 Welcome to the 29th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee. Can I remind everyone to please turn their mobile phones to silent or off so they don't restrub the meeting? Our first agenda today is the decision to take business in private, so can we take agenda item 3 in private? Agenda item 2 is school support staff data. It's an evidence session on the availability of information on school support staff data collected as part of the school staff census. The session will focus on the changes to the presentation of statistics, including merging categories relating to additional support needs, support staff and changing the publication status of a number of categories, so staff figures are now available on request, as opposed to being published at standard. I welcome to the meeting this morning. Roger Halladay, chief statistician and data officer. Alasdair Anthony, statistician, head of school staff and pupil census statistics team. Laura Meagle, head of support and wellbeing unit, learning directorate, and Mike Wilson, acting deputy director of education analysis at the Scottish Government. Very warm welcome, but I invite Mike Wilson to make opening comments on behalf of the panel. Thank you very much. I thought it would be useful just at the beginning to put the data that we're here to discuss and the points that you've just listed into a bit of context, both in terms of the statistics themselves and in terms of the processes used to collect, assess and publish those data. There's a range of data collection exercises undertaken on education throughout the year. There's a number of those or census type collections which are conducted in parallel over the autumn period. We are at the moment at the end of the 2018 collections across a range of things. Whilst all those collections are related and happening in parallel, they are each distinct exercises and have some important differences between them, and no doubt we'll come to some of those throughout the conversation. Primary sources of data for us are the pupil census and the teacher census, which are the ones that are probably most well recognised across the system. We also conduct the non-teaching school staff census from which the support staff data come. The primary school class data collection, school establishment collection and every two years we collect data on attendance and absence and exclusions in schools. There's a range of other collections carried out throughout the year as well, including collections on school meal provision, on physical education provision and a range of data exercises relating to pupil performance and outcomes. The administrative collections that happen in the autumn are supplied to Scottish Government directly by local authorities and, in some cases, by schools, particularly grant aided schools. As such, the quality assurance process starts with their initial collection of the data that they use for the day-to-day running of the education system. They hold those data on their management information systems for regular use. Quality assurance is built into each stage of the process, so schools, local authorities and the Scottish Government all have a rule to play in that process. The precise arrangements vary a little bit between the collections, depending on the nature of the data and the amount of detail that we collect, but ultimately the data are signed off by directors within local authorities prior to being published by the Scottish Government. During the course of those administrative data collections, we collect and process what amounts to tens of millions of pieces of data relating to two and a half thousand schools, around 700,000 pupils, 70,000 teachers and over 20,000 support staff across the system in Scotland. That enables us to publish well in excess of 100,000 statistics. In addition, we release bespoke data sets and analysis throughout the year for a wide range of users, including researchers and academics, the media, the general public, politicians and parliamentary committees. The code of practice for official statistics sets a framework for our approach to handling data and producing statistics. It is there to ensure that quality, value and trust in statistics are produced by organisations such as the Scottish Government, and it provides us with specific guidance on specific aspects of producing statistics. For example, ensuring burden on data providers is proportionate and ensuring that the appropriately qualified professionals are used throughout the process. Ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the code of practice is adhered to within the Scottish Government rests with the chief statistician. The purpose of those administrative data collections in education, as with all other sectors, is to paint a picture of the subject to which the data relates. It can only ever play back practice within the system or the picture of the system itself. It does not ensure or define or constrain practice within a system, but it does ensure and should facilitate debate and discussion about those practices within the system. Any statistical collection of publication does not exist in isolation or for its own sake. It needs to seek to remain relevant, reflecting current or likely future situations, while ensuring that robust and accurate a picture as possible can be presented. How we publish it therefore needs to be a balance between a number of factors. They include known limits or restrictions to the data, previous practice on publication, public interest, current issues and context in which we are presenting the data and the availability of other sources of information on the same or similar topics. Our approach is generally to publish as much information as possible, in as accessible a format as possible, without proactively releasing data that we need to be misleading, incomplete or erroneous. Education data are probably more in the spotlight now than at any time in recent memory. That brings with it a requirement to continually improve their fitness for purpose, but it also brings us closer more often to the practical limits of the power of the data that we collect. Therefore, simply replicating what has gone before will not always provide the most useful or accurate data and is right that we take action to investigate and address any anomalies in the data or issues raised by data providers themselves throughout the process. As a final note, no decision to make changes on the presentation of official statistics is taken lightly. In this particular case, the requirement to reflect on-going changes in the relative importance of support staff data as against other elements of education data, teachers and class sizes, for example, meant that a deeper examination was warranted when a potential issue was highlighted to us. The resulting changes, provided in our view, were more reliable data set than would have been the case if we had left those unaddressed. I would like to start on the process in terms of the timeline of publication. Typically, the data is collected for a day in September, initial publication in December, supplementary data around March. Obviously, the most recent set of data, the supplementary set, came in July. Was that a one-off because this was the year in which you began to make the changes that we are here to discuss, or will this be the new timeline going forward for publication of data? That is right. The reason that the data was released slightly later than it has been in the past was because we did those additional quality assurance checks. We have announced that the supplementary data from the staff census and the people's census will come out in March 2019. The data that was published earlier this year was the supplementary data. When it was published, the publication came with a notice saying that additional data would be provided on request. When I requested that additional data, my request was treated under freedom of information legislation. That seems like an odd and onerous process to go through when you are soliciting requests for that additional data. Will that be the process going forward? The data that we will publish in March 2019 will be available on the website as normal as part of the published status tables. We have not yet decided what we will do about the information that we released as management information on those additional categories of staff that were not practically published originally. That is a decision that we have yet to take as to how we will make that information available. It is relatively normal practice for us to treat a range of data requests as freedom of information requests. Strictly speaking, any request to the Scottish Government is a freedom of information request that is a legislation. I am sorry, Mr Wilson, but that is not the case. We, as members of the Parliament, routinely make requests to the Government that are not freedom of information requests every day. That is what MSPs do. It seems like a very odd and onerous process. It seems to significantly increase the work code on your teams, I would imagine, to treat it through FOI legislation. I do not recognise that treating it through the FOI process adds to that at all. A number of non-routine requests for data will be treated as freedom of information requests. In this particular case, it would have been the first time that we would release that level of detail for that particular set of data. It was right that we treated that through a formal process. It also meant that we could release that level of detail to everybody, to all users at the same time, because we publish our FOI responses, rather than simply to the individual making the request, which would be the case for most of the ad hoc data requests that we get if there is more routine throughout the year. I think that we need to come back to that. To move on to the specific changes around classroom assistance and additional support needs assistance that are now published under the PSA category. The counting of those two categories as separate categories was information-neupess, so when I requested it, you were able to provide me with it. I understand the issues of, for example, some local authorities have 700 staff listed under one category and zero under the other. We can come back to that as well. However, given that you, for this year, had both categories, could you confirm if, in years going forward, you will only request a count of people's support assistance from local authorities? You will not be requesting information under two separate categories and publishing under one. You will be requesting it under just one category in the first place. The information that we have collected as part of this year's collection for the 2018 census has not changed from what it has been in previous years, so we still collect information on classroom assistance and ASN axiliaries, as we have done previously. If you are collecting information on both categories, why publish as just one category? Information is available on request for both categories. I requested it, but it is now in the public domain. Why publish as pupil support assistance when you have both sets of data? The reason that we have done that is based on the feedback that we have had from local authorities about how they assign their staff to those categories and the staff roles and terminology that they use in schools and what not. It is a decision that we have taken as a statistician that the most appropriate way to represent the data that we have collected is to present it as pupil support assistance, because that is what local authorities are telling us, is the terminology that they use in schools. What alternatives to merging the data for publication did you explore? For example, did you explore working with local authorities on clearer guidance for the definition of what kind of staff role would fit into either of those categories? There was a range of options that we thought about at the beginning of the process when the issue was first raised. It is fair to say that we had a pretty open mind about where we might end up with solutions to that. What we do not want to end up doing is simply producing data on a basis that we know to be questionable. We know that authorities struggle now to assign staff to the specific categories that we currently collect data for. Rather than to make a fundamental change to the underlying collection process in a hurry, we decided to take the approach of combining those categories. Had it been clear that those categories were, if pupil support assistance were, a new type of staff or something additional to the staff that we were collecting data on before, one option would have been to add a further category to the collection. We could have reported on an extra category of pupil support assistance on top of the two that are already there. What became very clear very quickly from local authorities is that that is not the case. Pupil support assistance cover a wide range of tasks that incorporate some of those undertaken by the other categories that were listed in the collection. On that basis, it was preferable to combine those and present what we think is a more accurate overall picture of the resources in that area rather than to falsely delineate between the two categories that were in the collection initially. Do you understand the concern that exists when one in four young people in Scottish schools have not identified additional support needs but the published data has now been narrowed to the extent that we would until the further data that is published be unable to tell how many support staff are working with children with additional support needs? I can understand the question certainly. However, I do not think that what we have learned from local authorities tells us that the categories that we had before did not provide an accurate picture of the number of staff who were working with children with additional support needs. How does the currently published information provide an accurate picture of the number of staff who are working with additional support needs? It just provides a generalised category of pupil support assistance. That is precisely the issue in that we have a range of staff across the system now who are working in a number of ways with a number of different pupils in a number of different scenarios across schools. Some of their time is spent working with children with additional support needs, some of their time is not, and to delineate them on the basis of their updated job titles would provide a false picture. Pupil support assistance provides a more robust picture, enabling more comparison between authorities of the overall resource that is going into supporting pupils in Scottish schools. We know, of course. Fundamentally, it does not tell us what resources are going into supporting pupils with additional support needs. That is one in four pupils. It is an acute problem that has been identified, including by this committee, and the published data no longer provides information on how pupils with additional support needs are being supported in staff numbers. I think that the question of the resources going into supporting pupils with additional support needs is a slightly different one. That is a question of trying to assess what resources provided by a range of staff in education systems to supporting kids with ASN, whether that be classroom teachers, whether it be other professionals from outside of the education department, whether it be support staff of some form or another. I am trying to split out the proportion of time that individuals spend supporting pupils with additional support needs would be a particularly difficult, onerous task. I do not think that looking at the categories of support staff or specific teaching staff, either, is capable, either before or now, of telling you what the overall picture of resource going into supporting pupils with ASN specifically is. I am happy to hand over to other members at this point, convener, but I would be keen to come back in later on. Just before we move on, Mr Wilson, I wonder if it would be possible if you could write to committee just with your procedures about handling requests. It would be helpful for deliberations going down the line. First of all, who raised the concerns about the stats that we have raised? Who raised the concerns? Was the Scottish Government raising concerns or the statisticians that were raising concerns about the quality of the stats? Those concerns were picked up as part of our initial quality assurance procedures that we carried out on the data. When we looked at the data and we discovered that there were some anomalies, that is when we decided to take further quality assurance processes. On the library staff in particular, we responded to a parliamentary question that was raised with us, and some of the information that was provided in that question may not have been accurate. We returned to the data on that question and subsequently issued a correction to that parliamentary question response. I cannot say the word statistician, so I know that I am not one. However, it is a normal practice when people have given you poor information and they simply generalise the information that you are seeking. What feels like it has happened here is that local authorities are not giving you detailed enough information or accurate enough response, which has resulted in you saying that something that you felt was not justifiable professionally. Therefore, you have generalised it. Can you think of any other example where you are gathering data that you have done? I am happy to answer that. I think that that is a professional judgment of the statisticians about whether the time spent trying to rectify or improve that situation would be viva for money. I can think of situations around the economy or around all of our survey data. We could survey more companies or people to get a more accurate picture of what is going on, but we have to take a judgment about what is good enough in those circumstances. We would report on relatively high levels of industrial classification, for example, because our surveys are only so big of business and therefore their ability to drill down to very specific industry classifications, all for our labour market statistics. Although it is quite a big population survey, we report on relatively high levels of aggregation of job titles, because we can only go to so many people. The cost of going to more people becomes prohibitively big. The other side of the argument is that you produce statistics that do not tell you anything. If I asked how many women are working in a particular field and you say, well, I am not getting a very good response, that will tell you how many people are there, it misses the point. I ask Laura Meagle from the Scottish Government's point of view. The statisticians have a professional job to do, and quite rightly it has already been said that they describe the situation and do not define it, but it provides opportunity for debate. John Swinney himself has said that he is pausing some of his response to us until he looks at discussions that are not included, not engaged or not involved. There are very profound issues in there about the kind of support a young person with autism has, how much of the school day they are actually in school, whether they are excluded inappropriately, whether they are taught with their peers. If you have a situation where you cannot even say how many young people with autism will have the support of an additional support needs professional, how can you possibly even begin to enter that debate? What I want you to tell me is what did the Scottish Government officials say, or when John Swinney was very clear that there was nothing to do with him, when you were told that you were going to produce these new categories, these generalised categories, what did the Scottish Government say? I think that one of the very important things to reflect on is that the statistics are a very important part of the evidence base that we use to implement policy, but it is not the only one. If it is an important one, it is describing but not defining and it is offering the opportunity for debate, which is what they see as their purpose. In what way can generalising the categories in this way help to define the debate? In terms of the specific question about the decision, we have an advisory group for additional support for learning, which has a wide range of stakeholders involving children, young people, parents, service delivery people and a vast array so that we capture the perspective of a range of people when we are thinking about our implementation. We have had discussions in that arena about data in a slightly different way than we are describing here in terms of the specific change, but the information comes through there about the fact that the term pupil support assistant is more appropriate. The question about the terminology of additional support needs auxiliary or classroom assistant has been raised in those types of areas in my team's discussion with a wide range of stakeholders. There is a concern about just a proper reflection, so when the issue was raised about the fact that we joined those two categories together, I was comfortable with that decision because that has a link back to what our stakeholders raised. Are you serious when saying that the stakeholders who are already saying that their children's description of their experience in school, of not having a full day in school, will not be appropriately supported and the additional support needs that they are entitled to have been pulled with other young people? Are you seriously saying that they said to you that it is okay to generalise this? Will rest, will leave policy on anecdotes from this group rather than from the evidence underneath, which would underpin any policy? No. What I am saying is that my discussions with education authorities, with COSLA, as part of those wider discussions with all of those stakeholders led us to agree to that joining of those two categories together because the terminology that is used out there in the system is pupil support assistant predominantly. You would accept that families, campaigning groups have said that their sense is that the teaching unions, people working as staff support themselves, are telling us that there is a lack of support in schools. We are subordinate on teachers' pressure and on the workforce more generally. They are saying that all of those things are happening. The Government might say that it is not really as bad as that, and local authorities might say that it is not as bad as that. Where you would then go to is to the evidence base. You have generalised the evidence. You cannot answer the question now how many young people with additional support needs have somebody who is professionally trained to support them as opposed to generalised classroom support for which they would be given. They might get some of that person's time. We cannot answer that question anymore. I am sorry, but what I started out to say is that the information from the statistics is one part of the wide range of the evidence. That one part is no longer telling the answer to the question. We use a wide range of information to consider the implementation of additional support for learning. That includes information from Education Scotland inspection, including information from parents and young people about their view about the support that they receive in school. We engage specifically with particular stakeholders, for example in relation to the evidence that you referred to. Officials engage directly with the National Autistic Society, Scottish Autism and Children in Scotland, to have a discussion about what the actions are that are needed to take place. We do not have to rely entirely on the statistical evidence in order to take action to improve implementation, and we routinely do that. If you do not know what the picture is, how can you, if you believe that you are involved? Because we ask stakeholders to give us the information a much broader range of information evidence that comes from statistics. The logic of that position is that you would not employ statistics at all. You would simply ask people how they feel the things are going. I understand that there is more to your job than looking at the statistics. I respect that. However, if people are saying that the system is not working, one of the ways in which you can establish whether the system is working or not, if you can look at the evidence and say to families that there is something different here, and the challenge is that the problem is that in our schools we are being told that young people who need personal additional support and professional working with them are now being part of a broader group of young people, given broader classroom support. Those two things are not the same, and what people are fearful of is the consequence of that, as is told by the National Autism Society with the reports of Scottish Autism and others, is that young people around part-time timetables have been excluded within the school estate or are not getting access to the same level of support that they might otherwise have expected. You cannot even rebut that because you have not got the evidence to do so. What I am saying to you is that we do not use the statistical evidence that we are talking about here today to try to address those issues. If you are talking about part-time timetabling or exclusion from school, we go and we talk to people directly about what are the underlying issues that cause that problem in order to establish the actions that we need to take to resolve it. Can I just say to you that the Not Engaged Not Involved report is one of many. Enable Scotland did one that talked about the experience that young people were learning and needs in schools. The National Association of School Teachers and Women Teachers at NSUWD produced a report that said the same thing. The way in which the Scottish Government would respond to that is to say that the figures do not suggest that that is the scale of the problem. The Government did not respond to the reports, but you cannot now rely on them saying that it is simply about that dialogue and engagement. Do you understand that? I understand that, but I think that you are reflecting a position where we respond to each individual report and we do not think about the collective evidence that comes forward from all of those. We would consider all of that information as part of our evidence about implementation. We would test it against the statistical evidence that has been weakened? We would test it against the views of our stakeholders, the large group that I talked about. Does that feel real to you? What are the actions that we should take? That is the ultimate question for us. It is not about that we do not sit and challenge everybody's evidence, we do not rip those reports apart. What is it that we need to do is the question, and then we start to look at our implementation requirements with our stakeholders? You cannot argue in one hand that those reports provide you with the evidence to respond to the problem, but we do not have to worry about the stats because we deal with that. Those reports are pushing back because the Government has said that the scale of the problem is not something that we recognise. We use all of the information that is available to us as our evidence base in order to inform our actions. It is statistical information, information from stakeholders, including all those reports that you have referred to. We use Education Scotland information, we engage regularly with ADES and COSLA, there are specific groups looking at children and young people with additional support needs and we engage with the additional support for learning officers in order to ensure that we have a range of information at a number of different levels within the system in order to inform our policy decisions. We do not rely on any single piece of evidence at any single piece of time. It is about a holistic, but you are content to have less information from the statistical side, you are content for it to be more general information. On the specifics about the data in relation to that, I do not accept that we have less information. There is a premise behind the question that you asked that the titles or the categories that we had before were an adequate description of what those members of staff were. What that collection does is to count members of staff with various job titles or roles. What it does not do, as I said earlier, is to account for their time and what they do in terms of supporting individual pupils within a classroom or a school setting or providing broader support to a classroom teacher, nor do we account for the time that individual classroom teachers directly spend supporting pupils with additional support needs. That is a very different exercise. The job titles or the roles that we collect as part of this administrative data uplift, as I said earlier, I do not think that that is the right way to answer the specific question that you ask about the amount of support that pupils with additional support needs in schools receive. The purpose of the question is that we need to know that in order to make sure that the need is being met. I do not blame you if you find it difficult to collect that and you have to make a judgment call. You would not, under any set of circumstances, go into secondary school and just say, I want to tell us how many teachers are here. If you want to know, for example, the capacity to teach science in a secondary school, you will need to know how many science teachers there are. Why would it be any different? You are operating within a policy framework, which is not decided by you. I accept that. The Scottish Government has said that they do not want to disaggregate that information. They do not feel that it is useful. It could be disaggregated, but it is not necessary. You do not have to do it. There is no obligation policy terms for you to do it now. We need to separate slightly the statistical nomenclature that we use for those sorts of things from employment practice and practice within schools. What we can do is try, through the statistical collection, to reflect as accurately as we can practice within local authorities, within schools to reflect the specific rules and responsibilities and the job titles that people have within the system. What we have learned through the exercise is that the ones that we had before, particularly the two that we are here to talk about in particular, no longer reflected accurately how support staff functioned within schools because of the rules that they gave. You mentioned teachers, science teachers. For example, you are quite right. We do not simply go to schools and say how many teachers have you got. We have a detailed, long-established process for collecting the number of teachers on a given day in September in the system. We collect information about the primary subject that they teach. If they are a physics teacher or a maths teacher, we collect that information. We do not collect information about everything that that teacher does and how they spend all of their time in schools. They will no doubt undertake other duties that are not directly related to teaching their primary subject, because that is a very different statistical collection exercise. With respect, you make my point for me, because there is a difference between a classroom support assistant and an additional support needs professional. If we are capable of distinguishing between a physics teacher and a history teacher, we should be able to distinguish between those two as well. We need to distinguish between those two, frankly, if we are going to make sure that the whole needs within a classroom are met. The reflection that I talked about in terms of our discussion with education authorities is that, in fact, those two things are not as distinct as they have been previously, and that there has been a move to the use of a role called a pupil support assistant, which merges two of those functions. I know why that is happening. It is not because it is driven by the needs of children with additional support needs. It has been driven by the pressures inside the school and in terms of budgets that they are pooling and sharing the resource of a classroom support assistant as opposed to having additional support needs, support directed to an individual young person, which relates to their support plan. That is what parents tell us, that somebody who is supposed to be identified with the needs of one young person in a class will very often be pooled across a classroom now. You can understand why the school is doing it because of the pressures on their budgets. It does not make it right, and then to have the stats to follow a decision that has been driven by budgets, to me, creates a problem in ensuring that we understand what is going on inside our schools in support for young people with additional support needs. I think that my position is different to yours. In my discussions with the education authorities, when we have been discussing the role, there is discomfort that the fact that those two roles are described in that way. When practice in authorities is that there is a different terminology being used and we should reflect that. That was the basis on which the discussion we had and the decision that we had was made. It went no further than that. You have come across families then with a young person with additional support needs, who has been identified as needing individual support, who has said that it is entirely acceptable that that support that is coming into the classroom to support them specifically should be pulled across the whole classroom and the person who is called a pupil support assistant. You are comfortable with that in terms of policy. I cannot comment on the way in which education authorities deploy their resource. That is a matter entirely for the education authority. In terms of policy, the requirement on education authorities is to identify to provide for and to review the additional support needs of the pupils within that authority, and that provision and support should be tailored to the needs of the individual child. That is our position, which is enshrined in law. It is for education authorities to decide how they resource that requirement upon them. It feels we are now in a position where, if we do not ask, we do not know, and that is where we have got in terms of the strategy. I have a number of members who have indicated a supplementary at this stage. If you could give it to a quick supplementary, Ms MacDonald. A few quick points about the quality of data. In order to ensure that we have the correct level of support in place, we have to evacuate numbers about the number of young people requiring additional support needs. Comparing the first bulletin that came out with the last one that has been published, the school rolls increased by 2.3 per cent, but the number of pupils requiring additional support needs has increased from just over 10 per cent to 27 per cent in an eight-year period. Is there a reason for that substantial increase? Do you have any quality of the data, or has the methodology changed, or what has happened? Prior to 2010, the data collection around additional support for learning focused on the children and young people who were learning in special schools and those who had a formal plan, so a co-ordinated support plan, an individualised educational programme or some other plan, and that is a very, very narrow group of children and young people. So in 2010, we changed the statistical collection to instead collect anyone who is receiving any type of support, whether that be within a formal plan or out with a formal plan, regardless of the education setting that they learn in, and therefore, as a result of that collection, in 2010, changing 2010, there was a sharp increase in the number of children and young people recorded as having additional support needs in 2011 and 2012. The data stabilised more in the 2012 timeframe, so in effect we have a five-year period of run of information, which is broadly consistent, but the actual increase, the sharp increase, is caused because we have expanded the number of children and young people who have collected information. Right, in 2013 it was 131,000 pupils, so it is now 183,000 pupils. Yes, so there has been a continued increase. Children are continuing to be identified as having additional support needs and we are continuing to record that information, so the picture is rising. So, looking at the different categories, you mentioned co-ordinated support plan. Yes. Comparing 2010 to 2017, there has been a 37 per cent reduction. Individualised education programme, there has been a 19 per cent reduction, yet the category other has increased fivefold. And there has also been a significant increase in the number of children and young people who have children's child's plans, so there is another planning mechanism in there. So it is a balancing out rather than a whole reduction. There is a spread of different planning mechanisms used. So, given that other now makes up 78 per cent of the pupils who are on additional support needs, is there a need for more categories to make sure that level of support is targeted properly? In practice, the support will be targeted properly. The other category contains all the plans, which are not one of the other names. For example, educational authorities may use something called an additional support plan. For me, that would be an individualised educational programme, but they may not use that category when they respond to the collection, because it does not exactly match and so therefore they would use the other category for that. So the personalisation of support and the planning of support is there, it is just that the actual title of the plan is not there in terms of data collection, but that allows us to collect information about a very broad range of different planning approaches within our collection, rather than not have the information available at all. So will the level of detail that will be in future stats bulletins for education carry more categories in it? That is not the intention at the moment, no. I think that it is worth adding that out with those who are in receipt of a specific plan, we also collect data on the reason for additional support needs for the individual, so whether it be because of mobility issues or whether it be autism or whether we collect information on the reason for that as well, most of those pupils live in a group that is outside of those formalised plans, so we do have that level of detail and currently we do not have a plan to change that list or that method for collecting those pieces of information. Can I just ask Mr Wilson, just for absolute clarity, that the reason for bringing it together is that the individual categories were not consistent. Does that mean that when you get the additional breakdown, there could still be two different councils reporting ASN as a category but having completely different support levels for that job? Is that a question about the pupils' data or about the staff data? About the staff data and ASN. So at the level of detail that we collect the data, so the ASN auxiliaries and the kind of categories that we had before, we think that that is the case. Because those descriptions do not match any more with the staff that they have in place, we know for example that some authorities, because there is not an option on the collection that says that people support the system, which is what they call their staff, that they work kind of randomly in some cases allocating those people to one of those categories. So yes, I think that at that level of detail there is effectively a difference between authorities who may have individual staff members doing precisely the same jobings in a school who have recorded them against ASN auxiliaries because they think that that is perhaps the closest fit or it is what they have done in the past and another authority who records them all against something else, because they think that that is the closest fit or because they are just only able to make that differentiation between the two, which leads to the decision to amalgamate those two things for publication purposes, but not for collection purposes. Thank you. Mr Fandell, you wanted a quick supplementary. So just to go back convener to the answers to Johann Lamont, I just wondered if I am understanding it correctly. In effect from a Scottish Government point of view, do you just no longer from a policy point of view see a distinction between those two roles or do you think that the difference is significant? I think that the roles that are determined by the educational authority are not determined by us. You must have a view from a policy point of view as to whether or not the distinction is significant, because like parliamentarians I would imagine that the Government is looking at the performance of local authorities in this area and wanting to compare, practice, find best practice, support the work of education Scotland, etc. We recognise that there are a number of different roles. But do you think that the distinction is important? I will answer the question. There are a number of different roles. There are pupil support staff, behaviour support staff from school, link workers, school nurses, medical professionals, educational psychologists, classroom assistants and additional support needs auxiliaries. Some authorities do use those two specific categories, but the majority of them use the term pupil support assistant to describe the functions that may have formally been called a classroom assistant or it may formally have been called additional support needs assistant. The way in which the authority uses the resource is determined by the support that they need to give the individual children and young people within the classroom. It is not determined by me, it is not determined by our policy specifically. The additional support for learning act requires that the provision is made to the individual child. It is still not really an answer to whether you see a distinction between does the Government see a distinction? Does it see those as two distinct and different roles within a classroom? What I am saying to you is that I recognise that there are a number of roles in a classroom. No, but I am talking about ASN, AES and classroom support. Do you think that those are two different and distinct roles, or do you think that the difference between them does not matter? I think that in the past they have been very distinct roles. I think that currently practices that they are not as distinct as they have been previously. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Ms Mackay, you wanted to speak to us. Yes, thank you. Good morning. I have never been good at statistics. I am now completely bamboozled by all the different categories that you have been talking about. Is there a need for clearer instructions to go out to authorities about how to make the distinction—this very important distinction—in your opinion? I think that it is back to a point that we made earlier, in that there is a difference between—we have to separate this into two parts. One is providing sufficient guidance to local authorities and granted to schools directly on how they complete the statistical return. We did, for example, discover some errors within the returns as part of the process, where they simply did not follow the guidance correctly and recorded the wrong piece of information. Sorry, I will stop you at the guidance that is going out. Does it make the distinction clear between support staff in general and additional support needs pupils? No, that is what I was getting at by way of my opening remarks. That is not an issue that should be determined by a statistical collection. The statistical collection should reflect the practice that is implemented in the system. It is for the system to tell us what the distinction is and what the rules are that it has in place, and for us to then try to accommodate that as best as we can in a statistical collection, rather than to say that we have specific job titles or specific categories in mind for the collection. That is what they mean to us—you need to sort out your staff returns so that they match into those. Who gives that guidance then? Who actually tries to make that distinction? In terms of the rules that people have in schools, that is a matter for local authorities. That is the employer. The local authority, as the employer, determines what the rules are that are carried out by their staff under each of those different titles. I am asking who is giving guidance to local authorities. Should that come from the Government? It is not appropriate that we determine that from the Scottish Government. I understand that, but who would give that guidance when it is so important? It is for the education authority to decide what the rules are of their employees. It is not for them to guide themselves as to what the rules are in responding to children and young people's needs. When the rules are advertised, they are advertised in specific schools or specific establishments, and they have attached to them a series of functions that that person will carry out under whatever title they are. At the moment, their number of titles are used even beyond the ones that we have discussed. Is there any guidance that is issued with it? Yes. We have a specification that is publicly available on the Scottish Government's website that all local authorities will use when they are deciding how to categorise and assign their staff to the categories that we collect information on. I am not really any clearer on that, but can I ask Mr Halladay, if I picture up connectly, to extrapolate that information would be too much work and would not be value for money? I guess that the point that I was making is that, in whatever statistics we produce, we have to do it in a way that is value for money. We have to take a judgment on how much effort to spend in making sure that everything about that particular dataset is absolutely right versus making sure that the vast majority of it is so. I guess that, as Mick said earlier on, that this is part of a wider data collection or set of data collections about schools and pupils and that Alasdair and his team are taking that judgment about whether to go back and back and back to local authorities on the basis that that practice within local authorities is clearly different and mixed. I am struggling to understand how producing data that is general and does not tell people the information or the Government the information that they need is value for money. I do not see the point of that. It is back to a couple of the answers that we have given in terms of what those data are for. There are two potential exercises. One is the question of whether we have alighted on the pupil support assistant category and whether we can retrospectively go back and create a pupil support assistant time series for those data. What we have learned from discussions with local authorities is that that would be extremely difficult. For them, it would be very difficult for them to go back and pinpoint when, as the Lord was suggesting, they moved from a particular job title or when the rules sufficiently changed. That is one aspect. The other aspect is to look at again this issue of how staff spend their time rather than what staff they have. That would be an incredibly difficult exercise for anybody to undertake any organisation whether that is a school or a local authority, the Government itself or anybody else, to try to assign the specific time of individuals who have necessarily broad remits to specific tasks or actions would be incredibly difficult. I would question whether that was worth the resources to put in. Priorities do not come into it then. Do you not consider it to be a priority? I would say that we have in the community in Scotland a process in place to identify and listen to the needs of users of those statistics. I would also make a judgment about how we best marshal our resources to meet those needs. That might be through adjusting a survey such as this. It might be about collecting information in a different way. I am picking up from the conversation a different set of needs than perhaps we have been getting from local authorities and others. The question for us is how we factor the things that you are telling us into planning future collections of data. Whether there need to be some other way of getting at the information that you are describing, not necessarily that would be by adjusting this collection. We could spend ages trying to think about how we do that, but practices make that quite difficult in the format that we are in the way that the data collection is already set up. I think that the consequent demand on local authorities time to try and undertake an exercise like that would be a very serious ask. We would need to balance that off against the quality of the information that we were likely to get as part of that process. That is why, when Laura was speaking earlier about the wide range of information and evidence that we can bring to those discussions, it becomes really important because there may well be other more appropriate ways of collecting the type of information that we are getting at, rather than adjusting a formalised administrative data collection exercise. I am still on supplementaries, but Mr Gray. I come back to the point that Laura made about the roles that have been a matter for the education authorities and local authorities as employers. If she went to the local authority and asked to count teachers and they said, we do not call them teachers anymore, so we do not have any, that would be okay. No, I do not think that that is what I was saying. In taking this decision, what we were trying to do was, in effect, to try to align the data that we have more closely to the practice that is out there in the education system. That is not the point, really, is it not? The point is this. The Scottish Government says to local authorities that they must employ a certain number of teachers. In fact, if they fail to, we will claw back money from them. Why is it therefore acceptable when it comes to pupils with additional support needs to say that we are not even going to count the support that you give to them? It is unfair to say that we do not count the support that is given to them. We have a statistical collection and we have a range of other evidence. It is not worthless. Hang on, we have been told that the statistics that have been collected do not tell us how much support is being provided because pupil support assistants do other things as well. The example that you used of a teacher is that every single teacher in Scotland provides some support to children and young people. In order to collect that and try to provide the range of the data and the level of detail that you are seeking, we would have to apportion a part of a teacher's time to one of those collections. We would not manage to count that. That is nonsense, because what is asked for is additional support, a support above and beyond what is being provided by the classroom practitioner in the classroom. That is what people assume counting additional support in a classroom is. However, what we are being told is that authorities say that we do not really deliver it that way and the Government's response is that that is fine. The point that you have made about the additionality is that the support that is provided to an individual pupil, which is not provided to the rest of the class, would be considered to be additional because it is additional to that that is provided elsewhere. It would be a portion of that person's time that we would require to count. We cannot count the level of detail that is not possible. What we can do is to collect a range of information, which gives us a baseline of information from which to work. We also, as I have said already, rely on a far wider range of information to inform our policy decisions. We work with a range of people in order to inform our positions on policy. It is not simply about the statistics. They are important, but they are not the common rules. My colleague sitting next to me has just shown me a live job advert in my constituency in Knox academy in Haddington for an ASN Auxiliary. It is manifestly a member of staff being recruited to provide additional support. All the committee is saying this, why will the Scottish Government not count those employees? You are saying that the education authorities say that we are not going to tell you. You do not accept that for teachers. No, that is not true. Sorry. Teachers are a specific category, a profession and a recognised role. Is that role the same across local authorities for additional support? Is it an initial support auxiliary between different roles and different authorities? In previous sessions of the committee in the last two years, we have taken a lot of evidence on a whole range of educational issues. We have had in front of us people such as the OECD, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Professor Lindsay Paterson and Keir Bloomer, all of whom have raised questions about how effective is the data that is being collected about Scottish schools. This morning, it seems to flag up very considerable concerns about how effective it is on one specific issue. How effective do you think the data collection is on all educational issues? We have had concerns about that through the curriculum for excellence, through additional support for learning and through a whole range of issues. Are you content that the way in which we are collecting data, which is absolutely crucial to inform policy, is accurate and comprehensive? I am content that we have taken the correct steps to make sure that the data that we have is as accurate as it should be, and that, within the confines and the limits of the data collections that we undertake, they all have limits and restrictions necessary. We have talked about some of those already specifically in relation to support staff. I am familiar with some of the issues that you talked about that relate to a range of things. It would take us a long time to go through all of those, but the range of data that we have across Scottish education is very comprehensive. It is very detailed. We have vast amounts of information about the mechanics of the system, so schools, pupils, teachers and other staff. We have huge amounts of information on the performance of pupils and of the system. We take in all the data that the Scottish Qualifications Authority produces every year in relation to the exam results. We have all of that. We have data from Skills Development Scotland about outcomes from pupils at the end of the school process. We have the new collection, looking at the achievement of curriculum for excellence levels throughout the broad general education phase, which lines us up with the national improvement framework and other things. There are always questions about the system, whether it is education or anything else, but the data that we have cannot answer. Just to interrupt you, Mr Wilson, would you have an answer as to why you think that those individuals, in some cases groups, who have very strong pedigrees in educational research and data collection themselves, are raising serious questions? Had they been watching this session this morning, when, in my view—the view of several colleagues—has raised serious issues about that particular issue, why do they have those concerns if you are telling us that everything is as good as it could be? I do not think that that is what I said. I think that I said quite clearly that there are always limits to the data that we have. There are always questions that we might want evidence for, which are not answerable through a data collection exercise. They may be answerable through other exercises such as evaluations, research or surveys, or discussions with stakeholders in the way that Laura described earlier. Some of the concerns that are raised externally about information on Scottish education relate to how we use the information rather than the information that we have. Some of them relate to the type of questions that we are asking in terms of the data that we have rather than the scope of the collection. Some of them relate to a desire to maintain what are now historical collections on the system, whether that be the SSLN, which comes up from time to time, or some of the school leaver surveys that used to be undertaken. Those views come from a range of perspectives depending on the use that they want to put that information to. Can I ask you, Mr Wilson objectively, what would you like to see improved in terms of the data collection, in terms of the questions that you have just said that you do not think that the questions are always the ones that people might want to have answered? What do you need to have as an improvement to ensure that the data that we are provided with as politicians is better able to inform policymaking? The first thing is to make sure that we keep pace with the system, to make sure that the data collections that we have match what happens in the system. Do they not just now? I think that we have done our best to make sure that they do, but the questions coming from this room suggest that other people are not necessarily content with us doing that. I think that there are some broader developments in terms of data and how we use data as a Government that would increase the power of the information that we have. I think that our ability to match data sets together, which we now have a much clearer basis to do, that some legislative changes have enabled us to look at the potential for matching information across systems together, where we have the ability to match individual information. Looking at people's attainment records in schools and matching it to their subsequent employment patterns and earnings potential, for example, is a particularly powerful piece of information that at the moment we cannot directly answer through data collections. We can try to do other things, but not through data. I think that questions around the impact of particular measures, policies, programmes and approaches to delivering education are always a good question. I am not a statistician by profession. I am an economist. I have a broader interest in evaluative and performance information. Evaluation questions about the performance of particular interventions are always of interest. They are not things that are generally answerable purely through data collection exercises. They require further exercises, surveys and research. Would you agree that, for your work to interpret the information, accurate interpretation is very dependent on the data collection itself, that the facts have to be there in both a qualitative and quantitative basis for you to be able to make an accurate interpretation? Do you accept that? Just a question about the borderline between what is considered to be official statistics and what is considered to be background data to official statistics and how that line is drawn. The reason I mention it is because the committee has taken an interest specifically in recent weeks in instrumental tuition in schools, for instance. Am I right in saying that some of the statistics around music tutors in schools would be considered as background data or would they be considered within the scope of official statistics? I can say something about the general case and then perhaps leave my colleagues to talk about the specifics of the music tuition. My role as the chief statistician for Scotland is to make sure that we raise the quality of our statistics so that we can produce trustworthy, high-quality numbers that support decision making and that I take a decision on those things in relation to whether something is official or whether it does not meet that standard. We have strong processes across our teams about making sure that our statistics are trustworthy. We have good processes to make sure that our statistics have value across the piece. It comes down to judgments about the individual quality of individual data collections. That is really about understanding of the whole statistical chain from where that data is first recorded and then essentially what happens at that point and then what happens to try to refine and assure ourselves of the quality of that information by the time it arrives with our statistical colleagues and when that is published in a way that allows the uses of the statistics to properly understand and interpret and to use that information. I guess that that is my general approach and I will maybe just leave my colleagues to talk about this particular case. In terms of the music instructors in particular, in previous years that data has been released as supplementary statistics to the main headline statistics that were released in December. For the 2017 data, based on the information that we received from our quality assurance processes, as well as the kind of changing context and environment in which we are releasing this data, we took the decision to own at least certain categories as background statistics and the rest of the information that we made available as managed information. That was an interim position while we considered the most appropriate way to make that data publicly available and serve the need and demand for that information. It is just a point about quality assurance, because, as Alison Anthony said earlier on, that people's support assistance is what is used in schools. I used to work previously as a teacher and in 2014, Edinburgh Council had a policy whereby we had classroom assistance, which provided administrative support to principal teachers every two weeks. For example, they would come to my department and they would help with data entry and things like that. That role of classroom assistance in Edinburgh was very different to what it was in Fife when I worked there. So, when I went to work in Fife, classroom assistance meant somebody in the class supporting the class or providing people support. How do you quality assure that people who are not PSAs do not end up in that category? To a certain extent, we rely on what the local authorities are telling us about how they are the ones that are categorising staff and putting them into certain categories. That information will be based on how they are advertising those roles and the types of roles that they are describing and using in those schools. The information that we will take on board when we are doing our quality assurances will look at how that information has changed over years, how it compares to other local authorities, how it compares between schools within a local authority, and we will seek to draw together some kind of coherent picture of how those categories are being implemented. It is through that work that we have taken the decision to present the data for ASN Auxiliaries and classroom assistance under the new category of people's support assistance. What I am saying to you is that the same job can mean very different things in two different parts of the country. Do you check then that what you are actually gathering is the right data? To the extent that we undertake specific examinations of whether an individual member of staff is performing particular roles within a school, we do not do that. That would be something else. That would almost be an audit of the employment practices of the authority, rather than anything else. The guidance that we issue describes the kind of thing that is in scope for the data collection. Volunteer parents who are supporting people within classrooms, for example, are excluded from scope. We do not count them, so we are clear with local authorities that they cannot be assigned to one of the staff categories, for example. Boris Allister says that, to an extent, we are reliant on local authorities providing us with the correct information about the way that they use their staff. Can I just ask about the background data with regard to school technicians? The committee is about to undertake some work in relation to the STEM strategy of the Scottish Government. There have been articles and tests recently in July 2018 on the reduction in school technicians by nearly 500 since 2005. Is the situation for lab technicians and school technicians the same as pupil support in that there are different roles across different schools and the nature of those roles are changing? We have not undertaken any specific additional quality assurance on technicians and laboratory assistants, which is why we have made that information available separately as management information at this stage. When we come to look at that information in more detail, that is when we will be able to make an assessment as to how we think those categories are being implemented by local authorities. There are school technician roles that are advertised as term time only, and some local authorities will be employing people full-time. Obviously, it involves a significant amount of repair, preparation and so on. A full-time role would be different in one authority to another. Do you catch that in any way? We have information and guidance that we have made available to local authorities on how they should be calculating a full-time equivalent. That takes account of roles that only involve term time working and those that are worked throughout the year. In both technician roles and pupil support roles, is there any categorisation of the professional qualifications of the person who is doing that role from the data collection? That is something that is left up to the local authorities to determine whether the person they have is a technician, and that is how we would expect them to be recorded as a technician, if that is what the local authority would describe them as. Can you move on to Mr Scott? Mr Haldy, I assume that you are in charge of statistics across the whole Government. When you make a significant change to how statistics are being collected, how do you tell the world that you are doing that? We have a process called a ScotStat network. This is a network of a few thousand users of our statistics. We have a series of themed groups. School education would be one. First of all, there is a consultation that would happen with that group, and that is partly online, and that would partly be a face-to-face. I guess that it depends on the individual process. Did all of this happen with this example that we have been discussing all morning on ASN, the merger of the two categories into one? Did the process that you are describing happen with this? I will perhaps leave my colleague to talk about this specific example. The first thing that I would like to clarify is that we have not made any changes to the data that has been collected. Those categories that are collected from local authorities are the same as they have been for a number of years. The changes that have been made to the presentation of the data. When we presented this data, we highlighted that there had been additional quality assurance undertaken on the data that we were publishing and that the rest of the information was available on request. However, you did not put out an explanation as to why you made the change in presentation. That is something that, based on the feedback that we have had from here and from other places, we would like to make an improvement on for the next time that we publish the data. We could not find any minutes or anything or anything to explain why the presentation changed, so except that that was not good. I think that we could have made it more explicit to users that we had combined the classroom assistant in the AOCs and the auxiliary categories of people's supports. Can I take a message to you in the future? This is a judgment, of course, but in a policy area where a parliamentary committee has been poring over ASN, you make a statistical change to the presentation of the information. Someone in some part of your organisation has got to say, wait a minute, there has got to be a lot of parliamentary interest in this and we should make it clear as to why we are going to change the presentation of that information. It could be the same for the economic statistics, it could be for anything. I would expect that from my colleagues. It did not happen here, so that has got to change, obviously. I think that the change that we are talking about in terms of the support staff is a reactive change to issues that were unearthed during the quality assurance process. We cannot tell people what we are going to do about that until we have gone through the process of working out what the issue is and what the correct solution to that is. That is different to a planned change that we might make and we do make those, we make planned changes to collections, we stop a collection, we change the timing of it, we change the methodology or whatever. Some of those require us to, either for official statistics purposes or for broader legislative purposes, to consult more broadly on bigger changes to the collections that we do, but this is a slightly different case and I think that we did put out information about changes. The other one that I wanted to ask was a point that you made earlier on to Ross Greer. Are you seriously saying that you treat every request for information as a FOI? Is that a matter of government policy? I would say that we treated non-straight forward requests for information. Ones that are not trivial to answer. It is about the amount of time that is taken to respond to those questions or the amount of effort that is taken to respond to those questions. The criteria that you are using is how long it is going to take part of your statistical unit to respond to the question, which determines whether it is going to be treated under FOI or you are just providing information. That is what standard practice is. The FOI legislation puts specific responsibilities on to any Government. I know that. I am asking about the culture. Yes, I understand that but I think that it is a more general question that perhaps the committee could explore across Government to get some of the information. He is the head of statistics, convener, so that is the answer to the head of statistics. I think that it is a wider issue that we can ask as a committee. Can I ask my final couple of questions? Yes, absolutely. The changes that you are contemplating and will help us with understanding the presentation of your figures in future, can you make sure that the committee understands that that will now be in place from now on and the process by which that will happen or across important policy areas will understand who makes that call? That is what I would expect of our colleagues to be able to, as part of our publications, describe changes that have happened to either the data collection or significant changes to the presentation, not necessarily every single minutiae of that. I think that, as we have said a couple of times throughout this, the landscape shifts regularly in terms of the interest in particular pieces of information. We collect an awful lot of data. Some of it is of particular interest to a minority of people. Some of it stays like that throughout its life. Some of it does not. I think that that probably falls into the category of one that has come up the level of interest tables a little bit in recent years. When we make substantial changes to any of our data collections, if we know in advance, we will let the relevant people know about that, and that is certainly what we will do when we have been through this process to look at the support staff categories that we have got. If we end up looking at substantial changes to that, we will make sure that the broadest range of people, including ourselves, are aware of that. I appreciate that. Given how important and relevant education policy is, public policy and education sphere is at the moment, it is obviously extremely topical by definition. Do you pay particular attention to how education statistics are being presented? Yes. That is our job to do that. That is what we are there for. I know that the increased interest in that information is a bit of a double-edged thing for us. It is great because it means that our data is in the spotlight and it means that we can bring it to bear in terms of the debates and the evidence that we have, but, as I said earlier, it brings a responsibility to make sure that it is fit for purpose and keeps pace with practice within the system as well. If we understand why it is a bit difficult for us to understand why Ross Greer did not have that information provided, given that it was a matter of such interest to the committee and due to wider public policy sphere? I am not clear which information you think he was not provided with. I mean, we answered his question and gave him the data. I have been through for an hour all morning. I am not going to go over it again. Sorry, could I add one further thing to the point about future collection of data, particularly in relation to additional support for learning, which is that there was a regulation passed last year that is specifically about collection of data on additional support for learning and places certain requirements upon the Scottish Government should we seek to substantially change the data collection, and that is that we are required to publicly consult and, as part of that, we would consult the committee as part of that process. Before I ask the supplementary question, I wanted to be informed that the number of categories that are published is reduced from 21 to 5, but there will be management information available on request. It would be the case that, on the information that is narrowed, we would not have to put in an FOI for that, because it now categorises management information on request, is that right? We would not have that circumstance again. I think that you are making a slightly false distinction between the processes. It depends a little bit on the nature of the requests, as to exactly how we handle routine requests for standard information. This is information with respect that is used to… Could you let… Right, so it was 21 to 5. Sorry, Ms Lamont. Can you let this, or will somebody just point me and kill you back? I think that, as I said earlier in this particular case, because we were asked to release information that we previously deemed to be of a lower quality in terms of the distinction between the two categories, we felt that it was appropriate to go through the formal process for FOIs. There is, of course, as I said earlier, a set of requirements and restrictions on us around that. We receive a vast amount of requests for information and data throughout the year. A lot of them are handled as free of information requests. Some of them require, in some cases, protracted discussions and debates with the requester about the nature of the information that they want, the level of detail that they require, whether they want personally identifiable information and so on and so forth. We cannot handle those requests through the FOI process, because the process does not enable us to have that on-going debate. That was not really the point that I was making. The reassurance that it was given is that it is being given that you are reducing the categories from 21 to 5, and you are still gathering the information. However, that management information would be available on request, which is pretty straightforward. That is not complex, because it is what is already there. It is to give us reassurance that, when you are reducing the categories that you are reporting on, you still have the other information available. I think that we would want reassurance that that is actually what was happening. Very specifically, to go back to the question about additional support needs the nature of the support that a young person has and why it matters. I think that it has been particularly well highlighted by Jenny Gilruth, but his catch-all description may not capture what is happening in her schools. I note that, when we look at teachers, we are able to identify also some things about their age, their gender, main subject, contact time, whether they are doing training as a charter teacher or head training programmes, whether they can teach in a Catholic school or indeed can teach in a Catholic medium school. We gather all of that information. Are we able to gather the information about the skillset of people who are working with young people with additional support needs? I think that it is more a question for Laura Miklifant. I think that that is a statistical question. I am asking you, is it possible that you want information that tells you that somebody is characterised as a pupil support assistant, has got training or qualifications in autism awareness, working with young people with disabilities or whatever? Given the scale of the information that we are prepared to take from teachers, there would be a concern that the implication is that there is a school teacher and that everybody else does stuff round about it. In fact, those jobs are highly skilled professional jobs on their own. Do you try to capture the scale of professionalism among those offering additional support needs? As I said earlier on, I use a wide range of evidence in order to inform our policy decisions. Do you ask local authorities the scale of qualification and professional training of people who are supporting young people with additional support needs? It is again to the point that Government Donald made earlier about the importance that there is a match-up between the identified additional support needs and the support that is being offered. Do we attempt in any way to capture the qualifications and skills of those who are working with young people with additional support needs? The discussions that I have with a wide range of people, including education authorities and parents, families and others, touch on those issues. I would not use an answer. You do not touch on those issues and discussions around teaching, but you do touch on those issues and discuss them when it comes to the really important issue about the scale of expertise and professional qualification of those people who are offering additional support needs in schools. The point that I would make is that it depends on the way that I use the information may be different. If we are looking, for example, to consider what additional training might be required nationally for those who are working with young people around inclusion or around autism, I would go and ask those specific questions. I would not necessarily use a national statistical survey to do that, because at the same time I am looking to find out a whole range of other information. I would use those engagements that I have talked about in order to cover a whole host of issues, including when we are talking about training, how should we deliver that training best, what do people need to know, what is the balance of the information that people are requiring, and how can we ensure that any training that we bring forward can be recognised by professional recognition through the GTCS? If there is an issue that we would suggest is happening, that there is a generalised support for young people to support staff in the classroom with young people additional support needs, which has increased in the way that Gordon MacDonald has identified, that that support is very generalised. One way that you could establish that it is just a title that is different, but not that the support is different, is simply to ask. When you put down the category of additional support needs person, somebody who has that job, do they have a professional qualification, do they have training? It would be for other people to decide how that question be framed. Do you think that it is a reasonable question to ask that you want to know the scale of the professional qualification of people who are working to deliver additional support needs in the classrooms? The requirement would be to move from an aggregated return, which gives us a number of staff in those categories to an individual level return for all the types of support staff that we have. The reason why we have that information for teachers and pupils is because we have an individual level return for each individual teacher working within the system that allows us to ask for details of those individuals. We do not currently do that for support staff, partly because that would be an additional very significant burden upon the providers of that information for local authorities, in particular for the granted schools themselves, to extract yet more personal detail on those individuals. It also depends on the use that we are going to put those data to. Teacher workforce planning processes, for example, require us to have a level of detail about the demographic profile and other things about teachers to enable us to look at the factors that influence the demand for teachers going forward when they are not involved in a formalised workforce planning process for support staff in any way. We would need to consult publicly and more broadly if we would get that. That would definitely represent a change in the methodology for that type of information. That would be a much more substantial formal process to look at the potential changes to get to that level of detail. I will say, though, that it is not the case that, as I said in my opening statement, what we have always done will be what we will always do. We do change statistical collections. We introduce further detail and some things. We withdraw some detail from some things when they are no longer appropriate. We have made changes, for example. We are making changes to the early learning and childcare collections to reflect some information about qualifications to report on the additional graduate commitment and so forth. Changes like that are plausible, but they cannot simply be taken unilaterally by us to reflect a particular demand for information. You have made significant changes when all of them have been given us less information than we had before about the nature of the support that is available in schools. I wonder whether, given again the figures that were highlighted by my colleague Gordon MacDonald on the scale of need and the reports from families and others who say that the needs of young people have not been met. Maybe there is a time now for workforce planning for people who are delivering additional support needs in the classroom and a proper understanding of what they are actually able to do. There is an issue about diminishing the important job that is being done in schools by simply generalising it in a way that we do not really know, and we are not even asking how skilled those groups are, how many of them are there, how many are able to identify support for individual young people and their specific needs, as opposed to the general categories that have been highlighted elsewhere. We are, as part of our consideration through the advice group for additional support for learning, looking at the collection of data in relation to additional support for learning, but we are considering that in a slightly different way. At the moment, the collection focuses on input information rather than outcomes information, so we are trying to work through whether we can change the information that we gather to look at what difference has the support made to the individual children and young people who have received it through a range of different measures. That would mean that we would have to look at different ways of collecting information beyond the statistical collection that we have discussed this morning. We are currently discussing that with the advice group for additional support for learning in order to consider all the different ways in which we would need to gather that information together. I think that there is a need for workforce planning for additional support needs that recognises and values the job that they do. I think that we already recognise and value the job that additional support staff do. That is not in question at any point in time. Except that you have put them into a broad category where they may be doing that, they may be doing something completely different. With due respect, I do not think that the fact that we have made a decision to draw together two categories in a census devalues our respect for the people who are providing support to our children. We do not even ask them schools. We have already listed all the things that we ask of a classroom teacher. We are not even asking groups of people what their qualifications are, the appropriateness of their training and, indeed, their qualification and their capacity to support young people with additional support needs. We have just lumped them all together and it looks like a category now that really does not tell you very much at all. We can consider partners in the advice group for additional support for learning while we are doing our broader work on the collection around additional support for learning and those matters, but we also need to take account the views of COSLA and the Association of Directors of Education as part of the process that we will do. Sorry, are COSLA and ADES saying that they do not want workforce planning for people who provide additional support needs? Respectfully, COSLA and ADES are the employers of the people that we are referring to. Do you know whether they think that there should be workforce planning in this area? That has never been raised. The need for workforce planning has never been raised within any of the forums that I have engaged with. I am happy to have that discussion as part of the data collection discussions that we are having within the advice group for additional support for learning. I do not think that anybody is fixated entirely on the data. It is about the quality of the sport offered to young people. The people who are collecting the stats and are trying to make sure that the stats are robust as possible have one job to do. There is a separate job to do, which is about understanding what the stats then tell you. If you do not ask the question, you will not know. The grave concern is that we are not understanding the scale of the problem, the challenge to teaching staff and to support staff and to ensure that people are properly supported. As I have already said, as part of my work to support implementation of additional support for learning, we look at a very wide range of evidence in order to inform our decisions, which goes beyond the strands of information that is available to us from the statistical information. Therefore, I would argue that we have a good understanding of the position of implementation and that that information allows us to inform the actions that we choose to take in order to support implementation further. Mr Mundell, did you want to end the instance? I did. Thank you, convener. Before you seemed to suggest that you would be willing to look at different questions, would you consider ideas that came forward from the committee after today in terms of new questions to ask in this area? The short answer is yes. We always look at the wide range of users and their interests in the data that we have. Parliament and committees are a part of that user group, so we will look at those questions, although, as I said just a minute ago, some of them are not additional questions that can simply be tagged on to the current process. Some of them would require a very fundamental change to the way that we collect education data across the system in Scotland, and that clearly comes with an associated process and a set of requirements upon us and the decision. We will have to be balanced up against all those impacts. I wonder how much discussion you had with individual local authorities around the data that they are collecting before you designed the questions. I am, for example, thinking of my own local authority, which will, for example, collect data on how many hours of one-to-one support they provide to young people, because that has to be agreed at a regional level. Do you ask things like that to see what local authorities in general are collecting? Yes. We have an extensive and ongoing process of engagement with local authorities. I outline the list of data collections that we bring in at the beginning of this session, and that requires us to have a pretty close ongoing relationship with a range of people in local authorities from directors of education, or children's services down to management information specialists and data providers. We get extremely useful feedback from them about how they capture the data initially from pupils, from parents, from teachers, how they store it within their management information systems, how that matches or does not, with the way that we seek to extract it and the terminologies and guidance that we issue. We are fairly continuously updating the guidance to reflect some of those changes, some of which came as a part of this process on support staff. We made some changes to the guidance. We know that there is a lot more information held within the management. This is data that is held by schools and local authorities so that they can run the education system that they provide. We do not uplift all of the data that they have. That would be an infeasibly huge exercise and would leave us with data that we have no practical use for whatsoever. However, we have an ongoing conversation with local authorities. We have a specific network where we bring them together at least once a year to talk about current or forthcoming issues around those sorts of things and can explore those options as we did in the case of the pupil support assistance category. In your professional experience, do you think that there is more useful information that could just be out there and that you are not picking up on at the moment? I am not being critical, but in terms of where the prioritisation has been—maybe it has not in the past—those avenues have not been explored fully. Do you think that that is a possibility? Absolutely. I would be surprised if that was not the case, to be perfectly honest. The question remains as to whether we need to source that information on a regular routine basis in the way that we do with this type of information. We have an annual collection of those sorts of things. If local authorities or any other administrative data holder have information that we have a particular need for or use for at a particular time, there are mechanisms that we can use to extract that on a one-off basis to give us a snapshot picture of what is going on, rather than establishing what we have to recognise as a reasonably onerous annual process of providing data. There are options, but I would be surprised if there was not more data that would be of use to some. As a final question following on from that, you talk about the possibility of being able to do one-off work. Given the concern that there has been round this particular change, certainly from across colleagues on the committee, is it possible that you could do a one-off bit of work by probing some of the changes so that, certainly as a committee and as a Parliament, we could understand those different categories being merged to men? I think that it is possible to do work like that. I am not currently in a position to think through all of the various options that might be available and what the correct mechanism for doing some of that would be, whether it would be through the sort of work that Laura describes working with the advisory group, whether it is qualitative information coming from a select group of local authorities who have already given us some information through this process, whether it is a one-off data uplift of some sort. We would have to think about those, but if there is demand and a need for those sorts of things, then those are the sorts of questions, broader analytical questions rather than statistical questions that have come to us regularly. In theory, there is nothing to stop you, for example, from doing a one-off survey of your snapshot of On a Day in September, who is doing what within ASN, for example. In theory, there is nothing to stop that. Philosophically, there is nothing against that idea. There may be practical barriers and other limits to how we would conduct that and fund it and so on and so forth, but philosophically, no, there is nothing to stop that. I would like to stick with the issue of the individual versus aggregate method of collecting the data for a moment. Like colleagues, I am not a statistician, so I may misunderstand that, but my understanding is that the collection of the teacher data individually allows for distinctions to be made on, for example, where teachers deliver multiple subjects, so someone who teaches both maths and physics or history and modern studies. Because of that method of collection, they are not double counted as a math teacher and a physics teacher and they are not counted as just being a single full-time math teacher. That distinction is made and that informs, for example, ourselves in Parliament of what the full-time equivalent capacity is, delivering maths, delivering physics, etc. I understand that the shift of collecting the data and support staff from aggregate to individual would be a considerable one, but, just to be clear on the process, who would make the decision about whether or not to seriously explore that option? There are two things in that. One is just to clarify on the teacher that you are right that we collect information about the subjects that individual teachers provide. We have information on their main subject, but we also have information on other subjects that they can teach. What we do not do is assign proportions of their time to those subjects, so we cannot tell from the data that we have. We may know that a teacher who works full-time in a given local authority is primarily a physics teacher, but they can also teach maths. What we do not know from that information is whether they actually teach any maths or whether they spend off their time teaching one and off their time teaching the other, so we cannot quite measure in the way that you described exactly what teaching resource is provided in practice to individual subjects. On the question of how we would decide whether to explore this issue of moving to a different collection process, I guess in many ways it is quite an organic exercise. A need from users in a demand would arise. It would be discussed internally first in the way that we have described. For the current change, we would discuss the plausibility of it, at least, with the data providers. If we are going to ask them for different types of data, it is good to have a starting position of knowing whether that is even a feasible thing that they could do or not. Then there would be broader discussions with Roger in his chief statistician capacity. If that starts to look like something that is worth exploring, we will start developing options and looking at that, but then there would need to be a formal public consultation on that sort of change because it would be regarded as a significant change to the collection methods for official statistics. As Laura said, in terms of ASN in particular, there is other legislation in place that requires us to consult on those sorts of changes before ingestion is taken. I think that there is an appetite here from these users for that to at least be explored, but on the point of other users or other stakeholders in consultation with them. To go back to a discussion at the start of this session, Laurie mentioned, in exchange with John Lamont, the additional support for learning advisory group and stakeholder group being consulted on issues around that. Were they consulted on this particular change in the way that the statistics are published? No. When we had the discussion with them, there was a particular piece of business that the advisory group was considering at that point in time, which was around statistical information. We were reporting to them the fact that this issue had arisen and that there was a need to have additional quality assurance in order to make sure that the information that we provided is robust. As part of that, I explained that we were considering a number of ways to resolve that, but we did not consult them specifically on the matter that we discussed. I had to lead out to them a number of approaches that we might take. If you do not mind asking why not, that is the additional support for learning advisory group. Surely that is a group of people who should be sounded on something like that. Once you have a specific proposal, you can take that to the group of people who you have assembled as being relevant experts, those with an interest in that area, and ask them what the implications would be. We had done that as part of the discussion when we talked about the different options. I was aware of what the views were. As I said, it was not a specific do-you-think. That particular piece of this approach is what should be done. It was one of the things that we might do, which of those feel appropriate to you. The approach that was ultimately taken was one of the specific proposals that were laid out. It was one of the things that we discussed. What was their feedback on that specific proposal? There was no concern about it that it was appropriate. We regularly discussed statistical information and other evidence as part of our work. It was not a non-routine discussion, if I can put it like that. It is the type of business that we carry out within that arena. Alongside the discussion that I talked about earlier on, about changing any potential changes that we make to the data collection and moving to outcomes, it was quite routine. It was not a stand-out discussion for them. That is the only way that I can describe it to you. The only reason that there was not a specific question asked was that A was already aware of the position of the group but that the group was not happening to meet at the time. To move to a different area, but we are still relevant to that, are you aware of what is causing the quite significant discrepancies between the data that you are collecting through the census and the data being issued by local authorities under freedom of information requests in response to external organisations who are asking for the same information? That is an issue that crops up from time to time, where people will compare official and national statistics with information that has been issued through freedom of information requests. Very often, what tends to happen is that freedom of information requests are made for specific pieces of information, which on the Facebook may seem to match up with what the official statistics report on, but in actual fact, there is not exactly a clear and equitable match there. To give you an example, when you ask a local authority how many teachers they have, they may return to you the full-time equivalents or they may return to you the head count. That can give you two different sets of numbers that, on the Facebook, you have asked the same question but you have got two different answers. That is one of the things that we have seen from time to time with that type of request. Across a range of areas, we quite often see sometimes those FRI requests that have been sourced from across 32 local authorities come to us for review. Sometimes we see them in the media and try to reconcile those numbers with the numbers that we have across similar sources health-centrally. In my now fairly considerable experience across a range of areas of government, it is rare that those numbers will match because the response and the guidance—the statistical collection comes with a set of guidance on how to complete the return and what should be included and what should not and the FRI request. It does not, no should it, but that is necessarily going to lead to a discrepancy between the numbers that you have written. I am aware of some of the inconsistencies that my office is trying to compete with certain journalists in Scotland in the number of FRI requests that we have sent out and we are trying to resolve the inconsistencies in what comes back. The one that has been specifically raised with us, which you might be familiar with, is the work that the SSTA, the secondary teacher association, has done. Some of the inconsistencies there are quite considerable, so the example given is additional support needs teachers in Dumfries and Galloway on a particular day. The difference is 92 ASN teachers was what they were informed of, but the census indicates that it is 38 ASN teachers. That is quite a considerable difference. That is more than what I have encountered when trying to resolve the differences between FRI and census data previously. There is a number of things. I have not had a chance to investigate this particular issue. There is a number of things off the top of my head that I think could have contributed to this difference. I have already mentioned the difference between FTE and head count. There is also the fact that the information will have been gathered at different points in time. There will be definitional differences there as well. One thing that we see is a bit of an inconsistency in the way that the term ASN is used and that some local authorities will talk about ASN schools, where we would refer to them as special schools. We might hear the number of teachers in the special schools rather than the number of teachers whose main subject is additional support needs. That is just a few of the things off the top of my head that I think might have contributed to this. I am aware that that is a specific example that if you do not have it in front of you, you cannot provide full context on it. The committee would benefit in terms of the context of any further work that we take on that. If you would be able to have a look at that and provide a written response about why you think there is an inconsistency there, we would find that quite useful. That is me. Thank you very much. Can I ask a final question about the census? Is there statutory duty on local authorities to return the census information? The Education Scotland Act requires local authorities to return data to the Scottish Government. There is a broader duty to return education data such as we require. The return of the census itself is not specifically described in legislation. Thank you very much for your attendance at the committee this morning. I am going to suspend for five minutes and then go into private sessions.