 Funtiwl, iawn, everyone, and welcome to the 13th meeting of the Education and Skills committee in 2019. Apologies that have been received from all of Ermond Dell and we are therefore delighted to have an Austin alles with us this morning as a substitute for today's meeting, and Tavish Scott will be joining us a little later this morning. The first item of business is the second evidence session on the committee's subject choices inquiry. Welcome to the meeting this morning, Dr Allan Britton, Senior lecture in education. University of Glasgow. William Hardy. Policy advice manager. Royal Society of Edinburgh. Professor Jim Scott. School of education and social work. University of Dundee. I want to say to the panel the outset. If they would like to respond to a question, please indicate to me and the clerks. I will try to get you in as often as possible. We are going to move straight to questions this morning. I would like to invite First Liz Smith. Thank you, convener. Felly, roi that we wanted to move away from the breadth in learning to greater depth in learning and also extend the number of courses that deal with other skills. Is that the same interpretation from the research that you have all carried out? Is that the same interpretation that you would give that it was an intentional reduction or do you think that it was a practice? Well, not at all. I think that it is quite clear in the research and the work that has been carried out, that the reduction in course choices at S4, particularly as a result of an intended consequence, particularly around the national qualifications comprising 106 sellers at the time of a single year, you can fit in that learning. Also, a key issue seems to be the point at which you can begin preparation for qualifications, the issue about the extent to which you can use the broad general education phase for the preparation for qualifications. There is no intentional policy stated anywhere that there would be a reduction. I think that it is all really the unintended consequence. Can I clarify? Are you disputing the implication that was provided to us by Education Scotland who seemed to imply that one of the reasons for the reduction that has definitely taken place and I think that we have a lot of evidence to suggest the extent of that evidence, particularly in different parts of Scotland, too? Are you saying that that has happened with the sort of unintended consequences? There has been no direction about that? Why have we ended up in a situation? It is unintended consequences of schools, the way in which they have been to interpret national guidance. Indeed, I think that in 2016 Education Scotland had to issue new guidance on the way in which the broad general education and senior phases knit together because schools, of course, choices had been reducing, but even with that new guidance, if you read it, I think that it is still quite unclear to the extent to which learning in the broad general education phase can prepare young learners for progression to national qualifications. If that is correct, do you think that the structure of the system is wrong? I certainly think that the lack of guidance on the key issue seems to have meant that schools and local authorities have been somewhat left to their own devices. As I said, while Education Scotland might try to rein that back in with its guidance in 2016, which said that schools should be doing between six and eight subjects, I am still looking at that guidance. You can get the impression that it would still be quite unclear to schools and local authorities what that means for preparation at the broad general education phase. In terms of preparing pupils for going on to senior phase qualifications. Professor Scott, in light of all the extensive evidence that you have done school by school and local authority by local authority, why do you think that we have had a considerable reduction in subject choice and particularly why it has affected some local authority areas more than others? It is actually quite difficult to answer that, as I suspect that you know. I completely agree with what William has just said about the lack of intention in all this. What has happened is that there are several factors that have affected us. One is that some local authorities have mandated their schools almost without exception to do six courses in S4. That is really the only mandating that has gone on. That is a virus that spread round the north of Scotland from Angus in a fan shape, right round the north, and then there were outbreaks of it in the south and south-west of Scotland. There has been a ripple of infection, if you care to follow my analogy, through the central belt, but the central belt is still largely producer curriculum for your school that meets the needs of your learners, which is what I thought we were all about in the beginning, and it is certainly what the Deputy First Minister says on a regular basis. That is a major factor in the number of schools doing six. Roughly half of Scotland's secondary schools are doing six courses in S4. The ones who are doing seven are generally choosing that as a more sensible position to stand in a tighter, covicular space, because they only have S4 to play with for the first course. Doing eight would be a challenge. When I was headteacher of Perth High School, I chose to move to seven. I chose because it was a sensible compromise between the dangers of six, and I'll spell those out in a second, and the dangers of eight because the pressure on children who would be squeezed to do eight subjects in the period of time available would be difficult. The six course choice, if choice is the right word, came, I understand, from interviews with the great and the good of Scottish education that said that a group of members of ADES had decided that that was the best way to do it. Now, I have no way of substantiating that. That's what I was told. It would be interesting to ask ADES that question. I haven't tried. The problems, to some extent, lie with the fact that, if you do seven, it's perfectly possible to do seven in a time. If one reads HMI reports on Scottish secondary schools and one looks at the six-course schools and the seven-course schools, there is no evident difference in the pattern of inspections across the two models. The question that I always ask myself, therefore, is if you can do seven in a time, why do you not just do seven? If you're doing six because you want to introduce something else, then there has to be evidence of something else. You alluded to my map of the Scottish curriculum. There is little evidence of new infill in terms of vocational or other courses. One has to then ask a question. Why is it that schools are doing six courses or worse five unless they're being mandated by a local authority? If they're being mandated by a local authority, what is the rationale of the local authority for doing that? I spent a great deal of time, as some of you in the room know, trying to find out exactly what each of the 32 local authorities was up to in terms of what is the rationale of this authority in doing it. From 32 authorities researching every single document, I mean every document right down to every committee paper from every committee since 2008, I managed to find three curricular policies across 32 authorities. I'm sure there are more, but they're not in a public place. Of the three, one was a pre-CFE policy. I did the same thing with schools looking for curricular rationales to explain why this was happening. Roughly 15 to 20 per cent of Scotland's secondary schools produce a rationale. Can I finish on one question, Professor Scott? Given what you're saying about councils mandating schools to take a particular line, could I just push you a little bit? Do you believe that that is in the spirit of curriculum for excellence, which is supposed to be designed to suit individual needs so that the educational journey, if you like, is fitting the best interests of that child in that school? Do you think that that's an appropriate policy that councils take a one-size-fits-all policy to the actual structure of their curriculum? The short answer has to be no, because, necessarily, you're lumping all children in one direction into one model that may or may not meet their needs. Worriingly, that model has significant flaws because I've done some research on the number of authorities recently, not published yet. I think that some of you know that I have several papers coming, but that research tends to suggest, but I don't have a wide enough sample yet to prove it's true, but that research tends to suggest that in authorities where six columns and six subjects are the presentation, the actual number of qualifications that the child sits is around five and sometimes less than five on average. One begins to wonder if there is a correlation between that and the absence of the five at three and five at four and five at five figures in national publication. One can get five at five if one digs about in council papers, but to answer the spirit of your question, I think that it would be helpful to all of us, certainly to you, if we actually had a breadth of information, we'd been driven into corners. We tend to talk about one plus qualification at level five on leaving. I have no problems about talking about levers because I actually think that that has always been the purpose of education, is to allow children to leave us in education with a broad set of experiences and qualifications that meet their needs. I don't think that that's changed with CFE. It certainly shouldn't be a change, but we tend to talk about one plus at five or one plus at six. That does a number of things. I've been tracking schools that demonstrate the five at three, five at four, five at five figures. One can still find quite a lot of them if one digs. If you actually do that, you find surprising things. By and large, they're doing a little better at five at five, so the more able are doing better by and large—you know what I'm going to say next, don't you? This is not the case for the lease table, and the whole purpose of this, or at least the final purpose of CFE, was to improve equity. It wasn't the original purpose of CFE. We have a situation where—I'll give you an example of an unnamed school because I haven't published it yet and I can't do that—I have several schools in my collection where the five at three figure for that school in 2012-2013, just before CFE, was in the 90 per cent as many schools were. I can show you schools where that figure has dropped to 60 per cent, 50 per cent, or even in a few cases, 40 per cent. That's beyond acceptance. There are a number of things where there are serious issues. I have to say that there are other schools where the figures have been kept up, or in some cases have even better. It's not the homogeneous process this. That really is the problem, and that's where your question came from, in all honesty, was the idea that, are we actually getting a level of quality by doing this? The answer, sadly, appears to be no. Just before I bring in Dr Bitting, I just clarified Professor Scott. In your analysis, are you only looking at the SQA levels? For some of those pupils who aren't performing as well, now, is there a possibility, as Education Scotland has said to us, that they'll be doing other curricular activity, or maybe even modern apprenticeship college courses? I hate doing this, because Cube Lumer describes this as the Blue Peter approach to curriculum planning, but he will forgive me. This is a map of the entire 357 secondary schools in Scotland. It has. There's no way you're going to reproduce this for your notes, and you're not getting it. However, what it does is to demonstrate quite clear, I think, that we have a situation where there is considerable variability. I really find it difficult to say to you that anything is improving in this at all. I'm sorry, I lost a bit of a thread there on the midst of unwrapping activities. It was just, as you said, the figures that you were giving were those about the reduction in the performance of the less able students. Have you any way of tracking what non-SQA qualifications that you might be doing? That's right, I have a bigger problem. I've got caught up in the microphone, I lost that. The answer is yes, I can, because I can read quite clearly all the lesser SQA qualifications. Some schools publish, not that many schools publish, of attainment at all. It's a very small minority when you get right down to it, but some do actually publish other qualifications that they produce, but one can see it better when one actually examines their curricular structure. If you can see the option choice form, which one often can, then you can see quite quickly which qualifications are being offered. That doesn't tell you how well we did in those, but one can actually see the extent to which a school is offering alternative provision. Yes, school by school, I can track whether or not they are providing alternative provision. I have to say to you that there was quite a bit of alternative provision before CFE came in, and many schools have carried that forward into CFE and either enhanced it or not enhanced it. What I appear to be finding is that the enhancements are fewer than the non-enhancements, and that is a little bit of a worry. If I look at six columns, one of the problems in six columns, of course, is that they all get stacked up in the six columns, and so many options are piled up against each other in a way where, if you have seven or eight, you're able to spread out a bit more, but yes, I can track that. Thank you, so I apologise a lot to Brett. No, I mean, I feel that some of the conversation already in the questions from Liz Reinforce, a point that I tried to convey in my submission last year and in my responses, but we still have not resolved who owns the curriculum in Scottish education. We've got a system of distributed responsibilities and therefore quite opaque accountabilities, and so, yes, it's in the spirit of curriculum for excellence for schools, headteachers to be empowered and autonomous to make decisions around the curriculum, and that is more over part of the general ethos of Scottish education, but we've always had that tension between autonomy and central control, and that's the backdrop, I think, the more profound backdrop to everything that's happening is we're still unclear about who owns it, and therefore who owns the responsibility for the outcomes, because we talk about distributed leadership, we talk about autonomy at local level, and that was part of the thrust of CFE, so that's the sense in which I've characterised it previously as unintended consequences. The consequences emerge from deep-rooted structures of governance in Scottish education itself, which we've never resolved. Good morning to the panel. I'd like to go back, Professor Scott, to your map that you showed us a minute ago, with regard to the 357 secondary schools in Scotland. I wonder if anyone ever undertook any evidence in the past with regard to standard grade and the different offers that were offered in SBOe previously. For example, when I was studying my standard grade 20 years ago, I know that you can't believe that. I was offered seven subjects. That was the base level offer from Madras College State School in St Andrews, Fife Council. A couple of years later, my middle sister comes along. She's offered eight subjects. A couple of years after that, my baby sister goes to Bill Baxter in Cooper, just down the road again at Fife Council School. She's offered nine subjects. That variability is surely not a new thing. Has it ever been mapped in the past? To some extent. There are relatively few people insane enough to try and read the writings of 357 secondary schools, I have to say. It's not a quick process. It was much easier, however, to map it in the past, because we were driven at that point in time by a reasonably—up until the year 2000, when the yellow peril and its success of the white peril, the curriculum guidelines for Scottish secondary teachers and high teachers were revoked. Up until that point in time, by and large, a school should have been offering eight qualifications. That was the basic offer, since that seems to be the word for describing a curriculum these days. Everybody had a set of one modes within their curriculum, and so therefore there was literacy, numeracy, social subjects and so on. We worked across the seven of those and there was an eighth column. A few inventive schools—I worked in a couple of them—also certificated other aspects of their work, either through SQA qualifications or alternative qualifications. I don't think that there has been a map of Scottish education until now at all without being cheeky about it, so probably that was not done, but you would not have seen the degree of variability at that time. My point is, though, that there was variability under the previous system. It is important that we acknowledge that from the outset. I wonder what your view might be about the subjects on offer at the moment, potentially limiting subject options later, after S4, for example. My sisters and I all studied different numbers of subjects because there were different numbers available. All three of us were able to set five hires, but we were not disadvantaged. Are you suggesting that the current system disadvantages pupils at the end of S4, for example, because they are being offered less subjects? I think that it depends on how they do. I think that the most stable will survive in any system. I think that the most stable is prospering. I suggested earlier on that there was a danger that inequity was growing. In all honesty, that is because the most stable cope in any system, and if you give the most stable only seven or only six qualifications to do, then, by and large, they will use the time well, so they will probably prosper in that system. The trouble comes if you are at the bottom end of a group. If you are at the bottom end of the most stable, or the bottom end of the average, or wherever, then you will find it much tougher to do that. I would think that a child in pretty much any school in Scotland—I have some reservations about those who are doing only five qualifications in S4—there are still about four of them, I think. That is a problem, because they were always very, very tight. One of them had a curriculum for a while that was English, mathematics, Gallic, native speakers, and any two others that you fancy. That is not what I would call a Scottish curriculum. If you look at the sixes with sevens in the eights, assuming that the child manages to carry forward five subjects, if he does not manage to carry forward five subjects, that is a different matter, then he will be able to get five hours. I was taking with one of the points that you made there with regard to the most able will survive. I have a concern about the report that was published yesterday by Reform Scotland, which overtly focuses on the number of subjects. My concern is, as a former teacher, that we are still obsessed with getting children to study more subjects at a younger age—well, at S4—and we are not considering how that impacts on their mental health, particularly given the course requirements of N4 and N5. N4 requires a national added value unit, and N5 requires an assignment, and all the extra burden that places on our pupils never mind the mental health of our teaching profession. Has any analysis been given to that? I know that pupils at the moment, last night, when I sponsored a parliamentary reception with the mental health foundation, our pupils are really struggling with some of the requirements of these courses. Are we really saying that they should be studying more subjects? Therefore, that is going to add to their mental health issues potentially. One has to ask—there are so many factors here that apply—one could ask equally well if the addition of a third two-term dash to the previous two has significantly increased the pressure upon young people. My suspicion, having talked to quite a lot of young people, is that the answer there is yes. I arrived in Perth High School in 1998, and at that point in time, the five-higher figure was 6 per cent. This is an upper-middle-class secondary school, which is very comfortable. When I left Perth High School, the figure, without killing anyone in the process or causing serious damage to them, was about 24 per cent. It really depends on how one focuses the learning of young people. That is something that we did for the most stable. I equally well could talk to you about the way in which we introduced college courses for our middling group of children, vocationally-based courses for others. It really depends on what the headteacher, their colleagues and community chooses to take forward. I would like to ask a final point about how we solved the issue. We are here to try and help the system at this moment in time as a committee. I want to go back to William Hardy's point about our allocation. I raised that point with the last panel before recess. I was quite taken, Professor Scott, when you spoke about the six-course choice that came from Addis. That was not my understanding of it. My understanding as a former teacher was that the six-course choice option was driven by hours allocation from the SQA. If you look at that 160 hours allocation, it is only possible in one year to timetable 5.3 subjects, given that there are 855 teaching hours. You have to start a bit earlier if you want to give a bigger offer of subjects. We have heard from the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers. They want to go back to the 222 model. Jim Scott suggested in his previous skill that he had seven subjects as he offered an S4. I would really be interested in what the panel thinks is the answer to this. Can I just deal with the Addis bit first of all? It would be wrong of me to name the director of education concerned. I could. My understanding is that one director of education carried out some what I would call timetabling 101 work and did some simple calculations along the lines of those you were talking about there and decided that that was all that could be carried out in the time. I would prefer to look at someone whom I am happy to name, Maureen McKenna in Glasgow, who I think is exemplary. I think that her work is excellent. I have recently agreed with that. Her documentation on CFE very clearly says to her headteachers and colleagues that you need to consider third year carefully. You need to use third year wisely. There are experiences and outcomes that could be undertaken in third year, which will set you up well for progress in fourth year and allow you. Since you mentioned Keir's document of yesterday, Glasgow's response to that document was that we do not impose a system on our schools, we allow them to consider their opportunities and needs, and we allow them to build a curriculum that meets those needs. My old friend Jerry Lyons in two of Glasgow's secondary schools has chosen to go for six courses. His curriculum is almost exactly the same as mine and Perth High School, because we did them together, but he has mys to squeeze it into six columns. It is really a matter of how you think you should best meet the needs of your children, but it is not a matter of the number of minutes, because if one uses third year wisely, there are more than sufficient minutes. I am going to cop out of providing an answer on the technical dimensions to this, because there are lots of different possible models, but what I can offer from my perspective is how you go about arriving at that solution. I think that that is critical. Your report yesterday as a committee on the national test identified some of the issues about policy implementation, and I think that that is where we are at now, is how you implement policy more effectively. That would be the case for this scenario, what do you do to solve it? You talk to head teachers who feel free to talk to you without any restriction in what they have to say. Alongside that, as Jim suggests, there are expertise out there on resolving timetabling. It would be very difficult to propose a one-size-fits-all solution, and it would not be appropriate in the spirit of Scottish education governance that I mentioned before, to legislate for something. Again, that is one of the tensions in the Scottish system. Sometimes we legislate in education, other times we try to enact change purely through policy, but it is a quite a grey area when does it become legislation, when does it become policy. I do not think that you could legislate for it, but what you can do is work with the profession in different ways and look at the impact as well in a much more systematic way. Again, I have made the point before that we are operating at absent gyms working and a few other people. We actually have very little research evidence on the impact of the different models, so schools have been left to try things out, based on very sound local judgment almost certainly. However, there is very little evidence, so I think that we need to have all those things in place in order to arrive at the solution. I agree with my colleagues on the panel there. Clearly, we do not want to mandate particular models at this stage, because you could start getting into other unintended consequences. I very much support what Alan said in relation to the need for more research in terms of what different structures and pathways mean for attainment. I think that what happens in the third year is clearly key in terms of providing that preparation for qualifications and the potential for doing. We have spoken a lot around doing the qualifications over one year. Jenny, you mentioned that the stresses that could bring on pupils. Potentially, to what extent a two-year course is currently being run, because my impression is that the one-year course is the dominant approach. Perhaps, again, that comes back to the need for more research, but looking at what two-year pathways look like and what that means for the number of qualifications that can be taken and for attainment, and what it means for the learners well-being as well. I would really like to ask you about the issues surrounding multi-level teaching and whether you think that the courses are designed to support that method. I think that that is an issue that the House of Welles is putting on. I also support the learning societies group, which brings together the learning scientific society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Centre of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Biology, and I have also got a computer science and maths as well, and one or two other. Multi-course teaching seems to be a particular issue in the sciences, because, while courses may have similar titles, a national four in physics will be very different from the national five courses in physics, but quite often they will be taught together, which can obviously impact on the quality of teaching if a teacher has got to teach quite different classes. Sometimes that can even be exacerbated by having national four, national five and higher in the same classes. That also touches on the difficulty of recruiting subject specialists teachers, particularly in the sciences. Computing science is a notable error, which means that in some schools, multi-course teaching may well be the only way that the school can timetable those courses until all them are to be run. I was just going to add that this is an issue that the learning societies group raised back in 2016 with SQA, Education Scotland and the Government. They are aware of the issue, and I think that there was at that time, I do not have a go as far as a commitment, but there will certainly be a dialogue between Education Scotland and the local authorities to highlight that multi-course teaching was undesirable in the sciences, but as far as I can tell, I am just not aware of any action that has not been undertaken since then. As far as I can tell, the issue of multi-course teaching is prevalent now, as it was when the learning societies originally raised this issue. I think that the simplest response is, would any teacher actively choose to construct their teaching and learning in that way? While there are some relatively weak pedagogical arguments for multi-level teaching, the notion of peer support within the class and so on, I think that the reality is for most teachers that if they were given a choice between multi-level teaching or not, they would not want it. Clearly, again, this is where it is important to speak to head teachers and identify the resource allocations that are driving the inevitability of multi-level teaching. Professor Scott? We are actually making three different points, which is helpful. One of the things that concerns me based on what I have done in the past couple of years is the extent to which tri-level teaching is still prevalent in places. It tends to be prevalent in minority subjects or in smaller schools or both, but it is a genuine issue. I have quite a lot of write-in mail unexpectedly from teachers who want to tell me about the situation in their school. It is very good for statistics, but one gets the other things as well. One of the things that interestingly geography teachers who have featured this morning seem to be particularly exercised about it with some others as well is the concept of tri-level teaching. As William said with the sciences, it is a no-no or it should be a no-no, but it seems to be prevalent in quite a lot of the smaller subjects. Given the pressures on the last couple of columns in six-course schools, it tends to jam a lot of things in there, and that seems to have led to more tri-level teaching. My question was basically because of many parents that have actually been writing to me, and they are very concerned about it. I want to hear your opinions on it. From a personal perspective, I do not see how it can work, how it can teach a child in S4 and a child in S6. I think that you are stretching the teacher very far, but thank you for your opinions. I do not realise that you meant to cross different year groups, so that is even more difficult. It is much less common, but it is very difficult to do. If I were to attempt to teach advanced higher computing, higher computing and national 5 computing in one room, there would be a significant challenge, even for the most noble kids. I really wanted to come back to the issue, first of all, about multi-level. I suppose that I am interested in a lot of what has been described here as about the quality of education for all our young people. There is a particular issue around whether it is an unintended consequence, but most disadvantaged young people are even more disadvantaged in this system. I want to ask you, first of all, about this multi-level question, maybe Dr Britton in particular, because you will be dealing with people in national teacher education. Liam Hardy already said that there has been obvious impact on the quality of teaching in having multi-level classes. We were told by Education Scotland that this was not the case, but that it was all about the quality of the teaching. First of all, to what extent is that now factored into initial teacher education, that it may have been asked to teach across different levels? Is there any work being done at looking at how prevalent it is? I understand that, from one family background, small schools in remote areas, where you get a secondary school and that makes a huge difference, and of course there is going to be compromise in that. However, I have been told in my own city in Glasgow that it happens routinely across subjects. It did not happen back in the day, long ago, when I was a teacher, 20 or years ago. How are we supporting teachers to address that? Secondly, how prevalent is it? The prevalence issue—I do not have the data on that—and colleagues may well have that. In terms of the preparation of teachers, initial teacher education will do what it can to prepare beginning teachers for the different scenarios that they will encounter. Of course, our students will go out to potentially 32 different local authorities with different local authority-level approaches, and then they will drill that down to individual schools. Of course, there is such a wide variety, so you cannot necessarily prepare them for every eventuality. However, what you try to do is introduce the notion that, for example, in the primary sector, they may well encounter in smaller rural schools teaching a composite P1 to P4 class and a P5 to P7 class, and what you do is introduce the notions of peer-to-peer learning. I have seen superb examples in the past of that peer-to-peer learning being done in small primary schools, for example. In secondary schools, the preparation is about giving them the policy context. They actually have to know what they are going out to. That is particularly difficult for the secondary teachers who are certainly in Glasgow University recruited through the one-year programme, the PGDE. You do not have a lot of time in that one year, half of which is spent out in schools, to prepare them as best we can. If there are subject specialists in the secondary, each subject specialist input will try to prepare them for the reality of possibly multi-level teaching. They will learn about the different levels, the different qualifications and what is involved in those. They will give them ideas about how to teach across different levels. That is nothing new in the secondary sector in the sense that, in the 90s, I taught O-grade and then standard grades, and you would often have a foundation general or a general and credit class. However, I suppose that it goes back to my point optimally. Most teachers would say that you would have taught a credit class, a general class and a foundation with the understanding that there could be transitions within those levels. However, you would not ever have taught a higher class or very rarely have taught a higher class and a standard grade class at credit general foundation, which is why I have not been told that it is now happening. It is happening more routinely in the past. You would not get higher and the intermediates did often come together. I think that there is an equity issue in this. Way back in the day, tiny percentage of the kids in the schools that I taught and stayed on to fifth year, tiny proportion. In the school that I taught in, you could cobble together a higher class, but it was a wide range of ability. Whereas maybe in a secondary school up the road, they would have five classes doing higher English and the ones who were going to predict in A would be 25 of them. Is there an issue in more disadvantaged communities that they are more likely to be taught in multi-level classes because there are fewer of them and their chances therefore of achieving their potential is more limited than their peers who are in a school with 25 kids who are all predicted to get any in their higher English? I do not have that data. I do not know if anyone else has. I do not have that specific data on the health prevalence in disadvantaged schools, but it comes back to the issue of the difficulty of recruiting teachers and, particularly, in short subjects. As I mentioned before, the sciences seem to be particularly an area where multi-course teaching is employed. It may well be schools in disadvantaged areas that will find it more difficult to recruit some of those shorter subjects, perhaps against other schools who also need them, but maybe in less disadvantaged areas. There might be that in terms of the prevalence and availability of data. The last piece of work that I am aware of is the Royal Sat of Chemistry, which undertook work in this area in 2016. It is focused on chemistry. That was included in the Learner Society's group submission to yourselves in paragraph 20. It provides a short summary, but that research revealed that multi-course classes were prevalent in 73% of national 5 classes. The most common pattern was national 5 being combined with national 4. That was a survey of 259 chemistry teachers. That made clear from that survey that teachers felt that it was very difficult to support the needs of the different students across those different levels in the same class. As I said earlier, this is an issue that we know that the Scottish Government, Education Scotland and SQA are aware of, but, to what extent, any action has been taken to address it since we raised it with them back in 2016. I just do not know of that point. I wonder if you would share my concern that Education Scotland did not think that it was a problem. If I have not done any analysis whatsoever, no quality impact assessment, which in my view would show that more disadvantaged young people are more likely already, way back in the day, and they are still more likely to be in multi-level classes, and they are less support than they would with their peers who are more advantaged. I will share my concern if Education Scotland is turning its use away from it, given that it is being flagged up. They are aware of the work and the issues that they were raised in society group. It is clearly an issue. Is your view that the driver and shortage of teachers has then become a vicious circle? We can put them all together, so we do not have to find these teachers. There might be issues with the school management as well. If they might not necessarily know the differentiation between the different courses and because they might have superficially looked like similar content, we will put them together when it is quite clearly. That is very difficult to do. I am quite cautious normally about—I do not mind answering questions when I have the entire set of data sitting in front of me and you are asking, as you know, a particularly difficult question. Most of my writing or most of my interviews with teachers indicate that this seems to be a growing problem. It seems to be a growing problem that comes from several sources. Some of them indicate its local authority staffing levels. Some of them indicate that it is the headteacher slash senior management team's view of the curriculum that puts them in a particularly difficult position. They may be qualified to state that, but I do not know that. I can only hear what they have to say. Some of them say, probably with more accuracy, that it comes from their principal teacher who wants to do it this way to make more space and time for that, although that should be moderated by the senior management team. The Education Scotland question that you asked is a really hard one. If I heard correctly the chief executive when she gave evidence there said that they were only just starting, restarting aspect inspections, one of the things that one would normally expect in a major educational initiative, and I have lived through a few of them, is that there was a rolling inspection process. HMI were the pride of the world in terms of the way in which they rigorously carried out these things. Scotland had a right to be proud of that. Those of us who were inspected by them did not always feel that way, but they did it very thoroughly. I was aspect inspected in Perth High School in November 2011—almost the last thing that I did in Perth High School—and I had assumed that that would roll onwards, but it obviously has not. Normally, what happens is that aspect inspections and school inspections build up, and one needs that parcel of inspection evidence. HMI inspect a dozen secondary schools a year or something like that. If you give them 10 years, they will manage about 100 secondary schools, and the first half of the evidence is obsolete by then. It is quite difficult to get a feel for what is going on unless you carry out aspect inspections to drill down into aspects of the major initiative that has been carried through. Normally, what comes from that is one of the portmanteau reports that says, here we are in quick and fresh once this is how it's going. Unless I've missed something completely, there isn't a, here we are in CFE, this is how it's going. I think that we have a problem here in terms of how we are actually assessing ourselves in terms of how it goes forward. The geography teachers and science teachers and other teachers who write in all feel that they are the losers in this process, and that's one of the reasons they're raising this. However, if they're all losers, maybe there's a wider problem. Can I just ask one last question on Professor Scott's report? I think that he was troubling, and there's lots of really, really interesting stuff, and it's clearly a great deal of attention. However, in one point in your report, you say, in some cases, that sometimes this appears to substantiate the suggestion that equity may have been adversely affected by curriculum for excellence. I'm in danger of looking back to a golden age of standard grade, because the transition from non-certificate to standard grade was so significant for a significant number of young people completely written off in their non-certificate course. My great fear is that we create, yes, they're doing courses, but they're non-certificated, so we go back to that day when they get less attention. That seems to me to be a huge challenge. If I don't think that it's intended consequence, but an unintended consequence is that those who were supposed to be supported most by certification for all are now losing out in a curriculum for excellence that is supposed to be designed round equity. What can we do to address that? I wish I had an easy answer for that. A glib answer would be to say, do what OECD said in 2015 and go back and carry out a thorough mid-session review of CFE, consider what it's actually trying to do and how it should go forward. Again, I heard the CEO of Education Scotland say that they were getting round to that. They have other priorities, but four years on from a massive international report and they're getting round to it, it seems to be quite a serious issue. My personal view is that it will be difficult to resolve the problem in those areas where six courses are mandated. That's because their options have been so narrowed and the six becomes five or four and they are really in trouble right away. Those children are not being given a chance. I understand that some basic timetabling led some people, whether they were directors or headteachers or whoever, to make those choices, but they should have been more informed. In part of the problem, I think that I got the unintended consequences title first on the thesis about this way back in 2014 because it's been obvious for that length of time that there were those problems building up. I remember Dr Allen and I used to talk in another parliamentary committee about the modern languages problem because it was evident from quite early that some of these things were going off the rails. How we put it back together is not simple because it's a bit like turning a super tanker or the Titanic. It really takes 15 to 20 years to launch and steer a major educational initiative. You can't just do that. Whatever we do now will have to be a process of planning an organisation and it will take time. I share your concern because if this is a process that's designed to help children from deprived backgrounds and children in difficulties and young carers and all the other contexts that we've talked about to come up alongside those young people who have all the advantages in the universe anyway, then if we allow that to drift for another five years whilst we sort out something to go forward with, we're in serious trouble. We're in danger of a generation going past who have not had a good experience in education. The only thing we can do however is honestly debate what the findings are. I would personally release the five at three, five at four or five at five figures for every school in Scotland. I would personally release the extent of planning, organisation and leadership by every one of the 32 local authorities because that's a very mixed picture, as I suspect you all understand. That would give us some basis alongside deliver statistics, which are very helpful, and alongside some of the other stats that we have, I would also try to ensure that all the qualifications that children get, whether SQA or not, are actually publicly available so that we can see how schools are doing. I would also insist that you are responsible for legislation in 2012 and 2013 that required every secondary school and every local authority by statute to produce information on attainment and information on the curriculum. I can tell you, if you've read any of my research at all, you know that this is not happening. It's not happening massively. Some whole authorities are not doing it and many individual schools are not doing it. They're better at publishing their curriculum, but that pretty little map has a big stripe down the end of it, that stripe. Where the box is green, they publish their curriculum. Where the box is white, and look at that, all white, all white, all white, all white, they do not publish the curriculum at all and there are bits in between that. I did exactly the same thing with attainment. The percentage of Scottish secondary schools that publishes their attainment for parents to see so that they can understand how well the school is doing is a small minority. They don't even, in many cases, bother to say, by the way, if you go to parents' own, there's a link there, some of the information. It just isn't there. There are things that we can do now to allow the public debate to happen much more effectively. We could do that this week. I don't think that we will, but we could do that this week. Then there's a harder job of trying to plan something quickly over the year or two to pick up the pieces of what should be an excellent initiative and actually turn it into something that does the job that we're supposed to do. I just want to pick up briefly on Johann Lamont's point with regard to equity, which I think is really important. Jim Scott, you spoke about children not being given a chance. I do think that we need to reflect upon what came before curriculum flexible and what happened before the present day. In a school that I taught in Edinburgh until 2014, the policy there up until about 2012 was that, in the preliminary examinations that would happen before the final exam, unless a pupil obtained 33 per cent, they could not go forward and set a higher qualification, for example. We used to discount a huge number of pupils, I have to say. There was a large number of pupils who were just moved to the side and it wasn't fair. They didn't have a chance to succeed and the school changed their policy, Edinburgh Council changed the policy to focus on poverty and give the kids a chance. Do you recognise that? Do you think that we've moved away from that or do you think that the system is enshrining inequality? I don't recognise some of what is being discussed this morning. I think that our schools are working really hard to give all pupils an opportunity to succeed in a way that, actually, 10, 20 years ago, they just didn't do. Bizarre, Jenny. I think that you and I are actually saying exactly the same thing in different ways. I don't think that anyone disputes that all schools are working their socks off and trying very hard to do the job, but you need to look at the advice that they've been given, the supportive framework or not that they've been provided with and the ways in which headteachers have then taken that forward either individually or as a group within the local authority and with their colleagues in the school and with their community. Try going and reading the parent council minutes of every parent council in Scotland and seeing how many of them have been involved in consultation about the curriculum. I'm not going to state that here because I haven't published it yet and I'm still adding it up. It's not high number. I recognise what you're saying about schools discounting children, but I've already said to you this morning that that process is still happening. Children in six columns are ending up doing five or four or less. If you average at 4.7 and you start with six, obviously some of them are doing two or three. We are still doing that process of discounting children from what they set out to do. I shouldn't be asking this of a teacher, but I will anyway. Where is the skill of the teacher and the people who support the teacher in the upper echelons of the school? Where is the skill of making sure that the child who starts on the journey actually ends the journey successfully? That's the learning and teaching part of the process. Whatever the structure that that operates in, there has to be good learning and teaching. Part of what we all seem to be getting from people is that they're not certain, they're unsure. I quoted very deliberately the Glasgow City Council handbook to support CFE that Maureen MacKennag had produced because it's one of the highest quality ones in Scotland. In many authorities, there is no such handbook at all. There is no advice from the authority for the schools. I cannot find that in most of Scotland's authorities, so schools are operating in a complex environment in which the natural supports one would turn to, HMI for long-term advice on how things are going, it's not there. One would turn to the local authority for policy training and support, it may or may not be there. One would turn to a consortium arrangement of schools to work together. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't. You would recognise all those things from your previous experience. We have a situation where this should be a world-class initiative. It has the potential to be a world-class initiative. What the First Committee started with in terms of the four capacities and a view of education, I've debated with a few people in this room and I don't think any of us disagreed other than to say that this is a good idea, but the implementation process has gone in various directions and somewhere a lot of the teachers and head teachers and local authorities have been left behind. I very carefully evaluate a couple of Scottish local authorities professionally because my role was their chief external evaluator. I can't talk about those authorities because that's commissioned work, but I can tell you that within those authorities, if I speak to head teachers, deputy head teachers or teachers, there will not be a homogeneous understanding of CFE in any of the authorities that I deal with. There will not be a homogeneous view of how certain groups of young people can be supported effectively. That really shouldn't be happening because if I went back to the higher-stall training process, Mrs Piri may have shipped out furniture, van loads of CDs to everyone, and we may all have complained about that, but at least we had supportive materials to work with. This time, we're working in what is our best apparsial vacuum. Yes, it's just falling on from that. I'm just wondering where you think the guidance and support should come from. Is there a bigger role for education in Scotland, the SQA or the Scottish Government? I hear what you said, Dr Britton, about not mandating, but should there be a mandate to schools to say that five is too low? If some schools can do seven and eight, coming from a non-educational background, I can't understand why the rest of the schools can't do that. Where does that come from? An interesting illustration of the question of mandating comes in the document that I think, while you referred to earlier on, Education Scotland's guidance on progression from the broad general education to the senior phase. The point is that the language of this as a document is guidance, first of all, and throughout you see the word should. Sorry, just to start with, what document is that? I mean, I can make it available to the official report afterwards. It's just who's saying it. It's from Education Scotland, and it's guidance for schools, local authorities and their partners. However, the point that I was making is that it's in the language of this, and it's throughout the word is should. It can't be must because of the nature of Scottish education and how governance is distributed. However, I think that what you can do is provide a more coherent approach to informing the profession. I think that Jim is absolutely right, and we've spoken about this before, that there was a failure to clearly communicate from the outset of the review group report in 2004, and it has coincided that it's been that perfect storm of losing the local authority capacity to provide the policy translation effect, which was there previously around things like higher still and standard grade 5 to 14, where you had that middle cadre of people in the system who were able to take high level guidance and interpret and provide schools with ways to implement them that were consistent, and therefore you had, it was a cascade model to some extent, but it also operated in both directions, so policy could be cascaded from above, but equally, information from the ground up was being fed up into the system. I think that that middle layer has largely gone, the OECD highlighted that in their report as well. One of the possible ways forward is through the regional improvement collaboratives. I think that that's at least in an attempt to re-establish a layer that's sustainable in the current climate to provide a regionalised support for policy implementation and helping headteachers to find their way around this. Professor Scott? It's easy to kick education in Scotland. It's not difficult. It provides several opportunities, and I hate to say that. However, they have a key and important role, and that key and important role is to be the focus of it. They ought to be the marketplace of Scottish education. The training, the development work should all come together there to some extent, not suggesting that they should run it all, but they don't seem to have fulfilled that function for the past several years. There was a, like Joanne, I have to be careful of goldnevers in the past. There weren't in LTS, it has to be said, so ES is not necessarily a worse product than the one before. However, realistically speaking, under learning and teaching Scotland, they had a number of very useful things. They had Eddie Broadley, who was by anybody's standard a curriculum expert, who could stand on a platform and convey it. Eddie and I ran round Scotland for a couple of years trying to help people to understand what CFA was about. They had ICT people who were of high equality. They had a number of other people who, if supported appropriately and brought to the fore, were capable of doing the job that we have required to be done right now. They also had, in Ken Muir, who was chief inspector curriculum at that time, someone who understood root and branch Scottish education and was able to work with other people and facilitate it. All of these people have moved on without defaming their successors in any way. It used to be the case that the inspectorate in particular had a conveyor belt of people who rose up through the system. The lesser ones have fled to the sides like the chaff and strong people came to the top. There has been something of a discontinuity in the inspectorate in recent years, and we have not necessarily seen that continuity of expertise and ability. I hesitate to say that of an agency that has done immensely good things for Scottish education, but we seem to have blubbed the edges a little bit. The short answer to your question is that the curricular side of education Scotland, which is now being re-strengthened belatedly, went through a very difficult period for a while, and the inspectorate side probably needs to come together with local authorities who need to start to put together the expertise that my colleagues have talked about disappearing in recent years. If we can build that, we should be in a position where we can take those forward. However, what cannot be done is that it cannot be done by three civil servants in an office down the road in Victoria-Key. It has to be done in a much more systematic way. Can you start off by asking the panel what is your understanding of the link between deprivation SIMD status and the number of hires offered on average in a Scottish secondary school? Mr Greer, I do not really know in terms of the higher offering, but research clearly shows that the schools that I attended offer fewer courses at S4 tend to be in more deprived areas. I would leave me to believe that that would roll on to higher provision as well, although I do not have the data for that. I am referring to the reform Scotland report that came out yesterday. You could extrapolate from that, in relation to—I am looking at particular local authorities here—Eastern Bartonshire, for example, all appear to offer eight. You might be able to extrapolate further from that into the context at higher, but I do not have the data. Again, it is an example of where we need that information as a system. Everyone needs it. I could probably tell you school by school, but I cannot do an instant add-on. If you want to ask me at the end what that actually comes to, I am happy to do that. Obviously, it is the case that those who offer seven or eight are often areas with slightly more advantaged pupils, and that leads them to keep higher numbers, of course, because they think that they can get through. That tends to mean that they have higher numbers doing five hires. However, that is the demography of the situation, not the curriculum structure. To move slightly from the number of hires that people can take at the one time to the number that they are offered, the Times did a bit of work on this around about 18 months ago and found their understanding is that schools in the most deprived communities in Scotland will offer, on average, a choice between 17 different higher subjects. Schools in the least deprived communities will offer, on average, something like 23 hires for pupils to choose from. Does that correspond to your understanding of differences between deprived and less deprived communities and the numbers that are offered? There is a chunk in my overly long report, which I wrote quite clearly to demonstrate that. If you are asking, is it the case that those who have more upmarket communities offer a wider choice of hires, then the answer is almost certainly yes? That is reassuring to know, but it is reassuring to say that, Professor Scott, because when we had Education Scotland a couple of weeks ago, I posed exactly that question to them and asked whether Education Scotland would accept that if I were a pupil in one of Scotland's most deprived communities, I would be offered a choice between roughly 17 hires. If I was in least deprived communities, I would be offered roughly 23 hires. Does Education Scotland accept that that is the case? The response was, no, we do not accept that. The wider response, the longer exchange can be seen in the official report, obviously. What is your reaction to the fact that Education Scotland does not accept that there is a link between deprivation and the breadth of subjects that are offered to pupils in our schools? Do not think that it is my role as an academic to make comments about the leadership of Education Scotland in all honesty. I have to say that I listened with great interest to a number of things they said in all honesty and found myself wondering if I lived in the same educational world. Beyond that, I really, really should not comment. It is their job to answer for what they have said and whether or not that was accurate. All I can say is that I did not recognise their answer as a situation pertaining. I am going to make a similar point to what Professor Scott said. The data that you referred to is based on research and work undertaken by the times higher. If Education Scotland is simply saying that there is no link but not substantiating that, it might be an area in which the committee might want to follow up with them and see whether they have data that shows a different answer. However, other than that, I am not in possession of data on that issue. I have one final brief question. Education Scotland referenced their understanding and their belief that that was not the case based on the attainment challenge reports that they have. My understanding of the attainment challenge reports is that they would not back up Education Scotland's conclusion. If you take a broad overview of the attainment challenge reports that we have so far, you are not led to the conclusion that schools in the least deprived communities have just as much on offer as those in the least deprived communities have just as much on offer as those in the least deprived communities. Part of the analysis of the nine sac authorities, I suppose, is mine. Obviously, they have carried it out to different standards. Two of them have been declared to be excellent, two of them have been declared to be whatever the current word for mediocre is, and the remainder have been somewhere in between. Those who have done this job particularly well appear to have genuinely affected equity in a positive manner. They appear to offer coherent sets of choices, but I could take you to schools in some of the bottom-end of the middling set who offer a significant choice and other schools with exactly the same demography who are struggling to offer that same breadth of choice. The trouble is that, when one sits in a committee like this, one makes grand statements about how it is. When you are a headteacher in a relatively run-down school at the back end of a city somewhere—not that these exist in Scotland any more, but nevertheless—that headteacher may be facing a significant budget cut from a local authority. They might have had their entire sac budget taken away by the local authority, but it is not unknown. They may be struggling to find teachers of certain subjects even in the city, and it can be very complex. There isn't one thing that causes that. It is often an accumulation of factors that build things up, and if you happen to be in the unlucky school when sitting there and that is the epicentre of everything going wrong, you are the one who gets the bank situation. It is very complex to give you an answer to that question. I understand whether they are making any difference to the discussion on subject choices across Scotland, given that they are a relatively new part of the landscape in education. My own view is that it is very early days. I think that they are still being established. However, again, this is the opportunity to, to some extent, if you can set the agenda for those regional improvement collaboratives as part of that wider ecosystem of governance. It is important to be clear about what they can do and what they cannot do in the level of support that they provide. I mentioned earlier on that they can help to potentially fill that gap that has been left by the evisceration of support at local authority levels, but they cannot do that on their own either. There has to be that whole systems approach, and there is a danger that that could lead to a further spiral of local authorities to further relinquishing the support function that I think is still a really important part of the system, because that is where the local democratic structures and oversight of education reside in the system as it is constructed. I think that they will be part of the response and perhaps the work of this committee can feed into that as well. You are raising a number of really important issues at the moment. I think that that is the way to move forward collectively. I made the point in my previous evidence to you that none of this is about politicising any of this. I think that it is about making the system work in ways in which there is coherence across the board. I should be asking you questions. I have stupidly read the RIC plans for almost all of the RICs, and that is an edifying experience of itself. Clearly, they are not homogeneous once again, and we are bedevilled in a small country by a lack of homogeneity. I have been to China quite a few times, as Dr Rowland notes, and I do not particularly like the idea that, on Thursday afternoon, you are all doing that. That is not what Scotland is about. At the same time, it is helpful if a parent can have confidence that the experience that their child is going to have is pretty much like the experience that the child over there is going to have, in terms of quality at least. The RIC plans are interestingly different in their intents. I will be interested to see how that works out. I have some knowledge of the inner workings of some of them, but I am not at the stage where I am going to publish anything on this, because I am just learning at the present moment. It looks to me as if some of them are off to a good start and some of them made a much slower start. That may be due to the local factors and the personnel available to them. Alan has nailed the thing down several times. Local authorities have not ended up, necessarily, with strong sets of people to do the sorts of developmental and training jobs that we want them to do. That is a serious problem, and it is an issue in terms of councils just slowly being ground down. I was fortunate to work in the local authority where my director held his budget particularly well, and that meant that we did have development opportunities, but I left seven years ago who knows how things are there now. I think that it is early days to see fruit coming from the RICs. The whole issue of why did we stuff an extra layer of bureaucracy into the educational system. I was co-author of a report that our head teacher's professional association, which shall not be named, wrote the last time that this came up. We recommended that they either went for a regional type system or they kept to councils and strengthened them. We did not come down on one side or the other. We did not imagine that someone would stuff something in the middle. I think that it is going to take them quite a bit of time to maximise the resources that they have to them, and some will be more fortunate in doing that than others. However, we are going to have to wait two or three years to see what they produce. The other question that I was going to ask relates to Professor Scott, the point that you made about the 2015 OECD report and its suggestion—more than a suggestion—that there should be a fundamental review of CFE so that we know where we are. Do other nations provide, in effect, a state of the nation report on how their education system is doing on an annual basis? That strikes me on your point about long-term assessments, but on a five-year cycle or a three-year cycle, is there something that we should learn from that? Do you want to start, or shall I? I could not say whether they do such a thing as a state of the nation report, but where you see systems that implement fundamental change—it is quite interesting to look at the example of Wales, for example, which, to some extent, has followed in the footsteps of Scotland in the nature of the educational reforms that they have undertaken, but with some of the lessons learned from the early implementation phase of curriculum for excellence and the roll-out, it will be interesting to watch how they do it, because they were able to, as I say, learn from some of the mistakes, start with a much stronger baseline, start with a much stronger sense of what success would look like, because that was pretty much absent in the early phase of CFE. It was very aspirational, but there was very little said at the time about what will success look like. I think that it would be interesting to watch how Wales goes, because they have got that stronger starting point, and I would imagine that they have then got a strong point for review further down the line. I think that this has been a recurring theme in Scottish education for quite a long time, going back to the Audit Scotland report on the implementation of Macron, which pointed out that it was almost impossible to evaluate any aspects of effectiveness value for money, because that was never made clear at the outset. There is nothing new in this, nor do we appear to be learning as a system that we have to have a far stronger sense of where we are at just now in order to revisit that further down the line. If you have nothing else to do, chapter 4 of my thesis from 2014 deals with exactly this point. I will read it desertally. I will try not to waste your time and go on about it. We do not have a good record in Scotland. We probably carried out 22 major educational initiatives since the war, and roughly a third of them worked. A third of them did not work, and the rest were a little bitter at work. We tend to abandon things that do not work. It is true of all parties that I can smile at all of you, because all of you at various points in time have just given up on things. We have not really learned a lesson about going back to the initiative that we are dealing with and saying, sugar, this is not working, what can we do about this, how do we make this better? We tend to say, let us have a new initiative, that will sort the problem. Modern languages is a classic example of that, I have to say. There are some countries that have been reasonably systematic in doing this. New Zealand, which appears to have a major cavico initiative every 13 or 14 months, not a good idea, is quite good at publishing stuff. We have been pointed in recent years at Finland because they are quite reflective. I am not actually sure that Finnish system is remotely transferable to Scotland, but it is interesting to look at. There are really quite different systems in much of Western Europe that do not coincide with ours particularly well. The German, Swiss, Austrian and much stronger vocational side tend to make it not a good comparator for us, but it is interesting to read about how they plan that. There is some meat there that is potentially useful. I have given up trying to read about American curricular developments, and I should probably say no more in the parliamentary committee at all. It is not easy to find a simple parallel for Scotland that we can use. I quite like the Welsh one, but I note with interest that they took a whole lot of our people and go to Professor Donaldson down there to do that. Maybe there is a lesson for us in using our own people more wisely. I would add to what my colleagues said. When the OECD's review reported, that was focused on the broad general education phase, because the senior phase was still back in 2014-15, still in its infancy. We have had a number of years of running of the senior phase now, and quite a lot of the comments that have come up around the discussion is how the broad general education knits with the senior phase. Given that that was not covered by the OECD review back in 2015, there is potentially a case for undertaking a review to systematically look at how the broad general education phase does not fit with the senior phase and to look at because curriculum for excellence is meant to be a free-to-18 integrated curriculum, but we have only reviewed up to the age of 15. It might make sense to look at the system and its totality. The points that Jim just made about the need for evaluation and building that in from the start of initiatives, the OECD clearly said that, when they were reviewing curriculum for excellence, that the lack of baseline data meant that it was not possible to undertake a full and proper evaluation just because the baseline data was not there. That is a point that the Ross had of Edinburgh often makes. Again, it comes back to learning from all the mistakes and ensuring that data collection is working with independent education researchers and that they need to ensure that evaluation is built in from to all education reforms so that we can fully evaluate what impact they have and where improvements can be made. The committee has previously heard—a couple of colleagues have referred to this from Education Scotland—that there is not really a problem here, that there appears to be a narrowing of choice, but what that hides is a wider choice and access to alternative pathways. We have heard from the panel today that, in their view, that is not the case, that that narrowing of traditional subject choice has not been replaced by vocational courses, non-SQA courses and so on. We have also heard from the panel today about a potential reduction in equity, which runs completely contrary to the key objective in educational policy at the moment. We have not really heard a lot about this, but I think that Mr Allan will ask a bit about it. Mr Scott has talked about the future of some subjects in school being in jeopardy because of the current trends. Although you do not believe that to be the case around stem subjects, you do believe that there is potential jeopardy towards the economic prospects of the country. Indeed, the RSE has expressed concerns about a fall in the number of young people choosing stem subjects, not just at national four and five, but at higher. This morning, Professor Scott said that there is a danger of a generation losing out. My question is, how big a problem have we got here? How serious are the issues that we are discussing about what is happening in the curriculum, in the senior phase in our schools and the trends that are there? Education Scotland told us that there was not a problem really in their evidence. How serious a problem does the panel think we have? You want me to go faster, okay? I quite like to hide behind my colleagues. Can we talk to the minister today? 64,000-dollar question, is not it? It is very difficult to ask a national agency that has a parliament and a government sitting over the top of it if it is not doing a very good job. I have already declined to comment on the leadership of it and I will continue to decline in that way because people have to be given a chance to do the job. Has it fulfilled the role that you know I had something to do with it at one point in time? I worked with it rather than for it. Has it done the job that one would have hoped it would have done in supporting the development of CFE? I do not think so, certainly not to the extent one would have wished. Is it telling us the truth currently about what is going on? Well, obviously, one assumes that they believe that is the truth because surely no professional person would turn up here and say other than what they believe to be the truth. We are really dealing with elements of perception here. Sometimes when you are in a pressured situation and you are leading an initiative and things are falling at you from all places, it is quite difficult to see the wood for the trees. It may be that that is exactly what they believe to be the case, but we are not the only three people in Scotland sitting saying that there is a problem here. One hears that from parents. If I walk out of my front door and walk along the road in Dunblane, I bump into people whom I know, some of whom are ex-colleagues of mine, some of whom are just people I know. Because I am an educationalist and I am occasionally in the papers these days, there is a conversation quite often. They raise issues. My colleagues with whom I work in university and with whom I work in schools, because I still go there quite a lot, raise these issues as well. I have just finished interviewing an entire set of head teachers and deputy head teachers and teachers in one Scottish local authority, and they were significantly clear that the situation is not moving forward in a shiny, polished manner. I am forced to say that I do not agree with Education Scotland's analysis and that I believe that I have clear evidence and not just this spreadsheet but lots of them that demonstrates that that is the case. I also believe that some of the things that you have been told by—I remember an IDS rep, who was it? Terry Lannigan, I think, sat here and said that lots of schools in Scotland are doing 666 courses. That was about 31 of them out of 358. You are being told things that they may believe to be true, because someone told them that, but are demonstrably not true when one actually examines the situation. Is that the major problem? Yes, it is, but it means that we have to do what we have all been talking about, which is to open this up for sensible debate, gather the evidence that needs to be gathered to see what the state of the problem is and, from that, build a platform to move forward. It is the only thing that we can do. I think that I could only speak more broadly about the situation and the danger is that testimony like this can be translated into headlines around crisis in Scottish education. We need to be very careful with that. For example, I do not think that there is a crisis in learning and teaching in Scotland's classrooms. The quality of the teaching profession has never been higher. There is some incredible work going on in schools at all levels. I would not say that there is a crisis in the system, but I think that there are problems with the system that I alluded to earlier. The issue of the narrowing of curriculum choice is more of a manifestation of wider issues. It is an issue in itself, but it is a manifestation of wider issues. I keep coming back to that. I think that we have not yet resolved. I know that there was a review of governance, but I think that that was pretty inconclusive. We have to have an open conversation about ownership, responsibility, accountability and autonomy in the system. Those are all competing modes of how we do education in Scotland that have been floating around for quite a while and no one has yet resolved them. To what my colleagues said, apart from the need to have a common set of data, we can also work from the same page. It is possible that having that data independently produced would be quite helpful. I want to mention outcomes to you in terms of notwithstanding everything that we have discussed today and the clear issues that are with equity. Last year, there was a record number of pupils who went on to university and positive destinations in apprenticeships, etc. I wonder how that squares up with what we have been discussing and all the work that is going into trying to resolve matters. Should the outcomes outweil all that? I think that you are absolutely right to point those out, because in the end that is what benefits a child in the future. I always used to try and advise young people to build themselves a range of qualifications and experiences and attributes that would serve them well, not just in the job that they thought they were going into straight away or after college or after university, but in the next one and the next one because that is the society that we live in these days. That requires a balance of things. It does not just require that you have a lot of vocational experience because employers are employers, sadly, and we all still want to see the set of qualifications on a piece of paper. We need to build both sides of that. It is why I brought up in response to Mr Scott's question, it is why I brought up the German, Swiss and Austrian system because they have a far more effective way of balancing the academic and the vocational. I am not saying that I like all parts of it, but it does work. The university improvement is a good thing. There is no doubt about that. That goes with the fact that the level 5 children are doing better in many cases from CFE. That is one half of the equity issue because they are doing better. There is no doubt about it. I have given several reasons for why that might be the case in so of my colleagues. At the bottom end, however, it is not like that. I take the point about the apprenticeships and college entrance was the other thing. I know that this is the time to do the piece on my evidence on Saturday. The Governmental response was exactly that, but the Governmental response has shifted. The original Governmental response to the first year of data on performance that I put out was about the overall set of qualifications. That was a blip, and it would sort itself out. Then it fell back to one needs to look at the totality of the child's education and one needs to look at lever attainment. Sadly, I cut the feet out from under the lever attainment, which starts quite effectively fairly recently. Now we are talking about something else. That is really my problem with what is going on here because the ground shifts all the time. There is something in here about mission creep. Mission creep operates in a number of contexts in CFE. The goals of CFE have changed, the ways in which we measure CFE have changed, the structures that we put in place to support it and evaluate it have changed. There is not a yardstake that we can lay across it and say that things are getting better. It is really quite difficult to do that. That is why I keep coming back in the end to put all the evidence on the table. If we put all the evidence on the table, I could, from this, pull out 100 schools from which I have the 5 at 3, 5 at 4 and 5 at 5 figures, and they are fascinatingly stark reading. I cannot do it because it is not published, and I have to be quite careful how I handle that. Some of them have just gone along as they were before, pretty much. A few of them are actually significantly better than more than one aspect, not just the best, but some others. Some others have absolutely gone down the hill, either at the bottom end or at the top end or both. So there is not a standard school of response to CFE, and that is really the problem that we are all grappling with to some extent, because there are so many variables in the way from the system that was designed. If you read the CFE documentation from a curriculum for excellence through progress and proposals, BTC3 and so on, none of the structures that we have been grappling with today are actually in these documents at all. They are not there. Time allocations are not there. Numbers of columns in various year groups are not there. Other arrangements, other vocational qualifications, none of it is there. We actually never set out what we wanted to do. We had some cosy and fuzzy ideas that we wanted to make better people who were most successful in four contexts. That is brilliant, but we did not then support that with the necessary stuff. We need to put the sort of positive stats that you are talking about that show some things are working. I am amazed that no one has come up with tariff points. I was going to raise tariff points and decided that I would not bother. No, there is no parent, that is why I decided not to do it. One of the things that quite a lot of Scottish local authorities do to prove that they are doing better is quote the tariff points from Insight. Every course that a child passes gets a number of points depending on the SCQF level that it is at. There are various ways of homologating tariff points—you really did not want me to start this, did you? There are various ways of homologating tariff points that allow a local authority to see how well it is doing. It flows out of my head just now because I have just analysed the nine SAC authorities, and I know quite well that some of them will claim that they are doing quite well on tariff points. However, I would then set their tariff points against their five at three, five at four, five at five. They will leave our statistics and demonstrations of other educational experiences that children have had, and that is neither to the sorts of things that Jenny was trying to get me to talk about in the first place, to look at the width of Scottish education. If we can get all that data together, we can actually see how well we are doing. I bring you back to the last comment, Higgyos 4. How are we doing? How do we know? The data is there. Any local authority that says that it cannot tell you that it is five at three, five at four or five at five figures is not telling the truth. They are in Insight. A head teacher should be able to do that and send it straight to headquarters, and they should have their own version anyway. We should be able to get that data that allows us to see what the balance between the good points and the bad points is across Scottish schools. The main point that I will return to is the one that I made earlier, in terms of research showing that schools in the more disadvantaged areas tend to be the ones who do fewer subjects, but the research also shows that those choices that they have and make in S4 have major implications for what they do in S5, S6 and beyond schools. There is a major equity issue there. If they are somewhat constrained in the school system, they cannot get that back. It has quite major implications for what they do in the senior years of school but also beyond the school system, in terms of the destinations after school. The main point that I will make is the equity issue. That sort of goes back to my earlier point. Should there be a mandate for a minimum of five that is not acceptable, so that that might help the equity problem? Yes, there is a complex issue that we mentioned on the panel about the need for meeting the needs of learners themselves. We do not want to be bandating something that some of them might not be able to attain. We are trying to get that balance right, but I think that constraining to a set number of subjects is an issue, particularly when other schools offer more. I would be keen to look at what research tells us in terms of what different curriculum structures and pathways tell us in terms of attainment for learners. We are looking at two-year qualifications rather than just over one year. We are looking at opening up the pathways a bit more. The point about mandates is to reiterate that the kind of thing that would require legislation, if I understand the system correctly, and the similar scenario related to class size, minimum class size, could not be implemented as policy in Scottish education. It required legislation. That would be another example where it is conceivable that you could legislate for a minimum number, and you could roll in a number of other elements to that. Is that how you wish Scottish education to be governed? As Jenny Gilruth and others have referred to this, we have been concentrating a lot on fourth year, and what happens in fourth year on the national debate has been concentrating on that. In fact, it is important what qualifications people leave at the end of the time in school with overall. However, there is no getting away from the fact that in fourth year there are some subjects that have gone down particularly. I am going to concentrate on languages that have gone down the number of people studying them and fourth year has gone down by 18 per cent in four years, but I could equally have picked technology subjects that have also gone down by 18 per cent. I suppose that the system is premised on the idea that people will be taking in fifth year those subjects that they are not taking in fourth year. I suppose that probably what many of us on the committee would be looking for is a clear picture of what is going on. I am tempted to quote Sue Moore off-steg. I can never do that, so your galax is much better than mine. You are right. They were very concerned about the concept and their evidence, if I read it correctly, that there would be some sort of gap in the learning process, because we know that in languages, if you do not have that continuous flow of study, it greatly impedes your ability to build up expertise. The idea that you just will leave it alone for fourth year and come back to it is death to most languages. It is grace to even propose it. Obviously, French and German are the greatest losers, although Gaelic Llearners is pretty much in the same ballpark, worryingly. They have developed 60 per cent, virtually 50 to 60 per cent, depending on the subject since 2013. That is unbelievable. That really is quite a serious issue. Given that we may all be hurled wool ends, no ends, into the more of Brexit, we really need people who can go into the world and speak for us. It is not a matter of, that would be a nice idea, it is an essential. The idea that we have allowed modern languages as another unintended consequence of CFA to just fizzle away. Apart from Spanish, those of you who have a long history in education will know that the 1947 report from the advisory council on education in Scotland recommended that children of lesser ability, their words not mine, should be made to learn Spanish because it was easy, and those were the exact words. I have to say that there is some truth in that, because Spanish is holding up, but against that I place the hideously difficult Chinese, which, despite the tones and all the rest, is also holding up. It is not just easiness, it is the factor. The real truth, however, is that, if you do six qualifications, necessarily you do English and maths, you then do either two socials in the science, or two sciences in the social, or God help us to these sciences, that will be your one column. I am sorry, that is not a curriculum. That might be an English manifestation of a curriculum at the upper stages, but that is not a Scottish curriculum, it is not even a remotely one. We have a real problem there, because we have lost the mechanism for breadth in the middle of the schooling process in secondary. The Scottish Association of Geography teachers is a bit revisionist in suggesting that we go back to 222, but it is an interesting thought, because that would actually cure quite a lot of those problems. Not at the stroke, because we would have to do a lot of work to sort out the mess that has been made. I do not actually know how we simply revive the subjects that are dying, but my own personal subject, or one of my two personal subjects, computing, is in pretty much the same ballpark. I listened with, if I choose my words carefully, abject horror to a representative of Education Scotland in early April, suggesting that if you could not get a computing teacher, you should take them all down to a local company that drives drones around the place and they could have a really meaningful experience. Hell yeah, it is a really meaningful experience, but it is not an education. I am quite worried about that, because if we start to lose, I was a teacher of information superhighway. It is quite a heat of technology. Computing was going to solve all problems. I work in a university where there are several of us like that. We all are sitting looking at this and thinking that we have to be joking. We have spent tens of millions of pounds on this. We are allowing our international lead in gaming technology and all sorts of things to just do it the way. We have five problems probably. We have a modern languages problem. We have an ICT problem. We have a STEM problem, because the drop that should have been caused by the structural changes in Scottish education—despite the key of not getting answers for a lot of my note—I know how many people are doing six columns. Roughly half of Scotland schools are doing six columns. We have a problem there in terms of STEM subjects, because STEM subjects suffer, whether you like it or not, in a six column environment. Instead of a 16, 17 per cent drop that we should have had in STEM subjects, we have about a 25 to 27 per cent drop. There are problems in the arts and the technologies, as several of us have said this morning, because they are all competing with each other for part of that last space. It is extremely difficult to give them all the curricular bandwidth unless you hype it up to seven or eight. I am not proposing that we go back to eight. I am not sure how many children have used their eighth qualification, but we need to do something to stop the narrowing from happening. I am not sure that there is too much. I can say that Professor Scott stole my funder in terms of the reduction in the sciences, but at one point, the awareness societies group had highlighted that, because we focused on 2013 and 2018, the committee call focused on the data over that five-year period. Although the number of higher entries across all subjects increased between 2013 and 2018, the number of STEM entries proportionally declined relative to a subject. There might have been some other subjects clearly increasing, but given the framework that Professor Scott set out in terms of the narrowing down to six columns, the sciences are, in some respects, probably competing with one another. They have certainly suffered both at the national qualification level and at the high level. Just to add that it has become a very technical discussion, and I think that the technical dimensions to this are very important. However, if we are reaching a point where there is an appetite to review where we have got to, it would be important to revisit the why questions about what constitutes curriculum, what are the purposes of education and if we arrive at the conclusion that education ought to be broad, that it ought to encompass space for people to have artistic expressive arts experiences alongside science and English and maths, then, as a system, we have to invest in that. The evidence that the committee's own review has shown here is that the message from teachers is that there are all kinds of barriers, but the bottom line is availability of teachers' resources at the most local level. That is what was coming across from them. I made the point last time that the national debate in 2002 was, in many respects, less interesting than your predecessor committee's report on the purposes of the curriculum. That is the thing that we might choose to hook any review on, is what is the purpose of curriculum, because, to some extent, we started with that, but then it has been diluted and has become a very technical response school by school, local authority by local authority, whereas, in fact, it might be time to look back at why are we educating, why do we value certain subjects more than others, and then follow the conclusions that might arise from that. Sorry, can I sneak in a tiny little bit that I should have said? Whoever said that the three-year BGE was a good idea? Where did that come from? I think that I know the answer, but again, I cannot say it in the public forum, because if I read the documentation that quite a few people round us remember had something to do with or signed or whatever, realistically speaking, at no point in time do we justify the three-year BGE. I am sure that it was somebody's good idea, but it was never carried through in a process of consultation or analysis in any way. The unwise timetabling decisions that followed from the three-year BGE led to the six-course and five-course God help us difficulties, and all that comes back to that. Before we launched CFE, HMI was telling us that we wasted the first three years anyway. They said that we did not do it well, that we were not focused, that we were not organised, so we blew it up by 50 per cent and made it a three-year period like that. That caused the compression at the back end, and that caused the very subject difficulties that we are talking about. If we are going to review it, is that not the starting point? Thank you very much for your attendance and your submissions to the committee. They have been very helpful. I will suspend for five minutes until 11.51. I remind members that we will be coming back into public session. The second item of business is consideration of responses to the music, tuition and schools report. Responses have been received from the Scottish Government and COSLA and in paper 4 of today's committee papers. Members will be aware that the committee is holding a debate on the report of the chamber next Tuesday afternoon, which will be a further opportunity to discuss those responses. Are there any comments on the responses from the Scottish Government and COSLA? Is everybody content to have the debate next week? Look at the report then. That is great. Thank you very much. Agenda item 3 is subordinate legislation. It is consideration of teachers' superannuation and pension schemes Scotland miscellaneous amendments, amendment regulations 2019, SSI 2019-95. There is a negative instrument, which remains another negative instrument, considered by the committee before Easter recess. Do the members have any comments on that instrument? Thank you very much. That concludes the public session for this week. The next session of our inquiry will be on 1 May. I will now suspend as we move into private session.