 The first item of the agenda is a decision on taking business in private. The second item is to take evidence for our Scottish attainment challenge inquiry. I don't want you to know that. I don't want you to know where you are going with money, but I want you to know that I am doing everything that I can to look at the leadership of the committee. I think that we are all agreed. The second item on the agenda is to take evidence for our Scottish attainment challenge inquiry. I would like to welcome our witnesses this morning, Professor Mel Ainscow, Professor of Education University of Glasgow and Professor Becky Francis, Chief Executive Education Endowment Foundation, who are both joining us virtually, and Dr Laura Robertson, Senior Research Officer of the Poverty Alliance and Emma Congrive, who is a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Fraser of Allander Institute, who is in our committee room this morning. Welcome to all of you, and it's really good to have you with us. I wonder if I can start the questioning this morning by turning to—I think that it will be Mel Ainscow that I'm going to go to first. You submitted some written evidence, which is very interesting. I couldn't honestly say that I understood all that was being said in the evidence that was given to us, the written evidence that was given to us, but I did want to focus on the reasons why we've not made more progress than we should have in relation to the poverty attainment gap. You mentioned in your written submission five specific areas. If I can ask you just to summarise for those who are joining us this morning and watching our proceedings what you say are the reasons why we've not made more progress and what you describe as barriers, in fact, to making further progress. Professor Ainscow. Thank you very much, and it's delightful to be a member of this discussion. I should explain that I'm part of a research group at the Robert Oates Centre for Educational Change, which has been working quite closely in the system as the attainment challenge has been going forward. I should also explain that, previous to that, I took part in three other big challenge programmes. I had a small role in London challenge and then led the Greater Manchester challenge, 10 local authorities, 1,300 schools and then I led for the Welsh Government Tools Challenge Cymru, which was a major national effort. In looking at the situation in Scotland, I'm obviously drawing on those experiences and drawing lessons from those experiences. I think that it's important to stress before we talk about the barriers, which I will do, that there's much to celebrate, that a lot has been achieved in a relatively short time. Educational change takes time because it's so complex and so many people involved. A lot has been achieved. One of the major things that's been achieved, which shouldn't be underestimated, is that, as far as I can see, everybody in the Scottish education system are clear what the agenda is. They're clear that the push for equity and the concern for excellence is essential to everything. To achieve that in a short time, it's something to celebrate. It's a complex process that we're talking about and, as I say, change takes time. As my colleagues—and I'm relying on knowledge from my colleagues who have been involved longer than I have—have looked at what's happened, we see certain things that seem to be creating barriers, the implementation of the thinking of the policy. There's the paper that we presented to you. There's the first question, first of all, about what the agenda is. Clearly, broadly, it is equity. In other words, inclusion and fairness. I work a lot for UNESCO and my mantra is every learner matters and matters equally. I think that mantra is clearly reflected in the Scottish practice, but there's a rather narrow focus on what's called the attainment gap. Of course, you want to monitor the attainment gap, so you need systems to monitor progress, but if you start using those as the goals of education, that rather narrows the agenda. Particularly for children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, we don't really need them to have a narrow curriculum. We want to have a broad, enriching curriculum that inspires aspirations for the future. The question of how the agenda is articulated is something that perhaps needs some rethinking. I think that the focus should be on raising educational standards across the board, rather than focusing narrowly on the poverty attainment gap. I'd be a bit cautious about the word attainment. The danger that we fall into is that we confuse the goals of what we're trying to do with our ways of monitoring it. The two things have got to connect, but they're separate. We need to monitor the impact on attainment across the system, but the goals should not be looking for quick fixes to change those attainment achievements. What should the goal be then? I would have thought that your curriculum offers a very broad and enriching agenda for change, which is admired from other parts of the world. The curriculum for excellence is a very broad agenda, and I think that that should be the agenda. Particularly what they do with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. We need to open doorways to them rather than narrowly on the thing. The danger is confusing the monitoring of attainment, which we need to do statistically to see whether things are working with the goals that are there in the field. Why this educational change is so complex, of course, is that we need efforts at every level, but being no doubt the most important level is the classroom. Teachers are policy makers. For the next hour, whatever the teacher chooses to do, whatever he or she understands is the policy, will be the policy as far as children are concerned. That's why educational change is so fascinating, interesting and challenging, because of course we've got to get everybody agreeing with what we're trying to do. I'm reiterating that a lot has been achieved, but I think that there needs to be a rethink of what exactly we are giving the message. Yes, I want to ask you to come on to structure, because you talk about rigid local authority line management. What I wanted to ask you is, are you saying really that we should kind of rid ourselves of all the guidance other than the strategic objectives and just let the practitioners get on with it? Well, yes or no, if I might reflect on that. It seems to be perfectly sensible that in the early phases of a very large ambitious project like this, there should be direction, and there should be centralisation, and that was clearly the way to kickstart it, and I don't disagree with that at all, but now we need to another phase. Now we need to have a significant structural adjustment to make better use of the expertise that's in the system, but it has implications for thinking and action at all levels of the system. First of all, we need to make better use of the expertise that's there in the schools in the classroom. Scotland is blessed with the most remarkable expertise amongst the teachers and the head teachers. Frankly, you're not getting the best out of it because everything is being dictated either from the centre or from local authority structures. I'm saying that this has to be about local context. As far as education is concerned, context matters. What works in one place may not work in another place because the barriers are different and the resources that are available are different, so we need a system now as we move forward. This is my argument for an adjustment that places more attention on using the expertise in the system. For that to happen, the Government has to give the lead and have to encourage local co-ordinated action, and then local authorities have to facilitate that. I'm working in one of the local authorities quite closely at the moment, and the message that we've given is that the job of schools is to improve themselves. Our job, that is the local authority, is to make sure that it happens. These are the adjustments that I'm talking about to make better use of the expertise and creativity that's there in the system. The leadership for this is crucial. It seems to be that we need a new kind of co-ordination at the local level, where it's not the local authorities doing things to schools, but it's the local authority that's acting as the kind of co-ordination mechanism where they bring together senior people, particularly head teachers, to say how can we work together to address the challenges that we're facing with our children and young people in this kind of context? What's the barrier? Is the barrier that there's too much national control in micromanagement? Is the barrier that there's too much local authority control in micromanagement? Is that what you're saying? Are you saying that we should put more trust and delegated authority in the hands of the head teachers? Are we talking about local school? Are we talking about school leadership? Is that what we're talking about? I think you should be doing it beautifully. I can't add to any of that. It's exactly that. I think—and I'm saying it—it's an adjustment that you see educational changes about implementation. You can have the best policies in the world. You know, wonderful brochures and documents—Scotland's very good at brochures and documents. You've got some fabulous documents. I share them in other countries, you know, because they're so beautiful, but the real challenge is implementation down the level. I keep reiterating teachers and our policy makers. We've got to engage teachers, we've got to support them, but we've also given them the freedom. We've got to give teaching back to teachers. Right. You've started us off really well, if I may say. You've given us some very trenchant views there, and I really appreciate that, because it'll get us going. I'm going to bring in Michael Marra. Thanks, convener. It's picking up Professor Ainsko on your point about quick fixes and timescales in that. I mean, this programme started in 2016, the attainment challenge. We've spent £1 billion of taxpayers' money on it. When would you expect to see discernible progress? To me, that's not talking about quick fixes, really—six years. You know, that's the entirety of a child's secondary education. I mean, I think that there has to be progress. I think that we need to celebrate that, and build on it, but also now stop and think as you're obviously doing and say, how do we move into another phase? I mean, this adjustment that I'm talking about is probably the wrong word for it, because it's something quite significant. It's a kind of paradigm shift on thinking about how we implement the next stage. So, there has to be progress. I mean, reiterate again the success in getting the equity agenda onto the agenda. Every teacher I meet, every teacher, local authority people, everybody's clear that that is what we're preoccupied with. Every learner, that's as equal. Professor Ainsko, I'm not sure that that level of agreement makes a big difference to the young people in Dundee who are not getting the improved outcomes that they're looking from, from my home city. We're looking now at the biggest gap, and you've cautioned us that we should be cautious about focusing on attainment. I'm not going to be cautious about that. I want to see better attainment, particularly for the kids from the poorest backgrounds. It's not the only thing, but it's incredibly important. We now have the biggest attainment gap we've ever had. So, six years on, £1 billion down. I recognise the pandemic in the middle of that. That's a huge issue, but before the pandemic, progress, we hadn't really made any discernible progress. In fact, it was going backwards in a lot of places. To me, that's not about looking for quick fixes. Actually, there's been a policy consensus that's agreed with the Government's approach to this for a long time now, but we're not seeing the difference that we would hope. Is that not fair? I think it probably is fair. Other colleagues in this meeting will give more of a statistical analysis of that. You may know that the place where I'm working mostly is in Dundee at the moment. We've created this policy in Dundee, which is called Every Dundee Learner Matters. In a sense, what we're trying to do is to put into operation the kind of thinking that I'm sharing with you now, based on experiences of research elsewhere. The way we characterise the agenda in Dundee is that we've called it the three Ps. It's about presence, participation and progress. Presence, that means attendance regularly. Participation, that means being involved, being recognised, being welcomed, being valued. Progress is about attainment, of course, but it's about other things, too, in terms of the future. One of the issues that I think really needs looking at is presence. Actually, attendance across Scotland prior to the pandemic is pretty awful. If the kids are not in school, how the hell are they going to participate and make progress? I think that there needs to be a push on presence. It tends to be about cultural issues and traditions in particular places. A Dundee is a very good example, but Dundee is making some fantastic progress, being no doubt. I'd like to come back to my substantive question later, to the public pounds being the other Ps in Dundee and the substantial cuts that have been made at the moment. Thanks so much. I'm just really intrigued at the emerging conversation already. I think that there's been a short term. It's quite right to say that there's an emergency here in relation to broadening gaps and the need to diagnose where there's been learning last year in the pandemic and then to think of short term means to address that gap. Clearly, the present approaches are, as Mel said, drawing on the evidence and moving forward in the right direction, but it's absolutely right to say that it means that they're urgent here. The question must be what resources schools have to draw on in the very short term. I'd also like to say—of course, I would say this, Mel, because the Education and Endowment Foundation is primarily focused on the attainment gap, but that's for very good reason. Attainment is the key predictor of pupil life outcomes. That's very well evidence, particularly for maths and English outcomes. I guess what I would want to say is that, while none of us, I'm sure, would disagree that the curriculum should be broad and balanced and pupil experience is, of course, important and, indeed, supports attainment, nevertheless the job of schools is to be promoting capability and knowledge in the curriculum. Those outcomes in terms of the capability and knowledge that pupils gain during school are the job of schools. It's rightly that we publicly measure that to see what value we're gaining from the school system. As I say, we also know—again, I know very well that Mel's work and her scholarship has always spoken to this—that there's incredibly unequal outcomes at present, according to social backgrounds, and that is a huge injustice that we ought to be targeted at. That's really the mainstay of the Education and Endowment Foundation's work, and I'm really glad if colleagues are interested to talk about some of the work that we've been doing in England. I'm going to bring in Emma Congleif. Thank you, convener. Just to add to what we're talking about here, myself and Laura perhaps come at this from a slightly different angle, which is the socioeconomic status of children. The poverty-related attainment gap and the pathways that we know and need to know more about how poverty and low income and deprivation feed through to things like being able to attend school, being able to participate in classes, being able to attend extracurricular activities and being able to work at home, factors such as fuel poverty, overcrowding at home, lack of private transport. All of these things you can understand how they affect children's ability to learn once they're inside the school gates. I can't speak too much to the practice within schools, although we've done a lot of work with schools to help them to think about how they can better understand their pupils in terms of the situations that their pupils are facing at home. That's a really core part of this issue. The fact that poverty isn't falling in Scotland, child poverty isn't falling in Scotland, the pandemic has put an enormous amount of pressure on low-income households, the cost of living crisis is putting even more. I think to try and think about the long, why we're not making maybe the progress that we wish to do, obviously that side of the equation is incredibly important in the understanding of why we're in this position and why we're having this inquiry at this present time. Do you have a view about the comments that Mel made at the start about the structures and what he described in their submission as rigid line management, both from the centre and from local authority level? Do you have a view on that? Do you have something that you can contribute to? Is that true from your point of view? I can only talk to the work that we've done. We've been working with the Northern Alliance Regional Improvement Collaborative, so that involves teachers, head teachers and education professionals working inside the local authority. That has felt to me from the research that we've done as a very kind of collegiate approach to trying to better understand the issues that children are facing. I think that there is often issues with schools and teachers, and teachers have a very good gauge of pupils and probably the best judge of being able to understand what's happening in their home lives, but that information in terms of the issues facing pupils across the school or across the local authority, often aren't able to be reflected upwards. I think that there can feel like a disconnect between what the local authorities may be saying or doing and what teachers on the ground really think is necessary, but part of that reason is that it's very difficult for everyone to get that full picture of what the situations are that need addressing at a school level, at a local authority level, at a Scotland level even. Thank you. Before I turn back to Michael Marr for his main line of questioning, I wanted to ask one last question of Mel, if I might. That's about leadership, because if you're talking about there being overly tight controls at central and local authority level, can you comment on the quality of the leadership that's required in order to make the learning environment in a school successful? We're really going to devolve authority, more and more powers to headteachers and teachers. What does that look like and what do we need to do to be able to make sure that that doesn't itself become a barrier, because we're talking about barriers at the minute? That's obviously an important strand of the whole debate. I just think again that you've got untapped potential in the system. The headteachers I've been working with in Scotland are very creative people, but they're frustrated. They want more space. Frankly, they want more control over the budget in order that they can determine how to create priorities in their own school, which fit their context, and how to mobilize human resources to move forward. I think that headteachers and other senior people are a crucial part of that. As we're teachers, we've got to support and encourage them. Again, we have to trust them. They are the best people to understand their schools and their context. The constant messages from outside the school are demoralising at times. I keep emphasising the importance of teachers, but the people in the schools have untapped potential. There's no question. There's a lot of work going on in the country about the professional development of school leaders. I applaud that again. I think that's very important. Just an award. What do you mean by demoralising effective outside messages? Do you mean that demoralising effect of what you describe as the bureaucratic control or is it other voices? What are you referring to? The schools that we've been working with, we're trying to encourage them to use the best thinking about educational change. The key to that is contextual analysis. You have to understand your own context, the context of the school, the classroom and also the context of your local community, so that you can understand what the barriers are that some of your children are experiencing. Then what you do is create pathways by bringing people together. The schools are so used to the idea that somebody is going to come and tell them what to do or somebody is going to issue a new document and another guideline. It's all well-intentioned. You don't want to sound negative. It's all well-intentioned, but unintentionally it is creating a rather subtle set of barriers in the system, in my view. So your message is basically teachers are saying, get off our backs? Yeah, but I don't want to. I think everybody has a role to play. I applaud again the Government's effort and the national system. I think that the local authorities are crucial to this. We need a middle tier, but it's got to create space where the professionals who know the children best can take action around the priorities that they set. At the moment, the priorities tend to be dictated from outside as do the suggestions of the actions that you should take. It's a cultural thing. Right now, it's very useful and thank you for that. Michael Marra is mainly in questioning and then maybe Co-Cab wants to come in. I saw her expression when some of those things were being exchanged. Michael. Thanks, convener. I want to ask some questions about the allocation of resource and you'll recognise perhaps that part of the reason for this inquiry is that there's been significant changes to the way that the Government spends very significant resource and rightly so on behalf of the Scottish taxpayer has been allocated across Scotland. I've asked some questions of ministers on this but I don't feel I've had much of an answer. It seems to me to be a bit of a move away from an analysis of multiple deprivation. I recognise there's poverty in all parts of the country and the money has been spread more widely. I just want to brief comments as to whether you think the recent changes to how this money is going to be allocated will be beneficial to the education recovery of the most deprived children and communities in Scotland. Emma? Happy to start with some comments on that. It comes down to evidence. What is the best evidence to ensure that the money is getting to those who need it? That might be very different, depending on which part of the country, which part of the city or many factors. As I talk about many committees, I come to the evidence that we have. In Scotland, it is often not as good as we would want it to be in order to identify particular small areas, particular households, particular children who would benefit the most from more resource allocation. It is an incredibly difficult thing to do and an incredibly different thing for a very diverse country with lots of different needs in different parts of the country to agree on what the best approach is. I think that we see that throughout local government funding discussions and education is no different. I think that there are concerns in terms of are we able to do this in a robust enough way. Free school meals have been a measure used for a long time in order to help with those allocations, but we know that that is just a measure of people who register for free school meals, not everybody who needs free school meals, if I can use that word. SIND also has its challenges, particularly in rural areas, where it has been well spoken about. The relatively large areas that it covers mean that it is not capturing particular pockets of disadvantage, and some of the measures are potentially not as significant in rural areas as they are in urban areas. Do you understand what the rationale for the changes is? Have you heard anyone explain why? As far as I am aware, it is to try and find, with free school meal data, because there is now a more universal approach for it and it is becoming less of a good indicator, it is less available in terms of being able to use it in terms of being able to focus on disadvantaged children and therefore a different approach, different data is required. There has been a relatively new source of data coming out of DWP, the children in low-income families, which has only been around for a few years, but it is probably the best source of local data that we have on children. The data that has been used to allocate the funding? I believe that they are moving to that for PEF funding. Okay, for PEF funding, we are not for the core attainment challenge fund. Yeah, I think that, yeah, I am aware of it for PEF, I am not sure about it for the rest of it. Yeah, okay, because my understanding has just been allocated on a the traditional funding formula. Can I ask Dr Robertson if that's okay? When the First Minister announced the initial funding in 2016, she said that the attainment challenges focus specifically on and provides additional funding for literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing in primary schools in our most deprived areas. A large proportion of the attainment fund has been allocated to the local authorities that have the highest number of concentration of pupils living in poverty. I think that that was quite a clear rationale at the time. Dundee's had its funding of the fund cut by 79 per cent. What do you think the impact of that would be on the poorest people in my community? My understanding is that the change in the funding is to have a more universal approach, so for some local authorities that might have fewer communities in the 20 per cent most deprived areas, for example Edinburgh, we will be getting more funding to support young people who are living in poverty, which there is plenty in the city of Edinburgh. For me, the allocation of resources is important that all local authorities have access and that it is based on young people living in poverty, so we need to look at other indicators that Emma was talking about. For me, the PEF fund evaluations that people equity fund have been very positive from the head teacher's school perspective about the empowerment that gives local schools. It gives them autonomy around local services and they can offer bespoke support for young people who are living in poverty, young people who might be at risk of being excluded. A lot of the evidence about the people equity fund and the allocation of resources through that has been extremely positive. From our research at the poverty alliance, the main concern for us would be that there is a lack of robust evidence at a national level on how schools should be using their allocated funding. There has been improvements, there has been the development of the equity framework, there is national guidance about the people equity fund but there is a lack of information about how schools are using the fund at present. I would share some of those concerns, I am sure that colleagues will come on to them. I ask Professor Francis about the allocation of resources to the most deprived areas. It seems to me that the work that you have done is directed in this area about making change. We are looking at the £79.4 and £5 are spent on staff supporting 129 staff. We are looking at the loss of over 100 staff working with the most vulnerable young people in the city. You will understand how I am animated by that decision. Do you think that that kind of change will support the kind of change that you are looking for? There are two different points here that I wanted to draw out. One is about the impact of deep poverty that you are absolutely rightly focused on, Michael. The other is about inequality across the board and there is a risk of conflation of different indicators here. I think that that does need some careful thinking, particularly in relation to the art of the possible for schools and what schools are expected to do. Obviously, the persistent disadvantage, which is the terminology that we use in England, is a key predictor of educational outcomes. That is what is undermining the progress on the gap in the English case. Over the past 10 years, prior to the pandemic, there was a narrowing of the gap for attainment for disadvantaged kids overall, but that narrowing had not impacted the most persistently disadvantaged. Indeed, as both the numbers of those pupils increased and the problems have exacerbated—again, we know that that has been even more the case during the pandemic—we are sure enough seeing gaps widen. That is something really important to address. Nevertheless, we also know that the persistent disadvantage is that families and children bring problems to schools that are very hard for schools to move the dial-on. I think that we have to be quite clear about the parameters of what schools can be expected to do compared to, as you rightly say, Michael's wider social services and local authority areas. I would like to highlight the importance of maintaining a focus on inequality across the board. If we look at educational attainment against the spectrum of social disadvantage to affluence, we can see an absolute diagonal correlation. The most affluent pupils are overachieving, if you like, in regard to the mean. That issue for equity across the board remains fundamental in social justice. My argument would be that we must not be dragged away to focus only on the issue of deep poverty and persistent disadvantage—important and urgent, though that challenge is. In terms of the pupil premium in England, the focus is on ever-FSN, which covers almost a third of pupils. I would be a strong advocate of maintaining that metric and measure, while also being clear and tracking persistent disadvantage but recognising that there are diverse and separate issues at stake. Obviously, it will get on to talk about the best ways to address those different issues. We have already heard a little bit about how to address poverty more widely and the impact for a focus on the early years and so on. I will be glad to speak more about that as the session develops. I think that it is a useful observation in terms of the comparison with other comparable cities in urban areas in England. If you were looking at in one of those situations, an area where the progress had been limited by the persistent disadvantage and deep poverty—the different ways that we describe it—multiple deprivation, if you were to cut across the board for those most deprived communities the funding by 60 per cent for those different challenge authorities, as they were called in Scotland, what would you think we would see the results of that being? Exactly, as you are saying, Michael. We can see the intersection of geography, of social background. Social background remains the strongest predictor. I have talked about that spectrum of disadvantage, but it does intersect with geography because we know that, of course, there are pockets and even wide areas where social deprivation is both concentrated and long-term entrenched, getting on to some of the cultural issues that Mal has already raised. That needs to be recognised. Interestingly, in England, with the Government levelling up gender, that geographical approach is becoming much more prominent in education policymaking. I just wanted to go back a little bit. Maybe I am bringing Professor Mel back in here, in particular, but others feel free to come in. Having been a teacher until May, I was saying recently, and it is not that recent any more, but, nevertheless, a lot of what you said actually does resonate. I still keep in touch with my teaching colleagues that initiatives and expectations of data collection and implementation actually come from on high. It feels like that all the time. There are a lot of stakeholders in education that are actually quite disconnected from the classroom and from the children that come to school every day. The ones that don't, of course, have mentioned the importance of that. I am interested in sort of unpicking that a little bit. How can policy makers, national and local agencies increase their credibility a little bit more amongst teachers and headteachers in the classroom so that they do not feel that everything is being dictated to or coming down on high from them, that they are actually part of the process, as opposed to just recipients of it? For me, that is the kind of billion-dollar question that I spent my career trying to address. The metaphor that I have sometimes used, and all metaphors have their strengths and weaknesses, is leavers. What are the leavers for change? We have already talked about one. A leaver is when you have a widespread agreement about what we are trying to achieve. I think that that has been part of the success. Clearly, what we have just heard about funding is a leaver. If we can use funding effectively to help people and encourage people to work together, you see, much of this is about collaboration. I have always argued for more resources, as I agreed with what Michael said, but compared with other parts of the world that I sometimes work in, Scotland is very well resourced. The big question is, are we making the best use of the resources? The human resource is the intelligence, teachers, the families, the wider community, the services, of course the children and the young people themselves. They can contribute to all of this. From a national point of view, there needs to be a debate about where we can best put our attention to facilitate locally led actions, bore on the agenda, keeping the discussion going and then the accountability system. We know what gets measured and gets done in education systems. The accountability system that includes the monetary results but also the inspection process within a country gives messages to what is important. I would have thought, as the Government rethinks its strategy for implementation, that it should focus on where it can create leverage in the system. All of that must allow much more locally led action at the school level, community level and local authority level. We are doing this work in Dundee at the moment, and it is very much led from within schools. We have set up a head teacher strategy group on the local authority house that has designed and led the policy. The education officers who work in the system, one of them said to me fairly recently, when we introduced all of this, or when you introduced all of this to the way that she put it, we thought that we would have no job. Of course, we have realised that we do have a job, but it is a different job. Improvement is led from within the schools. Our job is to support and challenge what is going on. Although what I have described as an adjustment has implications for everybody at every level of the system. If anybody else wants to come in, please indicate. I was going to ask about accountability then. Has anybody got any ideas on how we can improve accountability at the implementation level? That would be at local authority and at school. At the moment, there is a lot of scrutiny and accountability at government policy level, but from what I am hearing, there should be more of that happening at local authority and school level. I think that we need a new kind of accountability, not one that is done to people but done with people. One of the approaches that I have been involved in in various parts of the UK is the idea of peer review, where schools are actually helping one another by revealing one another's policies and practices in order to learn from each other, which stimulates collaboration and creates challenges within the system. That has to have some kind of moderation. It might be that part of the local authorities job, as I said earlier, is to improve schools themselves and the local authorities job to make sure that it is happening. Part of the local authorities job is to keep an eye on that. I think that your national inspection system should also be a form of moderation of that process. Those are all about the adjustments that I have said that need to be made to make better use of the resources in it. Dr Laura, I thought that you were nodding Emma. So again, going back to the work that we have done with the regional improvement collaborative in the north of Scotland, one of the things that they are very keen to be able to do is to be able to work together as a cluster of schools and local authorities to be able to share more data, both on attainment and on some of the things that I was talking about before, the sort of tracking of socioeconomic backgrounds and being able to analyse that data. Across a wider area, you can understand how some of these trends are affecting attainment and where schools have been able to focus on a particular area because it has been identified as an issue, say transportation times or poor housing quality in the area, something like that, that they are able to share that learning between them. I think that that is a key thing that we have very much heard is what they want. Part of the issue is that at the moment some of the software platforms and the way the data is collected can constrain some of that. It is systems that are developed from often from above and schools have to feed into them, but it does not always give them the information that they want out of it. So part of the work that we have been doing, it is via the data for children's collaborative with UNICEF, is to work on that question as well in terms of systems that can support this collaboration and design it from the bottom up so that it is doing what the schools want it to do. I think that there are examples of that happening across Scotland. Part of it is bringing that together in terms of understanding what is being highlighted and some of the solutions that are being found. I would absolutely agree that there are amazing pockets. The pockets are actually quite vast of good practice that are happening. I myself have taken part in cluster projects and sharing good practice. I think that our challenge possibly now is to make sure that that is consistent across all 32 local authorities. That is something that we can explore further. Thank you very much, convener. I am okay. I can come in back later. Professor Ainscow mentioned previously that tools are needed to measure progress in education and closing the attainment gap. I would be interested in touching on what Colcab said about best practice and sharing information between local authorities. What other benchmarks could be used to measure progress at schools, local authority or national levels? Never can start with Professor Ainscow, please. The frameworks that you use give messages as to what is important. There clearly is a case for looking at that in more detail. I suspect that Becky has some more specific things to say on that. I would echo what our colleagues have just said. There are lots of great examples as far as I can see. Obviously, I already have a passion for knowledge up around Scotland. I think that we have got to learn from those experiences. Let's look at the examples. I think that the regional improvement collaboratives are an interesting new structure within the system. I sense that they are working in different ways across the country, but it makes sense to me. If all this is about horizontal moving of knowledge in relation to whatever indicators you agree, it is about what happens within schools, it is what happens between schools and what happens between local authorities. I think that the more horizontal pathways you create, the better. Becky, please. Thank you very much. I have made my point about the importance of attainment as the primary measure, but also some of the ways that we analyse that in relation to social disadvantage and arguing that we ought to maintain ever-FSM as a broad indicator of relative social disadvantage or lower social class, as well as a focus on the more entrenched problem of persistent disadvantage. In terms of broader measures, the EEF, while we always use attainment as our primary outcome, we also look at a range of what we see as secondary indicators such as wellbeing and so forth. Again, the point about students broadly thriving in school, in terms of their experience and their progress, is clearly crucial to supporting their attainment, but we all want that for our children during their time in school. Those other measures are also important, but I have already explained why we focus primarily on attainment. Local Government benchmarking is quite hard to compare, particularly in relation to its family sets, especially when it comes to education and looking at the attainment gap. Local authorities implement national policy, but they also introduce local led initiatives and policies that benefit that particular local authority area. How can best practice be shared, particularly when local government budgets are quite stretched at the moment? I am obviously concerned about the resource there and in terms of the actual funds in order to implement best practice and good policies to improve the attainment gap. If I could go back to Professor Becky Francis on that, please. We have a problem with the sound in the committee room, but we are not hearing what anyone is saying. No, we are starting to hear anything. I was just saying that I am at risk of a little bit of self-promotion for the EEF here, but it is important to mention our role in the English education architecture when we are talking about resource, particularly in relation to some of the points that I made earlier about schools being able to draw in the short term on resources and evidence-led practice to support recovery. I am also really interested in the points that Mel has made about the role of local authorities. I would absolutely applaud what he is saying about school-to-school best practice, needing to really support that autonomous professional mutual improvement, which becomes something of a movement, if done well. Nevertheless, within that, local authorities have a key role as brokers in providing the support and challenge, as Mel has said. In order to do that, schools and local authorities need a pipeline of evidence-led policies and fundamentally interventions and programmes that they can use to support the most vulnerable children in school. That is the role that the EEF has been developing in the English education system over the last 10 years. We think that we have great success and we have been able to mobilise some of those proven approaches and interventions at a national level during the pandemic. It is really heartening to see that our famous teaching and learning toolkit is signposted through the pupil equity funding resources and guidance. I can talk a little bit more about our evidence for recovery and the tiered approach with a focus on high-quality teaching, if that is of interest. The point that I wanted to make in relation to your question is that both local authorities and schools themselves having and being able to access a resource of the purely evidence approaches and interventions seems absolutely crucial. We hope that we are providing a good model here. I just wanted to echo what Becky was saying. The recent evaluation of the Scottish Attainment Challenge showed that the Education and Development Foundation learning teaching toolkit was widely used by schools in terms of them having access to evidence on what types of initiatives and interventions work well. I think that there is a lot of good practice in Scotland. There are rules that have been specifically created such as attainment advisers who are specifically in that role to find out that evidence and share that evidence. However, I think that there needs to be more support for local authorities in that kind of role in finding out what evidence there is and what works. On top of that, there is a lot of evidence out there about what works, but local authorities might not have the initiatives available. For example, tutoring has been demonstrated by the EEF to be particularly effective to tackle attainment gap, but that is a massive gap in current practice in Scotland. We recently were commissioned by the Robertson Trust to look at the provision of mentoring and tutoring for young people living in poverty in Scotland. We only identified free tutoring programmes in a couple of local authorities, so it is just not something that is available to young people. There are 32, but there are only two local authorities doing that. East Lothian currently has a tutoring programme that has recently been developed, and there is the Volunteer Tutors Organisation in Glasgow. Those are the two that I am aware of. There will be smaller-scale third sector community organisations. There will be schools that are using attainment funding for teaching assistants to provide extra tutoring as well, but those are the two that we were aware of from doing our mapping work. Laura, you said that something stopped to local authorities doing that, and I did not quite catch what you said. What was stopping other local authorities from taking those initiatives that have a proven track record and implementing them? For schools, they are just not an existence. In terms of tutoring, there are no programmes there for schools to utilise, so that is basically what I meant. There are ideas, but there is no delivery on the ground. That is very clear. Just to say the point about having evidence that is available is really important, but we also want to think about how schools can best monitor and evaluate their own programmes so that they can come up with robust evidence of what is working for them in their context. That is not just about gathering metrics in isolation of that programme. It is about benchmarking to other programmes. It is about looking at constructs and some kinds of control groups, so that you can really get into the detail of what is happening and what is succeeding for pupils in those areas. I think that that has a resource dimension to it. It is expensive to do that well. It is very difficult with the current climate to find that money, to carve that money out to do that, but in the long run, that is incredibly important for building on success. Becky Francis wants to come back in. Sorry, I think that the point has already been very well made by Laura. For those of you who do not know, the EEF was involved in designing in and delivering the first year of the national tutoring programme in England, based on the existing global evidence that we curated on the productivity of tutoring and its usefulness in the context of the pandemic, given the individualised nature of learning loss often. If you are interested in that, I can talk more about that, but Laura has already made the point that many areas do not have established tutoring practice. In England, tutor provision had been very much concentrated in London and the south-east, so a key job for us was to extend that offer nationally. That is often quite difficult because you have to mobilise resources and develop that in different parts of the country, but it is really fundamental, and it sounds as though that is exactly the same case in Scotland as well. What is the take-up of tutoring in England across the country? Is it now at the levels of London in the south-east? No, that will be a long journey, Stephen. I can only speak to the first year, but some of you may know that there are issues about supply and so forth. We are not delivering the programme. In the second year, that is being done by a private company, Randstad. In the first year, when we were developing and delivering the model, there was real inequality. We had our target to extend provision across the country, which we succeeded in doing. Nevertheless, it was very interesting and dictated by the pandemic as well, different levels of take-up in different areas. We met our bench line targets across the board, but, interestingly, given that the pandemic was slower to take hold in the south-west, we could see that, whereas the south-west had not had strong tutoring provision in the past, that was the area where delivery was implemented most quickly, and the numbers were strongest. We could see both playing out existing infrastructure and provision issues, but also the different levels of disruption caused by the pandemic in different areas. I think that it will be a long journey. The perfect segue to Stephanie Callaghan. The policy aim is to eliminate the poverty-related attainment gap in the next four years. Obviously, that goes much, much wider as well. When we are looking at poverty, things like the baby box, 1140 hours best at grants, Scottish child payment, keeping the promise, all of these things are going to come into it as well here. Obviously, Covid has a massive impact, too. What I am wondering is, is it realistic to be looking at closing the poverty-related attainment gap over the next four years? If not, what would the panel consider to be a success in the next four years? Of course. In terms of what a success would look like in the next four years, as you mentioned, Covid has exacerbated child poverty and impacted on the attainment gap in Scotland. We have been doing research at the Poverty Alliance as part of Get Heard Scotland, which has shown that particular groups of young people with additional support needs and young carers, for example, have been particularly affected. What we need to be focusing on is, as you say, the wider policy around reducing child poverty and policies that specifically address the impacts of poverty on participation in school. There is a lot of successful evidence about the Child Poverty Actions Group cost of the school day programme, which has been implemented across many local authorities, and the positive impacts around raising awareness of poverty and how that impacts on young people being able to achieve beyond just grades, but in terms of their wellbeing. We have to remember that young people only spend 80 per cent of their time within the school, and that more needs to be done to ensure that there is sustainable longer-term funding for third sector organisations, which have been critical in providing support for families on low incomes during Covid. I would also like to give the example of Maximise, which is a programme in Edinburgh that has been recently evaluated by the Improvement Service. The programme provides social security support to parents within schools, so raising advice about their eligibility for benefits has been shown to work particularly well. There is a lot of evidence around making social security advice really accessible in GB practices, and the example of Maximise and Edinburgh has been particularly successful. I would like to see practices around that develop more widely in local authorities around Scotland. The key thing about having targets is that it focuses attention on where we need to get to. The targets in themselves are very important, but wherever targets are made, the drive towards reaching those targets should mean that a better understanding of what works and how you are going to make that progress towards the targets is really important. Otherwise, you might meet the target, but you will not necessarily know how it might be for other factors. Mechanisms that take you towards the targets are incredibly important. If we have been knocked by Covid, which I totally understand will bear out in the data in the coming years, if we have a really good understanding in four years' time about what works and how we are going to get to those targets, that would be a massive step forward. That requires evidence, evaluation and that kind of analysis of knowing what the issues are, how we are going to address them and what the impact of those policies are going to be. We cannot just say that because of Covid, the targets are not achievable and, let's forget about them, things have got worse. It is not an excuse. If they are missed, we need to know why and how to get back on track. That evidence part of the process is incredibly important. That is great. I was looking through to find the quote, but I know that at some point in the papers of this bill it speaks about how important the parents' mental health and where they are at is on the children, the impact that that automatically has. I am wondering about North Lanarkshire Council, for example. It is looking at a hub model, where it has lots of services side by side. You are looking at school, you are looking at nursery, and what it is hoping to do is speaking to its chief executive Desmond very recently. What it is looking to do is that it has multi-disciplinary teams in there and it is looking at giving them shared funding and shared decision making. I was just wondering if there were any comments on perhaps that happening elsewhere and how effective that is. I am sure that I have got anything specifically around that. In terms of the research that we have been doing, mental health of parents and young people living in poverty is a massive issue at the moment. We heard from loads of parents who were struggling to afford essentials such as food and fuel during the lockdown. I definitely think that there needs to be more support and funding for community organisations and local areas to work alongside schools and develop a range of support, and that includes mental health. If I could direct that to Emma and say as well that one of the things that she is looking to do is that she has a single mum who is dropping a child off at a nursery or school that the last thing that she wants her to do is go home and be isolated. You are looking to engage them with education, whether it is a coffee shop, whether it is health, sport and exercise, whether it is advice services. You are looking to keep that parent there and get them really involved. How important is that collaborative and community-based support? I touched on this in a paper that I wrote with a colleague at Strachlide, Jonathan Norris. We looked at some of the more socio-emotional factors that come into education. Clearly, the role of parents is incredibly important, as you say. The stresses and strains that they face are easily transmitted to both the way that they feel they need to parent and how their children feel. In terms of evidence on impact, what you are talking about makes a lot of sense. I, myself, have not seen evidence and evaluations of the success of that in terms of whether the core thing for parents is to engage them in that way or whether just getting more money to them to reduce the stress from poverty and the impacts that it is having on their mental health is potentially as effective. I think that that is the kind of thing that we need to understand better. Where do you divert those resources? Is it into those areas? Is it into social security or is it both that have to complement each other? What you are talking about makes a lot of sense. In many instances, that will be helpful across the board. Ideally, we would have more evidence on that impact compared to other types of interventions. Just to finish up, convener, I know that there has certainly been that recognition recently that cash is so important with all the problems around energy, with the loss of universal credit, that it is really coming into play. I suppose another one is from Laura Aswell. You had mentioned about specific groups of children and young people being most affected by the attainment gap. Gypsy traveller communities, additional support needs, etc. I was wondering if there was anything more that you wanted to comment on around the collaborative work to provide support for those young people. Our research that was published last year on the poverty attainment gap looked at the nature of the gap and what groups of young people are particularly affected. As you mentioned, I drew attention to young people with additional support needs. Young people have been through the carer system. Gypsy travellers and young white boys living in deprived areas are most likely to be impacted by the attainment gap than their more affluent peers, so they are the groups that are most affected by the gap. In terms of support, there is a lot of work being done around supporting young people who have been through the carer system. I think that there is a need for understanding within schools the different needs that young people do have. That is the strength of something like the People Equity Fund, which means that schools can work with local organisations that might provide targeted approaches around working with young people in the carer system or with gypsy travellers, for example. Stephanie, a quick supplementary from Colcab, and then Willie Rennie. Thank you, convener. My supplementary might go back a few questions there. It was going back to Becky. I was interested in what you said that you would put the case for attainment being the primary outcome and you would consider wellbeing. I wondered whether you would consider other positive pathways in that, for instance like apprenticeships as well. In terms of outcome measures, we tend to focus on pupils 3 to 18. That, obviously, at post-16, can take in vocational qualifications. To date, the EEF has focused primarily on outcome measures to GCSE and, within that, primarily focused on literacy and numeracy. Obviously, for good reason, given what I have said about those foundational platforms for learning, but, nevertheless, there is more for us to do in both different subject areas in the secondary curriculum and going beyond that into post-16, not just academic qualifications, but also vocational pathways, including, obviously, apprenticeships. Further education, particularly, is something that we are trying to work further on. It is a very complex domain, as you know. In contrast to the school system, of course, there is extra complexity for our rigorous research methods. For example, in further education settings, kids from different age groups may be sitting the same course and so on. That is quite difficult for us to address with our traditional methods, but it is something that we are working on. Okay, thanks. The other point that I wanted to ask further on was about tutoring. Expecting our young people and children to not only go to school between 9, 3 or 4 o'clock, but then to do additional work. I wonder how many adults would want to do additional work in the evening as well, so I am always mindful of that impact. However, has there been any sort of thought about the impact of that? It is something that adults seem to be thinking that additional tutoring is a good thing and I am not against it by any means, but I am just wondering whether there has been any sort of consultation with the young people and the learners about what they feel about doing all that and what the take-up rate is there as well. Just a final comment before I let people come in about the VTO, the voluntary tutors organisation. I actually had the chance to meet with them a couple of weeks ago. They are based in Glasgow-Kelvin constituency and they are doing amazing work. They are rolling that across and beyond Glasgow, so just to put that on the record as well. That is really encouraging to hear. It is a great question about pupil views on this. The feedback that we had in the first year from pupils as well is that this was really popular both with families but including pupils. Something that is important to point out is that certainly in year 1 of the programme, the majority of the provision was concentrated within the full day. That creates its own complications about when that is provided, is it in lunchtime, is it after the end of school. The point is that schools were co-ordinating the tuition provision because of the evidence that otherwise you will have high levels of absenteeism and so forth and also the necessity for this to be a direct co-ordination with the school teacher so that you do not get the unfortunate, unintended consequences of tutors providing a different curriculum or teaching something irrelevant. That is very much guided by the school teacher. Obviously, that addresses the potential problem of kids having to do extra work on top of their school day. Equally, there are other areas of complexity about providing tuition in the round. It is worth mentioning that in systems such as Finland, it is very, very regular and common to be drawing kids out of the class in the school day to provide them with additional support and provision. I think that I am right to say that it is up to 40 per cent of kids in Finland have additional attention and so forth to ensure that that comprehensive learning can go on with all kids reaching the same levels. I think that there is a lot of and clearly the EFSO and evidence supports how productive this approach can be, but nevertheless getting the mechanics right and particularly while the pandemic continues is pretty challenging. Dr Laura, did you want to come in there? I think that Becky Francis has covered most of what I would have said. In terms of tutoring and what time it happens, it really needs to meet the individual needs of the child. There are a lot of young people who are on part-time timetables and not going to school on a full-time basis. There is an opportunity there to ensure that they have that education provision when they are not in class as well. I thank everyone for their evidence so far. I am looking for a bit more precision because I am not an educationalist. I am involved in the policymaking process. I get completely what Professor Ains Cole is talking about, about empowering people who know what they are doing to do what they know best. I get all that. What I do not understand is what we are getting wrong. I need a bit more precision on that. You talked about budget control. What elements of central budget control do you disapprove of and you would change? What would you change in terms of the measurement process? I have seen in the paper that the measurement is narrowing and that effectively has a disproportionate effect on disadvantaged pupils. What would you change about the measurement process? What are we getting wrong on that front? What are we getting wrong on guidance? I know that you will say that it is a partnership and that we have got a role, but what I want to know is what we are not getting right just now and what we need to change. Professor Ains Cole, can you give us a bit more precision? That is an easy question. Just to say it a few minutes ago, somebody said, can we be optimistic? I think that we have to be optimistic. Things can change. We know that in Scotland and other countries that it is possible to change things. In all the horribleness about Covid, there are one or two positive things that can be built upon. The evidence from all sorts of different places in the world, including in Scotland, is that the crisis has encouraged more collaboration between schools and with families. Professor Ains Cole, can I stop you there? I know that we have got positive things, but I am in politics to try to fix things that are not going well. Can you tell us what is not going well and what we are getting wrong? I am quite prepared for you to be personal, but I just need to know what we are getting wrong, because so far we have not had precision. It is difficult to be precise in a few words, but I will sum up what I am saying as what is needed. I have described it as an adjustment, but the word, as I said earlier, pops up the right word. I think that it is quite a shift in thinking that is needed to build on the success that has happened to move forward. I think that the Government has to create the conditions where local action is possible. That is about allocating resources, encouraging local action, encouraging local leadership at the school and at the aerial level. I think that the Government has to change its thinking regarding that in order to move forward into the next phase. Local authorities have to rethink what their roles are, including their roles within the regional improvement collaboratives. A lot of uncertainty about that. We have similar things in Wales with local authority collaboration, and frankly, it was a fairly poor shovel in Wales. It did not work terribly well. I still think that that is a good idea, but ultimately the key thing is that schools have to be given the freedom and held accountable for making changes to move children forward. The matter that I used in another place has to be about high trust and high accountability. We have to trust professionals to take action, and then we have to keep them accountable. Evidence is crucial on that, as we have just discussed. OK. Let me give you some precise questions then. SNSAs have been a strong critic of them. I think that they create league tables, I think that they distort learning in the schools, and the OECD have been very clear that we need to change. Are those the type of measurements that you think are narrowing the curriculum that is disproportionately affecting disadvantaged pupils? Would you change SNSAs? Would you get rid of them, for instance, for P1s? I do not know the details of all of that, so I would want to come in on the details. OK, OK. Let me give you a question. I guess that the measure is done. I would go with indicators that are crucial, and at the moment, whatever I talk to teachers and head teachers, it is about reducing the attainment gap. The point is that what is the indicator of progress? It is not the goal of education. That is the confusion that is usually going on with it. No, I get that completely. Let me give you another example then. Some of the controls that we have set from the centre are around the pupil equity fund, the attainment challenge. We have effectively ring-fenced the money for those things. There has also been a more recent one about teacher recruitment, particularly about permanent posts and so on. Would you get rid of those controls from the centre? Is that the kind of budget controls that you want teachers to have more freedom on? I think so. That is why there needs to be some trust. We have a trust for accountability, remember that. I hear when I speak to them, head teachers who are frustrated that they cannot design their staffing profile in order to deliver the kind of programme that they think their children and their community use. You cannot centralise that. It has to be specific to particular places. That is why I am saying that it is a very significant shift that we are talking about. It is very challenging to the Scottish situation because there is a deeply established pattern of working that will lead to changing. That is quite a radical change. One final question to Becky Francis. We have talked about tutoring so far. There is a significant difference between the way that the pupil equity fund works and the pupil premium works in England, from my understanding. Is that a part of the reason why we are not driving the tutoring that you have talked about? Is the lack of encouragement from the Peth not expanding the tuition programme? Becky Francis. How qualified to answer it I am, but I can speculate a little. My impression of the difference is the availability of different programmes that schools can easily get their hands on. For me, that is the role that the EEF is increasingly playing in the English education system. Not only do we point schools to the evidence from the teaching and learning toolkit, which the Scottish Government is obviously indicating as a resource for schools in Scotland, but we go much further than that. In our guidance support, our resources for schools, we have a research school network and regional brokers employed by the EEF to mobilise the hub-and-spokes regional profile in different areas of England to ensure the school-to-school work that Melle has alluded to. We know the evidence that teachers are most likely to listen to other teachers. We have a research school network of 40 schools working closely with the EEF across England to promote our resources, run CPD and so forth for other schools and initiate our school-led programmes as to how to use the evidence. We are supplying the evidence on programme projects and approaches that schools can purchase in with their pupil premium funding or draw on themselves in order to develop those approaches using pupil premium resources. The guidance that you will have seen developing in the English case goes a little bit beyond Scotland in encouraging schools to use our resources. It comes back to the earlier point that I made. I applaud what Melle is saying about school-to-school professionalisation and that ownership of evidence-led practice, but practitioners are very busy and they are not researchers. They need to be able to have user-friendly, accessible guidance and existing programmes that are quality-assured and proven to be evidence-led that they can draw on. The issues that have already been mentioned are implementation, which is of course important. There are no silver bullets that will work everywhere, but nevertheless, having concrete offers as fundamental and something that I am seeing to be different in these different national contexts. If I can just throw in as well, I also sense a slight difference in relation to diagnosis. I was quite surprised to see that, as far as I can see, there have not been large-scale projects that are independently assessed—going beyond teacher assessments—but run by an external organisation to test pupils now to assess learning loss against generalisable prior cohorts, which we have commissioned in the English case. I am sorry to teach grandparents to suck eggs, but it seems to me that getting that precise definition. We know the complexity here. You have individual pupil-level complexity, classroom-level complexity, school-level complexity, area complexity and so on. Drilling down to know what the problems are before we start addressing them seems to be really important. I was going to finish there, but your last point was quite interesting. What precisely is happening in England, but is not happening here, on that measurement front? Again, I apologise in advance if I am getting this wrong, but in terms of measurements, of course, not only do you have the renaissance learning research that is being generated by the DFE, but there is also a series of other national-level commission research, not least by the EEF, where we have cohort work going on from the NFER and the Fisher Family Trust, measuring the impact of the Covid gap in relation to prior cohorts pre-pandemic. We do not fully understand the impact of the pandemic on those key groups. I would not say that at all. I have no idea about the extent of your work, but from what I have read, the work that I have seen has been based on teacher assessments and teacher perceptions, rather than tests that have been run by external organisations. Thank you, Willie Rennie. Thank you, convener. Really interesting evidence session this morning. I was quite taken by Professor Ainsill who said that it seems like a lifetime ago now that we should celebrate the success. It was quite clear that there were lots of challenges still there. It is right to put some of that on the record. We do see that fuel leavers of all income backgrounds in Scotland are doing better for positive destinations. In the past 10 years, we have seen that, in the last few years, there has been a record narrowing of the gap between the most deprived and the least deprived groups for positive destinations. That has to be celebrated as significant progress at national levels 5 and 6. There is progress there. We would all agree that that is not fast enough. Can I flip the question on its head? Perhaps, to Professor Ainsill, given that I mentioned him, we know that there has been progress, but do we know how we achieved it and do we know how we can do more of that? We have some indications. My colleagues at the university have been working within the system for 10 years or so, and what we always say in organisational development is that the best way to understand an organisation is by trying to change it. A lot of the work that my colleagues have been doing is a form of collaborative action research on what we have seen is that, when you get collective efforts within a school, within a school, in communities of where schools work with other schools, you make progress. It is good to look outside, including looking at England, but England has its own problems. Do not forget all of that, which Scotland does not have. The tradition of collaboration in Scotland is remarkably inclusive. Most Scottish kids go to the local school. That does not happen in some of the countries. Those are strengths to build on. That is why I think that it is a good moment, I hope, as we come out of this horrible period, for a rethink now as to the next phase of implementation. However, it should build on the evidence that we have that collaboration within the Scottish education system has moved the system forward. I reiterate again that it is a relatively inclusive system. Equity, when it is defined, is usually about inclusion and fairness. Progress is more inclusive. The next step is making it fairer. That is helpful. We have brought it out to other witnesses now. The reason for asking the question was that we do not know whether it is exceptional careers advice for young people, whether it has been the teachers prepping young people for their exit exams, but it could have been success three years ago, four years ago, five years ago, because that is how long the attainment challenge has been going for and how long PEF monies have been in the system's significant bend. Earlier on, we spoke about early learning. I want to give one example of how we measure the success of this, and I will wind it out to other witnesses. One of my local primary schools a few years ago, there were significant issues with what they thought was physical literacy in the health and wellbeing of young people. They used PEF money to bring in a third sector local organisation to do physical exercises—not PE but physical workshops with young people over a period of time. They told me that they saw much better confidence in the classroom. They told me that there was much better interaction between young people and they told me that the spending of that money was a success. That was P1 and P2 and P3. Those kids are now going through the education system. We do not know their successes until we achieve them, if you like. It is back to a measurement question that I suppose to the rest of the witnesses. How do we know the successes that we are making to the system for the future? Is there any longitudinal study going on? Is there a cohort of young people who have been there at the start of the attainment challenge to monitor them going through over the years? That is a very open question, but I am just conscious that all the things that people say here today still will say that we are doing all of this already. There is great work going on, just let us get on with it. How do we measure that in a way that is not bureaucratic, but we can build our evidence base for doing more of it? Will we be widening that out and maybe go to Emma Congreave to start with? I am happy to start. As far as I am aware, there is not that dedicated resource being allocated to think about the type of schemes that are going on and how they are being robustly monitored and evaluated. We are not just talking about initiatives in isolation, we are also talking about how they build on each other and how early years then build through to interventions at primary school and beyond. A longitudinal approach to that would be really helpful. I may be wrong on this, but I do not believe that that is being systematically looked at. I think that there will be people looking at the longitudinal evidence that exists. We have grown up in Scotland, understanding society, but the extent to which they can link interventions to data in those longitudinal studies is probably going to be limited without a lot of effort to make sure that that is the case. That is partly why the Northern Alliance, the Musial Prover Collaborative, has involved some partners in thinking about that. The first start being understanding more of the issues, but once you are moving on from that, it is about understanding the impact of interventions. It is a real issue that there is a plan for monitoring and evaluation at a Scotland level, looking at what is happening overall and trying to get into that. However, there is a lack of attention at the smaller scale to really build a robust, what works methods for understanding some of those interventions. It is great to be able to relate to what is going on in England for some of that, but there is specific context, particularly in parts of Scotland that are very rural, remote, cities such as Glasgow and Dundee that face very particular issues due to the background of those cities. We need a lot more of that. I think that that is all that I have to say on that. I think that that gets to the level of some of the difficulty, because good work in schools is very hard to monitor and evidence base and track without overburdening bureaucracy and paper work exercise around it, which is why I think that a cohort study would be welcome. I saw in the Scottish Government's review of the team and challenge over the last five years that some schools are using scenario indicators as a way of just measuring the wellbeing and co-ordination of young people going forward in a way that was light-touched, but there is no systematic or nationwide approach to doing that. It is a very open question. I am not giving it to an individual witness, but can any of our witnesses point us to a piece of research that has been done or some monitoring that could be done that shows us or demonstrates to us the success or otherwise of PEF spending and attainment challenge funds that will take young people through the early years, through their school career? We want to measure that in a way that is not burdensome, but we want to learn what works for future generations because poverty bites countries time and again over generations. We want to learn what works and we want to embed it within our system for the long-term. Does any witness want to see anything about measurements and outcomes in a way that would be bureaucratic? Emma Harper does, and so does Becky. I will briefly come in on the point about bureaucracy and the issue about measuring in schools. That is a really useful point. As I mentioned earlier, it is something that we have been thinking about with the Northern Alliance. How you can use the systems that are already in place and that schools use day-to-day to enter information about pupils and pastoral notes and all those kinds of things. There are a number of different systems in use, and as I said earlier, none of them quite do what the schools want them to do. It is about whether there is a solution to replace some of that or to merge some of the data that is already collected into a more helpful way. That is a critical part of the evidence-gathering story going forward. Something that resonates a lot with schools and teachers in terms of the burdens that they are under. I do not have an example to give you, unfortunately. I thought that it was a great question about bureaucracy and the challenge for schools in being able to facilitate research and data collection. When the EUF started 10 years ago, there was real anxiety about running large-scale randomised control trials in education. There has been very little of that done previously in UK education research across the board. However, I am really proud to say that 10 years on, over half the schools in England have been involved in one of our randomised control trials. The energy and effort and commitment of teachers and schools to participating in research and being part of that collaboration towards evidence of their practice has just been eye-watering and inspiring. Obviously, we have cohort research that exists in different universities, including the IOE, which I used to run, but we also have the National People Database, which we link our RCT work with, so that we are able to do that tracking work that you have mentioned. Already, that is proving productive so that other agencies and work centres can draw on our data. For example, the What Works Centre for Children and Social Care has drawn on our longitudinal data to be able to track impacts for looked-after children as well. It feels as though there is a real collaborative effort towards collecting that data but also the mission behind it. Andrius Schleicher has commented on the commitment and how impressive that is. It is about galvanising that professional interest in evidence-led practice across schools, which can be really energising. I have a couple of questions for Mel to start off with, although if anyone else wants to respond to them, please indicate them. I am very sympathetic to the line of argument that you have outlined around the need for more professional autonomy for schools, for individual teachers and for heads, but I am interested in the suggestion that you made around headteachers having greater devolution of budgetary powers. It was only a few years ago that a suggestion on those lines was made in Scotland and the feedback from a lot of headteachers was that they did not want to become the chief financial officer of their school, that they wanted to be leaders of learning, but they did not want to be buried under the bureaucracy that would come with significant additional financial responsibility. How would you respond to that? It is an interesting one because other countries that have gone down that road have a similar pattern. When the idea is introduced, headteachers understand that because they have not done that kind of thing before, they say that they do not feel as if they are gilding all of this, I guess that they are thinking that they are worried about what it means in terms of my accountability. The evidence is also clear that, once you have gone through that pain barriers, to give school leaders—and it is not just headteachers but people to do it collaboratively—the space to decide the kind of staffing needs that they have, the kind of profile of teachers that they need, how to support staff and so on, and the flexibility to design a resource approach that fits with their priorities. It is clear that that is needed. The evidence is there that that works for quite a lot of different countries around the world. That would be a significant move forward, but I think that you could anticipate that predictable reaction. The countries that you mentioned have been good examples of that. The committee in the last session visited Sweden and Finland, one of which is a better example of that than the other. The one thing that you are aware of is the case that, to make that transition manageable, there is more administrative capacity within the schools rather than at municipality levels. The headteachers are able to manage that additional burden not singularly. They are not expected to do it themselves. There is a team of administrators located within the school rather than the local authority to help them to do it. That is the important process that goes on. You need to have different kinds of expertise in your office in the school that can address those things. That takes some of the fear factor away. I am just a part of a group that did a review in Portugal on behalf of OECD. Portugal is a very interesting example because it has made enormous progress over the last 20 years regarding equity and inclusion. It is a small country, of course, which is significant in Scotland. A strong element of Portugal, which is well established, is that all the schools are in clusters. The clusters are formal structures and there is somebody who has been elected for four years to be the director of the cluster. Of course, they have the ability to use resources and all the support resources are delegated at the cluster level. I would have thought that it needs careful planning and sensitive support, but I think that that would be an essential move sometime in the day of future. Scottish context, our education authorities are too big. Delivering education through 32 clusters essentially is too big. Well, I logically would seem so to be as an outsider. I would not comment too much on that, but I suppose that the regional improvement collapses could be a p to all of that. Is that not moving in the opposite direction? That is moving up to a dozen or 11 very large regional bodies rather than small clusters, which seems to be what you are indicating. The question would be what is the role of each of those levels? I am emphasising the need for much more autonomy at the school. Now I am suggesting at the kind of debt work or cluster level or whatever you want to take it. You create a collaborative governance arrangement, but you need some kind of co-ordinating mechanism, which would be the local authority, or perhaps it would be the RIC. I do not know that. It might be different things in different parts of the country, but the key to that is giving that space. As I referred earlier, having the accountability to ensure that that space is being used effectively by people who understand the local situation, the context, the community and the children, and they bring people together. It is often said in the school improvement world that school improvement is technically simple but socially complex. It is not that difficult to say what needs to happen. The difficulty is getting all those different partners to agree and pull in the same direction. That is why you would need shared understanding at every level and, as I emphasise, leadership at the local community level in the school. My second question is much more of a political one, but I am interested in your thoughts on it, given your experience from elsewhere. The phrase postcode lottery is not unique to Scottish politics, but it is used here an awful lot, not just in relation to education, but in health and a whole range of other areas. That is one of the challenges with decentralisation, with giving, whether it is local authorities or schools themselves, much more autonomy, is that you inevitably end up with more variation. The tension that creates is that the Scottish Government and we as a national parliament are held accountable for the performance of Scottish education. That is where, in part, the tendency for decentralisation comes in the fact that we are collectively, at least at election time, judged on the national performance of the education system. The more power that is devolved at a local level, the harder it is for those who are nationally held accountable to have any influence over outcomes. How is that tension managed in other settings? How would you resolve that here? It takes us back to the question of your accountability system, does it not? I think that we need horizontal accountability at the local level and a professional accountability amongst practitioners. Then you need some kind of co-ordinated accountability at the local area. The Government has the big picture of collecting evidence and monitoring what is going on. I am not quite sure whether I am answering the question, but I do think that the whole issue of accountability—I know that it is a matter of review in Scotland, but my honest view is that it needs reviewing. It is not working at the moment. The inspections, frankly, do not seem to be working terribly well. From what I hear from people in the schools, a secondary head, who took it over two or three years ago, said that his school had not been inspected for 10 years. He said that the first thing that he did was to look at the data on attendance and exclusions. He said that it was a disaster, but nobody had been looking at it. Somebody has to be keeping an eye on that stepping in. I agree with you on the inspection system. I hope that that is significantly reformed by the current process. Unless anyone else wants to come in on this specific point and indicate that they do, I have a couple of questions for Laura. I think that some interesting points were made in the written submission that you put in. One of them was about educational instruction and educational interventions outside of school in the context of the attainment challenge. Could you expand a little bit on what is meant by that and how that would again come up against the tension of consistency of access? As much as we are aware that there are issues with young people not attending school, the overwhelming majority of young people do, whereas the other contexts in which those interventions are being intended, youth clubs, etc., far fewer young people attend those, even if you have funded them significantly more than we do at the moment, you still would not get an equivalent level of participation as you get with compulsory education. How would additional intervention in the context of the attainment challenge reach the young people? It needs to compare to doing that through schools where, admittedly, they are not all present, but the overwhelming majority of them are. The main issue here is a lack of resource within families. We have done research that families just face barriers to accessing support outside of school because they just do not have the financial resource. Extracurricular activities such as clubs are just not feasible for families living on low income. I have mentioned that already. It is about sustainable funding for third sector organisations, community organisations. We have seen this week that a lot of small community organisations in Scotland are really going to be hit by the cost of living prices. We will have to see what the impacts of that are, but it is likely that many will have to close. I think that that is an important issue in terms of a lot of young people, that 80 per cent of their time is spent out of school, and it is those organisations that provide a lot of family support. I hope that answers your question. Yes, absolutely. I am still wondering, though, if we were to significantly increase the amount of funding that goes to the third sector and the organisations that are reaching it to young people in other contexts, would additional funding alone reach everyone that we are trying to reach here if the objective is to close the attainment gap? Are there changes in approach that are required as well? What I am trying to figure out is that, for the purposes of our committee inquiry, we should be considering making recommendations around allocating some of that money, not to schools but directly to third sector organisations. Is it as simple as reallocation of the money, or do we need to explore whether we should be recommending changes in approach? There is also the factor of raising awareness. From our review on tackling the poverty attainment gap in the early years in particular, I know that there has been a lot of work done by the Scottish Government in extending free hours of childcare. However, for a lot of families living in deprived areas, there is a lack of awareness about what they are entitled to. Alongside that extra investment, it is about ensuring that families' awareness of the support that they can access is there. That was an interesting line of questions. In your report, you also talked about extracurricular support. I can briefly just add to what Laura said, but she has covered it well. Children spend quite a lot of their life outside of school. The role of extracurricular activities in terms of the skills, socialisation and some of the socio-emotional skills that you develop, is incredibly important for attainment and for doing well in school and later on in life. It is thinking about what can be offered outside of school, which is a particular environment that some children may not do well in. Extracurricular activities can add a lot to that, and the evidence suggests that that has a very positive link to attainment. Where there are barriers to be able to go to any—it does have to be youth clubs—music lessons, it can be being able to be in sports teams after school. There are a whole range of things. The key barrier, as Laura said, is the lack of resources in families. There are different ways to take down those barriers. One is free provision, low-cost provision and, by the third sector, directing more money into the pockets of families. That is the key thing to think about. That is effective. The way that works in those particular areas to help children engage in those types of activities that we know will benefit their overall performance at school and later on in life. I have finished my previous comment and asked one more follow-up question on that point. The examples that we have of areas where extracurricular activities are free of charge and where there are not significant financial barriers at least to families—there is higher participation, but it is not 100 per cent participation. I suppose that what I am trying to get at is how do we reach those young people who, even if they remove every financial barrier, there are still other barriers to them, whether they are chaotic family lifestyles, etc, to them participating or who simply do not want to participate in that extracurricular activity. Those are voluntary activities and that is great, and that will help a lot of young people. What about the young people who simply just choose not to participate in those activities? That is a very valid point. Laura talked about awareness and that might be part of it. It might be part of lack of awareness of how attending those activities helps children, so parents might not be aware of how important they are. The key is to understand why people are not attending and what the root cause of that is. If financial barriers will be one, it might not be the only barrier—it might be stigma or all kinds of things. Rather than casting aside, I know that you are not doing it, but because not every child will attend, it is actually figuring out why that is the case. If we are clear that extracurricular activities are important, then understanding the whole range of barriers that stop children attending them in private transport is quite a big one. Even if the provision is free, getting to it can be difficult. It is an area that could do with a little bit more consideration of what the barriers are. Thank you, Ross Greer. Last but not least, to Fragus Ewing, who is going to take us down our last line of questions. There was a late songwriter, Johnny Marcer, who wrote a song that still sung called Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative. I mention it because, perhaps unintentionally, there is a risk in those discussions that we run into doing the converse, that we eliminate the positive and accentuate the negative. I just wanted to start off by saying that I hope that we all recognise, and I expect that we do, that every day our teachers are working hard putting in effort, enthusiasm and expertise into the job that they do. Having been an MSP for 22 years, I receive vanishingly few complaints about our teachers. I just think that it is correct to put that in record. Not that this morning has been unduly negative, and the fact that the Scottish Government is putting in this year, I understand, 250 million pounds of Scottish attainment challenge fund, as well as protecting free tuition for higher education, which has not been mentioned, but is absolutely key to addressing the problems related to the poverty gap. What I wanted to ask, in particular Professor Eims Cow, is that it is a very interesting discussion, but it tends to be of a general nature. There are lots of abstract nouns, but it is more difficult to get concrete actions, and that is understandable perhaps. I wanted to try to drill down following the line of questioning that Mr Rennie pursued. Can you say exactly what you mean and meant when you said that head teachers require control over their budget? Can you give me three examples of what you think head teachers might do in practice to make things better to tackle the poverty gap? It is a good question. The dangers of a meeting like this, we talk at the generalities. The ideas behind what I have presented here are based on working with schools in very different places over many years. As I have said, context matters. What we will work in one place might not work in another place. What are the barriers in one place may be difficult in one place and do not end in another place. What we need is the potential for senior people at the local level, particularly at the school level, to analyse their own situation and say who are the youngsters who we are concerned about. What do we know about them? What are the barriers in making it difficult, and how can we work together to make progress in all that respect? That could be about many things. It could be about attendance. That is where statistics are helpful, but they are insufficient. Statistics tell us what things look like. It shows the past, but it does not tell us why. If we want it to mean, we have to ask the question. If we have some children who are not attending, let us find out why they are not attending. Is it to do with families? Is it to do with transport? Is it to do with illness or employment? It could be all of those things. What happens is that, because people in schools are so busy, they tend to have hunches, which become beliefs. When my colleagues work with schools, we help them to use evidence that they collect, starting with statistics, but also listening to the voice of people, children, colleagues or families. Anybody else who has a role to play creates a collective understanding of the situation. In so doing, you take collective action to move forward. It could be about attendance. It could be about some children who are misbehaving and are being excluded from lessons too often. To give a specific example, one secretary I worked with, a large secondary school, looked at your died as it was in an English context, and they realised that a significant number of young people were invisible in the school. Nobody knew their names. Nobody knew anything about them. When they looked at the young people and collected evidence by talking to them and watching them in the classroom, they found that those youngsters went through the day and nobody ever used their names. They put their hands up in lessons but rarely got asked. Those youngsters were kids who were doing all right. Their behaviour was very good and their homework was done and all that, but were they included? Were they being valued? Not at all. I am arguing that we have to create an inquiring stance in the system in which schools and partnerships of schools are collecting evidence about their own situation to find out what are the barriers, to mobilise resources, to take action and then to boliti the impact of that action. I am arguing for a school system that is very much research-based, but not just using the kind of research that Becky will bring into the situation. That makes a contribution, but analysing their own context. I am impressed by the passion with which you have posed the views. Instinctively, I am in support of the idea of headteachers having more discretion, but when you get down to specifics, Professor Ainscow, many things are fixed. The level of salaries, for example, I presume that you do not think that headteachers should start to pay some teachers more or less than they get per the tariff or the repairs that are required to building, the rates, the heating, the lighting, the insurance. There is so much of the budget that is fixed. I was just interested if there were any specifics. When I speak to constituents about education, they do not really talk about that language at all. The language that we use is not a vocabulary that you get out of the Holyrood bubble or system. They talk about what I wish they could get a musical instruction and a musical instrument, but I wish they could get more tutoring. That has been referred to earlier. I thought that that was an area that perhaps we have not explored enough. Maybe they should learn how to touch type, which, in Holland, is mandatory and which is still seen as a marginal skill for the 20th century, but it is now an essential skill for the 21st century. I have no idea why the educational establishment has not honned in that. Or it could be that we would like more business people to come into schools to explain to our kids what they actually do. I think that my constituents would mention such things, but they have not been mentioned this morning. I am not saying that as a criticism of anybody. It is just a general observation from somebody who, unlike my colleague and friend Co-Cab Stewart, has not really been involved since I left school, which was rather five decades ago or thereabouts. However, I do want to come back and challenge your one specific point, Professor Rainscar, because I am just not persuaded that there is an evidential basis for the contention that you have made that headteachers and teachers do not focus on individual children. The impression that I get is that they do their best to do that and, by and large, they do that. I am not sure whether you meant to assert that there is a general failure across the board to identify or even communicate with large numbers of pupils in schools. I find that a very difficult contention and one that does not square with, for example, the experience that I have had to go to what used to be called prize-giving—I am sure that it calls somebody else now. When I heard that there is a huge array of achievements in a school in which children seem to get happy and well-known to their teachers as friends, I am afraid that I do not really recognise the one single example that you gave as being evidence-based, which was the point that you were making. I think that much of what you said supports my case. When you talk about what your constituents would want, it seems to be part of the role of management and leadership would be to actually be listening to the voice of the community and saying, what kind of education system do we need here? That is why I am saying that that cannot be dictated nationally. You cannot make those decisions. It needs to be made at the local level, involving people, listening to the young people themselves. They have an important role to play, listening to colleagues in the school, listening to colleagues in other schools and, as you have said, listening to families. I think that what you have said supports my argument, but somebody has to manage that. It has to be managed at the local level. I think that that will potentially reflect that. Maybe I should ask one final question of you and then perhaps invite the other witnesses to be fair to them to comment about specifics. If any of the topics that I have raised for example read the other witnesses, if they think that we should be making recommendations specifically about some of the matters that I mentioned or other similar things, let me go back to the national local issue, which you have raised, Professor Ian Scow, as perhaps your main point. If we take, for example, those kids that need a bit more assistance in learning have fallen behind, for whatever reason, be tutoring, surely there needs to be a national prescription that this is something that cannot be neglected and that must be dealt with. How it is implemented is then a matter for the headteachers in the local education authority. How can it be left just to random acts? There must surely be, and I am just taking this as a specific example where I think that maybe there is a strong case for doing something more, but there needs to be a national prescription. Otherwise, we are leaving entirely to the decisions of a local level and we end up with the postcode lottery, which was made too early. I do not think that we are in disagreement really. I am not sure about the word prescription, but I think that there needs to be a national lead. There should be a clear indication of what is expected and how people are being accountable, but then I think that it has to be interpreted in different contexts. You have this incredible thing in Scotland as well, of course, between the rural, the islands and so on. We have Glasgow in a completely different world. Local interpretation of those national requirements is absolutely essential. I do not think that we are in disagreement about that, but I certainly was not implying, in case I gave the wrong impression, that anything goes. Remember what I said? High trust, high accountability. We need to trust people to do the right things, and we have got the fantastic resource of teachers and other people in the Scottish schools. We need to trust them, we need to support them, we need to get behind them, but we need to hold them accountable for them. Maybe there is more agreement than a parent. To pick another line from set song, I think that we have maybe tried to bring Bloom down to the minimum. I may pass to the other two witnesses because I think that it is only fair to give each of them an opportunity to say if there are any specifics that we really could do more on, whether national, local or prescriptive are otherwise, to address the attainment gap to help particularly kids from rural backgrounds. Thank you very much. I think that we need to focus on the gap. I take the point that when you ask constituents what they would like in education, of course, there will be an array of different responses, but the focus here should be on the evidence around the attainment gap. The prior discussion is probably drawn to a good conclusion, which is that you need clear central policy and mandate where necessary, but also where possible professional autonomy and ownership in order for that energy to be gained on the ground and the locally specific context to come into play as well. The encouraging thing is that the Scottish recovery programme is emphasising some of the key things that we know from the evidence will make the best impact. We know that, for example, that quality of teaching is the thing that makes the biggest impact of pupil progress, but that is doubly the case for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. Obviously, your recovery programme is focusing on bringing additional teachers into the system. Quality is key. I do not know if the Scottish situation is following the same trends in England where we are already saying that applications for teacher training are falling, so there may be issues of our recruitment and retention to keep an eye on there, but nevertheless the thrust is exactly right. Then you have the issue of securing that coverage of high-quality provision across the country when we know that this tends to be patterned by kids from socially disadvantaged backgrounds being the least likely to be able to access high-quality subject specialist teaching. I imagine that, given everything that has been said, that is the case in Scotland also, and that requires, obviously, a national policy level and local authority intervention. On what can head teachers do, we recommend a tiered approach based on the distillation of the evidence across the board, which is, first of all, to focus—even though it is not catchy in recovery terms—focus on that high-quality provision that I have just been talking about—high-quality teaching, recruitment and retention, sending money to secure that, and, of course, to provide ongoing CPD to existing classroom teachers to ensure that we are realising the best from the profession, particularly for disadvantaged students. Secondly, to focus on evidence-led, proven projects and interventions, particularly in the context of the pandemic. For example, we have talked about tutoring, specific, proven literacy and numeracy programmes and so forth. Thirdly, wider cross-school programmes that ensure that kids are ready to learn. Again, that is doubly important in the context of the pandemic, given the impacts of that. Thinking about wellbeing, thinking about presence and attendance in the classroom, thinking about behaviour programmes and so forth. For busy head teachers, thinking about a conjunction of those different approaches in that tiered approach when spending the PEP funding will be crucial. I will finish with one specific and then one general point. The research that we have been doing has been in the north of Scotland, in a mix of rural and urban areas across the Northern Alliance. One thing that has not been spoken about today, which is quite an issue for some children, is the time that it takes to travel to and from school. It might not be that they live all that far away from the school, but the bus route that has to go around the houses to drop everyone off can mean an hour each way. Perhaps that is something that an inquiring mind might think that that could be done in a different way. It limits time at home to do homework and there may not be a bus that takes you at home after an extracurricular activity, so that might be out of the question. Just a general point, across the board, better linkage of the approach that has been taken or the focus on child poverty and thinking about how some of those interventions there link across into the work in the education system to make some better use of the evidence from interventions being put in place locally and at national level would be really helpful to join those two up. The poverty-related attainment gap poverty is a big part, obviously, of what is going on here. Sometimes it can feel a bit disjointed when you are thinking of the attainment gap versus a child poverty policy. It would be very helpful if those two are brought closer together. I thank both Becca and Emma for their answers and say that the recruitment retention issue is self-evidently important. The school transport issue is very pleased that Emma has raised it because I can say without fear of contradiction that it is a very serious issue for many parents. Even children who have lived just a few miles away from the school can take a long, long time to get to the school. I think that this is something that, in distributing the attainment fund and making sure that it reaches areas where there is hidden poverty, there are many parts of rural Scotland where this is a cost that simply is additional and does not arise in urban areas. I am grateful to both witnesses for the specifics that they have raised. Laura, do you want to comment? I do not think that I have anything to add from my original comments. I would like to reiterate what Emma has mentioned as well. It is about reducing child poverty. There are examples of positive things happening in different local authorities, such as the cost of the school day programme and maximise, which I have already mentioned. More needs to be done to ensure that that is not just happening in certain areas and that those programmes that have been shown to be effective are happening across the board. That brings us to the end of this part of our meeting. On behalf of all the committee, I thank Professor Mel Ainscow, Professor Becky Francis, Dr Laura Robertson and Emma Congrive for the evidence that you have given to us this morning, which has been very valuable. We are now moving on to the third item of business for the consideration of subordinate legislation, the nutritional requirements for food and drink in schools, Scotland amendment regulations 2021. The committee first considered this instrument at the meeting of the 26th of January and at that meeting we agreed to write to the cabinet secretary for education and skills for more information. The committee has received a response from the cabinet secretary and this is included in our meeting papers. Do members have any comments that they wish to make on the instrument? I think that it was right and helpful to have a response from the cabinet secretary, but it begs an awful lot more questions about the initial legislation and regulation. I am satisfied that we can proceed as we are. I think that there are still many unanswered questions about it all and we should continue to monitor it, but we should allow it to proceed. I would like to also add for the record that we received a letter in response to our letter from the cabinet secretary, but in that letter we were given no end date, no clarity on what the conditions would be for the lifting of this particular regulation, and there was, disappointingly, no record of how this regulation had been implemented since it was first enacted in December. The only assurance that we got was that officials were speaking to each other, but we were looking for something a bit more than that. Having said that, I understand what Willie Rennie is saying and agree with him. Before I move on, I would like to ask if anyone has got any more comments that they want to give. No other comments have been forthcoming. I ask that the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument. Is that agreed? Are we content? We are content. The public part of today's meeting is now an end. I will now suspend the meeting and ask members to reconvene on Microsoft Teams, which will allow us to consider our final agenda items in private.