 Sgwyl Gruffydd, mae'r ddau'r 11 o'r gwaith o'r Fydiad i fynd i ddweud â'r Fydiad i fynd i 2015. Gwybod i'n meddwl i'r ddweud â'r ffordd oherwydd mae hynny o'r eluotronau yn mynd i ddweud, felly mae'n gweithio i'r sylwgr o'r sylwgr. Fyfiad 1 o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r Fydiad i fynd i fynd i fynd i fynd i fynd i fynd i ffynol five on the educational attainment gap in private. Are members agreed? I agree to that. Thank you. Our next item is to take evidence on our inquiry into attainment of school pupils with a sensory impairment. This is our first evidence session on the inquiry and I thank all those who have made a written or a BSL submission. The first panel of witnesses will cover issues relating to the attainment of pupils with a visual impairment and the second panel will cover those with a hearing impairment. There may obviously be some crossover between the two panels. Next week, we will take evidence from some of the service providers and then from the Scottish Government the following week. Also on Monday, we will visit Craigie High School in Dundee to meet pupils and parents and to discuss the support that is provided by the school to pupils with sensory impairments, so I know that committee members are looking forward to that particular visit. I welcome this morning our first panel, Dominic Everett, who is from the Royal National Institute of Blind People. Dr John Ravenscroff from the Scottish Sensory Centre, Sally-Peters Paterson, from the Scottish Association for Visual Impairment Education and Tracy Christie from Hazelwood School Parent Council. Welcome to all of you. I will go straight to questions. My first question is from Mary Scanlon. Mary Scanlon, thank you. I think that the first thing that we need to do is to look at the extent of the issue and I am certainly very concerned about the data that we have before us this morning. I can just give you a figure in 2012 through 869 children on the blind and partially sighted register. The total number is estimated to be 2,080, and this figure is likely to be an underestimate with another 800. Within two sentences, we go from 869 to 2,880. Why haven't we got more accurate figures? I will ask that just now. Why aren't the figures more accurate? I will start with that one, if I may. I think that it is how you initially define a child with visual impairment and who is acknowledging that the child is visually impaired themselves. Currently, on the registration system, you can only get certified if an ophthalmologist has deemed that you are in fact visually impaired. If you use a whole range of education pupil sensors data and other registers, there is no guarantee that the pupils who are on the pupil sensors are visually impaired. That may account for an overestimate. If you look at the incidents and the prevalence rates, you are looking at around 2,000, 20,000, 10,000. A figure that we believe in Scotland is around the 2,000 mark. 2,200 is actually the figure that we academics working in the field believe to be the actual number in Scotland. Again, because the way that pupil sensors work, there is that overestimisation. The data from education Scotland varies within that. I will add that. Aron Ivey Scotland is quite concerned about the fact that so many children have a hidden sight loss, particularly if they have complex needs. Certain conditions—down syndrome, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis—many of those children who suffer from those types of conditions have an undetected sight loss, which can also perhaps explain why there are so many variances in the different types of information that is provided. There is a lack of data, and that data needs to be collected much more effectively than it has in the past. Education Scotland has very different figures from those 2,080 that you have given there. There is a real need to get right down and investigate to find out who those children are that are out there in the type of support that they need. I am grateful for your responses. My next question is, how does the lack of data between £800, £2,200 or £2,800 impact on, if I may say, the lack of services? If you have not got the data, how can you possibly meet the demand and support for children and Aron? I doubt it. If you have read the reports that have been submitted, it is quite interesting to see the overlap between three separate organisations. I am quite sure that Tracey's submission is well with regard to the fact that, right across Scotland, the services are being delivered in very, very different ways. It is extremely fragmented. Our concern from Aron and Iby Scotland is that, because there is a lack of data, we do not know who the children are, we do not know about their individual eye conditions, which can affect how they learn, how they can access the curriculum and engage with the wider world around them. Our fear is that local authorities, as a consequence of not having that data, are basically just saying, well, we do not actually need to provide the depth or intensive support that you, as professionals, say that is needed. We need the data first so that it can then target local authorities and make them stand up to meet the statutory obligations. We need the data. We do not have the data. What action needs to be taken to improve the data collection and assessment of sensory impairment? What needs to be done? It is not being done at the moment. If we can have a formalised pathway for every child that gets registered through the Vincent network, which developed from the VI Scotland network, which all of us were involved in, that would be one way of how to collect the actual data there. Dominic is absolutely right. If you do not know, A, how many children there are, and the profile of the visually impairment themselves, whether it is due to eye condition or whether it is due to a condition of damage to the brain, then how can you support and get the resources necessary in order to do that? We need to have formalised systems, either through the Vincent network, to ensure that this data, whether it is eye, the profile of visually impaired children, is being captured. Otherwise, we are, in some ways, in some local authorities guessing in the dark how much support and resources we need. Thank you. It is very helpful. I will just move on to attainment, and I hope that the two ladies will come in this time. I was interested in the exchanges on the back of Mary's questions. Are there examples of where, for example, parents are making a case that their child needs additional support because of a visual impairment and are not getting it? Are we meeting a degree of resistance, or is it more a question that the data is not there and therefore it allows local authorities off the hook in terms of what they have to deliver? I have worked in mainstream for the past nine years as a VI teacher. If you look purely at registration, some parents do not want their child registered as blind. That is another whole kind of worms. I know that their child has a visual condition, they know that they need support and that they are getting that support to whatever level they need it within school. However, in terms of actually recording that as this child being registered blind or partially sighted, there is also a debate about whether or not you should register children, because visual impairments, some of them are very fixed, but some of them, a lot of the children that I work with, can be more fluid than that. In terms of parents, it is very difficult, without tying everyone with the same brush. A lot of the children that we work with are with families where self-advocacy skills are not the best, and that is not their fault at all. However, in terms of whether their child goes to school and their school is providing a certain level of support and their learning and their achieving, they may not be doing as much as we want them to do within the resources that we can provide, but we do not have a huge number of parents that would complain that that is not being met unless there is a very specific need that is not being met. We are in a difficult position as teachers in that we are not allowed to influence that parent. Does that I am trying to be politically correct on this one, but there is a real problem with that? So there are children very much that we will look at and go, services should be better for that child, but if we are tied by how many staff we have and how many children we support and how often we can go and see that child then without a parent actually physically complaining about a situation, then it sometimes is very difficult for that picture to be any different. My role as education and family services manager is to advocate for those parents. If you look at RNIB submission, we emphasise the lack of early intervention support. We are not getting families right from the start of their journey, so parents do not know and understand their own child's sight loss, they do not know how they can support it, how they can scaffold the child's learning at home and their understanding of the world around them. Never mind how to support the work that is being done within the school, so many parents do not know how they can help their child. As a consequence of that, they do not know the right questions to ask of education professionals in other agencies as well, so that is why it is so important to start thinking about getting their families right at the very beginning to inform them as much as possible so that they know if their child is not receiving appropriate support. As Sally mentioned, she is absolutely right. I was a teacher of the vision pair for 20 years before I joined RNIB four years ago. I saw parents whose child was not being supported by the local authority, and the local authority is restricted because of the amount of funds that it has, etc. Teachers cannot challenge their local authority. I see that as part of my role, which is to ensure that local authorities are made to provide what should be being delivered to their child as and when required. If my experience is apparent, I have a nine-year-old who has registered blind, a pupil at Hazelwood school since the age of three, when she entered the nursery. It was a fight, frankly, to obtain a place in the nursery for my daughter. Hazelwood school is based in Glasgow. It is a Glasgow authority school. It was built and partly funded by the Scottish Government directly as well as Glasgow City Council. As an out-of-authority parent, my director of education in East Dunbartonshire was unwilling to meet the cost of her education. We did not end up going as far as a tribunal because we were able to make a very strong case. Ultimately, we had our daughter's educational needs met and she has now been in school for seven years. Prior to that, the most valuable input that we had was from Dominic's predecessor at RNIB, who was a qualified teacher of the blind and the family officer. She was able to come to our home almost on a bi-weekly basis and help us to understand what had happened to our daughter and what her likely future educational needs were going to be. That first year when my daughter lost her vision, I opened the newspaper on one August day. There was a double spread in the Herald announcing the opening of a school for the sensory impaired in Glasgow. I said to myself, hallelujah. Over the subsequent seven years, that hallelujah has diminished and has gone because the service level has diminished at the school. I know that we are going to come on to that a bit later. That is how hard it is to get your child into a school. Thank you for that. Thank you, Liam McArthur, for his question. I will come to you first before we go back to Mary on the attainment stuff. Thank you. Mary has asked most of the questions that I wish to ask, but I will come back to the definition of those who are sensory impaired through the site. Who defines that? We talked about themologists. Is that not whoever should, in the medical profession, to define that? Why is that information not captured there? What is the connectivity between those who define the impairment and those who then have to educate and include parents in that? Where is the connectivity between that? I know that some parents will not engage, as you have said. Why are we not capturing this data at source? If you have a child like mine, it is absolutely easy and apparent to notice that that child cannot see, but there are various profiles of CVI children and young people in the country who have, because of the particular kind of brain damage that they have, their sight loss presents in different ways. I would say that, even as a parent, it takes you years and years. I am still learning about my daughter's sight loss, because even though she has registered blind, her sight is changing all the time as she grows and her brain develops. So, what you need to do with young people is reassessing their visual acuity. Who should do that? The issue is that we have to be right. If we say that is the case, then they are presumably on-going assessments, but at source, like Mary Scanlon said, we are all over the place with numbers. How can we determine educational assessment needs, unless we know exactly what the foundation is, of what we require going forward? I feel that I will stand corrected by the professionals here, but the cohort of professionals who understand vision and vision loss is minuscule. A lot of the teachers in the profession do not seem to understand the individual vision loss of the child, so we are reliant often on health professionals to analyse and assess and tell us the nature of our children's vision and how education can best be put in front of them that they can access. For me personally, the most useful route to understanding my child's vision loss has been through the consultant ophthalmologist. You have to understand the difference between a clinical assessment of vision and a functional vision assessment. A functional vision assessment is carried out usually on a regular basis by a qualified teacher of the vision impaired. There is an issue across Scotland. I do not know if you have heard of the C-Vista model, which is basically a joint functional assessment service based in Tayside. That is the gold standard of multi-professional approach to carrying out functional vision assessments and bringing education, health and social service practitioners together in the best interests of a child. In a sense, the true spirit of GERFEC in action does not happen across Scotland. It is almost like a one-off. There are some C-Vista lights, money and time. It is time-heavy. It takes a lot of resources for local authorities to backfill if a teacher is going to a functional vision assessment clinic. Likewise, I am quite sure for health and social service providers, too. Trace is right. An ophthalmologist will carry out a clinical assessment and determine what it is that a child cannot or cannot see. However, what a child can see in an eye clinic is very different from what they can see in their home or within school. How they engage with the classroom environment or out in the playground and things like that is the role of the teacher that the vision impaired. On a regular basis, they are engaging with a class teacher who is not a VI specialist and ensuring that they feel supported in helping that child to access a curriculum. 70 per cent of children in Scotland attend their local school under presumption of mainstreaming. We have to ensure that there is better collaboration between professionals and that functional vision assessments are carried out. Parents are part of that process so that they do not understand what a child can see, so that they can reinforce what is being delivered within a curricular setting. Also, to ensure that the parent and the child, as they get older, are part of the decision-making process, so that they are taking possession of their learning and are being prepared effectively to access the school curriculum, but also for independent adulthood, too. We are making unemployable young people at the moment. That is why the level of unemployment among blind and past society people is so high. That is because we are not preparing them for successful life. Our children are surviving when they leave school. Surviving in school, many of them. They are certainly not thriving and that is really what we have to be doing to try to ensure that we are providing better service in the future. We are not working at the moment. It is not effective. I would like to say as a teacher. The best-case scenario is that I get a letter in from an ophthalmologist and because I was one of the members of staff that had to do what we called a new referral report, a letter would come into the service and would tell me about this child. Usually, maybe not before they were two or three and I would get a letter in, I would then arrange to go and see that parent. I would do a home visit. I would do, as Dominic was mentioning, I would not be doing a clinical assessment or I would be doing a functional assessment of their vision. What can they see when they are at home? What can they see when they are at nursery? What adaptations do we need to put in place to support that child? Then that child would be given a level of support that may be a monthly visit, it may be a termally visit, a yearly visit, whichever, or they may not actually come into our remit for support at all. That is what you are looking at. Equally, I probably have lost count of the number of children that I have been phoned by a school and said that we are a bit concerned because this child does not seem to be able to access the books that they are reading or whatever. A child at one stage in primary six, 10, 11 years old, who had a visual impairment, who for lots of reasons had not made it to hospital appointments and then had been very clever at making sure that she sat nearest to the board, that she sat next to a friend so that she could copy what they wrote. All of a sudden, in primary six, I am doing a functional vision assessment, I am contacting hospitals, trying to find out for a child that then actually needed a place at a school other than her local school. Unfortunately, it just is not simple. This is a child that should have been, you know, when she was two years old, should have been on some sort of register that said, yes, she has a significant visual impairment. For lots of reasons, she has slipped through the net, but she does become a number, but she is not a number right now because she has been coping, if that makes any. I am going to come back to Mary Scanlon and then Gordon. Yes, thank you very much. In particular, Tracy, there is no one who is better than the parent at the top face, if you like. I will just put my points together and realise that colleagues want to come in. First of all, the data on attainment for pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is analysed in such a way, Dominic, to address your point, that it is separated, the information is gathered separately for pupils with a visual impairment only and those with a visual impairment and other disability. In Scotland, it is not possible to separate those two figures, so that is my first point if it can be done elsewhere and perhaps you wish to say something about that. The second issue, Sally, I am quite familiar with the care inspector who reports at nursery education, which I am very impressed with and I do understand that every child entering nursery does a form of assessment, if you like, into their needs and you have to report on how they have advanced during the years. Why is that not picking up visual impairment? My third point is secondary schools. We only gather data on pupils that stay on beyond school S4 and on leaving school, so obviously something has to be done there. I am sorry to throw it all at you, but the figures on positive destinations I thought were interesting. Those are all from our SPICE report here. Positive destinations for pupils with no ASN is 91.7. For those with a visual impairment is 85.3. I hope that you will forgive me, but I expected it to be much less, but that comes down to the definition of a positive destination. I appreciate that. As an XFE lecturer with no ASN, 22.5% went into further education and with a visual impairment is 42. I hope that you will forgive me, but I expected the figures to be much worse. I am pleased that they are where they are. I would just like your analysis of those figures. Are things not as bad as we think they are? Are those figures just a result of the scant minimal data collection that we have? If it can be done in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, your point, Dominic, about the hidden sight laws, why can't it be done in Scotland? I am glad that is true, Mary, because that is plenty. If you could try and wrap those questions together, if you do not mind, because we have a lot of members who want to come in. Dominic, do you want to start? I am happy to go. A number of things there with regard to the gathering of evidence, you are right. Why can't we split and find out exactly which children have got additional support needs as well as additional impairment and those that are VI only? I think that part of the problem was that if I go back to 2012 when the Scottish Census Centre carried out research into the numbers of children across Scotland and a number of teachers, etc, worked within the field of visual impairment, not all the local authorities responded to that research. There was no obligation for them to respond, so some of the key hitters, like Glasgow and Edinburgh, did not respond. There are quite sizable populations of children who live with sight loss there. I found that particularly frustrating, because I was part of the group who was gathering that evidence. I felt that if it had been forced upon them to respond, they would have got a much clearer understanding of the data that has been carried out, as the research has been carried out. With regard to employment and positive destinations, my experience is that a lot of young, visual impaired people as they leave school are going on to further education college. They are being planted in courses that are inaccessible. There is a poor transition from school to the college, so I then get a phone call from the college to say, we have a blind child here, what do we do? How do we support that young person? It is a very difficult transition period for them in the short term and in the long term. Many of them tread water for three or four years and do one short course to the next, and are not necessarily being supported appropriately there. That leads to the 70 per cent of blind and passive sighted people who are unemployed. That is the true statistic. Aaron Ibee carried out research recently across the UK, and it is 69.7 per cent of blind and passive sighted adults of working age are unemployed. There is a feeling of the transition from school to college and university, which is a weakness. There is a feeling within the college and university sector, to a certain extent, not quite so bad as it used to be, where young people are moving around on short-term courses and, on the other hand, they are then facing unemployment because they do not have the skills. I think that one of the major issues is that a lot of our kids are leaving school with reasonable qualifications, but they are still unemployable because they do not have the interpersonal skills, the softer skills, the mobility, the independent living and travel skills that will enable them to engage more effectively in the workplace. That is a major feeling within the curriculum that we have at the moment, and I am hoping that we will have a chance to come on to that later on about what we need to deliver more effectively to ensure that our young people are actually truly ready for work. To answer your first question, there is absolutely no reason why we cannot do it. The Vis Scotland database that I was looking at before is coming here, which has over 1,150 children on it, has 70% children, have additional disabilities, 30% of single disabilities, so the database that I collected and have already has that system, but it is not a mandatory requirement to go on it, but if there was, we would be able to know a lot more and put those resources in place. Dominic is absolutely right in terms of the positive destination. It is how you define it, I totally agree with that, but we know from all the research that it is not necessarily the visual impairment per se that prevents the employment. It is the other thing, it is the mobility, it is the daily living, it is those skills, and it is those that are not really being catered for. I know we will go into that a little bit more. Although it is great to hear that you have got these figures of 85%, the real figure that 70% of people with visual impairment are not getting employment, I think is the one that we need to really focus on, I think. That is the one. I do not understand you all. It is just the nursery education convener that should be picked up there. Is there any additional point that you want to make? I am conscious of time and there are a number of things that I want to do. This juncture, because we are talking about children with a visual impairment in mainstream, and I would like to say now that I was very disappointed that this inquiry sought not to look for views from the multiple disability visual impairment community, so I should not really be here today. Why should you not be here? Because the parameters of this inquiry did not include children, like my daughter, who have multiple disabilities, including a sensory impairment. I think it is a big, big mistake to ignore this section of the sensory impaired young people in Scotland. Although they are maybe not going to the workplace, they are equally deserving of a positive destination after school. More children have MDVI than single disability. We know that from the data and the research that we have. The first point that I made is how do you define visual impairment? If you just define it as a single disability plus, that is not the profile of visually impaired children that we see in Scotland. What we see is around 30 per cent single disability, and then the rest have visual impairment with additional disabilities that the majority complex needs. As a consequence, we have children in Hazelwood school who not only have difficulty in accessing the curriculum, but they also have difficulty in accessing some of the issues that my colleagues here have brought up, such as the ability and independence in life skills. Even though we have a building that on the face of it provides an environment where they can be taught these life schools, it is in a state of disrepair. The life skills house is closed down because it is full of mould and damp and it is inaccessible. It is not being brought back online because of cuts to the education budget in Glasgow. Since the opening of Hazelwood in 2007, not one child has slept a night away from home in the life skills house. I am bringing this up to make the point that those in the complex needs sector are every bit as deserving of a positive approach to independence and life skills in their education. Indeed, the committee recognised that, and that is why when we set the agenda for this particular very short inquiry, which is a subset of a wider attainment inquiry, we did recognise the multiple disabilities that some children have. In fact, we stated quite clearly that, given the time available, we would, in this occasion, look at single disability sensory impairment. However, as we are going to say, it may be possible to then go on and consider other issues relating to children with multiple disabilities separately. It is not that we have more than one disability. Address it as a united body. As I said, we did recognise it. We are not ignoring it. We did recognise it and we stated quite clearly in the remit of the inquiry why we were taking the particular approach that we were. I am going to move on to Gordon. Children, I know from my own experiences as a parent, are screened in terms of very, very basically to flag up things. My own daughter, that was when I ended up with the optitions when she was five. That was picked up in a screening issue. Certainly, by the time you get to education, I do not know how many things a screening programme will flag up things that nobody has yet discovered between the ages of 0 and 5. Quite often, it is a teacher that comes to us on a—we do not screen the whole of primary one. Maybe that is something that needs to be done. Maybe it is a visual impairment issue that you look at, children in primary one. What we have to rely on is the fact that a teacher comes to us bearing in mind that a teacher is with those children for six hours a day and notices that there is something different about the way that child access is the curriculum and then they come to us and we get a phone call or we are in the school already and we get asked about another child in another class. There are processes that you have to go through, but we have said that we have picked this up and nine times out of 10 it can be a class teacher who has noticed that there is something about the way that child access is the curriculum. Equally, and I cannot overstate this, it is such a fluid thing. You can have a child who I had one very recently in my last job, a child who had done—we had done a neurofail report, she was going to be—what we call a monitor visit—a once a year. Within the space of 18 months, I had a phone call from the head teacher saying, we have a problem, can you come in? This child has gone from once a year to once a month because her vision is now deteriorating. You could say in primary 1 that there are two children in a school of 300, but that is the nature of it, which is why it is so critical that we have the staffing that we have in terms of vision and payment teachers to do that kind of assessment. Thank you for that, Gordon MacDonald. Thank you very much, convener. Dominic, you said earlier on that the children are not thriving when they are leaving school. What I am keen to understand is what we need to do to focus to change that. When I was reading through the evidence the other day, I was a bit confused. Most of the evidence that you have given focuses on the educational attainment gap, and you said that educational attainment is linked to the preparation for independent adulthood, future employability and economic resilience. However, the Scottish Sensory Centre said that it has led to some educators to focus too much on the educational attainment of children with visual impairment in order to match their sighted peers. The Royal Blind School says that many visually impaired children have access to a reasonable standard of curricular resources, but with little or no time devoted to life independent living skills, academic achievement is of less value. Where should we be focusing? Should we be focusing on life skills or trying to close the attainment gap, or is it a bit of both? To my mind, hearing you reading those out, they all more or less sound to me as others saying the same. The curriculum for excellence has wonderful aspirations. The four capacities are really setting a standard for what we expect Scottish children to have by the time they enter adult life. The problem with the curriculum at the moment is that it is jam-packed and extremely busy. If you think that a child with full vision or no disability is a very busy day for them anyway, if you have a blind or past-society child or indeed, as Tracy mentioned, a child with significant other needs, ensuring that that child is prepared and fully engaged within the school life and has the skills necessary to go on and be successful in life, as well as learn language and maths in foreign languages or history, etc. It is extremely challenging for the teaching professionals to ensure that that happens. There is a huge debate in the world of visual impairment about whether we should focus too much on academic, whether we should ensure that the children perhaps can look at the academic side of things slightly later and focus on the preparation of going back to the early years. Sally was talking about when they picked babies up If you lost your sight tomorrow, you have an understanding of the world around you. A blind child or a child with severe visual impairment needs to learn about the world around them, needs to be taught how to understand their own self in space, how they can engage with their living room out into the wider house, into the community and around the school or nursery when they start attending. All of that has to be taught. It just does not come automatically. They cannot see and learn through that medium. Time has to be dedicated to ensuring that parents feel that they can support the child so that they can help the child. More important, the nursery staff, the primary teaching staff and the secondary teaching staff know how they can support the child. My personal view is that there is an overemphasis on the academic side. Time has to be taken from the curriculum. Instead of a child leaving school with six or seven hires, we need to start shifting focus. Ensuring that those young people can touch type by time to leave primary school. Do they know how to use appropriate assistive technology, whether that be iPads or braille technology devices, so that they can be an independent learner? Time has to be put within the curriculum to ensure that there is orientation and mobility. Lessons being delivered is part of an appropriate habilitation service, delivered not by teachers but by habilitation specialists who know and understand the developmental needs of children. I also think that employability skills, social skills, communication, all that has to be delivered and taught to a young person. Social inclusion is a major problem for blind and past society kids. Sometimes they are very welcome within a primary setting. When they go up to high school, their friends that they had in primary school disappear and it is snow off a dike. Many of those children become very socially isolated because it is not cool for teenagers to be hanging about with their blind child within a mainstream setting. I have to engage and support young people through that huge emotional situation that they have to endure. That can then affect their behaviour within class, etc. What we are doing here today is really just scratching at the surface. There are major problems in what we are delivering to children across Scotland. We have to think about the curriculum and what is within that curriculum. We have to make sure that the professionals who are working with those children are geared up so that they can more effectively support those young people. As I have said many times, it is not happening just now. Teachers are not qualified. Local authorities are trying to do things on the cheap and they are not putting people through the appropriate qualifications and the postgraduate diploma. Teachers are retiring and they are not being replaced by inexperienced staff or perhaps not being replaced at all. Up in Orkney, there were months—in fact, years—where they did not even have a teacher that was impaired. We have got Ergyll and Bute. We have got one woman who works two days a week trying to cover the whole geographical area of Ergyll and Bute. Those things are happening right across Scotland, where local authorities, at a time of austerity, do not have the money and therefore are not meeting the needs of blind and past society to children. John. I think that if only it was just as clear as it could be, Gordon, that you have this, while it is entertainment or it is habilitation, as Dominic has alluded to, it is a complex mix. I think the complex mix begins with, well, let's have qualified teachers. That would be a good start. Let's have them recognised by the GTCS. That would also be a good start because the GTCS actually does not recognise my colleagues on my left and my right as teachers of the visually impaired. They recognised as additional support workers, but not as teachers of the VI. I think that would be a good start. Let's have more qualified teachers of the VI. I think that would be certainly a good start. Also, I think that curriculum for excellence is a great revelation to have in Scotland, and it really affords the opportunity to develop across all of the curricula that have skills, the mobility within the curriculum for excellence framework. I think more than anywhere else the curriculum for excellence really affords us to occur, but for it to happen and for it to occur, we again need trained specialist, not specialist teachers of the VI, but specialist habilitation workers who work primarily with children. This doesn't need to happen just within the school, and this is where a lot of the failings occur. It needs to happen at home, on the way to school, and within the summer holidays as well because what happens at the moment is the child may be able to have some mobility around the school, but then the summer holidays, eight weeks, six weeks, summer holidays, the child doesn't have that training, doesn't have the resources within the home environment, and that has an effect as well. I won't go on for long, which I could do. It is a complex weave that we have on this. I think, too, as a teacher. This has to be the—if I had one cause to Cusadon having worked with young children and young people, this is it. You quite correctly picked up what I had said there because there are days where I would say, I'm not worried about whether or not they get 100 per cent in their maths, but I'd like them to be able to have a conversation with the child next to them, and I would like them to know how to go down to the shops and buy something, and you are quite rightly, in one sense, fighting the system academically because they want teachers when you would come into their classrooms and you want to take that child to go and do something. Some of them would be very accommodating. For others, they just felt that that was another thing you were going to have to catch them up on, whereas what I wanted to say was, actually, no, this is not about catching them up. This is about something that will facilitate what you're doing. Now, it is a very difficult balance and a very delicate path to walk, and I know, too, that—although I mentioned particular provision, but as John was just saying there, we are not habilitation specialists, but as QTVIs, we are trained to do a certain amount of life skills and to basically support what gets started by those specialists. In the particular school that was our base, you're in a school where corridors are full of things. You can't teach a child to trail along the wall. There isn't a room—well, there is a room—but it can get used for different things where you would want to set up to go and do some cooking with a child or go and practice doing shopping and all these kinds of skills. In a school that is not built in the right way to do that and also has an ever-increasing school population, you're losing space. So it is very much, I would say, I would rather have a child that could communicate with their peers, that understood how to shop, that could pour juice for themselves. That's things as simple that you take for granted as that, being able to tie their shoelaces. But it requires a negotiation with the academic system really to say, okay, we need to be able to take them out and do that. As Dominic quite rightly said, maybe we should be doing that for the first two years of primary school, for arguments. I mean, I'm throwing it out as an option that actually it's more important that we get these children supported so that then they can make the most of their academic attainment because trying to do what we do now, which is we try and do bits and pieces and we try and fit in bits of life skills. I mean, I think I only attempted to have three things I was going to do with a particular child in a term because I knew that time was against us in terms of the other children I was supporting. I managed, I think, two lessons on working on tying shoelaces, you know, tying a ribbon, tying things to do with their hair. That's not enough. But there are other children that you go and visit, other things that you have to do, other things you need to see, and that is an important skills. They're skills that make these children, I say the same. They bring them up with their peers. They want to know how to tie a ribbon in their hair if they're a girl and how to tie a bow, and I'm trying not to sound too simplistic, but that matters. So we need a conversation about how we put that kind of life skills attainment into school and how we negotiate with teachers, how we negotiate with the curriculum for excellence to do that. To life skills attainment, are there any schools or local authorities that are striving to try and achieve that level in Scotland? I'm very concerned about Titan this morning because we've got a lot to get through and we've got another panel as well, so could both questioners and those on the panel try and keep their answers reasonably short, so if you don't mind. No would be my answer. It's trying to join in with fitting it in with everything else. Yes, because the Government and Glasgow City Council built a purpose-built sensory impairment school that had all the bells and whistles, hydrotherapy, art room, music room, home economics room, life skills house with hoists, with bedrooms, with cooking facilities, all adapted to try and support these young people to gain as many independent living skills as possible and socialise. We now have a school, if I can just give you some numbers, in the session 2012-13, Hazel Wooted 18 teachers. This year for the next session we've been offered 10 teachers. We have negotiated and been given 11.4 teachers. That's from 2013 to 2015-16. Can you imagine how difficult it is with a group of 53 children in a school, many of whom are in wheelchairs, how do you move those children around the school safely? Never mind educate them. There's been an undermining of the education system for these disabled children. Their visual impairment is perhaps the main barrier that my daughter, her main barrier to learning, is her visual impairment, but she has other disabilities as well, like her peers and the rest of the children in the school. How the school is going to cope with 11.4 teachers next year means that the management of the school will be in classroom, the school will not be managed properly, there is no budget to bring all the attributes of this fantastic purpose-built school online and make it actually live and thrive and provide the widest kind of education possible. I think that those figures speak for themselves. Looking at other provisions, Scotland has a spectrum of types of provision. Obviously, that's very much a specialist school environment. The majority of children go to their local school, supported by a peripatetic teacher. Depending on the individual needs of the child, the peri teacher might come in once a week, or once a month, as Sally mentioned. The honest responsibility is on the individual school to support that child. Those teachers won't necessarily know and understand sight loss and how to support it effectively. Time is the emphasis on the academic side and not enough time on the social skills development side of things. That's the case for the majority of children across Scotland. As we will discuss, the numbers are dwindling, the ability or their awareness of visual impairment and how to support it is perhaps not as good as it should be because many of them are inexperienced, so as a consequence we're getting lots of lots of children right across the country who are really struggling. Siobhan Mcmahon, I know that she wants to ask some questions in this kind of area. It was about the importance of the habilitation skills. To independence, because we've got a lot of written evidence on that, and following on from the questions that you just got, I got the sense that some of you thought that it was working well in habilitation skills. In some areas, some thought not so much. Is there any data out there? Is there any studies being taken to say? We've spoke about the importance of it, so I don't need to ask about that. I understand that it's important, but have we actually got any data to support if it's happening or not, both in mainstream and in special schools? I guess you're looking at me from the university. No, I'm not aware of any concrete hard data. I mean, there's anecdotal stuff that Dominic and Sally would know, but in terms of hard concrete data that we can look at and analyse, no. I mean, I've obviously, just to set this in context, when I wrote this, this was at the end of me working for the local authority to now be taking on a position for Royal Blind, and certainly what I'm about to undertake for purely this reason, which I think I'm probably allowed to say, is that I'm writing to all the heads of service in visual impairment to ask them where their gaps are for this particular reason, but that's in terms of informing some kind of service provision. That would give me, that gives me an idea, but there isn't anything in terms of that will be, I hope, all heads of service in visual impairment or somebody in the authority because sometimes it is just one person getting back to us and saying, okay, this is what we need, this is what we're not managing to, and I know that it will be the life skills, that kind of aspect of it, but that, in terms of hard data, no, I don't have. I can say also that habilitation is extremely patchy in a way that it's delivered across Scotland, and some local authorities it's delivered by the social work department, and other local authorities it's by the education, some it's local societies including RNIBs, Edinburgh and Lodians or Blind Children UK. There's no one set pattern in which habilitation is delivered. The other problem is that what is regarded as habilitation, which is different from rehabilitation because, as I say, adults are rehabilitated. A child has to develop and no one understands how to engage with the world, that's habilitation. Many of the people who are delivering the training aren't habilitation specialists. They've not undergone the postgraduate diploma that's either done through the Institute of London in partnership with Edinburgh University, so many of them are rehab workers who are mostly used to working with old people, all of a sudden they've maybe got a young child on their books. That's not good enough, and that's something that's being addressed by us, and I know that other people here have responded to that as well. We need habilitation specialists. I don't care who delivers it, I don't care how it's funded, but we need it. For instance, I'll give you an example. When I was in South Lanarkshire for 20 years, we had a sit-down meeting between the social work and education to say, look, we've got kids here, they need this input, who's going to deliver it, and they couldn't agree on who would deliver it. Likewise, you get many children who are maybe educated across authorities, so for instance, maybe a Glasgow child who was educated in South Lanarkshire, Glasgow City Council refused to give that young guy habilitation training. So that was a young boy who's now training to be a lawyer who had to park his backside down in Glasgow City Council and demand that they support him. They were embarrassed then to do it. That's unacceptable. So we have to develop something that ensures that our children are being supported more effectively. Is it happening? As you mentioned, the Blind Children UK talked about in their evidence during pre-school years. Is there any evidence to say that it's happening in pre-school years? I'll go back to Mary Scanlon's point. At nursery, do we know of anything that's happening at nursery schools that would be positive? The answer to that is no. What I can tell you is that Glasgow's habilitation team is based at Hazelwood school, as indeed their V outreach team is. The habilitation team in Glasgow is two members of staff for the whole of the city. They are wonderful, but there's only two of them. My own daughter has been able to get habilitation training through what's now Blind Children UK, which we know as Guide Dogs UK. They seem to be rapidly trying to train more habilitation staff, but there's just an absolute dare. I can say that the Glasgow habilitation workers were actually not paid for originally. Their training wasn't paid for by Glasgow City Council, it was paid by, I think it was, Cathy Spour as part of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. Now, they're concerned that one of them is about to retire, I don't know if you know that yet. They're worried that that person is not going to be replaced. We spoke about a number of the barriers that are put in place in order for young children to get the habilitation skills necessary to be independent, but what would be the main barrier? Obviously, if you're focusing on something at the minute, there are numerous examples there in the evidence, but what is the main barrier to this, would you say? Well, we had a pupil support assistant, an excellent pupil support assistant, who was funded to undertake her habilitation diploma. She would ask Glasgow if she could have a job and left because there wasn't a role for her within Glasgow. She now works for Blind Children UK. I think if you were to ask around schools within the pupil support area in schools, you may well find people who are interested in doing their habilitation diploma, but who is going to replace them in class? It comes down to money at the end of the day, doesn't it? That is part of it. There is a desire for people to take up the habilitation training course. SSC, the Scottish Science and Technology Centre, delivered that training, but the numbers weren't near because local authorities weren't releasing staff and said they didn't have the money, so many of them had to go and get training down at Wakefield in Yorkshire. That is costing local authorities who decide to send staff a lot more money. I think that what we need to do is to force local authorities to recognise that this is an issue. I know that the Scottish Council on Visual Impairment, SCOVI, is going to be one of the things that they are going to try to press forward and start challenging local authorities through COSLA, etc., and even yourselves as politicians here within the Scottish Parliament to accept that this is an issue that needs addressed. We need to make sure that the money is there—either ring fence in some way or whatever—to ensure that we have appropriately trained habilitation specialists working in partnership with teaching professionals to make sure that our children are more prepared than they actually are. I was going to touch on the issue of curriculum for excellence, but I don't think that you covered that quite comprehensively. However, one of the things that you were saying I had been thinking about is the presumption of mainstreaming or the way in which it is being interpreted and applied working against the interests of those with visual impairments or those with multiple disabilities. I was struck by what you were saying, Sally, about that even in the early stages of primary, getting some core fundamental life skills nailed down more proficiently would be more advantageous than maybe some of the other things that the non-visually impaired peers may be up to. Is there a way of applying this presumption in a more flexible fashion that would perhaps address some of the concerns that you are talking about? When I started this job nine years ago, I recognised that the whole inclusion issue, presumption of mainstreaming, when it works well, is good. The longer I have done the job, the more I have realised that for a lot of children it is not the best place for them to be. However, with the presumption of mainstreaming and my colleagues that probably know more statistics than I do, because of that, the number of places for children that would be better supported within a more specialised environment has reduced. Certainly, on my caseload of 28, 29 children previously, I had two children with severe cerebral palsy who were in a mainstream setting. It is very difficult for a standard, I would say QTVI, to be qualified to cover everything from a blind baby to a child with CP that is in a mainstream school. I do not know what my life is. It is an issue that I think is a real problem. I think presumption of mainstreaming, when it works, it works. When it does not, we need somewhere. As a completely personal idea of, for instance of mine, because I have a new role and a new path to carve on this, if you like, I would like to be able to gather together some of the children that are in mainstream, who we are only able to see save once a term or once a month. I would like to have somewhere that we could bring them with their teachers to spend a day or two days doing. Even only—and it is not a big thing, it is not what it should be, it is not really, really regular—but I think that we need that kind of provision within that mainstream. We need somewhere where we can actually go and say, for so many days or so many days a year, we come and we learn these things that it is very difficult to deliver in a mainstream setting. That can be done at a local level. North Lanarkshire Council used to have an area set aside where kids would be extracted and they could go and learn about life skills, but local authority cut backs closed that. I am a product of mainstream education. I lost my site when I was 16. I went to my local school, lost my site when I was 16 and then went to a unit in Erdingston Grammar for blind and passive sighted pupils and went on to university. The point that I am making there is that we need a presumption of mainstream. We need to ensure that the majority of our children who just live with a sight loss go to their local school or as near as possible to that. I think that that is vital in terms of inclusion. I also think that it is important to have a spectrum provision so that there is a need for children to go to someone at Robline school or indeed Hazelwood because that is a more specialised environment where they will not necessarily get that if they went to a local special school even with a peripatetic visual impairment support. I think that that is why I was framing the question the way that I did that I was not suggesting that the presumption itself was a wrong approach to take. However, the way that it is implied and the consequences that flow from that may not necessarily, in every instance, be meeting the needs of children whose needs may change over and over. Mainstreaming causes problems. There is no doubt about that. I have alluded to some of them today, the tightness of the curriculum. Sally mentioned that it is hard for some of the kids to navigate among a corridor because it is jam-packed or cluttered. A lot of inaccessible schools are not necessarily VI friendly, so there are huge issues there, but it certainly causes problems. However, that is not to say that that is not ultimately what we want for the majority of the children to go to a local school. However, the quality of the support that has been provided to those children within a local school, in many cases, is not good enough. I think that that end point is quite important. Not only should we have mainstream teachers looking at an inclusive pedagogy approach, but also it really is the quality of the VI staff. We have children who are supported by non-qualified teachers of visual impairment. How can that be? We have a mandatory qualification for it to be qualified, and yet we are still with a five-year statute on it, so the local authorities are allowed to employ these people who are not qualified with a five-year statute. However, this is not a tall look at. The inspector at HMIE does not inspect against this. The GTCS does not inspect against this. I have just recently trained or educated a teacher who has been teaching pupils for 20 years who has not qualified and thought, well, I better get qualified. How can this be the case that we allow unqualified teachers of visually impaired children to support teachers of visually impaired children? All the teachers are qualified, do not get me wrong on that, but the actual specialist qualification, we have many teachers in Scotland who are unqualified, who are supporting and doing their very best. This is not a criticism of them, but they are not qualified. This cannot be allowed to continue. You are not saying that these are bad teachers or poor teachers, you are just saying that they do not hope. You just mentioned a very specific example of a teacher who has been teaching for 20 years. Was that teacher a poor teacher, or whether they just did not hold a certification? I have not done a long-term assessment on that teacher. The fact that they were supported by other colleagues and they did not understand the theory that they were doing, that teacher—that is a pupil, he is my student—certainly benefitted from the qualification. They got a lot more out of it and understood the theoretical aspects and understood— I am sure that that is absolutely the case. I accept that absolutely. What I am trying to be clear about is that the teachers that you are talking about are teaching to a standard that we would expect them to do, although they do not necessarily hold the specialist qualification. How do we know that? If they are not being assessed by Education Scotland as part of school inspections, how do we know that that teacher is there or bluffing, just working her way through the motions? To me, it should be more than that. This is an enhanced curriculum that we are trying to teach kids. It is not just about helping them to access what the classroom teacher is doing, it is about the other skills that need to be supported. Unless that person truly understands sight loss, that cannot be happening unless they know the theory and the strategies and the resources that are available. That is a prime concern that I would have. I think that we are also beginning to see here in Scotland—it has been happening in England, but I think that we are starting to see here in Scotland as well—with the presumption of mainstreaming and local authorities trying to save money. What we are seeing is the merging of VI and HI services into a joint centre impairment service. Many of those are now being managed by somebody who has no experience whatsoever of visual impairment. Many of them do not have any experience of hearing impairment either. They just happen to be managers. Personally, I do not think that that is good enough either. I think that whoever heads up a visual impairment service in Scotland should really have a deep understanding of what is in the best interests of their children and that they are not just going through the motions of managing people. It should be deeper than that. I am hoping that we will have time to do so. The fact is that many of our children are not even able to access school internet systems or school networks. There is a huge issue just now with children using handheld devices such as braille notes and iPads, which have been locked out and prevented from learning at the same time as a sighted pier, which is against the law. Those children are expected to go away into study and research and gather information or download from Moodle or various other internet systems. Because local authority networks are not allowing them access, they are not learning or their system refreshes. Many of those children might use JAWS or supernova software and that becomes redundant. I have personally seen children who could go weeks without being able to access a computer because they are being blocked out. There is a huge issue in our report about the problem of accessing the curriculum in itself, which significantly affects attainment. I want to get a couple of other members in before we finish, but I will say that there are a number of areas and questions that we want to pursue beyond that. We will write to you with additional questions and, hopefully, you will be able to provide additional information beyond today. Just two very brief questions. We have heard how bad everything is and we understand that, but there are pockets. We mentioned Tayside earlier and we have had information that the Eastern Infrastructure Council suggests that mainstream schools were doing well at educating children with sensory requirements. We have talked about the spectrum. Why are we around the table, not just the politicians? Why are we not able to ensure that there is a cross communication to look at the best practice in pockets of Scotland so that those who are not performing might benefit from the good experiences? That is a very interesting question. One is that, in order to establish that we are comparing like with like, there are very good examples across Scotland. Highland is one of them, Aberdeen is another one of those, but we need to compare that. In order to put best practice into operation, we need to do that. Part of the role of the Scottish Sensory Centre, we have just released a mentoring scheme, where we are going to have senior experience qualified teachers of visually impaired from different local authorities mentoring newly qualified staff from other different authorities in order to support and give examples of that best practice. A lot of shadowing, a lot of mentoring come on. Funded by the Scottish Government in order for us to do this. So we are trying to, as you said earlier, get that connectivity across Scotland by showing and demonstrating through the senior qualified staff with new qualified mentoring system. So part of that is we're trying to incorporate that at the moment. Various CPD opportunities that both ourselves are in IB and at the Royal Blind are doing as well are trying to establish best practice criteria and also try to put on career professional development learning courses of that best practice. But those courses are only successful if local authorities release staff to come and take them up. There's no point in us as the Scottish Sensory Centre demonstrating what these best practices are either through online or through various other systems, multimedia approaches or through face to face, if local authority aren't allowing other staff to access those courses. So there is some connectivity, as you say, but there could be a lot more. I think that it's a part of my job as chairperson savvy, which is just a voluntary organisation of teachers, mostly teachers across Scotland. And we have an issue with members not being allowed to come to meetings, people who actually part of the fundamental reason for doing it is to get us together, yes, to talk about good practice, yes, to get other professionals in to speak to us to improve our own practice. A lot of why we do it is because we can sit in a room and we can discuss what we're doing quite literally from Orkney to the borders. And if there are areas where we're coming unstuck, you can actually find, as you find another teacher, that can support that or put you in touch with someone else. But quite often I would love to be there. I'd say I'd like to come, but I can't get out of school. I can't get out of school because I can't be released because there's no one to do my job or there's no one I can't be paid to come out. Train fares coming down from Aberdeen. Can we start the meeting at 10 o'clock because then I can get the cheaper train ticket? It's things as fundamental as that, that are making that kind of connectivity, albeit some of it very informal is being lost because of that. Also, Savie, I've been quite instrumental in trying to push forward this whole agenda of ensuring that assistive technology is available for blind and passive society kids across Scotland. In our report, we've mentioned a document called I write, which is getting IT write for blind and passive society children across Scotland. That was Savie that was instrumental in developing that. By bringing professionals together, identifying what the issues are across the majority of local authorities in Scotland with regards to IT, they've come up with a very positive example of where it is working so that staff within the local authority can go back to their IT managers, their corporate IT team and say, it's not working in our authority, why not? Because it's working on Aberdeen or it can get it to work in Edinburgh, why can't we allow our children with a Braille note-taking device to access our intranet system? That's the type of opportunity that has to be nurtured so that that's much more effective. Thank you very much. There are a number of areas that we haven't covered. I'm aware of that from our side and I'm sure from yours as well. As I said a moment ago, we're very tight for time this morning but we will write to you. If there's anything particularly that you want to supply to us, please go ahead and be proactive about that, but we will write to you with a number of questions that we haven't got through our areas. We haven't covered them this morning just because of time. I'm going to bring this particular session to an end, but we're very grateful for your attendance this morning and for giving up your time to come and speak to us. I know that this is a very big and complex issue and, as you said earlier, Dominate barely scratches the surface, but we hope that we can get further information from you, which will help us in understanding a bit better some of the issues and problems that young people are facing in Scotland, because we recognise the problems that some of you have brought to the table here today. Thank you very much once again for your attendance and can I suspend briefly? Can I bring the committee back to the second panel that we have this morning? We have Heather Gray, National Deaf Children's Society, Rachel O'Neill, Murray House School of Education, Dr Roger Cameron, Child Protection Research Centre and Catherine Finiston, British Association of Teachers of the Deaf Scotland. Excuse me. I welcome all of you this morning for attending. We're just going to go straight to questions and can I begin the questions with Mark Griffin? I wanted to go into questions around issues around teachers of the deaf in schools in Scotland. I'll kick off the shortage that we heard in written evidence from Aberdeen City Council about the age profile of teachers of the deaf. Generally, the majority of qualified staff are in their mid to late 50s. Do you agree with that? What needs to be done now to bridge that gap between boosting the numbers to an acceptable level as the ultimate ambition but covering for the staff who are going to be leaving the service in the next 10 to 15 years? I trained 39 years ago and at that time the Government had ring-fenced funding. It meant that all local authorities had the opportunity to appoint people to go on the training. We did one full-time years course, so people committed themselves to that year and became qualified. When the colleges and universities merged, they had to ensure that the modules were in line with the universities. It was done as a modular course, initially eight modules over a period of up to five years. Circumstances changed for people over five years. People get married, they have children, etc. At that time, there was also a monetary incentive to do the course. It wasn't a lot, I think that it was in the region of £200 or something, but it was some incentive to do the qualification, whereas now there is no incentive. What you find is that teachers who are extremely interested in working in deaf education apply for the courses. Some have to pay themselves, some have to go to authorities and ask for funding. If that is agreed, they continue with their day job and have to do the modules in addition to that. It can take quite a lot of time, and it is only the people who really want to do the job that will commit themselves to that, but other people will not. It has caused a national shortage. When you advertise for teachers of the deaf, qualified teachers of the deaf, you rarely get any applicants. If you are lucky, you will get one. I would like to talk about the course from the university point of view, because I run the post graduate diploma at Murray House, and we have some people coming on the course quite late in life, and we know that out there there are 30 per cent of teachers working with deaf children who are unqualified, so local authorities are sometimes not sending us people. The people who come usually are highly motivated. One thing I would like to see is more deaf people coming forward, and that is quite a difficult thing, because getting through to becoming qualified as a teacher and finding out about the possibilities once you are working in a local authority do not often get for example people with fluent sign language coming through. The age profile is quite old, but some authorities have made provision in advance by looking around for younger teachers. Fife is another council who has done this as well. They are looking at very good teachers, who they see in mainstream, attracting them to a service and sending them on the diploma. It depends on the authority's perspective. Small authorities and rural authorities struggle, I think, most. I think that some of the history about deaf teaching would be instructive at this point. There are so few teachers because deaf people are only allowed to become deaf teachers very recently, and it took a concerted amount of lobbying to change the rules to allow deaf people to train at all to become teachers of the deaf, and that is why we have got so few. One of the preconditions of becoming a qualified teacher was that you had to be able to hear what was going on in the back of the classroom. Clearly, a lot of deaf people who were qualified and intelligent enough to become teachers weren't able to do so because of those rules. I was one of those people, so I am very thankful for that rule change that allowed me to qualify. However, if we are looking at why there is such a dearth of deaf people as teachers of the deaf, that is the reason. We need to make a concerted and proactive effort to build that share of the teacher of the deaf population that is deaf to a much higher level. Just to think again about those statistics, there are 200 teachers of the deaf in Scotland according to the consortium for research and deaf education, and more than a third of those are unqualified. We have seen through the cry report in the last few years quite a significant decline, so we know that over 50 per cent of teachers of the deaf will retire in 10 to 15 years. We also know that it is incredibly difficult to attract teachers because there isn't the incentives that Kathy spoke about, so the additional qualification does not bring with it any additional responsibility allowance, which I think is a major factor. I think that we have a piece of work to do in terms of promoting the work of teachers of the deaf and the huge impact that it has for children and how it can really transform children's lives. I think that there is work to be done on really promoting the work of the teachers of the deaf and really starting to address the significant reduction that we are seeing and the difficulties in getting young people into the profession. I think that it is absolutely right that we should be supporting and encouraging more deaf young people to become teachers of the deaf. Interestingly, we have three of our young campaigners that are interested in becoming teachers of the deaf, and that is really important in terms of just giving young people the confidence to aspire to go into the profession. However, we have work to do on promoting the profession and the impact that it can have and the transformational change that it can make. I will pick up on a point that Dr Cameron made about the qualifications of teachers of the deaf in particular with BSL. Currently, the standard is for BSL level 1. I was struck by a comment that Dr Cameron said that, previously, teachers were not allowed to teach unless they could hear what was going on in the back of the classroom. However, a teacher who only has BSL level 1 will not know what his or her own pupils will be signing in the classroom. Surely, they were not qualified to be in the classroom, which seems to be a disparity. What are your views on the level of BSL qualification that teachers have and what you think that could be the impact on pupils learning when some pupils themselves have a much higher standard of BSL than the teachers themselves? That is quite right. It is very unfair. It can have a serious detrimental impact on their learning. If the language that is being used by the person who is instructing them is not clear and has a low skill level of British Sign Language, simple mistakes can be made. If you think about the English term iron, FE in the scientific world is an abbreviation. We have seen examples of people in the classroom using this sign for iron as in the thing that you iron your clothes with. Those are the kind of mistakes that are being made. Isolated deaf children in a mainstream environment are able to work out what that is supposed to be. It is crucial that the sign language is fluent and a standard that allows the deaf child to conceptualise what they are learning. We have done a lot of work in the centre and at the university about developing science signs, but none of that knowledge is being transferred or it is not being replicated anywhere. We are doing—there are such good examples of work going on, but what is clearly happening is that if the sign language standard in the school is not clear and it is not good enough, then the kids have got no chance of learning. When we develop these sign signs together as a group, you are talking about a large group of experts from the areas of science, linguistics, all those areas coming together and doing a lot of hard work just to get those concepts out in sign language. What we are doing at the Scottish Century Centre is helping teachers teach both deaf and hearing kids. I will give you an example. If you think about the concept mass, does the committee know what mass is? Can you describe what mass of volume is? It is very difficult, isn't it, just through the English word. When you think about gravity—I am sure that you are familiar with gravity. In sign language, look, the fist that I am using here is the sign for mass. Everything is there. Then you have got the gravity is the force that is acting on an object. We have this sign gravity as in to come down to earth, as Mary quietly showed with the pen. If you put the two together, conceptually, visually, you have weight. That is what weight is as a concept. You can see how visually superior that is to trying to explain something in English. Not only are deaf kids going to benefit if we can use sign language with them, everybody is going to benefit. Can you imagine trying to explain to a deaf child without the teacher of the deaf who might not be there in lip-speaking mass volume? They are not going to get it. If you have somebody who can sign like that, they are going to get the concepts immediately. It is incredibly disappointing that we allow teachers of the deaf to qualify with only level 1 BSL. I quite agree. I think that it is a great science lesson, Audrey. The work of the Scottish Science and Research Centre glossary is very important in telling teachers of deaf children and communication support workers about new signs and concepts that they can use. The current advice that we have from the government, and it is the government advice, is level 1, is the same all over the UK, and it is no way near enough for people who use sign language. What is more, it keeps teachers of the deaf assuming, that regulation keeps people assuming that most deaf children are not going to use much sign. In my submission and the submission from the British Deaf Association, we saw that there are larger numbers in children using some sort of sign than other parts of the UK. We know as well that teachers of the deaf, when they work with signing pupils, often have level 2 as what they regard as a good level. If you took to people in the deaf community, they are shocked by this, because level 6 is regarded as a good level for people who are interpreting. Level 3 is seen as a minimum. When I say level 3, I mean something like a higher in a language. If any of you have got a higher in a modern language, could you teach in it? That is the level which we are seeing as the minimum level for teachers of deaf children. That is what I say to my students, that the government regulation says level 1, or more as appropriate, and that vagueness of the language, more as appropriate, is very unhelpful. I feel that in Scotland we are in an interesting position now with the BSL Bill, and I expect that guidance to be revised upwards. Whether it is revised for all teachers of deaf children, or whether it is revised for those teachers working with signing students and the under fives, I do not know yet which way it will go. I think that we have got to remember that when we are talking about the word deaf in the Scottish context, we are talking about two quite different groups of children. There is some overlap between them, and the signing pupils at the moment are not getting a good deal. I will put that in a bit of perspective. 71 per cent of peripathetic hearing impairment services in Scotland do not have any teachers qualified to BSL level 3 or beyond, and there are actually six services in Scotland where there are teachers with no qualifications in BSL. That gives a sense of the dimension of the challenge that we face just now. We recently had a deaf learners conference, and we had 21 BSL users at that conference. They very strongly and clearly told us that they needed to have support, which was far more fluent than they currently had if they were going to succeed and to really achieve their potential. I think that we really need to listen to the voices of those young people coming from that deaf learners conference and identify the need to do something about that. Those are certainly the statistics just now in relation to BSL qualifications and teachers of the deaf in Scotland today. Can I start with a little plea for plain English in some of the submissions? When I look at a sentence like part of the solution is to transmogrify the educator from adhering to the sophisticated, deficit model to one that generates empowerment of the pupil, I can barely get it out. It's no one here. I was going to ask a little bit about some of the suggestions that have been made in terms of technology support and how that could best be introduced to give the biggest impact on pupils with hearing difficulties or sensory impairment. What would give the biggest hit? Where I am in Falkirk, we have sound field systems, which we are installing into all the primary one, two and three classes, into classes where we have children with unilateral losses, severe conductive losses. We are finding that that is benefiting all the children in the classroom. It is also benefiting the teacher because it helps the teacher's voice. You do not have to project it as loudly. All the children, regardless of where they are in the class, get the same level of volume from the teacher. There are also modern radio aid systems, which are discrete. Any of the children that we have that will benefit from a radio aid system will be supplied with one, but they cost about £1,000 each. We have had people writing and asking how we go about—there is a single teacher of the deaf in an authority—how we go about getting a radio aid system and funding for that or for a sound field system in our authority. It is very much at the hands of the education services whether there is funding for that. Is that the one major adaptation that you think would make a huge impact? In technology, children also have laptops. That would be the major one for us. It means that if they are wearing a radio aid system, regardless of where they are in the class, they will always hear the teacher's voice at the same volume and be tuned into what is happening. Just taking an example of what some local authorities do. For example, in my own Midlothian local authority, when schools are closed due to snow or in climate weather, children's homework is made available through smartphones or through the internet. How are sensory impaired children impacted by that? Does it disadvantage them hugely? Are there other adaptations that could be done to that to enable them to carry on with their education? I want to access support through glow. That can roll out to all the children if the parents apply. There is no disadvantage to that. If a child is ill or off, the parent will contact the school and ask for work to be sent home. The teacher will do her best to present challenging homework that she will be able to cope with. If that is not possible, then the teacher of the deaf in our authority will go out and do a home visit and tutor the child. Technology is obviously very important, but what underlies that will be a bilingual education that empowers deaf children. If they are able to read, they will be able to work from home, the same as any other child. If they are given language when they are born and they grow up confident using sign language and English in a bilingual way, then they should not have any problems. They should be able to access the written English just the same as their hearing peers. Like their hearing peers, they should not have to rely on technology for everything. I just wanted to say about technology. I do not think that there is one technological hit that will solve the problem, because, as Audrey says, the issue mainly is access to an early language, but in Scotland what we need more of is educational audiologists. We do not have enough. Those people can make the technological adjustments that are needed in local authorities, especially if they were able to work across many local authorities. Authorities are reluctant to employ one because perhaps they do not have enough work for one, so it seems an obvious job to give an essential service such as the SSC to work in many local authorities. Those people cannot fit radio aid systems. They cannot advise on sound field systems. They cannot advise parents. They are very valuable. They are basically teachers of deaf children who have had additional training, and in Scotland we need more of them. Is it an example of a local authority that employs one? Yes, five employs one. There is one freelance who is working across some local authorities in the west. Falkirk has got one. It has been hard to recruit as well, hasn't it? Yes. It is very difficult to recruit because there are so few of them. Do we know how many there are through Scotland? Five. That is a significant reduction over the last few years. Often what we are seeing is if post-holders leave, those posts are not being replaced. That certainly was the case in Ayrshire and in the Lothian. We are seeing a reduction. One of the points that I was going to make was that there is no point in having the technology if we do not have the expertise to use it properly. A very strong message coming through from the deaf learners conference was the young people saying that teachers do not know how to use technology. One of the young people gave this really funny incident of where the teacher had not switched off the radio mic and the kids heard the whole conversation that went on in the staff room. It is quite a fundamental point, but our young people are telling us that it is critical that our staff actually know how to use the technology that we have. The issue about the reduction in educational audiologists is that we need to ensure that there is a solution. Ayrshire has skilled up one of their teachers of the deaf to be a specialist. There are ways to do this, but it is clearly an issue that not everybody has the skills and expertise to use the technology that we do have properly. Is there any indication that councils are increasingly sharing that resource? At times of cuts, they are attending not to share. Previously, we had an education audiologist based in Edinburgh, who also worked with all the Lothians. That has not been replaced because the authorities could not agree. The service has deteriorated as a result. The children used to have excellent service from that education audiologist, right the way through from 0 to 18. I think that one of the other difficulties is that there is not any training for educational audiologists in Scotland. There is not any of the universities that provide that. Is there any consistency between the audiologists that exist in Scotland? There is not a job description for an educational audiologist. It is quite inconsistent. Do you have skill level? I mean, it does obviously make sense to have a better use of technology and also to centralise services across authorities and make good use of resources and not only hardware and software resources but the people resources. Rather than seeing authorities wasting money trying to provide those services on their own, an economy of scale has to be able to be leveraged. Before we move on, I will take a short suspension of the moment for a five-minute break. In the papers that we have, there is a quote from the Scottish Council on Deafness highlighting the importance of multi-agency information. The quote is under the universal newborn hearing screening programme. Children are picked up in a hearing test that happens as part of health tests in the first six weeks. We have heard at the earlier session in terms of vision impairment that we have no idea—there is a spectrum of course, but there is no idea of the actual numbers that are involved. We are told that, as far as hearing is concerned, screening is recorded within the NHS databases at a local level. However, our understanding is that this information is not always shared effectively across the different services, potentially creating missed opportunities for early interventions and support for the children and families. Do you agree with that? I think that, fundamentally, we need to know how many children we are dealing with for early interventions, for starting the language learning process, something crucial for a deaf baby to have access to a visual language from as close to day one as we can get it. It is very important. I have other concerns about the newborn screening test. My personal experience when I had a baby was that both my husband and I were deaf, and the test was administered the next day. I knew that she was hearing instinctively. I thought that everything was going to be fine, and straight away the person said, oh no, we are going to refer your baby straight away to a speech and language therapist, even though they are perfectly hearing. I thought, hang on a second, you do not know my background. You do not know who I am. I am from a hearing family. I grew up with a hearing family myself. My daughter, who is now 10, is fluently bilingual, by the way, so none of those fears speaks as clearly as everybody else. I can imagine what their attitude is going to be like with hearing parents who have a deaf baby the other way around. I was upset. My daughter had just been born. It is the day after. I put myself into the hearing parents position. The health services and settings need to know how to work with the social side of things, having positive role models, getting deaf adults in there, not to have this negative attitude of, oh dear, your child's deaf, and seeing it as a necessarily negative thing. The health services need to be plugged in, but they also need to be making parents aware of all the different life possibilities and all the different avenues that their deaf child can undertake and to know that deaf people do regularly strive for and achieve their dreams in many walks of life. That is very helpful. I suppose that the most important people that we have talked about, teachers are very important, the curriculum is very important, the methods are very important, but at the end of the day the parents are absolutely critical from day one. What measures would you support in terms of improvements in multi-agency working to support parents from day one and in the early years? Rachel? I would like to refer you to the Scottish Century Centre early years standards, which were developed by a group of practitioners and parents in 2011. They set out ways that the agencies can work together, seeing the parents at the centre of the team. That attitude about putting the parents at the centre is quite difficult for some agencies to realise. We know that we have got the benefit of newborn screening in Scotland and we have got good pediatric standards, but these standards are not statutory. Education Scotland does not assess with them at all and does not assess early years services. We know that many of those early years services are very successful. Angus, for example, has got a very successful service. It is a small authority, but they have got age-appropriate language for all deaf children who have been or nearest to age-appropriate from the age that screening started. As they go on more and more, what they are not getting from newborn screening is mildly deaf children. They are picked up. Children have got mild deafness, but they are not referred straight away. Those sorts of things could be improved a great deal. These guidelines could be made statutory. Education Scotland, HMIE, could inspect them. Also, if you look at the BDA recommendations about an early years sign intensive environment, that could also be very useful for establishing bilingual education for many deaf children because it is an advantage for everybody to have a bilingual experience. I like the way they suggested about having a resource space with a reasonable number of deaf children and deaf adults signing or hearing adults who can sign very fluently. Having a fluent language before you have an implant or having exposure to a fluent language before you have an implant actually helps you to map those signs that you know on to spoken English very well. Deaf children from deaf families actually do best out of any group when they have an implant because they already have a language before. Early exposure to two languages is a good thing, but it is very hard to organise. That is why I quite like the BDA's response there, where they were looking in practical detail about how agencies and authorities could cooperate to make that happen. I think that those are the two steps that I would suggest. Implement these and make them something that HMIE can inspect. Remember the parents at the centre and establish early years bilingual environments. I just say that we did have two pilots for local records of deaf children in both Lothian and Tayside, which was set up on the back of universal newborn screening and which was all about sharing information and making sure that services were working together. One of the things that we have called for is that we have a national roll-out of that because it creates that environment where services are working together and we are using the information from universal newborn screening to make sure that professionals and services are working together. The other thing that I would say is that what is critical for parents remembering that 90 per cent of parents are hearing, who have a deaf child, is the role that the third sector can play. All the things that are around deaf role models are making sure that parents have impartial advice and making sure that there is someone there to navigate them through what can be a really challenging and difficult time. GERFEC provides the perfect framework for that, but we need to make sure that we are progressing in terms of those GERFEC pathways and that services are truly working together and that parents have got that very practical, impartial advice from other parents. Our family support service covers every authority in Scotland. Our family support workers are parents of deaf children. That kind of practical emotional support is really, really important to us. I think that there are solutions there and there are things that we know and have learned from the past that we can roll out to improve how services work together and how we can make sure that within that pathway parents get support from other parents. Supplementary on that point, and I'm grateful to you for raising it. Paragraph 5.1 in the national deaf children's evidence, despite the introduction of the universal newborn health screening in 2005, the Scottish Government has not yet published any guidance on post-diagnostic and subsequent early years support for children and families, resulting in considerable implications for long-term education and wellbeing outcomes. I hear what Rachel O'Neill mentioned about coming together, but why has it taken 10 years for the Government to produce nothing after the introduction of the universal newborn health screening in 2005? I think we have got standards, but we don't have them. No, but the Government hasn't published, that's what I'm talking about. I think probably it might have been, sorry, do you want to reply on that? I think it might have been because newborn screening was seen in a very health-orientated way, and there are actually pediatric standards which are very good, but they don't involve what happens next, which is talking to teacher, talking to language role models. The implementation of the screening has been seen almost entirely as a health issue, and it's obviously not. When you say has not published guidance, I won't repeat what I've said, did you expect them to publish guidance, that's what I'm reading into it, or does the guidance not matter? That's what I'm not understanding. I think guidance is absolutely critical, and I think for more than 10 years. So why hasn't it been done? I think for the reasons that Rachel's describing in terms of health, sorry, Audrey. Oh, I was just going to say, nobody's listening to deaf people? Perhaps is the reason? Nobody's listening to us? I think we are listening today. I did pick up the, it was Audrey that started on that point, and to be fair, I have picked that up. Oh, no, the inference was that the Government hasn't been listening for 10 years. I appreciate it. Yes, but all I'm asking, convener, is the Government's guidance in terms of early-year support and information, is it critical going forward in terms of support, attainment, et cetera, for deaf children? I'd like to discuss this, because I think it is critical. In some local authorities in Scotland, there are not enough teachers of the deaf or not enough qualified teachers of the deaf, and occasionally, rather regularly, you hear about children who are language-less, at five or six, which is far too late. They are referred at birth, but perhaps they might be getting... I have heard examples quite recently of somebody being aided at three and a half and they've been referred at birth. Nothing much had happened in the meantime, so the reason why we need these standards is because there is inconsistency between authorities, and some authorities have got very proactive staff, go on extra courses, read a lot, understand the early monitoring protocol, which we have, which is English materials about the development of early sign and speech, and they're implementing them, they're monitoring very carefully. Other authorities say to me, I've heard one person say to me, what is the monitoring protocol? Now, that is just shocking. I mean, those children haven't got a chance. Language-less children should not exist, but unfortunately, in deaf, well, we meet language-less children, of course, they're not going to achieve academically. One of the problems is that language-less children often exist in rural areas and they're not allowed to get to a place where they can see sign language used. I'd have to say quite... It's a little bit sad. I mean, I've met language-less people who don't live in the rural area, you know, who are in, you know, urban areas, and it does come back to the fact that the teachers and the support staff that they meet don't know how to sign, their parents don't know how to sign to a significant standard. So what chance do they have, in a sense? But I wouldn't mind going back just quickly to the newborn screening issue. There has been some research from Leeds, I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the researcher, about the emotional attachment with baby. Because of the attitude of health professionals at the point of diagnosis, it doesn't allow either the mother or the father to really effectively bond with their child and celebrate, you know? I mean, everybody's always after the perfect healthy baby, is what we're told. But the screening obviously has an advantage because it picks these things up early, but what it does, of course, is it can run the risk of the parents detaching from the child, starting to feel guilty immediately about that. No matter what we think, babies pick up on that, they pick up on that quite clearly. So we should be straight away providing a positive environment for those parents saying, look, you know, here's a language that you can access that your child can access straight away. Before the newborn screening programme, ironically, parents had that time to bond with their child. My parents didn't know that I was deaf until I was nine months old, but that bond and the love had already been established. That affirmation for me as a human being had already been made. I wasn't seen as deficient or disabled immediately, so a lot more has got to be done in that area to give parents this positive experience rather than, oh dear, your child's death and everything's negative. To see it as something that necessarily needs to be repaired. Mary, do you want to move on to— Yes, only one question. My questions were actually on data, collection and attainment, but I'll just go to one question, and that is our briefing from the Parliament today looks at positive destinations for school leavers with a hearing impairment. If I look at those with no additional support needs, it's 91.7 and with a hearing impairment, 89.4, which on paper doesn't look too bad. If I just go to further education with no additional support needs, the follow-up destination is 22.5 and with a hearing impairment, 41. As an economist, I know that below those figures there are many stories to tell, but if you'll forgive me for taking a rough glance at those figures, they look quite good. I find it hard to believe that that's the full story, and I would perhaps ask you if positive destinations entry into further education. I have to say that higher education is about half for people with a hearing impairment, but behind those figures look quite good. Behind the figures, are there any concerns that you would like to raise with us today? You're right to pick out about the difference between further education and higher education. A larger proportion of children go on to further education. Rather than higher education, it's practically reversed. The reason is largely because of the English level. The research that we've done recently at the University of Edinburgh, the achievements of the Nuffield Foundation-funded research about the achievements of deaf pupils in Scotland, showed that there were two areas of concern. I showed them in the graph that I put in my submission, which was the English results at S4. Actually, no, you can't see this, but S4. S4, you've got all the levels of deafness category from people with cochlear implants to mildly deaf, profoundly deaf, severely deaf, deaf, performing much worse at S4 in English, and then when you get the high flyers, those who you'd expect to be going to university getting level 5 when they're in S4. Again, drastically different results. All the different categories of deafness performing much worse. Now, it must be because of early language experience and also the experience they have right the way through school in support and access to language and the curriculum. Data collection is very important. The other group that I would want to concentrate on is those who leave school with very low level qualifications or no level, no qualifications, which is about 16%. Much, much higher. With a level 3 SEQF qualification, you really can't get onto a very decent college course. That group of children need much more examination. Who are they? I expect that many of them are from impoverished backgrounds, which we unfortunately have come to expect in the UK. Many of them would also be probably the language list children that I talked about before. Many of them perhaps have been unfortunate enough to grow up in areas where they didn't have access to sign language and were profoundly deaf or they didn't have very good acoustic conditions. So, that group of children who achieved poorly, getting SEQF level 3 and below when they leave school, need more study and we need to find out who they are and we need to put targets in. Not when they're 16, that's far too late. We need the early years environment and I would say mildly deaf children as much as profoundly deaf children need that support early on. I am concerned in Scotland at the moment about the speech and language therapy cuts, which seem to be very widespread. I think that the whole range of deaf children in the early years need extra support, much better support from multi-agency groups. I think that just to add to what Rachel was saying about the need for support, but there is also a desperate need for research about what's actually going on in the classroom. When we have successful learners, why are they successful? What's going on with them? We talk about not enough communication support workers, not enough teachers of the deaf, not enough qualified people. That's fine, but we do need to find out what's going on in the classrooms today, what the reality is. I suspect that we are often finding mainstream teachers with one deaf child in their class and perhaps having a teacher of the deaf or a communication support worker, a CSW coming in for a certain amount of time a week and running what is essentially a macro class within the larger class. The classroom teacher isn't directly teaching the deaf child. They're devolving that responsibility to someone else who may not be qualified to deliver that education. I've seen this in evidence myself. There's no way you can expect a child to behave normally in that situation. Of course they're going to be disruptive, they're going to be distracted, they're going to look at the window, they're not going to be paying attention because they're detached from the rest of the class. They're existing within this macro environment, so there's no follow-up from the teacher directly. They're not enjoying anywhere near the level of access to education that all the other kids are, so this inclusive education is actually exclusive. I've been following four deaf children to try and ask them why they don't get involved in asking the teacher questions. That interactive part of someone's education experience is one of the most crucial parts of their learning. We've identified that often the classroom teachers, when they ask a question to the class, as we've seen on the panel today, hearing people can put up their hands a lot faster. It's actually 1.2 seconds as all you've got on average before the first kid's hand goes up. When you've got a communication support worker who isn't qualified, how are they supposed to keep the deaf child up to speed or a teacher of the deaf? I've seen teachers of the deaf. I've seen one of them saying, oh, don't worry about it, I'll write it down for you later, I'll tell you later. They don't stand a chance and therefore the children don't stand a chance, and that's why they're not getting anything out of this supposedly inclusive. What would be better is if we had children in smaller group environments interacting directly with a teacher that was qualified and skilled in the necessary language and cultural aspects to deal with them, not education through a third party, so that deaf children are involved in class discussions, involved in debates, they know what's going on in the whole classroom, and they're not feeling isolated as they currently are. We talk about a holistic education experience and life skills and habilitation skills, but we're falling woefully short on all of those measurements when it comes to deaf children. The first step to improving that is to have a look at what's actually going on in the classrooms today, and we don't have an idea, we don't have a picture of that yet. It wouldn't be acceptable—I mean, would you take it if it was your child? Would you accept that education for your child? A lot of the communication support workers that are providing the access, they don't have subject knowledge and they don't have fundamentally and crucially the language skills to perform their job. How can you interpret physics if you can barely sign? We need to look at what's going on in the classrooms today. I'll just say that this is one of the reasons why NDCs have been calling on an aspect review of deaf education, because what we've seen and what has come through our research are pockets of excellent practice, where this is done exceptionally well in Scotland and other areas where it's incredibly poor. But because peripatetic teachers of the deaf, who are largely the teachers supporting young people in the mainstream, are not routinely inspected, we do not have a national picture of the quality of support that's going in. I'll repeat it again today. We believe very strongly that what we now need is a full aspect review of deaf education, so that we can identify where practice is really good and really learn from it and share that best practice and really get to grips with where it is just not working well. I want to talk about the independence of people who are at school and how we get that. I had asked some questions about the habilitation skills in the first panel, which I will do, but I wanted to start with Dr Cameron's evidence. Dr Cameron, you finished with the sentence in the last paragraph, what we need is a system for gathering data on the achievements of deaf pupils. I was wondering what that system would look like and also what do you believe the achievements would be? I feel that the achievements in Scotland would be woefully bad and inadequate. I think that's what the picture would be. I had to go to England myself to get a decent education, so I had to travel from Scotland and I had to go down there. When you talk about that system, what we need to do is to take in the whole picture, not just the child's understanding of a subject. You talk about confidence, habilitation skills, independent skills and all that stuff that we see in the curriculum for excellence. It's simply not happening for deaf children. We have some isolated individual success stories, but it's by no means predictive, and often what we see is in that situation that there has been extra payments made either by the family or the school or somewhere to get extra communication support for that child, so it comes down to money. If it's a hearing child not receiving the same standard of education as their peers, parents would be outraged but we seem to find it acceptable for deaf children. I think that's the number of the question. I think that it comes on to Manich's questions about to what extent habilitation skills are being provided across the country. Do we know that or has anyone got an idea of who's doing more? If it's in mainstream schools, if it's in independent schools, if it's in special schools, have we got any idea across the country as to what's happening? In my job, I'm lucky that I'm able to visit a lot of schools and also do placement visits and read placement files, so in some way I have got an idea. I'm not saying it's a complete picture. There are many really good things happening in supporting. We don't usually use the term habilitation in deaf education, but I know what you mean in visual impairment terms, things like mobility training and things like that. In terms of deaf education, well I suppose independence and resilience and confidence. I think that the NDCS has done some very good work in this area. When I look at children who are coming to events, for example, which sometimes have events at the Scottish sensory centre for pupils, the places where there is a resource base school, I see much more confidence and I see in some areas of Scotland, deaf studies being a subject in itself, and I don't mean just big D deaf studies only focusing on sign language, but talking about the experience of being deaf and having the chance to reflect on that experience and seeing yourself as a potential deaf adult who is likely to perhaps sometimes want to use signs, sometimes want to use speech in different circumstances, understanding the situation of deaf people and understanding what they need to do to make hearing people work better with them. That sort of self-confidence assertiveness training is done in some places and you can see the results when you get groups of deaf children together. I must say that Valkirk is one of those places where I've seen deaf students being very confident and talk out and be aware about who they are. You've got deaf adults in that school, haven't you? I think that the proof is in the pudding there. I think that helps a great deal because a lot of deaf children amazingly think that they're going to become hearing when they grow up. They still walk around with that fallacy because they never meet a deaf adult throughout their whole childhood. We have a deaf sign language tutor, but we often have lots of our former pupils coming back and talking to the children and being involved with what they're doing. Anytime we have a deaf adult in the school, we always invite them down right to the primary classes to make sure that they're aware. We do surveys with the very young primary children asking, are you deaf or are you hearing? What do you think that person is? Are they deaf or are you hearing? How do they communicate? Do they wear hearing aids? It's a much more natural environment. The children that come back praise the education that they've had in Windsor Park because we care very much about each individual child's needs and try to address those needs as best we can. What we're seeing here is a clear need for an environment where a deaf-friendly environment, a signing environment, is not an environment that isolates the child. Thank you very much. I'm Liam McArthur. Very much. I was interested. Dr Cameron, you made a comment that echoed, I think, what Dominic Everett said in the previous panel about the scope within curriculum for excellence to address some of these things. His concern was then that there wasn't space and capacity within the system to allow some of the habilitation to take place. I wonder if similar issues arise in relation to the independence and resilience that you were talking about, Rachel. We got on to a discussion about whether or not the presumption of mainstreaming was actually the way in which it was implemented and interpreted was actually working against the interests of, in the previous discussion, those with sight impairments and whether there's a similar issue in relation to those with hearing impairment? I think that you'd say that mainstreaming isn't working at all in that regard. Now, you can see why wanting to include deaf people in society sounds like a great thing. It doesn't sound like a bad thing at all in theory, but the actual experiences that they're becoming more isolated, they're more vulnerable in the mainstream than they ever have been before and teachers of the deaf might be able to visit what, once a week, in some cases once a month, an hour a day. So what are the kids doing the rest of the time in school? What's happening all the other hours? If you've got a deaf resource centre or a base within a larger school where you've got that critical mass to enable confidence, independence, I think that we can get through all of the curriculum for excellence. There shouldn't be any barriers to learning if we provide the right learning environment. I've met deaf people who know a number of languages. There's no reason that deaf people can't even learn French, Japanese, physics, any subject. If the language base is there, if the education is accessible, then they can achieve on a par with their hearing peers. But to drop them in the mainstream with no support or inadequate support is shameful. One doesn't like to think about the mental health implications that must arise from the anxiety that young people must feel going through that experience. Deafness is not a learning disability and that's an important point to bear in mind. I was going to say that the visit to winter park school was evidence that where it works it can work extremely well. Therefore, I suppose the question is does that give us confidence that we should be able to make that work across the piece, perhaps by concentrating resource in some respects? Or will we need to tailor things in an urban setting compared to a rural setting? I mean, I had a previous panel talk about the lack of provision at all in my own constituency in Orkney and that comes as no surprise to me. Recruitment can present real difficulties in some rural areas. Is there a danger that we try to fix that with a one-size-fits-all and end up coming up with solutions that really aren't going to work in different parts of the country? I'm really glad that you asked that question. I caught it on the monitor downstairs, as you were asking it to the previous panel. I think that the standards in Scotland schools leading to the presumption of mainstreaming does some deaf children a real disservice because of the fact that they can risk falling into this category of language lists. As Audrey explained very clearly about mental health implications of being different, isolated and not involved in the classroom, the research that we did suggested that it would benefit local authorities if they co-operated and set up resource-based schools where you have a peer group. This can work for children who sign as well as children who use speech. DL High School is a very good example of a successful resource-based school where children achieve. If you notice, DL is in the top 50 secondary schools for Scotland, according to the Herald's league table, and it's got more than you'd expect in children from deprived backgrounds, and the success rate is good. Having a mass of children—I don't necessarily think that it's good that DL only uses speech because I can't see nowadays why we need to just have that approach, but the fact is that it's an achieving school. It's a school where parents want their children to go. Parents of deaf children are very happy when their children get into DL. They achieve well, and resource-based schools are a good idea. Obviously, it's easier to work out in central Belt than in the rest of Scotland, but rural authorities could collaborate, and they did in the past collaborate. For example, Aberdeenshire used to send children into Aberdeenshire City, where they have a school, but they don't anymore. That's where you have a risk, I think, and it's perfectly possible for those local authorities to collaborate more. We have to consider, as part of that, boarding schools. Children still do go to a school—Mary Hare, notably in England, is a school that they go to very successfully. They're usually weekend borders, so they go home at the weekend. I know that some people find it heartbreaking in today's context to being away from your parents, but I'm grateful to my parents for taking that brave step and providing me with the education that I required. If they hadn't done that at the time and hadn't made that move, I certainly wouldn't have got my doctorate and I wouldn't be sitting here in front of you. Perhaps the Harry Potter books have made boarding more attractive to 21st century parents. I don't know, but— That's what my experience is like. That's what my school is like, being at Hogwarts. Exactly where we're all deaf. It's still magical. Can I thank the panel for coming along this morning and giving up your time to come and speak to us and give us your evidence? It's been very helpful. This is obviously the start of a short inquiry into sensory impairment to go along with the bigger inquiry on attainment that we're doing, and it fits very well into some of the work that we've done with Mark Griffin's bill on BSL. Once again, I thank Andy Carmichael very much for all his efforts, so it's through him that we can do this so well. Thanks very much, Andy, and thank you. We will have to suspend now to allow us to leave. We move on to agenda item 3. On 27 January 2015, the Public Petitions Committee referred petition PE1530 by Spencer Fells on behalf of the Scottish Secular Society to this committee. Just so that everybody is aware, the petition stated that it wished 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 deep time. We considered the petition at our meeting on 10 March and agreed to write to the minister for learning science in Scotland's languages with a number of questions. We've now received a response from the minister, and that's attached to the papers that the committee members will have received. I invite the committee to consider what further action, if any, it wishes to take in relation to the petition or any comments that you want to make. Any comments from other members? Liam? I think that we posed three questions that have been addressed. I note in particular the comment in relation to having a non-statutory curriculum and the risks of going down a route that may see us starting to undermine that. I think that the assurances that we are looking for are in the letter, so I have been minded as we check to close the petition on that basis. Uniquely, I agree with the Government. I think that the main point is that it is preferable to leave the curriculum to teachers, enable them to exercise their professional judgment on what is taught, rather than legislate to ban issues in schools. That, to me, says it all. I think that I want the same page as others who have spoken. Any other comments? Mark? I think that the minister has answered the concern as to how the prevalence of the issue. I think that I am reassured that it hasn't been an issue in schools and in teaching of science lessons. I agree with what seems to be the consensus that we should close the petition. Certainly, from my point of view, one of the concerns that I certainly raised at the time was particularly in reference to the possible intrusion of creationism in two science classes. I think that that was the particular, not other possible, but not banning the possibility of discussion of such philosophies and ideas within the school, but particularly within science classes. I think that it is very helpful of the minister who has written to us who has said that, and I have just quoted from the letter, so it is on the official report, guidance provided by Education Scotland set out in the principles and practice papers and the experiences and outcomes documentation for each of the eight curriculum areas does not identify creationism as a scientific principle. It should therefore not be taught as part of science lessons. I think that that could not be clearer from the Government. I am in accord with other members in the committee that we should now close the petition in light of the letter that we have now received from the Government. Would members agree that we will write to the petitioner in form of the decision and also enclose a copy of the letter that we have received from the minister? Is that agreeable? Yes. Agreed? Okay, we will close the petition. Thank you very much. As the committee has agreed to hold the next items in private, I now close the meeting to the public.