 Good morning, and welcome to the 28th committee meeting of our education children and people committee in 2023. The first item on our agenda today is an evidence session with a panel of academics and experts in education policy to appreciate the progress made to date on the education reform, including the impact of recent reports and reviews on the ground. We are interested in any progress that has been made on the implementation of the 2021 OECD report on Scotland's curriculum for excellence. I welcome this morning Dr Janet Brown, who is the convener of the education committee at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Professor Gordon Stobart, Emeritus Professor of Education, the Institute of Education, University College London, Professor Walter Humes, the honorary professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling, and finally Dr Maria Shapira, the associate professor in sociology at the University of Stirling also. I'd like to move straight to questions from members and I'll bring in firstly my advice convener Ruth Maguire. Thank you. Thank you convener. Good morning panel, thanks for being with us. I'm interested to start off by hearing your reflections on curriculum for excellence, which parts of it have been a success. Is there anything that you would have changed about curriculum for excellence? Who would like to come in first on that one? First and foremost, the philosophy of curriculum for excellence was absolutely bang on. It was about trying to think about what should be taught in schools, the way it's taught, tailoring the education, so it's interesting, making sure that there are different contexts in which children can learn and to actually at that point give people flexibility and allow people to have different pathways through the system with a view to making sure that individuals in the system not only enjoyed their education but benefited from their education and were allowed to do what they wanted to do and came out at the end with something that was valuable. We were supposed to be coming away from the three two-term dash scenario. There was a plan to do that and there was a plan to basically make sure that there was a three to eighteen curriculum that actually enabled people to have a good pathway through the system. As with any type of change, I think the implementation is always the biggest challenge and unfortunately for CFE implementation of significant amounts of that change happened when there was severe public pressure on funding etc. So the whole issue of implementation became quite a big challenge. I think that a lot of benefit came from that. You can see some examples in some schools of really good progression paths and different ways in which people go through the system. I think that there was a refreshment of the types of learning that was undertaken and it gave some teachers some freedom. I think that some of the challenges were associated with the preparation that was undertaken prior to the introduction at all stages probably of CFE and I'll probably pass it on to someone else to continue that. Before you do, convener, if I could just come back in. You spoke there about implementation and sometimes that can be a bit of a theme in terms of new works. Do you think that the implementation was a challenge? Was it understood how much resource and capacity in the classroom was understood at the time of implementing curriculum for excellence or do you think that—and there simply wasn't the resource there or resources were too tight—was it understood at the time? I don't think that it was scoped well enough. If we are going to do change now, we really need to scope what we need to put in place to make it successful. I think that curriculum for excellence was well intentioned but, as I have written elsewhere, it was under-conceptualised and it wasn't thought through sufficiently. That led to a number of problems. I didn't particularly like the word capacity, which my sources tell me was a coinage not by an educationist but by a civil servant at a very late stage in the deliberations. My conversation with some people who were involved in the original plan suggested that many of them would have preferred the word purposes for purposes of education. Having said that, it also failed to take sufficient account of what we have learned from the past in relation to curriculum development. There is a very well-known educationist called Lons Stenhouse, who worked in Scotland for a good many years, who wrote a book in the 1970s that would have given lots of useful ideas about how to develop curriculum. In particular, the role of teachers. Part of the problem with curriculum for excellence was that the messages to teachers were not sufficiently clear and they weren't as well articulated as they might have been. Teachers kept getting mixed messages. They were told at one level that this was going to be transformational. It was going to make Scottish education world class, but at another level, they were told that they were already doing lots of this stuff, just continue doing the good stuff that they are doing at the moment. That kind of mixed message is not helpful. As the programme developed, there were all sorts of operational issues that arose, particularly the excessive bureaucracy that the Government attempted to address in the period 2014-16, not wholly successfully. Lots of good intentions, some of the ideas are certainly worth retaining, but as an example of how to move forward in curriculum development, it could have been improved. Similarly to other witnesses, what we found is that yes, curriculum for excellence had excellent purposes to improve the depth and breadth of education that we offer to children and young people. However, there were lots of issues with the implementation of the aims of the curriculum, and of course there were capacity issues, financial constraints, and these goes both to lack of specialist teachers, limited contact time and things like that, but these were not the only problem and what our recently completed study showed, one of the main problem was the demand of accountability and the culture of performativity in schools, when schools are focused on attainment statistics, and this focus on attainment statistics very often comes at the expense of more pedagogical considerations, and this is when very often the declared values of the curriculum for excellence are foregone in order to provide this better attainment at the school level, and what we could see at our study was pretty comprehensive because we not just analyzed existing data and we also collected from the school leaders information about the provision that is being offered in secondary school, but we also had a number of case studies with teachers, with parents and young people to understand how curriculum decisions are being made and how choices are being made both by school teachers and young people, and we found some absolutely appalling practices, for example channeling young people into higher performing subjects, discouraging young people from taking up a subject where they are not predicted to perform well, abandoning whole subjects which might be very important for providing a holistic well-rounded education, but abandoning them because this subject deemed as low performing, so for us the culture of performativity was one of the main issues that stand on the way of the successful implementation of the curriculum for excellence. And finally Professor Stobart. You're probably aware that I came, I'm an outsider to the Scottish system so there'll be some things I'll get wrong, but I came in on the back of the OECD report in 2021 because they were concerned that in senior secondary the curriculum for excellence just lost power was their words for it because the school exam curriculum takes over. So CFE actually fades away at that point and we get back into some fairly traditional teaching and learning styles there. So the concern is how do we get a better alignment between the curriculum for excellence and and the assessment that goes on in senior secondary and I think you have to say it's fairly weak at the moment, the curriculum is the exam syllabus. Okay. That's lovely, thank you very much. So we've heard a little bit already about this in terms, so does the panel agree that the curriculum for excellence is underpinned by that active learning and how learners construct their knowledge and if so what practical implications does this have for teachers and other educational professionals in developing what they're teaching locally? Does anyone want to come in on that? Professor Humes? You're all sitting back and not catching my eye. It's like the headstone, it's class. We're too polite, we haven't been introduced fully into the political world yet. You used the phrase active learning, I think that was one of the problems with the beginning of curriculum for excellence. The phrase active learning was used without much general appreciation of what was meant by that so that some people interpreted it as getting the children to get up and move around the classroom, for example, rather than meaning deeper intellectual engagement with the material they're being presented with, finding it challenging, having to work through problems with it, having to seek advice, having to consult sources in order to find answers to the problems that they were presented with. That's a more meaningful sense of active learning. One of the other terms that I think caused problems and continues to reverberate, interestingly, is interdisciplinary learning. That was a phrase that I think caused discontent and alarm in the breasts of many teachers, because they saw it as a kind of assault on their subject specialism, which properly understood it is not, properly done, interdisciplinary learning has much to commend it, but there needed to be a case made to teachers for the value of interdisciplinary learning, and for a long time that case wasn't adequately made. We're now in a better position, thanks to some considerable extent to the work of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in particular Professor Colin Graham, and we have made progress on that, but getting a clear idea of what key concepts mean and communicating them effectively to the whole teaching force is part of the strategy that's needed. Janet, you were name-checked there, so would you like to follow up? No, I also would like to thank Professor Colin Graham for his work in IDL. There is now an IDL network across Scotland where teachers can get together to try and actively engage with the true meaning of IDL. It's not just project-based, it's actually using two or three disciplines to actually solve the problem that could not be solved on its own with through one individual discipline, so I think that that is something that's really important. I think that the other aspect of why active learning is challenging in schools is A, the timetable, which is very rigid in a lot of places, and still is in most schools, and the other is the disciplinary requirement that goes all the way through the school sector, and that's actually through into universities, if we're being very honest, because IDL is getting better in universities, but it's still not across the board, and we're not taking sufficient advantage of it, I think. But I think that if you're a teacher of a particular subject and you have to start understanding and learning how you can engage with another subject, you need the time to do that, and that is not readily available in the current system. Therefore, for a teacher to actually go and try and do an interdisciplinary learning activity with another teacher within that school, it becomes very challenging, and it tends to go down to the lowest common denominator, because you'll do something useful, like, well, we'll do a project on ecology, which will bring in biology and physics and chemistry and stuff, but you won't actually explore the different connections between the subjects, so it goes back to time and experience, and why did that not happen? Well, number one, we didn't encourage or enable the teachers to actually develop that skillset. I think that we need to think about the skillset that teachers need to have over and above their individual subject and pedagogy, but the working with others, the collaboration, the understanding of different disciplines is something that we need to think through. Marina, are you wanting to come in on this at all? You don't need to. I'm just going along, because we're trying to figure out where all your interests and expertise lie in those early questions, so maybe as the session progresses, the questions might be directed at individuals. I'd like to share some thoughts about what we found about broad general education stage provision, which I think is also an important key to understand how the curriculum for excellence is being implemented, and what we found that BGE stage, of course it shows lots of variability. The provision is different between schools, between local authorities. It is different in timing when schools introduce for the first time the subject selection, how schools navigate transition between BGE to the senior phase. However, the overwhelming impression is that BGE stage is very fragmented. Sometimes in a week children are being taught by 15 teachers, and one of the main problems is that BGE stage is just trying to mimic the senior phase by introducing all the subjects that children would later select for national qualifications, but this very often comes at the expense of not being able to provide any in-depth learning. It comes at the expect of very limited subject content when so many subjects are being tried to provide to young children, and then sometimes they are being forced to make these early selections, every choices, and this again comes back to the culture of performativity when BGE is literally, instead of offering young people a broad holistic education, it just coached them, prepared them to the senior phase, so that is probably as much as I would think. It goes back to your first point, where it is almost selecting them for the courses that they are going to perform the best in, is not it, as well? Professor Stobart, you were nodding. Do you want to come in on this before we move to the next stage? To remind, I think that curriculum for excellence has been widely respected internationally. I come at this from a comparative angle, and it was looked on as ahead of the game, but that was 20 years ago, and nothing stands still. Just to remind you that I do not think that there is a country that is not modernising its curriculum at the moment to try and keep up with the changes in society and the like. Over the past couple of years, the appearance of AI has galvanised some of this thinking as well. How do we proceed when all this is available now for students, teachers and the like? Scotland was ahead of the game in terms of this curriculum thinking but how do you stay with the changes and make the adjustments that are needed? I think that in a sense backing up what has been said is that it was admired from a distance at a general level. Nobody asked too many questions about implementations and what did the teachers do and how did they feel? It was a sort of noble ambition. We will not go into the details of it in the classroom. I will have some questions on implementation later on. Pam Duncan-Glancy, do you have a supplementary on the theme before I come to my last question? I do, if that is okay, thank you. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for the answers you have given so far and also for the information that you submitted in advance, which has been helpful. I want to pick up on the point that Dr Shapira you made about whole subjects, in your words, being abandoned. In particular, contrary to the aspiration of the curriculum for excellence, fewer subjects are now studied. There has been a decline, as you have said, in your paper on social subjects such as arts and modern languages. Can I ask why you think that is and what we need to do about it? There are several issues for that. The trend for studying less modern languages, abandoning modern languages, is a long term. It started before the curriculum for excellence implementation and under the curriculum of excellence, the uptake of modern languages is declining further. But we also found that the uptake of, as you said, social subjects, to an extent, sciences, technological sciences is also going down. For us, you all probably heard that it is difficult to make a comparison between qualifications entries before the introduction of the curriculum of excellence and after because the qualifications has also been changed and the way they have been recorded for the official statistics this way also changed. But for us, looking at the trends under the curriculum for excellence and seeing these trends in the reduction of these subjects uptakes really tells us about the curriculum. So what are the reasons? Well, the reasons are the schools focus on a smaller number of subjects and this idea that when young people are offered less subjects, they have a chance to develop better learning and to produce better outcomes on this limited number of subjects, which is not the case as our study shows what we found on analysis carried out at the level of schools in schools where young people enter more qualifications in S4. In these schools, more young people pass national five qualifications in S4 and there is also a relationship between entry into qualifications in S4 and transitions to higher level qualifications and qualification pass in the 16th year. So this hasn't happened but that was very often the line of thinking in the attempt to balance between the systemic demands, attainment improvement requirement and limited resources. So why young people have been offered less social sciences subjects because if previously it was the norm was seven, eight subjects and young people could take up more than one social science subject and at least taking up one social subject was a requirement. Now they don't have to do it and if they take up one social subject it's fine and the same is with sciences and from what we were told, children are discouraged for example to take up more than one science subject. Again, the concern here that they wouldn't be able to achieve good results if for example this study was physics and chemistry instead of just focusing on one subject. So there is a mixed back, these influences that I mentioned but they are also limited school resources, they are timetable issues and once this flexibility idea has been introduced it was far easier to channel development into this direction and just offer less subjects and channel young people into taking less subjects than trying to tackle all the surrounding issues that would allow to take the whole range of subjects. Thank you. Do the other panel members want to contribute to that? Are you okay? Right, fine, just checking, thanks. So I was interested to find out what the panel thought of and if you agreed with the OECD that the role of knowledge within the CFE requires a bit more clarification and if so in what way, how could the understanding of the role of knowledge be consistently understood when curriculum making happens at that local level? Janet? I think that we need to understand what knowledge should be in our curriculum as well because the world has changed since the 20 years that curriculum for instance was created so it's what knowledge do we need? Do we need to collate facts in children or do we actually give them the knowledge of how to access facts and how to use facts and how to identify what facts are real and what facts aren't? So for me knowledge is absolutely a critical part of the curriculum and it's a critical part of what you need to develop in a school or in a college or in university or in a training provider environment. So for me knowledge is absolutely critical. It does need to be clarified what we need to be encouraging children to learn rather than providing them with facts. I think that's a very different perspective for me and I think teachers absolutely take great care in making sure that the children that are under their care are getting the sort of education they think they need but as has been said by Maria on several occasions today it's often driven by the measurement system we have so is the knowledge that we're providing the knowledge that actually gets the merit that society currently places on national fires and hires versus actually the knowledge children and young people need to be successful in the 21st century. Professor Stobart, do you want simply to point out that we don't learn in a vacuum, we need to learn about things. There was a move for learning to learn as if you could do it without any content and that's just not in my book how it works. We need to have mastery of some information of facts of basics in order to be able to think about them use them and that kind of deeper learning so it is it's a combination of asking the question what do we need to learn now but we do need to learn something it's not just a kind of we just know how to do things but we don't know anything. Janet again you want to come in before I bring in. Can I just say I think some subjects and being scientists originally I think some subjects you absolutely need to learn in a sequential way because you need to build that knowledge in order to be able to progress. Different subjects have different approaches and different needs so I think we need to understand that knowledge is not across the board it's a different way of doing it and I totally agree with the contextualisation of knowledge. Marina, do you want to come in on this before I bring in Walter? No, I totally agree with the previous speakers here. I think I just wanted to add that it's important for us to look also at different areas where our knowledge is important but what schools do they are preparing young people factual knowledge is important but schools are preparing young people for the life in the 21st century and if this is the aim one of the aims of the curriculum we also need to develop measures which go beyond traditional assessment on subjects that they learn to assess how well young people are prepared to this you know citizenship and work on life in the 21st century and how well they're equipped in particular by the curriculum for excellence which explicitly sets these goals and at the moment we don't have this kind of assessment in our schools. Thank you Marina. Professor Humes, Walter. Yes, I agree very much with the comment in the OECD report that we need to be clear about how we position knowledge in our curriculum and as part of our educational aims. I think there was a time when we began to be less confident about knowledge because we realised we had undervalued skills and in the attempt to adjust knowledge and skills more effectively we perhaps became a little fuzzy about what exactly we meant by knowledge but from my perspective both propositional knowledge, formal knowledge and procedural knowledge are important and both should be strongly represented in the school curriculum. I also think and this is a source of concern it should be a source of concern for all of us that knowledge and truth in our society are under serious assault from a variety of sources not least the technology companies. We need to be clear about what we mean by knowledge and we need to be ready to defend it because there are deep democratic and ethical issues involved in this debate. Nobody has an easy set of answers but it is an issue that we should be engaging with very strongly. Thank you Walter and I am just mindful of some of the meetings that I have had recently regarding that very subject but can I bring in Ben Macpherson who has a supplementary in here? Thank you convener and I am just building into the points that have been made in recent answers. It is my understanding both historically and in the current situation that the subject of English has significant prominence in the Scottish curriculum. For good reason it is an important aspect of learning but to have such prominence as a requirement in terms of entry to further and higher education in many cases in a situation where individuals can learn to write in the way that suits them best in their careers. In other subjects, for example, history and other social sciences, they can learn to assess truth and validity in other subjects. Do we need to reconsider the prominence of English without downgrading its importance in the Scottish curriculum? I should offer a confession at this point. I think that I have your attention. I started my career as a teacher of English and I value the possibilities of the English language in all its form. However, I agree that the world outside schools has changed and that different forms of communication are appropriate in different contexts, particularly in employment contexts. I would like to argue for the retention of a version of English as it has been taught in the past, but perhaps looking for different indicators of a capacity to manipulate language so that the old formal essay in composition and interpretation and so on may be judged no longer as essential as they were in the past. However, I think that I would want to have a more extended conversation about how a reconfigured subject of English might look and what it can perhaps contribute that no other subject can, because conceptual clarity in whatever field you operate is important. You have to be able to define your terms, you have to be able to say precisely what you are hoping to achieve, and you have to be able to communicate. I think that we have undervalued oral communication in schools for too long. I am interested in your question. I do not want to state a final position until we have had further dialogue about it, but it is a good question to ask. Does anyone want to come in on that? I have Willie Rennie wanting to come in on this theme. Also, as an ex-English teacher. I think there is a whole discussion around what is English, what counts as the subject, the domain of English, because are we talking about literacy and the ability to communicate, and if so, shouldn't there be much more emphasis on oral work and the like? Or are we doing literature, which is always a tendency to fall back on dead white poets and all that kind of stuff. I think we need a good discussion about what is English, how are we seeing English. I think the idea of being able to communicate effectively is probably at the heart of it, and knowing how to put forward an argument and use writing that way and to use speech that way. Janet, before I bring in Mr Rennie. It is a very quick one. As a starting officer scientist, and also as you can hear from the way I speak, I have not always been a Scott, my experience was I stopped doing, I did English language and English literature, which was the English system, and I stopped doing that at 15 or 16 year level stage. Then I was put on a course of English for scientists, because we were considered that we needed to be continued to be able to explain things to people, but one of the things that has come up in the Royal Society's discussions, the learned societies group recently held an ethics session. One of the things we talked about there was the ability for rhetoric, the fact that how have we lost the ability to argue our points, because one of the challenges in modern society is the fact that we actually don't have good conversations and we don't have good arguments and we aren't able to change people's minds. We sit in one space and we talk to the people who have common views that we do, but we sort of lost that ability to have a positive engagement and a positive discussion with people of different views and have the ability to change people's minds. And this is not just Scotland, this is everywhere in the world. So the challenge for me on English is should we add that to the English curriculum and actually get rid of the dead white poets? Willie Rennie and Ross Greer are wanting in on this. It's obviously peaked her attention. As someone who seems incapable of persuading other people to my point of view, I'm interested in this area, but just returning to the issue about knowledge, there are some who are very vocal on this, very strident about the role of knowledge. What I really want to understand is where are we with this in practice? Is it the scale of the problem? I understand the future threat, but where are we now? Is this deviation from knowledge a real problem and what do we need to do to fix it? I say first thing, we need to stop teaching to the test. We need to start allowing people to develop a broader knowledge other than what is defined in any assessment, no matter what that assessment is. Anyone else? Maria? Maria, sorry, sorry, Maria. I agree and just do a lot more creative way of teaching to in particular when we are talking about maths and sciences. Find some more creative measures of outcomes. It's not a secret that our young people 15 years old are underperforming. The international tests, which exactly test that they don't test knowledge of facts, you know, unconnected facts, what they do, for example, the PISA test. It tests how well young people can use the knowledge, understand what they are being learned about and can use it, can implement it for problem solving and Scottish students are not doing well on these tests. I think that this is one of the way we can start thinking about it. What do we teach? Why do we teach? What do we want the students to achieve? Walter and Gordon, both wanting in as well on this. Yes. Thinking of your question, I don't think that we have an immediate problem in the sense that most teachers are still committed to teaching formal knowledge in the areas that they have expertise in. My concern is to do with the extent to which traditional forms of grappling with knowledge, engaging with knowledge, may be being undermined by technology, so that instead of a youngster having to spend time reading things and discussing them and debating them with colleagues and answering questions by teachers, there is a tendency for some youngsters, certainly not all, to say, oh, I don't need to know that, I can look it up on Wikipedia, so that technology is seen as a sort of crutch, which means that they do not have to engage with the material as strongly and in his persistent way as perhaps was the case in the past. Acquiring a body of knowledge is not an easy thing. It takes time. You encounter problems, you take wrong directions and in the process your cognitive structure strengthens by having to encounter these uncertainties, so that I would see that retaining that engagement with knowledge as an essential part of any healthy educational system. Gordon? Just to chip in with one point, your question really raises it. Is it in a cohesive society? What knowledge do we need in common? I'm thinking if we're doing it in English, what problems do we need? We use expressions, we use that way. Should we be looking for a common pool of that so that we can assume that everybody can come along with that? Is that part of our duty, or do we all go our different ways? Ross Greer, on the subject. I strongly agree with Janet's point on the importance of rhetoric and Gordon's on wider communication skills. I'd be interested in your thoughts on whether those are the kind of skills that need to sit inside a subject silo like English. When we speak to employers, they often make the point that a lot of employers don't need to know that somebody was able to get a B in higher English, but they need to know that that person can communicate with their team, with their colleagues at work, and they can communicate with a customer. Are those not exactly the kind of skills that Professor Hayward's recommendations around a diploma could recognise? You can be recognised for your communication skills, your ability to persuade, without having done three 50-minute periods of English a week leading up to that particular exam. We need to recognise those kind of skills in that more holistic sense rather than getting trapped in the subject silos that lead us to all the issues that were talked about before, such as BGE, just becoming a diluted version of senior phase, etc. Janet Brown, yes. I totally and utterly agree, but we need to make sure that it is somewhere in the curriculum, because otherwise it gets lost. I think that's where we are right now. We're losing things because they aren't in any one place. The question is, does everything have to be subject-based, or is there something that is broader? That, for me, is the debate that we should be having. That's a much longer-term reform than the short one, but if we don't have discussions on longer-term reform, then we will never get there. I completely agree with it. It is something that should be across everything, because arguably one of the places that have rhetoric needs to be the most important at the moment is around politics, with the big and the little p, but also around the green agenda, around what we should be as a society. For me, it is not just English, but English is the place that it's always been. Walter, do you want to come in? Yes. This is slightly provocative, but you've got to live on the edge sometime. I understand where Ross is coming from, but as he was speaking, I thought of an area where I would want to defend more traditional approaches to English. I think that public discourse is in decline, as evident not just in the racier end of journalism, but also in public documents. I lead a sad life. I spend a lot of my time reading minutes, reports, committee documents, and I'm often pretty shocked at the poor standard of English in them, so that for certain purposes, particularly in a legislative chamber, absolute precision and clarity of language is essential. In fact, not to have it would be to undermine the democratic process. I'm not saying that everybody has to have that level of linguistic skill, but we need to have it somewhere in the educational system. Gordon, following up on that, really, in terms of the examination system, what role does oral communication play if you look at the baccalaureate, look at other systems? Students are expected to make oral contributions to defend themselves orally. If you get down to a pencil and paper exam system, there's no demand on that, so that becomes a curriculum issue as well. Where do we wait oral contributions? How can we encourage them? It is across subjects, because you can, as a historian, you can defend a piece and things, but we don't have room for that in the British system. Marina? I'll just put my university lecturer hat on here, and for years I'm observing the very poor writing, English language writing skills among our Scottish students. English students write much better, and our Scottish students are being admitted to our programme with requirement of higher A or at least B in English. Unless they're coming with advanced higher, they can't write logically, coherently, they can't construct an argument, they can't critically engage with writing. They learn by year four almost everyone can do it, and in the way that, you know, justifies your, supports your point about should we introduce this writing communication skills within every subject because every subject requires better communication. I'm just not sure it is possible to do in schools. I think in schools we need to have this dedicated subject of English, which improves their ability to express themselves in writing coherently because my understanding is that this is not that being done and young people are being encouraged to write almost in bullet points in many subjects, and we then face this problem in the universities. Thank you very much. As the convener, I have to always keep my eye on the clock, and I'm very apologetic to my fellow committee members that the questions by the convener and vice convener have taken this letter time to get through, but it's been really, really important evidence that we've been taking. I move now to questions from Stephanie Callahan and thank you for your patience. Thank you, convener, and I think we could all talk about this all day, to be quite honest with you, but I'm going to move on and talk about implementation, which I know isn't always a really, really popular word, but there's been that kind of increasing focus, I suppose, on applying and carrying through changes in education systems, and a number of different models of change have been suggested, too. What is the panel's view on how we best turn policy into practice? Maybe I'll start with yourself, Janet. Well, I think the first thing is we need to think really carefully. We need to think about unintended consequences. We need to think about an overarching policy that encompasses all education skills. We started off with 3218. We ended up with primary phase, BGE, senior phase, colleges, universities, et cetera. I think we need to think about the implementation needs to think about how we do it as much as what we're going to do, and try and address as many of the identified unintended consequences that we can. We need to learn from the past, because I think we have a brilliant learning scenario here for how we implemented CFE, and we need to be honest about it, and we need to be willing to say what really has worked and what really hasn't, and not just focus on one area, because I think if we look at the OECD reports, they highlighted several areas that needed change, and we tend to focus on one or two of those areas for change, which can drive the system, but are not going to be a solution to the full thing. I think that it's learning from the past, which Walter has already said. I think that it is about thinking about how we do it, engaging across the piece, but the other big thing for me on implementation is taking Scotland with us. It's not just schools and pupils and learners and parents. It is Scotland itself, because one of the big issues I think with curriculum for excellence was Scotland didn't really buy into the change in the senior phase. Unless we get a change, if we decide to implement Louise Haywood's recommendations, which I think are excellent, then I think that we need to make sure that Scotland buys into that and we don't slip back into what is comfortable and what we did and what we learnt, because what I learnt definitely when I was growing up is not going to fit me if I were to live till 2050. It would not serve me well, and we should not be doing that to our young people. I should pick up on that as well, but certainly culturally, in Scotland, we have this pride in teaching our children to read, to write, etc. Are there barriers? Is the cultural shift for the wider public a bit of a barrier to it, and how do we address that? I think that Marina has highlighted the fact that the measurement system drives what happens. Historically, the only qualifications that were discussed were the ones that came out in the summer. That is not what the vast majority of people in Scotland would like to do or would benefit Scotland by doing. We need to look at our measurement system. We need to look at what we value as a society. I will give the example of my children who did really well at school. My friends could not understand why they were not becoming lawyers, and the answer is that they did not want to. We have an aspiration at level in Scotland, and we have an aspiration to get as many children and young people as possible into university. Is that what Scotland needs? Is that what our young people need? We need to ask that question and be honest about it. I suppose that it is about what we value then. I am interested in what the other panel members have to say about turning policy into practice. Central to successful implementation is winning the hearts and minds of teachers. At the end of the day, it is the teachers who deliver the new policy, although I would be slapped over the wrist for using the word deliver. One of the problems that we face, and we have faced it for quite a long time—it is not a very recent development—is that there has been a loss of trust and confidence among teachers in the policies that they are being asked to promote, and in particular the leadership of many of those who promote them. We have a culture where teachers are too often expected to ask only how questions and when questions—never why questions. To implement a policy successfully, you have to persuade people to make the case. If there is a good case, teachers are reasonable people. They will listen to the case and either agree with it or say, okay, but I am not too happy with this bit of it, and you then have a constructive dialogue. It is also required that the policy is communicated more widely, not just to classroom teachers but to all stakeholders, especially parents and society at large, because public education is a civic good. It is an important bulwark of democracy, and so you have to have as many citizens as possible buying in to this vision of where we are going in the educational system. I think that we need to be quite honest that teachers have not always been presented with an intellectual case. One of the things that I say—and it is never terribly popular—is that we have had a lack of intellectual leadership in Scottish education to make the case. There has been too much cozy conformity of rehashing the same concepts and ideas and everybody saying that we are doing a fine job. That is not going to produce the world-class educational system that I think that we all want. There is going to be uncomfortable discussion that will have to take place. It will involve not just teachers' leaders, it will involve politicians, it will involve leading figures in the big educational bureaucracies, it will involve inspectors, it will involve civil servants. The role of civil servants in policy development and implementation, in my view, requires much greater scrutiny than it has received hitherto. There will be a period of disruption to engage in that kind of intellectual argument. I said that I was going to be mildly controversial. I know on that theme that we have questions on that specifically later on from one of Mr Kidd. Stephanie Carrion, please. I do not know if anybody else wanted to contribute on that point. Support Professor Hulme's point. We need to answer the question what secondary education is for, what we want to produce. I don't think it's a bad thing to preparing young people well for transitioning into the higher education, but definitely that shouldn't be the only aim. Also, how do we measure this preparedness? We need to reconsider how we assess knowledge, not just how we deliver knowledge, but how we assess it and what we assess and if this assessment fit for purpose. It definitely needs to be changed. What is happening at the moment, again going back to the importance when you talk to school leaders and teachers and you talk about the most influential factors that affect their curriculum making processes and decisions. They always talk about systemic issues. They always talk about demands to increase attainment. Once you have this demand, you focus the schools of limited resources. These limited resources are being focused on higher level of subject delivery. Those young people who are taking the subjects on lower levels of national qualifications, they are not getting adequate provision and they are suffering from this clear equity issue here in the way how at the moment these external demands affect the school resources and the delivery of the curriculum and this really needs to stop because we have those who are not going to take up the subjects on national five or higher levels. These young people are suffering from another great provision. Gordon, this may be uncomfortable, but coming from the outside, I am amazed by how much committees, discussions, consultations Scotland keeps spinning the plates all the time. I wonder how you make a decision in a structure like this where you have all these different groups contributing. It leads to inaction as far as I come as a pragmatist who would want to say that something needs to be done. I am aware that structural changes are being made. I am not sure that I see a great deal else. We talk a lot about the higher order stuff and the need for a vision and everything else. As a pragmatist, I just want to say, and what's the first step? Where do we go on this to start making changes? How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? What's the first bite here? I come with a particular brief that I would want to look at the assessment system and the exam system. What I would say as well is that you cannot add stuff without taking stuff away. You cannot say to teachers, here is another good idea that we would like you to do. In order to do that, we have to clear some space. You will have seen my views that Scotland has a really cluttered examination system that I think is probably counterproductive. Scottish students are more heavily examined than I think anybody else in the world. I don't dare to say that too strongly, but probably. I do with Carlsberg, probably. Nowhere else has three sets of examinations in three years. Most now have moved to just one set of qualifications at 18. Most of your students stay on to 17 or 18. For me, there's a point there, a bit of an edge, that something could be done to change the system, but this is me from a very personal comparative point of view there. I'm ordering that my colleagues will be asking some questions around this later on, but I'm really interested in what you said there about, you know, there's more and more and more and more information coming. Naturally, there need to be decisions and steps made forward. Is that kind of about the idea that having to a larger group, taking those decisions, kind of keeps you with the status quo because you can't all agree and that it's maybe a, you need that small group to kind of lead forward and take that lead? I think it needs some policy leadership, yes, and I think, is there a tendency to say if we can't, these two groups aren't agreeing, we'll set up another group to get a consensus about it and so it goes on rather than saying we've really got to get down to some practical steps in what we need and it's always got, there's always going to be objections. You can't have a reform without some vested interest, you know, being upset by it. And of course, two more groups were announced yesterday. Exactly. Okay, can I, Stephanie Calhoun? Have you got any more? Just a small question to yourself, Walter. You spoke about teachers and winning hacks in mind, so you can take the words out of my mouth on that one. And I'm wondering as well, you know, teachers themselves too have such a wide range of views too, so how do we actually bring that together and have them moving forward together as well? I think the aim in Scottish education for a very long time and this predates devolution has always been to reach a consensus. Now, you can get a measure of consensus in terms of educational policy, but to expect complete consensus is I think not just overoptimistic. I think it's not entirely desirable either. I think there should always be questions that are left open to be revisited at a later date. For some educational issues, there may be a case for running two policies and seeing which of them actually produces better outcomes. So, yes, it's going to be difficult and teachers often tend to be temperamentally inclined to be conservative. They prefer the familiar. I think that's true of all of us in most spheres of life, but they are open-minded people if a good case is put to them. That's where I think we haven't done as much as we need to. There was a tendency to say when curriculum for excellence was introduced that this will liberate teachers, that they will have autonomy to make decisions, but since they had lived under a regime in which they were previously told exactly what to do, making that transition was never going to be easy and some of them didn't believe it. So they kept their heads down, perhaps paid lip service to the new policy but continued to do what they had always done. It's always possible to find subversive ways of responding to policies that you don't like. I think that we need to be open to more vigorous debate and not go for the easy consensus too quickly. I sometimes say in my more critical modes—this is not one of them this morning, by the way—I sometimes say that Scottish teachers are ambivalent. On the one hand, they say that we are professionals and we should be making those judgments ourselves. On the other hand, they often say in a jaded voice, just tell me what to do and I'll do it. That kind of professional response is not the kind of professional response that I would want to see. I want to see a profession that is vigorously engaged with ideas in which they engage in collaborative projects together and they work through pedagogic problems in teams and learn from each other. There is some evidence that that is going on. I know that work with Mark and Marina Stirling and another colleague who works with— Is that a meaning? No, it will come to me, but they have done excellent work with schools and local authorities engaging in precisely that kind of professional collaborative project that I was referring to. You have to have a measure of consensus, but to aim for complete consensus is, I think, probably mistaken. It is a measure of consensus and flexibility on how you reach there. Valerie Drew is the name of the other colleague. Well done getting that on record. Before we move to questions from Bill Kigg, Marina Stirling wants to come in on that as well, Stephanie. I just wanted to go for some empirical evidence that backs everything that Professor Humes said. Our study indeed shows and our conversations with teachers, focus groups with teachers shows that teachers very often do not really understand what they are supposed to do. They do not fully understand curriculum for excellence, but there is also a lack of capacity in terms, for example, of non-contact time for teachers to actively engage in the curriculum making processes. Here, providing teachers with this ability, providing them with more non-contact time for collaboration within schools, but also for collaboration across schools, subject teachers, across different schools, creating networks, taking the leadership for the curriculum development. Those are the things that can really help with implementation. Time for collaboration debate is absolutely vital. Bill Kigg, can I come to you now please? Thanks very much. When I attended school, I did learn one thing, which is to listen to what people are saying. I have heard a great deal of what you're going to say, but I'm still going to ask you these questions anyway, because we're in the Scottish Parliament and we need to have a wee bit of talk about politics and how it's handled. We know about the roles of national, local government and supporting policy change in education and even driving it. How do the panel suggest balancing these traditional top-down implementation processes with more bottom-up approaches? I know a bit of that has been covered already, but is mixing the two together somehow? How do you think that might be done, please? Who would like to go first on that one? Go on, Professor Humes. Yes, good question. It is highly political. The territory is contested, shall we say. One of the reasons that we are looking at proposed structural reforms is the perception that education Scotland in particular was too directive from the centre, was seen to be too close to Scottish government and that an insufficient scope was given to local authorities, to head teachers and to schools. Of course, there was the empowerment agenda, which was introduced by John Swinney a few years ago. That was a kind of compromise because he wanted to limit the powers of local authorities more than they were content with. There was a deals truck and we have the empowerment agenda, which gives more scope to local authorities. It has reduced the centralist role of education Scotland to some extent, although that kind of trench warfare is still going on. The major thing that was introduced, though, were the regional improvement collaboratives. There are six regional improvement collaboratives in Scotland, where groups of local authorities pull their expertise, their resources, their share ideas, and they have more scope than used to be the case to try things out in their particular localities. It is slightly complicated in that the heads of the regional improvement collaboratives are employees of one of the local authorities involved, so they must have a bit of conflict of loyalty between the fact that the local authority pays their salary, but they are expected to do something that deviates from the traditional pattern. There have been two reviews of the regional improvement collaboratives. They are variable. Some seem to be functioning better than others. There has been clearly quite a lot of good work going on at local level. The difficulty in the more recent evaluation is that it is quite hard to demonstrate that any impact derives from the regional improvement collaboratives and not from other things that are going on anyway. Proving an impact is tricky. However, there are attempts to express the principle of subsidiarity that allows some decision making to be taken at the lowest possible level, where it is going to have a direct effect, rather than having, as in the French system, missives being sent out from Paris, which all schools throughout the country are expected to follow. We are still grappling with that, but, as your preamble suggested, it is a formally political issue. What are the panel's views on how structural reform of the SQA in Education Scotland will support the approach for better outcomes for children and young people? I am not mean this wrongly, but it is really supposed to be about children and young people, rather than the process itself. How will that deliver? Gordon, do you want to come in first on that one? I do not feel a position to say that. Okay, that is fine. You just stipulated your hand. I am just trying to gauge your signals. I am just agreeing with what I said. Janet? I think we need to understand what structural reform is going to do. I know that there have been questions. Are we just changing the nameplate? What is going to be the difference? What are we trying to achieve with structural reform, I think, is a really critical question. I am not trying to defend anything here. I am trying to ask the question of exactly why, exactly what are we trying to do, what was the exact problem and how is this going to fix it, and really sit down and work that out before we go about doing it. I think that they are irrespective of what structural reform we are talking about. Obviously, there is the Willets Review as well. There is the purpose and principles. We have a whole series of reviews, as Gordon has pointed out, that have come out with recommendations. Currently, the Royal Society of Edinburgh's education committee is looking at all of them together, because we do not particularly want to respond to each one individually, because it is not very satisfying doing that. What we are doing is looking at them all together and trying to understand where they overlap, where they conflict potentially, where they reinforce each other. There is one educational system here. I think that the opportunity cost of any sort of structural reform needs to be thought through and the unintended consequences on other aspects of the system. I noticed in the cabinet secretary's comments yesterday about the fact that, from the SQA's perspective, it will continue its international agenda. The branding of that has an implication on their ability to operate internationally, for instance. When the colleges were reformed, there were unintended consequences associated with the change in the structure and the change in the governance mechanism for the colleges. I think that we just need to think carefully about what are the unintended consequences and what are the costs of that level of radical change, both in terms of expertise that is available and what could be done in that period of time and the time that is lost through institutional reform. Do you think that there could be a danger of throwing the baby out of the bath water if we change it too radically too quickly? I do not know, but I would like to know somebody else's thought about it. Professor Humes, do you think that that is an area that I have written about quite a lot? Please stop me if I show signs of wittering on for too long. In Scotland, when there has been a recognition of the need to make change, the automatic response has always been to make structural change, to play around with the agencies. In a way, we are where we are at the moment because a political decision was taken to cabinet secretaries ago to replace SQA and reform Education Scotland. That was a political decision. Two years further on, there seems to have been a bit of a loss of nerve. The process has slowed down a bit. Partly, I suspect, is because of the legislative programme. Partly, I suspect, is because of cost concerns. In what I have written, I have often said that structural issues are not the principal problem that we face. I think that we have got plenty of structures. In fact, in some ways, Scottish education is trapped in its own bureaucracy. There are just so many agencies with so many people meeting again and again in different arenas revisiting the same issues and coming to no very firm conclusion. The real problems of Scottish education are cultural rather than structural. They are to do with power and the capacity of key players to defend their interests, their territories and to stop things happening. In one of the papers that I submitted, I said that if we want to bring about cultural change, and cultural change was highlighted in both the OECD report and the report of the international council of education advisers, they both said that cultural change is essential. Structural change without cultural change will not achieve what we want it to achieve. For cultural change to happen, it has to start at the top. It has to start in the way that politicians, national and local operate. It must involve the chief executives of national agencies, inspectors, directors of education and senior civil servants. That is the challenge that faces your committee and indeed Scottish education generally. I know, Professor, that we have a member about to pick up on that very theme very shortly, so that you will be able to go into a little bit more detail on that. That is an absolutely wonderful segue to the line of questioning that we now have from Michelle Thomson. It is me who is going to pick up that thread. Let us just carry on from it and then some other areas I want to bring in. I must admit that I read your paper with great interest, Professor Humes, on the comments that you are making. Based on what you have said, we have a good sense of the role that culture plays in delivery in terms of national governance and agencies. You have already put that on the record. In your opinion, how would you go about changing that? Changing culture is extraordinarily difficult to do, very time consuming and often agencies at whatever level get rather tired of it for that very reason and move on to something else. How would you go about changing the scenario that you have already depicted in your comments? There is no quick fix. It takes time and that is one of the reasons why politicians get impatient with it, because the timescale of politicians is usually quite short-term. They want to be able to demonstrate that they have achieved something before the next election. If you are trying to change a culture, you have to take a long-term view, and it requires a number of things. It is not a single thing. It requires the people at the top that I mentioned to start looking at themselves carefully and saying, are we exercising power in the best interests of children in schools and their parents and the community at large? It needs to involve teacher education. You need to start at the early stages of a teacher's career by encouraging them to ask the kind of questions that, at the moment, they tend not to be encouraged to ask the why questions, why we are doing this and also encourage them to be creative, experimental and innovative. I was interested in one of the things the cabinet secretary said recently when she said that she wanted to reset the Government's relationship with the teaching profession. I thought that that is an admirable thing to want to do. Because there has been an issue of trust and confidence, the fact that the cabinet secretary is seeing that and wanting to do something about it is to be welcome. She linked that to her proposal to set up a centre for teaching excellence. Without giving much detail, she was criticised for not having consulted anybody about it beforehand. My thought was that I am not sure that you want to retain the term excellence in the title. I would prefer a centre for teaching innovation because we have got lots of challenges in education. We have mentioned AI before and that is a big one. Very few people in Scotland seem to be addressing it. There is some interesting work in England, which I can mention if you want me to say a bit more about it later. The way in which teachers are initiated into the profession and encouraged to ask the why questions and to put forward their own ideas and try things out begins to change the culture, albeit in small, modest ways to begin with, but it creates a less formal, a less hierarchical situation and it involves distributing power more evenly. It is important that the people on the front line feel that they have agency to do things. You are talking about a 10-year programme. Most politicians do not really want to know that, but if we want to change culture, we have to start looking at that kind of issue. Can I bring anybody else in the panel specifically on this question about how we go about changing that? Perhaps you are looking at me, Janet. I should look somewhere else. I think culture is actually at the heart of all of this and Walter touches on the culture in the education system, but the culture outside the education system has a huge impact on what we do in education. I think that is an even harder thing to change because you have no control of that at all. If you look at the areas of the world that have done things well in persuading their populist that something is better, they have had a really good advertising campaign. If you look at what happened in 2020 in the first Covid year, if you look at what happened in southern Ireland about how they engaged with their population on what was happening with the examination system and the qualification system, they went to the level of drawing cartoons and explaining to the population that this is why we are doing this. The nature of the engagement with society was taken really seriously and was not academic. This is why it is going to be beneficial. If you want to change the culture of the way in which people think about career pathways in school, because one of the things that I get very frustrated about is the fact that we still, after multiple years of talking about it, do not have priority of steam between academic qualifications and vocational qualifications. If we take that as an example, how do we actually try to change people's cultural view on that? We changed people's cultural view by actually explaining to people that actually today, if you are a welder, you are going to earn far more than an academic in the university is going to. Not only are you going to do that, you might actually have a great career and enjoy yourself and you will have a happy life and you will have something you want and actually you will enable us to regenerate the industry in Scotland. Similarly, we have a huge challenge with regard to the existing building stock in Scotland in terms of getting it ready to enable us to get anywhere near our net zero goals. How do we actually go about changing the culture of people aspiring that their kids are going to actually go and be heating engineers and the value of that to society but the value of that to them as human beings as well? We all too often think about it in two different sections. We have conversations and we do this at the Royal Society. We have an economy and enterprise committee that has one level of language. We talked about language earlier and they talk about what we need these skills, we need these people, we need this and then we've got an education committee that talks about well how do we help people develop. We need one language that actually says there is a mutual beneficial relationship between what the country needs, what the industry needs and what people need and so it's a complex issue. I totally agree with Walter that this is not a quick fix but it's about how do we engage with the general population in a meaningful conversation to real people, not just politicians and academics and educationalists that actually enables us to see a different future? It strikes me that the acid test of any reform that we're talking about, any structural change, anything else, the fundamental question each time is what difference is this going to make to the classroom? What difference will it make to teaching, how teachers teach and how learners learn and if we can't answer that question for any higher level structural or whatever training reform, why are we doing it? That seems to me to be the focus, should be our focus of any moves we make, should be able to answer that question to some extent. Just following on from that, the International Council of Education Advisers view is that Scotland should aim for an egalitarian culture in education. What does an egalitarian culture mean to you and do you agree? Perhaps Marina, you might like the fear in their eyes. I think that Scotland can be proud of its approach to this and the emphasis on equality and the like doesn't mean we get it socially. One of the issues that I think and it's been a debate here in Scotland as well about examinations going to my narrow little world is that examinations are fairer than other ways and I'm not sure about that at all because there's equality in that you all sit down and do the same thing for the same time but that's not the same as equality of preparation and so some have an advantaged teaching and learning situation and everything and the subjects they they can take, I think Marina's research is really powerful on this, it undercuts the rhetoric about we've all got the same opportunities but when you find out, when you're more forensic you find out, no you don't, some schools really narrow you down, others broaden you out so I think that the fact that you have a largely comprehensive system and that has been maintained I think is a great strength. I come from England obviously and I wouldn't say that of our system there where the privileged just keep on being privileged. Marina, obviously I'd like to bring you in. Yeah, I think in principle our second education is egalitarian but we have an issue of equity because we have quite a wide variation in the provision by the characteristics of learners and characteristics of schools they attend, characteristics of neighborhoods they they live. What we found in our study is that for example curriculum narrowing is a socialist stratified process. Students who are attending schools in the areas of social and economic deprivation, they experience the curriculum narrowing to a much greater extent than those on the schools in more advantaged areas. Similarly lots of unintended consequences from the curriculum narrowing and from the introduction of new curriculum again are being experienced by those sort and schools in disadvantaged areas to a bigger extent. For example the idea of introducing flexibility in the curriculum was very loudable and the one young people know to take up all their national five level qualifications in one year and instead to spread it over the years and to allow the young people to catch up the data shows that what in fact is happening is that this is happening in schools which are located in the disadvantaged areas. Those who attend schools in better areas, they are following the old pattern of qualification uptake. They take all their national five qualifications in S4, all their higher qualifications in S5. There are those young people who attend disadvantaged schools, they take less qualifications on national five level in S4 and then take trying to take more qualifications in S5 as a result they take less higher qualifications and so on and so forth. But the interesting thing that overall there is a decline in the uptake of national five qualifications in S5 which means that this promised flexibility doesn't happen it just sort of shifted the problem towards disadvantaged schools and gave it as the second best option to young people to catch up with these qualifications and this is just one of the examples and it's the same when we look at the way the curriculum provision works. Huge variability starting from BGE stage. Schools have so many different models of provision that initially there was three plus three but what's happened many schools in disadvantaged areas they usually follow two plus two plus two. Two years for BGE, two years for national five qualifications, two years for higher advanced areas qualifications. Schools in disadvantaged areas they sometimes follow two plus one plus one plus one model which brings to a very fragmented learning and these are the issues that exactly needs to be looked at if we want equitable education equitable educational experiences. Led on to the next bout of questions. Before we go to Liam Kerr though we have a wee supplementary hope you'll make it concise from Ben Macpherson. Thank you convener. Just touching on what Professor Hume said about the political discourse and political decision making I just wondered if there's any further elaboration that you could give to that that if there's a shift in political consciousness that needs to happen in terms of how we discuss education and reform to make sure that there is a sense of at least medium hopefully long-term consideration that happens at a parliamentary level because you know I think of some of the challenges with for example the implementation of curriculum for excellence. Sorry I did ask for something a bit more succinct Ben. Okay again quite a challenging questions I often refer to an American political theorist called Murray Edleman who talks about the shift to what he sees as policy as spectacle and he has detected a trend both in the United States and in other countries that policy making is now seen as a social spectacle so that politicians come up with a fresh new idea or an apparently fresh new idea it may be a recycled idea which I suppose is environmentally friendly and it's launched particularly if it's a new minister it's launched with all sorts of razzmatazz with photo opportunities and smiling children and it's bigged up the language is bigged up we live in a boastful age everything is exaggerated nothing is promising or quite good everything is awesome or spectacular now if that's a general trend and I think it is a general trend fueled by social media by advertising by television you even see it on the BBC all the time now with all their hyped up trailers for programmes that you don't want to see at all especially if they include the word celebrity in it but if that is a general trend of political language it's not healthy it's not the only trend there's also a sort of cosy feel good kind of discourse that you see I want a much more hard headed kind of political discourse in which things are described as they are in which ideas are engaged with at a proper intellectual level it's not all about promotion and advertising and getting the headline in tomorrow's press it should education is important it should be about real issues real aspirations realistic aspirations not overhyped not boasted about and in that sense the question of discourse that you raise is an ongoing issue and I would like to see more people commenting on it and saying hold on a minute that kind of discourse is not helpful thank you very much for that we do have a lot of questions the panellers we're wanting to still present to you so perhaps if we make sure our questions and our answers are as possible and I'm going I'm going to limit all the supplementaries now till the end to see if we've got time if you don't mind Liam Kerr over to you now please thank you convener good morning panel Professor Humes picking up on comments that you made much earlier in this session the OECD has suggested that the Scottish system might be too heavily governed and my question to you is do you recognise that as an issue and if so how does it square if at all with the principle of subsidiarity which you described earlier as decisions being made at the lowest suitable level and which is core to curriculum for excellence yes I think the OECD is quite right in the sense that they suggest that the system is over governed and a one of the the questions that concerned me with both with sqe and with education Scotland was how close they were to government and I think that national agencies obviously they are accountable in a sense to government but they need a degree of distance and one of the things that we discussed in Ken Muir's committee I was a member of the expert panel on that was what happens to the inspectorate and we recommended that the inspectorate should report to the Scottish Parliament not to the Scottish Government and that was quite a deliberate thing the Scottish Government of course is not very keen on that because it means that they have less control the principle of subsidiarity has only really appeared on the agenda quite recently and local authorities are quite keen on it but I think we're quite a long way from actually embodying a principle of subsidiarity it's seen as an aspiration I think we need to do more work on it but the desire for central control is very persistent and the desire for the traditional policy community to exercise control is very persistent and it extends before devolution it was there well before devolution wonderful book by Andrew McPherson and Charles RAB called governing education set out how the policy community in Scottish education operated and somebody in 2015 a study of comprehensive education by Danny Murphy and colleagues at Edinburgh University he said that McPherson and RAB's policy community is alive and well in 2015 thank you dr Brown you talked earlier about what we value and what our aspirations might be for in and for the education system in Scotland do you take a view on how the performance of the education system should be measured at both the local and a national level and do you take a view on whether we should move from individual accountability to a more collective responsibility as Professor Chapman has argued? I think it is important that we do assess what is happening in the education system and because that assessment is should be useful it should not just be a tool with which to maybe beat people if they haven't achieved something so assessment should be we should assess the the education system as a whole because we need to know whether it's just being successful we should assess individual institutions because we we should make sure that they are performing to the to the area to the level that we we expect them to be but we also should be looking at whether one approach works better than another approach recognising that different scenarios and different environments will mean that that could could have impact on it I think I think Walt has talked about the fact that you know maybe we should we should be trying out two different things there is there has always been the view in Scotland that that when we roll something out we roll it all out together everything goes at one pace should we actually be piloting things and then assessing whether that is working better than this other thing that we're trying over here so that we ultimately get to the point that we start to improve the system because we understand what's going on and from that perspective it's a collective assessment it's not an individual child perspective but if you don't allow for assessment and I'm careful to use the word assessment not qualifications or anything else if you don't assess how an individual learner is doing if it if there isn't an assessment let me say it properly if there isn't an assessment of how an individual learner is doing then there is no mechanism of being able to identify what additional work needs to be done to make sure that that individual learner is successful and that can be done by the teacher it can be done in completely different environments but you need to be able to identify what's going well and what's not going well at the system level at the individual level and I think if you do that you have to be really careful because society and this goes back to the change in the culture society takes any measure that anybody takes on education and uses it to address the agenda that they want to achieve so you know we've got to be careful of how we use the measurement system that we put in place and we use it in the right way and we are vocal politicians are vocal about when it is being misused and misrepresented. Thank you Dr Shapira he talked earlier about teacher capacity and there has been lots of talk down the years we have in our papers a reference to a 2013 study about improving capacity of teachers and the necessity for it both at an individual but also at a structural and cultural level. Can you describe how effective have efforts been to improve the capacity of teachers looking backwards and looking forwards where ought the focus to be to improve capacity within the system particularly if as Professor Stobart said earlier what mustn't happen is adding without taking away. From I can't rely on the findings from our study and it doesn't seem that the teacher's capacity from what we learned that this capacity increased or have been improved teachers are overworked teachers are complaining on lack of non-contact hours to do anything else rather than go into the classrooms and teach and to us it would be one of the keys improving resources increasing resources and then allowing teacher to have more non-contact time if we want teachers to be able to use their agency and actively participate in the curriculum making and improving learning for students so we didn't find that there were some visible improvements compared to what it was. Unless any of the other panelists want to respond on any of those questions I'm back to the convener. Okay thank you very much. Can we now move to some questions from Willie Rennie please? Yesterday's statement I'm interested in your views about particularly the qualifications decision there is a I think there was a frustration amongst us that we thought we were going to get some kind of move forward but we're getting a new debate in the new year and I'd be interested in what your view is on that. Perhaps Professor Humes could Well it reinforces the impression that I had before yesterday's announcement that there was an inclination to delay big decisions and I think that will be a scene with a degree of disappointment by many in the system because they feel it's been going on long enough and it's time to take some decisions and big decisions are not easy but in the world of politics there comes a point when you have to reach policy closure and take the decisions and live with the consequences and this whole process was set in motion by one of the cabinet secretary's predecessors so I think delay while it will be welcome with the old guard as I call them in the Scottish educational system those who don't want to have their territorial reach disturbed in any way I think it will actually disappoint a lot of teachers too because they reach they get to the point where they simply want a decision to be taken and they can then see what this means for them in terms of their subject their school their community so I think it is disappointing having said that I think there are some things in Professor Hayward's report that do need further interrogation in particular the project learning the implications of that for the practical implications of that for staffing and timetabling I was at our presentation by Professor Hayward recently and which she was very well received but there was a head teacher from Ayrshire who said the project learning proposal which is one of the areas that is strongly recommended in the report would be virtually impossible to implement in my school because of the staffing level that I have and that there is he said and I don't have the information to hand to confirm this but I don't think he was making it up he said there were considerable variations in staffing levels across different authorities in schools so some of them might be well placed to take up the challenge of project learning others might struggle just to do the traditional learning so there are issues that do need to be fleshed out but that's not in itself a reason for seeing stop the buses I was sitting on a train all day yesterday so I missed the announcement but I was brought up speed this morning and the idea that once again we're halting to do more consultation just to remind her that this is Scotland and you're doing this if it's stalling or if it's moving very slowly the rest of the world is getting on with this kind of thing and there are reforms going on everywhere even the French baccalaureate is being reformed and that takes some doing and New Zealand and other countries are all looking at ways of bringing the assessment system and the curriculum up to date and if there's this ongoing internal debate in Scotland but no movement there I say don't be surprised if you find others have gone past you in the time with the others I could encourage them just to comment on what the cabinet secretary said about the reasons why I mean she was talking about issues around behaviour you know post COVID the real challenge on the poverty really detainment gap she said basically they've got enough on their plate just now we need to consider whether we should move forward with this when all these other things are going on do you think there's any merit in that argument dr Brown hi from the membership of the committee we've got several people working in schools and in the directorates of educational officers and from what we hear there is a significant issue associated with with the change in the nature of the children that are coming through the schools after COVID so I think I think there is a big issue there but what but I am disappointed that we we aren't moving ahead in general so I think I think the reasons are valid but if we but there will always be another reason coming round the corner you know I mean it was we didn't do something because of the the financial crisis we're not doing this because of COVID if we if we I agree with Professor Stubart if we don't do something we will fall behind and I think it's really really critical that we we think it's true we think it's true but Scotland will never ever reach consensus on its qualification structure and we just need to accept that and somebody needs to take a decision and take the leadership and do something yeah I would agree with this view because yeah there are always lots of complicated issues and there's always going to be another issue but there's a clear need to look at qualifications and think if we want to stick to the existing structure or maybe making some changes and shifts maybe moving back towards speaking about SCQF levels rather than national qualifications by and that would allow us to make what we already mentioned bringing vocational qualifications in rather than just focusing on the performance and the same is about assessment there's a huge need to look at the traditional assessment methods and that manifested itself during the COVID and we all remember what happened in 2020 so there's real need to reconsider what we assess how we assess and maybe the questions of equity with the existing forms of assessment again we saw that it is not working and think about creatively and we are living in the 21st century why do we still stick to these traditional methods of assessment why do we still think in terms of national qualifications now when we do have an alternative to approach it more creatively and change something and our findings really show evidence and desire for making these changes so I would say it needs to be something needs to be done if we're finding post COVID as everybody else in the world is that there's a level of disengagement shouldn't that be more of an incentive to make school more interesting and rewarding for students rather than say let's get back to the old stuff and get these kids in they've changed and we may need to change the system that may be an incentive rather than a discouragement to changing the system thank you for your excellent answers thank you thank you very much Mr Rennie pan Duncan Glancy over to yourself now thank you convener and thank you for your candor particularly in the recent answers I think there is there is no greater need to do something than some of the points we've heard about inequality that were made earlier by Dr Shapira and others and so it's to that I'd like to to move now one of the reasons I said that yesterday to the cabinet secretary that I thought reform was important is because the attainment gap remains so stubborn so can I ask the panel first of all before before I go into detail on that although it's related is there a risk that without examination at sqf level five there's more pressure on pupils at highers and given what you said earlier on Professor Dr Shapira sorry how will that affect our poorer students Dr Shapira sorry can you repeat the last part of the question it's a little bit of an echo so I'm not sure I captured that no problem and I probably waffled a little bit as well so that the specific question is is there a risk that without examination at sqf level five there's more pressure on pupils at highers and what would the impact on poorer students be of that so question is about whether having examinations at national five level puts extra pressure on students and affects their performance without having examinations so no exams at that point and only exams at highers I don't think we have sort of solid evidence about that but it's certainly we'll try to understand we'll try to understand how the existing system works and we certainly could see that the requirement of taking qualifications on national five level eight uh it is directly the number of qualifications uh number of subjects number of passes on national five levels it directly linked to the way students make a transition to the uptake of higher qualifications and subsequently on on the way they pass these qualifications so um overall I think it can bring us back to the question of what type of assessments we use and what we assess and I think there are two separate issues here more subjects needs to be taken up and learned on lower levels of qualifications overall including the national five level do we need to assess them using examinations that's that's another question are there other ways of assessment other other ways of ensuring for example using continuous assessment formative assessment there must be other ways to ensure that young people they master the knowledge that is being offered on this particular level and then they are able to make a transition to the higher level qualifications and then see the examinations so learning on that level definitely whether they need to do exams on national five level it's I think really the issue that we need to consider and decide whether we need to change the way we assess learning outcomes on on national five level how we use assessment which forms of assessment alternative forms of assessment and that could be beneficial to making this transition to the higher level of qualifications and final exams thank you um professor still work did you want just to make the point again um that scottish students are under far more pressure than other senior secondary students around the world because they're taking three sets of exams many of them around the world most uh systems end at 18 with with a diploma that you can have built up to over two or three years but we're not got in the the famous two term dash and anywhere else outside the british system hardly anybody examines nationally at 16 and I've made the point in the paper that in England education is compulsory till 18 but we take what was a leaving exam at 16 and the same is to in Ireland and the same is here formally that was a um a leaving certificate if you like for students at 16 many of whom would leave school 88 percent of scottish students carry on in the system um is it how much is that kind of exam needed and the opportunities to do other things at that point and provide a again the british system you leave school without any recognition other than a few certificates no certificates if you're not done well in the exams other schools have diplomas graduations and the like and I think that was the uh the push we had why not uh if you like celebrate the end of compulsory education with a broad description of what students will do and that's the the idea of the project and the like which other systems have the international baccalaureate and the like you do projects um and and you defend yourself orally and you do other things so there is the broader curriculum there a better stop i'm getting excited thank you professor i know that dr brown you want to come in and then i've got one further question just very quick answer i mean i think you're talking about bypass is bypass a big issue for for students who who are coming from disadvantaged schools in my view that this goes back to this disjointed nature of of the curriculum if we really had a three to eighteen what you would be doing is you would be building up your knowledge and then when you decided you weren't taking a subject any further then you would do some sort of qualification through an assessment that could be anything but then if you were taking it on then you would do that assessment at that point so you effectively instead of you know trying to do assessments and everything you don't do but it goes back to the fact that we need to be as we need that assessment all the way through that actually allows somebody to say i've had enough i've actually i don't want to take the subject any further but you've got all the evidence there already you don't have to go through anything else and that's what's valued by society thank you um could i do what's come back in just a quick comment i don't think we can discuss changing the way we assess knowledge and whether we change remove some national examinations without seeing education as a part of the broader system you know we can change whatever we like but unless let's say universities change their entry requirements these changes wouldn't work not just the universities in the modern society we all use qualifications as a proof of having some level of skills and knowledge if we don't have these official qualifications what else is going to be used national diploma certificate are the ways of acknowledging learning but this needs to be developed and you know in interconnectivity we can't just change one element of the entire system which is linked for so many other things employers labour market higher education further education so again it's just systemic issue and if we want to change we need to think about this all the consequences thank you in the interconnectedness of each part of the system and that kind of lifelong linear learning that you described is crucial thank you for those answers now specifically going back to the point of social economic disadvantage in your paper ahead of today dr Shapira you noted that the curriculum is narrowing but that is socially stratified it's stratified and has disproportionately affected students from disadvantaged backgrounds can you tell us a bit about why that is what you would change and how that might be affecting the attainment gap yeah thank you it's a really good question how this can be changed it needs to be changed because we can see very clear link very clear connection between social disadvantage and type of curriculum young people are being exposed to and this this connection needs to be eliminated uh how to just ask when you say the type of curriculum they're being exposed to do you mean the subjects they're being presented for and assessing that as opposed to looking at who's attaining what at the other side of it first of all uh in schools in the areas of social economic disadvantage students are being presented to smaller number of subjects yeah definitely and then relatively relatedly they also pass less less subjects on different levels there are lots of reasons for that uh some of the reasons are about school resources about availability of subject teachers but again i'm going back to this issue of accountability and performativity cultures in schools in social economic disadvantage areas school resources are very often being focused on students who are performing better on those who can be successfully be put through higher level qualifications and to achieve better outcomes and then more students are being left behind just letting them to do less qualifications to the lower level of qualifications and not really providing them with a valuable education experience so this again is linked to that the way currently the schools are being made accountable and this way is really also need to be changed we need to think accountability is very important but we really need to think what kind of data is being used for this accountability what is being used at the moment is just number of passes at national five higher level of qualifications and positive destinations this is not enough because this is not what secondary education is about this is not what curriculum excellence is about so this creativity this ability to think how to use the data for accountability and what kind of data we need for accountability is really important and this is something that would allow to cut this link between deprivation and low quality of educational experiences thank you thank you very much for that and we are going to extend the questioning a little bit longer because I know AI is quite a hot topic but and Ben Macpherson is going to lead on that for us this morning thank you convener as a convener said a number of you have mentioned AI already and just to start off with I want to give you an opportunity to just talk about what are the risks and opportunities in your view of AI for example should we be making proactive steps just now to make sure that our young people know how to use AI and how to use it effectively how should certification practices work in the future how do we confront this reality that is something that's going to affect not just our education system but society more widely just a little question just you know it's like quite we know it's whatever you say today might not be valid tomorrow in terms of this very fast-paced change but dr Shapira if you come in first please the way we think in the university about AI and it was quite an interesting process when I think approximately a year ago it was almost the moral panic of what we are going to do you know all students are going to write their essays just using AI and gradually it developed now into acknowledgement that it can be used creatively it can be used to enable learning in so many different ways and yes it is not going to be easy it would demand from everyone you know to engage and think what does it mean the existence of AI what does it mean to the way we teach to the way we assess to the way we think about knowledge but I think we're at the beginning of a very interesting process and I'm really glad that we stopped thinking about AI as some you know bogeyman but about something which is going to be used to improve our lives improve educational experiences so hopefully in schools this kind of thinking would be also adopted but it's I understand it's a very general sort of comment but this is as far as we got at the moment Gordon doesn't kid he wants to come in as as Janet so Gordon my guess is that students have been using AI with their phones for ages and distorting images and doing this and the like so that it's not come as a surprise to them it's come as a surprise to us probably more and it does have that kind of instant threat to things like coursework if I set the university if I set an essay has it been written by so for me one of the ways of dealing with this is this shift to say why don't we let teachers continuously assess their students in the classroom with what they see what they hear and everything else and that gives you a kind of feel for what the students actually know the idea of increasing the oral component where people defend which is what happens at higher level the viper and the like is really to demonstrate you've understood the work that's come in your thesis can you answer questions about it so that again it could it could help in broadening teaching and learning that way um I mean I don't have any clever answers about how we we handle it if somebody you know in terms of I can download an essay do I have to defend it or do I have to correct it or what I think I agree with marina I think it's really important to think about the two sides I mean there is there is the negative side that says you know we've got to learn how to deal with it and it's just a blunt statement we have to learn how to deal with it and and students have been cutting and pasting for years and learning essays verbatim for years that they've regenerated in an exam so there has been software generated to deal with that and that's happened in whether it's whether it's in project work or whether it whether it's somewhere else it is possible to do stuff like that so bottom line is we've just got to work out how to do it because it will be used but the interesting thing I said a little bit earlier on that the committee was looking at all of the reports that are out there and looking trying to explain we all poured through them we read through every single report one individual is an expert but it is very familiar with AI and he used AI to analyse all of the reports and it made his life so much easier and he came out with as good an answer as we did so for me that's the positive it saves time it allows you to analyse things it allows you to see the content of something you can ask a question you can go back and read it yourself and do something else but it actually does give you a different perspective on something so I think we've got to stop being scared of it because I think being scared of it means we just try and stop it happening and and we can't stop it happening similarly we need to find ways to assess things that that are done in teams things that are done out of school things that are doing done online we've got to work out how to deal with the new reality because that's where we are so for me AI you know if you listen to Elon Musk and Ricky Sunak and the fact that we're all going to be dead in 100 years then I think we'll we'll just be really upset but if we actually sit and think what could we use this for from a positive perspective not just be frightened sorry to interrupt you but so in that in that spirit do we need to be proactive in helping our young people to be able to use AI have those skills because for example touch typing we didn't take the opportunity to teach every young person how to touch type and you know we're behind on that so let's get ahead on AI should we question mark well we should get ahead on AI absolutely definitely but we should also get ahead on AI on teaching our kids how to learn and deal with social media that learn and deal with how do they get the right knowledge from the Wikipedia that they look at every day so there's a whole dimension of additional learning that we need to to put in place but that means we've got to take something out we've got to decide what we are not going to teach in the curriculum because arguably learning how to deal with AI learning how to deal with the new world is more important to this and next generation than some other stuff that we're currently teaching in schools and we need to be open and honest and we're willing to talk about that we no longer teach in Greek we no longer teach Latin what else do we need to actually think about well professor fumes you're being keen to coming on this as well yeah it's not an area that i have expertise in but i think it is an area that we should all be concerned about i think there are big integrity issues associated with AI and it relates to what i said earlier about the assault on knowledge and truth having said that i'm sure there are positive advantages to what AI can offer and if I could make one recommendation that you all have a look at a website called AI in education which has recently been launched by the historian Sir Anthony Seldon and he has brought in a lot of people with technical expertise but his position is educationists need to be at the forefront of how we respond to this and Anthony Seldon of course has worked in the private sector of education but i was pleased to see that there are a lot of state schools in England and one independent school in Scotland who has signed up for this i'm sure there is work going on in Scotland i think there are staff in education Scotland who are looking into this but Anthony Seldon is a big player and i think that anything he puts his name to will certainly be worth looking at and he indicates the work they're doing the networks he has set up and i think it will be a useful resource thank you professor marina you indicated very briefly early that you wanted to come back in on this do you want a final final comment from yourself in relation to your comments about us being more proactive so i just wanted to offer one good example how AI can be used in teaching and assessment proactively with students and maybe with in the final stage of secondary education as well students are being asked to use AI to write an essay on a particular topic and then they are being told to critically assess this essay using the knowledge they gain from literature from lectures from this to that and then use this critical assessment to write a proper essay and for me that was excellent example how it can be used creatively proactively and still contribute to better outcome and i think if i may that that is a very good example of the facts we also need to keep in mind that even if and when AI is working perfectly it is not perfect because it is reliant on the data on which it can access and our ability to to create data and to critically analyse what AI generates is going to be an important skill as well okay thank you very much that's a great place to finish the morning we are still in the morning and i'd like to thank the panel for their time and their contributions and yes for accepting our little bit extended time as well so that concludes the public part of our proceedings today thank you very much