 I welcome everybody to the fifth meeting of the Education and Cultures Committee in 2015. I remind everybody, as usual, to switch off all electronic devices in case they interfere with the sound system. Our first item on agenda this morning is to take evidence on the charity tests, specified bodies and the protection of charities' assets Exemption Scotland amendment order 2015. I welcome Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs and her supporting officials from the Scottish Government. After we have taken evidence on the instrument item 1, we will debate the motion in the name of the Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs, item 2. Officials are, of course, not permitted to contribute during that part of the formal debate at item 2. Therefore, can I invite the Cabinet Secretary to make some opening remarks? Thank you, convener. Good morning, committee members. I believe that public bodies responsible for looking after our treasured national cultural resources such as Historic Environment Scotland have charitable purposes at the heart of their existence. There are many examples of public bodies with charitable status looking after the historic environment, including our camps in Scotland and the historic royal palaces in England. The committee will recall that we discussed the implications of charitable status for historic environment Scotland last year. We examined a wide range of issues in some depth, focusing especially on the potential impacts for other charities in the sector, the risks of conflicts of interest. We also discussed the potential financial benefits and other less tangible benefits of the special role that charities contribute to public life. In the end, it will be for the newly appointed board of Historic Environment Scotland to assess the benefits of charitable status for this body at this time. However, before they can make a decision whether or not to apply for charitable status, ministers must amend two existing orders that would exempt Historic Environment Scotland from certain provisions of the Charities and Trustees Investment Act 2005. The order under consideration today will make those amendments. First, section 7.4 of the 2005 Charities Act prevents bodies that are subject to ministerial direction from becoming charities. That means that generally public bodies cannot be charities. However, the act also includes powers to exempt certain bodies from this provision, allowing them to become charities while being subject to ministerial direction. That reflects the specific nature of some public bodies whose activities clearly serve charitable purposes. The exemption is already in place for other national collections, including ARCAMs. It is therefore logical to extend the approach to Historic Environment Scotland, which will hold a national collection relating to the Historic Environment. The draft order achieved that by adding Historic Environment Scotland to the charity test specified bodies Scotland order 2006, which lists exempted bodies. Second, section 19 of the Charities Act protects the charitable assets of bodies when they cease to be charities. It requires them to continue to operate those assets in accordance with their charitable purposes and allows Oscar to transfer such assets to another charity. The act includes powers to exempt specified bodies from these provisions, in this case ensuring that assets that were funded by the public purse remain under ministerial control in the event that a body were to lose or surrender charitable status. That exemption is already in place for other national collections and I am proposing to extend this approach to Historic Environment Scotland. Finally, the order delivers on the Government's commitment to treat HES as we treat our other national cultural collections and as we already treat our ARCAMs. I believe that this approach has the support of all key stakeholders and I welcome the committee's support. I am happy to take any questions. Thank you very much Cabinet Secretary. Do members have any questions that they wish to raise? A question possibly a comment convening. We've had discussions with various statutory instruments that have been brought before us about the detail under the section on consultation. I think that the consultation here is quite appropriately pointed in the context of the bill and I think that you alluded to that again this morning Cabinet Secretary. My concerns stems from then the sections on impact assessment and financial effects, which do rather gloss over the fact that there was quite a robust debate during the passage of the bill about the likely impacts, whether the quality's impact or probably more likely the financial impact on other bodies. I think that the national trust were particularly vocal in that regard. Now, the Government's taken its view, Parliament also has taken a view, but I think just for the purposes of transparency that it would be helpful with a policy note to maybe better reflect that discussion and the points that were being made on both sides of the argument. There's quite a lot in there. First of all, on the consultation, I deliberately made sure that the committee was aware during the passage of the bill the issues around the impact or not of having charitable status. We made it quite clear during the examination that the viability of the new historical environment in Scotland was not dependent on whether it had charitable status or not. There's quite a lot of proactive provision from the Government in terms of what the implications were in the consultation of the bill, which was only last year. That was a very full consultation. Similarly, as you quite rightly reflect, there was quite a lot of discussion about the impact potentially on other bodies. That was determined and that discussion was taken at the time that we were looking at the actual bill itself. Indeed, the committee made a number of comments during your stage 1 report, but also in the series of debates. If you could recall, the final issue that gave comfort to other organisations, including the National Trust for Scotland, was that HES would operate under the historic environment strategy, which has brought everyone together. We've got a historic environment forum for the first time, bringing all the different agencies together. The key issue again comes into the point that why it's important that we have this order is that the ministerial direction that I may want to use in the future is that, reminding you that I've never used it before in seven years for all the bodies that I've had, is that, for some reason, Historic Environment Scotland worked in counter to the interests of the wider historic environment, for example, where it was somehow detrimental to any other body. The protection that charities have would be that other bodies would have within the historic environment strategy to which Historic Environment Scotland has to make sure that they're supporting. If there wasn't, that would be an issue. That was an issue that Mary Scanlon quite rightly tested during the provision of the bill. We've had quite a lot of discussion already fairly recently by the committee on those areas. Finally, there is a lot in the question. I think that it's a very important question. What does it provide? Having a chargeable status would, for example, allow Historic Environment Scotland as a charity to help the whole sector to grow the cake of what might be provided. The concerns that people had is that limited resources are every competing. That's a detriment. Where the Historic Environment Forum and the discussions that we've been having to date are taking is that we should expand what we're doing and try to grow the cake and availability. Obviously, in terms of Historic Environment Scotland, if it chose to, we're not saying it has to. It will be up to the bodies to decide. It would have access to gifted, rates relief, etc. Importantly, in working with other organisations, they might be able to, for example, approach to European Commission for funding in a way that Government bodies can't. They wouldn't be able to do that just now. However, in doing so, the sensible way of doing that is to work with other bodies such as the National Trust, etc. It's enabling. However, at the end of the day, whether or not—the debate today is not whether or not it should become a charity, that is a debate for the board to take and for them to decide. The debate today is if they so chose to become a charity. Is it sensible that they are treated the same as other collections that would, one, allow ministerial direction if there needs to be? I've gone through this a lot with the committee. That would be, certainly, the last resort that has never happened to date. Things should be resolved far in advance of that. Secondly, if it did decide to become a charity but at some point in the future either decided not to be or had charitable status taken away from it, public money that has been invested in public assets would still come back to ministers and they would be in control of that instead of Oscar. I know that's a long answer but there was a lot in that important question from you. I think that's a fair response and a fair sort of characterisation of the debate that we had about the case for and potentially against the move to charitable status. Obviously, it's for the board to make the decision, to make the application, it's for Oscar to decide whether or not ultimately it's compliant. I think that my concern is more that we are all familiar with that discussion because we were protagonists in it. Just looking at the policy note here, particularly in relation to financial effects, is that the impact of charitable status was considered during the business and regulatory impact assessment carried out for the 2014 act, which found that there would be no financial impact. I think that does rather gloss over what was a lively debate, albeit that ultimately came down on the side of saying that this bill should proceed, it ultimately will be for the board and there are reassurances that have been provided, but I think probably as a committee we will want to return to this if in the event national trust there are others come back to us and say, you know what, in practice, this isn't working as we were assured. I think that's in relation to the wider policy context. The convener or the clerks can correct me from wrong, but when you're presenting an order, when you're looking at the financial impact, the financial impact is on the order itself and on the public purse, as in, will it have an impact on the body considering, in this case in Historic Environment Scotland, or will there be a financial impact on the Government? What you're talking about is a financial impact on organisations that are not subject to the order that we're currently considering. Now, that's a bit of a, I suspect, a legal answer, is it correct, convener? Therefore, we've been quite precise in it, but I understand what you're interested in is actually the wider policy context in this, but maybe that's something that the committee can discuss itself, is in looking at orders, should you be focusing just on the order in front of you, or to what extent do you want wider context? Now, in this case, because the wider context was fully debated and discussed and examined by, very thoroughly by this committee and debated in the chamber, and we responded to that, we assumed that that's like a reasonable position to take, but technically, I think, the point that there's no financial impact, that means there's no financial impact on the Scottish Government or on the new body has to which this applies. I'm sorry, convener, I think that we need your hands on this. No, no, that's fine, thank you very much. Just for, to remind members, we did agree at the time that we would probably come back to the bill, or the act, later this year and look at it again, so that's already in the work programme for us later in the year, so check body. Good morning. Good morning. You said that there's no financial impact, and earlier, cabinet secretary, you mentioned that it may allow the body HHS to apply for European funding, etc. I mean, what is actually driving this change? Well, one of the, if you go right back to the beginning, and I don't think the member was in the committee at the time we took evidence on different bodies way, way back, one of the issues around Harkams, and I gave a commitment to the commissioners in Harkam, that we would protect the, basically the underlying tenants of what Harkams provided, and that that would not be compromised. Now, one of the issues there was particularly in relation to their education service, we're very keen that the element of their education service, which was charitable, would be able to be accommodated in a new body, so that was one of the areas. Also, in relation to opportunity, whether it's gifted or rates relief, there was somewhere, we reckon, between £1.4 million and £2.1 million thereafter could be gained by having a charitable status. So there is a financial impact? For the body itself, if it chooses to do so, if it chooses to do this order, it does not decide whether or not the body should become a charity. All it does is enable them, if they so chose, to become a charity, but to protect ministers that they would be allowed to have minister of direction. So what you're examining today is not whether or not it should become a charity, but whether or not, if it decides itself to become a charity, that ministers would have one still powers of direction, as we have under the other couple that's National Museum of Scotland, National Galleries, et cetera, and also, which I think would be in the interest of the public, that if at some point in the future we decide that either they had charitable status taken away, or they chose not to be, that the assets would not be determined by Oscar, but it would be determined by ministers. So it's kind of similar to my answer to Liam, is that what we're addressing here is the order and what the order does in relation to the Charities Act. It's not a decision as to whether or not it should become a charitable status. That was thoroughly discussed by the previous examination of the bill itself. So again, comes back to the financial impact, is about the impact of the order itself, and the order itself is about powers of ministers, not actually about the powers of heads? Is this indeed any of the other governmental charities? Have they been contested by other members who have subscribed to Oscar, other charities, in terms of the protection of the assets by the Government? It was chosen, I would correct me, in 2005 as the act that we're, debatey, I remember taking part in that at the time. In fact, it was a strong view of Parliament that our national collections, and it was cross-party that our national collections should have the powers to be charities, could be listed as charities under the act, but it was also recognised in the checks and balances that they didn't want them to be completely exempt from ministerial direction. There may be some instances, probably corporate governance or that kind of area. As I've said, under my term as a minister, and it's now coming on eight years, I have never used a power of ministerial direction on a body, but it's like a safety net if it needs to be done. That was my question, my question, but I understand that. My question is, can it be contested by other non-governmental charities in terms of how they wish to protect their assets? Well, you might want to explain what you mean, why would somebody want to, like another body, this is, the relationship is between us and the national collections, it's not with other charitable bodies. Why would any other charitable bodies, I don't understand the premise of your question as to why you think another external body would challenge whether or not there was ministerial direction or whether I'm saying that we've been specific that there's one rule for government in the charitable status, and I understand why we want to protect those assets, and another rule for other charities who may have a, or may wish to have an asset distribution model or activity. Well, take for example, I think that the national trust would not take kindly to this committee or this parliament or this government saying to them that if at some time they wanted to change the charitable status that the state would take control of all their assets, I think that's what you're implying, and that they would, you suggested they might want to have the same treatment. You know, I'm talking about other charities versus the government in terms of the rules, specifically applicable to the government in terms of control of the assets. I mean, I take your point in terms of the assets, but as I understand it, I may be wrong, that should charitable status be removed, then the assets are the government's anyway. I'm saying what is the comparison between non-governmental bodies and governmental bodies in terms of... If I might try to assist, with a charity, if a charity ceases to be a charity, the normal rule for all charities is that Oscar, the charity's regulator, will ensure that the assets of that charity are disposed of to another body which can continue to use those assets for the charitable purposes for which they were originally being used. Those assets for a charity which hasn't received substantial government funding as a core of its being would have been accumulated by contributions from members, money that the charities earned and so on, so they belong to that charity, so somebody has to act as a go-between to get those on to a new charity to carry on being charitable. In the case of the assets of the national collections and quite a number of other public bodies, the government has been the main contributor to the accumulation and care of those assets. The government is saying, we've spent public money on this body to help it to accumulate, to develop those assets for the charitable purposes it serves. We're taking it as a responsibility of the government to ensure that they are passed on to another body. In extreme case, that might mean that the government has to create another body to take on that role. That's not something that Oscar could do. It's a means of ensuring that the government takes its responsibilities for bodies that it has been supporting, funding and ensures that those responsibilities are carried forward. It is a special arrangement for government bodies because they contain money that has been given to those bodies over many years by the government to accumulate the assets that are supporting the charitable purpose. That's what convener said in terms of my previous answers. It's in relation to the public money aspect that has been invested over many years, which is of interest. Again, the committee, the Parliament and the government and the public in Scotland would have real concerns. After many generations of investment in national collections, were they going to be distributed to other bodies other than the Government to decide what to do with it? Mary Scanlon has a question, I believe. Just to seek clarity, I was on the committee of the Parliament convener that set up Oscar in 2005. I'm right in saying that the national museums and others were already charities, whereas should heads go forward, they would be facing a fairly robust test, as we would all expect by Oscar. This instrument today obviously opens a door for them, so it's just two points, and they're not exactly new. However, I do remember how important the independence test of the charity was in achieving its own outcomes in accordance with its own principles. I would just like some clarity from the cabinet secretary as to how does the independence of a charity sit alongside ministerial direction, and I hear everything you've said today that you haven't used the powers in eight years. Secondly, and we did receive quite a bit of evidence about this convener, and that was from other charities saying, while the Government allocates money, the Government disperses huge amounts of money, will they automatically choose those over which they have ministerial direction irrespective of how important that collection is to the country? I can't remember exactly who it was that sent in the evidence, but there were some genuine concerns, so it's just a bit of clarity around those two issues. An important point for not just TES but also the other collections is that the Government does not interfere in the curatorial decision making as to what they do with the collections, and indeed the scrutiny by this committee on the national libraries bill in particular made quite clear the reviews on that. Indeed, in terms of that legislation and the legislation that governs Historic Environment Scotland, we've made it absolutely clear that there would not be curatorial—that was a debate that we had at the stage 1, as Mary Scanlan rightly remembers—that there would not be curatorial direction. Remember, it will be up to TES to decide whether it wants to apply to be a charity, and secondly, it will actually be up to Oscar to determine whether it passes that independence test that she quite rightly identifies. If you can recall, during the passage of the bill, Oscar made a statement to the committee and to ourselves, and Oscar has had sight of the functions of Historic Environment Scotland in section 2 of the bill—that was the head's bill—and our view is that, in principle, those can be clearly linked to one or more of the charitable purposes set out in the 2005 act. So Mary Scanlan is quite right that the final decision will be with Oscar, it will be in relation to the independence that they see, but we've certainly drafted the bill in accordance that should has decided to become a charity. We think that the independence that is set out in those provisions should enable it to become a charity if Oscar agrees that it should be. My second part about the concerns from other organisations to say that, given that the Government has control over so much funding, will HES be given preferential treatment irrespective of how important buildings or collections are to the nation? One of the things that we have made quite clear is that HES would not provide grants to itself. I have managed to protect grants so far, which has been a challenge in the financial circumstances. One of the assurances that they wanted was that it would not suddenly be able to decide that it has a public funding and that it will just give grants to its own works. Obviously, it would need to have provision for its on-going care maintenance and development, but that is an important part of the separation of interests. The historic environment strategy is that one of the purposes is to enable collectively all the different bodies to try and share what the priorities are. Is it the buildings of castles? Is it the streetscapes of our conservation areas to try and work collectively to make the most of what we have in challenging times? The historic environment strategy, the form that I put together, will help collectively to decide what the priorities are as opposed to one sole body saying that it will determine everything that will happen in that area? It was really more about the Government having ministerial direction and having the ability to disburs funds for preferential treatment. For clarity, I have not got an issue with it, but I think that it is worth raising, because there was a concern during evidence. I think that, as a Government minister, the more resources I can allocate with the committee's support to the historic environment, the better for everybody, because not only would House get the benefit of that, but other bodies as well would, so that is the route for disbursement. If you separate that they will not be able to give grants to themselves, that gives the protection that a lot of the individuals have. That was the point that a lot of organisations came to us about and were satisfied with our response on that. Thank you very much for that. I am going to move now on to item 2, which is the formal debate on the instrument. I invite the cabinet secretary to speak to and move the motion. I would just like to move that the Education and Culture Committee recommends that the charity test specified bodies and the protection of charities are set to exemption to Scotland amendment order 2015 be approved. Thank you very much. Do members wish to make a contribution? I presume that you do not want to make any other further comment after that. No, I will come back. Okay. Can I put the question to the committee that motion S4M-12362 be agreed to? Are we all agreed? We are agreed. Thank you much. I suspend the meeting and will allow the witnesses to change over. Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. Our next item is to take evidence on the implications for schools, teachers and pupils of the Commission for Developing Scotland's Young Workforce. The commission's final report, often referred to, of course, as the Wood report after its author, was published last June, and the Scottish Government then published an implementation plan last December. Today's discussion is part of our ongoing work on educational attainment, and I begin by welcoming to the committee James Bream from Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce, Terry Lannigan representing the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, Professor Alan Galoran from Queen Margaret University, Kevin Loudon from the Robert Owens Centre for Educational Change and, of course, Murray Harrington representing Collarys Scotland. We've obviously got a large panel this morning, so obviously I would be appreciative if members could keep their questions succinct and, of course, the answers likewise, and we'll get through as much as we can this morning. Given that we've got such a large panel, I'm going to go straight to questions and I'm going to start with Mark Griffin. Thanks, Kevin. I'll just start on a more broader basis before we get into the work of the commission and the Government's implementation plan. If I can just ask a couple of questions about the attainment gap more broadly, and just to ask all five of the witnesses to say whether they think that there is a common understanding or if they believe that there is a particular—what springs to mind to them if you say closing the attainment gap? What does closing the attainment gap mean to you? To me, closing the attainment gap means raising attainment for all young people in Scotland, but raising the attainment from those from the more disadvantaged backgrounds more quickly and to a greater extent, so that, where you're born in Scotland, becomes significantly less important to your life chances going forward. I would say that, in some of the statistical evidence that there is here, there is evidence of limited progress with regard to that. We can see that across all SIMD deciles that attainment is rising, and it is rising marginally more quickly for those from the most deprived deciles. I think that there is a long way to go, but I believe that it's an agenda that my colleagues and I, and indeed schools across the country, take very seriously indeed. I also believe that the wood commissioner developing the young workforce work has the potential to be a powerful tool in moving the agenda forward. Does anybody else want to contribute? I agree with that statement, but I think that the research also shows that there are pockets of more extreme deprivation, where the attainment gap faces particular challenges. Even there, there are examples of innovation, particularly recently, in some educational programmes, where schools, local authorities and government, such as the school improvement partnership programme, are addressing this issue. I think that it's very interesting to try and tease out what we mean by attainment and say that that includes formal qualifications, but also broad achievement. I think that we need to look carefully at that. I would agree with what my two colleagues have said, but I think that a lot of effort has gone into, particularly in the higher education sector, into widening participation. I think that a lot of very good work has been done. I think that it's slowly making a difference, but I think that in some ways we have to push that work back, and we have to push it back. A lot of it has been focused on 15, 16, 17 or 18-year-olds. I think that we really need to start doing more work in primary schools. I think that it's at that age where you're actually starting to set what people think about education, how they approach learning, the culture of learning. I think that examples that I'm sure we'll come on to, like the Children's University, are very important in shifting the way that very young people see learning and trying to adopt a partnership approach. I'm sure we'll come on to discuss some of the nitty-gritty of that. Equally, I agree with my colleagues. However, for me, it's not just about raising attainment. It's about making attainment more meaningful. The development of Scotland's young workforce is quite clearly aimed at the 50 per cent or more of our young people who do not go to university. It's about addressing the qualifications and pathways that those young people currently are studying with a view to improving them quite radically in terms of going forward. For me, it's not just about raising attainment. It's about meaningful attainment. I would add to that from an employer's point of view. I think, ultimately, why are we trying to attain qualifications? It's to ensure that people are ready for work, to ensure that they can demonstrate that they're ready for work and provide a meaningful contribution pretty early on. For me, there's the low end of the attainment scale. We certainly need to focus on that, but I don't think that we should necessarily forget that actually there's room for improvement at the top end as well, and we need to make sure that attainment is maximised across the whole spectrum. I think that at the lower end, one observation I do have is that we need to address what we call a quality of access. Some families are well-networked and parents are well-networked. Their children benefit from that and things like work placements. Others don't have that opportunity. As employers, we can do a lot to manufacture solutions to improve that situation. Some of your answers lead me on to my next question. We've had evidence, written evidence, suggesting that measures of attainment should be changed and that more credit should be given to those vocational qualifications. Will you support changes to the measurement of attainment so that there's more credence given to those other vocational areas? That would be a step towards closing the attainment gap. That's a valid point, and it's a concern that has been raised. It's important to recognise that different qualifications are about measuring different things. Just now, we've got quite a narrow focus in terms of attainment and achievement measured by exams. Vocational qualifications are more commonly measured by competence. It's important that credit is given to that competence, but we don't make it about measuring the same thing. It's about upping the value and credit that we give to assessing the competence of young people. That's where you can look at volume, breadth and depth of study, which is every bit as valid as your ability to pass an external exam. We just have to be a little bit careful about separating out vocational and academic. It makes me rather nervous, and I wouldn't want us to create or to look at creating two-tier systems where some people are just going for vocational. I think that it's very important that we look at, in any kind of education, both of those, that we're looking to develop in young people skills that are important for vocational outputs, but also there are some academic and there's some theoretical and conceptual stuff. I think that we can do both. I think that there should be a blend. I don't think that it's ineither. I would absolutely agree with that last contribution. A number of the submissions make the point that what we require here is a cultural change in Scottish society, and it's about the perception of the importance of vocational education or employment education, or call it what you will, because I believe that vocational education is as important to academic young people as it is to others. I think that it is a false dichotomy when you talk about vocational as opposed to academic. If you think about it, the most high tariff courses in Scottish universities—medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine—are the most vocational qualifications that you can get. The skills that are developed through work-based learning are as important to everyone in society. I think that one of the challenges is about persparing Scottish society in particularly parents, not exclusively parents, but particularly parents, to recognise the value of different routes to a lifetime achievement. A modern apprenticeship, for instance, can be just as valuable to a youngster and can lead to a degree-level qualification, although that young person is earning a wage just as much as going straight to university. There has been a mantra about getting the maximum number into university, and for some of our young people—we know this from the drop-out rates at the end of first year—that is not the most appropriate route. I am less concerned in some ways about measures about attainment when we look at what employers tell us. 60 per cent, roughly, of employers will say that the main indicator of whether a young person is going to be successful on a job is whether they have relevant work experience. 80 per cent tell us that most of the lack of work readiness is because of a lack of work experience. When we start to speak about attainment and start to look at things such as vocational activity and how people learn, the two of them go hand-in-hand. If you can get that whole work experience thing right, the way we look at education in terms of its interaction with employers, the cultural change needs to move through to an actual behavioural change, so work becomes very much ingrained in it. I think that we have reviewed the old-fashioned way. As I had it of one-week work experience, the job simply does not, and I think that moving that forward would be a huge thing for employers and young people. Just on the vocational versus academic qualification, we all agree that there has to be a greater balance, but there is not. We have not overcome the cultural change. How do we change the culture in terms of education, university and university against an alignment of vocational qualifications with the Government's economic strategy in the sectors that it wants to play in? We can all talk about it in whatever bubble we are in, but what we are not doing is changing, I do not think—I was at college yesterday—changing the impression that people must go to university and still the most important feature of coming out of—am I wrong? That is a very important question. I believe that we change it in two ways. We change it in the way that everyone—and that includes political leaders—talks about the agenda. I think that the message that goes out there is extremely important that we do not artificially separate vocational and academic education, that we talk about it in a far more joined-up way, and that we talk about it as a universal right to high-quality vocational education for young people. The second way, however, that we begin to change perceptions is by results and by illustrating to parents the different routes that are possible, so that, for instance, if I use a local example, there has perhaps in the past been a perception by parents that college is a less attractive option than university, less academic option than university. We have now got a partnership with West College Scotland, where a group of youngsters from one of our secondary schools—and it is going to be rolled up out to the rest next year—are doing an HNC in engineering part-time at college this year and the rest of their subjects in school. What that is showing parents and parents have fully bought into it is that this is a role for the college sector, which is as appropriate. Some of the youngsters that are doing this intend to go on to modern apprenticeships, others intend to go on to do engineering at universities. What the parents are seeing in that small example is the fact that a college education can be as valuable both in vocational and in academic terms to a range of youngsters of different abilities. It is about illustrating the power of different routes to achievement. There is a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of modern apprenticeships at the moment. We need to get the message out there about how that can unlock a youngster's potential in a different way from the straight university route. In addition to that, the key difference in terms of this particular step change—it is a step change in our education system—is that at least half of the recommendations that come out of the education working for all are in relation to employers. This particular change has already got significant buy-in from our employers across Scotland. There are two regional investing groups that have already been established. They were looked at right across Scotland. It has quite a momentum in terms of employer support. I think that that is what in terms of working with partnership with schools, with the colleges. In fact, it is a significant buy-in from employers that I think has got the potential to really drive forward this change in our system. I agree with the comments there. Historically, parents' views on the value and the esteem of vocational education have been important. The attitudes of school staff and school leaders and the pressure that they feel under to move towards academic outcomes. There has always been pressure for schools to perform in the air, even though the political message may have shifted towards the message that we have heard around the table. I think that the culture more broadly is changing, but there are still mixed messages and I think that schools are still feeling the pressure. I think that it is a cracking question as to how you changed that perception of different destinations for young people. Following up on what Terry said, when I think about our hospitality tourism academy and trying to get young people and their parents to recognise that working in hospitality and tourism is not just being a chef or a waiter, but a whole range of career opportunities. The average age of a general manager in that industry is 35. You look at what people are earning and what opportunities there are in that kind of industry, but many parents will look at hospitality tourism on the thing—you mentioned medicine or you mentioned law. It is about changing that perception within the country as to the value of different destinations. It is a challenge, but I think that there is a lot of good work going on. I am interested in what all of you have just said in response to Terry's questions. If I could offer an example, I recently met a young apprentice taken on at St Magnus Cathedral in my constituency to undertake a stonemasonry apprenticeship, a young girl by the name of Sophie Turner, who has become a poster child for the apprenticeship scheme. She had been down the route of a university education at Napier. Photography was the degree, but an illustration of something that she was interested in, but the peer pressure within the school environment meant that there really was never any discussion of a young apprenticeship. For as long as this debate is seen to be about how we raise attainment from those from non-traditional or poorer backgrounds, the political imperative that the drivers in the system will always be a bit muted. What we need to see is more of those who are being channeled down the university route for laudable reasons, but that is probably against their interest in terms of their longer term attainment. It is always going to be an impossible nut to crack, so it is much about the attainment for those who are retaining quite well at the moment, but perhaps being put down pathways that are less well suited to their aspirations and their skillset. Would that be a fair comment to make? I think that that is a yes. Yes, but if you look at, for example, our academies programme and the academies programme is now being picked up by other local authorities, apart from the four local authorities that we work with, there are a whole lot of exit points, so it is not just about getting people into university, it is about demonstrating the benefit of college education, or it is about demonstrating the need to develop the relevant skills so that you can move into work. Although we have only been operating the academies for two years, the indicators are that some people leave and they go into work. What we are hoping is that they go into work with a better idea as to what that work is with better attitudes, better understanding and a better link with employers so that they are successful in that work, and the same with the people who go to college and go to university. Back to your earlier point about needing to push this further back, so it is not just a discussion at age 15, 16 and 17. Clearly, there is a cohort who are identified, probably before they leave primary school, as being of university material, and there is never a discussion with them about whether they go to college in terms of receiving that higher education for a lesser discussion around modern apprenticeships. Until what you have got is a better balance in terms of the demographic at colleges as compared to university, that party of esteem or that division between them is always going to be more marked, is it not? I think that it is very interesting that both reports touch on this about going back early into the education system, where young people, as we find ourselves as adults, will change their ideas about where they want to go and their skills to develop the other orientations, so that trajectory. It is a careful balance about providing sufficient information to allow informed choice and allowing those various pathways, and to make sure that we do not channel people saying that primary school is your university material and on you go, so much can happen over that. I think that the education system itself has to be nuanced enough to provide opportunities and partnership working with the right guidance about organisations, and something Alan was seeing there out. If people do change their trajectory and want to change, the system itself will allow that as their skills develop, so it is building in flexibility. Ultimately, if one goes back to why any of us learn to progress ourselves, get more money as a young person, it is that kind of simple thing that inspires people. For me, the culture change comes in a large part through a communications process, which shows inspirational people who have achieved great things without having gone to university and there is a huge amount of them out there. If you look at the way that the north-east, most of the industries have grown up there, particularly oil and gas and food and drink. Many of the fast-progressing young people have come through what I suppose you all call vocational type education or modern apprenticeships or apprenticeships of some, so we just call it a way to get into a job. Celebrating success has got to be a huge part of it, and what that success pathway has been should be a material, really. I have got a wee concern over perhaps understanding of some of the terminology. I will give you an example. Glasgow City Council gave a submission and they stated, we need to have a clearer shared understanding of vocational courses and not imagine that vocational courses are in any way worth less than an academic course. Medicine is a vocational course. On the other hand, North Ayrshire Council's submission said, reorganisation schools must not be done at the expense of our highly academic pupils. Scotland's workforce will still require doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants. There are two bodies who clearly have a different interpretation of what vocational means. How big a problem is it and how do we get consistency? It is a massive problem in terms of how societies place hierarchies in terms of jobs. The tradition for medicine, for law to be seen as the pinnacles of achievement, is that we all have a responsibility to challenge what are established orthodoxies in terms of why medicine is. It is plumbing for God's sake. Sounds like fighting talk. Why not? Be provocative. There is a lot of theory in there, but should we not challenge it? Why do you have to have five A's at higher in order to be a doctor? Does that make the best doctors? I think that medical schools are challenging that. I think that medical schools are looking at that they need a wider range of people. I think that we all have a duty to challenge that hierarchy. I think that Mr Beattie raises an interesting question. It is partly a question of nomenclature. I think that traditionally the division between vocational and academic education has been one that where one was seen as being inferior to the other. We are trying to get away from using the term vocational to try to get away from that sort of division. I would be much closer to the Glasgow definition that you gave than North Ayrshire, I have to say. I think that to start to talk about education for employment, employability skills, those are things that everybody needs. I think that language is important there. I would not, in any way, undermine the importance of academic education. A strong academic educational system is going to be very important to Scotland's future. However, the fact is that in schools traditionally the people who are delivering education are people who have come through the academic route and therefore are predisposed towards thinking that that is the route to success. It is that sort of mindset that we need to get beyond. As I go back, I think that there are a number of ways that we do that. One of them can be through changing the terminology that we use, but the other and more powerful one is by illustrating the different routes to success and the sort of opportunities that they can open up for young people. I agree that there is almost a conceptual fog. It would be interesting if you had a meeting between the people who made those different submissions and talked for long enough, you would find that they are probably talking about the same thing. I think that it is interesting when you look at the surveys of the last five, ten years of employers in UK-wide, when you drill down what they are often talking about, it is not a narrow vocation definition. It is these more generic skills that will allow people to adapt to change, team work and so on. The boundary between the narrow vocational academic is blurred, but I think that it is something perhaps that the work that is set out in these reports perhaps has to start addressing first is to try and get a consensus about what are we talking about here and to say what do we mean by vocational, what do we mean by academic, and then somehow address this parity of view? I guess that whatever industry we are in, we use jargon unfortunately, and it is usually used within the industry rather than people from outside the industry. As somebody from outside the education industry, it is sometimes tricky to get through all of this stuff. Ultimately, when coming back to what makes people employable, nine out of ten people will say communication, teamwork, eight out of ten will say customer service. You do not actually see any of those things in a course syllabus. They are not subjects, they are the things that people can do. I think that as part of this process, we need to move away from thinking about subjects and what has become a kind of lesson challenged way and move more towards what people can actually do. That would be a huge change, but maybe one more thinking about it. Clearly, there is a problem here if we do not have a consistent approach and a consistent understanding of what the basic terminology means. It seems to me that an awful lot of vocational courses and educational policies are tending to be directed towards pupils that are not performing well academically or perhaps are a bit disengaged from school. That seems to be the box into which vocational courses are being dropped at the moment. How do we move it on? Traditionally, you are right that it has tended to happen in the old system with standard grades and so on. It has tended to happen at the start of S3 that more disaffected youngsters for whom the traditional curriculum is not seen as appropriate or interesting, they are directed into vocational courses. I think that that goes back to a couple of questions earlier on from Mr Diffran and Mr MacArthur, when both of whom talked about the fact that this has got to be embedded at a far earlier stage. To me, if you are talking about closing the attainment gap and raising attainment and achievement for Scotland's youngsters, we have to see things like developing the young workforce in a much broader context, we have to see it as part of curriculum for excellence, we have to look at the initiatives that are taking place elsewhere in Scottish public life, not just education, things like the early years collaborative, things like the Scottish attainment challenge, which is targeted at primary schools, we have to look at the employability skills that we are starting to get into primary schools. My own patch, for instance, all primary sevens and about half of our schools get a week's work experience in the school kitchen, so if you start to embed that sort of thing and they learn the whole curriculum for a week groups of them through the medium of the school kitchen, not just the catering side of it but the customer service side, working as a team, et cetera, et cetera, and once you start to embed vocational education or call it what you will, employability skills into the curriculum, into the 3 to 18 curriculum, then you get away from this idea that vocational education is only for the less academic and the more disaffected. As long as we only offer it in the senior phase to youngsters who are less academic, then we won't get away from that mindset if we can embed it further down and see it as part of the core curriculum. After all, curriculum for excellence is about skills for learning, skills for life and skills for work, and I think we've still got a way to go in the skills for work agenda, but if we can embed that, that's the way we start to change the perceptions. When we talk about less academic, that's possibly not a reflection of young people's ability, so because young people don't thrive in a school setting, it doesn't mean they don't have academic potential. What we've currently got, just to remind ourselves back to the beginning, is over 50 per cent of our young people not achieving their full potential and back to that meaningful attainment. There are a large number of young people who are partaking in vocational qualifications, not simply those who are disengaged and disaffected from school, and I think that it's always better to give a real live example of where you see potential really being maximised. There are a number of pilot projects currently being run across Scotland in a number of the college areas. Our particular programme has targeted youngsters in S4—who are just going to S4—and in West Llywodraen in partnership with the schools have targeted the four schools who have the lowest performance and the highest deprivation statistics, so recruited 32 young people, and at the end of S5, that 16 or 17-year-old will come out with a full national qualification in manufacturing engineering, a competence-based assessed qualification in engineering operations, three core skills in communications, IT and maths, and a raft of more broad and general unit achievement from school. That's a fantastic CV for a 16 or 17-year-old coming out of school, and really, for me, that's the potential that needs to be explored and absolutely grown across Scotland. Can I just do one follow-up on that? I think that we're agreed about this problem of effectively how it's viewed in terms of academic and vocational and the sort of general culture of the country, but isn't the fundamental problem that you'll never shift that while effectively—people don't want to pursue academic or vocational qualifications for their children—what they want is status and financial security. Effectively, while status and financial security is tied up with succeeding academically, that's the way that parents and schools and everybody else in the culture and society will continue to push children and will be seen as the preferred outcome. Isn't the problem a much more fundamental one about that status and about that financial reward in society from being somebody who achieves very well academically as somebody who goes down the vocational route? Isn't that a fundamental problem in society rather than I was trying to muck about with this course versus that course? I think that it is, but I think that there have been inroads into that in terms of—I was talking earlier about that hierarchy—I don't necessarily think that the medical profession is quite as far up the tree as it was in my father's generation, so I think that society has changed. I think that society is much more critical and challenging of some of the established professions, and I think that there are other professions that were not around 20 or 30 years ago. The hierarchy is just that little bit more fluid, but we were talking about employers and I was talking about hospitality and tourism. If we are trying to encourage more young people into hospitality and tourism, those who are running those industries have to think about career progression within that. From an educational point of view, if we are helping to provide better-skilled young people who have aspirations within that industry, then employers have a responsibility to think about a career framework within their industry in order to keep them, which comes back to that partnership model that we were talking about. I will bring in the check of this point. I will just come back to the parental involvement question that we have. In the economy committee, when we looked at various aspects of employment last year, the problem was that nobody saw the parental involvement that is required. For example, we were very short of engineers. The number of women involved in the engineering industry, particularly in the world of gas, is reflective of the fact that they are either in admin or of the ones that are on the oil rigs that are in catering, because they are seen as a dirty job by parents. I wonder what mechanism there is. I know that the excellent work that QMU does when we have had this conversation about the hospitality industry. What do we do to embrace parents and help them to understand exactly what opportunities are available through academic or vocational qualification in industries such as those that I have just mentioned? How do we get them convinced that they should have a wider perspective on that? The new chief executive of oil and gas UK is a lady, Deirdre Michee. That is one positive and very visible step that has been made in that sector. It is a small step, but having visible role models again is really important to young people. In the north-east, we have just started to roll out an evaluation tool for all business and education links. One of the stakeholders that we ask about is parents. I think that for a parent and a speaker's one, you are often not visible and do not have full visibility of what is going on within the schools. There are two ways of thinking, such as with employers. There is an imperative on both sides. You will have some parents who are very engaged and who will take an active role in securing work experience. Some who, as I said earlier, may be less well-networked, for example, and feel unable to do that. From an employer's side, we need to open up that access to all parents and pupils to give the same level of opportunity across the board, not just to the ones that are particularly well-connected. I will try to answer your question, but I might go off on a wee tangent to start with. Involving parents—we have been talking about employability to do with education, but we need to think about education in a slightly broader sense. If I take the example of the children's university, the children's university is to try and use the idea that not all young people will be turned on by the formal curriculum within schools. Therefore, we try and use other activities that young people are involved in and try to get them to see the learning potential around them. If you look at a lot of the activities around schools, it tends to be a lot of the mothers that are involved. How do we get fathers involved? Using sport through the children's university and getting young people and getting fathers involved in helping out with sports teams or swimming or whatever. I think that it is about trying to have a renegotiation of the relationship within education between young people, parents, schools and employers. You have to allow the parents in, and they have to see where there is a role for them. For some parents, schools are big, scary places, because they have had bad experiences themselves or just because the school has that kind of formal aura about it. There is quite a lot of breaking down barriers to be done here. One of the things with the children's university is that you have regular graduation. The children, I do not know how much you know about the children's university, but it is a system that is accredited and they get stamps and children love getting stamps. Once you have got a certain number of stamps, you can graduate and you come to the university and, therefore, you come with your parents, so you are actually coming into a higher education institution. The parents are coming in, the young children are coming in, they have their bunnets on and their gowns and what have you, but it seems not to be such a scary educational place. Breaking down barriers, I think, is really important. I think you have to engage with parents first. We also want to engage in education to get them to look at the value of vocational education, whatever it is, the agenda. One of the big challenges across education at the moment is engaging with parents. In the research that we have seen in the past, if parents can be engaged close at school and you can demonstrate that what you are doing makes a difference to the quality of life of their child and the life opportunities, they are more likely to become engaged and then once that sort of relationship starts building, you can then engage them in the debates about life choices, cost choices and so on, but I think there is that fundamental level. Okay, thank you very much. I want to move on. Now come in, will you get a small supplementary? Well, I'll pick a supplementary from Gordon, then I'll bring in me. You mentioned the importance of parents and parents' attitude, et cetera, but if we really want to try and close the attainment gap between those individuals that are from our most marginalised communities as opposed to the rest of the general population, how do we get parents to switch on to the importance of education full-stop, not just vocational or academic education, when they are in a situation where they might be juggling zero-air contracts, they might be part-time jobs that they are having to deal with, they might get DWP sanctions. Unfortunately, in that scenario, their children's education is pretty low down because they are with the stresses of everyday life, so how does that play? If you're going to turn this around, how does that play? That illustrates the wide spectrum of the challenge here, and I think there are some really good examples across Scotland and wider, but certainly in Scotland, of schools and partnerships, educational communities that are doing just that, and it is by thinking more radically and innovating and going out into the community, almost outreach, working with community learning and partnership work, so it's not just education, education is one part of that, and it's these more innovative, outward-looking approaches that are starting to engage with parents in making a difference, and I think right through this proposed programme here, it's looking for examples that work like that and trying to mobilise that knowledge across the system and translate it as appropriate to different contexts, but I think there is practice out there that has already stopped doing that, but it does, it needs innovation, it needs creativity and a bit of risk taking. Very, very quick answers if you don't mind, I want to move on, but Mary and Terry want to... I think just to reinforce the point that parents who are struggling are nonetheless every bit as committed and want the best for their children. It's their ability to support their children that needs more support, and that's where I think we, as the organisations who are tasked with supporting them, have to use our very best resources and interventions at the very best time to get the best outcomes for those young people, and that can only be achieved in partnership with others in the schools and local authorities, but that's absolutely our duty. Okay, thank you. Terry, very briefly. Yeah, very briefly. I think you're right that this is a big challenge to engage this group of parents, and I think it's not just education alone that has responsibility for that. I think that society has a responsibility to try to pull them, those parents, into the system and schools do need imaginative ways to engage them. Having said that, I do think another important factor is that if we make the curriculum more meaningful to young people, if we enthuse young people about learning, including the young people from the most disadvantaged groups, then that is a way in which, ultimately, parents will become more engaged, because one of the issues has been that youngsters from those disadvantaged groups have become disengaged from education. If we can get them talking positively about their experience, if we can address their needs through school, and there's some evidence that we're beginning to do that with better staying on rates, etc., from more deprived areas, then that's a way, I think, of pulling parents in. Mary We're talking about attainment in the wood commission, and I'm just slightly concerned about the way that the discussion is going, because it seems to be that you get to the age of 14 and 15 and then you think, oh gosh, we've got a problem, we better do something, and the conveners will not forgive me for raising Audit Scotland again, but in the report last year, I have to say, I was quite shocked that, for example, you've been in for Clyde and East Lothian, same-level attainment, but hugely different levels of deprivation. So deprivation is not the only answer here. I think the second thing that shocked me, there's no independent evaluation of what councils spend on schools and the achievements and attainment and why they're achievement, and I think probably the most concerning thing is there's no consistent approach to tracking and monitoring pupils from primary 1 to S3. Then, just the final point, 2 per cent of primary 7s don't work at the expected level of numeracy. Two years later, 35 per cent of pupils don't achieve the level of numeracy. My point is that I'm just concerned that, because we're looking at attainment and the wood commission, we're assuming that there's not a problem until somebody's age 14. If you look at the unemployment rates 2013 for 16 to 24-year-olds, the average, and we're very good at looking at averages, is 21 per cent. It's 8 per cent for those that have a degree, but the unemployment rate for people with no qualifications is 47. I'm concerned, I mean I love the wood commission, I support every single element of it, but it's not the only answer to attainment and achievement. My first question is, what is being done in schools? We can't expect to start looking at this at age 14 or when people are unemployed. According to Audit Scotland, we're not doing enough in schools. I might just ask you to address that before I ask my second question. I would go back to my earlier answer. I would absolutely agree that we can't say that you suddenly get to 14 and then recognise a problem. I think that this work has to be seen in the context of the 3 to 18 curriculum, the whole curriculum for excellence model, the work that we're doing with the early years collaborative, the work that we're doing for the Scottish attainment about to start and the Scottish attainment challenge in primary schools. This is part of a much bigger picture. You put your finger on an issue about the lack of a consistent monitoring in the primary stages in terms of attainment and as a result of that, the vast majority of local authorities, including my own, have gone for standardised assessments. We've got them at primary 3, 5, 7 and S2, so we are beginning to build up a body of data that does give a robust measure of attainment. It's not in every local authority, but one of the aims of the Scottish attainment challenge is to look at the use of data in the primary and early secondary school to see whether there is something that we can do to measure more robustly the attainment levels. You put your finger on a significant challenge, but I would dispute the idea that we only see it as a problem at the age of 14. I would draw your attention to all those other initiatives and to the work that's going on in schools to try to address this at the earliest possible stage. Early and effective intervention is what everyone recognises works here. I think that what is also happening in Scotland is that we are starting to see a shift in teacher professional rules and identity in their culture where they are becoming more reflective practitioners, so that there is external monitoring built into the system. Teachers are also becoming far better at reflecting on the learning of their strategies, but you've accurately provided a pen portrait of the challenge and the wider context, and that is just part of addressing that. I did read Aberdeen Grampie in the chamber of commerce. I was actually being a lecturer before I came in here in further and higher education. I was surprised that the colleges barely got a passing mention. My question, Chick Brody and some of us at Westerhales last week, we asked a question about colleges. I was actually surprised at how much the school wanted to work with the college, but actually how difficult they found it. I think that my colleagues would agree with me. They were saying that they had resources for car mechanics and they could fill it if only they could get a lecturer to come in once or twice a week. The engagement from the colleges wasn't good, so I think that, first of all, Aberdeen and Grampie are barely a passing mention. Secondly, I know that the colleges have been a lot of challenges with the mergers, etc. Forgive me for saying this, but it was said to me that the colleges are too busy being universities that have taken their eye off vocational education and the colleges need to do more about engaging with schools. I am not talking about the whole of Scotland, but this comment was made in relation to Edinburgh College. In order for this to work, we have all got to work together rather than pass the buck. I will respond directly on that. The primary body of work that we have had in this area is between employers and schools, so they fit with what has been strong. The omission, as you see it, of comment on colleges is not necessarily to be seen as a bad thing. One of the things that we have in the north-east is that it was too. It is now one particularly strong college with two campuses, Aberdeen and Fraser. There are actually some really good practices being embedded between the schools and the colleges in the north-east. In particular, we are starting to now see a more flexible approach to learning within the schools and the colleges. People are being released from school time to learn their trade, education or whatever they want to call it within the colleges. That more flexible approach to learning, allowing young people access to college provision during school time, is something that we already see happening. In that respect, we do not see the need to reflect on it in any great depth, so it is a really positive thing. I am disappointed to hear that a request has been made to work with a college and it has not been taken forward. I cannot speak to the individual circumstances of any one institution. However, I would say strongly in my experience that colleges in most parts of Scotland play a very key and pivotal role with the schools in the development of vocational qualifications. The quality and evidence space of the college-goal partnerships is quite stunning in some areas. I think that there is maybe work to be done about that being consistent across Scotland. We can do that more by learning and sharing about the best practice that we do see. I think that colleges are such an integral part of partnership working that I can never be understated. I am quite sure that if that problem was raised and taken forward, it would be very seriously taken and addressed, because, as a sector, we are known to be very proactive, responsive and utterly committed to partnership working for the benefit of our young people. I was also disappointed in the reference and the account of the visit to Mr Hales about the comment about the college. One of the things about the final report from the Wood commission was that it highlighted that there is an issue, as Barry says, of consistency across the country. I think that that goes not just for the college liaison, but for all aspects of this work. You can probably find good examples of all of the 39 recommendations, or most of them, somewhere in Scotland, but it is about getting that embedded. I have to say that my own experience is very different from that with colleges. We have an excellent relationship with West College Scotland. I serve in the college's Learning, Teaching and Quality Committee. We have college lecturers working in our schools. Our youngsters go to college on both day release and longer basis. We work very closely together on a whole range of initiatives. I hear my colleagues talk like that elsewhere in Scotland. It might not be universal, but I think that there is lots of good practice there. One of the challenges in the final report of the Wood commission is for us to identify where there is good practice and make sure that that is shared right across the country. It is there already, but it is just not there everywhere. It is within my section a very small question. One final small question remains here. It is very small, but it is Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce. I was very disappointed to read that your members consider that the young people receive poor or incorrect information about careers and work opportunities in particular sector. That change needs to be embedded in primary and secondary schools, so I think that that would be a concern to this committee if people are getting poor and incorrect information at schools. The question is not a disappointment on us reporting it. It is something that we get told frequently. One of the areas in which we think that there is an opportunity to embed again a different type of behaviour and activity is actually engaging employers in the process of providing careers guidance into schools. It would be unfair to expect that teachers, whatever type of teacher you are, can give accurate careers advice, because you are a teacher and that is your job, and they are professionals in their own way. SDS is supposed to be doing it? Even saying that, SDS can access the knowledge of employers who are much more up to date on what jobs exist. We have heard earlier that jobs and roles are continually changing and will be very different in the other 10 years. The best people to give advice on what jobs are out there and what skills they need are the people who are employing. There is a great opportunity to look at this area and to use employers to be of benefit to young people. It is a huge opportunity and one in which we should snap up. Thank you. Just for everybody's information, we will have separate sessions with SDS and Education Scotland as we go through this process. Kevin, you want to take that? I will say what seems to be underpinning a lot of what has been talked about here is really co-ordination and almost brokering, because I think you have approaches from schools to colleges, the role of careers at primary school and so on. We have seen this in the past where there have been studies that have worked well, almost case studies, and it is really almost thinking within a local context, local partnerships, there is a need perhaps for some brokering, organisational, a co-ordinating body or individuals who can make the links and create the liaison, otherwise people talk past each other. That is where the regional invest and youth groups are absolutely crucial. They are the people who can see all of this going on, who can make best use of resources, help agencies to consolidate the resources that they have and use it in a more effective way. Okay, thank you very much. I am assured that a very quick supplementary from Siobhan McMahon. It should be. It is based on the evidence that we have heard at Western Hills, but obviously the evidence that was given in particular from the west of Scotland colleges in your area about St Peter's Apostle, about schools wishing to engage, so you said the engineering course into colleges, but the timetable is not starting when the school term starts and therefore pupils are left for four or five weeks not being able to get to college. Is that the case in that particular example? If it is not the case, what should we be doing to change that across the board? What resources need to be in place so that people, when they start their school term, can go to college from that off rather than waiting on colleges starting as well? Terry, our college courses start within a week of the start of the school term. You mentioned the St Peter's Apostle example. That is the engineering agency that I mentioned earlier. The key to that was that the school was prepared to be flexible in their approach to timetabling and the college was prepared to be flexible. They basically ripped up the timetable because it was an opportunity for a particular group of youngsters for whom that was an appropriate route. Increasingly, in the address written evidence, it says that we need to look afresh at the senior phase timetabling so that it is not so much a menu approach where you take it or leave it. It is about what do you want as an individual youngster to get from your senior phase and then we will do our best to make sure that you can get it. That is what happened in that case, and that was the key to its success. Very briefly, Alan. Just to reassure you in terms of the work that we do in the academies, there is huge flexibility. We are working with over 50 schools now, Edinburgh College, West Lothian College, Borders College, and there really has been that flexibility in moving young people around the country so that their education is in their school, in a college, at the university and in work, and we have managed to get it. It was not easy to start with, but that flexibility is now there in the system. I am following on from that because I was talking about schools and colleges and the flexibility between the two. Obviously, it is a major part of the wood report and we have gone on it at some length. To mention West College Scotland, it mentioned in its submissions at school, timetables and how subjects are placed across them and can, at times, lack flexibility. There was also a mention from the SDS that a flexibility, if a consistent approach to school and college timetables across Scotland within local authorities or regions where needed could avoid duplication of resource, which is a subject that constantly comes up at this committee as well with regard to covering education. The other thing that was when we were at Westerhales Education Centre, they told us how they, as you rightly said, ripped up the timetabling and found a way to make it work for them, that kind of flexibility. I was quite impressed with that, not just because the head teacher is a fellow paisley buddy, but I do not think that that is the only reason why the school has been reasonably successful. It might be one of them, but the other thing is that they were so flexible. How do we get to that place? How do we get to that type of flexibility throughout Scotland, where we can effectively, as you say, Terry, the young person takes control of, because that is how they are going to buy in, whether it be vocational or academic, is when they take control of their destiny and their future. I was very impressed last week with some of the young people at Westerhales, who were telling us exactly what they were doing and how they had bought into that. How do we get teachers to buy into it as well? I think that what we have to look at is making sure that in areas where we are trying to be really flexible, that fits the needs of the area. The danger would be that you would try to impose a flexible model across Scotland that would not actually be fit for purpose in all areas. There are serious logistics challenges in working between colleges and schools. However, in my experience, if the partnership is working locally, it is very strongly focused on the common goals for young people, then underneath that, what you need is a very good infrastructure to tackle the logistics. In West Lothian, all 11 secondary schools have come together with common timetabling options so that young people can travel to college. That was done a number of years ago because we wanted to open up the options for young people. The college sits on the senior phase timetabling group, we sit on the opportunities for all group, we work with the headteachers so we are embedded in the infrastructure that allows us to listen and understand the logistics challenges but to make sure that we deliver on the ground the programmes that young people need. I think that that only comes about as a result of working seriously and closely in partnership with our colleagues in the schools and education services. In addition to that, we have a similar situation in which we have common timetabling elements and that enables not just travelling to college but also travelling between schools so that you get the most efficient timetable possible. I would say that it needs leadership at the centre because if schools are left on their own, they will tend to do what they can in their own resources. It is about leading and co-ordinating that at the centre and making sure that you timetable across the schools. I have to say that once schools see the advantages for their youngsters because we have greatly, for instance—this is a more academic aspect of it—by changing the way that we timetabled last year, we almost doubled the numbers of youngsters who were able to get advanced hires because we maximised the opportunities across the five secondary schools. We are fortunate that there is a small local authority and a small geographical area, and we have made the most of that. The big advantage is that we can convince schools to do it. Both Mary and Terry have identified some really excellent case studies there. It is using those almost as an illustration to other situations around Scotland and saying, what can we learn from that? It is always wary of taking me and transplanting it. In the case of translating it, it is saying, here is a model, this is how we did it. How would you fine tune it for your context? I think that it is using those as inspiration case studies and building in careful evaluations so that we know what the impact is. We know that something works and we know that it works over time. In Western Hills case, the deputy head said that he had to give buy-in from the staff for a start to say that we can work differently. The problem in his fear—I am paraphrasing what he said—was that they were going through process instead of educating young people. They embraced the curriculum for excellence totally, I think, much of what you have already said yourself, and managed to get teachers to teach again as opposed to processing. I thought that that was quite valid because with quite a lot of the evidence that we get in various things, we come back to the idea of teachers wanting to know what is my end game, where to end up, where is the exam and working back. It was good to hear a place where it was successful and where they had found a way to have an on-going evaluation. It was one of those things that just made you want to say, how can we not have that flexibility elsewhere to your work? How do we engage with the unions and everyone else to get to that place? It is interesting that staff have not really been mentioned that much up until now. It is a really important point. One of the unintended consequences of the academy's project was actually getting teaching teams in schools, speaking to the teaching teams in colleges and speaking to the teaching teams in the universities and all sharing their expectations and what they are doing and then helping to understand what is happening to somebody when they are 14, 15 and then what is going to happen to them when they are 18, 19. I think that there is real benefits in that cross-fertilisation between staff groups. One of the other things that the Deputy Head was telling us in Westerhales Education Centre was that it was not until they moved to the 3 plus 3 model and away from 2 plus 2 plus 2 that they actually found that they were able to adopt the flexible approach that others have referred to. We are interested in whether the panel feels that that really is a cynic going on in terms of making the kind of progress that we are looking to make. The other thing that I found very interesting about what we were being told last week was that the teaching staff were able to tell where each of the pupils was at any given stage in any month on any subject. Given all the stuff that we have heard about the workload pressures and over-assessment in the roll-out of national four or five, it might be to a lesser extent that we knew how it is. It would be interested to know the panel's views on whether that is a realistic ambition for schools across the country. Presumably if Westerhales Education Centre can do it and appears to be delivering results and seems to be bedding in pretty successfully, it is not beyond the realms of possibility of achieving that across the board. I think that schools have become more and more sophisticated about tracking and monitoring and using technology to track and monitor the progress of young people so that you can naturally get a very clear picture. CMIS provides a module that allows you to do that quite effectively. I think that your question about the three plus three, two plus two, I agree that people are beginning to see a clearer picture about the broad general education and the transfer into the senior phase. However, it is interesting that the waters have been more muddied because there is probably now more divergence in the curricular models that are being offered, that elements of choice have been introduced in some schools by the end of S1 and others by the end of S2. We need to remember that personalisation and choice are an entitlement in curriculum for excellence. I sense that the three plus three v two plus two plus two is a dead argument now that we are moving into a period of refinement where schools are looking again at their curriculum, our schools are all looking again at their broad general education and are changing what they are doing. As far as the workload issue is concerned, I am halfway through the annual reviews of the secondary schools where we go out and spend a whole day in each of them. We have been talking about workload and about where teachers are at the moment and the feeling from the schools that we have been in so far is very much that this is a better year than last year. The pressures for introducing the national fives in particular last year have settled and people are much more comfortable with it. They seem to be more confident with the new hires where they have been introduced and dovetail well with the national fives that they were doing last year. While there are still significant workload issues, which I am sure you will hear from EIS and others, I think that the general feeling is that last year was of particular pressure and that things are improving this session. I am keen to understand the role of employers in this whole attainment agenda. I have a couple of quotes just to read out to you to start. All pupils over the age of 14 must have an opportunity for work-based vocational learning, linked to accompanying relevant qualifications. That will require a major commitment from Scotland's employers working closely with local authorities and secondary schools. There must be a major expansion in the involvement of businesses in our schools, while primary secondary and special schools must develop partnership agreements with local businesses and other appropriate organisations. That is a quote from a Scottish Executive Report determined to succeed in 2003. Given that the Wood Commission has similar recommendations, what are the challenges in getting employers involved in education? The determined to succeed thing comes up every now and again when I am in meetings with people who were involved in this 12 or 13 years ago. It is not the first time I have heard that. The fact is that we are seeing a latent demand. There are employers out there who want to do this stuff, so about 70 per cent would say that they want to get engaged in it, but only about a third are engaged in it. We have an opportunity there, so that is the first thing. We have something to go at. First of all, we have more at the small and medium enterprise end, a difficulty of knowing how to do it, what do they have to do and how can we get engaged in this pose? That is not knowing how to contact a school. It might sound fairly easy if you phone up the headteacher, but that is a bad air in itself. That is 12 years ago. I can only speak. Can you work out how to pick up the phone to the school? We have not moved on very far. From the investing youth side of things, we need to go down the route of some standardisation for the smaller businesses, which allow a very simple template approach to giving them the guidance. I cannot comment on what has happened in the last 12 years, because this is only something that we have been involved in for the last year and a half. I think that type of approach is something that small businesses are saying that they would welcome. At the larger end, there are pretty active partnerships in the northeast that are working really pretty well. The majority of the schools have a strong business partnership. We have spoken about case studies and examples. We just need to look at them and look at how they work, because they are achieving really positive outcomes. One of the challenges in the aspect of the agenda is the very differing labour markets that exist across Scotland. The western barter is very different from the northeast, for instance. The council is by far the biggest employer in the area. One of the challenges is that we have to take the lead as an employer in the area in engaging with not just education, but other council departments. We have two or three medium-to-big players, such as a Greco, Polaroid and BAE systems. It is comparatively easy to get them to engage in the process. In fact, they are very enthusiastic and very supportive. One of the big challenges is that most of our employers are not even SMEs, they are micro-businesses, they are one guy and two guy operations. How do you persuade them that there is something in it for them and that they have something to offer? We have to become quite inventive about incentivising small and medium businesses and micro-businesses to engage in that. For instance, a lot of very small businesses find it very hard to employ apprentices. We have to find a way of doing that by perhaps delivering part of apprenticeships on the academic side of it in schools, by joining up colleges, employers and schools together to do that so that there is less downtime for the small employer, where the apprentice is traditionally at college. Can that be done while the young person is still at school? One of the big challenges, I think, will be in engaging SMEs and very small businesses in this process. The bigger businesses, it is easier because they have the capacity to do it. I think that's fundamental to the strategy. The engagement implies at all levels. I think that we've seen in the past. If we look south of the border, there's been a real issue of engaging with getting employers to engage with schools. I think that it's a different context in Scotland, but we do have a range of different employer sizes. In some cases, employers may be transient. If you think about the vagaries of the economic system, some employers may feel they're able to engage with schools over a one, two, three-year period, but then the market turns or the employer unfortunately disappears. What happens then? We have to build some recognition of that into the system. I think it is right. It's how do you engage. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about having some focus or partnership in an area that's co-ordinated and somebody saying, again, brokering. I think for all partners it would be what's in it for them. Yes, they may have shared commitment to the outcome for young people, but they also want it, and it's looking at the incentives. I think it's fundamental of the whole strategy. Only about half of businesses are taken on young people and work experience because they think it's of benefit to them, which is surprising actually. I think bizarrely that the companies who are probably best suited to give a broad experience to young people are micro-businesses because in a week you can get an experience of finance, sales, HR, they do everything. If we can make it easy for those companies, that's the big opportunity for me. How do we make it easier for businesses then? We are at Westerhales, which happens to be in my constituency, so if nobody else is going to mention it, I was. The people said that a positive view of work experience and considered that slightly longer placements of around four weeks were better than a one or two-week placement. Placements were a good means of boosting confidence and increasing work readiness, so the people themselves have recognised the benefit of work experience. How do we actually get employers, if the majority are micro-employers, how do we get that one or two-man business to actually offer that work experience? There's been the right challenge put to employers to do this stuff. The challenge back to the education sector is how do you create a flexible timetabling system and embed the opportunity within timetabling for the old that's used to get a Wednesday afternoon release four weeks. Different models of work experience because the old one-week work experience really isn't fit for purpose in terms of allowing different employers the flexibility to act. I think employers can do so much, and I think it's incumbent on them to work in partnership with the education system to work around some of those challenges that you have for providing a consistent level of service across hundreds of pupils. I suspect that it's not easy, but we need to work it out. Terry, can I just give you an example from the local perspective? About six years ago, we decided that the week's work experience in S4 just wasn't fit for purpose, so we ripped it up completely. What we now offer is every young person the opportunity of a bespoke work experience or work placement in the year that they leave school, because more and more youngsters are staying on until six there now, so why would you do your work experience in S4? Often in the past, it wasn't related to the youngsters' aspirations or aptitudes. That's what we now do, and it can still be the one week if that's appropriate, but it can be half a day a week for a term. It can be three weeks spread through the year, depending on the nature of the placement, et cetera. One of the advantages of that is that by engaging with local employers, we're able to talk to them about what they can offer, because the full week isn't easy for some employers to offer, whereas half a day a week or work at weekends, for instance, might be something that would suit them. We've got a whole range of different models that are suited to the young person and are based on what the young person is looking for and on what the local labour market can offer. Just very briefly, I think that you asked the question of how to get employers involved. I think that we've talked a lot about engagement. We've talked a lot about people's contributions feeling valued. When we were setting up the hospitality tourism academy, we involved employers in designing the curriculum. It wasn't, well, we need this piece of industry-specific knowledge. As was said earlier by James, it was about communication. We want team working, we want discipline, we want attitude, we want those kind of soft skills, I don't know why they're always called soft skills, which seems demeaning, because they're some of the most important skills that we all need. My last question is on the situation of employment opportunities for young people. If we're going to show the importance of vocational training, et cetera, then there has to be an outcome for young people at the end of it. Currently, we're in a scenario where most of the employment opportunities given to young people tend to be in retail, hospitality and tourism. I read a report that said that in the North Sea, over the next five years, there's something like 12,000 new entrants over the next five years that was in the Opetal report fueling the next generation. Given that there are opportunities coming up, what can we do to encourage more employers to take on school leavers and maybe put them through the modern apprenticeship scheme, et cetera, to show the importance of vocational training? The oil and gas industry, one thing it is pretty good at, is getting young people into the industry. How you get people from wherever in the UK to decide, actually, I want to move to the north-east or move to Glasgow, wherever the supply chain is, is a slightly different question. I guess it's about making industry look attractive. In terms of getting people into modern apprenticeships, I mean one of the challenges that some employers tell me is that we've got an economic strategy which talks about getting people into these kind of higher value jobs, but actually the funding for apprenticeships for engineering is the same as customer service and actually the cost of delivering an engineering apprenticeship is much higher, so you're getting companies who do it, like Scor, for example, who are really good at this stuff because they want to do it, because they've got a leader who thinks it's important. It may be worth looking at the relative financial incentives in these areas to prop up our industrial strategy and economic strategy and make sure that they feed properly into each other. Thank you. At the end of the day, once we partially close the gap, there is no overarching strategy for the country and one of the things that we need are more entrepreneurs and business people. If you look at QMU covering four academies that are the basis of the critical to the future economy of the country, how much do you think we inculcate the spirit of entrepreneurialism in the curriculum? I think that we could do more. I think that I would accept that. I think that there are examples of good practice. I think that young enterprise or the schools that really embrace young enterprise and take it seriously, then you can have extremely good outcomes from that. The Use Philanthropy initiative is a valuable initiative. It is not just about entrepreneurship, but it touches on that. I think that we could go a good bit further. It is probably an area that a lot of teachers do not feel terribly confident in, because it is not something that they have been trained to develop. If you look at popular culture these days and the roles that prominent entrepreneurs play, such as Sir Alan Sugar and Richard Branson, there is probably a way to appeal to young people on that whole agenda. I think that there is a way to go. I think that it is a fascinating question, because so much about education is about putting things in boxes and entrepreneurialism is about thinking outside boxes. I absolutely agree with what Terry said. From the market's point of view, we do not have an entrepreneurial module that everybody does, but we have the concepts embedded in particular programmes. We now encourage business start-ups on the part of our students. We have about half a dozen this year. Surprisingly enough, you would expect them to be in healthcare while they are not. They are in drama and performance and the creative industries and some fascinating areas. The concept of this whole area does not necessarily always have to be about somebody setting up a new business. There will be great entrepreneurs within the public sector, probably within schools, maybe even within politics. It is about getting that inspirational person in front of a young person. If we can make sure that business people are in front of pupils, they will pick up the spark and they will get excited. Yes, do that, but there has to be something through the teaching mechanism of finding the entrepreneurs or at least exposing them to the opportunities. I guess that that is the role of the educator who is spending the time with pupils and seeing the ones who are behaving in a risk-taking way and encouraging those types of things rather than suppressing them. I would say that primary schools are much better at this than secondary schools. You get some fantastic examples of businesses being set up in primary schools and tied on to things like the eco-agenda or the whole range of different rights-respecting schools agenda. Often, you will see really vibrant examples of entrepreneurship where perhaps we do not do so well in secondary. George, do you have a quick supplement? I think that it is not so much just the entrepreneurial side of things as well. It is what Alan mentioned earlier about sports people—anything that can engage with whether it be the parents, whether it be someone who has got the credibility with the family to make that leap into education. Is that not the case that we could maybe look at that a wee bit differently to try and use sport on business people and all those people that we want young people to aspire to be like? Is it not a way that we can get them really involved in the educational process? There is a lovely very brief anecdote. Our head of outreach was in a primary school talking about the children's university and the opportunities that young people could get involved. Afterwards, there was a melee of the class and he said that the class parted and the class hard man walked towards them. He said that he would get fists like sledgehammers and he would not look at him and he just said, I do not suppose that my boxing would count, would it? The head of outreach said, well, let us go and talk to your boxing coach about it. He went the next day, spoke to the boxing coach with the young lad and found out that this young lad knew all about nutrition, all about a regime, all about discipline, all about timekeeping, all about a whole lot of things, but I had never thought of it in terms of learning. Thanks very much, convener. I was going to go back to a theme picked up by Gordon earlier on in terms of, I suppose, the qualities of opportunity and Gordon speaking up on the issue in relation to particular areas, whether or not the engagement of employers is more problematic because of the local economy, to give a couple of examples there, but it has been a theme or perhaps a criticism of the wood report if such a thing exists. A number of people have picked up at this point, if I can quote this Scottish Youth Parliament who is just one of a number, there is a significant risk of marginalising young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in the practical delivery of the recommendations, which could have no effect or an adverse effect on attainment. For example, the basic costs of sending a young person on good quality work experience may inhibit choice, and that was a point that you were making earlier on, James, in suggesting that those family relationships or parental relationships may open up doors that are not then open to others in that cohort. Is there a role that schools have to play in triaging the opportunities? People are doing things because they see an interest in it, as well as the more altruistic motives. Therefore, they may be predisposed to identify the higher-performing pupils and get them in for work experience when the opportunities that are available may be better for raising the attainment of others in that class group. How do we get around the situation in which, in a sense, the more able pupils are gravitating to the better work experience opportunities? I think that picking up on what Kevin said earlier, there is much greater reflection on the part of teachers. There is much less preciousness. There is much less. We can fix everything. Certainly, from our own experience of our work, not only through the children's university but through the academy, there was an openness in the part of teachers and a desire to get involved and work in partnership. I am not sure whether, five or ten years ago, that willingness to work in partnership, that triaging that you referred to, I do not think that that was there. I think that there is a lot of hope. That is a judgment that will be reached out by the schools and the employers in discussion rather than employers saying that this is what we have to offer and that this is what we need in return and that the schools are brokering that in a way that better reflects the interests of the individual pupil. I think that that is it. It needs a lot of in-depth knowledge about the needs and the abilities of the young people. You have the insights from the school, working with partners, careers advice, employers and their partners. It comes right down to knowledge about what would benefit that young person. I think that there is another dimension to this, which is that we should use our collective work with employers to benefit all sectors. The colleges as a sector have very strong employer engagement. The City of Glasgow had mentioned that they had 1,500 employers that they worked with in their submission in West Lothian in case we worked with around about 800 employers. In terms of our partnership with the school, that has got to be something that we could make more benefit from in terms of not keeping our employers to ourselves but making sure that they are involved with that whole skills pipeline development so that young people from school are coming on placements and then also working with the college. For employers, I think that that makes a much more joined-up approach to the skills development of young people. There are some great examples of some leading employers who are heavily investing in Mitsubishi, Shinnetsu, really investing in looking at those placements and opportunities right through from school, college and on into employment. It is not about employers for schools, employers for colleges, it is about employers that we all work to better effect. Sorry, I have a little bit of a check. If I could perhaps flip that round in that, presumably, there are challenges in areas of higher deprivation in terms of the ecology of businesses that may be able to engage, but, similarly, you will be aware of some concerns around the way in which the attainment fund is targeted at the SIMD-20 group of areas. What it does not do is pick up the areas of poverty and the attainment issues in those areas, which generally are perhaps more affluent, but where, in all parts of the country, there are pockets of poverty and individuals who perhaps need that support. Is that something that you see as a potential problem and, if so, are the things that we can do to perhaps link the funding to the individual rather than necessarily to the neighbourhood or the area? I am delighted that we are involved in the Scottish attainment challenge, but I am here representing ADES. ADES did have some questions about the distribution method for that in the sense that you have. I will give you an example. We are involved in the schools improvement partnership programme with Renfrewshire. The primary schools in our most deprived areas paired with the primary schools in the most deprived areas in Renfrewshire are not involved in the attainment challenge, but, in fact, the most deprived of the Renfrewshire schools are more deprived than the most deprived in Weston-Bartonshire. There are anomalies here, and I suppose that, statistically, the way to address the youngster's living in the most deprived area would be to get down to primary school level across the country. Areas like Fife, for instance, which have areas of significant affluence but also have areas of real poverty, so they also do not come into that. ADES has raised some questions about the distribution method. However, I think that it could provide us with a very interesting piece of work going forward over the next four years to look at what we can really do to address some of the attainment gap issues. Mary's question about the engagement of the colleges with the employers and the 800 employers. What skills development is Scotland doing? We work in West Lothian. We have a very positive partnership with Skills Development Scotland, and it is focused on supporting some of our programmes with employers, and it certainly works with us in terms of the modern apprenticeship places. As a college, we have a number of modern apprentices with Skills Development Scotland and some young students going through employability programmes. I can speak about our experience locally, which is very positive. We have touched on this, but I wanted to get to the bigger picture and how the implementation plan fits in with everything else. Already this session, the committee has looked at the early years task force, curriculum for excellence, teaching in Scotland's future, structural reform in colleges, the focus on youth employment, through opportunities for all and other initiatives, legislative reform and FENHE governance, etc. It is a nice easy question for you. What do you consider will be the light reduction in youth unemployment based on this plan? I do not think that in our regional investing youth group we have put a number on youth unemployment. We are generally looking at positive destinations, so that might include university or vocational qualifications, as people have used the term. There is not such a significant number in the north-east. From memory, there is something in the region of 600 young people at the moment without a positive destination. It would feel to me as though we could almost grab them and work with them on an individual basis. One of the things that Liam had alluded to earlier is that some of those young people have quite a different distance to travel than others. When we come back to careers advice and work experience, it is about trying to work with educators who are spending a lot more time with those young people to work out how long and in what process we need to go through with an employer to get them to that positive place. In a roundabout way of not answering your question at all, we have a relatively small number in our area. In some respects, with everything that is going on, if we could maintain that, it would be a fantastic result. We do see that as not being good enough and we are pretty committed to lowering that below the 600. Fascinating question. I would not want to put a figure on it, so I am not going to answer your question. However, I do think that it is interesting. One of the reasons that I am so enthusiastic about the whole agenda is that it has the potential to change Scottish society for the better. That sounds quite grandiose, but I genuinely believe that that is the case. If you look at the success criteria that is laid out in the final report, if we succeed, Scottish society will have been changed for the better. However, in terms of employment prospects for young people, this is something that education cannot deliver on its own. One of the things that has always struck me is that one of the entitlements and curriculum for excellence is support for a young person into a sustained positive destination. We can give all the support that we can, but if the sustained positive destinations are not there to support them into, that is where the issue lies. The ultimate delivery of that will succeed if we play our part, but if economic growth at a societal level, at a macroeconomic level, is delivered across Scotland, because unless the two marry up, we can have the best prepared workforce on the planet but without the sustained positive destinations for them to go to. I think that there is a larger societal challenge here, which is behind your question. Given your answers, I know that there is not a coherent education policy, and we talked about the pockets of good practice in earlier evidence this morning. How do we make this implementation plan work, and should it take importance over the rest of the pathways or plans that are already established or looking to be established? I think that that is a challenge. It has to articulate rather than be a bull tone or disrupt what is already in place and what is happening. At the same time, it is about taking something that is a grand strategy. How do we translate it to a local level, because I think that it will work if it is locally appropriate, and the partnership organisation that we were talking about earlier on. I think very carefully about how do we take something like this and translate it, so that it allows creativity, and it allows some of the examples that we have heard about the flexibility and so on, and it allows that to develop. Those involved at key decision levels, whether it is school, people working on local authority, employers, have to feel supported to take those decisions as well. If they want to be flexible, if they want to take risks and work in new ways, I think that culture has to run alongside this initiative. I think that very much the developing Scotland's young workforce builds on initiatives that are already well underway. We have been very clear that this builds on critical for excellence. It is not something different. It is not something dissimilar from that. It builds on what is already there. However, that said, I think that it needs to be driven forward relentlessly. In terms of delivering on those recommendations from Wood, there is commitment to, at least, the fact that this is a seven-year programme, because what it needs not to be is a short-term initiative or something that might be changing your minds about in two years' time. This seriously, as Terry said, is the most significant time of change for young people's opportunities. We are committing for the long term here and quite rightly. I think that that needs to be driven forward quite relentlessly. Liam McArthur, quick supplementary. Terry, you were saying there about the sustained positive destinations. Obviously, what we want to do is get this as right as we possibly can, as early as we can, and that, in terms of lifetime attainment, that is the best guarantee, even if it offers no absolute guarantee. Throughout the whole debate about youth employment, there has been the nagging feeling, particularly with the college sector, that we are dealing with a sector that enshrines the concept of lifelong learning. Businesses will not go belly up on a whim. With the best will in the world, they will come and go and those sustainable opportunities will only arise if we have a commitment to lifelong learning. A lot of people we are talking about here will come in and out of that learning process. Is there a need for us to continually reinforce that notion that it does not provide a guarantee? That does not mean that you will not come back into other learning or other stages and get that reinforced at the earliest point, as well as the notion that the hearing now is important for the life skills that will set you on a reasonable pathway? Yes. Going back to a point that James was making earlier, a lot of the employability skills training are generic skills and transferable skills. I think that that is going to be really important because it has become a truism in education that we are educating young people for jobs that have not been invented yet. Skills have to be transferable, but the fact that technology will continue to develop means that people are going to have to engage in lifelong learning if they are going to adapt to the change in society and the demands that different jobs and different employment patterns will make on them. I think that that is what we have to be involved in. It may be more a reflection of a political weakness that, while you are focusing on one thing as a priority, the danger is that you stop focusing as a priority on one other area. It is helpful if there is a message back that that element of lifelong learning, even if we get this right, that does not diminish the importance of lifelong learning. On lifelong learning in the workplace, our research suggests that 98 per cent of employers think that training and investment in training is a good thing, so I suggest that the 2 per cent of businesses who do not think that will be the ones that will go. The education sector can do is to get people to the place where they are in that pathway. Once they are in a job, it is over to the employers to be enlightened and invest in their own staff and see the benefits that that returns. On the whole, we are moving in a pretty good direction in that place. I guess that the only challenge is when we have economic down cycles that businesses think will keep investing in our staff because when we come out of it, we will be in a better place to push on, and that is probably something that we need to work on. I echo Terry's comments, which is absolutely lifelong learning at the heart of that, and we need not to forget all the parallel activity. Over the past few years in particular with the recession, there have been some very large-scale responses to redundancies across Scotland in which colleges have played a very significant role along with other partners. None of that has ever to be forgotten, and certainly if you did a straw poll around this room, as I put your hand up, if you are doing now what you thought you were going to be doing at 17, I imagine that that would be quite disparate around this room alone. Absolutely central to the central to the real learning of others. Thank you. This had better be small than we are, right? It is only to one person. I will tell you what it is. Over the past 10 years, the percentage improvement in attainment is in my favourite publication. Easton-Bartonshire improved attainment in the last 10 years by 15 per cent, which is commendable, but I wonder if Terry could tell us why Weston-Bartonshire only improved by 2 per cent. First of all, it depends on which measure you take. I can give you another figure, which is a selective document. There is another figure that indicates that we have improved by 10 per cent in the youngsters getting three-plus hires at the end of S6 in the past four years. In Weston-Bartonshire, if you look at the latest benchmarking data, which was published in December, the proportion of youngsters from SIMD deciles 1 and 2 gaining five-plus higher equivalents by the end of S6. For that statistic, we have the third top in Scotland, and only Easton-Bartonshire and East Renfrewshire are above us, which is quite a remarkable achievement given that the numbers of youngsters in SIMD deciles 1 and 2 in those two authorities are very small and the levels of deprivation of Weston-Bartonshire are very high. We can band these statistics around, but I think that I can show that there is significant and sustained improvement in a range of measures, not necessarily the ones that Audit Scotland chose to focus on. I will say 15 all at that stage. One final question. The Government has said that it will publish anual progress report on the work of implementing the developing Scotland's young workforce programme. I wonder if you had any suggestions, advice or comments that you wanted to make about what should be in that report, James? I suppose that we are slightly ahead of the game on this and that we have a regional investing youth group. At the end of year 1, which is only two months long for us, we will have a board in place. We will have had a series of working group meetings for work experience, careers and communications. Progress is moving. As we look towards the end of the first operational year once the executive team is in place, we would like to see that every single secondary school has a business partner, a formal business relationship. That type of measure starts to show that there is commitment from both sides to make a difference in this area. If we do not achieve that, I will be extremely disappointed. I think that both Barry and I are on the national programme board for developing the young workforce. Over the past few months, we have developed a programme or a series of programmes that should provide evidence for the annual report. We have the five different work streams, which have all been at very clear milestones and targets. I think that that will be part of it. I think that the work of the groups that James has referred to will also be important. I think that in the first year, it might be more of a narrative rather than a statistical report, because I think that it will take longer for the hard stats to really come through. A narrative about where we have got to in terms of particularly the five separate work streams, so that will cover employment and engagement, and it will cover what we are doing in the broad general education and the senior phase. There will be some statistical evidence on what the colleges are doing. I think that that should form the basis of it off the top of my head. No, I would support that. We have talked quite a lot about what we started with the conversation about measuring attainment. I would agree with Terry that it might be more of a narrative, and I would like to see information about partnerships, about collaboration, about what has been built upon, about some of the consistency that we have talked about this morning. We have also talked quite a lot about cultural shift, and I am not going to start opening up that debate as to how you measure that, but I would like some progress to be made in trying to identify how much of a cultural shift has been made. Thank you, Kevin. Coming from a research perspective, it is interesting to hear what we have just heard there, and I endorse those. I also expect to see a narrative given the ambitious scale of this, you expect to see evidence of infrastructure being put in place, systems being put in place, that will lead on to the maybe the more metric, the more quantitative indicators over time. I would like an annual report to pull out and highlight the real value being added by high quality partnership working across the five change teams, because we have said on the programme board none of this will be successful on isolation, so it really has to be how we pull on right across all the change teams for success. Thank you very much. I thank all of you for coming along this morning and giving your time. That was almost two hours, so we gave it a fair old go at that this morning, but it was very important that we started setting in to cover some of the broad themes, as well as some of the detail as we go forward on looking at the attainment gap. Thank you very much for your attendance today, and can I suspend the meeting briefly? Our final item today is petition PE1530. On 27 January 2015, the Public Petitions Committee referred petition PE1530 by Spencer Files on behalf of the Scottish Secular Society to this committee. The petition calls for the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to issue official guidance to bar the presentation in Scottish publicly funded schools of separate creation and of young earth doctrines as viable alternatives to the established science of evolution, common descent and time. Members have the clerk's note, which provides links to the petition and the previous consideration by the petition's committee. Can I ask members whether they have any comments or any points they want to raise at this stage or any action, any further action that the committee may or may not wish to take in relation to the petition? It is only a point of clarification that I would be interested in seeing some information about why other UK Administrations issued guidance that creationism and intelligent design should not be considered. I would just find that interesting. In relation to the paper that is prepared for the petition's committee in paragraph 14, it refers to the evidence from EIS and the Scottish Leaders Scotland. It suggests that neither believe that the guidance is necessary and just to find that by saying that teaching of creation is neither prevalent nor a serious problem in Scottish schools, which I am sure was meant as a reassurance, but the use of the word prevalence and serious problem as opposed to problem raised questions in me about the extent of cases where this is arisen. I do not think that I would necessarily support intervention by way of guidance because it tends to go against the grain of the way that ministers do and should interact with work in schools. I would have to observe that where it says EIS and the curriculum is a matter for teachers both individually and collectively and the legislative interference in the content of the curriculum is both undesirable and unnecessary. I would agree with that, but I would observe that in the recent past there has been controversy around items being placed on the recommended reading list for Scottish studies, which seems to move away slightly from that overarching principle. I think that it would be helpful to get the clarification that Mary has indicated, but I think that I would be reluctant to have ministers issuing guidance here, simply because we will be in a situation where there will be other areas where similar guidance is probably up. I was on the petitions committee when this first raised its head. While I am going along with the committee, I am minded to send both the secular society and the support creationism way with a message that Einstein said, everyone who is seriously interested in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifesting in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly superior to man and one in the face of which our modest powers must feel humble. I think that it should go away in a room and discuss that and just let everybody else go on with the curriculum the way it is. Okay, thank you for that. Any other contributions at this stage? I think that in my own view, I am quite happy to take on both the suggestions. I am sure that the committee is of Mary and Liam in terms of finding a bit more information. I certainly would accept what Liam said about the nature, if you like, of Scottish education and the fact that the directors are not issued in this sense in the same way that they may be elsewhere. That may be the difference that Mary was asking about. The Scottish Government has made quite clear that they do not issue guidance in this sense, so I would certainly accept that. The one thing that I would mention to the committee is that, obviously, in advance of this petition coming to the committee, I have been forwarded by a member of the public, a letter that they have received from their MSP, which was obviously written there on behalf of the minister. The minister wrote to Eileen Campbell MSP and it contains, I think, quite a useful paragraph in the letter. I want to make members aware of what it says in relation to school science teaching. Guidance is provided by Education Scotland in line with curriculum for excellence. The guidance does not identify creationism as a scientific principle, and consequently it is not and should not be part of science learning and teaching. Likewise, Education Scotland does not identify creationism as a scientific theory or a topic for inclusion within the curriculum. Therefore, creationism should not be taught within science lessons. I think that that is quite a clear statement there by the minister, Alasdair Allan, on the issue. Given the questions that have been raised, I think that maybe it is appropriate to ask the committee what their views are that we write to the Government to ask them about the difference between what is happening elsewhere in the UK and Mary's question about what is happening across the UK. Just for clarity on that, I think that it is to do with the different traditions in the education system and also asking them to just confirm their position as lead-out in the letter, I think, quite fairly by Alasdair Allan on 26 February. I am entirely supportive of that. It would be helpful perhaps to inquire whether or not they have a sense as to how prevalent or not or how serious a problem or not this is. I mean, in the sense that it will be up to local authorities to take action with those concerns that are raised, but there has obviously been one very prominent example where concerns have been raised, but I think that there are others and getting a sense as to how widespread those issues are and how frequently they have arisen in the past would also be helpful. Is the committee agreed then, if the letter is any other point, is the committee agreed to write? Sorry, Mary. If I may, can I just ask if the letter that you read out, which is fine, but you have said that the Scottish Government does not offer guidance, but that seemed pretty clear to me. That was from Education Scotland? From Education Scotland, aha. Is that letter to this committee or would that letter go out to all local authorities? No, no, that was obviously a letter to, well, Eileen Campbell was the MSP from the minister. I assume that she was raising a question on behalf of a constituent. With the minister. She got this response, which she passed to the constituent who then sent it to me. Okay, so that would have been a few years ago then that she got that letter. No, this is the 26th of February 2015. Okay, all right, it was on behalf of a constituent, aha. I just wonder, given that the letter is absolutely clear and I'm fine with that, will that letter be available to all local authorities or? Because it is quite clear in what it's saying. Well, I think that, no, this is a letter obviously from the minister to an individual MSP who's acting on behalf of a constituent, but I think that— State's the Government's position quite clearly. I think that it's quite clear, but I think that for clarity, if we ask as a committee, then that letter would come back to the committee and the position would be available for everybody to see rather than use an individual letter about a constituent. That would be very helpful. And I think that that's why I'm suggesting that we write to the Government about the three points. One is about the clarity of the position, which I've referred to the 26th of February letter to an individual member of the public. Secondly was the question that you raised about the difference in cultures, to be honest, in terms of the information and guidance elsewhere in the US and the UK. And the third was the issue raised by Liam about prevalence or otherwise. That's fine. Are members content? Okay, that's agreed. We'll take that course of action and with that that's the end of the Theresa Jender. Thank you very much for your attendance and co-operation and I close the meeting.