 Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 24th meeting of the Education and Culture Committee in 2015. Can I remind everybody that they must have their phones and electronic devices switched off? They can and sometimes do interfere with the sound system, preferably if they were off, but at very least have them on silent. First of all, I have apologies from John Pentland MSP, who cannot be here today, and Liam McArthur, who is trying to be here today but is having the usual problems with his flights from Orkney. If it helps us, on behalf of the committee, he says that whoever provides the flight to Orkney could help Liam McArthur and get him here more often, but Liam is trying to get here, he may not make it, but I know that he is annoyed by that. He is not here because of his flight problems. The first item is for us to decide whether to take items 3 and 4 in private. Are members agreed? Yes. The next item is an evidence session on Education Scotland continuing our work on examining the spending decisions and the outcomes that are delivered by some of the key bodies in our remit. I welcome to the committee Dr Bill Maxwell and Alasdor Dillani. I welcome to you both this morning. I believe that Bill has some opening remarks that he wants to make. I do. Thank you, convener. I start by saying that we very warmly welcome this opportunity to meet with the members of the Education and Culture Committee today to engage in discussion about our recent work and the emerging priorities for the period ahead. I hope that today's discussion will give us the opportunity to set out some of the detail of the exciting and innovative work that Education Scotland is carrying out to contribute to improving Scottish education and the achievement of Scotland's collective national ambition for education. That is the ambition to ensure that Scottish education achieves excellence with equity for all learners, regardless of their individual needs and their social background, and that public confidence in education is high. I believe that the creation of Education Scotland in July 2011 was a bold and progressive step that has given us a unique form of national improvement agency, one that is able to capitalise on powerful synergies between evaluation, development and support functions, which were previously provided by a range of separate bodies in less clearly integrated and coherent ways. It is a model of improvement agency that, particularly while suited to helping our education system, makes the transition from being a good system to being one that is truly great. An agency that, in many ways, reflects what is increasingly becoming known as the Scottish approach to public service improvement. The range of core functions that we provide can perhaps most easily be summarised in terms of our five main outward-facing strategic objectives, each of which represents a key area for our work. First, we provide national leadership for development and support of the curriculum, including learning teaching and assessment practice, most obviously through our lead on the implementation of curriculum for excellence, but also through leading on the development of national guidance in other areas such as adult learning, for example, or community learning and development practice. Secondly, we play a national role in promoting high-quality professional learning and leadership among education practitioners, providing resources, facilities and professional learning opportunities on a broad front. Thirdly, building on Scotland's impressive tradition of promoting self-evaluation and improvement in education, we undertake a whole variety of activities designed to enhance the capacity of front-line education providers to drive continuous improvement in their own performance. That ranges from the more obvious, such as how good is our family of toolkits for self-evaluation, how good is our school, etc. To the more subtle, such as the experience gained by serving practitioners who join us and work alongside inspectors as we look at practice out with their own areas. Fourthly, we continue to place a strong focus on providing independent professional evaluation of the quality of education across Scotland through our programmes of establishment and service inspections and through national thematic reviews. That continues to be crucial in providing assurance and in providing a strong basis of evidence that we can use to promote the spread of effective practice across the system. Finally, drawing on our uniquely rich evidence-based inspections and all our other work, we have a crucial role in providing ministers with policy and policy colleagues and other national bodies with high-quality professional advice to feed into their decisions and their policymaking. Those five functions are distinct, but they are interdependent, and they can complement each other powerfully if we plan and manage them well. We aim to provide a balanced blend of all five functions to support the improvement of quality education at every stage from the early years through to lifelong learning, working in collaboration with partners appropriate to the sector. Having all of those functions within the one organisation, we can strategically shift our resources and our priorities to suit the current needs in any sector or at any point in time. Over the past four years, I believe that that certainly enabled us to play a more effective role in driving the implementation of key programmes of reform and driving improvement across all the areas in which we work. Of course, in recent times, we have made a huge commitment in particular to supporting the implementation of curriculum for excellence through a key phase in its development, as CFE has become more increasingly embedded across the early phase in the broad general education and as the first new national qualifications were delivered to pupils and students in the senior phase across Scotland. However, there are many other initiatives in which our teams have played an equally important role in close alignment with curriculum for excellence work. We have worked extensively, for example, on the developing young workforce programme within a focus on improving work experience, career education and, generally, improving more coherent vocational pathways into employment through the senior phase and beyond. I believe that our contribution to informing the development of policy continues to grow. Looking beyond CFE, teaching Scotland's future and developing the young workforce, there are many other examples that I could cite from our role in developing and implementing the new youth strategy, the adult learning statement of ambition to more specific areas such as Gaelic education, Scottish language and contributing to ministerial subgroups on child sexual exploitation. We continue to respond to sometimes rapid changes in the policy landscape. Indeed, in the last year, we have been closely involved in two major new initiatives that were announced through the last two programmes for government, both designed to achieve a decisive move towards breaking the link between social background and poverty and attainment, which has been a persistent feature of our education system for far too long. We are working in close partnership with our policy colleagues in learning the electorate to take forward the Scottish attainment challenge and the national improvement framework. Those are key priority areas for our work and will be for some time ahead. The issue that they are addressing is one of the defining challenges of our age and how to ensure that all learners in Scotland can achieve their full potential regardless of their social circumstances. With all that in mind, today's committee session comes at a good time for us as we are beginning to look forward to the conclusion of our first three-year strategic planning cycle. We are about to start a process of wide consultation about our strategic direction for the three years beyond 2016, so it feels particularly timely to be meeting with the committee to engage in dialogue about our contribution thus far and about the sort of priorities that we will be focusing on going forward. Thanks again for the invitation and I look forward to responding to the questions that the committee wishes to raise. Thank you very much, Bill. A lot of stuff in there and a lot of stuff in your submission that you sent in, so thank you for that. I'm just going to go straight to members now for questions and I'm going to start with Chick Brody. Thank you, convener. Good morning. I have to apologise if I can nip out and then come back at the committee about half past 10. I wonder if I can ask about the organisational city after the merger. In your submission, there was mention that when ES was created in July 2011 through the various mergers, it found that it sits within the director general of learning and justice portfolio. Why was that decided that it should sit within that? Why not? Direct communication? I know that you will have direct communication with the ministers, but what role does the director general of learning justice play in terms of your organisation? We certainly have direct lines of accountability to the minister. As an executive agency, which was the constitutional position that was decided best suited education Scotland, it was also, I have to say, exactly the same structure. Yes, we did input the discussion around that. Ultimately, it's a ministerial decision, but we did discuss that. It's exactly the same relationship that I have to say that HM and spectra of education had prior to the merger also with the same relationship to the director general of learning justice, for example. There's a rather arcane title called the Fraser figure, which is technically the role that the director general learning justice plays in relation to the agency. We engage with that family of policy directorates to help to keep alignment with policy and to help to make sure that our advice is also going in where it can do most use. Ultimately, the director general has a role—it's laid out in her framework document in quite clear terms—but the director general has a role in advising ministers on whether the work that we are proposing to do is aligned in his view with the priorities of ministers and of the policy department. Forgive me, I don't understand that. In terms of the Fraser figure, it sounds more like corporal Fraser than anybody else. You have a huge role in promoting education in Scotland. Why does it need to have a conduit through the director general of learning in his portfolio? I would say that all public bodies are sponsored through portfolios of one director general or another. The executive agency status just means that we are, in a sense, more closely part of the family than a typical NDPB would be, although they are like SQA or SFC. They are nonetheless accountable through a director general, but in a different way. The executive agency link with the Fraser figure role, from my point of view, means that we are better connected and better plugged in to the development of policy at an early stage within Government and the ability to play our role in feeding evidence into that process. That is the point. You are feeding evidence in through another channel to the minister. Cabinet Secretary, I have no doubt that you meet the minister quite often. What we will want to understand is who calls the shots in terms of, for example, the framework document in 2012 said that education in Scotland will increase the pace of improvement across the whole of our education system. How does the additional link add value to what you are trying to achieve? It is always helpful for us to be closely aligned with Government policy. As you say, we have close and regular links with ministers directly. There is no sense in which the membership of being part of the family of the DG gets in the way of that. On the contrary, it can be quite supportive to have a clear understanding within the director general portfolio and the director general himself and his fellow directors in that area of what we are taking forward and how we are working to drive that improvement that we all seek. It does not get away at all of our direct role with ministers. On that basis, in terms of performance outcomes, who does the measurement of education in Scotland? How do you determine or who determines your delivering against your ambition, as explained in the 2012 framework document? How and who and who knows which improvements in Scottish education are the result of the work of Education Scotland or other factors? Who is quoting on the nail? Certainly mine, but as an accountable officer for the agency. I will say a word in a minute about how we have developed stronger ways of trying to get external evaluation and feedback on the performance of the agency and how effective we are being in driving improvement in the system. Of course, we work through other people. We do not, at our first hand, deliver education directly, but we work through local authorities and a range of other people. Fundamentally, the agency is all about supporting improvement and influencing. That presents challenges in getting a full account of exactly how effective our work is being, but we have done quite a bit of work on that. The first thing to say would be that it is very difficult to disentangle what any single contributor their role is in achieving improvement, because there are lots of players in the education field, but that is exactly what we are trying to do through something called contribution analysis, trying to understand what our contribution is as a national agency alongside the other players, including local authorities, schools and whatever the areas are. In terms of the work that we have been doing over the past two years, we have been looking at creating a set of clear outcomes for us as an agency and then defining how we will gather evidence against those outcomes to prove that we are actually making the impact that we want to do, and in amending our programmes of work in light of that. That is still work at early stages. It is a very challenging process to do. We can easily tell whether our work is well received because we systematically gather that kind of information, but there is a different question about whether it actually makes an impact and makes a difference on the education system. I wonder if you would give me a couple of examples. Let us see your papers as you work with a whole range of bodies. How does that contribution analysis work in relation to independent schools and the likes of SDS? How does that impact your outcome analysis? The first thing is that we have to work in partnership with an independent school sector, or SKIS, an umbrella organisation for independent schools, but we work more directly with independent schools because there are fewer other players in that area. We would have a set of objectives in relation to independent schools and outcomes that we are trying to achieve. We would gather direct evidence. An example would be that we are doing far more work in terms of following up after inspection after a period of time—for example, after six months or a year, going back and asking what contribution did inspection play in the improvements that have taken place in a particular school or service? That is something that we are increasingly doing. We are applying that same process to things such as the events that we hold, the resources that we produce, because although they may be well received, what we want to do is make sure that they are actually making a difference on the front line. In independent schools, that is more direct. We work with SDS through, for example, careers information and guidance. Obviously, we would sit down collectively together and we are possible to agree what we are trying to do and what our respective roles are. That helps us to do that contribution analysis. What is it that we are putting into the system alongside the other key players? We would have some overarching outcomes that we are trying to achieve, but, obviously, within that, what is it that we are particularly trying to do that is our contribution towards that? Mr Dillain, you just said that you would sit down and agree with SDS where possible. Sounded like a caveat of some sort of myth. Where is it not possible? Where are the problems? Is there a clash? Is there a gap? Is there an overlap? Why did you say where possible? No, I just meant that different organisations will have different objectives overall. We have collective areas of interest, and we will have specialist areas of interest. That was simply the caveat. Obviously, SDS has a particular role in remit and responsibility, and so do we. So there are areas of overlap, and that is where we would sit down and agree what our collective contribution is and, therefore, our individual contribution to that. Okay. I just wanted to clarify that, but it was rather than something more interesting. Can I take you—you've begun to talk about your breadth of activity a little bit, so let's move into that area. You do a whole range of things as Education Scotland, and I would suggest that, over the recent times, it's been increasing the range of activities that the organisation has. However, the EIS, for example, Express Concern, stated that the support function that Education Scotland inherited from LTS has been marginalised in significant ways. Do you agree with it or disagree with it? I would now. I was surprised to see that comment. We have put a huge amount of effort into the curriculum development work, which would traditionally have been LTS work. Indeed, that has been a major priority for us in recent times. I am not sure exactly where that comment is coming from. Certainly, we flex and continue to focus on the evaluation and the support side, but support has been very prominent lately, particularly in the school sector. You don't understand or you don't agree with the EIS comment about the transition between learning teaching in Scotland and yourselves? No, I don't believe that we've lost anything of the capacity that was available— Why do you think they said that? I know that, later in their submission, they have positive things to say about some of the specifics around that, where we have worked together, for example, to tackle the bureaucracy agenda in primary schools. Why do they say that? I'm not sure whether they simply hark back to a day when they could engage with two separate organisations—perhaps that felt more substantial to them than engaging with one—but we do work closely with the EIS, and some of our more—we've had some good successful events recently where we have fielded staff with the EIS to work on some of the national priority issues around CFE to good effect. Is it perhaps because there's been—certainly there's a risk, there's a danger or perhaps even an accusation—that the organisation, Education Scotland, has been spread too thin? Given the breadth of activity that we've discussed? Like all organisations, we are certainly having to focus hard as we are working with our reduced core budget overall. However, I think that the benefits of being able to engage right across from early years through to lifelong learning are very great and well worth preserving. Hence, I think that the focus we have to the ability to range across those areas requires us to be very careful about where we place our resources. It means that we can't just continue. Perhaps this is some of the nostalgic stuff from LTS. We can't just continue turning out resources in areas that aren't a priority area, which we might once have done when resources were more available. However, I think that it is really important that we have that broad spectrum of view of the education system—zero to 19 and beyond into adult learning. I guess that the inspection programme that is out across all areas of the country is not the case with the developmental activity. I would simply disagree with them on that. There's a range of examples that we could field around work that we're doing as far north as Shetland and indeed to Orkney, if Liam might have come across, but we spread across. I think that they might be confusing the fact that our staff are predominantly based in the central belt, but nonetheless we maintain offices around Scotland in Vanessa Aberdeen and elsewhere, and all our staff range across Scotland. They don't necessarily work where they're based by any means. We have a range of—we could happily elaborate on, if you wish—specific examples in Aberdeenshire and Shetland and other areas where specific support activity is going on strongly. You don't have any concerns that have been expressed in some of the comments to us about the areas of the country where—let's put it in a positive way—your support and development should be further enhanced. It's very bespoke. There's always areas in which we will flex our resources to spend a little more time in some authorities than others to address priorities with them. We're doing a lot of work in the borders, for example, to move to the other end of the country, too, at the moment, very successfully working with the new head of education there to address issues across border schools. We will bespoke and customise our support offer in every local authority area, and we do that through our partnership agreements with local authorities, which are negotiated annually. Is it your view that the organisation has expanded in a logical, sensible and strategic fashion, or has it been a bit more ad hoc? Is that an unfair criticism that the expansion has been slightly ad hoc? It's unfair. We have had a lot of work to do from the merger to create the ability to manage our resources more strategically, having inherited resources from several sources, but having done that, I think that over the past two or three years in particular, we've developed the ability to be much more strategic in the way we focus and move around resources. Probably the most recent example of that is the way that we've been able to re-prioritise and focus and bend our resources to pick up the work on the attainment challenge and the national improvement framework in a very rapid fashion. That's the final question from me. If you don't mind, you talk about synergies, efficiencies, having a broad overview of the whole system. Can you give us some concrete examples of those synergies and efficiencies and how they have directly benefited learners? Yes, I certainly can. I think that they occur at three levels. Alasher has got to pick up some of the concrete examples, but for me it can happen at the level of the individual establishment or service in which we can combine evaluation and follow that through with specific support for that service or school or college or wherever to help them and drive their improvement. We've got examples of that. We also have at local authority level where we've engaged clearly with the local authority that has local issues where we have helped to identify and evaluate those issues but then moved in to help support. Thirdly, it can happen at national level where we pick up producer national thematic reports such as we did recently in technologies and move in a programme of support in the aftermath of what we've found, what we've been able to identify as the key issues in that particular area of the curriculum. If you want to illustrate more. Yes, one of the key areas where we've managed to balance resources between ourselves and local authorities are through the local partnership agreements, because what that allows us to do is to come to an agreement at each local authority level about the strengths of that local authority area and what areas are improvement at and then make bespoke contributions to that because it may well be that the local authority itself or a neighbouring local authority has a strength in that area and so can make a development itself. It may well be that they're looking for support from us or that we can broker from another agency and so in that way we make sure that what we don't do is apply the same model of approach or whatever it is that we want to develop across all 32. It's actually bespoke to each of the local authority areas in the schools and colleges and services, et cetera, which are within that area. It's a good example of where we are maximising what is limited resources available to all of us to improve the quality in a local area. Thank you, Gordon MacDonald. I want to move on to the subjects of expenditure over the last few years. I noticed in 2014-15 that you had a budget over spend of £3.7 million. How does that compare to previous years' out turns? To some extent, that reported over spend is a presentational technical issue because it's primarily down to a predicted amount of resource that was required for glow and the development of glow at that time. In previous years, a transfer of money came in so that it didn't show within the accounts in the same way but fundamentally the same process happened. Just to explain where that comes from. Just to be clear, in previous years you reported an underspend for the three previous years, is that right? Yes, that's right indeed. The first two years, in fact, we were dealing with quite a complex accounting scenario where the merger of all the previous organisations and one of which was an NDPVA for us, and the other was in the civil service and was still being rationalised to a large extent. Indeed, we were going through significant reductions of staffing, but that was the scenario. I could just contribute one further thing. It is complicated because, as an executive agency, our budget is part of the ELL portfolio. The budget is managed at that level, but we have to report to our own accounts because we are an executive agency, which makes it more complicated. To give you figures, we have made efficiency savings of 6 per cent, 6 per cent, 8 per cent and 3 per cent over the past four years, but that is a contribution to the overall portfolio. It is less an underspend, if you see what I mean, rather than our contribution to efficiency savings that are required to take place. That took us through from 1112 to 1415. In between your final outturn of 2013-14 and your final budget of 2014-15, you had an increase of 5 per cent, yet you still managed to produce an overspend that year despite getting a 5 per cent increase in your budget. What were the reasons for those overspends? I have to separate out again. We have a core budget and we have predicated funding that comes in during the year. Our core budget over the years, if you take the core and they are not directly comparable because of the four agencies coming together, but at 2010-11, just prior to the merger, we had £40.3 million of a core budget. Last year, that was £21.8 million of a core budget. That is a reduction from the year before of £23.3 million of the core budget. During the year, we were asked to take on further activity and on some of the occasions we were given additional in-year funding for that. The in-year funding has gone up, so in that period, it went up from £11.7 million to £13.6 million. Those are predicated funding and quite a large chunk of that is grant money. As it comes to us, we issue it to other agencies as well, so it is not even money that we have any control over. In our briefing paper, there was an explanation for your overspend relating to ICT in learning, Scottish and school-improving partnership programmes, VAT liability and GLO. What was the main reason for those overspends? Again, they are not overspends in as much as at the very beginning of the year they were scored as precious on the portfolio. We knew right from the start that the money was not there to deliver on those programmes. That is a standard practice across the whole of the portfolio, given that efficiency has occurred during the year. Those figures are correct. Those were the four areas that we had, including the provision for VAT liability, which is an on-going dispute with HMRC. What are the cases of that dispute? How did that arise? It is because HMRC took a view that, if we use secondeas, we were liable to VAT. In previous times, they had not said that that was the case. Our local authorities have taken that case up with HMRC, and we are still pursuing that and do not have a final resolution. We have to make a provision just in case that comes to the fact that HMRC did £1 million. Adding that up, that was £4.5 million. We could have taken a transfer mid-year when the portfolio knew that it was able to cover that, but we did not. What we did not want to do was take money from other areas of the portfolio when we felt that we still had efficiencies that we could make ourselves. We managed to achieve 700,000 additional efficiencies during that period until the end of the year, which took it down to 3.8. However, the problem was that, because of our accounting processes, it shows that we were overspent in our accounts, whereas that is across the portfolio that was covered and managed at the time. I am just trying to understand how they came about. I understand the VAT situation that they had to provide for £1 million because of the potential change in ruling. In terms of, say, ICT in learning, when you look at the figures, you had an in-year transfer for ICT learning of £5 million, but looking at your accounts it says that you had an ICT infrastructure cost of £3.6 million. That would suggest that you had an in-year transfer higher than what you actually spent in ICT, yet you are saying that part of the reason for your overspent is because of ICT. Again, it is complicated. The ICT in learning programme is a joint programme between ourselves and learning directorate in government, so it is managed across those boundaries as a single programme. At the beginning of the period of that programme, it was understood, and it involves glow, for example, that there was a requirement to actually redo, glow to update it, and that the programme overall, therefore, knew that it needed to run higher than the original programme, spend at the spending review in a living and set aside. That programme jointly across ourselves was managed within that budget, and it stayed within that budget. It is just about which account codes were used to pay for what, that the transfers are done, because at the moment the programme is being transferred to us in its entirety from 1 April. There was a period of transfer where we were paying more from our accounts than it was being paid for from learning directorate account codes. It is just a technicality again as to how those things are dealt with. Our overall liability was £2.8 million in that area that we knew was over and above what the programme had initially set out to achieve, but that was what was agreed between ourselves and the learning directorate in government as a total programme cost for that programme, as a joint programme. In terms of glow, in the two previous years, again comparing your development costs for glow and what you got in your transfers that were related to glow, you substantially underspent on those two previous years on glow to the tune of about £4.3 million. Now you said that you operate, according to the submission to the committee, you operate a zero-base budgeting approach, so why was a nothing allocated for glow in 2014-15, and you spent £4 million so that was that £4 million the previous years cumulative underspend brought forward, or why was it not budgeted for in 2014-15? I am not sure that I quite understand the question. I think that part of the confusion with that is that some of the resources that are transferred in for us to do glow is to meet contribution of our core staffing and various resources that we have, which would not be perhaps particularly visible in our accounts as going out again, because some of the resources that we take in, we use to pay contractors for work, which goes out, and that is the bit that would be clearly transpired. The immediate transfer includes staff costs, and on the accounts you absorb that into the heading for staff costs. That only leaves the other point. If you operate zero-base budgeting, and you spent £4 million on glow in 2014-15, why was a no budget for glow in 2014-15? We operate zero-base budgeting for all of our programmes, apart from the digital learning and teaching programme, because it is a joint programme with learning directorate. Our contribution was established from the beginning, and so that money was set aside. We had a set-aside amount of money for our contribution to that programme. Our zero-base budgeting approach for all our other pieces of work just means that every year what we do is that we make sure that we do not have just a historical spend, we actually review what is required at that point in time for that coming year. The digital learning and teaching programme was a longer term programme where we had a commitment over a period of years. Can you just say a wee bit more about what the school improvement partnership programme is? It is a programme that we do together with Glasgow University, which is based on collaborative work between schools. What it tries to do is to promote collaboration between and within schools across boundaries. That could be across sectoral boundaries or geographic boundaries. It was based on international research, which the Glasgow University worked with us to look at how we could implement that in Scotland. We were trying it out as a programme to understand how that would work in Scotland. We are a small country, but there are still quite a few boundaries that get in the way of people collaborating. We have written up an interim report, and now a final report that was launched at the Scottish Learning Festival to understand how we would promote that work going forward. It should be embedded to be honest, as part of the way that we do business in Scotland. However, this was a pilot project to understand what was required. A couple of questions about the budgeting. Your budget for grants, grant payments to external organisations, increased from £1.8 million in 1112 to £5.9 million in 1415. Quite a substantial, quite a steep increase over those short number of years. Can you provide us some background and the reasons for that? That is the direct consequence of a transfer of responsibilities from core policy directorates in the Scottish Government for grants around about youth and adult learning territory, where we agreed that it made more sense for the agency now to manage directly the relationship with a range of organisations to receive grants. It includes youth link, for example. All the strategic funding partnerships, which were administered through ourselves, used to be administered by Government themselves, but they were administered through ourselves. No, that is fine. It is a rationalisation. Secondly, just in terms of the end-year transfers, the respecting rights, nothing in 1213, nothing in 1314, £1.6 million in 1415, again, what is that? I need to get back to you with exactly what that is for. It is the same process, I am sure. We have been looking at a whole range of areas with policy directorates in the Scottish Government as to where it makes more sense for particular relationships and grant programmes to lie. We talked about the youth one earlier, but that was an example of that in that territory. Thank you very much. It is probably the inclusion for all grants. That is what that actually is, although it would have to go back and double-check. Is it nothing to do with the rights-respecting school stuff? No, I do not think that that would be to that order. We are involved in promoting that work directly ourselves, but it would not have that kind of funding attached to it. I am sure that you are right that it is in fact the access. It would have to be great to us afterwards, but the detail of that would be beautiful. Mark, thank you for that. You mentioned about the flexibility and responsiveness of the organisation. What has been the financial impact of that flexibility particularly around the attainment challenge? What has been the financial impact on your core work as a result of your responding to that? We are still in the process of working through exactly where we put resources in terms of the attainment challenge, but we are certainly one of the big commitments that we took on, for example, was to ensure that there will be an attainment adviser available for every local authority in Scotland. We now have the 32 in place and we should have the other two in place by the end of November on schedule. That has an impact, as you identify particularly, as a number of those individuals will be recruited from outside, but some will also be our own staff where we have capacity. We will refocus that capacity on them playing a part-time role for some of the smaller local authorities, for example. Partly, it is about refocusing our own resources through using our business planning system to see where we can stop doing something or downsize a piece of activity to free uptime from staff. In other cases, it is about freeing up resources in order to bring in succondes for a programme. We always run a healthy number of succondes that has to be said, I think, around six-day-ish. Succondes to support specific programmes of work gives us a lot of flexibility, because it means that succondes can come on-stream but also off-stream as priorities shift and change. Have you identified any of those areas where you said that you would be downscaling the work to support the attainment fund? One of the strategic shifts that we are currently making, and without wishing to suggest that curriculum for excellence is all over and that it is all in place fully needing no support, we are a huge hump in terms of the provision of support for a CFE, new qualifications around about NQ5, etc., and then higher over the past couple of years. As that has moved on, we are still having a more targeted programme of support, but we have been able to release some resources from that territory to refocus on the attainment challenge. Pushing any event to me is really the next step in extracting the full benefits of the new curriculum. It is beginning to drive out improvement for the young people from more disadvantaged backgrounds. The other question that I had was just on the impact on your organisation of having such a large percentage of your budget made up of in-year transfers. How does that affect your strategic planning, your financial planning? Normally, organisations would expect to plan going forward on the basis of spending review periods. How is such a big in-year transfer affected by that ability? It does make it more complex because it reduces our degrees of freedom to some degree. We have much more control over our core spending with the in-year transfers. It certainly means that we have to be ready to shift during a year. In fact, the school improvement partnership programme that Alistair was talking about earlier was an example of that, where we took on a pressure as a ministerial announcement and decision mid-year effectively to set up this new programme of school improvement partnership work. We agreed to take that on as a pressure and try to absorb it during the year as far as possible, but the portfolio ultimately was able to absorb it if not. We can adapt to reasonable-sized adjustments in that way in-year. Beyond that, we need to look at year-on-year adjustment to our spend in order to accommodate larger new adjustments. That is where we tend to focus those in a year. For example, taking over the grants for youth—as you say, it is quite a big chunk, £5 million or whatever grants we are now giving out—we would time that for the following year and get our budget adjusted to suit from the following year. As part of our budget scrutiny going forward, would you prefer to see fewer in-year transfers on the budget to be set out clearly in advance? I think that it is very helpful. The more it can be set out in advance, I am realistic enough to know that politics is not going to be perfectly adjusted to setting our budget cycle. We need to be ready to adjust and respond when a new initiative comes along that would benefit from our input. The last thing that I want to be doing is saying that we cannot help with that until next year if it is going to be far too late to make a significant impact in that kind of area of work. Ideally, the more long-term advance warning that we have of issues coming up and needing significant resource from us, the better. I will ask you a final question on the grants thing. The increase that we have seen over the last few years up to £5.9 million in 2014-15, is that the end of it? Is that plateauing now or is it going to carry on increasing? You are shaking your head, Mr Delaney. Negotiations on going could possibly see further transfers or such responsibilities to us as an agency that would see that figure increasing. To what? Probably not on that scale. Oh, nothing on that scale, I do not think of it. I don't know what you have a bit of an idea. Yeah, it could take it up to about £9 million. Right, so that is a substantial chunk of money that we are currently negotiating. One point something up to nine points something. Over quite a short period of time. Okay, when is that likely to happen? From the first of April next year. Fundamentally, it is not particularly problematic for us if it makes sense. You know, it is money that we can manage through. We have set up a grant managing team within the organisation. If you are going from one point, with all due respect, I accept that if you are distributing £1, then you are distributing £10, it is the same process that is involved. But if it is going from the figures that we have been talking about, just over one to nine something in terms of millions, that surely requires perhaps more staff, greater time, more input, more accounting, checking, etc. That must be a cost on the organisation. That is a cost to the organisation. We have reallocated some staff to create a centralised grants team, and that ensures consistency across these grants schemes, which is a good thing. That is a benefit that actually means that we are approaching all of these different schemes that sometimes similar agencies are applying for in a very consistent way. However, it does put pressure on the people who are deciding on the grants, I think, or educational staff as well, because then there is far more volume for them to do. But some of these grants are large. Some are over £1 million in their own and a single grant, so again it can be that some are very small. To be honest, the bigger ones are easier than taking on responsibility for much smaller ones, because obviously the volume of each individual case is much higher. Government, to be fair, recognises that there is an on-cost that comes with us taking on these grants to increase the administrative capacity to deal with them. I would like to look at aspects around the autonomy of Education Scotland. Education Scotland is an executive agency that is staffed by civil servants and that is accountable to ministers. The submission from EIS expresses concern about the increasingly politicised role of Education Scotland. Again, questions remain about the independence of the inspection process and its relationship to government policy. How would you respond to that? I am surprised to see that. Fundamentally, our constitutional position because Education Scotland, in comparison to HMS Spectra of Education, for example, before the merger is exactly the same. From my point of view, the degree to which we are involved in closely working with government is a good thing because it helps us to inform government policy and provide a good source of evidence into that. However, there are very clear firewalls that preserve our independence. The familiar mantra that we need to be able to report without fear or favour is very well written into our constitution, if you like, through our framework document in particular. That is partly why we have a specific role accountable to the chief executive as director of inspection. We have a senior member of staff as director of inspection who preserves the integrity of the inspection process and various processes around that, which Alasdair, as he is, director of inspection could explain a little more, if you wish, about how that works. I also see it very clearly understood by ministers that the last thing that they need really is an agency that just tells them what they want to know rather than an agency that really can generate good independent evidence and provide that to them through a variety of briefing sources. Personally, I feel that it is very clear how we report and evaluate independently. We have had, in practical, realistic terms, a specific challenge where an inspection or a piece of evaluated work that we have undertaken has been challenged on the grounds that our independence had been lost in the process. Given the perception from the EIS, are there any ways that you can avoid such accusations in the future by putting in place different processes, different firewalls? Is there a way to improve that distancing? We are always keen, and I am very conscious that not only being independent is important, but everybody recognising and understanding that that is the case is also important. We will continue to engage with the EIS and others. We have regular meetings with the EIS, and they are direct one-to-one meetings to reissue their views directly. Have they raised this with you before? Not strongly of late, I have to say, but of course it has always been. I think that it always was, prior to Education Scotland with the inspectorate, an area of discussion, because there will be times when the EIS is promoting a particular view of the world. That would happen within any context, whereas ours might be different, and it might be more aligned with Government, or it might not, but that is something that we work with. Perhaps another facet of that. There is a society of Edinburgh that curied the rationale of carrying out inspection and curriculum development. There are inherent risks in a body that has both policy development and quality assurance responsibilities. How would you respond to that? Again, we have our very clear firewalls in place, and that is part of our response to that. But fundamentally, I think that we have great synergies and advantages from having an association between our inability to feed through our evaluation into our curriculum development work, but I do not think that in any way it undermines the integrity of the curriculum development work. How do you balance that? You are supporting the needs of the schools and teachers, and you have responsibilities also for delivering Scottish Government priorities. How do you balance that, and who is your main customer? Fundamentally, our main customer is the learner, and we work through supporting various agencies. As a national improvement agency, we have a key role in supporting the effective implementation of Government policy, and that is natural and core to our activity. We also take the intelligence that we gain from our constant engagement with the system, look to surface concerns or issues that we are seeing out in the system from schools or wherever, and respond to those to help to support. The bureaucracy example in primary schools would be an example of that, where we have worked well with them to tackle issues that have arisen through the implementation of CFE that effectively were coming from the ground up through schools experience, and we customise our work with local authorities, as we have described earlier. You mentioned previously that you thought that there was an advantage in yourself in engaging closely with ministers and the Scottish Government in terms of being able to influence policy and so forth. What involvement have you had with ministers in developing the current attainment agenda? We have had close engagement from the start around the development of policy on the attainment challenge, working alongside colleagues, the policy directorate, clearly learning directorate, taking the lead in developing policy, but we are working very closely on that. As a result of that, we have now, as it is moving towards a phase of implementation and beginning to develop the attainment challenge out in practice. We have an increasing role, I think, and have shifted one of my senior management team into playing a lead role, a professional leadership role for the education sector and taking forward the attainment challenge and working it through into practical action out in schools. I will ask you one other question, which is derived from your submission. In fact, page 10, 4.1, the final paragraph, you state that, although it is unlikely that any particular intervention by Education Scotland would be the sole reason for improvement happening in any establishment, et cetera, it seems a bit negative to me. I realise that you cannot be the sole intervention that would result in something good happening, but surely you must be a major contributor. You should be a major contributor. That is indeed, maybe it is an excess of humility, but we certainly seek to maximise our input. However, I think that that is also recognising that fundamentally it is front-line practitioners who deliver change for learners, and we only work through influencing what they do fundamentally in a whole variety of ways that we seek to do that. Fundamentally, in the classroom or the community centre or wherever learning is taking place, and that is the more we recognise and work in partnership with providers, the better. Of course, with local authorities who have a statutory duty to improve education in their areas. We work through influence, and we will continue to recognise that. Perhaps I can slip one more in. Page 12. You make a statement, complaints about inspection are law. Is that good? That is a good question, because zero complaints would be worrying at one level, if it certainly you might wonder if that simply meant that nobody ever bothered complaining or were frank to complain. However, I do not think that that is the case. We do respond. In fact, all our complaints last week, while generally resolved at the very earliest stages, we have at the earliest stage in our complaints procedure is an informal discussion with the person who has an issue to see if we can work away through it. What sort of percentage of your inspections result on a complaint? What is the definition of a complaint? We take a broad definition of the numbers that we record, so anyone who has raised a matter that is of concern to them during an inspection, sometimes it is not about the inspectors or it could be about other aspects, the timing of it, or the local authority support for the school has been raised as a complaint. However, in terms of percentage terms, we have numbers. It is under 10 per cent that results in any kind of complaint, but the most obvious sense is that there is still an on-going discussion between ourselves and the establishment about whether we have got it right. We take additional evidence, we talk to people about it and we try to come to a reasonable position, so that is regarded and recorded as a complaint under our complaints procedure. Do you work towards a compromise result? No, not necessarily a compromise, because we have to be very clear that we would only respond to further additional evidence that we may not have seen at the time. An inspection team going into a school at any point in time or at any other establishment is there at a point in time, and we would want to approach that to be open, so that if we did not see something or there was other evidence that we did not pick up on, that the school or establishment would be able to highlight that to us afterwards. We would then negotiate and discuss that, but ultimately it is not coming to the lowest common denominator, it is not going to just an agreement. There needs to be evidence that we perhaps have not picked up on during the week. The vast majority of what we would class as complaints are at that level. We need to separate that from complaints of nature, such as conduct of inspectors or complaints after the report is published about the whole process, which are negligible. I should say that I have a process that I am pleased with. The professional associations, EIS in particular, co-operate with us on that, but they share privately any feedback that they are getting, which is another independent source, because of course every school that we inspect has an EIS rep or whatever in the school, and they themselves ask their reps to feed back on their experience of inspection, and they share that with us confidentially on a regular basis, and that is an encouraging picture. That is generally a good picture overall. I will pick up some of the questions that Colin was just asking and questions from Mark earlier. Clearly, you have just been discussing the issue about this tension between being responsible for delivering Scottish Government priorities and also dealing with, for example, the support needs of teachers, schools and learners, and the ability to criticise as well as support the Government policy. On the one hand, you have that tension, and you have also got a situation where your budget, as was discussed with Mark, is up to a third of it in your transfers. I am just wondering what the influence of waiting on whether I am not to see whether you get a third of your budget during your transfer affects the ability to operate proactively as an organisation, or are you sitting back waiting effectively to react to whether or not there will be any of your transfers and how that structure impacts on the ability to balance you have to strike between the different sides of the organisation's activities? I should start by saying that, although in-year transfers do constrain funding, because they mean the funding that you get is a ring fence for that purpose, and sometimes they come mid-year, but more often they come as a result of a planned discussion and development of a policy that we have been involved in from quite an early stage and indeed may have influence from an early stage. An in-year transfer can be a perfectly good thing that suits everyone's strategic view of the next priorities. Indeed, there may well be the case with attainment challenge, for example, if there is resource required to support our work in relation to the attainment challenge. As we are very comfortable with that, we have been part of the process of discussing the attainment challenge right from the start, and it is an area in which we want to be refocusing resources as best we can, as well as refocusing some of our core funding to support the work in that area. They do not necessarily—I suppose that what I am trying to say is that they do not necessarily all come out of the blue and get in the way or tie our hands down in ways that we would not agree with. I think that often they are on important priorities. We have had a large chunk of work, for example, on health and wellbeing over recent years, which I think has been, and that is all ring-fenced in the transfer money that we use, but it has helped us to do a great deal of very positive work in health and wellbeing on the PE, the two-hours PE in schools, the agenda and, generally, promoting physical activity, a healthy diet and so on in schools. That is helpful, but I am asking fundamentally about the ability of an organisation like your own to act independently and be critical and proactive in its operations. While holding its breath and waiting to see whether up to a third of its budget is going to arrive in your transfer? The bulk of our budget will still be, and I do not see any great threat to that. We will continue to be a core budget that is unconstrained of that sort. I am certainly not feeling any pressure to be uncritical of Government in that sense. Fundamentally, that point is often raised to our role to be critical of Government policy. I do not see it as the role of the agency, to be honest, as being some completely left-field organisation that lobbies Government or on the behalf we are much more involved with informing Government policy, but fundamentally it is for Government ministers to make policy decisions. It is then our role to help to give Government feedback on the impact, whether those policies are achieving the desired impact effectively or not. If they are not, it is really important that we are feeding that back so that adjustments can be made to policy to address that. That is what I was trying to get too effectively. The ability to feel that you are completely free in that kind of constructive criticism that should drive Government policy or changes in Government policy. If we are not doing that, then we are really reducing our potential value to ministers. Mary Scanlon, I would like to move on to questions about accountability and quality assurance. Representing the Highlands, as I have done since 1999, I have met a lot of teachers, a lot of head teachers, particularly in small villages throughout the Highlands, who have never worked again following their inspection. In fact, when I look at your principles, mutual respect, building on self-evaluation, partnership working and your comment to Colin Beattie about your excess of humility, I have to say that those teachers did not find that. I thought, convener, that it was perhaps just a Highland issue, but Terry Sheffelin, the clerk and I had an informal meeting, as all members of this committee did, with directors of education and finance directors in local government. Not every local authority was there, but a significant number were. At the end of the meeting, we just threw in a question about what your views of Education Scotland and, basically, there was a huge groan of disapproval, eyes rolling round your head, I am not quite sure how that will be written up in the report, but no one had a good word to say about you. I have mentioned your principles, what I have been told and I met another two head teachers who have never worked since your inspection just last week. They talk about fear, trepidation, stress, traumatic bullying and humiliation, no respect, dignity or value or even just a little bit of kindness. Some of the papers that we have today mentioned, Neil McKinnon, serves the function of compliance and control. The EIS suggests that the abandonment of formal inspection is in favour of a model designed to provide support to teachers and educational establishments. I would have thought in a modern Scotland that you would be looking at valuing teachers, respecting teachers, working with them. That has not been my experience. I have been quite upset at listening to some of those people who have never worked since you guys came in the door and they are humiliated in their own communities. What do you say about your approach? I know that you said to Colin Beattie that the complaints are low. What I am told is that they are terrified because they are picked on. Also, there is no right of appeal. Can I ask you about your actual approach? Is there any need for that? I am certainly sorry to hear the experiences that you have heard from other people. I think that you are very familiar with many of the cases that I mentioned. There are one or two cases that I would be familiar with. I would have to say that they are a very small minority in which I suspect that the case. If I can pick up firstly the point about people being frightened to respond, that is not our experience. We try hard to encourage every headteacher who has been inspected to give us a response. Equally, I am sure that they are not frightened to respond to the EIS, who, as I said earlier, produce feedback that they then feed to us. They have said to us that it is a pretty good picture on the whole. Of course, there will sometimes be individuals who end up at the end of the process. We believe that the best interest of the learner may sometimes not be in the right job, and that does happen, but that is not a common experience. We certainly work very hard to make inspection and improvement focused in support of activity. Indeed, one of the things that we do with new inspectors as they join us is to take them through a training programme. Effectively, it is a kind of social skills training programme and a programme in how you work as a consultant alongside individuals who are evaluating what is inevitably a quite pressured position during an inspection. We have many testimonies that I can equally share with you of schools who have found inspection a hugely empowering and positive experience. Indeed, 97 per cent is the figure of headteachers who responding in a post-inspection questionnaire to say that the inspection has helped them to improve. We have worked very hard over many years to take, whereas there are other countries and other places in the world where inspection is quite deliberately set up as a confrontational high-stakes accountability kind of regime. We have worked very hard not to have that, but that does not mean that, occasionally, when young people are being underserved by poor provision, we may have to be quite strong in our evaluations. Indeed, in one case recently, we moved to almost immediate closure of an independent school as the committee is probably aware of North and Aberdeen. I do not make any apologies for doing that, because I think that it is ultimately important for the learners, but I would just reinforce that my commitment is to make inspection as empowering a positive experience for good professionals as it can be. I have to put on the record, convener, that none of the headteachers in the schools that I am aware of were underperforming and certainly no child was left behind as a result of a lack of that, so I am not accepting that. Given that you have quoted the EIS from our paper, convener, the EIS suggests the need for a strongly supportive approach. Possibly the abandonment of formal inspection in favour of a model designed to provide support for teachers and educational establishments. I am not accepting that they are suggesting something quite different. No-one was into teaching to do a bad job and I am not picking up from people across the Highlands that this is supportive. I move on to another point in Neil MacKinnon's paper to the committee today. Inspection never delivers accountability. It only works if there is something to inspect against. All at once inspection is overwhelming and becomes a burden, second guessing what they are looking for. The RSE is asking how you gather evidence of schools and teachers' needs for support. That is what we are looking for. People can develop bad habits along the way, but we are looking for a supportive approach, not a humiliating, bullying and dictatorial approach. We are looking for something that values teachers. That does not seem to be coming through here. I can only say that that absolutely is not our approach from my perspective. What we are clearly seeking to do is, fundamentally for us, inspection serves three purposes. One of which is certainly about improving the capacity of schools at the front-line teachers, community workers or whoever we are inspecting to drive their own improvement and, fundamentally, empower them to help themselves to get better. That is an important purpose of inspection. It also serves the purpose of providing some assurance to parents, to the wider public, that the provision being made in a particular area is effective. Thirdly, it provides that source of evidence that we were talking about earlier, which allows us to advise ministers on how progress is being made nationally or within particular regions of Scotland on key priority areas. We blend those three. I think that we can all agree with that. Rather than this heavy-handed approach in a modern Scotland, I would have thought that there should be a little bit of kindness, respect, dignity and a bit of value. Here is a bit of support. That is not what they are feeling. My final point is that there should be a right of appeal for head teachers, because, apparently, there is nothing at the moment. Despite everything that you say, Mr Maxwell, according to the RSE, your staff employee survey says that only 28 per cent of your staff feel that change is well managed. That is not much—about one in four. Only 30 per cent of the view that the changes that you are making in education Scotland are for the better. It does not even appear that your own staff are fully behind the changes. Should there be a right of appeal, can you maybe look at just a little bit more dignity for teachers in future? I retire in five months, so that is my—I probably will not sit in front of you again. However, I would like to ask that. I think that everyone in every job deserves that. I can reassure you exactly that absolutely dignity and empowering professionals is what I would want the organisation to be all about, and we will work very hard to do that. In terms of a right of appeal, I think that our processes are very clear. If a head teacher is now being inspected, we will feed back throughout an inspection the emerging messages that we are finding, the conclusions that we are coming to, give some oral feedback before we leave the school and then provide a draft report, a draft evaluation to the school and give them an opportunity. As Alasdair said earlier, it is not then a negotiation or compromise, but it is an opportunity for them to give us further evidence that we may not have been aware of or evidence that contradicts what appears to be the conclusions of the report. We will then take account of that and inform our professional view of whether that changes, sometimes that shifts our evaluation, sometimes it may not. It depends on the nature of the evidence provided. At that point, we provide our view to parents in the wider public, and that seems to me to be a reasonable process. What about your own staff not feeling that your changes are well managed or that they are better? I know that Alasdair has a fairly good lead summary of the staff survey results. It is certainly the case that, through the merger, we have a fair bit of turbulence around staff feelings at the time, as the merger came quite rapidly and quickly, and we had a lot of change to make to all organisations coping, of course, with reductions and constraints on funding, but we had far more than that when we were putting together a few organisations. However, I was committed to having a regular staff survey throughout that time, so we have been through staff survey and sometimes more often through shorter, focused exercises being included into staff views. I have to say that, overall, the trend is positive in the direction of the results, including on leadership and managing change. That is clearly not where we would want it to be, but I think that part of the issue is that the fact that change is constant in the public sector and in our agency at the moment, and all of us would all like a little bit of opportunity. Most of my staff would have some breathing space from that change, but that is just not the kind of place that we are actually in. Because of that, yes, we have a lowest percentage of leadership management change, but it is 3 per cent lower than the Scottish Government figure, and even the civil service UK-wide high performers are only at 50 per cent, which is obviously 8 per cent or so higher than us. It is obviously clearly an issue across the whole of the civil service that there is enough of a lot of change going on and people are adapting and having to respond to that. I do not say that lightly. I still think that it is what we want to do something about. We want our staff to really want to work for us as an organisation and to feel value in their contribution to improving educational outcomes in Scotland. It is something that we are very aware of, but I would say that it is probably mainly down to the fact that there is so much change going on. George Adam. George, can you hold on one second? Can I just spend briefly for a second? Is one of the other ones working? No. Really? I am looking forward to it. Are we back? Do you need to test it before we go? We are all okay. Do you need George from the very start? Okay, thank you. We are high enough. Everybody, sorry, Mary. We are just going to start again. The technical fault has been resolved. Okay. I hope that I can ask the question without breaking the mic this time. Obviously, I asked earlier on about the education Scotland activity. You are mainly one of the main players in the bridge and the attainment gap, but you do not deliver it yourself and you are working with partner organisations to ensure that you deliver that. When you are looking at the attainment challenge, ADES has concerns that the centrally driven model and the current raising attainment initiative as following has been rapid development of ES staff without necessary engagement with all stakeholders and they believe that it has left some schools and local authorities feeling a lack of involvement. Why would ADES feel that way? I think that it is partly to do with the, this has been quite a rapid policy development, the attainment challenge and a big important one, but it has not necessarily been pretty rapid. Of course, the Scottish Government policy directorates of working very closely with ministers and ourselves in forming that have had a lot of initial work to do just to get the basics agreed of how the programme would go forward. I know that there has been consultation through that process with ADES, particularly although, of course, that does not necessarily percolate through to all 32 local authorities and the extent to which ADES can genuinely feed back and take views from all its members is a matter for them really, but as we are moving forward now into a more operational process of delivering, designing the challenge, I think that there is much greater involvement, it is particularly evident. For example, I was quite recently at a meeting of all the local authorities and the 57 challenge schools who are enhancing the 57 challenge authorities. Those authorities, of course, have been quite heavily involved from the start. As it rolls out now, I think that we are increasingly seeing a much greater engagement with a much wider indeed all 32 local authorities, because even beyond the challenge schools, we are now putting in place the attainment adviser for every local authority and working through with them how we can use that locally. There is a lot of flexibility in how authorities can work with us to deliver this new model of working between us and them with a locally embedded attainment adviser supported as part of a national network by ourselves, so I think that that will rapidly change. I was quite interested in your comments earlier on with regard to the attainment advisers at 30 out of 32 are in place. That has happened quite quickly, which is quite good, but how do we see the role of the attainment advisers going forward with yourselves working with them? Obviously they will be working for the local authority or within the local authority environment, so they will be the bridge between themselves and the local authority. Will it be about getting resource into areas that need it? Currently, we are using the SIMD figures for certain areas. Some people say that that is a blunt instrument to do it, but would the attainment advisers be the ones that would possibly, as times move on, actually see that they need resources in that school or that school or in that sector of that area? Yes, exactly so. Brokering through ourselves where we can find that resource either from our own central specialist teams, which we have, and we can deploy in targeted ways working with local attainment advisers who identify need at a particular point in time. In networking across the 32 and sometimes in clusters, we are very keen on some of the work that is developing around clustering authorities in particular areas—the northern authorities, for example—I think that it is at Highland in Aberdeen, and others in the north, all seven plus Erganon buta, I think, are now also interested in working as a collective, to some extent, where we share the expertise of the attainment advisers. We are very encouraged by that and we are very keen to support that. The collaboration in networking will be one of the key ways. That is one of the things that I am quite interested in as well. As Mary Scanlon said, we recently spoke to directors of education. There is an offline meeting throughout the country, and the one that I had, ironically, was not urban. It was more rural. I am quite interested in the clustering of some of the up-in-the-highlands or Aberdeenshire areas, where they are all working together with the problem with teacher numbers to try and make sure that they can work together to do that. Do you see more of that happening or the clustering? Are you talking about three or four authorities or geographically over the authorities? We do see more of that happening. Addests are very supportive of that approach. Indeed, they are driving it to a large extent. I think that it will certainly happen in regional clusters, however that many be seven or eight across the country, but also sometimes thematically, where there are a few authorities interested in a particular issue—maybe it is Gaelic or one plus two languages at a particular point in time—that we can also broker that kind of networking that might cut across areas. One of the partnerships that you work with is the school improvement partnership programme. Can you provide some examples of how you have improved attainment from that programme in itself? I will pass over to Elsie, who ran that programme initially and will be aware of the evaluation. The evaluation report, which was published at SLF, gives full details. A summation of what we found was that we had different kinds of partnerships, as I mentioned earlier, somewhere joining up across sectors in a local area. We were trying to make better linkages between the nursery provision, the primary provision, the secondary provision and another educational around it. Somewhere across different parts of the country we have had Montrose, Persia and Edinburgh schools working together, so three secondary schools working together, with similar type challenges, but sharing staff and resources and ideas and training and things between each other. The evaluation report found that those kinds of collaborations, different and bespoke and suitable to the individual circumstances, were really productive in sharing that expertise around the country, which is something that we as an agency would want to promote anyway more generally. If someone is doing something really well in a particular area, say a faculty or whatever in a secondary school, they will be able to share that expertise with others. Not just what had happened potentially previously, where, say, after an inspection report people would do a visit to a school to find out what they did, this is actual hands-on collaboration between different teachers from different schools, learning from each other, working together and, in some cases, sharing across the actual schools themselves. It was a small-scale pilot project to see what would come out of it, but the results have been very positive in terms of their impact. On that same point, just a final point, convener. Some of the colleges have been saying that, because of the regionalisation of the colleges, they find themselves in a perfect place to be able to work with local authorities as well to try to get an original educational way of going forward. I do not know if it is part of the design of the regionalisation or if it has happened by accident or if it has a few proactive principles that have gone down that route, but to me that seems to make a lot of sense in how we have managed to make everything work for over a three or four local authority area. I do not know what your opinion is on that. A very exciting potential from the new regional college model, working with clusters of local authorities, as it will be around the senior phase, because, for me, that is one of the next challenges with CFE. Perhaps it has been very focused on schools until recently, but, as senior phase develops, I need to be looked at as provision in the round in an area. Indeed, it is a challenge for us, even in our evaluation work, where we are piloting a senior phase review, i.e., it is in Murray, looking at all of the senior phase provision that the college and the local schools together make in the area, because I think that driving that model of thinking of a network of provision in an area to meet young people's senior phase needs is the way ahead. Some questions on collaboration with partners, but I just wanted to ask a quick question first on the inspection regime and the attainment gap, and just to ask whether going forward as part of inspections the attainment gap, whether the attainment gap is maintaining, worsening or improving in a particular school, will that be reported on in the inspection regime going forward? Yes, that is a simple answer. How good is our school version 4, which we have just launched at the Scottish Learning Festival, which is a revised, updated toolkit for self-evaluation that is also used for inspection? That has clearly taken that very much on board, so you would see that traced there. My question is on collaboration. What opportunities are there for greater joint work and joint planning with local authorities going forward? We are looking to continually develop the local partnership agreements that we have established a couple of years ago and have grown, increasingly now grown in impact. We have seen some particularly strong examples where there is a very clear focus on driving a local improvement agenda. The Scottish Borders is one of those examples, but I was in Aberdeen recently. There is, similarly, talking to them about how that was focused in their case on areas such as STEM. I also want to say a little bit about the local partnership agreements. It is a really important development that we have made. We have only just put in place all 32. That was from about 1 April this year. Although the process started before that, we were moving to include everyone, so we did a roll-out across our local authorities. They are still a work in progress. They are not the finished article, but what we are trying to achieve from that is an agreement about the local needs in a local area and then matching the local resources with the national resources to create one coherent plan about who is going to do what in a local area. That, as I said earlier, will help us to reduce doing things in an area that nobody actually needs or wants or could be done within the local resources that are available. That means that we are targeting and prioritising what we do, but it means that it is bespoke to each 32 local authorities or, in some cases, as a result of the attainment challenge, there are groupings coming together. We are looking at creating one overarching plan as a result of that, where we pull our resources together. It is definitely a directional travel and something that we have been doing for the past couple of years. The Royal Society of Edinburgh particularly has asked how education, Scotland, gather evidence of schools and teachers needs for support and how that support that you provide is then evaluated. We do it in a whole range of ways. We have so many engagements through inspection, but also through many of our other support and development activities with schools that we have a rich source of feedback to pick up on around current teachers' needs and where we see those emerging on a consistent basis nationally. We can adapt and respond to that. It certainly was the case during the CFE implementation process, for example. On occasion, we deliberately did a wave of visits to schools where we would send not inspections but simply send some of our curriculum staff out to visit a range of schools. We did that with secondary schools, for example, around the new emerging senior phase curriculum models about a year ago. Particularly with the CFE and the new qualification, there was a criticism from the EIS about the support to teachers and pupils around the new curriculum-related particular to exemplar papers. Do you have any response as to how you move forward, to how students will be provided with more support in that area, so that they are better prepared for the new qualifications? We work closely with the SQA, which has produced exemplar papers recently. We work closely with it to provide events and resources around curriculum areas and particular subjects. We are particularly narrowing and focusing that in now, I think, on where we experience the greatest need lies and many of the subjects, such as STEM subjects, computing, maths, where we are particularly focusing on providing further opportunities, further resources and exchange of effective resources. Often, the most effective support comes from seeing where other schools have managed and delivered courses effectively and what resources they have developed for themselves. We are working collaboratively, as I say, as part of a national partnership with SQA and IDS to get the best possible support in the system where it is most needed. Finally, I have a question about collaboration and communication with the Scottish Government. It is a very localised example, and I will forgive you if you do not know the detail. Education Scotland approved a merger of two common old high schools on the proviso that the Scottish Government would part share the funding of a new building. That was only approved on the basis of the educational benefits, just to ask what communication and collaboration you have with the Scottish Government around the difficulties with the capital funding for a range of school builds across Scotland, because of the decision by the EU on accounting methods? You are right in that tie. I do not have all that detail to hand. We do not deal directly with capital funding and school building programmes very much an issue for learning directorate policy colleagues. We do not take a direct role in that. Our role in looking at consultation and merger proposals is quite specific. It was recently reset as a part of legislation, in fact, or adjustments to the statutory process. We go in and look at the case as presented at the time and make an assessment of whether the process has been followed properly and educational benefits appear to be likely to accrue. We leave that judgment with the authority. There are appeal mechanisms, as you will be aware. We do not keep a long-term engagement with what might then unfold in terms of the further design of school buildings or whatever. Given what I mentioned before, and given that Mark Griffin mentioned the attainment gap, we are now looking forward to assessments at various levels in primary and S2 or S3. You could perhaps understand that many teachers, in particular head teachers, are quite scared of what is coming. I am not sure what high stakes or people are being worried that this is going to lead to leak tables and maybe further humiliation. Can you tell us how you see once the new assessments come in, will we have leak tables of good and bad performing schools or will it simply, as I hope, be looking at progress within each school? I fully support the Scottish Government's assessment and attainment. My party fully supports that, but we certainly would not want a system where schools that were not performing as well were humiliated. Can you maybe just explain how the new system will work? Of course, it is out for consultation at the moment. In a sense, a lot of the detail of how the system will be designed is yet to be determined. Ministers have been very clear, as pleased to hear, that there is no intention to produce leak tables on a national level or to drive a high stakes comparison agenda, such as you described. Rather, it is all to be designed to support improvement at local level, in individual schools and within local authorities, and to retain the primacy of teachers' more rounded judgments of attainment being informed by data and informed by our standardised assessments, but not being usurped or trumped by them. So one information will be made public, convener. I just think that it is an important one. Will it be the progress that each school is making? Will it be the progress that they still have to make? What information will be made public that may allow these comparisons to be made? It is still to be determined, so that decision has not been made. However, it is an important point that we need to be very careful about how information is made public and how to protect against it being used crudely or inappropriately with counterproductive effects, if that were the case. The amendment has yet to be published that will come to the education in Scotland. We have taken evidence on it. I am surprised that it did not get an answer, because it has not yet been published. Obviously, none of us knows the detail of that, but we will be looking at it very shortly as a committee. It is one final question, if you do not mind. You mentioned earlier that learners are our main customer. That might mean a direct quote, but it was worse than that effect. Can you tell us then that, since Education Scotland was created, have outcomes for those learners improved? Outcomes. In our mission statement, we set out an ambition for attainment to rise, excellence, achievement for young people to rise across the Scottish system and, indeed, for equity to improve. In both cases, there is plenty evidence that overall that is happening in the Scottish education system. I am sure that it is not uniquely down to us, but we are part of, as discussed much earlier, our contribution, I hope, is positive to that overall improvements in Scottish education. There is also some evidence that the equity issue is beginning to shift, but there is a long way to go to get it to where we would all want it to be. We are all on the journey. Thank you very much to both of you for coming along this morning, and we appreciate you giving your time to be here with the committee. As the committee has agreed earlier to hold the next items in private, I now close the meeting to the public.