I welcome everyone to the sixth meeting of the Education and Skills Committee, and can I please remind everyone present to turn on mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting. Apologies have been received from Johann Lamont and Fulton MacGregor. Johann is unwell and Fulton is unable to attend. Agent item 1 is an item in private. The first item of business is to consider taking item 4 in private. The committee will be discussing its approach to scrutiny of an LCM. I agree that we will take item 4 in private. The next item of business is a panel on curriculum for excellence. This is the fifth of six panels providing an overview of key areas of the committee's remit. Those sessions will inform consideration of our priorities for this parliamentary session, and I welcome this morning Keir Bloomer, convener of the Education and Skills Committee, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Dr Janet Brown, chief executive of the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Grant, headteacher at Sean's academy and Susan Quinn, education committee convener at the Educational Institute of Scotland. I understand that Keir Bloomer may at times comment in a personal capacity or as a member of the Reform Scotland advisory board. Please just clarify whenever you feel necessary what capacity you are speaking in just to make things simpler for the committee. We will go straight to questions and I will begin by asking the degree to which the original intentions of the reforms have been met. I will start with you Susan. The evidence that has come forward is that, to some extent, we have seen the original intentions of CFE taking forward considerations around changes to pedagogical approaches, particularly in the early years, and primary sectors within the BGE are clearly developed over the years. The six around the four capacities certainly form a great focus for schools and establishments in terms of their work and in terms of how they assess and report on young people in those areas. I think that there are clearly from the OECD report and others areas of evaluation through Education Scotland and even within our own membership that there are aspects of the original principles which perhaps have not been met. Moving to less formal assessment for young people has not been realised in our opinion across all of the sectors. There are still assessment burdens within the BGE and in the qualification stages. We still see some issues around the curriculum being overcrowded and that was clearly one of the original intentions was to consider how the curriculum could be decluttered, if you like, in terms of what was there from 5 to 14. I think that there are merits to what has been taken forward in the original intent but there are specifics that still need to be worked on in order to realise the full original aims. Do you have any reasons that you can give for any move away from the original objectives? I do not know that it was a move away from the original objectives, it is just not a realisation of what was intended. The over assessment has come in the primary sector because of the ease and oes being assessed on an individual basis in some establishments or becoming a tick box exercise in relation to assessment across the national qualifications in terms of the unit assessments and the challenges around that which have been aired within your documents but within the national review group have been considered. In terms of assessment, it is just not a rounded off approach to assessment and where teachers professional judgment has been classed as being the aim, what we are not seeing is a backing up of that in terms of other aspects. It is teachers professional judgment but we want to have standardised tests to back that up. We want to have more paperwork to back it up to be sure that we will go evidence that teachers professional judgment is actually there. In terms of the curriculum, what we have not had in the primary sector is strong enough guidance in terms of curriculum architecture to allow for the curricular areas to be developed in a way that the curriculum is less crowded. What we have in the primary sector are a whole range of very worthwhile approaches to the curriculum. Schools develop their focus weeks around green issues, literacy week, numeracy week, financial education week. No joining up of the dots in terms of how that looks when you take a 25-hour pupil day over a 39-week pupil year and how that can then overtake. In terms of the BGE, it is then about whether or not what we are seeing is an understanding of a curriculum architecture that would allow for the worthwhile approaches to education that are being developed to sit within a structure that does not mean that you are just jumping from one thing to the next and not getting the depth and balance that you want. Thank you for the opportunity of speaking this morning. Obviously I can only speak on behalf of my own school. I cannot talk for secondary education in general. However, I do have to emphasise that I am an optimist and I am very positive about what is happening in terms of curriculum for excellence. I think that it has given us the opportunity as a profession to look carefully at the curriculum. I think that the idea of having a progression from 3 to 18 was a very positive one. I think that the clarity in terms of the four capacities was a very, very strong statement for the profession and I think that the emphasis in terms of pedagogy was also very, very important. I think that the OECD spoke about it being at a watershed. I think that where we are in terms of Scottish education is that we have that chance to really take education forward from what has happened so far that we can take that forward. I do agree that there are issues that we need to look at in terms of assessment. I think that that was something where we tried to make sure in Shollins that when we were planning with the Ease and Nose, I do not think that we went into looking at the Ease and Nose as a way of using that as assessment. I think that it is perhaps different in the secondary sector. We were able to look at the Ease and Nose in different ways, but I do think that the assessment burden was an issue, but I am delighted that that is being looked at now. I think that that is going to make a significant difference. As I say, I am an optimist and I believe that it is a good time in Scottish education. I think that one of the challenges of CFE is that any change takes a particularly strong period of time to be able to bed in. Teachers have done a really good job in terms of understanding what is the nature of what CFE is trying to undertake. Part of that has been mentioned previously is that depth and breadth of learning. One of the challenges is to look at what we are trying to achieve in education. There are obvious milestones that people hit, such as qualifications when they get to the senior phase, but it is about what is the learning and the growth of those individuals as they approach that qualification that I think is critical. I think that it is very important that the depth of learning is really essential. It is not just a matter of jumping through the hoop of getting through a qualification. It is about the ability to apply that knowledge, the ability to put it in different contexts and the ability to do that. That, I think, is starting to really come through in some of the things that we have seen, for instance, in the last diet. The contextualisation of learning is something that was another aspect for CFE, because one of the things that the teachers in the room are probably much better to talk about than I am is about the fact that learners learn better if they are interested and they are excited by the context in which they are learning. CFE really gives that ability, and one of the things that I think we continue to develop in across the system is the ability to put that learning in a context that excites the individual. If you are learning about angular momentum with a pendulum, it is particularly boring, but if you are learning about it in a racing car or you are learning about it in a different context, you get kids interested, and that is possible and is being done across CFE. That for me is a very positive thing, and associated with that is the whole idea of personalisation and choice, not just in how you learn something, but also in what you learn. We have seen over the last set of qualification structures that we have run the last three years, that personalisation and the choice is increasing. When we first started out with the examples that we put out in terms of the nature of how you could teach particular things in the national courses, a lot of teachers used those particular examples. For instance, in environmental science, the wind farm was generally what everyone taught the environmental science around. As the teachers were getting much more confident, much more comfortable with it, we started to see different contexts, which I think will really help in terms of that excitement and personalisation for the students. The broadening of the curriculum is the other aspect of what CFE was about, which is not just focusing on the national qualifications, the national four, five, highs and advanced highs. I think that that is a cultural shift that the country needs to go through. It is not just schools, it is also about what are parents expecting their children to be doing. We are starting to see a bit more of a take up of the other aspects of learning within the school, and I think that that is hugely positive, but it is a cultural shift that I think still needs to be gone through as a country. I think that many different goals that were associated with CFE, I think that some of them were well on the way to, some of them we know we need to get there and others we are reassessing. The word assessment there I think is very appropriate. As the committee is aware, we did a piece of work at the end of last year, beginning this year, to look at how the qualifications had worked and the role of assessment. We identified that the unit assessments were actually causing issues within schools, and we put in place some actions to undertake that. The Deputy First Minister has decided to take the approach that we remove unit assessments and I think has been said that that should free up some time for additional teaching and learning within the courses. However, it is really important that the courses are given the appropriate amount of time for students to be able to learn them, because that is a real issue around depth and breadth of learning. It is a good journey that we are on, and I think that we have made a lot of progress and we continue to do so. Strictly speaking, none of us can answer your question. We do not know what progress has been made because no serious attempt has been made to evaluate it. This is the most significant development that has taken place in Scottish education since the war, and no evaluation system was set up at the outset. There is not even any baseline on which to make comparisons. That is a very serious shortcoming in the programme, and one of the things that the RSE has consistently argued for is proper independent research and evaluation of what is going on. Successive Governments have made claims of success in relation to curriculum for excellence, and to be honest with you they are based on no evidence whatsoever. We can all have impressions, and indeed the OECD report backs up those impressions. It says a lot of positive things about curriculum for excellence. It puts it in the mainstream of educational developments globally, in my view quite rightly, and it points to things that have taken place within the context of curriculum for excellence, which are indeed very positive. I do not disagree with any of the positives that my colleagues here have mentioned, but it is important to stress that the evidence to support it simply is not there. I think that we can say, with some degree of confidence, that there has been significant change in pedagogy. There has been a greater emphasis on depth in learning, which is extremely important, although, as Susan Quinn pointed out to you, the flip side of that has not taken place. You cannot really get depth of learning unless the time and space is available for it, and that has depended upon the original intention in curriculum for excellence to declutter, and we have not been successful in decluttering. If you want a little bit of evidence of that, I would refer you to page 44 of the OECD report, where it says this. It has examined all of the guidance that has been issued in relation to curriculum for excellence and found that the guidance contained four capacities, 12 attributes, 24 capabilities, five levels, seven principles, six entitlements, ten aims, eight curriculum areas, four contexts for learning and 1,820 experiences and outcomes. That is self-evident lunacy. We have allowed mountains of guidance, much of it, very badly written, nearly incomprehensible, to accumulate over the years, and that now stands in the way of the decluttering of the curriculum. I am pleased to see that the cabinet secretary is determined to do something about it. It is slightly unfortunate that the most recent attempt to do something about it has resulted in the issue of a further 99 pages of guidance, but it will be nice to think that the next attempt will be more successful than that one. I thank you very much for that positive outcome. I could just pick you up on that point. Why do you think that that happened? Why did we end up in a scenario where we had so many different pieces of jargon when we were trying to assess the curriculum for excellence? Why did it happen? I think that is a very good question, a very important question. Why did it happen? In my view, reviewing now the 12 years since the original curriculum for excellence document was produced, it seems to me that there have been some political mistakes, but that most of the mistakes that have been made have actually been made by the leadership of the profession. That the quality of advice that Governments have received has not been strong and that there has been a lack of strategic overview of the process as a whole with the result that what has taken place is that guidance has been added to, in fact it has multiplied rather than added, and the overall consequence of that has been to obscure rather than to illuminate. You mentioned in your submission to the committee that you feel that there are issues with the delivery plan for Education Scotland, which might relate to staffing, capacity, capability and resources, and you go on to say that they need to demonstrate an increased willingness to consult widely with the profession and to take proper account of comment received. I think that that paper is from the Royal Society, rather than from you personally. Could you comment on that? Yes, certainly. The Royal Society welcomes the delivery plan in general. We find very little in it with which we disagree. There are one or two things. We are concerned about its manageability. If you look through the development plan, some of the points contain several actions. I tried to count up the actions and I came to 117. I think that a delivery plan with 117 separate actions is in danger of becoming unmanageable. When combined with the very demanding timescales that are set within the delivery plan, I think that it will be very difficult to take the profession along with all aspects of it. There are some difficulties, I think, but a large proportion of the actions fall to be carried out by Education Scotland. One of the things that has concerned me just in the last few weeks has been the choice of Education Scotland or the inspectorate part of it to look at bureaucracy and unnecessary workload. To be fair to them, they were asked to do it by the Cabinet Secretary. They did not take on the role themselves. If they had done it, it would have been simply a grotesque impertinence, given the fact that they are responsible for very much of the unnecessary workload and unnecessary documentation that is involved in curriculum for excellence. If they are to be involved in slimming this down and taking forward the many actions of the delivery plan, then there are serious capacity issues that have to be addressed. I think that there is also something of a reprogramming exercise that will have to be undertaken. I just finished my initial questions with Mrs Grant. Do you feel as a headteacher that your staff have been compromised in trying to deliver on the curriculum for excellence because of the number of things that they are asked to do and because of the jargon that has gone with that and the difficulty of interpreting outcomes and experiences? I think that in any profession there is jargon and I think that my staff are used to the jargon of curriculum for excellence. I certainly hope that they are. It is my job to make sure that they are. I do think that there is a recognition nationally that there has been a lot of information given out and that there has been a lot of information that has been well-meaning and helpful in its intention. I must admit that I am very pleased to note that the intention will be that there will be four pathways in a new Education Scotland website that should make the accessing of resources and accessing of information much more manageable. I also note that within that there will be a specific one for staff and that that will be slimmed down information. Perhaps one of the issues is that information has been added to and information has not then been taken away so that that process will make things much more meaningful. Basically, in terms of what the teachers of my school are doing, they are delivering every day education, they are delivering for young people and our focus has been very much in making sure that what happens in the classroom, what happens in terms of learning and teaching is of the best. It has been my job to filter that information to staff. I have seen that as my role as head teacher to make sure that as a member of Glasgow City Council I listen to what Glasgow is saying as a teacher within Scottish education. I listen to what is happening nationally. It is also my job to make sure that the priorities for my own school we agree and that we focus on. It has been my job to make sure that I filter that, I make sure that people are being aware of things. Therefore, I would hope that the staff would feel comfortable in the kind of tasks that would be nice to do. However, as I say, the fact that the website will be slimmed down is again only a good thing. Tavish, you wanted to come in. I have two supplementaries. Just in response to your answer, Mrs Grant and Liz Smith, is your view as we have seen in terms of the information that has come out from the centre? Has that come from Education Scotland or has it come in terms of excellence or has it come from your local education authority? Again, I am very comfortable with the kind of information that we get from Education Scotland and Glasgow City Council. Glasgow City Council obviously works within the parameters. When we do an improvement plan, we follow Glasgow City Council policies, which are the priorities that are set by Glasgow City Council, but they are set within the context that is nationally. In terms of answering your question, we respond both to Glasgow City Council and to Glasgow City Council nationally. In the same way that I filter the information, Glasgow City Council has that function too. You made a very clear point about having to do all that filtering, but that is coming from somewhere. Curriculum for excellence is coming from Education Scotland, as Mr Bloom was suggesting earlier on? I think that it is. That is a fair statement. Curriculum for excellence also has engaged the profession in a dialogue. I genuinely believe that teachers have been empowered to discuss issues in terms of learning and teaching. They have that capability. I feel that within the council I work in, I have a certain degree of autonomy in terms of organising what we need to do to make sure that we deliver best for the young people. I think that it is important to reflect on where we were before CFE. Where teachers were given and told what to do, and they were almost reporting in the national debate that it was robotic in terms of what they were being instructed to deliver on. What we were trying to do was to reprofessionalise and bring teachers into that role. We were trying to do that so that they were making professional judgments around the context that their young people were learning in relation to that. Over time, the advice notes and documents in relation to that, which have come through Education Scotland, have gone through the CFE management board of which all the stakeholders are engaged in, have added to that advice in response to the questions that have been asked by the profession or by others. Sometimes what has not happened is the removal to make sure that there is no duplication or otherwise in the conversation. What we get reported is often that it is then how that is delivered at local level in relation to local authority. That is the challenge of what advice is given. We know that some local authorities took a very firm approach to it and went right. We were all going to do the same tracking system, the same reporting system. You were back where you started with schools being told what it should look like for their young people regardless of the context that they were in. There are others where perhaps the local input has not been as helpful in any way, because it has just been, well, it is there to sign your own things. Then we would contest that there is probably the happy medium somewhere in the middle of that, where supportive advice has been given locally to ensure that curriculum design assessment, moderation, tracking, reporting are done in a way that meets the needs of the establishments, the parents, the young people that are with them. The challenge is then how to do it. If I take, for instance, the ease and oes and where we are now. Just for the record, you should maybe say what ease and oes are, because it is all jargon. The experiences and outcomes are the building blocks of each of the curricular areas. We are all meant to know this. I do recall that each time we come before when it is different committees. At the point where they were introduced, they needed to be the way they were to allow the move from people who took the 5 to 14 book and just went through it. We needed that shift and then we needed to develop back to get the more structure around things. That is part of the problem with it. At the point where CFE was starting out, we were in a different climate in terms of finances and otherwise in education. There was a bit more time and space that could be created. To my own circumstances where you could create professional learning opportunities for teachers because there was enough staff there to be able to free up time. We are now in a situation where that time and space is not as readily available and therefore it becomes more challenging to take this forward. I think that where Education Scotland has responded is to then look at those nos and to look at how that has been interpreted in a particular way and looked at the significant aspects of learning, which take that a wee bit further forward and maybe give more clarity around the assessment issues and the work that is done within schools. Probably the answer to your question is that there is a bit too much from everybody. There are lots of different things in lots of different places and it is that consistency. Some of our members will report that locally they are being instructed too much and in others they will report that they are not getting enough support and it is the balancing act around those. The key issue around where we are at now is how we create the time and space to review what is happening whether it is locally in an establishment, locally in a local authority or nationally where we are in terms of CFE and how we make sure that the BGE is delivered in terms of the initial intentions, broad general education, which is where we are at from 3 to 15 before we get into qualification stages because I think that is where we would have major concerns about how far that has been delivered and how far that has gone and where it disappears when you get to the second stage as things become more focused on qualifications. That sounds very fair to me. Can I just ask one supplementary to Mr Blumer in the context again of Liz Smith's questions? Your submission from the Royal Society is that it is incompatible for Education Scotland to have both the inspection function on one hand and all the guidance that you have all described on the other hand. It is the logic that this AzoECD in my view hints at should change in the future. Yes. That is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest that is built into the organisation. That is not the organisation's fault, of course, but it is there and it has to be resolved. We cannot have an agency that is responsible for development inspecting its own work. I think that you were just making, Susan. In the introduction remarks, I think that what stands out is the situation where we have addition to the guidance and issues around joining things up. Certainly, when I have been going around primary schools and primary schools, I ask them what does curriculum for excellence mean. I am being shown big binders where they are having to essentially map how the learning outcomes are going to work and how they are going to deliver it so that they do not have those kind of gaps. I want to ask and grant what in a practical sense is required for you to implement curriculum for excellence, following on from the point that Susan Quinn was just making? There was a time when we were issued with the green binders, and it was, as I say, within the context of being helpful and supportive so that staff were given materials that they could use as professionals. I think that that is very much part of the whole notion that, following McCrone, teachers are professionals who have autonomy within their own classroom in terms of the kind of work that can take place. We do not really use those. I think that, as someone has mentioned before—I think that it was my colleague on my left—Dr Janet Brown mentioned the fact that change does take place over time, and over time the way people have worked with regard to the information has altered so that a lot of it is online, a lot of the information is online. There is a lot of discussion in departments and in faculties within a secondary school. There is discussion across departments in different schools so that people of the same curricular area will get together and discuss issues and support each other in that way. That collegiate approach is very much a strength of what is happening in the teaching profession. It is not really a case of a teacher sitting with a green binder and taking things off or reading through that in isolation. Those days have gone, if they ever really existed. It really is now a case of people working together collegiately, looking at information online, sharing good practice, learning from each other in terms of meeting the needs. One aspect is that teachers are concerned that they always do the best for young people. Therefore, there is a necessity to ensure that nothing is being missed or that someone is not doing their job well enough. As an individual, a teacher wants to make sure that they are meeting the entitlements of young people who are built into curriculum for excellence. There can be a desire to make sure that that is happening. That is when you can go back to look at lists and check that you are doing things. The ease and those, the experience and outcomes for each curricular area are very much to do with planning. The new statement indicates that the planning in terms of short-term planning should be in one way, but the longer-term planning should be looking at ease and those across a year. That would be something that teachers would get together and discuss what they would do in terms of meeting the curricular aims within their own curricular area. I do not disagree with Anne, but what is reported often to us is that where collegiate working takes place, things go along very smoothly. The difficulty can be where, whether it is within a secondary school and departments are all doing their own things, the bureaucracy has built up around how you track and monitor and record some of what you are doing. It is not what is being delivered that is the issue in and of itself, it is how you are evidencing that and how that is going. Within the primary sector, one of the biggest issues has been that the ease and those have sat there and primary schools have planned around those and are now moving towards planning around the significant aspects of learning in that way. On top of that, you have special interests that get added in to the curriculum, so you have one plus two languages, you have the science lobby saying that we need to have more STEM work, you have the desire for schools to be right-respecting, have a green flag, be fair trade schools. All of those events in and of themselves are worthwhile to the learners experience. However, very often what schools are not doing is deciding on one against the other and saying that covers all of what we need to do or the vast majority of what we need to do, what they want to do is everything. That has become a problem. That is exactly what happened in 5-14. We were overcrowded because we were trying to do too much of things that are genuinely worthwhile to young people, but not if you are trying to do them all. It is then about saying, which are the key priorities for this session? Are we able to use that? Does that cover all of the significant aspects of learning that we need to do? The thing that struck me was the volume of work that is being undertaken by primary schools, in particular, to make the curriculum usable. I am just wondering if that is an accurate reflection, if that is something that is widespread. Is it what we need? We talk a lot about streamlining and I think that the instinct is to think about what that means less guidance. I am just wondering whether we are not actually what we need is better guidance rather than necessarily less. In terms of what the Prime Minister said, what we need somewhere around here is a system shift. Some of what has happened around the curriculum is that we have taken new jargon and we have tried to make it fit with what we always did. We have changed some pedagogy in terms of approaches to learning within schools. That has taken off in lots of ways, but we are still trying to fit it around a similar model to what we did previously. When I started teaching 25 years ago, we would have an hour and a half of language in the morning, an hour and a half of maths in the morning and that would leave two hours of everything else for the afternoons. What we have done with CFE is not to say, let us look at that 25 hours a week differently or look at the 25 hours a week over each of the weeks differently. We are still in too many establishments trying to do the exact same curriculum design, but with more stuff. We are squeezing in two hours of PE a week. Once you take the two hours out of the 25, you get your languages. The curriculum design from three through to the end of the learner's education has not shifted enough. I think that we have not added up the time required to do all the things that we are asking to happen. There is a bit of that, but once you add it up, if we are still saying that, we still have to be looking at two hours of PE and having one plus two languages which have been agreed or otherwise. I think that those are going to be worthwhile for our young people in terms of their on-going life skills. What you need to do is look at how that is delivered across a young person's educational experience. The point is that you do not need to be doing every curricular area every week. In the primary sector, generally, we are still probably trying to do a bit of art, a bit of music, a bit of drama every week. That is where we need better examples in the primary sector of what the curriculum architecture would look around in order to allow us to make sure that the young people get the best experience. Teachers are really only doing what they know, and they have not got that structure to it. Better guidance around primary curricular architecture. I think that there is a real miss and a real problem with the fact that we have not got that consistent across the country in terms of what young people experience of broad general education to the end of S3. That is partly to do with the fact that we have not gone wholesale for the original principles around the qualifications, which should be that, generally, the national fives and hires were a two-year qualification and architecture around that. What we are seeing is that, again, at secondary, we are just modelling in lots of cases what we used to have. Instead of standard grades and hires, we have got national fives and national fives and hires, and we are doing it in exactly the same way, and we have not moved enough around that. I think that your educational architecture point is absolutely reflected what I have been hearing over the summer. Thank you very much. I think that, almost inevitably, the conversation has sort of drifted towards bureaucracy and streamlining guidance. There has been a great deal from teachers about the volume and quality of the guidance that has been issued. Over a period now, there have been quite a few initiatives in connection with reducing the bureaucracy. From what you are saying, this has not been as successful as it might have been. Indeed, just in August there, Education Scotland said that there is currently too much support material in guidance for practitioners. I think that, remember a few months ago, there was concern that there was not enough guidance issued in certain respects. How do we get that balance? I think that one of the challenges is—I agree with everything that everyone has said about—we have provided more and more support and we have added and we have not necessarily gone back and looked at modifying rather than adding. That is one of the challenges. How do we make sure that we improve the amount of support and the nature of the support that is given? It is about understanding from the teachers what they need. We need a lot more conversations about what does a teacher in a context require and how easy it is for them to get that. Right now, the system produces documents that cover multiple things. One of the challenges is how do we give support and guidance in a way that is timely, appropriate and just in time for when teachers need it? That is arguably smaller pieces of advice, smaller pieces of support that teachers can use on a daily basis. That is a challenge to do and it is a challenge to tailor it to the requirements of a variety of different contexts. For me, the whole issue of support is also what is being talked about in terms of teachers getting together. One of the philosophies of CFE was about the profession—meeting together, sharing experiences, sharing support at both the school, local authority and national level. You can see really good examples of that across the country but you can also see areas of the country where that has not happened. Teachers are left with not as much peer support as they could get. From the experience of SQA in the senior phase, the most positive feedback that we get is when we run events and we bring teachers together. Teachers getting together is a really, really key thing in here. One of the challenges is allowing teachers the time to be able to do that. Part of the problem lies in the word guidance. In a sense, it is a weasel word because sometimes it means instruction and sometimes it means suggestion and it is really important to distinguish between these two things. The essential role of government and its agencies is to provide clear strategic advice that is limited, manageable and memorable. The scope for any amount of suggestion—there is no reason why the Education Scotland website or any other source of information can't contain limitless amounts of suggestions to teachers, which they can look at or not, adopt or not as they see fit. That is something very different from the strategic role of guidance, the bit that is essentially instruction, which has to be, in my view, very limited in its nature. As far as the suggestion side is concerned, I think that what Janet has just said is perfectly correct. What do teachers need? The suggestion element needs to be teacher led. It needs to be a response to difficulties or problems or issues that teachers are genuinely experiencing rather than gratuitous advice thrown out from the centre regardless of whether or not it is answering any need in the classroom. Underpinning all of this, it seems to me, is the problem of how to bring about change in a complex system. It seems to me that we still have some considerable way to go in understanding that process. The first step in understanding it is the separation of the genuinely strategic from the operational and the permissive, as it were. A further stage in it is understanding the nature of iterative change, a change that takes place not all at once but gradually over time with successive changes building upon the experience of previous changes, eliminating weaknesses and emphasising strengths. We have really not succeeded in doing that. Take just two examples of that. One is the experiences and outcomes that have been referred to. Experiences and outcomes are a serious attempt to build a curriculum on the basis of the skills and the knowledge that young people are actually acquiring. The notion behind the experiences and outcomes is that they will define in each case what it is that the learner should be able to do at the end of the experience that they were not able to do at the beginning. That is a perfectly sensible and highly innovative way of building a curriculum. I think that the Scottish attempt has probably been the most thoroughgoing of any in the world so far. It is not to say that the experiences and outcomes are without their feelings. They have lots of feelings. There are far too many of them. Many, probably most, are obscurely worded and require a kind of textual exegesis in the part of teachers that they shouldn't be asked to undertake on a daily basis. They differ in kind. In many instances, they break down learning into comparatively small steps, which I think is what they are supposed to do. In other cases, for example, the health and wellbeing ones—this is an area that is regarded as crucially significant by government—there is no progression built into them whatsoever. They cover every level from early to fourth in the form of aspirational statements. That is completely useless. They have been around now for something like 8 years. We should have been going through a process of iterative change whereby we refine our approach to the experiences and outcomes and they become steadily more useful. We haven't actually done that. What we've done is duplicate them. First of all, by the significant aspects of learning, which were really a recognition that the experiences and outcomes were too many and too complex. Here is a simpler system for you. Susan referred to them. My impression is that they are no longer current. They have just been replaced by the newly issued benchmarks. If that is not the case, then we've actually now got three systems of essentially the same thing, which is a strange approach to simplification, I would have thought. There is a need to look seriously at how you bring about change and then to dramatically simplify what is on offer. The other area of this is the building of the curriculum series. Nobody has mentioned that yet, but it is supposed to be the high-level guidance, the genuinely strategic guidance in relation to curriculum for excellence. It contains, particularly in the third of the series, which is about curriculum structure, much that is useful. It is very repetitive and badly written, but much that is useful within the document. There is no sense of the planning of the series overall. For example, interdisciplinary learning was mentioned, which is a key part of curriculum for excellence, with which teachers were not familiar. There is no building the curriculum document that deals with that. Whereas curriculum areas receive attention from building the curriculum one, and it, in fact, is an area with which teachers were totally familiar, most of them could have written building the curriculum one in their sleep. There is, in the overall architecture of the guidance that is on offer, no coherence, no overall strategic plan. Those, to my mind, are the crucial things. We need to be genuinely strategic. We need to demote much of what has been published to the level of suggestion. We need to empower teachers to operate within limited strategic guidelines, showing initiative of their own. If we perhaps do what you suggest and simplify the guidance and make it more limited in nature, which is your words, Mr Blimer, are we not in danger of oversimplification here and that we might end up with a tick box approach? I think not. I think the opposite. Either you trust the teaching profession or you don't. The whole philosophy of curriculum for excellence is that you trust the profession, that you set a sense of direction and curriculum for excellence set a sense of direction that was widely welcomed and agreed. Nobody at all, I think, queried the principles of curriculum for excellence at the outset. You supplement that with a limited amount of strategic advice and you trust the profession then to implement it. That, to my mind, is the way in which you achieve genuine change and we have done too little of it. Perhaps I can just turn to the bureaucracy side, which has been very well publicised. There seems to be a bit of a debate as to where that bureaucracy is coming from. Is it predominantly from national government? Is it predominantly from local government? I see RSC seem to, in their very last sentence this year, say that the implication in this action that local authorities have been more responsible in government than national agencies in generating unnecessary workload. Where is it coming from? Where is it really coming from? It depends where you work. That is the genuine answer around it. Do you mean that different educational authorities are different? Different educational authorities, different educational establishments. If you trust teachers and you are working with them as a head teacher then you should not require them to fill in lots of bits of paper. You should be able to have conversations with them around how young people are progressing. The quality of conversation within the timescale at CFE has been implemented is significantly better for lots of establishments because they spend times talking to each other. Where head teachers are less confident in the conversations, they tend to have boxes of ring binders, of tick box things, which prove nothing other than a teacher. Similarly, on forward planning, if you have beautiful forward plans, all it proves is that you are really good at writing a beautiful forward plan. It does not prove that you are delivering quality learning and teaching to young people. Teachers want time and space to deliver quality learning and teaching. They want time and space to have the kinds of conversations that Janet talked about with peers within their own establishments and in the wider communities. However, there is no time to do that because, in lots of cases, what they are still doing is replicating the old system of a termally plan that is handed in and may be discussed or may be marked or may be handed back, and then daily plans and in some cases weekly plans and tick boxes of assessment folders and all sorts of stuff. That will depend on where you work, whether it is dictated or prescribed by your local authority in their systems or whether it is where what happens within your establishment. It is alarming in its own way because, if there is such a diversity of bureaucracy deriving from local authorities, local schools, how then can any national initiative be made effective to reduce that bureaucracy? Where we are at now is a situation where we have the opportunity to look at what is working in different areas. Here is a point about having more concise advice. We should be at a point where now we are able to say, here are examples of good practice in a range of context. The fact is that we know that one size does not fit all. We cannot just simply say that every primary school in Scotland should do it this way because that takes away from the context of that establishment. However, what we should have now through the inspection processes and through visits from all sorts of different people into establishments through local knowledge is examples of good practice, which would then fit to a more concise group of context and then looking at that particular situation for your own establishment. I do not think what I am describing in terms of local situations. It is terribly different from before. A lot of it is about leadership within establishments and how confident they are in their own ability to articulate their school. Often what we hear from our members is that we have to keep a daily diary in a particular way and we have to keep our forward plans in a particular way and we have to keep our assessment folders in a particular way in case the inspector calls. Education Scotland's inspectorate team guidance and advice has long since been very different from that and it does not matter how many times I say it as education convener of the EIS. Schools have still got in their heads in lots of ways this situation that if the inspector comes I am going to have to produce lots of evidence. The evidence should exist within a confident leader. The evidence should be that I am confident enough to say to you, this is where my school is at. How do I know it? Because I talk to my teachers and I talk to my young people. Do I keep lots of books about that? No, I don't. I actually know and I speak to my parents and we know that but we don't have that confidence for lots of people because we haven't got that culture shift because we hear in the press about situations or employers don't understand the new structures. We need to look at how we communicate what education is doing in Scotland in the wider context so that everybody understands it. I've got teacher pals who don't understand the new qualification processes because they're an early years teacher. They've got young people who are going through secondary schools and they're saying to me, what is it? There's a problem in terms of how we have communicated that. It's not that we haven't tried, there's lots of communication documents have gone through lots of different things but for some reason or other we haven't sold that. I think that's partly because we haven't got the time or space to get some of that culture shift in place. Before I bring in Travis, I can just welcome Gillian Martin. Gillian was given evidence at another committee this morning. That's why she's just arrived just now and I should have mentioned that at the start of the meeting. I could also remind the committee members to direct their questions to individuals if that's the case and also if we could both committee and panel keep the questions and answers as short as possible. We've got a lot to get through today. Thank you. Just one supplementary Mr Boomer to Colin Beattie's questions. You said there was no strategic plan and no coherence. Who's responsible for that and who should do it? That's a Government responsibility. So the Minister's office is where that sits, do you believe? Yes, and I think that many of the things that the cabinet secretary has said recently indicate a desire to put a much stronger strategic framework in place and tackle some of the problems that have been identified, some of those of bureaucracy that Susan has just been talking about. So there is maybe an understanding of that but essentially it is a Government task. Thank you. Thank you very, very briefly. CureBlimmer's statement about the ease and oes and whether or not they're all compatible, coherent and whether or not the benchmarking actually is an additional set of assessments. I mean, I just was wanting to ask Anne Grant and Susan Quinn quickly. Is that an assessment that you share or not? My understanding of the recently published benchmarks, which are only out for certain aspects of the curriculum at the moment and have to come out for the rest by the end of the calendar year, my understanding of those is that they have subsumed the ease and oes and also the significant aspects of learning. In other words, that's now the document I'm expecting to be the working document. I'm expecting that I'll look at benchmarks and working that with my staff and not look at ease and oes in the same detail and not look at significant aspects of learning. It's my understanding that they've been subsumed. The ones that are in literacy and numeracy have an interesting feature which is that there's bits in bold and italics which are for all teachers and there's bits in an ordinary font which are for specific teachers of English for literacy and maths for numeracy and so that they've been conflated into one document. That's the way I'm looking at it. I may be wrong, but that's the way I am approaching it. I would agree that those are the documents which now will be the key planning documents for schools, but they've only just come in in August for certain subjects and the other ones are not there yet. We will still be talking about the ease and oes and the significant aspects of learning until establishments can get to grips with those. That's again, it's back to having the time and space to look at that and to look at what that means for your establishment in terms of the work that you're doing. It is one of the challenges around development because schools and local authorities will have developed their improvement plans prior to the summer holidays to plan for what they are going to be doing with their development time for this year and now we have something new. That's something that you should be helpful in terms of what we're doing, but it does mean that establishments will need to revisit what their priorities were and find the time and space to discuss those. Following on from the theme of how we go about reducing bureaucracy, we had the cabinet secretary before the committee, not all that long ago, emphasising that he does want to look at how we reduce bureaucracy and duplication in teacher workload and his statement to Parliament to announce the creation of regional clusters. I would like to ask Anne, who is a headteacher, who is on the coface of delivery, what is your understanding of how those regional clusters will work, what the relationship will be like between the region and the schools in particular, and has there been any engagement between your school and your education authority and Education Scotland in terms of a blueprint in terms of how that might operate? In terms of the last part of your question, I haven't been engaged in any discussions about it with my Education Authority and Education Scotland. I imagine that that will happen and I'm pretty sure it will happen. In terms of the regional clusters, my understanding of them is that they will be supportive bodies, which will be there to ensure collegiality across councils. Again, this is my reading of it. I think that the aim is that if a council is doing well in a particular area and another neighbouring council, or a council somewhere close by, I suppose, is doing less well, than those councils can get together and share information. I do not see them and I hope that they will not be in any way in terms of governance. My understanding is that it's about sharing information across councils rather than having actual governance. The whole notion of how that will develop in terms of governance and the local authority role will be an interesting one. Obviously, that's something that I could comment on if you want me to, but maybe I shouldn't. In terms of the regional boards, I understand that they are very much a notion. I think that it's in response to the OECD document that suggested that councils can learn from each other. I think that that already happens. I know that Glasgow is already linked with Fife and there's sharing of ideas there in terms of the way we approach things. I think that it's to do with sharing ideas rather than governance. Absolutely. For example, in North East of Scotland, which I represent, we have the Northern Alliance, where councils have been working with each other, particularly in relation to issues about teacher shortages and how we work together to address those. Speaking to education lists in both Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire, they do not have a very clear understanding of what it means, but I think that it could operate as a board. Perhaps you have a joint QIO who will go in and present challenge into the schools. How do we ensure that we have greater collaboration when we can work together? We are not adding in that additional layer of bureaucracy or management between the local education authority and the Scottish Government. Is that achievable? I think that it's achievable if what you do is you accept that you can use the same activity for multiple purposes. If you think that one example of perhaps a regional board working is around moderation of standards, that will go on within an establishment. In a local authority, it should go on across establishments. There now needs to be that outwith your own authority. I understand that part of what is happening in terms of the regional boards is around working in that moderation aspect. The potential is there to say that we are going to be doing a moderation exercise three times because you are going to do it with your own school and your neighbouring schools and now you are going to do it with people in other authorities. You can use the one activity to meet the three needs and avoid that duplication or overworking of something. I think that your idea of the joint QIOs. Otherwise, there needs to be consideration around that because the support systems within local authorities are varied across the country depending on their ability to provide the staff in those areas. It has been an area that has been hit by cuts to budgets within local authorities and decisions around that. Again, rather than having a part-time QIO in a smaller authority, if you have one full FT across a number, that would make more sense to the system because what you would do is see that sharing of good practice and developing of understanding. Janet Brown said, where we see developments is where teachers talk to each other. That is teachers whether it is classroom based, middle senior management or in the strategic offices. Where people talk to each other and not just in their own wee bubble, you see a sharing of good practice, you see a development of good practice within that. You referred to regional clusters. In fact, the governance review paper refers to school clusters and to educational regions and they are two separate things in the review document. The first one is obviously a group of schools in a neighbourhood. Generally, the secondary school and associated primaries and probably prefive establishments within the same area. The education regions appears to be the aggregate of a number of local authorities. The paper is very fair one. It gives a concise outline of governance in Scottish education as it currently stands and it asks a number of quite open questions. It does not tell us all that much about clusters. It tells us even less about education regions. We are free in responding to this document to make our own interpretation or make our own suggestions as to what these might be and what they might do. That seems to me to be a perfectly fair approach to consultation. I think that it's difficult to answer your question at the present moment. We don't really know what these regions will turn out to be and at the outset of a consultation I have no complaint about that. I do, however, remain to be persuaded that there is any purpose to them whatsoever. The Royal Society will respond to this consultation in due course. Obviously, I can't at present moments anticipate precisely what we will say. I think that we are likely to be sceptical about what they will contribute that is additional and helpful. I wonder, Dr Brown, if we can pursue some SQA issues. The cabinet secretary was very clear in Parliament that you and he had had discussions about what was possible so as not to compromise the integrity of the exam system and obviously pupils' progress. After that, we find that unit assessments are completely disappearing. Can you tell me why you think that major U-turn has taken place? When I was discussing with the cabinet secretary about removing units, the conversation around removing units and not doing anything to the further assessments that were in place, what we are currently doing is that given the feedback that we got back from our research and field work, there was over-assessment associated with the units, some of which was associated with the nature of the units themselves, others were as a result of other issues such as being discussed here in terms of the preparation that candidates were getting in terms of broad general education, in terms of the amount of time being given to the teaching and learning of the courses and also in terms of the nature of the cohort being presented for the qualifications themselves. How can we address that? How could that be addressed in terms of reducing workload? What we have done is we have looked at, is it possible, by removing units and by looking at how you address the course assessment in general, that is the assignment that is undertaken and the final examination at the end of the year, it is possible to say that the things that we have been assessing through the units, we are now going to assess through the course assignment and through the final examination. What SQA is currently scoping and undertaking is ways in which we can make sure that we have full course coverage associated with the qualifications to maintain the credibility and the standard of those qualifications. That means taking the things that we are being assessed in units, looking at what needs to be added to the course assessment, whether it be an additional assignment, whether it be a strengthening of the assignment or whether it be a strengthening of the examination. I do want to emphasise that both the examination and the course assignment are absolutely compliant with the curriculum for excellence philosophy. One of the things that we have talked about here is about the flexibility that is necessary for kids in terms of their being able to learn appropriately and to be able to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in different contexts. The course assignment is things like projects, things like work that they do in terms of science that allows them to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in different contexts that is done within the school environment but that is sent to SQA to be externally marked and hence that is where the quality assurance comes from. That allows the flexibility still within the curriculum for excellence. Notwithstanding that flexibility, would you have some sympathy for the parents of those pupils who have already gone through these unit assessments to suddenly find out that they are not particularly rigorous or academically sound and that they are going to be dropped? Would you send a message to them that there might be some other reforms coming down the line that they might have to adopt as well? First and foremost, the unit assessments are absolutely rigorous and absolutely academically sound. The philosophy here was that the way in which the unit assessments were being undertaken within the school sector meant that part of this is cultural shift and part of this is the nature and the way in which the unit assessments are being used. We had already planned to make some changes to the unit assessments that are in place for this current session, which we believed would reduce the workload, but the decision has been made to say that the approach to assessment now should not be with units and course assessments, it would only be on a course assessment. The units themselves, historically, are absolutely rigorous and absolutely appropriate. What we are doing is changing the way in which we assess candidates' knowledge and skills and moving that to the course assignment itself, that is the project, for instance, and also to make sure that the exam has a greater course coverage than it has currently got. I just press you on that, Dr Brown, because if you are a parent who is being told that they are rigorous and that they are very much worth academic pursuit, why have they disappeared, not given what you are saying about the flexibility, and are there other changes coming down the line? No, there are no more changes coming down the line. We have committed to the cabinet secretary that we will be doing national 5 for introduction in the following session and then higher the following year and then advanced higher the following year after that. The issue on course assessments is that the course itself is not changing. The nature of the course, the content of the course, the type of learning, the knowledge that the kids are going to be getting, the way in which they are going to be asked to demonstrate that knowledge in different contexts, the way they are going to be asked to apply that knowledge to problem solving, all part of the philosophy of curriculum, for instance, is still there. The way in which SQA captures that experience and that knowledge is being changed from being three aspects, which were units, the assignment and the final examination, to only two now. Did they go because the impression from schools was that they were a burden in terms of assessment? Yes, and in fact that was a very strong piece of feedback that we got from our research that we have undertaken, which I think that the committee has got a copy of or has got a link to. But there are also other aspects as to why there was over-assessment being undertaken in schools, and that was also discussed at the assessment and national qualifications group that the Deputy First Minister chairs. Can I just move on to when you were last at this committee, I think that it was the 22nd of September last year, when we had a discussion about the integrity of the exam system in light of the problems that were experienced, there was the new hire and there had been some issues with human biology and classics. At that time, you said in your comments that you acknowledged that there had been some concerns, but you were utterly sure that the integrity of the exam system was 100 per cent and that changes had been made to ensure that freight-related boundaries, et cetera, had all been very carefully put in place. Can I just ask you about the exam system? What process has gone through to ensure that papers are properly produced in the first place, properly moderated, and can you give a cast iron guarantee that is always done by people who are experienced in that particular subject? The people who are involved in the development of the question papers and the verification of the question papers are absolutely qualified. That is one of the criteria that we have. The advantage of the Scottish education system is the full participation of teachers. Every year, we hire 15,000 appointees to not only develop the question papers and assessments but to mark them. That is absolutely essential. The teachers are part of the system. We have quality assurance processes that we put in place. As you said, there have been occasions in the past where there have been issues with question papers. One of the things that we have done as a result of that experience and as a result of the experiences this year is to make sure that we double our efforts to make sure that those quality assurance processes catch everything. Why did we have some problems with national 5 computing this year? There were several issues associated with national 5 computing and I have apologised for that question paper because I think that it is a real challenge. I think that one of the things that we all need to recognise is that whilst SQA is developing qualifications, we are also delivering a live certification every year. That remains a challenge for us in terms of being able to put the appropriate focus on. What we have done as a result of the experience, both from last year and from this year, is to add additional steps in terms of a completely separate, again fully qualified group that will look at the exam paper after the exam paper has been completed. It is a complete fresh pair of eyes, fresh sets of eyes that will look at that paper so that we can catch those things where people have been embedded in it for a long time have not been able to do so. When you advertise for people who you want to set papers and mark papers, you are confident that you have absolutely the right people all the time? Yes, because one of the things that we have from the Scottish teaching profession is very strong support for the SQA and we look forward to that continuing. Would it be helpful if Dr Brown was able to say whether we could access as a committee the quality guarantee about the setting of exams and marking of exams? Would that be possible to put that into the public domain? In terms of how we do the quality assurance, yes, I am perfectly happy to provide that. I suppose that the other side of the coin is the issue around that force and obviously there has been some discussion around the parents seeing less of a value in that force because it does not have an exam at the end of it. I am interested in your views on that. I know that I have my particular views of how student-centred is that approach if we were to actually make that four being an exam-based qualification. When the qualification stage of CFE was being developed, the EIS and others within the system adopted the position that national four as the exit qualification for a group of young people wasn't best placed to have an external exam. I think that we would stand by that position at this time. In and of itself it isn't the lack of an exam that has brought about the questions around national four. There are a whole range of reasons why it's not being seen as a qualification in and of its own right. To simply add an exam back into it wouldn't remedy that because the reasons we moved away from the exam was to do with equity, opportunities and the life skills and approaches that this group of young people would have. Having an exam in and of itself wouldn't reverse what's ever there. It's back to the cultural shift. It's back to the understanding of employers and parents and other groups in terms of what the purpose of national four is. We've had reported from our teacher colleagues that those young people for whom national four was going to be their exit felt demoralised because they didn't have an exam. When you drill down it's not that they felt demoralised because they didn't have an exam. It was that they felt demoralised because so much focus was being put at school assemblies on those groups of people who were having exams and that they were putting too much focus on those groups of young people who were going to have study leave to have their exams and that they felt different as a result of that. It wasn't that they were asking for an exam. I'm fairly confident that if you were to go to most fourth year pupils and say, do you want us to give you an exam in each of those subject areas, they would probably say, no, you're okay, thanks very much. It's about how we present national four and how we take it forward. The other issues around it can be considered as the assessment review group moves forward into the next stages in looking at that. I think that they can look at whether there is a viability around having the value added units externally assessed and that might give some credibility to those who feel that it needs an external assessment component to it. I think that you can be doing that, looking at whether or not you extend the idea of just a pass-fail to having whether it's graded or whether it's a pass-plus, looking at something around that, but I think that those are for the assessment review group to take to their next stages in the discussion around it. In and of itself, national four as an end qualification for those young people who are going to be leaving school at fourth year isn't a bad approach. In terms of the principles behind it and the reasons why we moved away from the end exam, that still remains sound in my opinion. It's now about how we promote that qualification as part of the bigger pathway package and it is about looking at the wider qualification options for young people than just national five and higher or the be all and end all. Janet and I have had this conversation many, many times. We have two bigger focus in lots of ways around and it's because we haven't got the culture shift and because it's really easy for the press to do it but to judge a school purely on the numbers of hires and the numbers of young people going to university is to the detriment of those for whom that isn't the appropriate educational pathway and we need to get a system where we are valuing every learning opportunity that a young person can have and recognising that we're not all the same and we can all be the same and it would be a shocking world if we were all the same because we would be struggling if we didn't have people to do the wide range of jobs that we need in our societies. National four, I wouldn't be going for an exam, I would be looking at how you actually promote that as an end qualification, part of a pathway. Schools reflecting on how they give, how they promote and how they encourage, because at assemblies it would just be they would be encouraging those students that were going for their exams. They would be trying to gie them up and maybe weren't they thinking that there's a group here that are feeling that they are not getting that exam leave. If we had moved to a two year qualification system there wouldn't be any exams in fourth year, everybody would be doing them in fifth year and sixth year so you wouldn't have studied leave so they wouldn't be worried about it. I suppose that it comes back to wider achievement as well, so following on from that, a cultural shift in parents and Scottish society and recognising wider achievement as attainment. In terms of national four, it's really important that we really think through what the country wants from national four and that should be done in a well-studied way. In fact part of the next phase of research that we're doing is to look at national four and to solicit feedback from teachers, parents, from industry and from pupils very importantly on the nature of national four. In terms of internally assessed qualifications, and this touches on the point of broadening the curriculum, employers are very familiar with internally assessed qualifications and they are very happy with them.  I think that the challenge here is communication. A lot of it is challenged with parents, a lot of it bluntly is also challenged with teachers because there's a lot of teachers that say they've got no credibility because that school down the road is not doing it properly, their schools are all fine but the other school is not. There's a lot of credibility issues within the profession on that. The other aspect of it is to make sure that we continue down the road of developing Scotland as a workforce because those qualifications, those awards, are really valuable. There's awards there about personal development, there's awards there about personal finance, there's awards that are entry-level national certificates into vocational professions that are part of what we should be doing. A school should be celebrating all of that, parents should be celebrating all of that. One of the things that we've done over the last couple of years is when we do put out our statistics, we put out everything that the schools undertake. We don't put out what's done throughout the year in colleges because not all of the kids get them in August. They've actually done qualifications throughout the year through the college engagement. We, as a nation, need to recognise that we need to celebrate all of that and it doesn't help when we continuously focus on the higher pass rate because higher is brilliant but not if that's not what you want to do, if you want to do something else. Yesterday, I think a lot of you may have been at the College Scotland event and if you talk to some of the young people in there and the work that they're doing in terms of their apprenticeships and the things they're studying, they're able to do that and start on that route through SQA qualifications through the school, through the college. Actually, we need to be celebrating that as much but it's really important that we think through what are the qualifications for and what skills and knowledge do they give the kids and how is it best to assess them so that we actually understand their abilities. I agree with that last point strongly, not least because I was at Moray College in Richard's constituency last night because my son's there just graduating or if that's the right phrase, but actually I'm now totally confused because you've made a very good argument about wider achievement but we're being pushed down, attainment and assessment. How are these things compatible and consistent? My view is that Scotland needs to understand where people are, where people exist. The word assessment seems to be a dirty word in some scenarios. What we're talking about here is making sure that you can actually assess that learner's abilities, their knowledge, their skills and assess it to standard. How that standard is assessed can be done in multiple different ways. As we've just discussed in the new approach to national fires and hires, that's going to be done through an assignment and through an examination but it's equally possible to do that through internal assessment. It is the judgment of Scotland that needs to decide how it wants to assess its candidates and its learners, whether they're aged in primary, secondary or in the senior phase. Is the logic of that that we end up being able to compare on a data basis school against school? I don't think that that's helpful. I personally think that what we need to do is understand where a child is, where a learner is, whether the learner is eight or whether they're 62 because that is actually what you're trying to achieve. You're trying to achieve a development of that individual that then helps them in the next phase of their life. I want to follow on with your comments to Liz Smith's line of questioning about the change to unit assessments. Previously, we had the chief examiner on the record saying that we couldn't go any further on unit assessments without compromising standards. I'm just really wondering what's changed or what's being done to compensate for that and just maybe just a bit more of an expansion. How are we maintaining standards with those changes coming through? When I said that I was unable to move any further, that is because there was no plan, there was no focus on modifying the other assessments other than units. The focus was just remove units and certificate. You cannot do that and maintain the credibility and the standards. The reason it cannot be implemented immediately is because we need to go back and we need to look at what we're assessing in the units and now take that and put that in either the assignment that is being undertaken within the school, whether it's a new assignment that needs to be put in place and whether we need to strengthen and increase the coverage that exists within the examination itself. Given that, when you talk to schools and you appreciate just the volume of assessment that was going on with unit assessments, I think that the school class in yesterday was giving me the number and it was a bit mind-boggling. I understand the driver for this, but are we shifting the workload on elsewhere? Are we going to see an increase in the workload for teachers in terms of assignments or is there going to be an increase in resource requirement from the SQA in terms of external assessment of these bits of work? Are you confident that you've got that resource on hand to be able to deliver this increased requirement for assessment? There are two things. The assignments are done within the classroom. That should be part of teaching and learning. It's about the change in the pedagogy. It's about the nature of how a kid demonstrates their knowledge and their skills and applies that knowledge and skills. In terms of if we increase the amount of the assignment or if we add an assignment to those qualifications that currently don't have one, yes, SQA will require additional external markers to be able to do that. That is the engagement that we have with the profession of a year. That is the appointees that we appoint. Similarly, if we have to add additional aspects to the examination itself, to the question papers, that may mean that we need more markers again, so yes, we need to be able to look at that. One of the things that we are currently doing is continuing our discussions with the teaching professional bodies to make sure that everybody participates in the system. I'm sure that other members of the panel will agree that there is very strong value to teachers participating in SQA activities. One of the challenges here is ensuring that every single teacher in Scotland understands the standards. That's very, very key. If you become a marker for SQA, you absolutely do that. There's a great deal of professional development associated with that. We're working with GTCS to make sure that that's recognised. It is that increased requirement that's likely to be there, but we are looking therefore at freeing up the teacher's time within the classroom in terms of not doing unit assessments. There are two further questions. First of all, we do need additional markers in order to come to it. Roughly, what are we talking about? Is this a big jump? How confident are you that you can find them and how big a change is that going to be? First and foremost, we don't know how big a change it is yet, because it is quite a complex issue to look at what's being assessed subject by subject, level by level, within national 5, higher, and look at what needs to be moved from units into either an assignment or into the course assessment. I cannot give you that information right now. We're currently in that planning phase. One of the things that we've been doing over the past few years is really encouraging teachers to participate. We had a full complement of teachers last year. I know that there's been some issues associated with the workload that has had some concerns expressed within the unions, but as that goes away, we believe that the unions and the teaching profession will again fully participate in the SQA's activities. It is beneficial for everyone. The system is run by all of us in Scotland. Given the fact that you need qualified teachers in order to be markers, and given that this is a workload issue, and given that teachers are finite to the extent that you can't instantly create new teachers, is there a danger that we're just pushing that workload problem round to another part of the system? We're still going to be asking teachers to do more work as appointees rather than in their role as teachers. The appointee role is undertaken outside of school hours and is fully compensated by SQA. It might well be the same people doing the same work but just under a different mode of employment. That is the way that the system runs today. Teachers volunteer to do that on a regular basis. The dangers around workload are that what teachers have expressed to us around the unit assessments is that they were frustrated by the duplication of assessment within unit assessments in coursework and exams. We provided, as an organisation, a significant document that came from our members in relation to what was already there within it. In terms of what will now migrate from the unit assessments into the coursework or otherwise, will vary in quantity depending on the subject and depending on what is there. Your comments around just moving the workload, I suppose, from our point of view, if an individual teacher wants to continue to volunteer to do paid overtime, if you like, with SQA, that's their choice and their decision. The potential changes to the system are that their workload within their contracted job will be more manageable and, more important, it will be more manageable for the young people. At EISAGM in the past two years, the more moving speeches that were made were not related to teacher workload. Yes, they were clearly our predominant thing but were teachers who were referencing their young people struggling with the level of workload related to that particular aspect of it. We, as an organisation, are comfortable that the unit assessments in and of themselves may well still help to structure courses and to play a part, but if they are not a mandatory part of the qualification, you won't be redoing them and redoing them and redoing them and that in itself will help. If that means that people then feel more comfortable about going back to working with the SQA outside of their contracted hours, that will be their choice, but at the moment that was the key issues for us. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that the unit assessments were over demanding in certain aspects. That's one of the things that we did find when we did our research, but the amount of assessment and the amount of workload for pupils also needs to be looked at in terms of the time that's available to do these courses. There is an assumption, for instance, in national 5, that a candidate for a national 5 will have been secure at curriculum level 4 before entering that course and then that course requires 160 hours of learning teaching. If that's not available for that candidate, no matter whether you take the units out or not, you will not actually improve that experience of that candidate. That's back to your curriculum architecture. That's back to the original principles around what was intended and what was the design brief of CFE at that stage. That's what we'll be doing finally. We've got Ross Greer. I'd like to ask Ann Grant and perhaps Susan Quinn specifically around personal social and health education in curriculum for excellence. CFE is about creating confident, well-rounded individuals, but this core area doesn't seem to have caught up. The time from course of education campaign found that about half of teachers weren't aware of Government-funded resources on dealing with issues around homophobia, LGBT issues, and 80 per cent of teachers didn't feel confident in those areas. The Scottish Youth Parliament's found similar concerns from young people themselves around mental health, either in educating young people about it or in supporting them through it. I'm wondering, do you think that we need a significant refresh in personal and social education because it's not caught up with the rest of society and with the aims of curriculum for excellence? As teachers in early years, primary and in my case in secondary, the importance of looking after young people cannot ever be underestimated. One of the things that I genuinely deeply believe is that the job of a teacher is to be someone who looks after other people's children. The trust that parents give to us in doing that is something that we hold dear. The whole notion of how a young person develops and grows is fine. We can talk about attainment, examinations and wider achievement in offering young people opportunities. However, everyone in my school and everyone in society would want to make sure that young people feel safe, cared for and feel happy. That's basically the way we operate in Scotland. It's something that we've worked on very hard on and it's very much to do with the values that we consider ourselves a values-based school. Personal education is really important and mental health issues are a significant aspect for young people today. The resources that we have to support young people are there to some extent. That might be an issue that we could look at more because of the way the resources are just now. The kind of support that a young person can have from their pastoral care teacher, from a teacher who just listens and cares, can be really significant in terms of life. I think that that's something that should never be forgotten about or undervalued. Likewise, in terms of issues to do with sexuality, in a secondary school we're looking after young people within that stage of their life. When that's often something that they're recognising about themselves. Again, that's very significant. As a school, we undertook on one of the in-service days at the beginning of August. We had three hours of LGBT training. We had trainers in because we recognised that, in terms of the diversity of Scotland's academy, we recognised that it's an incredibly diverse community in so many different ways. We were responding to different needs, but where we were responding to that need, we addressed that and we're looking at that in terms of the way we approach young people in our school. It's been a significant aspect of the way we work in the school and I'm sure that that's something that's going to happen across all schools in Scotland. In terms of the wider need to refresh, you're probably correct that there probably is a need to look at that as an area. I think that what we need to reflect is that very often there is a key initiative and that gets a lot of publicity, whether it's press or within establishments or within local authorities or otherwise. There's a push around that area. Unfortunately, the next big thing comes along and we haven't found ways to make sure that we keep momentum around all of these areas. Quite often we forget that schools refresh, so I think back to receiving very clear and very sound training in anti-racist education. It was 20 years ago. Lots of teachers won't have received that again because that won't have been necessarily revisited because we've done it, so we don't necessarily have time and it's back to that creating the time and space to fit things in. You need to look at what are the absolutes in terms of still needing to be there. Do we still need to be doing an hour a week of handwriting in the primary sector when most of our young people will use technology? How do we create time and space in looking at those things to allow it to be part of a more integrated system so that it isn't add-ons? I think that's where things fall off. If it's just added-on and doesn't become an integral part of it, it can happen to fall off if things start to spin a wee bit faster. There is a key area to look at. In terms of some of the wider health issues, it is about the whole GERFEC approach and how we can engage much more with wider partners. The challenges around that are when everybody is stretched because partnership work takes time. Partnership work requires individuals to have the time to talk to each other and to plan and to see who is going to be involved in things. If you are struggling as a headteacher or a deput head or a principal teacher, if you are struggling as a social work department or a third sector organisation, then it becomes more difficult to organise it. Clearly, there are examples of good practice in terms of engaging with third sector partners in particular in relation to young people's mental health issues that, in and of itself, can make not an add-on but an integral part of the whole of the establishment and the system. Go back to Anne Grant's point about the training that you have facilitated at Shollins. Is it an issue often of inconsistency because it comes down to individual leadership within schools and, presumably, in your case, the decision to allocate part of your budget to getting back training facilitated? I think that we have talked about collegiality a lot today and I think that in terms of identifying issues it really is very much we have to respond to the needs within our schools. Susan spoke about anti-racist education. That is embedded, that is part of the nature of everything that we do in Shollins academy and likewise with other aspects because we are very much with regard to our values. In terms of the LGBT training, that was something that we had evaluated, looked at and decided that we needed to do that. I think that it is important that schools are given that opportunity to be able to respond to needs within their own communities. It is also something that we respond to, as I said previously, we respond to nationally. There have been national initiatives and there have been talks about that and as society changes schools have to be able to respond to that. I suppose that there is a balance between responding to the needs that you recognise within your own school and your own community but also responding to national initiatives in the way society changes. Schools have to reflect and respond to the changes in society. We are, after all, engaged in looking after the young people who will be society in the future. I take that point. My concern would be that the schools who maybe do not feel that they have a need for that are perhaps the ones with the greatest need, particularly on an issue like LGBT issues. Again, I would imagine that the way that would be resolved, although I am responsible for that. The responsibility for that, I would imagine, would go beyond into the local authority monitoring it, discussing what is happening, knowing that if schools are doing that schools are responding why other schools are not, it could take us back to the regional board where people can look across the way. I imagine that that is the way things will happen. I certainly hope that it is. There are raising means also of using school improvement planning processes within a local authority for a local authority to direct. School improvement plans very rarely are wholly school improvement plans. The vast majority of a school's improvement plan will be national or local priorities. Within local authorities, they will often see, in their advice each year, no more than three priorities, one of which needs to be the national priority on raising attainment. One of which needs to be that you review your PSE programmes to take account of current positions on that, and the third one is up to the school. Very often, local authorities will give direction in terms of that. If it is something that is identified, whether it is nationally or locally, as a priority, it will not necessarily be left up to a school to identify it through their self-evaluation processes. That is one of the cries from establishments very often now, is that their school improvement plan really is not their school improvement plan. It is how they are going to respond to national and local issues. On what you would have locally that would not be assignable to one of those things, I would probably question, but there are raising means of making sure that key issues are in improvement plans and taking forward. Just to pick up Susan's point, one of the key aspects for an improvement plan is inclusion. It is within that heading that we have responded to. Inclusion is part of Glasgow City Council's agenda, so it has come through that way. Rossi, I want to comment briefly. I want to touch on an office question and answer from Susan about the improvement plan. I know that local authorities work with each schools to put those in place, and often they are set for a year, sometimes they look further ahead. I know in my own area that when we look to trying to make changes to try and get some teacher training in and about the dangers, the new dangers are presented by legal highs at that time, how it can be really difficult, so the school tried to do something slightly different rather than include it in the plan. Touching on for Rossi's part shows that there is an inconsistency across local authorities about what they determine as a priority or not. On something that is fundamental, how can we try to get greater consistency across local authorities in ensuring that that sort of inclusivity is included in our plans? I imagine that organisations will respond to the current governance review in ways that will hopefully address that question. One of the questions that the governance review raises implicitly, although it is not one of the questions posed by the Government, is how desirable is local variation? One of the principles that has underpinned governance in Scottish education up until now, certainly as set out in the 1980 act, which is still the base legislation as far as education is concerned, is that the principle agent of governance is the local authority. That is an expression of local democracy. Local democracy obviously entails that priorities can differ from one council area to another. I think that it is increasingly evident that, in relation to education, the public actually does not believe that, and that may well come out of the governance review. However, so long as that is the legal position, as currently it is, we have to accept the fact that there will be significant variation from one local authority area to another. I appreciate that you do not want to be dictating to every school what they should be including in their local improvement plan. It is to suppose that it is understanding that, when something is fundamental, is issues that Ross Ross raised, how we ensure that there is that equality? My view would be that a school improvement plan should be the school's improvement plan, and that that is a pretty straightforward concept. Incidentally, just to give a more general answer to Mr Greer's question and not specifically related to the issues that he raised, the orthodoxy in Scotland is that the most powerful way of improving the education system is by improving the quality of teaching. Indeed, that globally is the view as expressed by OECD. I think that it is very much open to question. It seems to me that, important though the quality of teaching is, there is something that is actually more important in a school, and that is the nature of its culture and the quality of the relations among the people who are attending there, learners and teachers and so forth. I thank the panel for their very good contribution today. That was excellent. I am sure that we all took a lot from it. Thank you for your time this morning. I would like to welcome all those students who came in five minutes ago who were just about to ask to leave as the public session is just coming to an end. If you could just clear the gallery please. Thank you once again. Thank you.


A love letter to all draft dodgers. The New York Times is naming and shaming Ukrainian men who've fled the country rather than stay and kill Russians for Washington, because it was illegal for men of military age to leave, and because their countrymen are angry at them, and because it's the New York Times. They shamed Vova Cleaver, who said, Violence is not my weapon. They shamed Voldemire Danuliev, age 50, who said, I can't shoot Russian people.  And to those men I can only say, I love you. I love you, Vova Cleaver, outed by a trusted friend and made a pariah on Ukrainian social media. I love you, Voldemire Danuliev, who refuses to shoot Russians because you have Russians in your family. I love you, other Voldemire, surname withheld, sipping your beer in shame because you shirked your patriotic duty.     I hope you experience lots of beauty. I hope you make lots of beauty. I hope you read good books. I hope you dance in supermarkets. I hope you have lots of sex and I hope you find and lose religion. I hope you fall in love often and have at least one excruciating but liberating divorce. I hope you drink deeply from the river of life because there are many who never got to. You know that better than anyone. I hope you know fear and I hope you know fearlessness. I hope you set aside your armor so that you can let someone all the way in. I hope you learn to open your chests and love with reckless abandon and I hope you learn to cry easily as all real men do.  There are no war heroes. There are only war victims. Here's to everyone, ever, who throughout the ages has chosen not to be made one. I raise my glass to your lives and to your hidden yet radiant dignity. Please know that at least one pair of eyes sees your beauty.


What are living things made of? You probably know it's cell, but what are they made of? What's happening inside them that makes them so alive? How are your cells different than that of trees or those of dogs? And how do they make perfect copies of themselves? And how do they join together to give us such diverse types of organs like skin, the bone, or the heart? If these questions fascinate you, then join me in this mini course where we'll unravel all these mysteries. This mini course has four units that cover the essential topics of class 11th and 12th CBSE biology. We first start with cells and then look into the different biomolecules that keeps these cells alive and then see how these cells join together to give us different kinds of tissues. And finally, we go into the DNA to understand how they make perfect copies of themselves. And inside each unit you have videos to give you instruction and exercises where you can practice different concepts separately. And then you have quizzes and unit tests that jumble all the questions up together to give you perfect mastery of this unit. And then once you've mastered all the units, you can take a course challenge that jumbles all the questions to give you complete mastery over the course. So it's exciting, but at the same time a rigorous course to ensure that you strengthen your foundations. If you're excited, let's begin.