you have to deliver any initiative and the amount of cash that you have to deliver any initiative varies enormously and we have surveyed members over the course of the past 15 years three separate occasions and the inequity is becoming worse. If you are looking at delivering equity within schools, can we start to look at something that is aligned to a minimum basic staffing formula and a minimum basic funding formula because what we have here in relation to the paper that we are discussing this morning is additionality. Additionality lies at the core of delivering equity. If there is a basic minimum that is there, which is then topped up and added to through whichever additional fund is given, then we start to look at something that enables schools and empowers schools to start to target resources and to target staff in a way that is appropriate to the local community and the needs of the young people within that local community. To come back to answering the other parts of your question, Greg and I view this in a slightly different way and I think that it is important to make the point that that reflects primary sector and secondary sector. Then secondary sector, following on from TP21, we have had a reasonable experience in the way in which we manage the funding that we are given to us. We are very much up for the whole notion of funding coming directly to schools and being used within the schools. In terms of the support, again harking back to TP21, every school was supposed to have a business manager. All schools do not have business managers and that comes back to what has happened across local authorities in the way in which money which was given out at that point in time was not spent in the format for that purpose. We are potentially in a significantly better position in relation to the way in which funding is used within schools. Of course, it is an admin issue, but it is not the admin issue within secondary schools that it is within primary schools if the school has a trained business manager and well-paid business manager to do that. That is another issue that I know, but it is important that we start to look at the way in which we support young people within schools through the allocation of staffing resource and funding resource. However, we start to look at decision making and empowerment. All through the fort and through various other reports that are there, decisions taken at the point of most impact are the decisions that have the greatest impact. Schools know their local community, they know the young people who are walking through the door, they know the parental background and Mike's point around the whole notion of parental unemployment plays exactly into this. We know our local environments, so we are able to reflect that in the way in which we then start to make decisions and at all levels, if decisions are based in the first instance on the identification of clear outcomes. Why are we doing this? Why are we spending this money? Why are we appointing this person into post? The argument around the vote should be somebody at classroom level. In the large part, yes, it should be because that is where impact is made, but if a decision at school level is roundabout the way in which you appoint someone to a principal teacher post to take one example into a support position within the school, to take another example, if those decisions are made on the basis of identified need and the outcome being clearly outlined at the start, then when it starts to come to accountability and coming back to the convener's first question, is it working? You get a better and more clear opportunity to answer that question away from the anecdotal and start to say, here is what has happened in terms of having impact on young people's learning and health and wellbeing, social accountability, the way in which they interact within their local community and the way in which you support families within the local community. In power schools, to do that, start off with an equitable playing field and you get a better chance at the end of answering the question, has it worked? The premise of PEF, as I recall, was to empower head teachers and their staff because they were the best placed individuals and groups to understand the needs of the school. I was a little bit concerned at Andrea Bradley's comments about teachers being weft out of the decision-making process, but I think Mike Corbett's comments perhaps cleared that up, that there are some very good examples where the teaching staff are involved in the decision-making, there are just some where that hasn't happened. That's covered where I won't probably want to go at the outset, but my first of my two questions is around the nature of how PEF is deployed, because there have been a number of comments that have suggested that it's about who does what in a school and how they go about it, but some of the best examples that I've certainly come across about the use of PEF have involved some more innovative things. For example, the appointment of truist officers to visit families in a very supportive way to understand better why children aren't attending school. I also had examples of the secondary schools and clusters putting maths teachers into the primary schools because they were finding that the kids weren't as well prepared as they should be for coming to secondary on the maths front. I wonder if you would recognise that there is more to the use of PEF than simply the deployment of resources within the individual schools. I would perhaps direct that to Craig Dempster in the first instance. Absolutely, yes. Other examples would be the use of homeschool link workers, as well. I think that there's a lot of work that isn't simply just more of the same within schools, so I would entirely agree with you. Jim Lewis? Thanks, a couple of points here. The first is within the report itself that I picked out a statement freedom within a framework, and I think that that very much reflects what you are saying there. It comes back to what I said within my previous comments about decisions being made at the local level and in a way that reflects the school background, so that one or two of the examples that you have picked up is absolutely correct in relation to the way in which schools can respond to a local need. One of the things that we were worrying about in the report that we were issued was the whole notion of looking at strategy and how strategy comes around. It touches on the collegiality part that we have been speaking about earlier on, because if strategy is driven from the ground up and local authorities then look to support the strategies that schools are devising, then you are in a much better place of enabling and empowering schools to respond to young people's need in the ways that you are suggesting, rather than have strategy coming from local authority down to school and schools have to find its way through what the local authority is expecting of it. Schools are more than happy to be held accountable in relation to the strategies that they put in place if they are empowered to make those strategies in the first place, as opposed to having them imposed upon them in a local authority-wide structure. In fairness, I have a name-checked Andrea Bradley and Mike Corr, but I should give them the chance to comment. Andrea Bradley. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that schools are pulling resources and working within learning community structures to maximise the impact of the resources that they have. Instead of each school working with its smaller portion of resourcing—we know that some schools have actually got quite sizable PEF budgets, but because of the numbers of young people within their pupil cohort who would qualify for an allocation of PEF funding, it has been decided at school community level to pull that funding together and to share the resource that can be purchased, whether it be staffing, whether it be equipment, whether it be, for example, one of the examples that we got was a school bus being purchased. That has been shared across the school community to enable the young people in that community to get the benefit of outdoor trips, residencials, that sort of thing. There is good evidence of schools taking a more collegiate and community approach to maximise the impact of the funding. Mike Corr. I am just touching one of your first points about the truncie officer. I noted that some research came out just last month done by Strathclyde University, the Poverty Alliance, the GTC, the Opic and Social Research Council, which has reinforced the point that overall absences, according to them, are negatively associated withemic achievement. That, to me, is ideal in that we have some research evidence there that is informing what can then be good practice and good use of the money. That is one example that you have touched on there. There are other things, for example, the child poverty action group. I have focused on the cost of the school day surveys in terms of a lot of kids missing out on things because they do not have the funds for school trips and for non-uniform days, etc. Just to give you one quote from a teacher last week on our survey, you said that they have had in the school cost of the school day training, which has had a big impact on how they deliver things because they no longer ask pupils to bring money to school. No contributions are asked for for non-uniform days. There is a reduction in the number of sponsored events throughout the year. That all touches on the fact that there is good practice out there in a variety of ways, but what is absolutely crucial is for time for teachers and schools to share that good practice to inform the planning. That should lead to better outcomes overall in the end, you would hope. In the first instance, it is probably best directed initially to Greg and Jim again. The EIS survey talked about some instances where it was felt that PEF funding had been used contrary to the guidance to plug gaps arising from cuts in the more general budgets. I am just wondering whether that is still something that is being seen. An example that I came across was where a local authority was halfway through a training programme for the entire teaching staff and its employment. Along came PEF, and it was suggested to the head teachers in the remaining schools who had not had the course that they could use PEF funding to pay for that to avoid the local authority having to meet the cost. Is that still going on or are we seeing a set one down in the approach? We are still seeing that and the difficulty here is that there is not a baseline that says, here is the money that schools already have and here is your PEF funding, which is additional. When the funding that is within a school where an authority goes down, some of that PEF funding might not really be additional depending on your definition of that. It might be to prevent a reduction in staffing or a reduction in what is being offered within a school. You might lose a couple of support staff because of a change of funding or policy within an authority and then use PEF funding to retain those staff because you know that that is what you need to make a difference or that there will be a negative impact from using them. Similarly, when there are ASM or behavioural issues, sometimes that is supported through PEF funding when those children might not be receiving free school meals because the resource to support them is not there otherwise. That still exists, yes, Mr Dave. Not to repeat what Greg has said. The answer is yes, it still does exist in schools. It is not nearly as blatant as it was in the early stages of this when a number of local authorities were taken to account by the Cabinet Secretary in the way in which the words that they were starting to do things, but it is there, it is hidden and it is systemic. The reason why it is systemic is because the local authority can hide that within what it is doing. If we have, as Greg says, a base level and if we have local authority, I am not, for a minute, suggesting we do away with the level of governance that sits between Scottish Government and between schools, empowerment is not about that, but if empowerment is based on local authorities being there and acting as an agency to support the schools and to enable the schools to spend the funding and use the staffing available in the best possible way and we use funding at school level to buy into the services which we require at local authority level. That is an entirely different ethos from local authorities as they do at the moment, filtering the fund before it gets to school level and deciding that they will take forward certain initiatives in certain ways which they feel to be to the benefit of schools. I know that the EIS survey has reported in that on numerous occasions, but that is an ethos thing and we need to look at that in the way in which the layer of governance which sits between Scottish Government and schools operates in functions to support as an agency to schools, not as a filter.  It is not to disagree with what Jim is saying but just to qualify it to a degree in the sense that we survey members annually as part of a workload survey and one of the things that we ask them is whether they feel that they have an appropriate degree of autonomy in relation to FF and SAC funding and the vast majority respond to say that they do. For most school leaders, they do not feel that they are being directed in that spend, but there are times to address Mr Day's point where they are choosing to spend that on items that have been cut by the local authority. That clarifies what my point was in there. Okay, thank you. Oliver Mundell. Thank you, convener. Just following on from that line of question, the obvious thing to say is that there is a gap in schools that are not always being properly funded. I would not want to defend spending your attainment funding on other things, but certainly schools locally do not always have a choice in keeping staff on it as a priority for headteachers. Do you agree with that, Mr Demster? I think that, in part, I would agree with that, yes, in the sense that if you take the last period, the last from the turn of the year to now, the absence levels in schools have been enormous, so if you have a PEP teacher just for simplicity within your school supporting different initiatives, but you have a lot of other staff absence, you are not going to send kids home, you are going to use that teacher to maintain them within school, so over this last period particularly, a lot of that resource will have been used keeping the show on the road effectively. Do you agree with that? My main line of questioning is probably going back to an earlier point. Jim Thew has said that there are 32 different models across the country. I am particularly concerned for rural schools. Often, there are not the same suite of options available to headteachers or even to local authorities. I just wondered whether you recognise that as a challenge by going down that route? There are not the same third sector providers, there are not the same opportunities on schools doorsteps, and often, those smaller schools have a smaller PEP budget and therefore less flexibility. I have two points to make in response to that. The challenges associated with staffing in rural schools per se is a challenge, and we know that. I take the whole notion of the cost of the school day and rural poverty attached to the cost of the school day as a point well made, and again it comes back to the flexibility and the use of additionality in funding within the school sector. I think that what we really need to look at in a bit more detail is the whole notion, as you say, of rural poverty. Lots of it is hidden, lots of it is misunderstood, and lots of it just does not get addressed. Young people miss out on opportunities and account of no fault of their own just through the rurality of where they exist and the kind of ethos within that environment. It is something that is not picked up particularly well in the report, and it needs to be something that I have put down here in bits and pieces of refinement. It is one of the bits of refinement that I think we have to look at. Is that something that any of the other witnesses recognise and see? I think that particularly in terms of headteachers, if you have a small PEP budget and there are limited resources to tap into within the immediate community, does that prevent the policy working as well as it might? Yes, there are a couple of parts to that, as Jim McSane said. You have the rurality aspect and the budget-sized part of it. Something that we argued for when PEP first came out was the ability to think strategically over a slightly longer period, so maybe roll two years of PEP funding together to enable you, if you are in one of those situations where you have a very small PEP fund, to be able to purchase an intervention in the second year. That is an element of a solution to that for those with the small levels of funding. I do hear from members in rural areas, if you are in the wilds of Dumfries and Galloway or Aberdeenshire or the islands. You might have a reasonable level of funding and you might have identified that the intervention that you want to have is a play therapist but you would not be able to get one for love and money because that resource is not available within your area. There is a rurality dimension as well as the challenge around those with smaller PEP allocations and what impact they can make in one year with those. What you are describing is another facet of the dichotomy of SAC funding. On the one hand, it is very welcome. Of course, additional funding to schools help to address the impact of poverty is absolutely welcome, but I think that that in lieu of sufficient core funding that takes account of the circumstances of schools, including the rurality, that is the problem. When you have it in lieu of sufficient global funding that would take account of the geographical context and the numbers of children with additional support needs and so on, because we have it not as an instead of but in some way as an instead of we encounter difficulties along the lines that you are describing. I think that the other thing about living in a rural area is that the cost of interventions in many cases is going to be higher. To use the same formula to direct funding to children in rural areas may also be something that is inherently flawed because it does not take account of the additional costs that there are in getting services. People even travel out of rural areas if they want to take young people into learning experiences in environments out with their own communities. I think that there are some additional costs that are perhaps not being considered around addressing the impact of poverty in rural areas and that is maybe something for future funding formula to factor in. Hi, not to repeat what others have said, but I think that that almost touches on a point that came up in a previous education committee about the digital divide, because the new way of working perhaps for some rural schools opens up at least the possibility of having access to some services and advice remotely, but the evidence that has been heard by the committee before suggests that there have been huge problems with network connections and access to remote learning, and the same would apply even where you are trying to access experts, perhaps remotely. That point about the digital divide is reinforced by what you are suggesting, Mr Mundell. Thank you. That is all very helpful. The last thing that I wanted to ask was about the small group of schools, and it has got smaller again who do not receive any PEF funding at all. I am personally not convinced when I look at the list of schools that there will be no young people at those who are in poverty, and it is just whether the policy can be fully effective when there are some head teachers in some schools, many of which are small rural schools who receive no PEF funding at all. I guess that Greg or Jim would be best placed. Thank you, Mr Mundell. It comes back to a point that I made earlier on and which I do your touch on as well. It is to do with base funding within schools and the level of support through teaching staff within schools that is available across the country. If we are going to look at additionality, I think that the point that you make is that we become a wee bit more sophisticated in the way in which we devise the level of additionality into schools is something that we can look at now moving on from where we are with this. We are in a better place than we were five years or so ago. We have learned an awful lot about this, and the sort of discussion that we are having this morning is very much related to taking it on to the next stage. If the next stage looks at additionality and a more sophisticated way of identifying the level of additionality that comes to schools bearing in mind the discussion that we have just had, that will help. However, the whole notion of basic staffing formula and basic minimum funding is absolutely fundamental if we are going to deliver equity in relation to the level of deprivation that exists within individual schools. I agree with absolutely everything that Jim has just said. The mechanism for distribution of PEF is clearly through using free meal entitlement, and that becomes less and less usable as there is more and more of the primary school that receives universal free meals. There is not the same information on claimants, so the accuracy, if we accept that distribution on the basis of free meals is correct, which I do not think that any of us would say is perfect, but that is the mechanism that we have. It is becoming less accurate as time goes by. Do you think that the use of low-income households, which has obviously been used elsewhere in Scottish Government policy now, would be a potential replacement? Again, that certainly appears to pick up more poverty in rural areas. I saw Andrea nodding as well. I see my microphone still on, so I will briefly chip in on that first, if that is okay. There is a lot of work being done on what the best mechanism would be for distribution of those funds, and it goes right through the education system to look at widening and access in tertiary education and what mechanisms should be used to identify the poverty-related group that is trying to be tackled. It seems that none of them are perfect. All of them have different shortcomings. Although free school meals are probably the best proxy that we had at the outset of pupil equity funding, my point is that it is becoming less likely to be the best proxy. I am not sure exactly what other mechanisms you were referring to there, whether it is SIMD or something else, but I think that that needs to be reexamined. It creates problems, because you would be talking about a transition from one mechanism for identifying who gets a finite pot of resource to another. Those have been promised the long-term stability of the funding that they are receiving at the moment. That might not be something that would be able to be delivered immediately unless it was accompanied by a further injection of resource, so that those schools who had already started their planning based on money would expect that they would not see that disappear when they have committed to staffing and contracts. I took it from Mr Mundell's question that he was concerned about some young people in schools being excluded from the PEPH allocation, so we would not at all be looking at anything that would result in any detriment for other schools, other school communities and the young people within them. However, I think that there are more sophisticated measures that we could be looking to use aside from free school meals and SIMD, both of which we have known to be a bit shaky. We have repeatedly suggested that to the Scottish Government over the years, but there seems to have been a difficulty in data being shared by the UK Government that would have the information about family income levels and the Scottish Government and local authorities. There has not been the triangulation in place that would be required to get measures that are more close to the link to actual family incomes. Of course, we know that poverty is about levels of or insufficient levels of family income, but there could be measures that would be much more accurate in reflections of need. That would lead to larger numbers of young people being entitled to allocations of PEPH money. That could be a solution to what you are describing in some of those rural communities. I want to look at the evaluation of PEPH, but I was struck by something that Jim Healy said at the start about the longitudinal study in relation to how the impact of PEPH over a number of years is. It is something that I have raised at the committee before, and I know that the convener mentioned it this morning. I give two encouraging statistics if you like Jim. This year, there were record high positive destinations from secondary schools, which were quite outstanding, given everything that we have been through with Covid. The hard work for that will have been this year, but a lot of that work will have been in previous years getting young people ready for the wider world and the world of work. We are not very good at measuring that, also before lockdown started. The two years beforehand, we saw a literacy up 3.1 per cent and numeracy up 2.7 per cent. Again, that is a two-year snapshot in time, and it is in for that longer-term research and evaluation. I would be interested to know briefly if that is okay. Briefly about what such research might look like, should it fall a cohort of students over their school career? Should that be a little bit more about that? I think that we are making recommendations in relation to this over a longer period of time. We would like to better understand what a robust research process would look like. Two parts to answer that question. There is a latter part that you touched on just at the end. I think that it would be useful to have a longitudinal study following a cohort of young people, and that will give some sort of understanding of the process of funding targeted at need. That will give you the longitudinal process. What we also must do is start to have a look at the strategies that have been put into school and let them run and support them over a longer period of time to get an understanding of what works, what works well, what could work better and what does not work. That will give some sort of level of confidence within the school to know that if we are going to start off on a strategy, we are not going to bail out of it because the funding is not going to be there, but what we are obliged to do is track it through and look at it the way in which it is operating and perhaps not operating quite as well. I can a two-stream thing, follow a cohort of young people but follow the processes to see how the processes are evolving and developing and supporting. If there is something that we consider as a committee, thank you for that. The more I think about evaluation in the short term, from the discussion that we have had this morning, you embed evaluation in the planning process from day one. Much of the chat this morning has been about what that planning process should look like, how teachers should be involved, how carers should be involved, how parents should be involved and how the wider community should be involved. I note that the refresh of the attainment challenge was announced on November 21 with Associated Doc that has been published in March this year. In that guidance, it is pretty explicit in relation to the things that should happen within that planning process. It was far as to talk about almost a participatory budgeting process with everyone in what that wider community is having to say. I am unsure whether that happened already in some areas or whether that will happen now more consistently across the country. Of course, if we are planning for next term, that planning should already have started and those revised guidance came out in March this year. I am just wondering what, when will witnesses think, schools will take account of that refresh guidance and put that refresh guidance into practice? I wonder if Greg Demster might start off the reply to that. I think that you have hit the nail on the head with your analysis. That guidance was too late in many cases to influence planning for the period that we are now in. It would be next year for some where that would happen. However, the spirit of it and the nature of it I think that you would see represented in a lot of the work that was on-going already. However, again, that would come back. It would depend on the levels of PEP available, whether there were programmes that had been agreed a couple of years ago, a number of years ago, that were carrying on. They might not be revisited in that sense. I would say that next year would be when you would hope to start to see that guidance uniformly in practice. That is helpful. I am just wondering, from an employee or an educational perspective—of course, an educational perspective, Mr Demster—like a classroom teacher perspective, what the unions think about that planning process and the new guidance. Andrea Bradley, has there been any discussions so far at a local authority level with the EIS, for example, about how that fresh guidance could engage teachers more in that planning process? As you point out, Mr Doris, the new framework was launched on 30 March. The school holidays were hot on the heels of that, so there has been virtually no time for any discussion at local authority level about it. Indeed, no time for the EIS committees to consider that guidance, to put guidance out to members and so on about what they should be looking to get out of any engagement around it. That is definitely something that we intend to do. On the point about participatory budgeting, we know from some research work that some of our members have done in that area that that kind of model has been adopted in some school communities and seems to have been pretty impactful. It is good to see that that will be the basis of development of the next phase of the SAC programme, but Greg is absolutely right about timescales. Because SAC is new to 23 local authorities and all the staff within those local authorities, there will have to be quite a sizeable piece around professional learning that, so far, has been missing. It maybe goes back to some of the points that were raised earlier in the discussion about how headteachers have felt supported to handle the PEF funding, how they have been able to work with the teachers in their schools around it, and I think that there is a big piece around professional learning that needs to be considered. That was among the feedback that I was giving on behalf of the EIS to the civil servants who were developing the framework, that there needed to be much more about teachers and about teacher involvement in SAC and PEF and more provision made for them to understand what it is all about, reflect on what it means, talk to colleagues, collaborate with colleagues and then do the professional learning piece around the processes. There is a gap there that will have to be quite quickly considered and provision put in place if even by next year, as Greg suggests, the system is going to be ready to take the ball and run with it. That is very helpful, Andrea. Of course, the nine authorities that were ready to attain a challenge to local authorities will have developed a degree of expertise that hopefully could be shared across wider local authorities. I take on more absolutely the points that have been made about this guidance, which is literally just out. We are at the exam diets, particularly for secondary schools, but I am just wondering, Mike, when you would anticipate those conversations starting to happen at a school level, a couple of uncertainties before the summer break early in August? A second follow-up question, if there are sizable decisions being made at the moment and there may not be, Mr Corbyn, in how those funds should be spent, would it be better to have some interim provision for the next few months, perhaps say to Christmas, to give the time to engage with teachers for a more fundamental, effective and systematic roll-out of PEF funding that does engage fully with teachers, parents and carers, so would it make sense to have those conversations as soon as possible and maybe hold off some of those decisions on how that money is spent to get it right rather than rush to spend the money for August? I think that the first thing that I would have to say is to remind everyone that we are still in a pandemic. We had record absence levels just last term, as well as many pupils. Many staff are absolutely not in a position right now to be engaging with that. Having said that, whether it is reasonable for this to happen this term—I really do not think that it is, I think that this is more a medium-term plan—would be to try and work in what are already existing mechanisms in schools, where there is discussion about school improvement plans and working-time agreements. That kind of discussion could then perhaps become a part of that, which does, of course, tend to happen in this coming term and involves planning for the coming year. However, I think that it would be unlikely that that is realistically going to happen right now, and some kind of interim approach might be useful. Just a couple of other quick things to touch on. On building on Andy's point about professional learning, that snapshot survey that I talked about earlier, 72 per cent of our members who responded said that they did not receive any training on how to support pupils with poverty-related issues. That is maybe the point that is important to make before we get into making decisions about how that funding is used. Thanks, Mike Corr. I am going to indulge the convener. I have been given permission for a brief final question. I thought in the revised guidance that it was very helpful that reports would be given to parent councils at the end of each year in relation to being pretty clear on what PEF has or hasn't achieved within that academic year but also as part of the process of refreshing and changing each year. Greg Demister, maybe I will just bring you in for this final question. Has some of that been happening already? Is there an annual trawl within parent councils about that direct engagement? Is that just affirming good practice or is it patchwork across the country? I also see that Mr Theulis would like a, I am sure, very briefly Mr Demister, and hopefully with indulgence of the convener, Mr Theulis. Again, it would be mixed practice, I am sure, on that point. I think that it would be affirming best practice, as you say. I will try and be brief. I will come back to the original point that you raised, Mr Theulis, in relation to how much of this is going on within schools just now. Some of it is in some areas, lots of the areas that it is not, but to come back to this, the whole notion of the way in which this report sits and the way in which it is taken forward, one of two things to bring to this. Schools at the moment will be involved in their improvement planning review and taking forward improvement planning for next year, and it is impossible to separate recovery from where schools are within this, and that will sit within school improvement planning. It is not to suggest for a moment that everything else gets ignored, everything else gets taken forward within the context of recovery within a school improvement plan. But we start to look at what is outlined within this report and the way in which it is suggested that it is taken forward. Could I presume to suggest that there are one or two really quite useful tools within this to enable schools to start to meld that into where they are given their position just now and given the recovery process which they are going through. Now, the whole notion of having stretch aims there and stretch aims which are agreed within the local community, not just with the local authority people, but with the various other agencies within the community, very, very useful in taking schools from where they are within this process to another place and going forward. The three-year funding part of this is absolutely fundamental to the way in which this is taken forward. The kind of insistence on the notion of collegiality, and it has been picked up in several contexts earlier on, the whole notion of collegiality. I would presume to suggest that the level of collegiality at school level is significantly greater than the level of collegiality between schools and local authority, and that needs to go worked upon. However, the whole notion of having logic model and the various aspects, the various iterations of the logic model included within this gives a focus on the structure to take that forward. To answer your question, we have to start somewhere and start sometime. We are at that point in time just now, and it will be for schools and local authorities to find their way through and into this process based on the tools and structures that are there, but there are three keys here that we cannot move away from, which will always be there, and we do not address in the first instance that we are not going to get to. The first is that this is suggesting that we need to have a change in culture for some schools, some local authorities, a significant change in culture. We have got to become more attuned to understanding the barriers that are there. Why is poverty making learning difficult for young people? We have got to become much more clever, and we have touched on that, but we are going into the whole notion that you picked up earlier on, on the use of data and the use of data in the way in which we start to make decisions and monitor the decisions that will be made in relation to the outcomes that we want to have. Thank you very much, Ross Greer. I stick with this point around evaluation. I am interested in any examples of local good practice. There have been a number of anecdotal examples mentioned this morning of good practice in terms of the deployment of the funds, but I am really interested to know whether there are schools, clusters, local authorities or even RECs. Anywhere that any of our panel witnesses are aware of that you think is already doing a really good job of local evaluation that you could point us towards, because I think that that would be of considerable interest to the committee if we can see an example of successful evaluation in practice. I wonder if I could start with Jim on that one. As we have already said, there are anecdotal examples of what is going on there within schools. Certainly from my point of view, if the committee is interested in picking up on those examples, I will be more than happy to come to you with examples of monitoring, tracking, target setting, the way in which we support young people within the home environment, all sorts of aspects of that. I am more than happy to engage with the committee. Through my professional association on that, and I would imagine that my three colleagues will be in exactly the same position. Does anybody, Greg, Micra or Andrea, have any specific examples that you would like to provide this morning? I cannot really account for the efficacy of the various modes of evaluation that have been cited to us, but they are varied. I suppose that, to some extent, they vary according to the kinds of interventions that have been put in place. However, for members, they have reported things like just using established quality assurance processes with a particular focus on equity. In some elements of those, they have talked about tests of change, they have talked about, as Jim has just done, specific pupil tracking, including using systems that enable drill down to relevant individual qualitative data, attendance figures, benchmarking assessments for literacy and numeracy, maybe at the beginning, midway point and end point of certain interventions around literacy and numeracy. In some cases, SNSA data is being used to evaluate the efficacy of different interventions that have been put in place. However, I would say that that is an area that requires some professional learning input for teachers, possibly for head teachers. The other thing that I would say about the whole kind of evaluation measurement piece is that we need to be careful that—I think that it was touched upon a bit earlier, too—that we do not go for interventions and approaches that are easily measurable, at the expense of maybe ones that are more complex, harder to measure the outcomes of. There is a danger of simplicity and reductionism rather than doing things that are going to be longer-term impactful if we simply look for things that are easily measurable. That has been a message that the EIS has given consistently with regards to the attainment challenge, per spending, etc. The other thing that we would like to see feature in the evaluation piece, whether that be short, medium or long-term, is the voice of teachers' qualitative data in addition to quantitative data, and for that to be over what we were talking about longitudinal evidence gathering, for that to feature within that kind of evidence gathering as well. Thanks very much. I believe that Mike Corbett is also looking to come in. Just before I bring him in, Andrew, you mentioned again what you said just at the start of the session about the difference between attainment and achievement and making sure that we are getting those wider measures of achievement. Again, on that same theme of what I asked a moment ago, are you aware of any local authorities, for example, who are trying to take that more rounded achievement-based approach? Is it still a pretty consistent picture in the country so far as we are consistently too narrowly looking at just attainment? I am not aware of individual local authorities having made specific strategic decisions with regard to those things. Again, I know that anecdotally good things are happening. For example, in some school communities, the measures of participation are being used. It is not just about young people's attendance at school, but about the attendance at school and the way that they are interacting with their peers, with the learning experiences that are being designed for them and so on. However, I do not have hard and fast examples from individual local authority areas. Thanks very much. Before I bring Mike in, I do not think that I mentioned it at the last committee meeting, but Mr Corbett was my English teacher, so if any colleagues have complaints about my approach to Scottish education, you can take it up with him after this session. On that point, Mike, do you want to come in on that? Yeah, thanks for that, Ross. I am just to really re-emphasise, I think, much of what Andrea was saying about what we are measuring, because, as has been pointed out early on, the focus of attainment really is too narrow. That should be broadened, but it can be very difficult to measure some of the things. For example, we are rightly looking at focusing on the four capacities more of CFE, but how do you measure how a child has become a more effective contributor? It is a really difficult thing to do, so that needs to be borne in mind particularly. The other thing that I wanted to say is that are we gathering enough of the right data in the first place? I am aware of a contribution to a recent cross-party group on challenging racial and religious prejudice, where the point was made that there is simply a lack of data currently being collected for some groups, particularly Black and Afro-Caribbean pupils. We really need to bear that in mind as well that we are collecting the right data across all areas, but the focus is not just to be on the most easily measurable data. I will look at those broader themes. I have one final question. I suppose that it is a bit of a two-parter. I will come back to Bobsline a question about the new guidance around annual reporting to parent councils, for example, but also the questions that he raised around longitudinal studies, which I think is really important. On one level, I think that it is a really good idea to make sure that there is that clear expectation of local accountability through, for example, those annual reports. However, there is a bit of me that is concerned that that then creates an expectation that you can and should be able to measure the impact of some of that stuff within a year, whereas we have spent quite a lot this morning talking about the fact that, whether it is a year or even indeed an entire parliamentary term, you cannot close the poverty-related attainment gap in such a short period of time. I would be interested in your reflections on how we get that balanced right between making sure that there is robust local accountability but not creating unrealistic expectations, whether it is with parents or local authority level or indeed Parliament nationally. I am also interested in your thoughts on where responsibility for longitudinal studies should lie with that. Is that something that schools, cisters, local authorities, RICS or nationally education Scotland or even the Government directly should be doing?  If we could start with Jim on both of those. Perhaps the answer to the first question is a bit more easy to answer than to do with the reporting to parent councils. I think that we will be careful here to use some of the structures and some of the systems that are already within schools. The relationship that the school has with its parents council exists in that sort of reporting and that sort of level of discussion in relation to what the school is going to be doing and what the school has been doing and what the school has been achieving on a much more fine grained way exists within schools just now. To have it in that sort of a way and formalise the way is only to the good. I think that what we have to look at and put this within another context is the education reform agenda and Professor Muir's report and the way in which that then sits in relation to what we do in terms of attainment, achievement, the assessment of progress, the evaluation of progress and young people's school experience. If we start to then look at the agencies, the national agencies which are there and align them with this sort of level of discussion and thinking that we've had this morning, we've got a much greater chance of looking at things which are operate in a kind of an era of mutuality, they are nested and they are aligned, so that we don't have a report for the parent council, a report for the local authority, a report for the inspectors that the inspectors come along, a report for the Scottish Government. There's a huge opportunity which exists and it sits out with the context of this specific discussion in relation to the way in which we review and evaluate all aspects of progress within Scottish education. If we are to miss that bearing in mind what Professor Muir's report has said, I think that it would be absolutely negligent at the highest level on us all if we missed that opportunity. On the second part around responsibility for the longitudinal work around this, we could do a study nationally education Scotland to be responsible for, but are there levels beneath that that you think it would be appropriate to do? Sorry, I missed the earlier part of work with what is already there. There are quality assurance processes which exist within local authorities just now. They are well used and everybody understands how to do that. What we have got to do, as I said, is to look at largely within the report, there's a bit within the report that says, we don't give the system more work to do on account of producing more reports. What we use is what is within the system just now to make sure that the information gets in the correct way to the correct people to start to make more policy decisions, which are more meaningful. Part of the discussion that we've had this morning is in relation to what's the next stage of work that we're going to be talking about this morning. That information is information that is useful and useful in the context of supporting young people's learning, but also in the wider context of supporting what happens at the local school level, local authority level and national level. Let's start to align the system as opposed to having it in different chunks reporting at different times to different people. We are much better at that than we were in the past, but the reform report gives us a much clearer opportunity to take that forward now. Thanks, Archer. That was really useful. I believe that Greg Dempster will come in on that as well. I think that Jim's point about having the different parts of reporting nested and aligned is extremely important, because you could create a bureaucratic nightmare for school leaders around creating reports for multiple different audiences. That point is very important. On your question about a longitudinal study, I think that clearly at the national level, whether that's Education Scotland or probably Education Scotland or the inspectorate aspect, there is a role there to take a longitudinal approach. That's relevant for the systematic design or evolution of the attainment challenge and the per funding approach, but, as Jim is talking about, there are Biden-tested systems within school and local authority levels around about quality improvement, which should take a longitudinal approach, which should inform that study. I think that there are things within the attainment challenge just now that are a little bit problematic in that. That's the repeated determination that we should be accelerating progress and the language about reporting success of interventions. I think that there needs to be more of a sort of black box approach where we accept where we are. We want to get back on track of an improving picture, which is where we are starting to get to, but not every intervention will be successful, and there needs to be a climate in which people can say, we tried that and that didn't work for us, and that's as valuable to be shared as a success. Thanks for actually believing Andrea, and then Michael can come in. I'm conscious, I'm probably eating into colleagues' time at this point though, so if you don't mind me asking you to be briefing your responses. I'll try to be very quick, so I think you had three questions. The first one was about maybe something about the behaviours that might be encouraged by the expectations of annual reporting and on expectation that you will be reporting here on your success, and there needs to be a realism that that is not how it's going to look. That is not going to be linear progress, particularly not when we take into account the wider societal factors that impact on young people's life in school and so on. We've just had two years of a pandemic that's really derailed so much of the trajectory towards more equitable outcomes, so there needs to be a realism about it. I absolutely agree with colleagues that whatever reporting mechanisms are put in place need to be bureaucracy light, otherwise we will take valuable resources away from the very young people that we're trying to help and support, so that's absolutely crucial. On the point about longitudinal evidence gathering and data and evaluation, I think that that could be something, as Greg suggested, that sits with either the agency that's going to replace Education Scotland, possibly the inspectorate, but I don't know, it depends how that evolves, it depends how the inspection regime involves. I'm not sure that the culture of that would be quite right for this, or we could look to have independent academic research established over a long period of time to look objectively at a range of evidence bases and to report into all actors who are part of this endeavour, not solely Scottish Government. Thanks very much, Mike. Yeah, just very briefly then, yeah. I mean, the parental counsel reports, let's focus on activities undertaken rather than, you know, get bound up with the percentages you've passed, you know, SNSAs, et cetera, and yeah, absolutely avoid bureaucracy, but we need to avoid that just-in-case culture that is developed too often, particularly around inspections, right? Well, we'll need to do this just-in-case, and there's a danger of that coming in here as well. Well, we need this additional bureaucracy just-in-case someone asks us how we've spent the money and we need to justify ourselves. And that touches on Greg's point. We need to allow the confidence here to make mistakes for people to have well-intentioned, well-researched ideas that maybe, in practice, just don't work in the end, and let's have some openness and honesty about that, so that we don't have that just-in-case culture. And absolutely, I think, let's have some, you know, external independent research as part of this, as long as it's not too bureaucratic. And I don't know, like others, if I certainly wouldn't be rushing to give a job on this to Education Scotland or the current inspection regime, so let's see what the newer regimes there look like before, I think, we'd be confident to say that we'd trust them with that kind of work. Great. Thanks very much. Thank you, convener. Thank you, Ross. Michael Marr. Thanks, convener. I want to talk about the and maybe get your views on the shift away from challenge authority areas where poverty is deepest to the more general allocation of funding across Scotland. I mean, that changes already having very significant difficult consequences for some of the previous challenge authorities. But, in my view, it's also a significant departure from what was a settled Scottish understanding of the particular challenges of communities that face severe multiple deprivation. So, can you explain the rationales you understand that for this departure from a focus on the deepest poverty? And can I start with Andrea please? So, from the early beginnings of the attainment challenge, the EIS had some issues with the way that funding was being distributed. We understand that school communities that experience higher rates of poverty and higher levels of the associated deprivations require additional funding, but to organise the funding in such a blunt way, in the first instance, we thought was problematic, because it kind of supposed that poverty didn't exist in other parts of Scotland, and we know that it exists in every single local authority, every single school community. So, it's quite right, we feel, that there has been a reframing of the attainment challenge to take greater account of that. So, that's a good thing about it, but we have been absolutely, I have to say, appalled at the levels of funding cuts through six of the original nine challenge authorities. It beggars belief to us as to why those cuts would be made at a time when we know that poverty levels are rising, for the pandemic has absolutely bludgeoned some communities, and we know that the individual families and the young people within those families are struggling as a result of Covid. The Scottish Poverty and Inequality Commission has reported to the Scottish Government that it's in danger of missing the interim child poverty targets and the 2030 child poverty targets, so we don't see it that cuts in communities that have disproportionately high levels of poverty and deprivation make any kind of sense whatsoever. We agree that the money should be distributed across all 32 local authorities, but we don't see it that that should be the expense of budgets that were being dispersed to authorities that were originally considered to be in additionally high need of additional support. So, that's a part of it that has really vexed to our members, and it would discuss a lot with the Scottish Government and civil servants. Can I ask what the response to that has been, Andrea? What's the rationale you've had because I really do share those concerns of your members in terms of the cuts that are for the poorest people in some of the poorest communities in the country? What has the justification been? I've not heard one. It's been simply that there's a fixed amount of money, and in order to make that money go across all 32 local authorities, some are going to have to take a hit, basically. For some of those local authorities, you're talking click-manager, 62 per cent, funding cut over four years, Dundee, 74 per cent, East Ayrshire, 61 per cent, Inverclyde, 78 per cent, and even Glasgow. Of those local authorities, the least sizeable cuts at 10 per cent, but you've got so many communities in Glasgow where more than one in two children are living in poverty. To us, that is very problematic about the new arrangement sport for the attainment challenge funding. Greg Dempster, we've talked a lot about additionality, but for many of these are very serious cuts for the poorest communities. In your discussions with the Government, have you had a better and more comprehensible justification for that action? No, I think that Andrea has said it all there, really, that she has rehearsed all of the issues there quite fully. I think that the argument has been that there needs to be a more structured approach to supporting the use of the attainment challenge across the 32 authorities. On one hand, you've got smoothing of PEP allocations where those would have not been given any more than a 10 per cent cut to the resource if there has been a change in their demographic within their school. However, there is not a similar smoothing with the attainment challenge funding, so there is quite a difference in approach there. Can I ask Jim Thewlis, mewn Mr Thewlis, when you were a headteacher in Dundee for many years, it's a local authority that you know very well and the challenges that are there. My figure is a 79 per cent cut for Dundee, about 100 staff across the schools. Can you imagine how Dundee is going to cope with that? I agree entirely with everything that Andrea and Greg have said and to answer your question directly. No. Does that mean that the significant context of that is for Dundee pupils to have that on the record from Mr Thewlis, from his experience in Dundee, is really important? Mike Corbyn, your reflections on the same place? Just very, very simply, Mr Thewlis. It's absolutely right and principle to broaden the approach, as has been touched on earlier, for example, because of rural poverty. Why has there not been some effort to have some transitional funding or transitional arrangement for the nine authorities? I cannot find them, because it is clearly not right to be making those swinging cuts that you are talking about, and that will certainly have a negative impact in those areas. If I can come on, convener, to the issue of then, of additionality, because again, if I can. I think that we just wanted to come in on that. Ruth Maguire. Thank you, convener. Just while we are on that refreshed approach, I think that all of us would recognise that there is poverty everywhere, and certainly my colleague Oliver Mundell made some good points about poverty being in rural areas and not just urban areas. However, the timing of the change is hugely difficult for the nine challenge authorities. It is widely acknowledged that more deprived areas have been affected the most by the pandemic and the impact of that. I suppose that my question would be, if we are operating within, I should declare an interest, my local authority is one of the areas that was a challenge authority. They actually made excellent progress. We have spoken a bit about evidence of improvements. Education Scotland's 2021 report about the Scottish attainment challenge said that North Ayrshire, the attainment in literacy and numeracy between 2016 and 2019, has improved for learners at all stages. In addition, the pace of improvement of literacy has been faster for children and young people living in the most deprived areas, so clearly the work that was being done was helping. I suppose that my question would be, if we are operating within a fixed budget and we acknowledge that there is poverty everywhere, is there any evidence or any situation that would change your position that it should go to all 32 authorities? If there is evidence that the improvements decrease, for example, should it be changed back and targeted to the areas of greatest need, or how do we deal with this hugely difficult decision? Andrea, I have come to you first. I think that you might be suggesting that, where there has been variability in terms of the impact of the funding, there should be penalties applied? No, I am not suggesting that for a second. I am simply acknowledging that there is poverty everywhere and that there is a fixed budget. From my perspective, I see evidence that the targeted assistance to my area that was in great need has made improvements. If we find that, down the line, by spreading the money across the whole country, those improvements are impacted or it is not having what appears to be a great impact, would that change your thinking around whether the support should be targeted or universal? What I was trying to say earlier on in this morning's discussion is that there has to be sufficient global funding of education. All of the things that are necessary for all young people have a good experience at school, regardless of the particular needs that they have or the socioeconomic backgrounds from which they come. Then there will be some additionality required over and above that, given the levels of poverty that there are currently in Scotland and more widely in the UK. We absolutely need to see more funding going to all areas, so we must definitely have to see that. We would suggest that it should not be first and foremost through the attainment challenge. It should be through core national funding to all schools, all school communities via local authorities, with some additional package, perhaps like SAC, with that very targeted focus on top of that. At the moment, the problem is that the core budgets are insufficient. I agree that the money should be going to all 32 local authorities. We are good back from the outset. We think that that is a positive development in the reframing of all of this, but it is just very difficult to see how, across Scotland, we are going to continue or get back on track with progress by taking away huge waves of funding from those six areas where poverty has been a long-standing issue for a very long time. As I suppose, we see a bit of a conflict, and maybe that piece of it undermines what is a really good rethinking of how the money should be shared across all 32 local authorities, but we would argue that additional funding could and should have been found to avoid cuts to those areas in the first place. I can't see any other panel members wishing to go to Jim. Notwithstanding Andrea May's point about basic core funding, which I am totally aligned with, when we looked at attainment challenge funding in the first place, it was directed towards deprivation and nine areas of deprivation that were picked up there. Surely there is infamous in terms of equity. We should know, and the Government's statisticians will know, the number of young people who were impacted by deprivation in those nine areas. We had a discussion round about how we defined deprivation, but let's take that there is a definition there. A reasonably straightforward statistician's exercise to look at how much core funding per capita was allocated across those nine areas and reallocate that into the other remaining areas on a per capita basis. In fairness, that makes sure that those young people are young. I know that there is a financial aspect to this, but in fairness to the young people who are in the areas that have been supported in a certain way, it is surely immoral to take away that funding and allocate it across all the areas on a per capita basis, working out how much was allocated per capita to those nine areas in the first place. I would like to step back from the funding that we have been talking about today and go back to those points from our members that I mentioned earlier on about more support staff, more teachers, more support services in schools, tackle parental unemployment. Those are all national things that need to be addressed by improvements and increases in national budgets. Not just for education beyond, because we have said that it is not only down to schools to have the ability to narrow the poverty-related payment gap. That is vitally important, and we cannot forget about that. However, the other points that have already been mentioned about using better measures to target funding are important. I understand the point about whether the funding seems to be working better in one area than in another. You could potentially look to switch that focus somewhere down the line, but that might again get away from what I was talking about earlier about giving confidence staff to try things and suggest things with the best intentions and feel that they are not going to get penalised if one of their ideas does not work. I think that we would have to be very, very cautious. I thank everyone for those answers. They were helpful. I feel that I should be really clear. I was not for a second suggesting removing funding where things work. I was suggesting that funding should remain what it has been showing to work. That was my point. I would also say that I totally agree with Mike in terms of teachers and schools being given the space to try things and to fail. We know that there is learning in that too, so it is important to have the opportunity and space to do those things. Greg mentioned the black box earlier, so I want to come in in answer to your question. Greg? Very briefly, you will not get any of us defending the withdrawal of resources from different local authority areas. It is not something that we would support, because we would all be looking for greater investment in education across the board, so we would not expect us to say any of that. However, I would say that, because PEF is distributed and the bulk of the attainment challenge funding is now PEF is distributed on the basis of free school meals, we would expect that it follows that the authorities that you have referenced would be getting a much higher share than other authorities. On the face of it, it would seem a more equitable way of distributing the money. That does not overcome the fact that it was distributed in a different way, and there has been a cliff edge for those authorities. Michael Marra, I want to focus a little bit on issues of additionality in particular in reference to the pandemic. Some of the panel earlier on were questioning a quote from Professor Patterson on what data set that referred to the 2018 PISA data. What we know and that was regarding the decline of more affluent pupils' attainment, but what we know is that things have got worse since then, given the Covid pandemic. There is an issue that we have touched on in terms of additionality around cuts to council budgets, cutting parts of the education budget and then backfilling. Mr Thewlis gave some examples on that. I am particularly concerned as to whether we are backfilling the impact of the pandemic now. We know that things have gotten worse. We also know from the Audit Scotland report that actually progress has been limited up to the pandemic. A billion pounds of Scottish taxpayers' money is spent on this activity and rightly so, but limited progress. Need has increased, but where do we find ourselves now? Do we feel that the measures that are being taken by the Scottish Government to cope with the impact of the pandemic is sufficient? As far as I can see, this is it. The Scottish Tainment Challenge process is the allocation of resource. I will start with Gareth Andrew, please. In a word, we do not think that the plans that have been put in place for recovery are nearly realistic or ambitious enough given the impacts of the pandemic. Even pre-pandemic, we did not think, as I have said a few times this morning, that SAC was going to be the answer in terms of reducing the poverty-related attainment gap. What we need to see is significantly greater overall funding in education to enable class-sized reduction so that teachers can work more closely with individual children, small groups of children, do things that are really creative and in the spirit of curriculum for excellence. We need more specialist additional support needs provision in classrooms. We need it to be on-hand in schools so that it can be deployed to classrooms, as well as teachers having additional knowledge and understanding of additional support needs. We also need there to be on-hand the range of external agencies that can support young people who have additional needs. That is CAMHS, speech and language therapists, educational psychologists and, sadly, in spite of significantly increased numbers of young people with additional support needs in recent years, we have seen cuts and cuts and cuts to those services year upon year upon year. We need to see teachers with non-class contact time in order that they can think, reflect, collaborate, talk about what works and what does not work, and build strategies to make the kinds of improvements and provide the support that young people so desperately need. That is ever more or all the more important, given the shocks of the pandemic and what is needed around recovery. That seems really basic to us, but there is a big gap in the Scottish Government's free school mail policy, whereby it is inclusive of young people from primary one to primary five currently. There is going to be a delay and it has been rolled out to primary six and seven. Young people in the secondary sector are completely missing from it. We think that there are things that need to be done urgently now to make sure that all children and young people are not hungry at school and that they can have access to food that is absolutely stigma-free, and that seems to us to be a really basic and obvious thing to have done after the economic and financial impacts and social impacts of the pandemic, but also now that we have the spectre of the cost of living crisis looming. There are so many more practical things that could and should be done in the interests of recovery. I think that the foundations should be the foundations from which things like SAC and PEF emerge or are built upon, but those things on their own are too shaky. Do we risk sitting here in a few years' time looking back on this reshaped programme for the Scottish attainment challenge closing the attainment gap, saying that that might have been adequate pre-pandemic but post-pandemic it wasn't fit for purpose? I'm not so sure about the not fit for purpose, but I think that we are in a position here where we could have made it better in relation to the way in which you could impact on young people, on their learning and on their health and wellbeing. If we're going to put some sort of structure into place, then the structure that we have is attainment funding structure and PEF—that's what the system is accustomed to working with. I think that we've made the point on several occasions earlier on this morning that we could become much more upfront and much more curve in the context of the school environment and the way in which it is allocated and the way in which schools are impaired to use it. We've up the discussion that we've had just over the past 10 minutes or so in relation to the sharing out of what was for nine local authorities into 32 local authorities should have been done on a much more equitable basis. If we're going to look at it as a per capita allocation targeted at need, then that could have been done. It would require more funding. Any of us have said—all four of us have said—that it should have been more funding. The whole notion of PEF allied to that applied at school level. Schools, given the decision within local authority strategic planning to look at the way in which they address need and the environment in which the headteachers, the school staff, know best, we will have a much better way of doing this. I want to understand what life is like in the classroom just now. We've heard about the various pressures, but I think Andrea, in particular, would like to address that to her. We're just coming out of the pandemic—some say that we're still in the pandemic—there's significant mental health problems, and then there's also pressure to perform on attainment and closing the attainment gap. I speak to many teachers, but I want to hear from you about what you think life is like in the classroom just now. We've gathered information from our members quite recently about that, and we've had quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that young people are struggling with socialisation. There are difficulties in concentrating for sustained periods of time, difficulties in listening to peers, teachers and support staff, difficulties in verbally communicating, increased distraction of mobile phones and digital devices. There seems to be less resilience among young people, increased number of behaviour concerns, and that is particularly alarming because of the numbers of very young children who are exhibiting challenge in behaviour. Young people have made the transition from early years to primary one. A number of violent incidents have been reported as a result of distressed behaviour in very young children. As you have suggested, the mental health crisis is growing to what it was pre-pandemic. To some extent, that will have been the result of bereavement. Thousands of young people will have experienced bereavement over the past two years, and we know that a disproportionate number of young people will be in communities where levels of poverty are high. Of course, we have had for senior phase students the anxiety of having to prepare for an exam diet, and at the same time coping with all those things or many of those things that I have outlined as being generally experienced by young people in schools. In addition to teachers struggling to maintain education continuity and handle all the mitigations that have been in place in schools, they are seeing that kind of intensification of need among their young people day and daily. It has been a huge amount that teachers have been contending with and trying to juggle over the past two years. It seems that there has not been a firm enough grasp of that among decision makers who often have sought to keep the attainment drive narrative going and all the business-as-usual processes and demands going. It has really been quite unsustainable. That way of working is unsustainable. There has to be acknowledgement of the need for recovery of all, and that recovery also has to include teachers, because they are absolutely critical to the on-going and longer-term recovery of our children and young people and our education system in its entirety. You have highlighted that there seems to be a lack of a grasp of the competing pressures. Where is that coming from? Who is it? Is it the council? Is it the Government? Where is that coming from? Why do not they get it? I think that it has been different organisations at different times. For example, towards the end of the autumn term of 2021, there was the announcement that Education Scotland was going to resume scrutiny activities. They seemed completely cut off and remote from the reality in school now to their credit. They are about to turn on that because of probably the protestations of us and others about the inappropriateness of that. We have had the Scottish Government maintain its expectation that young people complete national standardised assessments in the midst of all that. We have had the continuing collection of achievement of curriculum for excellence levels data. Even the decision to go ahead with an exam die early on this academic session without us really knowing the full picture of what Covid was going to do. We cannot guess what Covid might have done over the course of that academic session. We are not really taking full account of the recovery principles that Scottish Government Education Scotland co-authored along with input from others and about what should have been the primacy of health and wellbeing coming out of the pandemic. There seems to have been a lot of collision of policy priorities and a lot of inconsistency of messaging around what is important at this time and what should be less important at this time. Tell me, what do you think the consequences of this, long-term, short-term, will be? I think that to fail to have proper cognisance of the impact of the pandemic on children and young people, their families, their communities, on wider society and on the professionals who work with young people, will be a huge error of judgment. We all have to understand the magnitude of what has happened to Scotland and the world over the past couple of years and to understand that even just to fix the damage that has been done by that is going to take a lot of creativity, a lot of collaboration and additional resource. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, we were also trying to emerge from more than a decade of austerity, but it also battered new communities, children and young people and their families. We had not even recovered from that decade-long period of austerity and then the pandemic came along and dealt with a few further additional hefty blows. To fail to understand that and to fail to understand that we need to not only get back to where we were pre-pandemic, we need to do better than get back to where we were pre-pandemic. We have to think differently, work differently and resource differently if we are going to make that longer-term difference. If we do not do that, we will see all the impacts of poverty. We know that young people have health inequalities that emerge in young people, not just later in life but during their childhood. Health inequalities, inequalities in terms of criminal justice, in terms of longer-term employment, in terms of housing, all those things we will continue to see unless we properly equip the education service to do its part in addressing poverty and do all the other things that we need to do in the other parts of society to more decisively tackle poverty at source. I do not want to just focus on you, Andrea. Maybe the others will come in in a second, but I know that you have focused on this area. If we rush to get back to the way that it was, might result in longer-term mental health, unemployment, criminal activities, the whole range of issues that we know come from the attainment gap, the gap between the wealthy and the less wealthy. Do you think that that will get worse if we rush to try to get back to normal in the way that you have described? If we rush and if we simply look to do a quick repair job rather than full restoration, we will not start out those longer-term problems. Even if we get relatively short-term gains in terms of attainment in school across a narrow range of measures, that is not going to do what we need to do around the eradication of poverty. That too would be tinking in around the edges, albeit that would make things better in some ways for a cohort of young people. We have to take the opportunity, coming out of the pandemic, to reframe and rethink so many aspects of our society. If we are genuinely committed to social justice, equality and social justice equity have to be across a range of policy domains. I know that employment is reserved, but employment, housing, transport, social security, all of those things and education social services all facets of our public service playing their part towards the endeavour. I am finished unless any other panelist wants to come in. Mike? Yes, thanks. Just to reinforce some of those points, our members are saying that they have had a massive increase in workload to keep the system going. As has been touched on, there has been a huge increase in behavioural issues with pupils that teachers are not going to deal with, and they have touched on the mental health crisis, no doubt informed by trauma in many pupils, but that applies to teachers as well. Perhaps it is an understandable desire to somehow get back to normal, but there is really no normal any more. There seems to be a lack of recognition of where teachers are currently at, and that has manifested itself in 67 per cent of our members in a survey back in January, saying that they had considered leaving the profession in the past 12 months. What we are facing is a looming recruitment and retention crisis, and there will be no recovery without teachers. All of those matters need to be addressed in the ways that they have been touched on earlier. If we want to help pupils and have that individual or small group work to help them, we need more teachers and teachers who are not being as worked as hard, not having as many classes, not having as many people in their classes. All of those points that were touched on earlier are absolutely vital. That gets us back to that overall national funding, which is currently inadequate if we are going to get where we need to be. Greg Demster I will add a little bit to the points that Andrea Gray made. Mr Rennie asked about realities in school at the moment, and I agree with everything that Andrea Gray was saying there, but that intensification of need that she talked about—I am hearing about that particularly from those who have nursery classes or nursery schools in their senior—is a big increase in dysregulated behaviours, which we will presumably see progress into and through primary schools as well. There is a need to keep an eye on that and perhaps for further investment there. Also, a reality in school at the moment, which would lead me to say that we are still within the pandemic—you are saying that some say that we are in it and some we are coming out of it—is the huge amounts of staff absence that has been swallowed up, in turn, huge amounts of school leadership time over in classes. That is a real impact for our members. Implications, just to add, not to replace any of the implications that Andrea Gray was saying, the desirability of school leadership roles that I am hearing from our surveys and members is waning quite significantly. There have already been problems about recruitment into headship, particularly in some areas, but across the board there is an issue about recruiting heads into the primary sector in particular. We asked members, deputes, we asked them to respond to the statement, that I am a deaf head teacher and I am keen to become a head teacher. 18 per cent of those who responded were positive. That would, to me, be an implication. That is a drop-off from the first time that the survey was 2016, and it was 35.7 per cent were positive. It is a significant drop-off over time. Jim Thewliss I am not designing the points that my colleagues have made, all of which I align with and tune with, but one or two points just to raise in relation to your question, Mr Rennie. The first one in relation to what school like just now, what school has been like over the course of the past 18 months or so, has been an effort in keeping the school open for all of the very varied reasons why schools have been kept open. We have understood that, and that is what we have done. The level of pressure that school leaders have been under to do that has been well detailed by my colleagues earlier. On moving forward here, I already said that it is very important and it is important in the context of our duty of care to young people right now and their future development, not to separate recovery from improvement. Recovery needs to happen in account of what we are going through. Improvement is the obligation that we have to young people within school and young people within school at any point in time. That having been said, there will be a cost to pay in the future in relation to physical mental health and wellbeing, in relation to what we have experienced. There will be a cost to pay in the future, sometime in the very near future perhaps, in relation to the cost of living and the increase in the real-time poverty that young people are experiencing. So we have got to be very astute in the decision making process that we are going through just now, and very conscious of the fact that the pandemic may be over, but life is not going to be the same, and life chances for young people are going to be very, very challenging. Life for the staff within school and the level of pressure that they have put up with over the course of the past two years and the kind of cost to pay in relation to that in the future has got to be taken account of in relation to the decisions that we make just now. So it's important that we start to look in terms of reform agenda and where we go at better different ways of working, at different ethos within schools and at different relationship that we have with our school communities. And there is an opportunity there, and I think I said earlier on this morning that it's very, very important that we do not miss that opportunity. Thank you, chairman. Thank you, Willie Rennie. This brings to an end the first part of our meeting today. We thank our panel, Greg Demster, Andrea Bradley, Mike Corbett and Jim Thewlis for joining us this morning and giving us the benefit of their evidence. With that, I wish you all a good morning. We have a short suspension and allow the witnesses to leave, and we will continue to agenda item 3. Welcome back. Our next item in business is to consider the legislative consent memorandum LCMS 617 on the British Sign Language Bill, UK Parliament legislation. The bill recognises British Sign Language as a language of England, Wales and Scotland, places a duty on the Secretary of State to report on the promotion and facilitation of the use of BSL by ministerial government departments and places a duty on the Secretary of State to issue guidance on the general promotion and facilitation of BSL. The entirety of the bill extends to Scotland, clauses 1, 2 and 3 all relate to the reserved matter of equal opportunities, but fall within one of the exceptions to that reservation. As such, each of those provisions relate to matters in which the Scottish Parliament and Scottish ministers have competence for. The Scottish Government is recommending consent, because, while the Scottish Parliament has passed the British Sign Language Act 2015 and has established a precedence of support for the promotion of BSL, the bill will additionally recognise in statute BSL as a language of Scotland. Further, the Scottish Government states that the bill will be beneficial to Scotland's BSL communities as it will promote the use of BSL in Scotland, particularly in relation to reserved functions. The committee considered its approach to the scrutiny of the LCM at its meeting on 30 March, and agreed to write to the Scottish Government seeking an update on progress since the introduction of the 2015 act. The response from the minister for children and young people was included in members' papers. The minister states that a significant part of the act is delivered through the BSL national plan 2017 to 2023. A new national plan will be published and implemented following the conclusion of the current plan at the end of 2023. Do members have any comments? I think that I am very enthusiastic about the fact that Scotland has played a very leading role in the 2015 act. That is a point of progress that should be noted and commented upon. The UK Parliament piece of legislation that establishes BSL as a language of Scotland is also to be very much welcomed. We are all in agreement. Are members content that a short report prepared by the clerks and signed off by myself and the deputy convener be prepared? The report should be ideally published by the end of this week. Is the committee minded to recommend in its report that the Parliament agreed to legislative consent motion in terms of the LCM? Are we content? We are content. The next item of business is to consider two pieces of subordinate legislation under the negative instrument procedure. The first instrument to be considered is the police act 1997 and the protection of vulnerable groups Scotland act 2007 fees, coronavirus amendment regulations 2022, SSI 2022, 97. Do members have any comments on the instrument? Is the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? We are agreed. The next instrument for consideration is the teacher's pension scheme Scotland amendment regulations 2022, SSI 2022, 102. Do members have any comments on this instrument? Is the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? Thank you. The public part of today's meeting is now at an end. I want to suspend the meeting and ask members to reconvene on Microsoft Teams in five minutes. That will allow us to consider our final agenda items in private. Thank you and good morning.