fodd fel ymateb du i'r 13 yma o'i ddweudgyrwyr i'r ddweudodau meantimeol a'u drwy'r Gwein meth chi yn 2022. Mae unrhyw i'r ddigon o'r agenda yn eu sesio fydd言ol ar y SES Ym M сказалаu o desg, ac yn yn neid, mae'n defnyddio'n desg ffasol o ddweud o'r Education Scotland. Ieithi'r Prifysgol Creg Clemence, ysgolwch gyffredin niad, Pamela Dynarddw, ddweud Cymru yng Nghymru. Elizabeth Somerville, entertainment adviser, and Patricia Watson, strategic director. Good morning to you all. Just before we came on air, we were celebrating the fact that this is the first committee meeting that we've had this session, where everybody, the committee and our witnesses, are all in the room, so we're really happy about that. It's a sign of good times to come, we hope. Let me begin our session this morning. I have a quote here, if I may share it with you, from Education Scotland. Education Scotland, the quote says, will evaluate the impact of their work against the outcomes and measures set out in the organisation's corporate plan and draw on stakeholder feedback to support this through the attainment Scotland fund evaluated by the Scottish Government. What I wanted to ask first is, what outcomes and what measures are we talking about? Whoever's best position to answer the question just indicates and will come to you. Who's best qualified to answer that particular question? Patricia. I'll start us off, and then maybe someone else might want to come in. In terms of, I think there's two parts to your question, convener. Thank you very much. The first part of your question was about what outcomes are we evaluating against. Talking through those outcomes, I would just take you back to the long-term ambitions of the Scottish attainment challenge, and we set out four big outcomes, if you like, for the challenge. The first is embedded and sustained practices across the education profession in Scotland in terms of understanding poverty-related challenges for children and young people and practices that help to mitigate against those challenges and bring our young people, who are most deprived, able to make the same life chances as those who are least deprived. We talked about all children and young people achieving expected or excellent outcomes, so a high aspiration for every single child in Scotland, and again the challenge particularly being around those who are most deprived. The third is about an aspirational and inclusive education system. Again, having an education profession, and by that I mean not just in schools but in early learning and childcare, in the CLD and third sector, everyone really that works with children and young people having very strong aspirations for every young person in Scotland and making sure that they are included and able to achieve the best life chances for them and their aspirations for their future. The fourth and probably the most challenging of the long-term goals is, of course, to close the poverty-related attainment gap. In terms of those four outcomes, there is a number of pieces of evidence that I would direct you to, and I know that you have had a look at some of those previous to this morning as well. Our Education Scotland five-year report on the first five years of the challenge that was published last March was very clear from the evidence that we gathered that we are making successful progress around a number of those four big outcomes. The first one being that embedded and sustained practice. We have seen very significant cultural, systemic cultural shift and knowledge across the education profession of those barriers to learning that are sometimes impacted by poverty, a real strength of understanding around social justice and the impact of poverty on the day-to-day learning experiences of children and young people in our schools. Real interest and knowledge, for example, around cost of the school day and some of the challenges that schools, some of the experiences that children and young people are expected to participate in and want to participate in, can often be impacted by poverty. We have seen a big shift in how schools deal with that. How do you know that, Patricia? How do we know that? I know that. I think that we know that from, first of all, the on-going work of the evaluation of the Scottish attainment challenge, which is the attainment Scotland fund evaluation, which has been an annual evaluation by Scottish Government analytical services. I had teacher survey every year and a local authority survey every year, but we also know that more importantly from the work that our staff do on the ground with those practitioners week to week. It is very close work through the attainment adviser team, but it is also the wider group of staff in Education Scotland who are engaging all the time with practitioners across Scotland and listening to them talk about the shifts in their practice. Every engagement that we have in terms of a professional learning activity around the Scottish attainment challenge is evaluated. We ask for feedback, so we get formal feedback and informal feedback from those who are participating in all those activities. We see it. HMIE has also reported on the changes over time that they have seen in the classroom in terms of that shift in practice. There are a number of ways that we have confidence that that shift is happening. That was the first area of embedding practice. What about the second area in terms of the outcomes for children? The outcomes for children, what we are seeing there is that we are seeing a shift in outcomes in terms of the broader outcomes for children and young people, in terms of their opportunities for achievement, in terms of their engagement with learning. We are seeing much more participation and some increases and some improvements in some parts, some local authorities, in terms of, for example, attendance, reduction in exclusion, children actually engaging in learning. That has to be the first point. We are also seeing quite a significant and particularly throughout the pandemic and now in this recovery period a real focus on children's health and wellbeing. We can see therefore that children are engaging and having access to support in the classroom from teachers who understand those health and wellbeing issues that, again, impact on learning. Attendance is a very black and white measurable, isn't it? But the issues around wellbeing are very hard to measure, aren't they? It is hard to measure. It is a complex measurement that, to be honest, across the system we are grappling with. We are looking at how local authorities do that. There are a number of tools and approaches that schools and local authorities are using to engage and to help young people themselves. That is the most important thing. We think that the children and young people themselves understand their wellbeing, their sense of wellbeing, and what they can do to ask for help in terms of their wellbeing and how they can actually manage over time that they, as they grow older, be able to to some extent manage their own wellbeing and be able to access support. In terms of measurement, a number of things that attainment advisers are working on in terms of helping schools to track and think about health and wellbeing, but it is something that we are grappling with. I think that Liz might want to come in and say a couple of practical things. How are you measuring that? You know that nationally there are measures around wellbeing. Are they the best measures? Are we doing them often enough? That would be a different question. However, what I would say is that it does give us— Is the answer to that question no? No, it's not no because actually for me this is about, we do have the Scottish health survey, we have information that comes through from PISA, we have those attendance and exclusion measures. However, what I would also say is that those measures will give us that big picture, but actually whenever we are looking at wellbeing it's far more important that we begin to think about what are the barriers, and the barriers are different depending on your own circumstances as a child, they are different depending on the barriers that a local authority may face, a school may face, and actually through our empowerment agenda and actually encouraging and as an attainment adviser alongside all my other attainment advisers around the country, we are doing a lot of work with schools and local authorities to actually look to see what are the big barriers and from there we can begin to support them in the measures, but there are also measures that can be used locally. For instance, we have the Glasgow wellbeing tool, which focuses on some work around Alison McLean did a number of years ago, which is still extremely valid, and it focuses in on things like autonomy, agency, affiliation, that feeling of belonging, that feeling of having some control on that feeling of having some goals, and actually whenever we start to look at those measures with schools, it becomes not necessarily a measurement, it becomes much more an opportunity to actually look for solutions, and that's where for me, yes, we do have that big national measure, but actually those local measures that attainment advisers are working closely with local authorities in schools are actually much richer because actually they will lead to improvement rather than necessarily always just telling us where we are, it's much more important that we have data that we can mobilise. Does all that lead to a discussion around the concerns of the one individual child? It normally comes right down to that, or groups of learners, and that's the rich information, but the kinds as well as the Glasgow wellbeing tool, we've also got things that Education Scotland have developed around a wellbeing matrix, we also use really well established tools around, for instance, nurture, we would use boxhole profiles and we would encourage our local authorities to do that, but again everything that we're doing locally is about leading to improvement for learners and supporting learners, but also I would like to add as well that it's also our job to actually not just consider the wellbeing of learners because we do recognise that family's wellbeing can also be impacted and that can have a direct impact on the child, so actually this is where all local authorities need different measures around this because the barriers and the challenges that they're facing are all very very different and that opportunity to allow people to have that bespoke measure of success and you know part of the refresh is going to allow local authorities to really really do that as well and it will allow them to actually make that difference for the children that they're working with. Elizabeth, that's a very full answer. Let me ask Patricia to conclude her answer on the other two elements that she mentioned of the four, the next one I think I had to do with an integrated, I saw an inclusive system, how do you know the outcome on that? How do we know the outcome on that? Again, I think through the work that we are doing in terms of that work, close work with practitioners, Education Scotland is a very teacher focused organisation and works on a weekly basis with practitioners across the country, particularly over the recovery period and through the pandemic. We've increased the number of practitioners that have been working with through the digital delivery of our work, but also through the attainment Scotland funds, through the evaluation reports that come through. We also, if you think about the OECD reports and the recent Audit Scotland report published last year, again, both of those reports telling us very clearly that we are on the right journey and that our practice is changing. The international council for education advisors, the same message coming through in their reports, that we are making progress and that our practice is changing on the ground. So, this is the external assessment that you say. This is the means by which you know whether you're making progress. It's a combination of our own internal assessment, that daily work of attainment advisors. Attainment advisors report on their local authorities regularly and they report the local authorities' feedback to Scottish Government on a regular basis too, but then that external evaluation on top of that. Yeah, thank you for that. On the last point, closing the poverty-related attainment up. Clearly, the pandemic has an impact on this as well, but we're not making any progress on this. In fact, the latest measurements are worse, right? Pre-pandemic, there were some signs across some local authorities that we were beginning to make some progress in some of the measures, particularly measures around the senior phase and also improvements, particularly in children and young people's numeracy. Literacy seems to be a bit of a more complex picture across in terms of closing the gap, probably because of the different complex nature of literacy in terms of the pandemic. We've certainly seen an impact on that in terms of children's phonological awareness, oral literacy and so on. We can't deny that and I don't think we can. I guess we just measure where we stand at the minute and where we stand at the minute is that gap. It's greater than it's ever been and therefore the importance of what we're doing. I'm just interested about this. I mean, I know the pandemic has affected things quite significantly, but this claim that we were making progress before the pandemic, it was pretty marginal and the rate of progress at that rate would take another 35 years to close the attainment gap, so we can't really be satisfied with that, can we? It's a long-term endeavour. That long-term? Well, I hope not. That's part of why we have introduced some of the changes that we've most recently introduced in the new framework for recovery and accelerating progress, is to really look at and the introduction of stretch aims for each or local authorities across Scotland being really much clearer and taking on account of the OECD challenge was about are we really being clear enough about what we mean by closing the poverty-related gap and the expectations, so the OECD report was really clear on that. We need to be much more upfront about what we expect, what's the progress and by when in every local authority across Scotland and that's one of the things that we have sought to address in this new refreshed model for the attainment challenge going forward. That's right. Michael Marra. The issue of the pandemic, can you tell us about the quantitative analysis that you've undertaken in terms of the impact of the pandemic? Yeah, just to come in on that, Mr Marra, I think during the pandemic, the work that authorities were doing, schools were doing and we were supporting that was really to make sure that there was as much education continuity as possible without a huge focus on health and wellbeing. I think in that context within Education Scotland we were working in each locality with each so that would be with individual authorities, with individual schools and that was across all our directorates within Education Scotland to make sure that continuity, the impact on continuity was minimised. I think it's the national position that we're well aware of and I think what we're trying to do there was to, and it goes back to what Elizabeth was saying, looking at that on a school-by-school basis to make sure that we were minimising the impact, where there were particular issues through absence etc, working with that particular school community in more detail. So on, I mean we're interested in the scale of the challenge here and whether the efforts of this policy are commensurate to the scale of the challenge. What can you tell us about what the pandemic has done to the scale of that challenge? We know that it's grown anecdotally but what do we know, but numbers-wise, what analysis have you done as Education Scotland about what needs to be achieved? Is there anything being done in that regard? Thank you for that question because it is something that we were really keen to look at. After the first round of school closures, the attainment adviser team went out and we didn't statistically look at this because actually the schools were maybe dealing with other issues that they felt were more important so what we did was we took a case study approach to this and across the country we visited all different types of schools in different areas and actually we looked to see what has been the impact and there was a report written which I think you get access to which was around the impact of Covid on equity and the clear message that we're coming around from that were very much that yes, Covid is having a bigger impact on children's experience in poverty. We've seen that qualitative analysis but has there any quantitative analysis been done in terms of the scale of that gap? I'm happy to give you an example so in terms of during the pandemic we were very reactive to be able to wrap around the supports that the schools and the local authorities identified in particular in terms of numeracy in mathematics if I was to use that as an example in terms of closing poverty the least attainment gap in numeracy. We were aware that pre-pandemic there was a gap there and we were obviously wanting to target attainment and make sure we minimised any additional gap so there was a bespoke piece of professional learning put together in partnership with one particular local authority co-constructed a programme of work and we looked at research basis in terms of a math recovery programme and we provided additional supports to wrap around 15 schools and work with tracking over 100 learners within three local authorities. Now we took pre, interim and post, we're in the process of taking post measurements but that gave us very detailed analysis in terms of how we were reacting very swiftly to go in and minimising the additional gap in a particular curricular area. And do you think that that analysis, I mean that's one specific area of the curriculum and the core area of assessment, do you think that that is going to be a robust measurement that's could be translated across the whole of Scotland? I mean it sounds to me that there's individual pieces of work a lot of done during the pandemic to assess but what I'm interested in is what we are doing, what's been proposed, what we're evaluating, going to meet the scale of this challenge and I would like to see Education Scotland produce the information for us if you think that that's within your remit. If I could come in just to finish off that response then obviously I'll be in the place. Yeah and then we'll go to Bob Doris. I think it can't be underestimated the complexity of the landscape of a scale-up model and my experience of being a head teacher and executive head teacher and a quality improvement officer before I come in and I'm still a registered teacher myself. In terms of managing our school and looking at consistency within practice and the high quality of learning teaching that every child deserves in order to make progress, scaling that up across a school, scaling it up across a cluster, scaling that up across a local authority and then multiplying that by 32. You've got to look to see at those measurements to ensure that we're putting the right money in the right places and we are very much working with our schools who are closest to the children to identify where they want to obviously prioritise that time and that investment. The other part of this is if children themselves have, and we touched on well being already, have issues coming to school, for instance that child is not breakfast in the morning or that child hasn't had a proper night's sleep for a whole variety of reasons that affects social and economic deprivation and that means that child will not be ready to learn. I would say that Health and Well-being is interwoven in terms of any of the interventions that we put in place. One of the key measures that we have that was published in December as part of the national improvement framework is, of course, the achievement of curriculum for excellence levels and that's data that comes from every local authority. The national data around literacy and numeracy in particular, that data, Michael, you've seen that, absolutely shows us the extent of the gap across the different local authorities across Scotland. That's a very small area. I'm going to move on. We can come back to this later. Bob Doris. I'll take the brief, convener. It is a supplementary based in your interaction with the witnesses. He's thinking of his right to push you on whether there's been improvement pre Covid. The statistics that I've got for primary school are that in the two years before Covid hit, that young people in primary schools meeting the expected standards for literacy was up 3.1 per cent and for numeracy was 2.7 per cent. There's quantifiable progress has been made and last week we heard from local authorities that we need to be better at celebrating the progress that's been made but also the committee met the west partnership teachers. It's rock secondary in my constituency. Myself and Graham Day MSP were up with one group of teachers who were a bit concerned that the impact of Covid might mask some of the really good success that has been evidenced over the previous years and that we need to make sure that is acknowledged that that good practice is supported and is embedded as well as the recovery that Mr Marra talks about. Can you say a little bit more about making sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bath water if you like, about the good practice that has seen these improvements that is masked by Covid? That's a lengthy supplementary, but just one answer to that would be good for time constraints. I don't know who wants to take that. I think it's a really good point in terms of celebrating the success and that was really the point that I was making at the beginning that before Covid we were seeing in the data at local level. We were absolutely seeing improvements coming through more so in the senior phase, to be honest, than coming through in the primary. Those improvements that you've mentioned were really important for us to remember. What we are now doing, of course, is supporting and what Education Scotland's role now is to support those teachers to get back to where they were in terms of recovery, to build their confidence, rebuild their confidence in the classroom, to upskill them in dealing with some of the new challenges that they are finding amongst children in the classroom because of the impacts of Covid and looking at how they can use the range of interventions. The learning that we've taken from the first five years, six years now of the challenge in terms of what works in the classroom, what was working to move those children on and coming back to that again and again, that relentless focus now is really important in that acceleration of progress. I understand entirely how complicated that is and I absolutely understand why your focus has been on supporting schools through the pandemic, but it has been said to us in taking evidence that there could be an argument for a degree of rebaselining the situation around attainment because of the impact of the pandemic. In order to get a clearer picture of a mea convener, where are we now in terms of attainment and the challenge that is set against where we were pre-pandemic? How would you quantify that as a result of the pandemic? To quantify it in one single-figure frame, I think that it's about quantifying it at each local authority level and even at each school level. That's the work that we are supporting schools and local authorities with, is to understand their context. One of the big questions that is really a mantra, if you like, for the Scottish attainment challenge and has been since the very beginning, is about knowing your gaps, not just one gap, but in the context of your school, your local community, your local authority, your region even. What are the gaps and how do you use your data effectively? One of the really strong pieces of work that we have really championed in terms of the attainment adviser role in Education Scotland is about effective use of data and effective analysis of data for planning. What we are focusing on at the moment is support to understand the data and make the difference. Are you agreeing with Graham Day's question then that it is important that we establish a new baseline in terms of what that gap is? You have just said that we don't know what the gap is, but we need to know the gap before we can follow through on the rest of your answer. Absolutely. Right down to classroom level, we need every teacher in Scotland to know the gaps that are existing in their classroom and to know the context that they are working in. We should get to a point where we can quantify that. I think that we are already, to some extent, able to quantify it in terms of saying the data that was published in December through the national food framework. I thought you said that you couldn't quantify it. No, I didn't say that. I was saying to Mr Marra that we do have that national measure from the attainment of a level data. We will have more as time goes on because the national improvement framework and the 11 measures contained within the national improvement framework are the baseline that we are using. Quick come back from Graham Day. Yes, very briefly. Thank you, convener. We have focused our inquiry on the west region. You are involved in the regional collaborative. What teachers have said to us is that the pandemic has had a massive detrimental effect on the work and the scale of the challenge. Would you accept that characterisation? Absolutely. When you look at the local authorities in the west partnership, remember that there are five of the most deprived local authorities in Scotland are in that west partnership. Then South Lanarkshire, which was originally a schools programme, has significant levels of deprivation and 35 per cent of the school population in Scotland in that region. The refreshed approach to the Scottish attainment challenge in the framework for recovery and accelerated progress says that the Scottish attainment challenge mission is central to all of Education Scotland's work in supporting Scottish educators. Part of that was to support local authorities to deliver an agled plan. We have been taking evidence, obviously, from teachers among others. That evidence suggests that there is a lack of consistency across the local authorities. I am interested to know what work Education is Scotland doing to reduce that consistency. Everybody is entitled to having a quality input wherever they are in Scotland. I do not know who the best person is. I was thinking possibly Craig, but I will take your lead on whoever is the best person to take that. Thank you, Deputy convener. I am happy to start off, maybe colleagues will add. I think that our approach has evolved over the pandemic, and as we were saying earlier, it was very much about that supportive role, which will continue in the future. In terms of providing bespoke support, we have already talked about that, doing that at school level and potentially at individual classroom level, but we will also be doing that at local authority level. We will be working with each local authority. We have really got excellent relationships, both at authority level and through the regional improvement collaboratives, to look at the requirements in each particular authority. We will be looking back again at the data. We will be looking at the data in each individual authority, where the gaps are, how a cohort is performing as that cohort proceeds through school, what is the gap in terms of SIMD and so on, overall attainment and providing a bespoke package of support and challenge where it is required to that individual authority. That will very much now, while the general support that we are providing during the pandemic is now moving very much to a bespoke support for each individual authority where they require it. We can bring that expertise, we can bring that advice and the challenge because we are working with authorities across the country. As we are doing that relationship building, we are looking for where support is most required and then delivering that in unison with the authority and the school. You have been working on that for a while, for years. That aim will have been there. I am just interested to know why it is that, consistently through the evidence teachers work again and again and parents as well, we are saying that that variation is there. I must admit that I am concerned about that variation. There appears to be a lack of progress in making it more consistent.  What work are you doing at authority level to do that? Pamela Dydd mentioned the scaling off, but that is part of your remit to do that. I think that the very specific thing, because we will come in here, is that for each authority, by September, we will be agreeing stretch aims for each individual authority. That is a range of indicators. There will be core indicators in there that we will jointly agree on in measuring progress in terms of achievement, but that also allows each individual authority to identify their own particular stretch aims if there are issues or areas of focus in that authority. Health and wellbeing is a good example, if we touched on that. An individual authority may decide to have particular additional stretch aims. That progress can then be measured both in terms of quantitative data and, importantly, the qualitative evidence. That often gets beneath the surface of the raw data. It is what is happening underneath in terms of that support and challenge, that quality assurance approach that is in place, et cetera, in that individual authority. You published a report on recalibrating equity and social justice in Scottish education and bouncing forward. As part of that, intensifying support in the short term, high quality, universal and targeted provision is vital. What progress has been made in those areas? I will start as often as there might be other colleagues who want to come in. In terms of a senior regional adviser role, I have the privilege to lead a large team who are aligned to the WEST partnership. We support, we are bespoke and support, drawing national expertise, a multidisciplinary team who are very much rooted and on-the-ground working shoulder-to-shoulder with local authorities and in and around the schools. The company today is one of the members of that team. In terms of the footprint, if we were to use it as a footprint, in terms of knowing that local authority, in terms of inside-out working with that central team, identifying strengths. There are many strengths and just touching on Mr Doris's point that there are many strengths that need to be celebrated. I think that our teachers need to hear that in terms of the hard work in the graph that has went in to ensure that we are on the right track. We do have to have a conversation about what is not working so well, where are our focus, where are our areas, and that is about having a shared mission. That is where this refreshed narrative is absolutely crucial to ensure that we join up that approach as one system. To use an analogy of the balcony to the dance floor, which all headteachers would relate to, Education Scotland are very much on that dance floor. We have an external perspective that we can provide but very much go and take practice from elsewhere and have examples on quality improvement, quality assurance. To get underneath and drill underneath those processes, why is something working in one particular school? Could that be lifted? Maybe it cannot, because sometimes it is to do the particular context of that school. There is a very experienced team that is working, and I am just using this as an example. I am one of six senior regional advisers, and they all have their own team that all operate in the same way. We are underneath, but we are in having conversations with headteachers. We are engaging with class teachers. That is our direct role in building on what Craig has already said about locality work, because we draw on expertise from our scrutiny colleagues. Out with that, we have the regional improvement collaborative, obviously the three overarching principles—equity, empowerment and excellence in terms of the west partnership. They also have equity that filters all the way through. The team is aligned to each of the work streams that the west partnership does. In terms of being really clear at all levels of the system, in terms of what is working well, where do we need to focus, we deploy and I drill underneath the data of the footprints of every single member of the team that they look to see why that particular school needs to be better up in support. There are conversations with the authority, they go in together, there is coaching, there are supports, and it is very much welcomed by the headteachers the feedback that we get and the feedback that we have worked really closely with the RIC to ensure that we are collectively working as part of a shared mission to get the best for our children and young people. It is interesting that you have mentioned the RICS and again the evidence that we took. It was mixed, I have to say, from the ground. The principle of RICS was sort of wholeheartedly welcome and people understood that. Although the experience of actual teachers was mixed on that, and again that goes back to my line of questioning about variation, across the authorities, so where they are not working so well, maybe the principle was recognised as being good, but if it needs tweaking, how are you able to respond to that? Are you taking on board the views of teachers? For some it was working well, but other teachers actually felt that they weren't part of that collaborative process, that it was still a little bit leadership led rather than classroom led. How are you dealing with that? I can come in and I know Liz wants to come in and our colleagues want to add to this as well. In terms of the teamwork, there is a particular work stream in the west partnership just now that is looking at wellbeing for learning, and that goes back to if our children and young people are not in a right place to learn, how do we support our teachers to engage and ensure that we respond to those particular needs that have changed and evolved in light of the pandemic. Our team are delivering professional learning with the RIC to our teachers, and they are very closely evaluated. That feeds into the professional learning that we plan for the year ahead. Every regional improvement collaborative creates a plan. We work with them to identify and evaluate in the cycle of what went well last year, what we are wages now, what is our indicators, and they have critical indicators that they measure themselves against. Obviously, with the stretched aims, that feature is part of that space. Each local authority feeds into that process, and they look to see what additional support RIC can provide. Each local authority has its own professional learning offer to reduce some of the variability that it has identified to ensure that it is very tight around the needs of individual schools. The QIOs and central teams have very much worked in that space. We work with them to ensure, transport and share some of that good practice and challenge where there is a need to do so. RIC then looks to see how they can respond. The interesting part that I would say about the teachers' engagement around the offer of the RIC is about leadership of all levels, because some of the West Partnership Workstream has been about leadership for improvement, but there has been significant changes in terms of new leaders coming to the front, in terms of new people taking up leadership roles. In terms of that leadership and in terms of everybody's role to look at data, everybody has the responsibility whether you are the class teacher. Everybody is essential to the core vision of targeting, where we need to target improvements. Given that the organisation is about to go through structural changes, do you feel that you have sufficient capacity within your organisation to offer the support? The challenge functions a lot of which you have mentioned already. Who would it be, Patricia? The whole issue of reform has obviously been a challenge for Education Scotland over the last year, as we have waited for the outcomes of Professor Muir's report. We welcome it. Education Scotland is an organisation full of educators and a learning organisation. I have been almost 40 years in Scottish education. Change has continued to be the paramount thing that we have all had to work through, and change is a good thing. And change for Education Scotland. We do not see that as a bad thing. If you were to look at our response to the Muir consultation, a lot of what Professor Muir had put into his report is absolutely chimes with the kind of direction of travel that Education Scotland has been moving towards under the leadership of our current chief exec in terms of being much more with Scottish educators and for Scotland's learners. In terms of capacity, we now know, in terms of the cabinet secretary's response to Professor Muir's report, that we think that, at least at the moment, we are led to believe that we will have at least two years before the organisation actually does change. As far as we are concerned for the next two years, and the cabinet secretary has been very supportive of that too, it is business as usual in Education Scotland. We have a team of 32 attainment advisers, we have a strong team of curriculum staff in Education Scotland, and we are continuing to recruit, we continue to fill those posts when vacancies arrive in our normal way, and we continue to work in partnership with the local authorities and schools that we serve. So, really not worried for the next, for the short term anyway. Thank you, thank you, convener. But there is change, and there's been scrapped, you're being scrapped. How can you welcome that? That seems strange to me.  But this, the Muir report suggests that you're going to be done away with and replaced by a completely new organisation. I wouldn't use the word scrapped, convener. I think reformed and cheap, and as is the word. You've been done away with and replaced by something new, that's what she says. We were reformed previously from being Learning and Teaching Scotland, I was in HMIE at that time, we joined with Learning and Teaching Scotland to become Education Scotland, and now... So it's just a name change. I know it isn't just a name change because the change to the organisation will create for us really important opportunities. As you know, there has been a lot of discussion, shall I say, about the need to separate the inspection function from the improvement function in Education Scotland. We're going to come on to that. All of that will be to the good, I think, for the system. Thank you. Graham Day. Thanks, convener. I'm just picking up on the RICS point. When you reform something inevitably, there's a degree of resentment from some quarters and a period of readjustment. If you look at the approach that it's taken here, if you look at PEF and funding streams, that's put power in the hands of head teachers. That was a change. Local authorities, some local authorities didn't particularly like that. We threw the setting up with the RICS as a similar impact. They have Education Scotland as a direct involvement on those. So what I want to ask you about is, was do you accept that there was a degree of pushback by local authorities at the outset of that, or at least some of them, and has that changed? Have we got to a position where everybody is pulling in the same direction now, or do we still have some way to go? Sorry, Graham. Can I just ask you to clarify when you're saying pushback to pushback on what? In the context of local authorities, saw their role changed considerably. I mean, local authorities were the power and local education delivery. In terms of empowerment. In terms of empowerment and in terms of their actual direct control over this. What was the landscape at the start? What is it now? I think it's fair to say, and at the time of that change I was in local government, so I was aware of some of those tensions I suppose. And as you alluded to, it was a change in a way of working, so there was some anxiety about that. However, my experience since coming to Education Scotland, which is over a year now, that the relationships between ourselves and the RIC leads and the colleagues in the RICs and directors generally is actually really positive. I think there's a couple of good examples of that in terms of over the pandemic, the work on e-learning for example. I don't think that that would have happened to the same extent hard RICs not being in place. So, you're right, I mean any change always brings a bit of uncertainty and a bit of anxiety, and I'm not sure I would describe it as pushback, but it was folk trying to find their place in the system I would say. Now we meet regularly with RIC leads, we meet with colleagues from ADES, associate directors of Education Scotland, about the development of RICs. And I have to say that that relationship, and I think in large part that is due to the SRAs, including Pamela, have worked really hard on those relationships to make sure that it is a productive relationship in terms of the work the RICs will do to ensure that that complements the work that authorities do and the work that we do, so that we're not all in the same space as it were in competing with each other. Now that's not to say there can't be further improvement, and I think the valuation of RICs outlined that, and indeed it was mentioned in Professor Muir's report as well, that there may be changes required in terms of governance and so on, but in terms of the principle of that regional working, I think that that is now well established in terms of the benefits of regional working. I think particularly, and you mentioned that yourself in terms of the empowerment agenda, if I could call it that, and I think empowerment is the one bit across the system, whether that's teachers, professional associations, other support staff, ourselves, etc. That's the one area where everyone's agreed on that there's huge benefit in empowerment. So, taking that positive, I think we can build on that, at least in terms of accountability will remain with authorities, it's important to say that as well, but within that context of empowerment, I think there's a huge opportunity to build on the successes that we'll have to date. I'll just follow up, and this is perhaps a question for Pamela. We've, as Sirella, we've focused on the west region. They have a very clear focus, they've got a significant poverty issue, an attainment gap to tackle, everybody knows that, everyone seems to be focused on that, they were prior to this work stream. Is it the same across the rest of the country? Because if you take, let's take an example for the Tayside regional collaborative, which I think you were involved in at the outset. Now, there's a collaborative that takes in a major city with a significant deprivation issue, an attainment issue, but then rural areas like mine, where we have towns with a focus of deprivation, and then challenges masked in the rural areas, which you know my colleague Mr Mundell will come on to. So is that picture that you paint, out of the great Clement paints, universal across Scotland, or where we have a different set of challenges and a different level of recognition of those challenges? Is it variable? Are we seeing a variance in the performance of the ricks in the context of attainment? Well, as Craig referred, there are six SRAs, and we work very closely, very much to use that example about the routes and lift and identify what's going well. We regularly connect, share practice, and it's not just Education Scotland that work in that space, as you know. We work very closely with the ROP, the Robert Owen Centre, who provides support to the west partnership and provides a different research basis in order to kind of support the direction of travel. You see some of that in terms of going back to other university links with other regional improvement collaboratives, but going back to your point in terms of their connectivity, if you like, or the variation, it comes back to the point about if you're going to make any change, there has to be a shared mission, and everybody has to be really clear about what their function, what their role is, and how they can support. So your initial question to Craig, just if I could touch on that, about local authorities. Local authorities work very closely with their schools. They're in the schools and they're very much working to say, right, okay, in terms of pupil equity funding, let's look at your self-evaluation, where do your school improvement priorities sit, and how you're going to use your funding in order to support and drive some of those areas. So if you then take that from school level into local level, and then you lift that from local level into RIC level, the variation because of those structures are minimised, but there's still lots of work to do because obviously the RICs were very recently evolved and then with the pandemic struck. So in terms of that kind of new space, very much a book of learning environment, you know, where are we going to adjust our practice, where do we need to be prioritising focus, and share the expertise to ensure that we've got the equity across the country. Thank you, Graham. Thank you. Good morning panel. Thanks for being with us this morning. Appreciate it. I'd like to ask about the role of attainment advisers and a little more detail on that. I acknowledge that you spoke earlier, Elizabeth, about taking down barriers both with the local authority and with the schools themselves. Could you tell us a bit more about the degree to which attainment advisers are working with schools or working with local authorities? And it's always helpful to hear examples of specific bits of work to help our understanding. No problem, thank you. And thanks for that question. It's always nice to be able to celebrate the work of attainment advisers, so thank you. For us, our role can be quite varied, and I think it's important to acknowledge first of all that we take quite a responsive role. So the major part of our work is actually to work with local authorities, to work with schools, to work with teachers to actually look at, well, what are the barriers that actually need removed if you are going to have a focus on closing the poverty attainment gap. And attainment advisers do that at different levels as well. We don't just only work in schools, we provide national support, we provide guidance, we provide national training programmes, we have a whole suite of training that's targeted at leaders, targeted at practitioners and also targeted at support staff, because we also recommend and highly value the work that they are doing in our schools. We also provide a real opportunity to work with local authorities and schools on leading improvement and building that capacity to close the gap. And that's the type of work that Craig was talking about earlier, where we are working at a universal level at a local authority. So for me, we might be doing some work and working maybe with schools on data and actually at local authority level first, we might have to look at what are the processes that they're actually following to allow schools to be more adapt, actually understanding the gap and knowing the gap. So our work can be really varied about supporting that improvement, but we also work in a targeted way as well. So that can be a local authority might say, okay, here are the groups of schools who are maybe needing support around the actual numeracy and actually what can you do to support them. We've got lots of different examples of that. For instance, one of the team advisers at the moment has been working with the local authority for a parental engagement strategy. We know that, for instance, any strain there's been support given around outcomes and measures we know in Westin Bartonshire, the team adviser has been helping to support the review of the use of the care experience in the young person. So that's quite a targeted universal approach, but I suppose whenever we're coming right down to that intensive support, the intensive support can be quite varied. And some of my own work, I mean I work very closely with schools that sometimes are directed by the local authority and sometimes the schools come and ask for that level of support because they recognise they're maybe not making the progress they want to make. And that type of support is really about, first of all, a really deep contextual analysis to really understand what is their gap. And that's not just based on numerical data. I think that it really is really important that we also consider that qualitative data. Actually, what are your pupils telling you? You know that the children's voice is at the heart of this, whatever parents telling us. How do we make sure that we are listening to the whole picture, rather than just looking at the numbers? Because we need to get all of our work based on really sound foundations that will allow us to then drive forward the attainment for these pupils. But I also think as well that it's important to recognise whenever we're going into that intensive work that sometimes that can be around our main streams, which is leadership, then it can be supporting. Currently, what's quite interesting with the impact of Covid is our leaders were amazing. Honestly, I'm in awe every single time I speak to a headteacher and the fact that they've managed to take their school through a pandemic. Very, very proud of them as well. But what I would also suggest is as well that that's an impact on them. Sometimes the role of the team adviser is to actually build them back up and actually allow them to remember that, you know, we were making really good progress before. What were we doing? Actually take them back. So it's not always about being new and innovative and bringing it a shiny new toy. Sometimes it is about giving leaders the opportunity to just step back and actually remember what they do well and giving them the opportunity to then build on that and take that forward. Sometimes our intensive work can be also about supporting, tracking and monitoring. And that whole agenda around providing a robust evaluation of what are you actually doing and is it working. You know, you heard Ruth the other day quoting us around the phrase adopt with that to abandon. You know, everybody that knows me will know that that is my mantra and the reason for that is because it's really important that we do recognise what we're doing well. And again, we do that at an intensive level, what's specifically working well at your school. We also do that at a local authority level, what is working well and what supports are going in at a local authority level. How can we share it? That's the role of the team adviser as well to make sure that we're sharing internally within the local authorities, but also externally because we have this amazing network of 32 people who all know what's working around the country, but it is about being able to provide that bespoke advice that they need at that particular time. And I suppose the part of the job that I find the most rewarding is when we actually we hear the anecdotal stories from practitioners, from head teachers, you know, recently I actually undertook, I'm always keen to be better at my job, so undertook a 360 where I asked the people I work with closely, you know, is there anything I can be doing better. And actually, you know, one quote come back that said, you know, thank you for your time because you just make me a better head teacher. And, you know, if we can be doing that, then the leadership and driving forward the attainment challenge will be amazing across the country. And I know that all my other attainment advisers, you know, are doing the same thing. Thank you. That's helpful. And I think it is always important while we're scrutinising and challenging and looking for things that we can do better to not lose sight of the diligence and professionalism and commitment that we've got out in our schools. And we've certainly heard great examples of that. We spoke with teachers, the convener myself and Michael Marra, we're with teachers on Monday, forgive me, I forget, I've been a long week already, and heard some fantastic examples of work. I was particularly impressed with work that was going on to involve parents and bring them in and assist with literacy. The specific example was a film club that was held in the library and had been successful. One of the challenges that was raised at that by teachers though was around some of the research and one of the policies built on, one of the teachers actually described it as flawed in terms of it not being disaggregated by ethnicity. And they also spoke about some of the research that was being used, undervaluing and underplaying the importance of support for learning workers and for their particular school where many of the children English was their second language. The support for learning workers were absolutely crucial. Again, there was another example of a young pupil being given his assessment in Turkish and to quote the teacher smashing it. If he'd been given his assessment in English, the outcome would have been different, so I'd be keen to hear your reflections on how we make sure that that research isn't flawed and the policies are appropriate for all our children within the schools. I suppose that it is important that we are being evidence based because I know you have heard already from EF and what they will tell you is that in any research that actually this is a good chance of working and I don't think that Becky would object me to saying that because what we are saying is that that will give you an idea of what will work. And as attainment advisers, everything that we do and every piece of advice that we give is based on evidence, so from our training, from the things that we put in the national improvement hub, everything is based on evidence. Now that question around is the evidence flawed, that brings us on to the next piece of work and that is done at both local authority level through attainment advisers and also as Pamela Dementia-Diller on it through the RICS, where actually we have a really important role in supporting practitioners to actually undertake inquiry because actually the large pieces of evidence that will give you a good hint of what might work might not actually give you a fuller picture of what might work for you and that's where we are putting lots and lots of support in place to allow practitioners to undertake inquiries, to actually look at their own context, you know that example of you know children with English the second language, if that is your barrier then actually that's what we need to be looking to see what can we do to help support and address that. And also as an attainment advisable part of our job is almost to be, we do have a very, very job, but we do almost become researchers for them so we have we would possibly go away and actually look out some some evidence around that, we would also link with places where we knew it was working particularly well, for instance your English the second language, we know that Glasgow within the West Partnership has you know such a vast number of children who have English the second language and are very, very skilled in their approaches to actually addressing that need, but also within other local authorities that practice is already there so as a attainment adviser about our role to almost link and look for those opportunities for collaboration as well so that people are not sitting in a room on their own trying to work it out so definitely facilitating that collaboration is how I would see my role and take that forward. And I suppose trying to understand what might go wrong where somebody would say that that is an issue, is that perhaps about someone further removed from the school placing value on research that maybe isn't necessarily appropriate to the people, does that make sense? I'm just trying to understand where that could come in from. I'll be honest without us actually having that conversation you know it's hard for us to sit here and say well that's the reason why that person made that comment, we would want to have a bit more conversation with that person to understand the context of that comment. I wanted to add to Liz's feedback there just a little bit more about your point around classroom support workers and support staff that work the most closely in terms of supporting some of those young people with additional support needs so some of our own is saying trying to improve our own work so we recently did some evaluation on who was using our resources on the national improvement hub and one of the things that came back to us were that there are two groups particularly of practitioners that we felt were not using, we're not aware of the resources that were there, we're not accessing the support, the professional learning opportunities as much as others. One was student teachers and we've now taken some steps over the course of this year, I've asked the attainment advisers throughout this year, we've been scoping out some work with the Scottish council of deans of education and looking at how do we become more involved with initial teacher education so that we are reaching those students and that they understand the support that's available from Education Scotland and the wealth of resources and knowledge around the Scottish attainment challenge and poverty and so on so we're doing some work there. The second group was exactly the group that you talked about and again we've taken steps both at local authority level to be really proactive and all of the attainment advisers have that as a key strand of our work over this academic year and that will continue in our national site plan as a focus group. Sorry to interrupt, what will they actually do to it because what's your understanding of why the support workers would not be accessing that, is that about time workloads, do they maybe not have the same space for professional development? It varies but all of that in variation across the country, support workers as you know have different contracts from teachers, a lot of those workers work part-time for example, they're not always available for the twilight that might be in offer so again we have rescheduled some of that activity and as a result of that we really are beginning to have an impact. Actually in the office yesterday one of our team advisers was talking about a particular learning activity targeted at those support assistants that will take place next week and we have at the moment and it's not closed yet over 200 already signed up to that and that's about us exploring through the attainment advisers and their links right into the local authority so they do offer and work through their local authority links for those groups of staff at that local level but at a national level we've had to take more steps to really get underneath the skin of that and take proactive action thank you that's helpful. So you can completely refute the comment that was made by one of the head teachers that spoke to us that Education Scotland placed little value in the support for learning role. Completely refute absolutely. Education Scotland values the support for learning. Every member of staff in Education Scotland would understand the importance of meeting learner needs and the value of those staff. That's very important to make clear. I appreciate that. Willie Rennie for a quick supplementary. I was fascinated by your contribution about the attainment advisers. The feedback that I get from quite a lot of teachers just now is that they're exhausted through the pandemic. They still feel they're in the middle of the pandemic because a lot of staff are off sick, kids are off skip, a lot of the children have fallen behind on the kind of where they would expect them to be. I'm just wondering where we got from one particular teacher on Monday that they were frustrated by the latest idea that was coming along when they already had a mountain of work to do and I know it's probably much more sophisticated than that but I'd like to know how do you you've got pressure from us and others to improve the attainment at the same time you're getting pushed back from the school saying we've got enough to handle here without you coming up with new ideas? How do you judge that? Just go through what a discussion would be like to make sure that we're not overwhelming the schools but at the same time we're trying to drive forward improvement? Can you maybe just talk through that a little bit? I could possibly give you a couple examples of the kind of conversations that we're having currently. One school that I'm currently working with, they were actually pre-pandemic, things were going really well for them, the excellence agenda was for them improving, attainment was up in general, they were beginning to close the public attainment gap, they had previously gone through a local authority review which was very very positive. The dynamic of the impact on Covid on their school has been really really difficult for them and actually rather than I'd said before it but the shiny new toy, it is about sometimes refocusing and actually giving people the opportunity to take that time to refocus. However, what we can't do is stand still, we have to continually be moving so if we are going to refocus then we want to refocus on the things that are going to make the difference, that are going to accelerate the progress because I haven't met an educator yet, I haven't met anybody who is working in a school whether it be a support staff member, whether it be a headteacher, a deputy head, who are not all there because they want the best for their children and actually what they are really keen to do is recover not just the attainment but recover the children's wellbeing, the opportunities of experience and we may have some children who really because they've been working in bubbles all the way through nursery and I don't remember phonological awareness we have that kind of interaction with children that are really really struggling and actually every single person that I'm meeting is committed to that so yes teachers are tired, yes they have had probably you know someone who would describe him this year as tougher than the other years because if you imagine you know Paul's off on a Monday, Pamela's off on a Tuesday, Patricia's off on a Wednesday and actually my lesson plan is not I want it to be because I've got to take everybody with you but you know something our staff are resilient and they are amazing and they are able to actually do what needs done in order to recover those children and for some schools it's not even just recovery it's recovery and beyond because we have seen some schools that I've worked with where through the pandemic they have in fact managed to not only recover back to where they were but they've made progress further in closing their gap and made further progress with their attainment results and really that's about the context in which they're working with because the higher the deprivation, the higher the barriers, the higher the the impact of those barriers and actually it is about giving heads, giving staff time to refocus and actually remember what was working from them and within a classroom we can even see and you know it was interesting and some of them I also support one of the the rick work streams and we were doing some training and this was an excellent teacher who had come along to actually talk to other practitioners and shared their practice and what she said to me was you know this has been really really good for me to refocus because actually I've gotten some bad habits I have had on my children facing the front for the last two years and actually I forgot so this refocus this beginning to look back at your practice should should empower teachers to then be able to say you know I just need to remember what was working well and then actually go on with it and it's not always about shiny new things and I don't think local authorities are pushing that shiny new thing but what they are pushing is to make sure that the recovery is there and that's where our stretch aims will come in because it will allow them to really focus on the things that they know work well for them so that they can make the difference. Thank you very much. Ross Greer. Thank you. This is probably a question for Patricia in the first instance but if it's more appropriate to refer to colleagues to feel free and I think it's largely just drawing together threads from various answers that you've given so far already. We had Jim Thullis from School Leader Scotland in a couple of weeks ago. He was one of a number of witnesses who suggested to us that there was greater need for some longitudinal studies on the impact of the funding now that we're at the point where you could have had an entire cohort having gone through their whole time at primary or secondary with this funding in place. This is an appropriate point to do some really high quality and depth longitudinal work to assess the impact of that. You've already mentioned a couple of times this morning various bits of assessment work that you've been doing. What you're already doing matches the description of what Jim is asking for there and if not, do you have any plans to do the longitudinal work that there is an interest in seeing? I think that the question around longitudinal study is a really good one. For us in Education Scotland, not just for me personally, it really is about the question of what we want to gain from that. What do we expect that we would gain from that, that we're not gaining from the kind of evidence that we're gathering year on year, if you like? The Attainment Scotland fund evaluation, if you like, is a longitudinal study of the impact of the Scottish Attainment Challenge because every year we have had a headteacher survey, we've had a local authority study and we're building up a picture year on year of the impact in terms of what's happening on the ground. If by longitudinal study you're thinking more around case study and following and tracking individual learners, then I think there is merit in that and I think we do that through the attainment data and there is potential to do that better and we're looking with Scottish Government at how we do that in terms of tracking individual pupil progress. We're also doing that with some of the regional collaboratives where they are absolutely, so there's a piece of work at the moment that's on going between the Northern Alliance and the South East Improvement Collaborative where they are really looking at how do we take a close look and how do we get a granular picture of individual learners and be able to track them over time. I think there is merit in that because that gives us back to the system, a really close understanding of what has made a difference for those young people. My fear is that what it will tell us is that different things have made a difference to different individual young people and we'll get more and I think that's the question we need to think about. Will we get more out of that? As an educator, as I've said for many years and as an HMI too, for me the biggest impact in terms of evaluation is when we do robust evaluation at local level and when we have a system that is able to accurately self-evaluate the impact of its own work. That is why, right across Scottish education, we take a real strong approach to developing skills in self-evaluation and that means that triangulation between data observation, stakeholder views, bringing all of that together to get a really accurate picture and a granular picture of what's working well and what the next steps are. That's why we share the quality indicators that we have, how good is our school and how good is our sales, all of that suite of quality indicators. We are quite unique as a country in sharing all of that work that the inspectors use but sharing that out across the system so that we expect everybody to use those tools to really get under the skin of what's working well. I think there could be some merit in a longitudinal piece of research. It depends what we want to get out of that and then it depends how we use it going forward and how we expect practitioners to use it. Absolutely, I agree with much of that. Would it be fair to say that, if we were to embark on that, the appropriate bodies to undertake or to co-ordinate any piece of work like that would either be yourselves or the directorate within Government. You are best placed to do that, whether it's case studies, if you look at a school in an urban area with high deprivation, a school in a rural area that sits in the middle of SIMD, a school with a high level of English as a second language students, you are the national education agency so you are ideally placed to co-ordinate such a piece of work. Is that something that you could take the decision to do yourselves or would you need direction from Government, would you need the cabinet secretary to come to you and say, we've now been running this funding programme for long enough, I want to see the kind of longitudinal work that school leader Scotland has just suggested? In terms of a piece of research, Education Scotland would most likely do that in partnership with the academic institutions. We already work quite closely in partnership with the universities across Scotland and I think that's where we have to acknowledge that in terms of academic research, that's the huge levels of expertise there. Our staff undertake a lot of evaluation and a lot of our staff are very skilled in research, a lot of our staff are undertaken or have undertaken PhDs. I think that every educator in Scotland, remember, has undertaken research as part of their journey, if you like, towards being a qualified educator. There is a level of expertise but I think for that to have real impact we would want to be looking at that in partnership. If we are talking about a whole system approach to improvement, I don't think that it will go moving forward, that Education Scotland would take on board any of that on its own. We would be saying, this is for the system to own and it's in a collective. The universities, the local authorities, Education Scotland and Scottish Government analytical services are coming together to really be clear about those things today. I'm sorry to jump in. You're absolutely right that there needs to be a whole system approach but somebody needs to lead a piece of work to actually get it started. I suppose what I'm asking is, what I'm asking is, will you consider leading that piece of work or do you need direction from Government? Do you need, for example, the Cabinet Secretary to say to you, that this is a strategic priority? Therefore, I would like you to co-ordinate that. I would like you to commission academics, I would like you to work with partners, etc. Or is that something that Education Scotland can itself, using the executive authority that you've got, just go ahead and do? I think that if it was seen as something, if we saw it as something that was a strategic priority, it's not on our corporate plan at the moment. It's not part of our strategic priorities at the moment but yes, absolutely it is something that we could undertake. Thank you very much. I've just got one other question of the time, convener. It's just about the role of inspectors and inspections in this. It somewhat relates to that issue of longitudinal work, particularly given the length of time often between inspections that an individual school receives. When your inspectors are going into school, engaging with them as part of that regular programme, are there specific points related to the use of attainment funding that inspectors have to, as standard, as part of their report, look into and ask some questions about it? Could you just give us a little bit more detail on what role the inspectors play in making sure that we're gathering the right kind of evidence in a supportive manner? That's a really good question and I'm glad to have it. Equity, the thread of equity and is embedded within how good is our school for the current quality indicator framework that inspectors have been using. All of the quality indicators, that framework was launched in 2015 coincidentally or perhaps not at the same time as the Scottish attainment challenge, so in developing that refresh of ideas at that time, all of the quality indicators were refreshed with the knowledge that this piece of work was really important and was going to be a journey for Scottish educators. So, yes, absolutely, every quality indicator and every inspection of an establishment or a centre would be looking at the impact of Scottish attainment challenge funding. Has there been any collation, any review of, now that has been the case for seven years, has there been any collation or review of what inspectors are coming back with? Any identification of common trends in their reports? Yes, absolutely. A most recent publication by the chief inspector was just last year, looking at a collation of inspection findings from 2018 to 2021 and again there. A lot of the strengths that have already mentioned in terms of cultural shift, in terms of focus on wellbeing, in terms of teacher practice and teacher awareness of interventions and the kind of practice that actually helps to alleviate the barriers for learning that most deprived children feel are all coming through as the strengths in that report. What we are still looking at and what that report says is that we still need to do more in terms of the areas that Ms McGuire was asking around, in terms of meeting learner needs and really identifying what every individual, so more differentiation in the classroom comes through in that report and a closer look in terms of monitoring and tracking of progress and how that impacts then on planning for learning that is appropriate to make sure that every learner is making the right progress that they are capable of. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Ross. Clearly, many more of our children nowadays are struggling with the anxiety with social skills, with relationships and I am wondering as well how much focus is there around actually asking our children and our young people and also their parents, too, about their health and wellbeing and also about what outcomes it is that they actually want to progress towards? I'll let you guys choose your answers. I'll kick off and then colleagues might want to come in. In terms of the examples that I've already provided about how we weave and work around the local authorities and work with local authority improvement priorities and then also work with the regional improvement collaborative, if I could give an example of the current work stream which is looking at wellbeing for learning. Within that wellbeing for learning at work stream, within the WEST partnership, there's an area for youth ambassadors looking at how the UNCRC can be enacted as we have a senior education officer who has worked and delivered professional learning in terms of the voice of our children and young people in order to be leaders of their own learning and to capture some of those insights and views in terms of where they are, where they feel they need to be supported and what we can do better and what we can put in place that's maybe not already there in terms of this changing in context. In addition to that, there's been a piece of work in terms of distressed behaviours, nurturing behaviours and actually those were the uptake of them. It was so great that we had to roll them out, additional sessions as well and then also we've opened that up nationally. We had people coming from different regional improvement collaboratives asking for that so that's an example of one focus piece of work that generated a lot of discussions around practitioners thinking about the children in their classrooms, thinking about individuals and then going back in terms of almost a team around a child or a team around a family to say right okay what does that look like for the families or the parents that are in my school? What does that look like in terms of the improvements that we have or the way our team works? Some of the insights in terms of the way PEF in particular has been used to open up cooking classes, for instance, where the parent comes with the child and they cook together and then there's maybe someone else there, a family support worker that's working alongside them, enables us to then take that feedback from our children and young people, strengthen our relationships with our families, bring a community together to wrap around in support and then ultimately support that child in their journey for learning. So that's an example in terms of one particular way that we're going into to kind of respond in terms of that wider wellbeing. I don't know whether if you want to come in, Liz, with some other work you've been doing. Yeah, no problem. So in captioning that pupil voice, the kind of work that we do with schools is really to really just take the time to consider what's the best way to do that and that can be used and we've got our national document, how good is our school and there are parts of that document that would allow that to pull through in us as a school. I think that that's actually interesting at the school level but I'm really interested in actually when you're talking about individuals, individual children saying about where it is that they're at and parents and where it is that they want to be, what changes is that they want to see themselves? So within the Glasgow wellbeing tool that I talked about earlier on what actually happens within that tool is children ask a series of questions that leads to conclusions about where they are around their autonomy, their affiliation and their agency and then those teachers would then follow up those conversations, now they follow them up at different levels so they might follow them up in a one-to-one with the child but also if we're talking about autonomy and within a classroom then the class can actually say listen do you realise that three of our classmates don't feel that they belong, what could we do to actually to strengthen that but I also think as well as the wellbeing tool we also see lots of local authorities and we encourage this to work with our third sector partners so we have you know people working with CLD with Bernard Doe's with lots of different agencies out there and actually that type of work then is very granular and the fact that they are working very very closely to look at the strengths and difficulties that children are facing and actually to try and increase some of the strengths and reduce those difficulties and that is done in partnership with both the parents and the child and that is not just a secondary level that is actually going right into the primary and there are many many agencies that use that strength and difficulty to model but also it's integrated into the overall child's plan within a school so that everybody knows what the clear agenda is everybody is working towards that. We also see in some schools for instance wellbeing coaches employed and again that can be around the strengths and difficulties so it might be you know a child maybe feels that they have difficulty you know making friends in the playground so actually then it's a concerted effort for that wellbeing coach to make sure that child is included feels involved and then that then is the rock-on effect that actually nobody do have maybe friendships beyond that one experience so yet there's lots and lots going on in different schools as it should be because again we're back down to that know your gap know your individual child and I think more so for wellbeing it's really really important that it is at that granular level because actually the difficulties that children face can be very different you know and you've talked there about anxiety and a piece of work we were doing recently around attendance in partnership with the educational psychologists in the local authority and we made sure that we addressed all the different elements of what would be the barriers and how to reduce them and one of those barriers definitely is anxiety based or emotional based difficulties so actually by bringing in the experts and how you actually overcome them so again that's going then encouraging schools to actually look at those individuals actually why are you not attending and taking that problem-solving approach so I think the work of the attainment adviser is not just to do the locality the local work but then it's taken it right down into that classroom when it actually makes a difference but we can't just start in the classroom we have to do the the foundations and the scaffolding so that it actually will go all the way down to where it needs to be so that's really really good to hear and I'm quite interested as well obviously you know we've got over 30 percent of our young people now our children and young people have additional support needs there's neurodiversity we've also got care experience young people as well there and anxiety social skills relationships are all things that are kind of have always been issues for that particular group there so it almost sounds like we're coming a little bit closer together with this cultural shift where actually all children have been looked at more individually and I do remember Angela Morgan saying you know actually if we addressed all kids needs in the same way as we look at additional support needs it would bend for all children but I'm really interested is there any specific work around improving outcomes for young people with additional support needs or who are care experienced and on actually measuring that as well and seeing the outcome specifically for that group improving yep happy happy to take that question and indeed there are lots of supports out there for children with additional support needs and I think what we need to remember as well is that actually poverty is an additional support need so what we're doing centrally is working but I suppose what I'd like to do is take you a bit deeper into the care experience fund because that's probably one of our newest funds and actually you'll be aware that obviously there has been a promise made to these children and actually what we're seeing is that the care experience funding is hand in hand with the promise and it is driven by the children a bit what we were discussing a minute ago it's coming from the children the children are directing so local authorities are deciding what aspects with the children that they want to focus on first around the promise we're then is is a is looking you know what kind of what can we do to support our local authority colleagues to to really address this particular group of learners and I'm come back to you in a minute on how we check that because that's a very complex issue but the types of interventions we're seeing we see training for staff we see projects that are run in partnership with third sector colleagues we see a participatory approach where we actually see learners actually identifying what would remove the barriers for them to be able to access learning whether that's tutors whether it's you know things that things that other parents might be able to provide that they can't so we're seeing a lot of this really rich work that's coming directly from the children but we're also seeing a more strategic approach and that we're seeing the the role of a virtual head teacher where the virtual head teacher is actually a head teacher it's taking responsibility for all children that care experienced and that head teacher is the person who's making sure that those outcomes are positive for those learners and you know they're not in every school this person is is very very virtual but what they're doing again is working very closely in partnership and we're seeing that approach increase throughout the country and actually one of the strengths of that approach has been around the fact that there's been a virtual head teacher network set up and that's one of our colleagues and our inclusion team that helps support that work but also we've because the context are very different around the country we recently for instance had a west region training day for all the people involved in working with care experienced young people and a variety of people there from different local authorities to actually drill into the next part of your question which is about how do you track it because actually tracking it is a very different and difficult thing to do then what we would normally do in the main reasons around that is that if we're talking about the and we're using a measure of care experienced children care experienced children numbers will only ever grow because nobody ever un becomes care experienced so when we actually start to look at you know figures around attainment figures around attendance you know people who are coming on to become care experienced possibly you know they've been looked after at home or they've been looked after away from home those learners are probably at a point in crisis and actually by the time they've actually got to that point you know they're the the impact in their attainment the impact in attendance has already happened so we have to look again at that granular level of looking at every single child and that's where the work of the virtual head teacher would come in you could also use the measures of looked after and at home or looked after away from home but again if you go to those measures children come on and off of those and actually it is not appropriate to only look at the children who are actually on the register at that point in time because we want to be making sure that every learner who's had that experience has been supported to make sure that they can overcome any difficulties that they've had so tracking it is a fairly complex thing to do and for me it is important that local authorities are looking at their data in general to look at what are the groups you know where is the biggest impact but actually that can change from year to year depending on what what data you're going to look at but looking at more at a granular level of at all these children and you know there's a power of work happening currently both at local authority and also supported by Education Scotland that's going to really allow that to happen but we're still early days because we've only had that funds for a few years but you know it can see where it's going to really make a difference that's great and just a quite a short question there as well convener of this time just around the two million funding for the RICS as well that's is that going to be actually ranked then only to go towards this only to to match up with the Scottish attainment challenge is that something that's that you're going to actually be able to do or is it going to be much more of a combination okay thank you yes in terms of rick funding it comes through the the attainment funding and it's as you say to 2 million pounds and then each each rick uses their share to identify how they will use that to to implement their their own improvement plan their own strategic plan so that's there's no intention to to change that in the meantime and what we've been working on with Scottish Government colleagues and local government colleagues is to try and give a bit more certainty over that level of funding because if you're planning and you've only got funding for one year it's it's quite difficult it's the same issue with with schools so in an ideal world there would be a medium term plan agreed in terms of rick funding rather than the year on year funding that we have at the moment every rick is expected to have a focus on on equity what education scotland doesn't do is tell them how to make that focus clear in their plan so it comes through quite differently in different plans so the west partnership is panel saying has these big overarching principles around equity and excellence the southeast improvement collaborative has a very dedicated work stream in their plan there is about equity and improving equity and that was to account for some of the diversity of those local authorities within that rick in the northern alliance again there's a very strong focus on equity but it runs right through all of their work streams in terms of improving literacy their literacy work stream their health and wellbeing work stream etc so but we be absolutely in reviewing their plans expect to see how they are addressing the issues around the attainment challenge within within those plans thank you thanks thank you willy reyny there's been there has been a quite rightly a focus on closing the poverty related attainment gap but you think we're lifting everybody up everybody right across the school population what's the effect of the the challenge yeah yes and to a short answer yes and so we should but what we should be doing equally at the same time is closing that poverty related attainment gap so that you know we are our agenda is excellence and equity it's not one or the other and it is it is important that we are we are lifting the learners as well as I was going to describe this as it's it's like a motorway and there's two different lanes and we want to push all our learners on but actually we want the outside lane the fast lane for our learners who are impacted by poverty okay if you were to give could you give me and it's probably simplifying it too much but could you give me three of three things that have the biggest impact in the classroom on closing the poverty related attainment gap things that I could understand yep so first of all I am teaching and learning okay we know that teaching and learning and the quality of teaching learning we know that if a child does not have the the most effective teacher that actually their outcomes will not be as good as others so actually what we do see is we see local authorities we see schools taking that focus on improving teaching and learning but also having a kind of equity slant on it and this is some of the work that we've been doing nationally as well as is looking you know at the evidence to tell us what actually makes the difference to equity around pedagogical approaches so for instance that idea of metacognition metacognition is quite a scary word but actually when if you look at it what we're talking about is independent learners we're talking about learners that can look as they're working before they work what approaches they're going to take they're looking at during their work is this actually working I need to change my approach and then they evaluate that one actually quite well so those are the kind of approaches that we're working with our class teachers to develop and again it's all research-based because we want to make sure that we've got a really good opportunity to to make it work the other things that I would suggest that are really really working is leadership and not just leadership at the head teacher and the the deputy head level but actually drilling right into that classroom to empower our teachers to have them supported by the leadership teams but also been supported to be the leaders in their classrooms and actually be able to really look at okay that's not working for him what can I do differently and have that authority and that empowerment to actually make those decisions themselves and again there is a professional learning agenda around that and as well as a cultural agenda where we actually have to make sure that our staff feel that they are able to do that so I would definitely say that whole picture around teaching and learning is is massive we also see it in running parallel to that in that kind of motorway analogy we see the use of interventions and that opportunity for additional staff in whether that is support staff whether it be teachers whether it be in third sector delivering you know a lot for CLD colleagues that are actually delivering additional qualifications for children that are maybe not accredited but are equal important for life skills so we see that whole range of the opportunity to work with children to deliver an intervention to actually intervene so we can put them in a stronger pathway and we see I mean there's lots and lots of evidence from all schools around the country and in the west partnership of how effective that has been because the other thing I would suggest as well that's working really well is that use of data so we are seeing that in the classroom we are seeing more and more and that's taken time and I mean one of the questions of that idea of it's a long-term endeavour we've actually put really solid foundations down in the last few years and we do have our staff in schools much much more equipped and we're at the point where we're actually seeing that delivered in the classroom there's a lovely programme that the the the rick deliver which is called improving our classrooms in the west partnership and within that there is a heavy emphasis on data and as Patricia said earlier on it's knowing your gap knowing your children knowing what you actually need to do so for me I would suggest that those are the three things that I see jumping out but surrounding all that we've also got that idea of families and communities because we can't do it without them so again it's about supporting the families and communities and uplifting them and over the course I was you know I think I've been a teacher now for people just not tell you hello however I would say that the job that I did at the very beginning is a very very different job to what our teachers are doing now our teachers not only educate pupils they support families and we see that again in that relational approach and actually taking our families with us through family learning approaches through engagement through even just family supports and enlisting the right type of support for those families so that they can flourish again we'll all make that difference in the classroom for those children quick question from graham day community following on from that presentation you've just given a group of principal and head teachers that bob doris and I met in Glasgow said to us that in the first year of all this there were fads but they were quickly identified as fads and ditched and that they felt we were now in the space where we knew what worked in terms of tackling the attainment gap is that the case in your experience it is all of the country in that space do we now know what needs to be done to tackle the attainment gap and if that is the case would you accept it given that starting point and accepting it we may need to re-baseline post pandemic we ought to see significant progress made in the coming years in this area absolutely that is the picture in the early days we did see schools were given significant some schools very significant amounts of peff there was a lot of professional learning around how to use that money effectively and of course the big message of the challenge was around we need to do some different thing we need to try new ways this is a big tricky wicked issue for us in scotland closing the poverty related attainment gap so we encouraged schools to look at evidence look at research look at what had worked in the london challenge the manchester challenge and so on and take that learning but of course not everything that worked in either of those contexts works you know perfectly and what works in one school down the road might not work perfectly for a child in your classroom so yes and in the beginning we saw for example underspends in peff we saw big issues in terms of recruitment and the time that it took for people to get the new staff the additional support staff on boarded in terms of that recruitment because of the financial year as opposed to the funding being given in the financial year as opposed to the academic year and all of those were challenges for schools in the first year or so people tried things and you know this phrase about abandoning you know just adapt or abandon really important and we encouraged that but i think now and i know that you've seen most recent publication around peff looking inwards outwards and forwards we've just gathered together from across the country some you know a wealth of strong examples about what is working well and that's not just about what happens in the classroom in terms of learning and teaching but how decisions are made how support is given from the local authority to encourage really effective use of that money and our mantra is absolutely and has been from the beginning we need to spend every penny of that money we couldn't we shouldn't have any underspend in that money we should make maximise the potential of that and so we should be doing that from now on and we're certainly seeing huge difference in that now green where the underspends are significantly reduced from from where they were in the first couple of years and and that money is making a difference now because people are are learning from each other we started off with challenge authority schools programme and then brought in peff and all 32 local authorities our job as a national agency has been about spreading that learning right across the country and catching it and synthesising it in through the hub throughout our publications more recently and being really clear about here are some of the things now that's not to say that there might not be things that have not discovered yet that might work so we're still encouraging that innovation and creativity but generally there is a you know a kind of universal understanding of the things that kind of things that Liz was talking about in the classroom those are the things we want to make sure that every practitioner has a relentless focus on but if that's the case we should and certainly our ambition in terms of coming back to that how much and by when yes by the end of this parliamentary term we expect to see stronger progress okay thank you thank you Bob Doris thank you very much can you hear fascinating conversation this morning i want to look a little bit about the monitoring role of education Scotland within all of this and i might look at some of the the core aims of the attainment challenge and then maybe look at some of the stretch aims i think core plus they've referred to as so one of the core aims is the proportion of 16 to 19 years participating in education employment or training now i waxed lyrical last week in the committee about success in my constituency across Glasgow for positive destinations tremendous given the pandemic in the last two years however the snapshot in time the 16 year old that leaves a school in my constituency where are they at 17 18 or 19 who's monitoring that we have to be robust about what we measure and we have to make sure the progress is sustained so does education scotland monitor that yes thanks for that question mr Doris i think i think you're absolutely right with with the question in that it's something that's that's an ongoing throughout a pupil or a child's journey from from coming into school all the way to to post school there's a lot of work being done not personally by myself but by colleagues in the in education scotland and it's as well as looking at the positive destinations it's thinking about participation beyond as you know so you might have a positive destination as you say at that snapshot but what happens six months later and and so on and i think there has to be a bit more work in this area with with colleagues in fe and it she and employers and and so on to make sure that it's not only a positive destination but it's an ongoing positive destination but it's also starting earlier you know so when the pupils are coming through they're going into senior phase and so on what choices are they making in terms of of curriculum so making better use of foundation apprenticeships for example alternative qualifications you heard you heard from the directors last week it doesn't always have to be about qualifications other other achievements that will help that child that pupil that young person move into employment or to fe to he so duke edinburgh for example so i think it i think what you're looking to there is absolutely right that we need to take that wider picture rather than just looking at that that snapshot as part of a bigger a bigger scene uh i suppose in terms of to get a general understanding of progress generally rather than just taking that one that one specific aspect very helpful public bring in a wee second but just i mean just there's a follow-up question to if you want to address that that would be great but i know mr clements got a reduced responsibility for performance so i want to know about that 16 year old that goes into a structure volunteering activity is a positive destination that's a positive destination if it's 17 year old creates another opportunity and 18 year old the build on that again it's a lifelong learning pursuit to put those building blocks in i absolutely accept what mr clements said what he didn't say mr clements is who's doing that monitoring who's doing that i mentioned the previous meetings and ross can mentioned again to that longitudinal study are we tracking a cohort of 100 of 500 of 1000 are we doing over three years five years seven years so who's doing that kind of work if that work's not been done there's a great opportunity for education scotland and your successor organisation to do some of that work so i don't know if parma wants to come but that was my thoughts based on that initial response convener i'm happy to come in can i say that's an excellent question because um that you're absolutely right in terms of the and craig touched on this about our wee ones that are coming through our nursery if we don't address any gap from opening in early years then that then has an all con effect in terms of that long scale progress that we would wish for them to make there's some fabulous examples a piece of research just now that the that we're working with the west partnership looking at around 1140 and how that's really making a difference and that's across the regional improvement collaborative so that's looking at that end but there's another example in terms of collaborative improvement and i know my colleague from east infrastructure spoke about this last last week when you were speaking with directors from the west collaborative improvement is an activity that is pulled co-constructed with the local authority and pulls expertise from across the country from ades and expertise from our regional teams and our organisation to focus on a wicked issue a particular area that they want to explore and in our clients one that's just recently been um has recently been through that experience that's exactly what they were looking at they were looking at positive destinations they were looking at are we getting it right for all of our young people post it or exit where do these young people come in terms of adults back into our communities again because that knocks into that cycle about if they become parents how do that supports the economy so it's that cycle in terms of just coming back though around tracking and monitoring this goes on in every school teachers are engaged in three-way conversations with head teachers about progress of every single child if they're not making a progress why and i will refer to some of the interventions that can be addressed with that that's then collected at local level and in some instances at local authorities they do that cluster level with a look at you know comparator skills and so that there's a real rich threading if you like it that's helpful but i suppose you want to come in greener but i suppose the danger is when you have that granular child-centred and family-centred tailored approach which we need and you've got all these wonderful anecdotal stories in the layer upon layer upon layer of great practice that happens but we need to know reliably what's happening consistently across the country not as a snapshot but as a pattern so we can measure that so as Education Scotland going to bring a structure to looking at that data rather than citing good individual bits of practice which i'm sure is times 32 local authorities across the country what work is Education Scotland doing now or does it intend to do to monitor this in a meaningful way going forward Patricia Watson do you want to come on that yeah thank you so in terms of what we're doing now our 16 plus team which sits largely within the inspectorate within Education Scotland works very closely with Skills Development Scotland and they are they do have a significant amount of national data around participation measure and year on year destinations for for individuals and then looking at that pattern and aggregating that up across the country so we do have nationally significant amount of data around the participation measure and the post school destinations and how that we know for example in a recent report that was published that the gap is widening the gap is the same there it is widening in the way that it is for young people in school a post school the gap is widening in terms of participation and we know for example that those young people living in the highest areas of deprivation are less likely to sustain that positive destination and more what going on there's that the other tool that's really important in terms of tracking all of that is the national insight tool which is the senior phase tool that tracks and the database for all of senior phase attainment and and again in there that tool can be manipulated so we can look at what individual groups of learners we can look at at the end of s4 at the end of s5 the end of s6 and and see who's stayed on at school where the destinations are and what the journey is so there is there is a wealth of of data available that we use to track that and again it's used both with we share that with local authorities to get in dialogue with local authorities around that but but the one of the opportunities around the new organization will be what they the opportunity to refocus and strengthen that focus on being a performance-led organization which is the challenge that Professor Muir has given us in his report kit now I don't take about a tiger of the stock that'll come forward I think that we will build on that right I think there's a couple of things you need to follow through on this because our committee will eventually move towards report recommendations in all of this and what to do that by consensus and with the convener's indulgence I asked witnesses each week about celebrating success in education and I deliberately mentioned the really positive things that are happening but for my own credibility I need to make sure that I'm also scrutinising the information that that's positive and education scotland may collect data so so might skills development scotland but that doesn't necessarily mean you're collecting the correct data in the correct way consistently in a way that fits in with your monitoring role your key monitoring role for the proportion of 60 to 90 years participating in education employment and training so what would ask would be I know we've got a new organization but you've also said there's another two years where education scotland performed we're not going to wait two years till we get more sophisticated in the data we collect so perhaps in writing or a little bit just now perhaps in writing because the time constraints convener but we would like to say something meaningful I suspect in our report about how we can make sure we have that longitudinal approach that Ross Greer was talking about that I'm talking about just now so when I celebrate success at this committee which I think is important that I'm confident that that 16 year old in my constituency is being supported when they're 17 when they're 18 when they're 19 and it's success for learning for life and that's what we're not sure about as yet so any comment on that but finally because I won't go back in again convener because of time constraints at each meeting I've been asking about a dashboard of indicators that are robust and reliable and I suppose that's to de-politici some of this because sometimes the data will show good things for politicians that are in government and sometimes it will show not so good things so do we have an agreed range of indicators where we can take a balanced approach to scrutinising the progress that's been made and if so would Education Scotland lead on providing that information and by that I don't mean in a 40 page strategy document I mean in a one page here's your top 10 indicators and here we're tracking that over time and some will be up some will be down some will be the same but we can look at it in a quick and easy accessible and transparent way so any thoughts on those two things convener and I won't go back in I think I think in terms of your first point happy to give you that information separately in terms of colleagues with that FE experience in particular in terms of your second point Mr Dorris absolutely a dashboard would be helpful but already you alluded that yourself we have the stretch aims the core stretch aims so that will provide that core bit of information I don't think in terms of your wider question that's something we could agree alone I think that would be much better to agreed with all the partners because you know you're probably aware there's a lot of potential indicators at the moment there's the the local government benchmarking framework at the moment that has an agreed set of indicators some of which are in respect of education and so on so we'll have the core aims but in terms of the approach for dashboard more generally Patricia alluded to that earlier in terms of the work that we're doing across Northern Alliance and the southeast and that's to try and get and I think there's fantastic work on the go at the moment in terms of tracking and monitoring a lot of that is in individual systems it's not a coherent model in that everybody's using their own their own package some of it's commercially bought some of it's through the national CMOS system someone on insights etc another is just the school have developed their own their own package so in order to do that comprehensively and I think in my view at least that should really be from the classroom up so that the tracking monitoring should commence at the classroom and then eventually looking at national level but it has to be built up rather than a top-down approach but if we don't tracking monitor the same way we can't compare anything back in I know but I know it's your birthday it's my birthday but I'm sure someone else I'm sure someone else other than myself with their line of question will want to get an assurance that you have to track and monitor consistently across each school across each local authority or we will have a mountain of anecdotal information and nothing we can compare this substantially that point has been well made by you today Bob and we'll require some further response I think you suggested in writing from education Scotland which nodding heads that's what we're going to get but thank you thank you very much Bob Doris uh Oliver Mundell thank you uh convener um I guess in terms of just the feedback I get from teachers on a regular basis you know they often feel education Scotland still feels too remote or distant from what's happening in the classroom that it can be kind of urban you know sort of central belt sort of centric in its thinking and that often the needs of particularly smaller rural schools can can be missed off just and again I love that a lot of the advice and guidance you give is is fine I mean they're not challenging the content of that they just feel it can be quite generic is that feedback you take on board start with that one so I think it's really important to remember that education Scotland is an organisation that is largely staffed by teachers we recruit from the teachers and from the education profession across all the sectors whether it's FE early learning trial care CLD so our organisation is an organisation that is staffed by educators and we're turning over that staff you know as regularly as any other organisation so we're bringing fresh blood if you like into the organisation on a regular basis so we are connected I think very much to the teaching profession into what's actually happening we also have those strong relationships with with schools and local authorities and so on it is the feedback that we take on board really strongly and we've just over the past year been really focused on a piece of work around our transformation programme and a big part of that work has been moving how we develop as an organisation much more strongly towards a user design a service user design approach taken on board the Scottish service user design approach and building on that for our own organisation so we have a lot of work we do a lot of work directly with teachers with class teachers with with school leaders with educators in different sectors we had a whole programme for example during the pandemic which we called our wee blethers and big blethers and and again you know hundreds of practitioners from across the country joining with Education Scotland to talk to us about their experiences during the pandemic and then us looking at them how do we listen how do we take account of those experiences and build our support and our resources to to support their needs you know they were the ones living and breathing you know educational continuity in their schools we we would have been foolish not to take account of that and indeed we did so we do listen and we do take it really seriously and we adapt our resources and we adapted approaches regularly on account of that so i ask about two specific examples the first one would be around regional improvement collaboratives you know again i hear you know even within what are quite large areas you know many small rural schools feel they're pushed out of you know of the decision making when it comes to setting the priorities and agenda the staff in those schools often find it hard to participate because there isn't cover you and support within the school you know to take part and again they feel that their interests are sometimes you know drowned out you know but not that the priorities are wrong just that you know the priorities inevitably tend to gravitate towards you know sort of you know larger urban centres and what larger schools are are saying so just that there's a voice you know and actually they would say you know they've got more commonality with schools in other you know in other areas but but the nature of how the collaboratives are set up you know that there isn't always a chance for you know for those kind of national issues that affect rural schools and remote schools wherever they are in Scotland they kind of don't have that kind of community of interest always within the kind of larger regional improvement collaboratives is that something you again that you'd recognise? I think if you think about the larger regional improvement collaboratives you know we're two the west partnership and the northern alliance both made up of eight local authorities very different contexts and very different challenges so in the northern alliance we have a team a regional improvement team that is working very closely with the northern alliance team as well as the local authorities in the north and the work there as I think that comes back to the work that Craig was talking about earlier where we actually it's not a one-size-fits-all in education Scotland we must work with our partners we must take account of their local context so he would find and it's getting underneath some of the work of our northern team with the northern alliance a very strong focus on rural poverty a very strong focus for example in the attainment challenge on addressing some of the poverty of experience and working with cld and third sector partners in that you would expect that's not always consistent across the country you know that's I guess as an example of where we point to something that's working well in one of the collaboratives or one of the areas but that's patterns not necessarily shared everywhere and you said I think someone said earlier in the evidence the different collaborative set out their priorities and their slant on equity different and I think there's a feeling certainly you know within the local authority that my constituency's in you know that sometimes you know that the interest of smaller rural schools is not always reflected in how the priorities are set out and you see that that would be frustrating you know as a teacher in a school there where you can see rural poverty and you feel you know it's you know the circumstances smaller schools are not always reflected in the decisions taken absolutely agree you're a teacher in a school and you feel that your voice and your your circumstance has not been taken account of then that's going to be really frustrating I guess where I was trying to articulate is that the collapse not the way the collaboratives are intending to work so what I would be saying to your member in that school is is to talk to their head teacher to talk to the local authority to talk to to raise that issue through the channels to see where is that that you know that's compounded by the fact that they're often you know got a small staff base you know a number of competing priorities they don't have the same space as you might have in a larger school you know to take part in that reflective work I mean that I have a big worry about that you know that they are under more pressure generally up sometimes in single teacher schools you know that there just isn't that professional kind of freedom or space and I know all teachers are pushed for time and under pressure I think is a particular challenge the challenges are the challenges are different whether you're in a you know in the school that let's take for example the school that gerry lines who was here talking about his head teacher role last week you know if you're in a school in the centre of Glasgow and then the challenges are very different from the challenges in a very small rural primary school whether that's in Ayrshire Scottish borders or in in Highland and and I think it's really important that we acknowledge that and Education Scotland absolutely takes account of that and make sure that our staff are skilled and understand the different challenges and that's not to say that we get you know that everything's right all the time and everything is having the impact that we want it to have all the time but again I would be I think that there's the intention is to support all practitioners in all different contexts and that would be absolutely our aspiration if we're not getting that right then we need to know more about that and we need to know how do we actually address the needs of that particular school I mean I'd be very clear there's a barrier to participation for staff in smaller schools because there just isn't the time and space to participate in initiatives beyond you know beyond school level and they do struggle to find cover you know to keep the school going in order to participate in that. Just the first thing to say yes I acknowledge that and understand the difficulties of small schools, small rural schools as well and you know having had schools and authority I worked for in that situation what I would say a couple of things and I think in some ways well in a lot of ways actually the establishment of regional working and the RICS has helped that in that and I'm aware in one RIC there was a recent activity where all the schools were involved in a way that probably that wouldn't have happened previously and not just head teachers actually but a whole range of staff in terms of developing the plan for that particular RIC and in some ways that's you know one of the positives as opposed from the pandemic is that we've moved much more to an online facility which overcomes the difficulty of rural schools because we're as well aware of that you know a traditional way of having those kind of discussions would be a meeting a central point that somebody might have to travel an hour there an hour back and so on which just wasn't practical so I think that online bit is important there. Another thing for small small schools I would say is working either within the locale you know so that four or five schools coming together working together in terms of priorities and sharing who goes to what and so on or as you suggest in most cases is locale but it could be that you work with a partner school who's elsewhere in that particular council so that you're working differently because it is a challenge if you're a head teacher there's no other promoted posts potentially within that school so you have to make sure that you're putting there's other mechanisms in place to to overcome that barrier as it were but I think it is really important that those heads do feel included because they're a vital part of that decision making process. Yeah and that leads on to just the second issue which I just want to raise briefly is around pupil equity funding because again I think there are a lot of head teachers in these smaller schools who feel excluded from PEF either because they're in the 3% of schools that don't get any PEF funding at all or they receive such a small amount of PEF funding that it's difficult to actually do something that they would consider meaningful with that money and I just again wonder if that's something you reflect on and whether there's a policy challenge moving forward for these schools that don't get any PEF funding because clearly those head teachers you are aren't empowered in the same way to to do things differently in their school and again it's a problem that attaches itself particularly to these smaller rural schools. Does that mean that I know it's a point but I don't know if it's okay just to convene you now just very quickly to give you a response having been a head teacher in both a rural and an urban school and in terms of the examples that you've given around complexities of that I just wanted to touch on about the online learning facility so in terms of some of the supports to be provided as it's anytime learning so having been a head teacher in that context it's about how you can utilise some of those national supports to provide your staff with those opportunities and what I would say in terms of. I think that would come back to the generic point whereas people don't feel those resources are bad they just don't feel that they're school specific and they don't feel that the same quality of resource as other people are enjoying either face-to-face or in terms of the. And I think that would lead me on to the second response which I'm glad you've given that further point because as a head teacher my job is to look at supporting that self-evaluation process at local level which then feeds into national to say this is what I need this is the context of my school so it's self-evaluation it's drilling back into improvement planning and therefore we make sure it's bespoke to the needs of all of our school leaders and our teachers to support the needs of the children in their communities. On your point around PEF and the policy challenge around PEF and the fact that there was a 3% of schools who received no PEF part of that was the evidence that we looked at in terms of designing the new approach to the challenge and the new strategic equity fund which goes to all 32 local authorities is a way of helping to ensure that those local authorities in those areas and perhaps in the most rural areas can identify and work with their schools using that funding to begin to look at some of the practices that they might need to take forward in terms of rural poverty and some of the hidden poverty that perhaps the original framework for the challenge didn't address in such an overt way. In the interests of time to move on there's more things I'd like to push on but I'll go to Michael Marra. Thank you. Thanks for the evidence and for realising that time has taken on so I'm going to try and be short and punchy if you can be the same that would be great. I appreciate your endurance as you've shown over the last couple of hours. You've just confirmed that you have been involved in the redesign of the Scottish attainment challenge work. Did you as strategic directors Patricia Watson, Craig Clement raise concerns about the significant cuts to the existing challenge authorities and what that would mean? The refresh of the challenge Michael is a result of looking at all of the evidence that we've had over the last five years or six years of the challenge and all of that evidence points us very closely very clearly to a need to accelerate progress the OECD report asked us also to look at more universal support and to look at the hidden poverty to look at and and take an account of the pandemic to make sure that we were really recognising that poverty exists everywhere in Scotland. So in looking at the redistribution if you like of the funding and it's not a cut to the funding remember that the overall attainment Scotland fund has actually increased from 750 million to 1 billion and that's the Cabinet Secretary's decision but it's not a cut to funding it's a redistribution and it's a different model it's a different model. It's not increased on an annual basis that's just because we've got more years of the same money so it's not and actually the amount of money per year has decreased this year on last year and even when you take away the 15 uplifters a decrease so it's a small cut but it's a consistent piece. My question though related to those attainment previous attainment challenge authorities so Dundee's facing a 79% cut that's a that is a cut and it's a hundred posts that are at threat North Ayrshire a colleague raised this as well 60 posts at threat. Did you not raise concerns about the impact in those authorities? We have worked with those local authorities as you know for a number of years the