 Ond byt chael Buy one to the 13th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee. Can I please remind everyone present Enjoy, turn their mobile phones on other devices and on to silence for the duration of the meeting. The first item of business is the decision on whether a review of the evidence we received from the Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Jobs and Fair Work on the Enterprise and Skill Review next week will be in private. Are members agreed? Thank you. The next item面 agenda is to consider the Scottish Minister's annual plan planning period Scotland regulations 2016. The SSI is subject to the negative procedure and will come into force unless Parliament agrees to a motion to annull it. No motion to annull has been lodged. Do members have any comments? The second item of business is the last of the committee's pre-budget scrutiny. Earlier this month, we have heard from Skills Development Scotland, the Scottish Funding Council and the Scottish Qualifications Authority. This week, we have Education Scotland, and I welcome to the meeting Dr Bill Maxwell, the chief executive, Alasdair Delaney, chief operating officer and Graham Logan, strategic director at Education Scotland. Before we start, I would like to put on record the committee's thanks for Education Scotland for meeting with Tavie Scott and Gillian Martin last week, and I understand Dr Maxwell wishes to make a short opening statement. Great. Thank you, convener. Can I start by saying that we welcome very much this opportunity to discuss our work with the committee? The Scotland's core purpose is ultimately very simple, improving the quality of educational outcomes for Scottish learners. Everything that we do is designed to drive improvement in education. As members will be aware, when we were created, the explicit aim was to create a body that could add value through creating closer synergies between how knowledge and expertise gained from evaluation activities feeds through into guidance, development and innovation, and vice versa. The intention was also to create an organisation that could deliberately flex and rebalance the way that it deploys its resources and its methods of working across the full range of improvement expertise and activities that now lie within our grasp to provide the right balance of support and challenge required for any particular stage in the national programme of education reform. At the point that we came into being, there were a number of major strands of reform being developed and implemented across the whole education system. Of course, the most prominent among those, and I'm sure we'll end up talking a lot about this, has been curriculum for excellence. I should point out that there have also been major changes driven forward in a range of other areas, each of which have involved a role for Education Scotland in supporting their implementation to some extent. That includes getting it right for every child, the additional support for learning act and the expansion of early years provision. It includes a reform of teacher education and CPD from teacher teaching Scotland's future. It includes developing Scotland's young workforce, structural reform of the college sector, career services and modern apprenticeships, and the development of new strategies for youth work and adult learning and community empowerment. All of that together, taken in the context of inevitably tight constraints on public resources, has meant that it has been appropriate for Education Scotland to set the balance of our activity quite strongly towards development guidance and support functions over the first few years of our existence to ensure that we played our part in supporting those major change programmes through periods of major transitional change. That approach reflected ministers' priorities and has had strong external endorsement. The positive comments, for example, from last year's OECD report on Scottish education about Education Scotland being the linchpin organisation in CFE reform programme reflects the effectiveness of which we have adapted our functions to play our role. However, we are now moving into a new phase in the development of Scottish education. Again, the OECD has a widely quoted phrase of this being a watershed moment in the implementation of CFE. The report was very clear in saying that we are on the right track with the direction of Scottish education reform. The challenge that it has now put to Scottish education system is to move forward boldly to realise the full potential of all the reforms and changes in which we have invested collectively over the last decade or so. As we do so, to become more focused and more specific about the improvements that we need to make. With that shift in the educational reform journey in mind, the balance of Education Scotland's work is now changing. The need for the agency to prioritise the development of generic curriculum-wide guidance and support to help the implementation of new structures is lessening, and some more targeted work will still be important in certain priority areas of the curriculum, such as STEM, for example. However, as that demand for generic curriculum development lessens, the need for evaluation work and for work that drives forward targeted improvement initiatives is increasing, as does the need for the active dissemination and spread of what we are learning about the impact of new approaches that are being developed and implemented in schools across the country. As part of the response to that changing demand, we intend to build up our commitment to evaluation activities, such as our inspection and review programmes, to help to ensure that we can provide a strong flow of evidence about what works and spread that across the system. In addition, we have also shifted the balance of our activities to ensure that we play an effective role in providing strong professional leadership for the new, more focused drive for improvement in the key priority areas that the new national improvement framework so clearly sets out. We played a key role in supporting the development of the NIF, working with policy colleagues, and we have a substantial programme of work under way to support the implementation of the national improvement framework in a whole variety of ways going forward. In what is certainly the largest rebalancing of our resources over the last year, we have also established a major new programme of work to provide national professional leadership for one of the NIF's most prominent national priorities, that of closing the poverty-related attainment gap. We have worked in very close partnership with policy colleagues to help design and develop the Scottish attainment challenge throughout 2016. We have built and developed a team of 32 attainment advisers supported by other educational specialists, and we are playing a lead role in brokering collaboration across the country to ensure that the programme thrives. I would like to close my comments with an example of how the agency has flexed our resource to address some pressing shorter-term issues that required us to deploy both our evaluation and our guidance functions in synchrony. This is a work focused on the need to simplify, streamline and refocus aspects of CFE implementation, where a complexity and lack of clarity had grown through the years of development and roll-out. Through the delivery plan and indeed in some cases prior to that, Education Scotland committed to undertaking a range of actions to achieve the streamlining. We are taking action ourselves to dramatically reduce the amount of guidance, material and content on our websites, providing a more easily accessible and integrated offer for schools. In May, we developed and delivered a clear statement of advice to every secondary headteacher on planning for transition from the broad general education to the senior phase, responding in part to some apparent confusions and poor practice that we were seeing emerging in schools. We developed and published a well-received set of assessment benchmarks for literacy and numeracy in August. Shortly thereafter, I also launched a concise statement setting out in one place the definitive package of CFE support, at what teachers need to know to deliver CFE effectively. On the evaluation side, we undertook a review of how the 32 local authorities had been, to what extent they had been successful in tackling bureaucracy at their own part. I will close on that next year. We are developing our corporate plan. We will be looking to engage very widely with stakeholders and, of course, taking account of whatever may come out of the governance review as we do so. In the meantime, I look forward to a discussion with the committee. I have a couple of questions before I open up to my colleagues. One of them is both the SQA and Scotland's education. What working relationship, what close communication do you have because it would seem to me sensible that the two of you work very closely together? Yes, thanks, convener. We have very close relationships at every level, and it is particularly about the development of the new qualifications. Our staff meet regularly with them and, of course, I meet regularly with Janet. We all sit on a range of the key committees, such as the curriculum for excellence management board and the assessment national qualifications working group, which collectively plan the action that is needed to be taken at any one point. We are particularly planning the support for teachers. There has been a range of joint working conferences where we have convened events. For example, for secondary head teachers that the SQA and ourselves both contribute to in parallel. Very close working relationships exist. You should say that there is no evidence of silos there. There is no evidence of SQA here, education Scotland there. It is almost like an amorphous beast at times. That is a very integrated and collective approach. We are clear about our own responsibilities, for sure, but not silos—absolutely not. We do communicate. I am sure that some of my colleagues might want to come back in on that. One of the things that came across—we met with a group of teachers and one of the things that came across, and from some of the inputs in the survey, is that communication, which was a big issue that we had last week, but communication seems to be an issue. For example, the teachers are talking about the guidance. There have been a lot of positive comments about the guidance and advice that is there, but many people are saying that it is very difficult to locate. Surely there is a communication issue there. Also, when you look at some of the statistics that say that over 60% say that the guidance support will the capacity of education providers to improve their performance continuously, they say no. You would obviously say that you are doing a good job, but if you are doing a good job and there is over 60% of people saying that they don't think that you are doing a good job, there is a communication issue. I take on the point about simply navigating the amount of stuff that has been built up over years. I am old enough to be a veteran of previous curriculum developments, like 5 to 14, and higher still. We have certainly reached a point in the programme where, for good reasons, throughout the development and early implementation of a programme, there has been a demand for a great deal of guidance support exemplification. That now needs to be stripped right back. We are rebuilding our websites to a much sharper—in fact, Graham is involved in that—and maybe I will ask him to chip in a little with some exemplification of exactly how much of a reduction and focusing of that resource it is, but it is quite dramatic. We will be launching a new guidance website for teachers with a much more streamlined and accessible set of resources. We have certainly been working with teachers and others to reduce the amount of online content, so we are about to, in December, launch our new national improvement hub and corporate website, which will represent a 90 per cent of reduction in the amount of case studies and materials. There are around 20,000 pages of examples and case studies that have built up, requested over the years by the management board and others to show different examples of CFA. We are stripping that right back to the absolute core materials as a result of the OECD directive about streamlining and clarifying. That is a dramatic change. We are also exploring new ways to reach all teachers. For example, a definitive statement on curriculum for excellence that Bill described, we have worked with the general teaching council to email that directly to every teacher in Scotland. As a result, that piece of guidance was downloaded more than 50,000 times, so we are looking at new ways of reaching individual teachers with absolute key messages and bringing real clarity to the material that is produced. That is not because clarity is something that does not seem to have been forthcoming, not just in your own organisation, but in others. The National Parents Forum of Scotland refused to participate in that because it said that it could not understand your submission. Obviously, clarity does not mean that you just mean that you pare back. It means that you use language that everybody else can understand, because nobody is more important than the parents of the pupils that we are trying to recruit. I would say that I was disappointed to see the NPFS response on that. We have talked to them since just to have further understand what exactly they were saying. Generally speaking, we work pretty closely with the NPFS and have done over a period of time with a particular focus on developing parent-friendly materials around the implementation of this particular series called the… Nutshells. Nutshells, that is. Get it right. They have taken a whole range of issues in CFE and expressed in clear terms. Actually, they are pretty popular with teachers, too. Nice, clear terms of what is happening around assessment or different aspects of CFE. We also run parent zone, of course, which is a website. I suspect that many folk out there probably realise that we develop it, but we develop that in close partnership with NPFS. Generally speaking, we have a good, strong relationship with them and a good focus on making things accessible for parents. We will take on board the comments that we made in the… Of course we will. We are going to move on to a governance and relationship with ministers, etc. Luds, do you want to come in first? Yes. Dr Maxwell, I wonder if I could start with some issues to do with the inspection process. Could you tell us which other countries in the world have the inspectorate within the same body that is looking at curriculum development and school policy? The international picture of how inspection is organised is extremely wide and varied. In fact, the particular UK tradition of having separate inspectors is something that is relatively thin or not many other countries have inspectors of that sort. I would recognise that it certainly is a relatively new step that we have taken in taking inspection and bringing it together with development to create this new integrated improvement body. It has attracted a lot of interest from other countries around the world, I have to say. There are some agencies that have some similarities with us. In Norway we deal with a lot who also have a body that does both evaluation at least at a system level and development work in another of its arms. It is seen as an interesting and developmental way going forward. I should emphasise that, in the Scottish approach—this is different also from other parts of the UK, in many respects—we are effectively looking at a three-tier, a three-level model of quality assurance. Fundamentally, our strongest emphasis has been over many years now building up capacity for self-evaluation at school level and for schools to be openly reporting back on their own performance to their parents. That is the first level, if you like, of quality assurance, and we have put a huge amount of effort into that. The second level is then at local authority, quality assurance level, where we expect local authorities to be keeping track of the performance of their schools and reporting as they do publicly to their education committees and otherwise. The third level is our own role now, which has evolved increasingly into a role in which we sample provision right down to the classroom level in every local authority across the country on a regular basis. However, the three are interlinked, so quality assurance is not simply about our inspection activity, although it is an important part of it. I go on the specific issue about the inspectorate being part of the body that is looking at curriculum development and school policy. I think that that is the thing that is interesting to the wider public. Lindsay Paterson makes the quote that Education Scotland is responsible for developing the curriculum for excellence and through the inspectorate for evaluating. That risks a conflict of interest. Keir Bloomer says that having development and inspection functions within a single organisation has introduced a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest into the heart of the Government's main educational agency. Do you accept that criticism? No, I do not accept that criticism. Fundamentally, all the functions that we contain within our organisation are about improvement fundamentally. What I think sits underneath that is a bit of a misunderstanding around who develops the curriculum fundamentally, because Education Scotland does not go off on its own and develop and produce policy on the curriculum. Indeed, policy on the curriculum in Scotland is a very collective effort. Fundamentally, the curriculum for excellence management board is the body— Is your responsibility to deliver that? It is our responsibility to help support the translation of policy into effective action at the front line. We work collectively with our partners in the curriculum for excellence management board, for example, in agreeing—consulting the stakeholders—to agree the kind of guidance that they would like. Dr Maxwell, the guidance that comes to teachers might be a collective effort, but the responsibility for that delivery lies with Education Scotland, surely? The responsibility for providing guidance that matches the policy that we have all agreed certainly lies with us. If that guidance needs to change, it is changed. We regularly do change, as we have discussed earlier. We have taken major steps to make that guidance clearer if there are confusions around it. Would you accept, however, that in the job that you do in terms of delivering that with the responsibility that you have just outlined, you are acting as judge and jury to be able to deliver that and also to do the inspectorate job? Why I am interested in what other countries are doing is that there does not seem to me to be very many countries around the world who have a system where the inspectorate is part of the same system, the same body that is developing the curriculum. I would argue that there are huge advantages in having the two better connected, while LTS and HMIE in the past always did work quite closely together in terms of track feed messages back and forth to each other. It has become much more easy now with the integrated agency. To take an example, where we have guidance on technologies, which is probably the first area of digital technologies, particularly computing in areas like that, where the original curriculum guidance produced back in 2009 might have been fine at the time, it is clear in 2016 that it needs updated. We are seeing that from our inspection activity, we are also picking that feedback up from a variety of other areas and we are now able to immediately translate that into action to update those guidelines. We have our development arm, as we speak, consulting around new experiences and outcomes, an update of experiences and outcomes to take account of the fact that we no longer have floppy disks and all the rest of it. That shows exactly the kind of synergies that we can get from picking up evaluation evidence from one part of our organisation, which operates under strict firewalls to ensure that it reports without fear or favour. You are denying that there is any conflict of interest, despite the criticism that comes from education experts and, indeed, for many teachers who have given submissions, you deny that there is any conflict of interest. I think that there are healthy synergies and there is no real conflict of interest that there is in practice, no? I continue this point. I am interested in your role as giving independent advice to ministers. You give independent advice to ministers and say, I do not think that that is wise. The minister said, we are going to do it anyway. It has been developed in schools and the inspector is establishing that there is a shambles that is not working. How can it possibly be that Education Scotland is going to report that something that they have advocated on behalf of ministers, even though they were not favourable, how can they have an honest assessment of what is happening in schools if they are arguing the case for it in the first place? It is absolutely vital. You describe our role very accurately. It is our duty to inform ministers with accurate evidence about whether policy A is in our view the right direction in the first place and B, once it is being implemented, whether it is having the desired effect that was intended from it. Ultimately, it is for ministers and to policy officials to do. I determine whether they follow that advice and to what extent or not. Against that, while that is going on, it is vital that we report accurately what we are seeing on the ground. I have often had this conversation with ministers and I have never had a minister disagree with me that we, as an organisation, would not be much use to them if we were, in a sense, telling them what they wanted to hear but not reflecting accurately what was happening on the ground in terms of the real picture. Hence, inspection, which operates under a strict code of practice to ensure that it reports without fear or favour and is professionally led, gives us that evidence. It is a unique selling point of the agency that we do. We are in schools week in, week out across the whole country and we have that reach in to see what is actually happening at the front line. It is a responsibility on us absolutely to surface that evidence faithfully, inaccurately and feed it back in to ministers but also to the bodies like the correct conference management board and others who are taking collective decisions about what seems to be working and what is not working. Are you providing information rather than being in the education agency? We are providing professional advice, which is based on some of my information. Do many examples of where government policy has changed as a consequence of you realising that, on the ground, government policy is not working? In fact, it is detrimental? There is certainly, if I go back to our May statement, which we put out around the way that borough general education and senior phase were being implemented, that is a clear example of where some issues that we were seeing emerging in schools on the ground resulted in a need for policy to be clarified to schools and some clear guidance given. That is what the May statement contained. The clarification goes to people trying to implement policy rather than those who have developed a policy that is causing problems. The advice was pretty clear that there were certain misunderstandings around the intention of policy that needed to be affected. I would have thought that there needs to be an agency that says to government that this is what is happening on the ground and that we need to change the policy. What you are saying is what happens is that this problem on the ground will change the guidance because they are getting it wrong and they are misunderstood. Are there not any examples of government policy changing? There are examples where there have been changes made as a result of independent inspection evidence. For example, the amount of assessment and the assessment burden that we highlighted several times. Therefore, there was a change to assessment materials and guidance. In the formation of policy, if we think of the national improvement framework, the assessment model that we heavily influenced through our independent evidence and advice that we needed to place standardised assessment in the context of teachers' professional judgment. It is a heavy influence to ensure that the policy was educationally effective and made sense to teachers. I think that there is an on-going relationship where we are providing professional advice to ministers and policy colleagues. We are surfacing evidence from inspection. The statement about curriculum for excellence in August, the definitive statement, pulled together all the evidence that we have seen. We are just about to publish a three-year analysis of inspection trends across different education sectors, making it very clear independently in our view what the strengths are in the different sectors and the challenges and areas for improvement. That evidence is there. It is continually feeding the feedback, not just to ministers and policy colleagues but to the teaching profession. That is a unique selling point of having an improvement agency that can draw on all the functions that we have described. My sense is to get my head round who is responsible for what. Last week, we raised with SQA genuine concerns about equality in education because the end of certification for all and the N4 has been seen as something of not any great value and the narrowing of the curriculum in order to meet the needs of the senior phase. Who is responsible? Who made that decision? For example, that there would be no external assessment of N4s and that there should be a narrowing of the curriculum in the senior phase, which is having consequence in terms of subject choices. Some teachers have highlighted that there is a reduction in, for example, young people are going to stem subjects or whatever it might be. Who made those decisions and who is accountable for them? The SQA made it clear that it is not their role as a delivery agency. Is it education Scotland or is it Government ministers? Fundamentally, those are exactly the sort of decisions that are discussed and agreed in great depth through the curriculum of excellence management board in that case, which is an establishment set out by Government to drive policy making around the curriculum for excellence generally. We all sit on that and feed evidence and views into that. Those are very active points of discussion in the national four one. For example, there clearly are issues around that. The answer is not necessarily, in my view, to introduce an external exam in order to give it credibility. We have a situation in which lots of further education colleges manage internal assessment with great credibility. It is about equal valuing of the courses that young people are doing, which has been evidence of that. As I say, college courses going up to SCQF level 6 can be internally assessed and have credibility. Is it conceivable that the management board for curriculum for excellence will take a view that is contrary to the view of the education agency in Scotland? If you go to that body and say, well, we think X, is there any conceivable circumstance where that board would then say, no, we do not agree with you? Because what you seem to be saying is a collective responsibility. This other group that is not you, they make the decision, not quite sure who they are accountable to. We have a voice in that body. We do not have a veto, no, I would say that. We do not fundamentally... It may be possible that the body charged with responsibility for education in Scotland could be outvoted or ignored through this management board. If you were saying explicitly, you do not think X should happen, it could still happen. Indeed, it could if ministers chose to do that. We do not run the education system, I should add. We are not charged with responsibility in that absolute sense for running the schools or running the education system in Scotland. We are charged with responsibility for implementing what Government policy is on issues like the CFE management board after due discussion negotiation with all stakeholders concerned. Fundamentally, that is the position. Thank you, convener. Tavish, you have got some questions. Thank you, convener. Just on the same theme, who chairs the curriculum for excellence management board? Fiona Robertson, director of learning. When you all collectively agreed that narrowing the choice for science subjects at the senior phase and secondary school would mean that young people could not take three sciences at schools, because that was clearly known and understood. That was an agreed decision, and you all decided that that was the compromise that had to happen. The model of secondary, senior phase and broad general education that worked through was agreed and understood very much. So for kids who want to do three sciences at senior phase, three sciences at senior phase, to continue John Lam's correct question about STEM subjects, which is a commitment of Government and something that we all share, it was known when you discussed that, because I presume that you did discuss that in that management board. The implications for all of you, and therefore for schools and for young pupils, was that pupils would not be able to take three sciences in one sitting, and therefore get into university on that basis. The senior phase by design is a three-year experience, so it's not helpful. Please, I know that. You're telling me things I know. I'm asking a specific question about three sciences in one year. Did you discuss it and the consequences of the decisions that you made collectively, which you've just been telling us as how you do it? That was the consequence of that decision. I think that the choices about the design of the curriculum are taken at local levels. Was that someone else's fault? The curriculum for excellence is a broad national framework. No, that's not good enough. So are you saying that you didn't discuss the implications with the SQA sitting there, Education Scotland chaired by civil servant? You did not discuss the logic of what you were agreeing on choice for pupils at S5 in Scottish schools. We did, in great depth, and I can say that the universities were part of that as well, and therefore universities signed up to the kind of qualifications and the patterns that would emerge from the three-year senior phase. I'm not saying that the demands for different patterns of qualifications for entry to university were discussed in great depth. For example, whether students needing to get into medicine in Glasgow or Edinburgh how the universities would react and respond and adapt their selection procedures so that the pupils would certainly not be disadvantaged and would indeed get the qualifications and the appropriate level of training that they needed prior to going into university. As far as we are very clear that, in fact, the current output from CFE, the number of passes and hires has been increasing. Over the last couple of years, the highest figures that we've had in many years, more kids getting into university. Specific patterns, I would say, and they'll probably never have been possible to do three sciences in most schools. You've moved away from that. On Liz Smith's point, please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that when the changes to unit assessments were published in September, the announcement of that was made by Dr Maxwell in your capacity as chief inspector. The piece of paper that I've seen, which went to all schools, has that announced as you as chief inspector. Could you explain why, as opposed to chief executive of education Scotland? Sorry, it's a question about why the unit assessment was announced or about the job title. My job fundamentally is having three dimensions, to be honest. One is chief executive of the corporate body of education Scotland. It certainly subsumes the role that I previously held as head of the chief inspector, which heads up the inspection function with all the firewalls around it. Indeed, there is also a role that is very much around being the chief advisor, if you look at it that way, to ministers on professional education on matters. To continue my colleagues' points, what you issued to schools about assessments was issued under the title of chief inspector. Therefore, we're going to take that as a statement of absolute writ. If it comes from the chief inspector, that is a statement of absolute writ. You better follow it or else. It's a statement of advice and it's clearer than it is. Do you not understand the point that we're all making about this clear conflict that that is? Clearly not. Okay, I give up. Can I just get some clarification here? There seems to be a point where Tavish was saying that you can't do three sciences. Is that in national position, Graham Logan? Mr Logan, you said that it's down to local authorities. Over the course that the whole purpose was to create a three-year experience so that young people could do more qualifications, more achievements than ever before. However, the decisions on how many subjects, on how to design and organise a curriculum is a local decision within a broad national framework. That is the premise of curriculum for excellence. Within the broad national framework, does that exclude doing three sciences in the one year? Not necessarily. I mean, we can look into the detail of that. I'm going to double-check that specific point and we can come back to you. Over the course of the three years, it's designed as a three-year experience, so looking at one year in isolation is not helpful. It undermines the purpose of—and there's more young people staying on at school beyond S4 than ever before. That was part of the design of curriculum for excellence, but we can clarify the position on science for the committee. I appreciate if you can come back to us with some clarification on that. Thank you very much. In their submission to the committee, the EIS raised concerns over what they called the increasingly politicised role of education in Scotland. They stated that the EIS continues to have concerns also over the increasingly politicised role of education in Scotland within Scottish education. That question remains about the independence of the inspection process and that education Scotland has been reticent to challenge the misconceptions and or politically motivated approaches of civil servants and ministers. Are there sufficient safeguards in place to protect against undue political influence on education in Scotland? Yes, thanks. I'm comfortable. I note that comment from the trade union, but I would be confident and assure you that there are appropriate safeguards very much in place around education in Scotland. Of course, education in Scotland is a relationship to government, where an executive agency of government is exactly the same as HMIE was in prior to the merger. The same arrangements apply framework documents in the public domain, which sets out how the relationship works. If folk are interested to explore that, again, they are pretty much identical to what was there for HMIE. Alasdair could explain a little more, I think, about the code of practice and the firewalls that exist. Inspectors in Scotland are appointed HM inspectors, so they are approved through the privy council. That therefore carries a level of independence, and all our inspectors are very clear about what responsibilities that places upon them. My role in addition to chief operating officer in the framework document is stated as director of inspection, and I have a duty—a protective role, if you like—to make sure that we operate impartially, incurring our scrutiny obligations. I can take that to wherever it needs to go if I felt that that was ever impinged. That was what was written in as a safeguard when the agency was created. Our inspection function operates, as Bill said, without fear or favour. That is what we are there to do. We are there to report what we find, and we are there to report what we find in terms of how it is for children, learners and adult learners in Scotland. That is our main focus when we go out into inspect in all settings, including schools. It is very much clear—processes are very clear—about ensuring that there is no opportunity for interference in any of the judgments that we make. Those judgments are reported through at appropriate times to say that that is what we have found, and it is what we have found. I appreciate the reassurance and the clarity that you have given, which leads me nicely on the next concern that the EIS raised in the advisory committee of which I quote, Even the simple fact that employees of Education Scotland were reclassified in 2011 as civil servants is indicative of the centralisation that has occurred, with no discernible gain to the Scottish education as a result. Rather than the function as an organisation that is objective and independent of the political slants and motivations of government, Education Scotland appears publicly at least to be politically compliant. Therefore, given what you have just told me, can you tell me what has your experience actually been, and is this not a fair criticism from the EIS, particularly around centralisation? First, I would like to just nail an early point that inspectors were civil servants before the merger, so that was no change. The change applied there to the LTS, former Learning Teaching Scotland staff, I guess, who were in an NDPB prior to the merger. That had no impact on the inspection function, where independence is so important. Beyond that, we occupy an interesting space. Inevitably, as an agency, we need to provide robust independent advice. At times, I suspect that that means that folk like the professional associations will think that we are too close to government. It may also mean that at times the civil servants and ministers think that we are too close to the views of the professional associations, but we need to keep an honest middle ground in providing advice based on what we are actually seeing in practice and the professional expertise. We recruit from the best educators in the country, so we have a high level of independent professional expertise within the organisation to offer. I would also like to pick up a point that was raised by the Auditor General in the submission again to the committee. He raised a number of specific governance issues, stating that, as the management board had only met once, there was a risk that it was not fulfilling its duties as outlined in the terms of reference. Dr Maxwell, why is the board only met once and why are you risking feeling in your duties? I can give you some background. On the management board, as an executive agency, I should start by explaining that we have an advisory board that does not have the functions that you would expect a board to have if we were further out from government, if you like, letting NDPB. However, they are important for us, and we use them effectively. Alistair, as chief operating officer, will not be able to explain. Audit Scotland, we are correct in the report that they supplied for the year 2, 31 March, 2016. Obviously, that is where you are quoting from. As much as formerly, we did not have the four meetings that were originally planned for a number of reasons. What we did do, with the agreement of our non-executive directors, was that they came along to two sessions with our senior team, not just ourselves but our assistant directors, who run their programmes of work, to talk about our business planning and to engage in that process. They did that once in the December of 2015 and once in the January. It was a really important time because we were changing from a structural approach to planning our work to going to a programme approach that we have outlined in our submission. We agreed with the management board at that point that it would be really helpful to have the non-executive directors, rather than have a formal management board meeting, who would engage with those two full-day sessions. In addition, one of them held a special meeting with the senior team about the direction and future vision for the organisation. That covers two. The last one just so happened at the March meeting, which was planned. It had to be moved due to holidays to the April, which then knocked it over the financial year. In the course of this current year, we have fulfilled all our obligations in relation to the planned meetings of both audit and risk and management board, and they are planned through to the end of the financial year. Just to follow up briefly on that particular point, in relation to meeting the four meetings up to 31 March 2016, he said that there were a number of reasons that did not happen. Presum when you are moving board meetings or fundamental board meetings are not happening, then those number of reasons must be of most critical importance that you would not meet. About what sort of reasons were there that you could not meet as a board? It was not that we could not meet. We agreed with the non-executive directors. It was more productive for them to engage in a workshop, a full-day workshop, with our corporate leadership team, on the planning and the new approaches that we were taking to planning. As an advisory board, they are keen to help us by bringing in their different experiences and expertise that we do not have inside the organisation to bear on new developments, so we agreed with them that that was an appropriate way forward. The Easter meeting, if you like, which had to move over technically over the financial year, was just due to a clash in holidays. Obviously, we have to have a quorum to have the management board function, and we just had to move it a few weeks, which knocked it over the reporting year for Audit Scotland. Mark Presley, in his submission, states that there has been, and I quote, again, an increased need for bureaucratic tick box ticking, which in turn has increased workload. When will teaching go back to giving young people the very best education rather than teaching simply a culture of tick box ticking? That is exactly the intention of Curriculum for Excellences, to provide a rich, broad education in which young teachers have great flexibility to design the curriculum to suit themselves. We are very strongly against any notion of a tick box culture. We note Mark's concerns about that, where I would agree with aspects of what Mark is saying, that one of the challenges for schools in the new arrangements under Curriculum for Excellences is the capacity of their leadership and staff to design and develop rich curricula for themselves within broad guidance. Some schools do that very well, others need more support in order to do that. I know that Mark himself has done some very useful work with East Lothian. I think that one of the Lothian councils in working with heads around that is an important part of the development going forward, because the last thing that we want is a tick box culture to develop. I think that we brought further clarity to that, Mr Thomson, with the statement in August, where we said that there are two resources for teachers to use, experiences and outcomes for planning, benchmarks for assessment, and that strips it right back. We have then done a workload review of local authorities to see how the attempts to reduce bureaucracy are being implemented and we will be following that up again. However, we have stripped it right back and made it very clear that we expect teachers to use just those two resources for planning and assessment to try and cut out by any other bureaucracy that has grown, and we will continue to monitor that both in what we produce ourselves and what local authorities demand of schools. I am very briefly on that. The committee had a wayday when we first came together. We went to Stirling. We met with secondary head teachers and primary head teachers. A lot of the feedback that I had from teachers was about the box-ticking culture and a wonderful folder, but the size was presented to members to say that this is what we have to go through, this is all the boxes that we have to tick. I appreciate that you do not want there to be a box-ticking culture, but, clearly, from what we could see, that is an inherent part of the job right now. It was an important message from the review that we undertook of the 32 local authorities and how they were translating national intention, if you like, into local guidance for their schools about planning and assessment. In a number of cases, we were seeing evidence of too much emphasis on assessing every level tick box culture, so we have sent strong messages through that tackling bureaucracy review in August to counter that. We have a very specific picture on each local authority. We know that just under half of 15 of the local authorities in our independent view have been proactive at reducing workload and bureaucracy, and we are following up with the others where there is further action to take to make sure that that happens. I would just like to start by following up on one of Ross Thomson's points. I mean, his initial question about the EIS evidence, you answered that by referencing what you are already doing. Forgive me, but the allegations that they are making are pretty serious that, essentially, the inspection regime is overly close to Government and, again, your proximity precludes you really from providing the objective advice to Government. Are they—is that a baseless allegation, or why are they saying that? Could you please address why you think they might have put that so starkly in evidence to the committee? Yeah, I mean, I do reject that. I do understand that they are a professional association who represents strong views from the profession, if you like, around certain issues. There will be issues where—to take the assessment and the introduction of national standardised assessments as an example—there will be issues there where they may feel that they would like us to have argued their case exactly as they saw it to Government and therefore change policy in the way that they desired. Equally, ministers started with a view. We did absolutely, over a period of time, feed our evidence and advice into that. The end result may not be exactly as the EIS would have designed it in the first instance, but it is based on what we believe is good professional advice around the way forward. Indeed, it is quite a unique and progressive development of the use of standardised assessments in schools, which has come out of that. We have a very good way forward, but it may not be absolutely the one that the EIS might have picked if it had a free hand at the beginning. Do you think that the issue is just that they lost the argument and that there is no inherent incompatibility in that you are structured and set up with reference to both ministers and other agencies? I would not even say that they lost the argument. I am sure that they were influential also in their views into that. However, the agreed solution going forward is not, perhaps, exactly if at times they felt that it was our role as an agency simply to back up their view that that would be incorrect. However, I can assure you that we had a strong voice in that discussion right the way through. Both this week and last week, we have had a very thick pack of papers from both individuals and from agencies, which I think paints up a worrying picture. I think that one of the points of focus that those come down on is that we have curriculum for excellence taking pupils up to S3. We have a qualification system, and there is a crunch point. The requirements to provide that broad general education and then switching into the senior phase frankly are placed both through a rapid succession of changes, but the requirements of what is required from both those things are incompatible. I am putting teachers under an awful of stress, and they just do not feel that they are being supported either by you or the SQA. Would you agree with that as a broad assessment of where teachers are right now? I would not agree with that as a broad assessment. I would agree that there is an issue that schools are currently working through. It is partly again to refer back to the May guidance that we put out was exactly on that issue about how to transition effectively from what should be a rich and broad general education going higher than ever before to the end of S3, but making sure that that also sets the groundwork to prepare young people to thrive in the qualifications framework. We have part of the activity now under way also to provide absolute clarity on what level 3 and level 4 in the CFE framework mean. We are seeing the new benchmarks that we issued, and I want to comment on how we are helping schools to understand even more clearly what is expected from a broad general education view. First, curriculum for excellence does not go to the end of S3. It goes up to age 18. It is for the first time that we have a curriculum framework that is 3 to 18, with progression from the early years all the way through to leaving school. The EIS has issued advice to its members on welcoming the recent curriculum for excellence and the benchmarks for literacy and numeracy and endorsing some of the key messages. It would be fair to say that we do work constructively with them on the agenda, and we try to represent the views of the profession and our independent views when policy is formed. As Bill said, the benchmarks are intended to be very clear on the standard that is expected within each level of curriculum for excellence so that we can see that progression all the way through. Again, it is a significant streamlining activity. This is a question of standards and deliverability. That is what has been very clear from the evidence session last week and this week. Indeed, you have just admitted that there is an issue. If there is a problem with the design of both the curriculum and the qualification setup, is that your fault, the SQA's fault or the fault of ministers in the way that the policy is being conceived? I think that the curriculum for excellence framework is being endorsed by the OECD as the right way forward, and it is a case of working together to provide the best support for teachers, which is what we are trying to do, why we have cut back and streamlined a lot of the advice, because for a period there was a request for more case studies, more exemplification and we have cut that right back. As I said, what we are trying to do just now is to pare back the amount of material that teachers get so that they have the absolute advice and the material that they need to make the decisions that they are empowered to make remember within our curriculum framework locally on what best suits the children in front of them. That is one of the important principles of curriculum for excellence, and that has been recognised as a strength of the programme. I mean to be perfectly straight with you that we are at the point of having just run through the first complete run of the new curriculum for excellence framework up to S6. I think that there are lessons being learnt from that for actually all of us, and it was collective decision making about how we implemented CFE, but out of that is coming there is action on our side, which is about reducing and clarifying, making it easier for teachers to access the guidance, which they appreciate. There is action for the SQA in terms of cutting back the assessment burden, which they are taking, but there is also action very much for local authorities and for schools in terms of ensuring that they are fully embedded approaches, which do make it possible for schools to really get the best value out of the new curriculum framework. Just finally, you are standing behind the WECD, essentially a declaration that curriculum for excellence is right, but if you look at Lindsay Paterson's evidence to the committee, he is basically saying that while the WECD is broadly supportive of the intent and the overall objectives of curriculum for excellence, they are very clear that the evidence is just not available as to how effective it has actually been, and more importantly that we have missed the opportunity to do that evaluation. I am just struggling to understand how you can be so confident that it is all fine, and then standing behind the WECD when the WECD is saying themselves that we do not have the basis to actually evaluate and say how well it has been implemented. The WECD did not, in my understanding of their report, say that we had missed the boat and could do nothing more about evaluating its impact, Mr Paterson says that, but the WECD were recommending that further research would be appropriate now to undertake further research and evidence gathering into impact on various aspects that do not naturally flow through from the improving stats on SQA results, for example, or improving. We do have evidence, of course, of improving levels of positive destinations for young people and even evidence of the gap closing to some extent, although not yet fast enough in terms of outcomes. The results of literacy and numeracy reflect on the curriculum of changes. There are results of literacy and numeracy from the SSLN surveys that raise issues that we need to be concerned about and address quite directly. We have picked up an action under way that we are leading on the math side, particularly flowing from the last results there. We certainly need to make sure that those are heading in the right direction, if you want to mention anything about the hub, maths and so on. There is a wide support programme around improving attainment in literacy and numeracy, and that is to enable as many children as possible to reach the very high standards. We have set in the curriculum for excellence levels. That is not about basic literacy and numeracy, remember. It is assessing children against the curriculum for excellence levels, which are very challenging and demanding. Our evidence does indicate that we need to do more to raise attainment. We need to continue to do that, and we need to continue to close the poverty-related attainment gap in literacy and numeracy. That is why the Scottish attainment challenge is designed around literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing. I am struck that your response to a number of questions is that people have not understood your message. Local authorities have got it wrong and have had too many boxes to take. Teachers have not really been clear about what you have been asking. It feels to me that maybe you should be looking at whether the message that you are delivering is one that is creating the problems. In terms of what your responsibilities are, it is to emphasise the point that was made by Professor Lindsay Paterson. He says that it is now too late to evaluate how curriculum for excellence is working in detail at school by school because the moment at which the comparative data could have been collected has passed. Missing that moment might be described as a dereliction of duty by Education Scotland. What is your response to that? I would need a discussion with Dr Paterson to really understand what he thought would have been or should have been collected school by school from the start of this process. What I would say is that there is a range of evidence that we can track back if we wish to do so around school attainment at the secondary level particularly, where there is less evidence has been around primary level at a school by school or local authority by local authority level, and therefore I am pleased that the Government has taken the steps to introduce collection of data at P147 and etc. You were not aware that Professor Paterson had this view? I have heard it before in various forms. There has not been a conversation with him about why he might think something like that. Somebody who has got a reputation in education. Indeed, I always speak for him. Fundamentally, it has tended to be associated with a view that more academic research should have been commissioned from the start, a programme of academic research. The OACD also looked to that, they certainly argue that there should be, they have made a recommendation, there should be a national research strategy, which would be for government to commission, and I believe that that is in preparation at the moment. At some point that we have made research on, did the curriculum for excellence implementation group ever discuss the need to benchmark for curriculum for excellence and perhaps take the suggestion that they get data school by school? If they did discuss it, why did they reject it as an idea? What Dr Paterson may also be unaware of is the fact that we have regularly reported to CFE management board on the outcomes, because of course school by school we go into inspections, we have seen how practice has been emerging on the ground, so that has been going on right through. Yes, absolutely. Every school that is inspected, the curriculum has been evaluated, and it has been looked at in terms of design of the curriculum, the quality of courses and programmes, where schools have been inspected on a sample basis, and that evidence is collated when was reported regularly through the channels that Bill described. Whilst there has not been a formal research strategy, and that is obviously a recommendation, and that is in the Government's delivery plan with a timescale, so it is not just at some point in the future that there is a timescale that the Scottish Government set out to implement a research strategy, there has been evidence through school inspection through other engagements. For example, once a year we meet all secondary head teachers and look at the leadership of curriculum for excellence, look at what is happening, and all that evidence feeds back from all the engagement work that we do. Can I accept a simple point? If you are going to implement a new way of doing things, that might be a good idea to check whether it is making things better or worse by having a benchmark. Professor Patterson seems to be suggesting that we are doing poorly in numeracy and in literacy. We do not know, because he has not presumably even discussed the idea of doing that, whether curriculum for excellence is tackling that or creating more of a problem. You can only assert that it is a good thing and that there is no evidence. It is quite a serious issue if, in fact, what we have chosen to do is to make the problem worse rather than improving things. We have absolutely been monitoring the progress of curriculum for excellence through our inspection programme all the way through the programme. Professor Patterson, all the EIS is also mistaken then? If he may well not understand the level of monitoring that goes on through inspection, I suspect. However, as I said earlier, there has been plenty of evidence around the SQA about results and positive destinations in the system. There is evidence around and, perhaps, under trade. With respect, you would not be able to prove a causal link between curriculum for excellence and people getting jobs. You cannot do that, I presume. There could be all sorts of other factors. You could have brilliant curriculum. I taught in the 80s that the curriculum was excellent but there were no jobs. Did that mean that the curriculum that we were pursuing was a failure? You put your finger on the challenges of having an assessment of a programme as broad and far-reaching as curriculum for excellence. It will never be possible to make an absolute scientific study of a one-to-one correlation between a change to the curriculum and outcomes for young people in a whole variety of ways. It is probably also true of, for example, that we are concerned about the SSL in literacy results, a particular dip in writing at the upper and early secondary level. However, we know that that is an issue that also appears in other countries around the world and it may be as much to do with issues such as young people's increasing use of social media and digital technology that we need to adapt and change teaching to accommodate rather than what is specifically happening in the curriculum. It is always a complex answer and there is never a simple track between one piece of data and the six that you can ascribe to curriculum in a simple terms. Okay, thank you. Just before I bring Tavish Scott in for a short supplementary, can I just clarify again? You seem to suggest that the data for benchmarking was there or that you would be able to get it to a position where you would know if we had to improve it? Just to be clear about that, I am not sure exactly what is intended there by the term benchmarking. What was there? Now we want to know where they are, I would say, with benchmarking. Throughout the process, inspection has undertaken and inspections use quality indicators as our benchmarks, if you like, where inspectors have judged, for example, the curriculum against a six-point scale in every school that we have inspected through that period of time. There is a clear professional assessment being made against benchmarks that we publish openly in how our school goes. Indeed, through the process of implementation, we issued annual updates on guidance on exactly how we were interpreting, for example the curriculum quality indicator. So, yes, we were in that form. That was happening. Can I just check further to Joanne and Daniel's questions? Page 14 of the OECD 2015 report, which was commissioned by the Scottish Government, says that the evidence is not available for an evaluation of CFE. That is correct. That is your understanding as well. I think that it would be premature now to say that we had the evidence and could sit down now and make a final judgment about whether, in its full form, it was... That was not the question that I asked, but I am just asking you for a matter of record. Is it not what the OECD said on December 2015 that the evidence is not available for an evaluation of CFE? I would absolutely like to take your word for that. In those circumstances, first of all, the questions that my colleagues have been asking, what was the CFE management board doing all these years? The CFE management board took the view that there was evaluation of CFE should be commissioned. Indeed, I probably would cite the OECD report as probably the most significant example of that because the management board was party to the decision that we should invite an independent group of external experts in to have a look at CFE, hence the report that you have in front of you. I think that it is also fair to say there at Hearst in their report that they understand that a premature leap to assessment of whether or not a programme is successful, whilst it is in the process of implementation, would also not be helpful, but they do absolutely encourage the system now to step up the assessment effort. I am sure that that is true, but CFE started in 2004? 2009 was when the experiences and outcomes that are the basis of planning and when it actually hit, rubber hit the road in terms of schools beginning to have practical guidance. In 2009, I will say that I remember Peter Peacock describing it all in 2004. Yes, there was a review in 2009. Between 2009 and 2015, according to the OECD, there was no evaluation, so we do not know what is happening to our pupils and our schools during that time, other than the inspections. I take the point about the inspections, other than that. Inspections and some data, of course, were continuously available, such as SSLN and such as the exam results of pupil destinations. Just to repeat my question again, between 2009 and 2015, did the management board that you talked about a lot this morning, Dr Maxwell, consider not that it would be appropriate to provide the education minister of the day? I have been a number of them over that period, but maybe he or she never asked, but did it not occur to the management board that it would be a good idea to have an evaluation on a regular basis so that we knew what was going on? My recollection of the discussions around the management board was certainly that a clear understanding that, at an appropriate time, a comprehensive evaluation should be developed and undertaken. The OECD report, as I said, was the first part of that. I will hear about that. What the OECD is arguing is not that you can come out with a full-scale measurement of curriculum for excellence and whether it has or has not succeeded, because there is a short timescale. What they are making the point about, and what Lindsay Paterson is making the point about, is that the data that we would need from the instigation of curriculum for excellence until the time that we choose to measure its overriding success, that data has not been collected in the way that it would be helpful. That is the point, surely. Is it not? That is certainly the argument that he is making, and I would be interested. Is the argument that the OECD is making? As I say, there is some data around. There are gaps in the data. As I said earlier, I would agree that attainment data that you could drill down to school level as opposed to the SSLN, which is only available at a national level, would be helpful to have. That is now going to be forthcoming, as a result of the changes that are made. For various reasons, no doubt, the management board did not create that data earlier. We will now move on to the subject of inspections in Gillian. Do you have a question on that? Thank you, convener, and thank you to Education Scotland for our meeting last week for myself and Mr Scott. Now, as and then, I would like to speak about inspections. On your website, it says that you are going to plan to introduce a suite of inspection models that we can use in different contexts and for different purposes. We are continuing to develop our short inspection, localise thematic and neighbourhood review models. Can you clarify what is happening in the change in inspections from the previous model to those short inspection, local thematic and what they mean? Great. I will pass over to Alasdair as he has been leading our inspection review, which has been going on for a year or so to redevelop the existing models, but also to enter some interesting new territory such as an integrated look across the senior phase. I have been learning out of view since April 2014 and we have had an external reference group involving all the key stakeholders, including professional associations, parents bodies, directors of education etc, advising us throughout the course of that review. The situation up until September of this year was that we had a single model, for example, of how to inspect schools, so there was one standard model approach across secondary, primary and whatever. What we wanted to move to as a result of evidence and consultation was the idea of a menu or a suite that could be flexed to be more proportionate, more risk-based and to give us the ability to get around different kinds of themes and issues as they were arising in Scottish education. To achieve that, the first element of that was the new set of quality indicators, which were launched in September of last year. They were allowed a year to bed into the system and we started using them in inspection from September of this year. There were lots of training events involved in getting teachers up to speed with what that meant, so that was how good our school was before. To be clear, that is a self-evaluation framework that we also use for inspection. It is not compulsory on schools to use that framework, but about 99 per cent of schools use it because they are involved in the development of that framework. The new models have a full model, which is similar to what we did previously, but it is updated with the new quality indicators that we started. That is a full model approach. One of the big differences that we had in relation to that was that we were negotiating a quality indicator with the school as part of that model. The idea of doing that is to try to help the school focus on an issue or a challenge or something that it wants to engage with inspection teams about. That was a formalised way of doing that. We piloted those approaches and that is now what we are doing from September. The other models that we will have in the system are a shorter model of inspection, and we will be doing that more systematically from January. We did some try-outs of taking less time in school. If there were issues or things that we could not find out about, we could follow that up by coming back again. In a sense, it is a very risk-based approach, but a shorter period of time in the school. We will be doing a number of those from January and then fully implementing thereafter. We are also looking at short notice. Very interestingly, agreement of ourselves and professional associations is about a 50-50 split among teachers, absolutely nearly almost exactly 50-50, about those who think that that is a good idea and those who do not. Parents' bodies would prefer us not having a notice to the schools and just turning up. We did again some piloting work around the idea of short notice. The short notice meant telling people on Thursday and arriving on Monday. We have learned a lot about that. The key thing that we need to put in place is electronic questionnaires that we send out in advance of inspection. Currently, we send that in a paper format, bring them back, collate them and that goes to parents, staff and learners and pupils in the school. Again, we have all our inspections from January this next year. We will use an electronic questionnaire as a pilot again so that we can finalise that and then roll out some more in an unannounced. The last elements are localised thematic in neighbourhood. Localised thematic, we did a pilot inspection in Murray Council. That was looking at the senior phase, no matter who the provider was. It was not looking at it just from the school's point of view, it was looking at it from the learner's point of view. How did the college and careers and everything else all work together to make the senior phase work? Everyone who was involved in that thought that there was a really added value in terms of our inspection activity and so we will be rolling some of those out over the coming inspection year. The neighbourhood model is taking that to the next step again, which is saying if you live in a community, what is it like to learn in that community? Again, no matter of the provider. What is your progression in your path from early years right through to your destination coming out of the other side? We have done one pilot of that but we need to do some more work in developing it up as a model. Again, the intention is to have that on the stocks. We have had some feedback from teachers about that and we are also in the EIS submission. I mentioned it as well when representing their members. They said that the new inspections, I will grant you, have only just started to take place, but they are still saying that there is a variable response from teachers on them in terms of the model that you say you would like to be more supportive of teaching and learning rather than the overall judgment that gets people into such a state over the inspections. The centre in confusion around the process of inspection, the lack of opportunity for a genuine professional dialogue between teachers and the members of the inspectorate teams, excessive workload and stress that inspection generates for teachers and senior management. My colleagues Ross Greer and James Dornan spoke to some teachers and said that the inspection still creates a flurry of activity that is risked to inspectors not gaining a real insight into how the school works. I am sure that you are familiar with that kind of comment. What feedback do you get from the teachers that you inspect? Is there a reverse feedback coming back from them and how valuable they found the inspections? Do you look at that and would you modify the inspections based on that? I would like to make one slight amendment. That is that the changes that we introduced from September are changes to our approaches to inspection, but we have over a long period of time now for over 15 years. We are moving towards more professional dialogue and more improvement-focused activity on inspection. We are not switching from September from being about pure accountability to being about improvement. In fact, the Scottish approach to inspection is regarded as genuinely internationally renowned and a lot of inspectors have followed us for being improvement focused. To answer your question directly, every single inspection has a post-inspection return from the school involved itself where they come back and after the process is complete so that it does not affect the process, they have the opportunity to come back and tell us what they thought and how valuable they felt that the process was. Our statistics show from that response is a very high response of people saying that the inspection was valuable, but more than that we have excellent relationships with the professional associations and we meet with them regularly. They provide us feedback from, for example, the EIS representatives in the schools that have been inspected and they give us that on a confidential basis. That allows us to get a feel for how we are doing from their perspective as well. We have been particularly low over the process of the past two years when we have been developing and amending and refining those models and new approaches, learning from and trying to get a consensus about the best way to do inspection in Scotland, which will both achieve the requirement of having some level of accountability because we all want to make sure that the schools are delivering on what is expected of them, parents certainly do, but also alongside that making things better. So we do not just go and tell people, say, read the meter as it could be phrased, tell people what is good or bad. We are actually helping them to understand what they can do to improve. Do you accept, though, that the idea of an inspection for a lot of teachers is still a very worrying thing and that the workload increases as a result of it? Possibly your main message about it being support is maybe not getting through to let every teacher who is possibly spending that Thursday to Monday completely and utterly obliterating their weekend, reprinting documentation, spending times in the schools. That message really is not getting through because people are still concerned that the inspectors come on the Monday and they need to have everything tickety-boo. We genuinely understand that that is a reaction that people can have and we try through great lengths to persuade people that that is not what they should be doing. The whole basis of the Scottish system is based on self-evaluation. The school should have to make no adjustments whatsoever for the fact that an inspection team is coming in. Everything should just be as expected. Now, that is easy to say and, of course, there will be running around checking what is on notice boards and things like that in advance. When we go out and ask teachers ourselves, they say that there is an obvious concern about someone coming in to look at your practice, to look at something that you have invested your life in. That is there. You cannot stop that in itself, but they have been very positive with the reductions that we have made to what is expected of them in advance of us turning up. In years gone by, there would be rooms filled with paper and we do not want that anymore. We do not demand it anymore and we do not ask for it anymore. There has been an issue whereby local authorities have sometimes tried to anticipate when a school would be inspected and do their own kinds of reviews. That is not universal across the country, but it has actually been raised with us by teacher unions and by teachers that that is more of a concern, that it is what actually happens around an inspection. It is something that we have engaged with local authorities to try to stop that happening. We are embarking at the moment, we are just about to embark on a campaign of publicity and information to all teachers, one thing being mythbusters. That idea of saying that you might think that this is what inspections want, really it is not, and we are going to try to reinforce that through different channels such as social media, I accept, to try to get that information out. Do you accept that when you give a school a final verdict that that could really obliterate everything else in the report, has that been something that you have noticed? You will always have an issue where you want an accountability element to inspection, and if that is the case, then people want to be able to look at something at the end of the report that says, here are the grades, and it would be an expectation that that would be there. We want people to look beyond that and read the story of what that school is actually about. We try to encourage people to read beyond just reading the appendix at the back. Because there is a story, an individual unique story in every single school that we visit, and you will never understand that if you only look at that part. But let's be clear, when you put grades on any kind of school, people living communities, the local media will comment on that report, your parents will comment on that report, your colleagues will see that report. It is a natural thing, which if gradings are part of an inspection system, that you cannot get away from it, you can only mitigate it as much as you can. You gave a glowing report a couple of weeks ago to Cragallicay Primary School in Spadesize, so thank you for that. That certainly did attract media attention, thankfully for the right reasons. However, as other members have said, the inspection process is extremely stressful for teachers and schools, and that is one bit of feedback that constituency members regularly get from speaking to schools and teachers. I hope that the short inspections and other improvements that you are speaking about will make a material difference to the stress levels. However, the other factors that cause stress in the classroom are variable, and we are taking evidence on budgets. I know that we tend to stray into policy in all kinds of areas, and it is quite difficult and challenging to focus on budget scrutiny. However, in terms of an inspection process and a lack of classroom assistance or whatever it may be, the factors that impact on day-to-day teaching, how do you take them into account when you are carrying out your inspections? In other words, presumably your focus is on the delivery of education, the quality of education, but there are so many different factors that influence what is happening in the day-to-day life of a school, so how do you take into account the budget issues and pressures that some schools face? As you rightly say, the focus is on the delivery of education in the school, from our point of view, when we are doing an inspection. However, where we are seeing that is being affected adversely by a constant excess requirement for supply teachers, if schools have to align supply teachers. I know that there are particular issues in the north-east around availability of staff or specialist subjects. Where that is having an impact, we will report on it in the school inspection. We will certainly feed back to the local authority but also back into national sources around what we are seeing, where we are seeing it, if that is localised or more widespread. Therefore, it is a classic example of where we certainly judge the impact and report on that as it applies to a particular school, but we can also draw out messages from that that we need to feed back into into government and into policy. Relating to that, there are some issues that I am aware of in relation to additional support needs and clearly inclusive education and the resources that are applied to that to make sure that we are giving proper educational opportunities to people of all abilities. How would you take that into account and what expertise have you built up in respect of the SNL elements of education? Of course, most of that now exists in mainstream, although we have a very active programme of special school inspections as well. We inspect them rather more frequently than other schools quite deliberately because of the consideration that they are more vulnerable pupils in that sense. Our specialist teams recruit people with additional support needs backgrounds such as educational psychologists, who have that kind of background, who are engaged in that kind of work, looking at special schools and provision within mainstream schools. The general trend towards mainstreaming has been on the whole a success story in Scottish education, but it still throws up challenges all the time. Particularly with budgets stressed as they are, it is important that schools maintain the right level of support, including classroom assistants and ASN specialist teachers, in order to meet the needs of young people in mainstream settings. We are seeing some very good practice in that context. I hope that you want to mention that. Thank you, Bill. In terms of the ASL sector and the special schools, most of them receive over the past three years positive inspection reports. Around a third of schools are very good and excellent evaluations, but there is further improvement needed, particularly in the curriculum. 58 per cent of special schools have a good or better curriculum on those that we have inspected over the past three years, so there is a need to further improve the design of the curriculum in the special sector. That will be highlighted in our forthcoming report and will require further action in that sector to improve the quality of the curriculum. We are active members of a group that has been running since the additional support for learning act came into force, run by the Government advisory group for additional support for learning. We have been feeding evidence back to that group each year for the report that it publishes. It informs the report that that group publishes in its responsibilities for monitoring the implementation of the ASL act. That is another source through which we feed evidence. In some parts of Scotland, such as Murray, for instance, there are no alternatives other than to mainstream education. Do you comment on that or look at that as part of your inspection process? I am aware of that. That is the case very much from my own back-handed working grampion at one time. Murray was always very relatively pioneering in developing inclusive provision for young people. There are units in some of the schools that have a specialist nature, but we would be looking to Murray. We would evaluate provision in Murray in other places, but there may well be good lessons from inclusive practice that can be spread elsewhere. In terms of the cabinet secretary's emphasis on tackling teacher workload, is it now the case that, when you are carrying out an inspection, you will make recommendations on how to reduce teacher workload? Is that a much more focused objective of your inspection process? That has been happening for some time. It is not brand new, but we will challenge schools where we feel and, indeed, feedback messages if we feel the authority is requiring them to do things that are generating unnecessary workload for their teachers. We sent out some very clear messages on that. As Graeme mentioned earlier, in the past couple of days, the EIS has put out guidance to their members supporting the guidance that we have provided around tackling teacher workload and encouraging their members to adhere to it and to, indeed, challenge management of necessary in their schools if they feel that unreasonable things are being demanded. Very much goes back to the points that Gillian Martin was making about inspections. When the convener and myself met a group of teachers, one of the phrases that came up was that inspectors will very regularly be hit by the smell of fresh paint upon entering a school. If we take, as a start, the assumption that inspections do result in positive outcomes improvement in the schools, there is a trend in the data that we have from the various surveys, our own and your surveys. Obviously, it is a different methodology, but the trend is quite clear. The further away from the classroom and individual is, the more likely they are to see inspections as positive and to see them as having a positive outcome. Almost all the heads of education in your data are very positive about the outcomes of inspections. Head teachers are fairly positive about front-line classroom teaching staff less so. Why do you think that that is the case that the further away from a classroom someone gets, the more positive of you they have of inspections? I guess that, to some extent, that feels like a natural trend to me. It is fundamentally the teacher in the classroom who is feeling that the process will very much focus on them, although, fundamentally, we look at a school as a whole and we do not rate individual teachers in any sense. Of course, it may be the case that, at some time, not that often, any individual teacher in a classroom will experience an inspection, whereas it is much more part of the daily working life of local authorities as we are dealing with inspections on a much more regular basis. Staff are based there, and head teachers get regular briefings from ourselves or conferences. They are probably naturally just more attuned to how the process works these days. I would never underestimate the fact that, of course, it is a process in which you feel a certain degree of pressure. That is only right. In a sense, people are passionate about what they do and want to show their best side in any external review process of that sort. It is also worth pointing out that all our inspection teams also involve peer associate assessors, as we call them, but they are folk from other schools, head teachers from schools in a different authority who have trained with us as associate assessors trained in inspection methodology. Inspection teams always include people like that, team members who are associated as well as HMI, and that in itself is a powerful way of spreading understanding about quality improvement across the system, because we are regularly told by those people how valuable and experienced they find it to be part of a team going in to see a school in a different authority. Excellent CPD invariably tell us. There is a spin-off benefit from inspection to the wider system in that way, too. I think that we can all understand that, for the frontline teaching staff, of course inspections are going to be stressful, regardless of the circumstances that they come under and there is an element of stress. That is more about a belief that the outcomes have been positive, so it can be both a stressful and unenjoyable experience and you can still have faith that there will be a positive outcome from it. That seems to be the issue of less faith from frontline teaching staff that there will actually be a positive outcome. Due to, on board, the feedback from EIS in particular, that there should be more focus on the education authorities as part of the inspection programme. I agree that I explained earlier about the three-layer system schools and their own self-evaluation being the vital front line of that. The local authority level is also important, so we have arrangements for engaging regularly and continuously with local authorities and, indeed, feeding into an annual scrutiny arrangements with other inspectors, which effectively risk assesses each local authority in terms of their ability to quality improve and assure their schools and other education services. It is an important level and it is important that we engage with evaluating and supporting authorities to build their capacity to quality assure their own schools, but I think that it is still important that we sample that occasionally and go in and see what is happening on the front line in Moray, Aberdeenshire or Scottish Borders to get a sense of how that is working. The communication afterwards seems to be essential here that the communication with frontline teaching staff is not at a point where they have faith that there are positive outcomes from those inspections. The further away from the question that you get, there is more faith that there has been a positive outcome. Dr Maxwell, I wonder if I could pursue some issues relating to some data that you published about inspection activity and the number of inspectors. That is on the back of promises made by both the First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Education, who intimated earlier in the year that the number of inspections would increase. Obviously, by definition, I would have thought that that would lead to an increase in the number of inspectors or greater frequency, perhaps, in the number of inspections that they carry out. The table that you have given us, however, tells us that the number of inspections projected is continuing to decline in 2012-13 for preschools. It was 162, it is going to be 99 next session, primary 101 down to 90, secondary 26 down to 17. How does that tie in with a promise to increase inspection? I will hand over to Alasdair to explain some of the detail more in more depth around the projections. The table that Yarrow has provided for Spice to give you on this does not contain projections. In fact, it also illustrates, I think, that pretty clearly the wide range of different inspections. Sorry, it does not contain projections, did you say? It does contain projections for all sectors, and it shows the very wide range of areas in which we are now actively quality-issuing in inspection. In schools particularly, because I know that that is what you will be particularly interested in, primary secondary schools asked for, you can maybe update? It is very clear. The first fact to say is that the figures are projections, and obviously they change when they move up and down regularly. That is just a fact, because of things such as staff illness and the ability to go to a particular school at a particular time due to something happening there that we find out about after notification, whether or the rest of it. We constantly update those. Our expectations is that this year we will do the same number of school inspections as we did last year, and that is where we will end up at 31 March in terms of the financial year. The increase will happen significantly next year, and that is because of two factors. One is that we took on board an additional nine inspectors recently. They are still in probation, so they are not contributing to additional numbers at the moment. They should be fully deployed as lead inspectors to add the inspection numbers from April, but that is an individual judgment based on each individual's ability to be able to do that, or readiness to be able to do that. I am sure that schools would welcome the fact that we take our time to make sure that they are ready to lead inspections. The second main factor will be the shorter inspection model, which will allow us to do more inspections overall, while strengthening that risk factor element, which will allow us to go back should we have to. When you say for 2016 that there are 66 full-time equivalent inspectors, but 27 you are saying that it is going to be nine additional to that. Is that correct? I would have to check that figure. I am not sure when that figure relates to. Is that still lower? I suspect that those nine are in the 60s. For example, we have an advert that is already placed for inspectors in next week. It is a constantly changing thing because we have people retiring, we have the need for new staff. The numbers again go up and down. Given that we are coming retirement law, you used to be able to predict very clearly when your numbers were going to change, but nowadays you can't. I am not quite clear why that is. The main issue here is that parents and teachers and pupils want a good understanding of the inspection process. The data that we have in front of us shows that the number of inspections is declining in schools, and the number of inspectors, despite the nine additional ones that you are projecting for 2017, will still be fewer than the number of inspectors back in 2011, when it was in 2010. It was in 1983, so that is still fewer that are being projected. The issue is that, if we are wanting to build a world-class inspection programme, the natural question is why are there fewer inspections now and fewer inspectors? Does that not make your job very much more difficult? To be clear on one thing, there will not be fewer inspections of schools this year than there were last year. The figures that have been supplied were a projection in the summer of this year. What I am saying is that our projections now would be likely that it would be the same number. That is purely a natural process inside the organisation. The projections are constantly updated. That figure is a formal projection of 107 because that is of schools, because that is the staff that we knew that we had deployed. I am sorry to interrupt, but it says here that, for pre-schools for the academic session that has just passed, it was 135 and your projection, which is intimated here, is 2016-17, is 99. Primary schools, it was 97, it is going to be 90. Secondary schools, it is 18, it is going to be 17. That is a reduction in all three categories. Yes. For schools, I am saying. We believe that we will do exactly the same number, if not a little bit more, than what we did last year, by the time we reach 31 March, because a projection can go up or can go down. However, our belief now is given extra resource that we have deployed there, that that is the case. However, you are correct to identify that, in early years, it is the case that there is a reduction this year. For example, you will see the advert next week specifically asking for expertise in early learning and childcare, so that we can boost that number back up again, because we have lost expertise in that area. By that point, we should go back to where we were over the piece, because we have these new inspectors who are going through their induction. Next year, from 1 April, we will see an increase overall in the number of inspections. I would be happy, by the way, to provide updated projections, because they have changed primarily because we looked at our budget mid-year a couple of months ago and agreed to take on some. We regularly use retired inspectors on a contract basis to undertake some inspections, and we do that regularly, and we have well done the track of contracting some people. If you could do that, that would be great. Thank you, convener. Just one supplementary on that. When your board is considering the inspection regime—not the numbers, I take your answers on the numbers—your board is considering that inspection regime at the same time as your board is presumably considering all the guidance that has been given to schools and the pressures that you have described this morning. Is there a correlation between the two? There is certainly a correlation. We look across the whole piece, if that is what you mean, on how we are managing our resource and budget. We need to make strategic decisions. In fact, in my opening comments, I was indicating that we feel that the demand for us to put resource into the guidance and development area is lessening. It is certainly not disappearing, but it is lessening, and we can redirect some resource into two things. One has been the work, like the attainment challenge, where we have created those attainment adviser posts, for example. Another area is to build up our inspection programmes to some degree again. It's written on the question. We're on the budget, and I suppose I should ask a budgetary question. Did you reduce the number of inspectors that were available to inspect schools because you had to put more into attainment advisers, because that was the Government's priority? Those things all interact out of a fixed budget, undoubtedly. We didn't reduce, no. What we did do—let's be quite clear about this—is we reduced the number of inspections that we undertook in the early years of Education Scotland's existence. Those people quite often were inspectors spending time supporting and advising on some of the curriculum developments that were going on. Inspectors can't inspect all 220 days if they're working life. It's just a practical reality that they have other ways in which they can feed in. Part of their job was also to advise on guidance that was going to schools? To feed in, too, as they would have done in the previous years. Okay. Thank you very much. You wanted to come in on the subject choice question, which you referred to earlier. Last week, when Dr Brown was in front of us, she said very clearly that she thought a very important conversation had to be had about the senior phase and the concerns that there is a narrowing of the curriculum within that senior phase. Just to go back on the comments that Tavish Scott made earlier, are you concerned about the narrowing of the curriculum in the senior phase? I don't accept that there is a narrowing that is looked at in the broad scheme of things. Senior phase is about offering a much broader and richer set of pathways for young people, taken as a whole, looked at a three-year programme. We're seeing good evidence of that with, for example, increased uptake of vocational qualifications at a higher level, with greater parity of esteem of those. We are also, just to be clear, broad general education provides greater breadth in the curriculum rather than narrowing us up to the end of S3, whereas previously that was not the case. It is a different pattern of curriculum. It is a very active discussion that needs the curriculum for excellence management board, is engaged in it and needs to continue to engage in looking at the new models that are emerging, but we are seeing some very effective new models would you accept the point that there is some pressure on subject choice that in some schools there is a reduction in the number of subjects that some pupils can take and that having been through S3 with the experience that they've had there going into S4, they are forced because of the number of hours and because of the way that the courses are structured into a much reduced subject choice. Is that correct? What's happening is that pupils are moving from a broader base in third year than previously, as I say, typically into a smaller number in S4 than would previously been in the case, rather than eight. It's probably six or seven subjects following through into fifth year and sixth year, ideally in programmes. What I'd like to see more of actually is the original intention of two-year programmes being young people going into effectively more able pupils bypassing to use the short hand, which was always part of the intention. Maybe not in other subjects, maybe in some of their subjects and some not. All of these models are possible and we're seeing some of the better design curricular models that are emerging in schools beginning to really explore that and also using freeing up their thinking about even mixing age groups so that it's really not a one-size-fits-all for young people as they go into fourth year, fifth year or sixth year. It's an interesting point that you make, but philosophically and back again to your curriculum design teams and the discussions that you have as the board, what was the philosophy behind having a very broad general education up to S3 and then a much narrower senior phase? What's the philosophy behind that? I'm not sure. It's really about taking young people broader, higher and broader. We include in the broader achievements as well as the exams and subjects, hence we're pleased to see the rise in Duke of Edinburgh awards and join your trust in leadership awards as well. That entitlement to a broad education should be absolutely clear up to 15, fundamentally, end of third year. From there it was, of course, people would start to, I don't know if you want to put it that way, we would start to choose pathways which were coherent pathways that would lead them right through and might involve school, might involve college, might involve a range of things. I'm just echoing the views of parents who feel that in some schools, because they are forced down to fewer hires than would have been possible in past generations, they've got an issue about compromising subject choice. That's the point I think that Dr Brown was concerned about that. I'm just anxious to know whether Education Scotland is concerned. We're concerned to see really good models emerging. I haven't seen fewer hires as an issue. I think that, in fact, there's larger numbers of hires being achieved than ever before in the last couple of years. The issues discussed with us are more around fourth year, to be honest, but I think that's... I'm not looking at those two in isolation. I'm looking at this as a three-year phase, and actually across those three years there's more opportunities to do more qualification and awards than there was previously. So, if you look at us for an isolation, it could look like you're going from broad to narrow, but that is not the design of CFE. It's a three-year experience with lots of opportunities to make choices, to look at different pathways and to build up a wide portfolio of achievements and skills. We've seen in excess of a 40 per cent drop in the number of pupils sitting higher French and German. Would that not be evidence of the narrowing of the options that you say you don't have evidence of? Sorry, I don't have those figures right in front of me. As I say, what I do know is that the number of hires being achieved in the system as a whole has increased. If there are shifts between some subjects and other subjects, there must be some going up and some going down. The point has been made, Colin Beattie. There are not our figures, but I'm sure you'll have them from the open source. I'd like to move to resources and budgeting. I believe that you take a zero-based budgeting approach. Is that common in the public sector? It's hard for me to judge how many other organisations do exactly that approach. I suspect that it's becoming a little more common, because we're all, like all other public bodies, needing to manage exercise very careful husbandry over what is a pretty tight resource, understandably, these days. We have found it valuable to go back to taking an approach that fundamentally questions every year and refreshes the questioning of whether we need to be doing this, and, if not, can we move that resource to do something that's now a higher priority? If you're rebuilding your budget in total every year, that's hugely time-consuming and incredibly resource-intensive. I would point many of our programmes. We profiled them over a longer period than one year, so they might have a three-year horizon, for example. As you're going to it this year, for example, we're rolling forward the programmes that we created for the first time last year. Many of them have a broad profile, which will then be tweaked and adjusted rather than completely designed from scratch. So it's not from fact completely a zero-based budgeting process? Yes, but I did bit, Alice, of you, on two. Just obviously if you have a one-year spending settlement then, in that sense as well, that's what we've had each year going back. When we gave evidence last year, we said, you know, I said specifically that it was a year of base budgeting and that's what we're taking forward. However, when we introduced the programme approach, we did allow the programmes to put a profile, that's in a life cycle, where they were projecting their resource use. All we're saying is that that's not a given, that we have to every year revisit that and make sure that that still stands up. Take it that you're using a hybrid budgeting process, in fact. The portion of the budget that is really incremental budgeting, doesn't that need specialist training? Well, we have specialist staff within the organisation in planning and performance and finance staff. So as an agency, we're not all educationalists. We have a lot of specialist staff to support us in how to do this. You'd have specialists in the centre, but the people that are actually on the coalface are feeding back the information that will inform that budget, need to understand the incremental accounting that's involved in this. I'm not sure they need to know the technical element, but what they need to feed back is how effective the activities that we've been undertaking during that current year are actually having on the learning experiences in Scotland. So, I mean, we have a lot of feedback loops. We have a lot of discussions with key project leaders, for example, of key pieces of work. At this time of year, it's the key point of doing that because we're reviewing all the programmes to make sure that we're clear what the resource requirements are for next year, as we speak, and then that'll be profiled and put together. What about intangible outputs? How do you factor that in in terms of having the portion of the budget that's zero based? I'm not sure what you mean by intangible outcomes. Well, there's intangible outcomes where there's no direct fiscal element in the budget, but there is an outcome that has a notional value. We take a very structured approach to this, which we've been developing over the last few years. Every programme has a set of outcomes and a set of performance measures, and all of our corporate functions have KPIs. That allows the start of the programmes to be about what are we trying to achieve, irrespective of resources, and then the resources built below that. There could well be, just by doing certain activity, other outcomes that are identified for each of the programmes that don't require resource. I would highlight that, given that our resource base is 80 per cent staff and very a little other spend that we can actually make when you take off accommodation and travel and subsistence, for example, most of it is about the deployment of our staff and how effective they are and what difference they are making. If, effectively, you've moved into a hybrid burgeoning process, what about your fiscal indicators and your trend analysis? Won't that be quite difficult to do comparisons when you're formulating this sort of budget? I would have to take absolute specialist advice as to whether it's that difficult. From my perspective, we can take an overview over the past number of years and see where our trends have been. We have that. We have monthly performance reporting in-year, which makes it clear what the trends are in terms of spend against forecast, but also in terms of impact, what difference things are making. We make adjustments, as Bill referred to earlier, when we made adjustments to the inspection process in August-September. That was a result of a mid-year exercise that we undertook to see where we were. We have a very well-rehearsed and rigorous process of understanding where our spend is going and what difference we're making. If this is the first year that you've brought in zero-based budgeting, your trend analysis is going to be distorted? No, it was the opposite in a sense. We were doing zero-based budgeting up until this point where we introduced new programmes from 1 April. When the new programme approach, rather than a structural organisational structure approach to planning our work, we introduced a programme approach from 1 April. At that point, every single programme had set out its longer-term objectives and had a life cycle at that point. All I'm saying is that now, for this year, we're revisiting that to make sure that that's still appropriate and updating it in light of what we've learned this year. Okay, that point wasn't clear from the information that I had. If you've been doing zero-based budgeting up to this point and you're now going on to a more hybrid basis, is that because of resource constraints? Yes and no. Yes, we are under resource constraints. I would want to highlight that. From 2012-13 to 2015-16, we've had a reduction of about 12 per cent in our budgets, and in 2016-17, in the spending review last year, 7 per cent reduction in our budgets. We have to manage that. That's not different in other parts of public service, so that's just an exercise we have to go through. What that's meant is that we have to revisit whether what we're doing is having the impact that we expect it to do. And we've had to, for example, ask more of our staff by being more agile and responsive in terms of their deployment, for example, whilst bearing down on core costs of the agency, which of course we would be doing anyway. You've also mentioned here about specialist skills and problems in recruiting staff with specialist skills, particularly on the IT side, and we're well aware from other examples in the public sector of whether there have been difficulties in that. How are you handling that? How is it being co-ordinated? There's an understanding that there is a central process, more or less, for this now. How do you fit into that? We, as an executive agency, follow all the Scottish Government protocols, and we are therefore keyed in to things like the process that you're talking about for IT staff through a digital directorate. When we are looking for certain skillsets, we are able to go through Isis, the core Government IT provider, and a digital directorate to try and identify the skill sets that we need, in particular for short-term pieces of work. We have, for example, access to the Lockheed Martin contract, which we have used to develop pieces of development work in the IT area, which we've needed to do, such as an actual improvement app. That's invaluable to us, because, especially for the specialist level of skill and the amount of time we might need that skill, there is no way that we could attract the skills and expertise that we would need in an agency like ours. Obviously, as you know, there are issues about the salary levels that certain people would expect. I would also want to highlight, in terms of specialist skills, though we have an issue with educational expertise as well. As the fiscal constraint applies across ourselves at national level and at local authority level, there is less ability for us to take second dews out of the system in education providers as well. They are not willing to come and they are too busy doing their own job in their local area. We need to bear that in mind in terms of our constraints as well. Looking again at your budgeting process, according to your cells, you re-prioritise your resources in June 2016 over the education delivery plan. What impact did that have on your budget? How did you handle that and what has been the impact? Did you have to restate the budget? We had to do some—it wasn't just the budget, but our total resource allocation. We had to have an exercise of re-prioritising and moving resources to deal with what were then, in year, higher priorities than what we had originally set. We did that through our structure process to identify what our commitments were in the delivery plan, whether we graded them, whether they were already within what we were going to do, whether they were a new ask, and then we re-organised our resource profile to be able to deliver on it. Is that re-prioritisation for a fixed period? Oh, yes. Thank you. Do you want to very briefly? I might just—in every possibility I lack—no specialist knowledge in this, and this is all a very big learning curve for me. Each of the years, from 2013-14, a third of your budget by the end of the year is transferred within the year. Is that because—because it's remarkable similarly right along the columns—is that in order to allow you to address new government initiatives? If that were the case, you would be able to sustain your longer-term planning for the core budget that you have been identified for? The in-year transfers are previously agreed at the beginning of the year pieces of work that we are being asked to undertake where the money is held elsewhere. At some point during the year, there are only two points of the financial year where you are allowed to make transfers. That money is transferred notionally across to our budget to account for that. We are being asked, for example, by policy divisions within the government, to undertake a specific piece of work. They are giving us a specific amount of money to do it. A lot of that money is grants. We are supplied money to co-ordinate grant giving to other organisations, so the money comes into us and we then distribute the money to the grant receivers. The reason for doing that was because we are applying a greater level of control and strategic oversight of those grants than was possible prior to us having them. When you have the approach that my colleague understands in more detail than I do, it is not really zero-based budgeting, although you called it that. Is that the purpose of that, to recognise that there will be government initiatives that will not be fully funded and you therefore have to, although you have a long-term plan, shift resources quickly? Does that mean that you would encourage people to be short-term or present what they are doing in a slightly different way than if they had the space to develop something over a period of time when they know that they have the budgets behind them? I would not hide from the fact that there is always attention between our long-term planning of what we would believe that we want to do and pressures on new ideas and new things that come along during the course of any particular year. A lot of the time, though, it is about changing emphasis. It is not necessarily about stopping entirely doing one thing and starting to do something different. It is about changing emphasis in relation to a pressure during the course of the year. Government initiatives that are underfunded? It certainly can be driven by government initiatives where we need to reprioritise some of our own existing resources to meet them. The attainment advisers would be a classic example of that. Thank you very much. That is the end of this session. I thank the witnesses for their time.