I welcome everyone to the 11th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2018, and can I please remind everyone present to turn our mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? The first item of business is the decision on whether to take agenda item 3 and 4 in private, which is a review of the evidence that is heard today and also consideration of the work programme. Is everyone content that agenda items 4 and 5 are taken in private? Can we also confirm that we are content to take future reviews of evidence on the attainment and achievement of school-aged experiencing poverty inquiry in private? The next item of business is an evidence session on the attainment and achievement of school-aged children experiencing poverty inquiry. This is the first evidence session on inquiry, and before I start, I would like to put on record our thanks to everyone who has contributed written evidence. Some of the evidence is arresting and it is really important that the voices of young people, parents, teachers and community workers are heard in Parliament, and we will be hearing more from those people in coming weeks. Can I welcome to this meeting John Dickie, director of Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, Kevin Loudon, research officer Robert Owens Centre for Educational Change, Daniel Mason, head of research education endowment foundation, and Dr Jim McCormack, associate director of Scotland, Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I should say to the panel from the outset that if you would like to respond to a question, please indicate to me or the clerks and I will call you to speak. Before inviting questions from my colleagues, I would like to ask the panel for its thoughts on two things. We have received lots of evidence from lots of people that this is one of the major factors in the attainment gap, the fact that children are coming to school hungry and they do not look like maybe sometimes they have had a good night's sleep before, or a lot of that seems to attain to poverty. Why do you think that we have had a rise in the amount of that that is coming that seems to be impacting on the school attainment levels? I will then come on to ask you a number of questions around interventions that you may be able to put forward. Will anybody like to answer? When we come on to talk, as we made this morning, about progress and achievements that are being made by children and low-income households, it is important to say that those achievements are really against the odds and against a very heavy headwind in the sense that we know that after 20 years of progress, which help poverty is now rising again, we have now got enough data over a number of years to tell us that we have passed a turning point. In common with many others, one framing point to bear in mind is that there are things that can be done within the education system in how schools relate to families, communities and the costs that they face. We have to be careful that we are trying to improve the quality of what we do, the education and attend to the income risks and shocks that families face, which show up, for example, in food poverty and food insecurity, and resist the temptation, as we have seen in other parts of the UK, to say that it is one or the other. We both have to be in play if we are to make more progress over the next few years with the attainment challenge. I would absolutely agree with that. When I was thinking about what evidence was going to be most useful to speak about this morning, I was thinking about the distinction between, on the one hand, reducing and alleviating the impacts of poverty for children on a day-to-day basis. From the very large to the very small, the distinction between that and a specific focus on narrowing the attainment gap between poorer children and the rest. You do not necessarily need the same types of interventions for those two different things. For instance, a really simple example, introducing swipe cards in schools for school meals so that there is not the stigma between free school meals and other children. That could have a big impact on a child's experience of school, but it is not very likely to improve their attainment. At the margins, perhaps, but it is not going to be unlikely to have a significant impact. Those two things are linked. The alleviation of poverty and narrowing the gap are obviously closely linked. They are both extremely important, but at EEF, where I am from, we are quite narrowly focused on that narrowing of the gap. In terms of that, it really is about improving the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom, even when you take into consideration these wider issues. Just to give some examples, we have funded some projects which aim to raise attainment by alleviating the material impacts of poverty. We have funded some breakfast clubs. We have also funded a number of projects looking at raising attainment by engaging with parents. In both cases, we have seen effective projects, but when you are looking specifically at narrowing the attainment gap—and I should stress again that I think that both alleviating poverty and narrowing the attainment gap are equally important—when we look at the attainment gap, it is about high-quality teaching for children in disadvantaged areas, high-quality early years provision, so we tackle that gap, which we know opens early, targeted evidence-based interventions in the classroom for children who are falling behind. Those are the things that are really going to impact on the attainment gap. I qualify that by saying that this is assuming that poverty is not actually preventing children from being in school in the first place. Something else that might just be useful to say right at the beginning is that this can be done. I do not have the figures for Scotland. We did some analysis on English data recently, and we saw that 10 per cent of schools in England had an average attainment for their disadvantaged children that was higher than the average for all children across the country. Those are not just a few really posh schools with a tiny number of poor kids. Some of those are schools in areas of high disadvantage with large numbers of disadvantaged children, so it can be done, and that should give us all cause for optimism. What Jim and Daniel have said about that ballot, if we are serious long-term in ending the poverty attainment gap, then we need to be tackling the underlying poverty that is driving that gap. To your question, as Jim said, we are seeing increasing levels of child poverty in Scotland across the UK, and the projections are substantial increases in the years ahead. Not just increases in the day-to-day grinding poverty of just not having enough money to live on, an increasing number of families has been left in acute income crisis as well as the result of primarily failures in our social security system, sanctioning and administrative problems in the system, leaving people with little or no money at all. That translates in the worst cases to children ending up at school hungry. In some cases, children are not getting to school at all because of the costs of getting to school in the first place. More widely, children are missing out on significant aspects of the school day, school trips, school activities and the additional pressures that schools put on families with already low incomes in terms of charging for curriculum course materials for course activities, leaving children missing out on school trips—a whole range of ways in which children are missing out on core parts of the school day. Long term, we need to be tackling the underlying poverty. That is why we welcome the Child Poverty Act here in Scotland that sets very clear targets towards eradicating child poverty by 2030, a delivery plan that sets out meaningful action that will take us in that direction, but at the same time, as others have said, there are real actions that can be taken within schools. A good news story, lots of schools and lots of local authorities are already taking forward action to reduce and remove the barriers to full participation at schools that too many children face in Scotland. We will be coming on to all those issues over the course of this session, but Kevin, do you like to hear? Yes. Just again, I reiterate and support everything that has been said. It comes out quite thoroughly in the briefing document that was circulated. That schools really can make a difference. A lot of our research has shown that, for that to happen however, schools and teachers need a lot of support and the conditions have to be right, so whereas we might have key proven interventions or approaches that make a difference, pedagogical approaches that do help those from more disadvantaged areas, the skills of the teachers, the leadership in the school, the ethos in the school, the ability of the school to work in partnership with other agencies to enhance what happens in the school, to make it more holistic and engage with other agencies to have that value and that value added impact to take it beyond the classroom, that needs particular attention and focus. A couple of members want to come in at this point, do you? I am interested in this point, but I will deal with it in more detail later on. Families are more impoverished, so it is an issue for them that the cost of school day is a real challenge, but is the cost of being at school rising as well? Anecdotally, we have heard that teachers are now bringing in materials that would routinely in the past have been provided by the local authority. Have you done any work around looking at things that children are now expected to pay for, which they may not have been expected to pay for in the past? I think that there are two angles to come at this from, which is about what we are asking of families who are on a low income, but also what we are asking more of them because schools themselves are under pressure. Is there any evidence on that? Our work has been done over the past four or five years in terms of the in-depth work that CPAG has done in schools, so we do not have that in our own specifics or that baseline. I think that there is a sense that there are increasing demands in terms of costs being passed on to families for material, cost and curriculum material activities. Some of these issues have been there for a long time, but the pressure on families has increased because too many families now have incomes that they are struggling to meet other costs with, but others may have more evidence in terms of a long term trends in terms of the actual cost of that school. We will be coming back to those issues later, so if I could just ask Richard to come in, you would want to see some, Richard. I am not sure that it was just a general question to John Dickie, but what he said, and also perhaps Jim McCormick, he began to speak about factors outside of the classroom that can impact on poverty, and other speakers have spoken about factors inside the school that can deal with poverty. My fear about the whole debate around educational attainment is that we just talk about schools and teachers, whereas it is other factors that influence educational attainment, not just the school. Can you just elaborate on where we are in 2018 with the factors outwith the school that is impacting on children's ability to learn? Yes. It is both, but there is no question that families are under increased and increasing pressure that we have seen primarily as a result of cuts in the benefits and tax credits and financial support that are available to families. Alongside stagnating wages, low-income families have faced a real squeeze on their incomes, and more and more families have been pushed below the poverty line. All the projections are that that will continue as primarily cuts to the financial support that is available to families to kick in and accumulate. There is no question that that puts real pressures on families and makes it more difficult for parents to ensure that their children are able to fully participate at school. It is worth saying that parents go to extraordinary lengths, and children themselves will come on to that later in terms of their resilience and ingenuity of children and parents to be able to try to get the most out of school despite all those barriers that they are facing and the financial barriers that they are facing. However, there is no question that families are under increased financial pressure and that costs are making school, getting to school, dressing for school, being able to fully participate at school, being able to build on what happens in school in terms of the home environment and learning opportunities outside school. All of those have costs attached to them in a situation in which an increasing number of families are being pushed below the poverty line. We worked with a number of academics of the LSE and elsewhere in recent years to try and look at international evidence on that and then bring it back to the UK and Scotland. The important point here is to try and contextualise what is the role of these external forces, not least how poverty acts as a pathway towards or against attainment. It seems pretty clear when you boil down lots of complex evidence that there are two main pathways. One is that it just creates more stress in families.  When you factor in resources in terms of housing, security or quality are also limited, it is a very hard environment, especially for older kids coming up to exams and so forth to stay on track with what they have to do with their learning and to invest less money in equipment, opportunities, trips and so on, as John saying. Achieving the kind of targets that we have in Scotland would be much easier against the backdrop of the recent past when child poverty is falling. That is an important thing to say. Having said that, we make him want to look at this, there are nonetheless very, very big variations in attainment, depending on which measure you take. Controlling for area-based deprivation is to say that it really does depend on where you go to school in Scotland as to how your fortunes look in terms of attainment. We should maybe talk about that as well, but the big picture is absolutely that those external forces make it much, much tougher, even with things going in the right direction with the school system, to achieve those good outcomes. Dr McCormack, can I just pick up on a very interesting point that you have just raised about the variability across Scotland? You said that the number and characteristics of deprived areas of areas across local authorities suggests that attainment varies substantially within those deprived areas, but the reasons for that are not fully understood. Is that because there is an absence of the relevant data that we need to make that understanding, or is it just that we are not interpreting it correctly? Let me try to talk about the data. My colleagues are probably more expert in explaining what we know about the causal factors that can contribute as well. In Scotland, we have as our primary focus the Scottish Index on Multiple Deprivation, an area-based measure, which is helpful but quite a blunt instrument, as the Parliament and the committee have talked about before, because most families in poverty do not live in those areas, and even within them most people are not in poverty. It is a really broad measure, but nonetheless, accepting that note of caution, we have taken one indicator from the improvement services, a useful local government benchmarking framework, and looked at at least five passes at level five, which is a more demanding target than at least one pass, which is in one of the measures that the Government uses. That shows well over double the attainment in the best-performing authorities compared to the least-well-performing authorities. The best-performing authorities are some of the usual suspects, and that is looking at children who live in deprived areas within them. However, it is also quite an interesting mix of West of Scotland local authorities with very high rates of jail poverty, which are doing relatively well on that measure. At the other end of the spectrum, performing less well, where your odds are less than one in three of attaining that level, is a mix of city and very rural authorities, which is very hard to see what they have in common. That suggests to us, and it is not a very satisfying answer to your question. That is absolutely to do with how schools organise and collaborate. It is likely to do with how they relate with families and communities. It may be about resourcing, but it may be as much to do with how resources are deployed within those schools as about absolute levels of resourcing. It will be to do with not just having good data—we are increasingly getting good data—but how data is used so that there is a know-how question within schools in spotting children who are off track. For example, in rural authorities, when we have schools with very small numbers of children on free school meals, who in the past at least could be almost invisible to those school systems. We do not have that excuse of not knowing, and the challenge is whether we are deploying that data well, acting upon it and targeting our resources well, and whether we are making sure that children who should be attaining higher are back on track. Data is yes, but going beyond SIMD as a measure is what the national treatment framework aspires to do. If I could just really pick up from what Jim is saying, that's exactly what we've seen when we've worked with schools, not just researching and evaluating what they're doing, but helping teachers through research to do what they do better to tackle inequality. It is that ability to work, to book the trend almost, to deploy resources, enhance teacher skills, work with partner organisations, and it's making sure that the conditions that foster that are known within the system and when they are known, how those collaborators of schools put them in place, embed them and sustain them, because a lot of those factors that support what Jim is talking about, to work that way, to try and offset some of the external poverty factors, you need to be quite agile, shall we say at the moment, in the current environment, and I think if schools, yes, some of it is resourcing, but teachers will often tell us the lack of teacher cover, for example, really impacts on getting teachers together to plan collaboratively to improve their skills, so a lot of that building that infrastructure needs to be looked at. What do we need to build that infrastructure to do what Jim has been talking about? It strikes me that the data question is extremely important because if we're going to formulate successful policy we need to know exactly what the data actually is telling us. Could you just be more specific about the individual local authorities and whether you think they are using the same data across the board, or whether different local authorities are using different data, would that be possible? That's a problem. I think what we're finding, stimulated by the attainment challenge and the PEPF, I think that local authorities have revisited this. There's still variation in what data is being collected and how it's being used and fed back to teachers and so on, but I think we're seeing progress across Scotland generally in that local authority data teams and data offices are becoming more sophisticated in some of the factors we've talked about, you know, what are the variables that they need to gather data on both in terms of attainment but also the individual circumstances of the child and we were working with a local authority recently and their data collection is now adding layers that looks at what interventions is the child receiving, what's the home environment like and this is over time so this will become a very rich data stream. This skill then is how is that used, how does that filter down to the classroom to the teacher but we have seen progress but it's patchy, but again authorities can learn from each other and we have seen that where local authority officers are talking about their data collection and usage as well. So just my final question would be are all local authorities looking to the likes of yourselves to help with this data collection or are there some that are much more advanced in picking up better qualitative data? I think it varies for a whole range of reasons, you know, for their own resources and their own capacities but I think as awareness gets out into the system about what system is helping to improve the use of data and then translate into effective approaches I think that's another part of the strategy making sure that that gets out into the system and ripples across. Thank you. Pick up on a few things that people have said. I can't remember who was it mentioned about getting the best teachers to the schools that need them the most in terms of, but that's obviously very difficult when you have a culture where if a school has a reputation of not achieving or it being difficult to work there and having it, Jim McCormack said, a headwind of poverty. How can you bridge that kind of reputational thing of encouraging the best teachers to apply for jobs in those areas that have the most challenges when you've got, I suppose, a culture and maybe an inspections regime that makes it look that these schools are failing? How can we make it attractive for teachers to actually look at these challenges and say I want to work in that area, I want to make a difference to that area? So there is some evidence not from the UK but from the US about financial incentives for teachers to move to schools in more disadvantaged areas, schools that are perceived as more challenging, which has the evidence as shown an impact on actual children's attainment from those kind of schemes of incentive transfer. As I say, there's not much evidence from the UK on that yet, but at the EF we are starting to test interventions looking at teacher retention in disadvantaged schools and the evidence of that is going to come online in the next couple of years. There are potential ways to encourage good teachers to move to the most disadvantaged schools. There's also quite a lot of good quality evidence out there on the best type of continuous professional development for teachers, so it's not just about encouraging a specific group of teachers into a different set of schools but to really build the skills and capacity of the teachers who are already there. There's a good base of evidence about the type of CPD that works with continuous professional development, longer-term interventions, things that are relevant to teachers' day-to-day expertise, that build a strong relationship between peers who are doing the training and the trainer. There's an evidence base around the kind of CPD that works, and there's now increasingly an evidence base of the types of interventions that take that sort of training and deliver it to schools and then see an impact on pupils. The kind of things that we've tested at the EF would include meta-cognitive approaches to teaching, so this is where teachers understand meta-cognition is sometimes referred to as learning to learn, but it's where teachers have a better understanding and are able to equip pupils with strategies to plan, monitor and then evaluate their work, so they're thinking about how they're learning. That has a good evidence base that, when teachers have a good knowledge of how to do that, we see an impact on students. High-quality feedback, for example, teachers can be taught how to deliver high-quality feedback, good questioning of pupils that builds cognitive skills, and again we see an impact on pupils, so there's both an evidence base around transferring teachers and an evidence base around how to build high-quality CPD, and if you can build that into reforms, then we can have more high-quality teachers teaching on most disadvantaged pupils, and that quality of the pedagogy and the interaction between the teacher and the pupil is, as I said before, there's a much wider issue here, but that's where you really get to the heart of improving attainment. Yeah, we have situations and I can think of some schools in my area where you haven't got a continuity of leadership, for example, because you have get-head teachers that have just stayed there for a while and the stress is too great, but the challenge is too big and they move on to another school, and you have this situation where you have an unstable situation and that's not going to improve a school, so how do we address that? I suppose school-to-school support, as well as already mentioned, is really important, like when we've done research, something that comes out time and time again is that schools want to listen to other schools, they want to take their expertise from other schools, more so than evidence-based organisations like ourselves or universities or local authority guidance, so if you can first of all have school-to-school support to deal with some of those stresses and things like that, but also to build the expertise on what works within schools. We've just set up a network of 23 research schools south of the border and the idea is that they are developing intervention support training for heads and for teachers, and it's being shared between schools. Just again, that's exactly what the Robin One Centre has been doing over the past eight years, is working with local authorities and schools to build that capacity locally, because I think one argument, one strategy could be that you're trying to attract teachers into areas. The question is, are there sufficient teachers even if you could attract them like that, so I think the more sustainable model is, as we've heard, is to build those clusters, those collaborators of schools where the whole culture and approach is to focus on quality teaching, building that, and we've found that where we've worked with programmes to do what Daniel has been talking about, teachers are enthused, they find that as their practice improves, their attainment improves, their motivation goes up and it has a reinforcing effect. I think if you can get that sustained where you're building that capacity in collaborators of schools to focus on quality teaching, but also working in partnership with other organisations to tackle some of the other facets of poverty, that influence attainment, that seems to be a lot of strong evidence already in Scotland that that does work. I'm coming back to just the second part of my theme, I suppose, is about the reputation of a school being based on, for example, an inspection result, or we're talking about low performing local authorities, for example. Those phrases can't put practitioners off, they can demoralise a teaching. They can certainly demoralise, and I think that that puts an onus on the inspectorate, Education Scotland and Government about where schools are struggling to use that term, what's the most appropriate way to deal with that and how do we couch that so that it's seen as a form of supporting rather than overt criticism, which then demoralise the local workforce. The message is about how do we help those schools in those areas, and some may be in challenging areas and may not be, but how do we help those schools to improve? There's a lot of literature, a lot of research, I haven't spent how we do that. We have a track record in Scotland of doing this in certain areas, and there's evidence as Daniel Sears further afield, so we know how to do it. It's just putting in commitment and resources into that sort of system, and I think importantly for a lot of what we've been talking about is seeing this changing in a realistic timescale, because of the impact of building that school system and wider systems up. The dividends and the impact on attainment may take a little bit longer to see, but there's evidence that that will happen. Dr McCormack, you started today by saying that child poverty is now rising in Scotland after 20 years. The direction of travel for government policy on funding our schools is towards direct funding. We don't know how far that's going to go, but that's certainly the current direction of travel. Is there any evidence that that direction of travel is the right way to go? Obviously, in England, there's been a move towards more direct funding to schools. There's certainly no evidence on which is a better system that I'm aware of, that I would want to point to here, but certainly if you do have more direct funding for schools, it gives you an opportunity to make the very best of headteacher and teacher expertise. We encourage schools when they're thinking about how to spend resources that they receive directly from government. We set out a school improvement cycle, if you like. I'm interested in the evidence. I understand what you're now describing as best practice or things that you're promoting to schools, but this is a committee looking at the evidence to support a direction of travel on funding, which we're now discussing poverty. Do you have any evidence for that, as opposed to just giving us examples, which I'm sure are very good? Of just practice? No, I'm not aware of evidence on comparative. The direction of travel in England, which is much more as you've started by saying, has gone down the route of funding schools directly. There's no evidence that says that that tackles child poverty. I'm not aware of the comparative evidence. I don't know if we're to get it, that's what I'm asking. You're not aware of any. Can I ask the rest of the panel, some of you have mentioned PEF funding in the team, and I very much took the point that some of you made at the start, that attainment funding, which of course does not go to every school in Scotland far from it, so many schools don't get any of this at all, is that there is linked, but not related to child poverty, but not to the same thing. So do you believe that PEF funding is the right way to go, or is in terms of tackling child poverty, or is PEF funding something linked and related to it, but not directly related to it? I see this as something that we build towards different layers to improve our ability to understand what's happening, our ability to support better practice. We began this back in 2015-16 with a number of authorities with the highest rates of child poverty, based on SIMD, and we were critical of that because we thought that it was a very blunt way of trying to identify underlying needs and opportunity to support. Then along has come PEF, which is better because it does have some kind of household measure of fiscal meal registrations, which is different from entitlement and different from take-up, so again it's a partial way of doing it. I think that we would like to see other factors being added to this picture. We know, for example, when we are now making progress in Scotland in understanding the risks that looked after children experience across all sorts of outcomes, not least educational outcomes. One could argue that we should be doing more to wait towards good interventions that work well with that particular group of children and young people with those experiences. There are probably more, we could say, around disability and additional support for learning. My interest is not making this overly complex, it's just that insofar as we want to try and identify the need and opportunity to intervene as accurately as possible, then I think that it would be good to see within the national improvement framework a kind of overtime early thoughtful approach to how we measure and support. I think that we have to do that on a geographical basis, as well as understanding how it looks like at the school level, because local authorities are important in terms of accountability and evening out performance differences over time, at least in theory. The school level is important for what we have already heard about ownership of the issue, knowing your catchment area and deploying resources appropriately in that context. I think that we are definitely not there yet, but we are on a journey towards getting into a better place. You have all persuasively argued that youth work, child psychology services, ultimately the NHS in terms of clinical needs of young children, mental health, so a range of other services that are all funded by government, but broadly through local government are essential in these underlying causes of poverty. If I'm correct me for a moment, you've broadly said that. In those circumstances, that money to provide those services, those schools all depend on those services, don't they? My argument is if we go down a route of directly funding schools from the centre, that money will not go so much to local government who have to take that broader view of providing those other services that you've all argued are every bit as essential in terms of tackling these poverty issues. Is that a fair argument, or am I just wrong on this? I would like to say again, I go back to what you said earlier on about do we know of PEF works? I think it's far too early and we need a national evaluation just as there has been with the attainment challenge, so we need to know that's at water level, but drawing on our experience of working closely with schools in different contexts where PEF is deployed, as a mechanism it really does depend on how able the school and often the head teacher and that leadership understands how best to use it in deployed, because a head teacher would have the autonomy to deploy to use and bring in services like that, so their understanding of what works as we've heard when we've seen the papers. If leadership teams and teachers were savvy enough to know this, then they could work to deploy that funding in that way. I think our experience is it's far more patchy. I think money will come into schools and it isn't always best used. It does vary and again it goes back to is there some sort of local authority guidance, is the school already working in partnership? So I think you get that patchwork of use of PEF without really a background of universal understanding of how best to use the resources. Your observation earlier, Mr Loudon, was that where schools collaborate and the culture is greatly improved by that, that then feeds through into success both in terms of tackling poverty, reducing poverty, but also in terms of tackling the timing gap. Yes, it certainly helps and I think those partnerships can be people like ourselves from the academic and research, but also local organisations and local authorities pooling that knowledge, but moving that knowledge across the system, not just in terms of the pedagogies, but how do you use resources? How does the headteacher deploy that resource to get the best impact? Is the headteacher the right person to do that? That's the key question. I'd like to go back to Richard's original question, where we've talked about the external factors that don't help or cause the attainment gap. I'd like to ask John Dickie, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said that the benefit freeze is the single biggest policy driver beyond rising poverty, hitting families and in and out of work. I'd like Jim to expand on that and tell us how that reflects on the attainment gap and how you feel about that. John Dickie, I know how involved you were with the Child Poverty Action Group. I'd like to ask you to mention that the Child Poverty Delivery Plan can make a big difference. Can you maybe expand on that as well and tell me how it can specifically relate to the issue that we're discussing here today? The question about the dominant drivers of child poverty in Scotland, and in particular, as John mentioned, the projected increase that we're likely to see all things being equal to the end of this decade and beyond. The most consistent finding from that evidence is that various aspects of UK social security policy is the single biggest reason for the increase, followed by what's happening at the bottom end of the jobs market. Both those things are in play, not least what's happening in terms of insecurity at work, and much of this increase we know is affecting working families, not just out of work families. It's about social security and the labour market, but in particular in terms of what Governments can do directly. The benefit freeze that I think is meant to be reviewed in a year or two has caused great damage in terms of poverty rates already. In terms of how that translates into children's experiences at school and life chances, there's a very broad dampening effect on how families function. There's the ability to participate and engage with different systems, including education, but it's back to what I said earlier. That really is variable geographically, and it does depend on partly what education systems are doing across Scotland, but also on how well the housing system is operating and what kind of additional support is available at the local level. If you have access to excellent welfare advice and rights supports or you have a really high-quality housing options service on your doorstep, then the way in which those risks translate into life chances will vary. Local services really matter as well in terms of mitigating some of those impacts. In terms of the child poverty act and the child poverty delivery plan, as I said, the act now gives us in Scotland something that we don't anymore have in the rest of the UK, which is a clear set of targets towards eradicating child poverty by 2030. Accountability mechanism in terms of government needing to report to Parliament on progress against its child poverty delivery plans and also for the first time in Scotland legal responsibilities on local authorities and health boards to produce local action reports in relation to what can be done at a local level to tackle child poverty. I think that within those there's real scope to think about the role of schools, the role of education in terms of reducing costs. The other very positive thing about the act and the delivery plan and the approach that is being taken is that there's a very clear focus now on action to increase the incomes of the long-income families and reduce the key costs that they face because it's by doing those that will achieve those targets at local level. One way of reducing costs is clearly to reduce costs at school but also there's a role for schools in terms of ensuring that the families that they're working with are accessing the full range of supports that they need, including the financial supports. There's education-based financial supports, school clothing grants, free school meals. There's a specific reference within the delivery plan towards action that will help to optimise payments of school clothing grants and free school meals that make access to those education-related benefits much more easier and effective and ensure higher take-up. There's also scope to build on that and look at what are the other supports that that family might be missing out on. There's good practice. Again, there are examples in Scotland where school and family development workers are working with families to not just ensure that they get the school clothing grant and the free school meals but also that they're getting the universal credit as it's been ruled out or the other financial supports that they're entitled to. A real role there within local action reports for teasing out the action that can be taken at a local level to both maximise incomes but also remove cost barriers and then the wider longer term issue of improving the process ensuring that all children are able to access their learning opportunities. In the longer term, it will ensure that they are more likely to be able to earn and to support them and their children in the future in the longer term in terms of sustaining a lower level or sustaining a Scotland's free of child poverty beyond 2030. I want to go back to the two issues in one round, SIMD and the other round local authorities, because I hear what you say absolutely about choices that have been made around precarious work and the impact of that. I think that there is a lack of willingness to address what we now define as positive destinations, which can be very poor working experience for people, but also the benefit system in which you are obliged to identify that in terms of child poverty. I wonder how out of you have done any analysis of the impact and the disproportionate cuts to local government on being able those very agencies that want to support young people and address the question of poverty, their capacity to do so, because it is one thing to say that a young person should have access to a grant if local authorities are under massive pressure. Has there been any work done looking at what the choices are that local authorities are making in the context of a lack of resources? Does anybody want to respond to that? Over the past four or five years, we have worked with Glasgow University and some others who have developed a practical toolkit for local government that helps them to work out the best way to protect low-income people in places as fast as possible. That was co-produced with four or five local authorities across Britain, including Renfisher and some of the largest cities in England, which over that period faced quite different budget reductions. There was a real budget reduction in the Scottish example, but it was much less than in Newcastle or Coventry or other parts of England that were included. However, if you roll forward, what we see is that different councils in Scotland are benedicts, but they are also highland in the last couple of years, using this to try to identify how to proactively assist and improve, but as a minimum to limit the damage that can be done when budgets are falling. Again, it is back to the point about data and knowing how to deploy your resources when they are under pressure. It really does matter that both the financial support that can be available through grants and other types of support but also the in-kind value of high-quality services has a much bigger value for low-income communities than for everyone else. To be able to, in a very mindful way, when you are drawing up draft budgets, run the numbers and know with some degree of accuracy what is the different impact of different budget choices, it has not affected the budget settlement but it has affected how you use what is available to you in a more thoughtful way than we saw in previous spending rounds. I think that we have seen it on the ground what John is talking about there. It goes back to that patchy distribution of the skills and the knowledge of how to use often dwindling resources to best effect. We see that, but what we have noticed in our research working with schools is that, I mentioned infrastructure before, such as that might be advised as locally in the education system, it might be local support workers. The cuts have definitely had an effect on that availability, so what the effect is then tracing that back down the way to look at attainment in schools. I think that that is harder to look at that, but, in terms of the feedback from teachers and headteachers, they say that that is very much affecting their ability to tackle the attainment challenge, the reduction in the available infrastructure that helps them to do what they need to do. I am struck by the fact that some of the things that you described, we were doing 25 years ago, Strathcly Regional Council was very radical in a lot of the work that it did, but if you speak to people now anecdotally about the supports that are in school, they have gone, and the extent to which people are talking about young people with additional support needs not being appropriately supported. My concern, as I want to ask a question about that, is that we both recognise as a systemic problem, but we then talk about individual solutions. If there was only a Mr Chipps in every school, everything would be fine, when, in fact, it is about systemic approaches, as opposed to just about individual quality or individual quality matters. Can I ask that question about SIMD? Dr McCormack is not the first person who has come along and said that he is a very blunt instrument, etc. Does not address where young people are impoverished. Would your own figure suggest that, if you are a young person living in a relatively well-off area but you yourself are disadvantaged, your outcomes are better? Therefore, SIMD is a good measure because even if you are yourself in good work and are not impoverished and are very supported by your family in a school where there is an intensity of poverty, that then impacts on your local service, whether it is your doctor's surgery or the pressure on the school or whatever, that impacts on you, even though your own family circumstances are relatively supported. Is it fair for me to say that it is not a blunt instrument if you are looking at systemic problems around poverty and the impact of poverty on communities, even when individual families themselves are not in poverty? That is a really great question and a good challenge back. SIMD is really helpful in identifying what you have just said about the variations across what we are calling deprived areas. That does map on to some degree on to places doing well or not doing well, so it is helpful in that sense. Less helpful in one sense, though, which is that when we look at how children growing up in deprived areas are faring, there is a risk that we then take that as a shorthand for low-income families or families in poverty. There is some correlation but it really depends where you are. If you go to rural Scotland, the correlation is very weak indeed. If you go to urban areas, the correlation is much stronger. It is interesting that when you look at the indicator that I have focused in on here about level 5 passes, you have Weston Bartonshire, Inverclyde, North Ayrshire and North Lanarkshire, really bucking the trend, if you like, in beating the odds, at least in that one single indicator. Can you ask if you mean that they are bucking the trend in contrast with Glasgow? Is it that they are bucking a trend in the areas around them? You could argue, for example, that Glasgow draws the challenge to it because it is a city and the areas around it perhaps are not quite the same pressure, or is it bucking the trend across Scotland or beyond that? If you look at the top quarter of authorities with the highest rates of child poverty, which is where we began the attainment challenge just for the purpose of illustration, they are distributed differently, but Glasgow is above average on this indicator, too. I think that it is striking that areas such as North Ayrshire have been struggling for such a long time with the economy, with participation rates in the job market and so on, with a very high rate of child poverty, are nonetheless faring better than some relatively affluent parts of Scotland. The system around about you is under the strain on transport, housing and welfare support, and absolutely it is a material factor, but it is still quite interesting and maybe surprising that some of the authorities who appear to be doing better on that measure are clearly, and we have taken a three-year running average that is not a single year's data, that they must be doing something that other authorities could be learning from as long as the comparisons are fair and appropriate. It is an encouraging picture that authorities who do not have the challenges to seek are, despite all that, and that is no indication of what is going to happen in the future, but for now are managing to maybe outperform what, on paper, we might expect. In contrast, some authorities ought to be faring better. The final thing that I would say is that, despite the long-term nature of how change happens, the other encouraging thing is that some authorities who have been struggling on that indicator are starting to improve quite quickly. That may be a trend or it may not be a trend, but there are lots of hopeful things, even with this very narrow way of measuring attainment that we can take away. I would like to ask about the cost of a school day, but, first of all, Daniel Mason, in your opening answer, you said that 10 per cent of schools in England are managing to achieve what we are trying to achieve. The obvious question is, what are they doing? I think that it comes back to the focus on what is happening inside the classroom, and I think this links really nicely with what you said. It is not about trying to put in opposition the wider issues of deprivation with what a school can do. Both are very important, but there clearly are a set of things that a school can do around teaching and learning, which make a difference for children even if they are experiencing other unacceptable impacts of poverty. The evidence suggests that the best things that schools can do are the things that really impact on the relationship between the teacher and the pupil in the classroom. I do not have the evidence on what those schools are doing in the classroom that is different to other schools, but we do have very good high-quality evidence that the types of things that you do with pupils that are around high-quality feedback, as I said, metacognition, understanding the process of learning for both the pupil and the teacher, making really good use of collaborative learning and peer tutoring, well-structured, targeted interventions, always focusing on pupil needs, and, when people start to fall behind, well-targeted catch-up, good deployment of teaching assistance in the classroom to target individual pupil needs rather than using them as general classroom help. There is a range of things that schools are doing. Another thing that is really important is that it is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It is about, as Kevin was saying, the ability of heads and other senior leaders to diagnose what is needed in a particular school and deliver that. We had quite a weight of evidence about the cost of a school day and that is impact on families. I would just like to hear more of your own reflections on that. I was particularly struck by, I think that it was Unison who spoke about, if you have had the opportunity to see a play as well as read about it or read out loud, that you are going to do better at interpreting it and therefore better in your work. That was one of the things that struck me. I suppose it is that bit that Johann Lamont touched on, about the extent to which education is free if parents and families have to provide additional things so that their kids can get the most out of education that they are participating in. I suppose that the reality is that too often education is not free, what is offered in school is not free. Pupils and families are being charged for it, including for materials, for courses, for particular areas in the work that we have done across Scotland, where there seems to be a real issue with charging for materials in home economics, technical, art and design, and also in drama as well. As part of the curriculum, you need to go and see. You are going to see plays, you are going to see plays and the cost buyer excluding young people from being able to do that. Real evidence of young people making subject choices influenced by costs and young people themselves saying that that has had an impact, young people and teachers saying that they have witnessed that having an impact on subject choices. That is one area where there is a very clear charge of materials. The good news is that there are schools and local authorities who have now made decisions just to scrap those charges and not to charge for those, and teachers reporting increased participation in those subjects, increasing enthusiasm and motivation. By taking away that charge, they have seen a difference already in terms of young people's participation. Charging for CFE stuff, is that common? As far as the work that we have done, we have done significant work in Glasgow and Dundee and work in other local authority areas. Charging for materials for ingredients for home economics, materials for art design, and charging for trips to the theatres part of English and drama courses. There is variability in terms of the extent to which schools will try to identify those pupils who might need some additional support or to the extent to which those pupils are left behind, but that is very variable. The reality is that pupils and teachers themselves are saying that pupils are making subject choices on that basis. In other areas—again, this comes back in terms of the overall funding package, where schools attempt to reduce those costs and remove those costs—the kids are then complaining that all they ever get to do is bake the cheapest things rather than the no-kids at other schools that might have a more mix and more resources available are doing more interesting things in classes. No question about it, pupils and families are being charged. There are two things. The direct children are actually missing out on those subjects or not being able to participate, or their sense of enjoyment, their ability to enjoy those subjects and knowing that it is causing a stress for them and their families to be able to fully participate is diminished, but it is also reducing the disposable incomes that are available as families to meet all their other needs in terms of paying the bills, buying food and all the rest of it and sustaining their home— My apologies, Ruth. That is the most direct way in which course materials are being charged for. The other big one is school trips. I am particularly the P7 residential trip, which is absolutely a major part of my young people talking about how big a part of P7 this is—the residential trip—and this is in local authorities across Scotland. That is over £300 in some cases. Again, variability is how much is charged for it, but it is charged for. Across Scotland, there is evidence of children being left behind, not participating in that school trip. In one local authority area, we did a survey of the schools on average of three or four pupils in every school, in every P7 class, not participating in the P7 residential. Here, young people are describing how big a part of P7 that is. The impact that I must have on that young person, those young people left behind, sense of school, sense of education and what it has to offer—we would have a direct measure of what impact that has on long-term attainment. It is hard to believe that that does not have an impact. There is a question here about not just the school level and the local authority level, but the national level. What do we mean by a free education system in Scotland? I was interested in the SPICE report that there is a legislative underpinning suggesting that school should be free. In fact, it is not. What do we need to put in place to ensure wherever you live in Scotland? We have a clear understanding of what is the core curriculum, what is it that school should offer to every young person, and we ensure that there is no financial barrier that that is free to all pupils. It has particular relevance. If you look at the research literature on what works as we have heard, some of the strategies that make an impact on those more disadvantaged students and help close the attainment gap, or what they call enrichment opportunities and experiences, where students who are normally disadvantaged get the opportunity to experience things they would not, whether it is culture, museums, outdoor experiences. There is a research evidence to say that that does make an impact. That makes it all more crucial that there were opportunities that should be part of the strategy as school and local authority and Government use it as its repertoire to tackle some of the issues that we are talking about. If the cost of the school day does impact on school's ability to do that, that is quite a key issue. I have seen First Hand in North Ayrshire, which is in my area. I should probably mention their professional learning academy, which is a step that probably impacts on the good results that they are having. In terms of activities for young people, there is a strong duke of Edinburgh groups and youth work that goes on. You can see how the good that it is doing for the young people. As a follow-up question, we mentioned that there is legislative underpinning for free education, but is there something more that we need to be doing nationally in terms of policy to make sure that education is properly free and that everyone has the same opportunities? If you read most of the education policy documents and major policy strategies, they are very coherent, interlinked and very holistic. You could not argue at a systems level with a lot of that. I think that the challenge is translation into reality and operationalisation at school and local level. Perhaps the funding and resources use that are needed to translate policy into reality and need scrutiny. If we are saying that this is what the policy is to achieve those objectives, then we look at the system that is out there and the resources that are out there. Is there alignment there? There is some argument that there might be mismatch. If we are serious about translating those policies into action and tackling some of those targets that we have talked about today, then we need to go back and say, is the system that we see and some of the pressures that it is under, what do we need to change there to make that happen? I think that there is a rule for a greater national steer and a review of what we think is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of charging for school activities or broader school trips and others that are absolutely clear understanding what is and what is not acceptable, a clear steer that is not acceptable. If the P7 residential is such a core part of primary education, which it is, then at national level it is absolutely made clear that it is unacceptable that any child misses out on that because of financial barriers and that local authorities and schools are supported to be able to make sure that that happens in whatever way it needs to happen. I think that we need to have a national steer and a national direction on that. There is also a rule in terms of the school support and inspection regime, in terms of making sure that barriers to learning, financial cost barriers to full participation are an explicit and intrinsic part of that process of inspection and support to schools and that schools are held to account on that and are supported to. Again, that is getting the balance right. There are lots of good examples, lots of good things that individual schools are doing and that are sharing with other schools, but there is also a accountability thing to make at national level to make sure that wherever you are going to school in Scotland you are not missing out because you cannot afford to participate in what that school is offering. Ross, and would you like to go on to your next question? I would like to come back to the point that John made about income maximisation, which is quite key to us. It goes back to the point that was made at the start that poverty is a challenge that children arrive at school with. As much as there is a huge amount that can be done within the school environment, it is largely to mitigate and compensate for the effects of poverty. It is a whole system approach that is needed to tackle poverty itself. There was a lot of compelling evidence in the Joseph Rowntree submission on the impact of income maximisation. Will you be able to expand on what the role of schools is in facilitating that whole system approach that allows, for example, income maximisation projects to reach the families that they need to? I have already flagged up. There is more that individual schools can do to promote and ensure that young people in their school are accessing the school clothing grant, the free school meals, the educational maintenance liens, and the supports that are already there, which are not being fully taken up. Sometimes it is quite hard to see where any information about the free school meal entitlement or school clothing grant is. It is often left to discretion that individual teachers or school staff are promoting that or being on a website, but there is far more proactive role for schools in ensuring that people are taking up their entitlements. It is interesting that PEF funding has driven, because it is based on free school meal entitlement. It has driven an increased focus on schools to ensure that children are registering for free school meals. That should be happening anyway, and it should be happening in relation to school clothing grant and educational maintenance liens as well. On the back of that, I am repeating myself, examples of where staff within schools, such as families, sports development workers and Dundee, for example, are actively supporting families to maximise their incomes on top of those specific education-related income support. A real role in schools being able to ensure that the children that they are working with and their families are getting all the financial support that they are entitled to help to ensure that they are fully participating in the school day. It is linking schools. There is a mainstream universal service with wider income maximisation and local money advice and welfare rights projects. There is potential there to develop those links, and there are again individual schools and in different local authority areas doing that. It is about learning what works most effectively, because it is a difficult thing that teachers and heads not necessarily want to have conversations about people's individual finances, but finding the language, finding the way of engaging with parents around what are the issues that they are facing that might be preventing their child from fully participating at school and then offering the support to ensure that they are getting the financial support that they are entitled to. One very real example of where we have seen that work over the last four or five years is that we have been evaluating a programme in Renfrewshire, Families First, and one of the range of services and embedded workers that they have working with schools has been an income advice, as well as energy advice, and other specialists who will liez with parents often in these challenging services to see what their entitlement is and to then advocate and support their access to those. That has made a huge difference in funding claim, money is claimed, and then the impact of that funding, getting people out of real chaos, in really serious situations that I was affecting the whole family as well as the education of the children and turning situations around. I think that schools often do not have the advice to hand, but where they can work very closely with embedded services and workers in those place-based approaches, I think that we have found that to be very effective. It seems like a—sorry, John, Jim was about to cut you off there. I am just going to make a supplementary point, which is just that—I think that you are absolutely right—the evidence internationally in the UK is really, really clear and consistent over decades that, for low-income families, increasing resources, driving down costs and boosting income, has positive effects on child co-admission, on attainment and so on. Schools have a stake in the stuff, which is a nice thing to do around the margins. If we get it right, it will have a direct impact on what their core mission is. I will add another point to what Kevin said. What we have learned about how to do this well is to stop passing vulnerable families from pillar to post to get the support that they need. The more we can do this using co-location models, which might be the school, although I think that I would suggest that secondary schools are pretty daunting places for the majority of families, not just for low-income families to cross the threshold and have those conversations. It might be schools, but it absolutely should be primary care based on what we have seen in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, and it might be other settings as well. However, wherever people go in their daily lives, if we can design confidential, high-quality gateways that will get them a quick access to the support that they need, both financial and non-financial, that stuff works. It is cost-effective. It gets people the support that they need at the right time. We are in a good place in terms of knowing how to design these interventions well so that they will work for the families that we are talking about. It seems like PEF would be ideally suited as a way to facilitate this and to make sure that schools are involved in this approach. I am taking on board what has already been mentioned, that we are not yet in a place to fully evaluate that. From what you have seen so far, are schools being supported to take those approaches? I have come across it very much where the local authority is taking that approach. It is working very well because they are able to ensure that every school or the schools that need to are facilitating it. However, on that individual school-by-school level, which goes back to Tavish Scott's point about, is the direction of travel towards individual schools taking those decisions. Are schools being supported and provided with that knowledge? It is not knowledge that teachers or headteachers even will often naturally have to hand? I think that that is exactly the issue. The knowledge of the school team and the secondary school might be the pastoral team, as well as the school leadership team. That varies often whether there has been a history locally of the school working with these services. There tends to be a knowledge base about who can help them, but often that landscape of support agencies is in flux with cutbacks. A lot of the services that schools would have traditionally reached out to are no longer there or they are greatly reduced. There is the issue about the existence of support, but where it does exist, you often find that there is a need for co-ordination and raising awareness of that. Teachers will not always know about the existence of those and how best to use them. As we have heard, the co-located gym is saying that we know about the models in which how best to set those services up and align them with what schools do and make it more holistic. Is perhaps the best way of rolling schools having to look around and think, where would I find the support? Ron Sir, are you suggesting that some local authorities are instructing headteachers how to use their peff money? No, the local authorities have not done it through PEF where they have separately initiated and facilitated income maximisation across their schools. However, the point is that where schools could use PEF to do that, some schools are because they know that it is an option, but there are schools that have PEF money but the headteacher simply does not have the knowledge that income maximisation would be an effective way to spend that money because no one has advised them that it would be an effective way to spend it. Okay, that is not what I have found, but I just want to clarify something on that. Thank you. I think that it is worth reiterating that the kind of things that we are talking about income maximisation and poverty alleviation and spending money and resources and time in schools and around schools on those is absolutely essential, but it is necessary but not sufficient. All the barriers to learning and to parental engagement that you alleviate through those kind of measures, it is necessary, but it is not enough. You have then also got to have the focus on the good teaching and the good interventions in the classroom to make the most of it once children have enough to eat in the morning and are not being stigmatised for certain things and are not missing out on trips, then there is the additional thing of the actual focus on learning to get the attainment outcomes that you want. Yes, that was just in terms of PEF funding, examples of individual schools using that money to reduce costs, to remove costs for school trips, to get rid of those costs for ingredients for home economics, for example, investing in breakfast clubs to ensure that children have got something to eat before they start their school day. There are individual examples of PEF being used in ways that reduces costs at school, which is great and needs to be supported. There needs to be more support and guidance to support individual schools in terms of that work and make sure that those things are not subject to an individual funding stream or to the decisions that these things are not a subject of good practice or individual bits of good practice or a subject to a funding stream, but to become the absolute norm in schools across Scotland that all the time schools are just reflecting, reviewing and removing any financial barrier to participation. There has been quite a bit of interesting evidence that has been submitted around the impact of parental engagement. I would like to specifically look at homework. As an example, this is something that has come up a number of times, where there are issues of parental confidence in engaging with the homework of their children. There is a significant knock-on effect to the attainment of those children and a very clear link with poverty there. I was wondering if you would be able to expand on what that impact is and if you have seen from the evidence a difference between children and families who are in poverty but not in an area of deprivation. Where the parents themselves may come from that background but the school is generally a high achieving school in an area not of that background compared to where it is an area of deprivation, where those challenges are common for a number of families in their community. If that has any effect on the levels of parental engagement with issues such as homework. I do not know of any evidence on that specific distinction. Obviously, parental engagement is a crucial factor. Other people on the panel will know as much or more as me about the importance of it in terms of its impact. Despite the very strong evidence about the impact on parental engagement, the evidence on how to use parental engagement to improve attainment is much weaker. We have tested some interventions that aim to bring parents either into schools or to sessions in other places to improve engagement with their children's learning or to teach specific parenting skills to do with learning. Those tend not to be particularly effective in our experience of high quality trials that we have done so far. There is a challenge around engaging the parents that you want to reach and then there is a challenge around the types of interventions that are going to be effective. It is difficult for schools to find really good ways to get good parental engagement. On the other hand, we have tested an intervention. It is just one. It is a first trial that we have done where parents were texted with prompts to encourage them to engage with their children's homework or test that children have coming up. It was very low cost, very low resource and had an impact on both attainment and attendance. There are some things coming through that schools can try to increase that engagement. On homework in particular, one interesting thing that I have to add is that there is obviously the parental background and parental attainment and the ability to support your children doing homework. There are also material issues. If a child doesn't have—if they share their bedroom with a number of siblings and don't have anywhere quiet to do homework or if they have caring responsibilities because of the nature of their family—material issues that impact on the impact and effect of homework, as well as the parental ability issues. When we talk about parental engagement, it is a wide spectrum. It is what we mean by meaningful effective parental engagement. Some schools really find to get to that. It is about building relationships first with those parents and where those relationships have been built up. Those parents who might be reticent about approaching the school for whatever reason, where they have had success on that, then involving those parents in the learning of their children is often a lot more effective and productive in terms of outcomes. I agree that I am not sure that the evidence that specifically links poverty, place and attainment quite in that way, but I think that what we can say something about is the kind of intermediate outcomes that are probably on the pathway to attainment gains if other things are in place. Those kind of prior conditions that have to be got right really matter. I can think of an example of schools where there is a problem with first and second year boys not turning up to school and getting into trouble. There is a real issue about P7S2 transitions for another day perhaps, but in the past what schools have tried to do is bilaterally, individually, by family, by family, try and say that there is a problem here. Can you sort this out? Can we work with you? Not getting very far, but the breakthrough comes when you socialise that problem and you say that you are not alone as a family, other families are on the same boat.  Although that is in the category of promising rather and proven as a way of working, I think that there are some interesting signals in there about culture and power sharing that really matter for families generally, but especially for families who are having a tough time in terms of poverty. The other example that I would give is that when schools, as they increasingly do, are providing study support during Easter holidays or after school or homework clubs, often teachers will have in mind the kind of children they really want to turn up to get the extra support. When those children don't turn up, we can either say they didn't turn up, they're not interested, or we can ask ourselves, what could we do to reduce the barriers? Would it help if we were able to support their travel home later in the day? Would it help if we fed those kids? Would it help if we approached them as peer groups, so them and their friends invited, not just individually? There are all sorts of things at that granular level where we can ask ourselves, it's not just enough to provide an opportunity, we have to ask ourselves how do we make that opportunity genuinely accessible. When we do that well at the school level and it does need, supported by local authority, to do it consistently, we get better outcomes. We just have to be much more mindful about how those opportunities are experienced by families and to make it more of an invitation than simply a passive opportunity to be involved in the education of your child. You can get a chance to respond at that time. You've finished your process. Yes. Thank you. Follow on from that point. If you picked any handful of schools across Scotland and visited them and asked them about the level of parental engagement, every single school would say that there are parents who are engaged with the school and there are parents who are not. It's not a new issue. I remember when my sons were at school, I used to see the same group of parents and there were parents who never, ever attended the school. There are a number of reasons for the lack of parental engagement. It's not just because of poverty and deprivation. That's a really important point to make. You can't point a finger at parents who come from a deprived area and say that that's the reason that you're not engaging with the school. If you think that it's the school's responsibility to improve that engagement, what should the schools be doing? This is an issue that's gone on for a long time. If there is a link between parental engagement and attainment, surely schools should be doing more, so what should they be doing? Can I believe off one particular example? It's the later end of the school year, so the earlier we do this, the better. My example is that we looked at how aspirations form among teenagers going to schools in different kinds of catchment areas in Glasgow and other parts of the UK. We're trying to understand this shorthand that's out there about poverty and ambition, poverty of aspiration, and we found that Evans was really weak on that. What we found was that all kinds of families, all kinds of backgrounds, were quite right to start off with high aspirations for the children. The reasons why they go off track is something to do with having connections and knowledge and know-how about turning those aspirations for your children into reality. The example that I get from Glasgow is that, if your aspiration is to become a mechanic or go into the professions or whatever it happens to be, those families who have those connections and that understanding of how to get their children really good quality work experience at 16 and so on are far more likely controlling for qualifications to achieve those career choices in later life than those who lack those connections. What schools can do is try and even up that disparity by really focusing on building know-how within the school, improving the quality and consistency of careers advice, which frankly is very, very patchy all these years after we knew there was a problem. Recognising that, given that parents do have those aspirations, engaging with them earlier more consistently about that scary moment of subject choices, those scary moments of exams and scary moments before your children leave school, I think that we are leaving families who really need the support kind of on their own too often to navigate a complex landscape and schools that absolutely could do better consistently. So do you think that schools should have almost a continuing and on-going dialogue with parents? Absolutely do. I think that we too easily fall back upon representative structures, which is a very small number by definition of families who will be involved in life at the school. Mike has been saying it totally as I'm asked to get involved with my daughter's high school if there's a problem when they want money. So that's not good enough. We need to have many, many different invitations from schools to be involved in how all sorts of things can be improved as well as more relational approaches when things are going off track in ways that make families feel they can be part of the solution. The hopeful thing is that we've got really good evidence in Scotland on what happens when you build a culture participation in different schools from the Children's Commissioner from three or four years ago. This stuff, when it's done well, really works, really makes a difference. I can't tell you the link into attainment, but I can tell you a bit about the links into the intermediate outcomes about family confidence, good choices, when you've got a link into good quality careers advice, good consistent early work experience, it really makes a difference to confidence and motivation. Just before I let the other panel members in, I'll make one very brief point. How much of an impact does a parent's experience of school have on the way that they treat the relationship with their child's school? I don't know the quantitative evidence, but anecdotal evidence from the projects that we do is that it's very important and it's a big barrier to engaging precisely the group of parents who you might want to in terms of attainment. That then comes back to exactly what Jim was speaking about, which is making it as easy as possible for parents to engage. We know from research what forms the adult's perceptions of education, childhood experiences of education. It doesn't devalue the vision of the utility of education, but their confidence to approach schools is definitely affected. That then will then pass on to how they engage with schools and working with schools, what really works, going back to that theme about relationship building with the local community, where you have headteachers and teachers who will get the message across to the local community that their doors are always open and really invite parents to just come in and as far as they can, even though headteachers are very busy, that message then does get into the community over time that the headteacher will sit down and talk to them. You build that relationship up in the community. It's easier for primary schools to do that, which is much more difficult given the structures in secondary schools to do that, but perhaps it's not impossible. Building those relationships with parents over time is key to that. Just a couple of examples from our work of ways in which parents who maybe traditionally haven't been involved in school or engaging with their children's education directly with the school. We've been involved in a couple of bits of work undertaking participatory budgeting exercises, where a pot of money has been set aside for the school to use to reduce financial barriers to participation. Parents and children themselves have been involved in deciding what are the key issues and what that money should be spent on. For example, in Glasgow and just on going in the middle of the moment, so I don't have the data there until the long term, but it seems like a way that potentially brings parents in to be able to make real choices about how money is spent that might help to make school more accessible for the young people and boost participation. The other thing that we came up against was that we were doing a lot of work in schools, with pupils and with teachers. What came up was quite often that there was pressure from parent councils for trips, fund-raising activities and it was those things that were creating financial pressures on pupils and making it difficult for young people. We've developed a toolkit for parent councils and engaged with them to develop a toolkit to support them to look at how they can engage in a diverse group of parents in their activities and to reflect on and think through how their work might impact on children from lower-income families. That toolkit is jointly produced at national level with the National Parent Forum, so it's something that's there to support parents and I think it's something that we can build on. We've got a few people left who still want to ask questions and we've got a very tight timescale, so Ruth, you want to come in very briefly? Briefly, thank you, convener. Just in terms of parental engagement, it's a term that makes me shudder a wee bit sometimes. Would you acknowledge that actually there are parents who may be not on the parent council or in and out of the school, but that we need to value the contribution that they make to their children's education by reading with them, by talking about their activities of the day, that it's not just that kind of set thing that maybe springs to mind about being on the parent council and lobbying for trips or whatever the different thing is that actually the value that they add to their children's education can be through other ways as well? You won't be surprised to hear that I think that that's the most important type of parental engagement, it's the engagement with the learning rather than being on the school council or at the school gate. We've got examples of schools supporting that and with good feedback in terms of providing home lending packs during the school holidays that will engage parents and their interests, the parents have good feedback from parents on that, providing support books for the parents as well as materials for the young people, materials for parents as well in terms of particular subjects. A math support book was one example that was given to us by a school again with positive feedback from parents and teachers saying they've seen an increased level of engagement in those subjects as a result. Thank you, convener. A number of the points I was going to raise have already come up, so I'll try and keep it a bit shorter. I was going to ask you to talk about the importance of that teaching and learning relationship. My experience in speaking to teachers in my constituency is that a huge amount of their time is taken up with activities that are not teaching or learning-based. Is that something that you've come across nationally and in research? Absolutely. It's a big problem that comes up when you speak to teachers. A good example is marking and marking practices. It's become common practice. I don't know if triple-impact marking is a practice where teacher marks a book, the child responds to the marking and then the teacher responds. It's a way of demonstrating that you've had interaction with the people and given them feedback, but it's an incredibly resource-intensive one, one with very little evidence behind it. Marking is a particular example where people are doing very resource-intensive things with very little evidence of impact. I think that there's a range of things. It's really about schools not spending time and resources on things that have not been shown to be effective just because they feel there's pressure to do so and focusing on the areas where we know things are cost-effective. How do you break that cycle? Do you have any practical advice? I think that watchdogs and the light can be clear about the fact that, on the marking example, it's not illustrating that you've done the marking that's the important thing. It's the fact that you've had good feedback with your children and that could have been oral feedback in the class. We need to remove pressure on schools to be seen to do certain things that are not evidence-based and we need to get to heads, teachers, local authorities, good evidence on the most effective way to spend their teacher time and resources. That guidance and steer will come from Education Scotland and Government. I think that unless teachers feel they are safe to do this and it's not seen as some sort of accountability measure, then only then do they feel if the message from leadership, whether it's school, local authority and Education Scotland, if there's a culture of that, yes, that's what you should be doing to maximise the impact on learning, then teachers will do that. In schools where you have very strong leadership, they may resist certain pressures, but in the absence of those types of environments, I think that the only uniform way, generalisable way, is to have that steer come down from senior leaders. The other thing I wanted to go back to was the area-based deprivation and the different links. Do you think that there's a case for rurability being used as an indicator of likely attainment? Is there the evidence or the correlation strong enough to start looking at that? In our research and again, we lack generalisable research, but in terms of working on programmes and pilot programmes in different areas, we've been made very well over the decades of the particular challenges of schools in rural areas, about accessing resources, accessing services that other schools might use to promote learning, if all learners are not just those in attainment challenge areas. Those challenges are persistent. I think that they need particular attention, but they should certainly be factored into the strategy as the focus of what we're talking about here. It's almost a compounding factor for schools in rural areas and small schools. There are distinctive features across rural parts of Scotland. One is organising activity, transport, broadband and so on, but we can learn from other parts of the world about similar challenges. It would also make the point that predominantly rural local authorities are spread out in terms of how they are fearing on some of those indicators. Some of them are their trajectory. Their changes recently over time look quite different as well. For some rural authorities, but definitely not all, there is probably a challenge about, in their schools, quite small numbers of children living in pockets of deprivation or very dispersed groups of families who are getting by on a low income. When you lack that visibility or that scale, it makes it all the more important that you understand your data and that whatever measures you're using are non-stigmatising. There are different kinds of risks and opportunities that come in rural areas. It probably means that we need to come through the regional improvement collaboratives, a particular focus on rural experiences and lessons learned, so that we've got appropriate comparisons and clusters going on and not trying to make inappropriate lessons taken from cities that just don't work in Fifeysigall or other borders, for example. Ross, you've got one final question. Yes, just very briefly. Much of the discussion that we've had this morning is focused on schools and how we improve the outcomes for children and parental engagement, for example, in school, but we're all very well aware of the evidence that the difference to a child of their experience in early years is massive. I'm wondering when, for example, the focus of PEF money has been towards schools when we talk about parental engagement. It's very much how do you engage in child earning at school? How do we use early years to mitigate the effects of poverty on a child's life? How do we improve outcomes at that preschool level? If we look at the policy environment at the moment, you would say that that is recognised and reflected in Scottish Government policy, and that a lot of the infrastructure has been focused on that. That has been recognised, it's there. Again, I think it comes back to, locally, how is it operationalised? Is the skills base in early years, are they aware of the evidence of what works, and building it into a continuum? We talk about progression from early years to primary and so on into senior and beyond. I think seeing that 3 to 18 curriculum and beyond as a reality and looking at how does that get reflected in the system, I think we need to look at that, because certainly the policy speak and the policy documentation is there, the guidance is there to do that, to address a lot of what you're talking about, but the reality is trying to get it uniform across Scotland and made real, I would argue. In that case, I thank the witnesses for their attendance today, that was a very useful open session in this inquiry, and it brings us to the end of the public part of the meeting and we'll now move into private session. I shall spend for a moment to allow the witnesses to leave before continuing. Thank you again.