 Welcome to the next meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2019. We have received apologies this morning from Gordon MacDonald. Is to take a decision on whether to take item 5, which is consideration of the draft report on Scottish national standardize assessments in private. Are we content to do that in private? Are we content to take future consideration of the draft report in private? Agenda item 2 is subordinate legislation. We have two pieces of subordinate legislation The first piece is consideration for the education fees and student support, miscellaneous amendments, EU exit Scotland regulations 2019, SS1 2019, stroke 70. This is a negative instrument and the details are provided in paper 1. Do members have any comments on this instrument? I would be content to let that go forward there. Thank you very much. The second piece of subordinate legislation for the committee is the teachers' superannuation and pension scenes Scotland, miscellaneous amendments, regulations 2019, SSI 2019, stroke 48. This is also a negative instrument. Members will be aware that the Scottish Government has now laid another negative instrument that will amend the instrument before us today. The amending instrument will change the date of implementation of the increase in the employer contribution from 1 April to 1 September 2019, set out in paper 3. Do members have any comments on this instrument? We are content to let that go forward. The item 3 is a review of responses in consideration of the committee's report on young people's pathways, a progress report on developing the young workforce. The responses have been received from the Scottish Government, Skills Development Scotland and the Association of Directors of Education. Those are detailed in paper 4. Before I invite comments from members, can I make one suggestion for further work in this area? Recommendation 3 of the report recommends that the Government undertake a large-scale quantitative survey on young people to establish whether developing the young workforce has progressed the culture shift towards achieving parity of information for young people on post-school options. The Government response does not suggest that it intends to undertake such a survey, and on that basis suggests that the committee could rerun the survey of young people it used to instigate the inquiry. It was open for a few weeks and received over 900 responses when it was originally done, and we could run this same survey at the end of 2020 to assess any progress made towards parity of options, and this would be compared with the 2018 results. That was just a suggestion for the committee, if members have any other comments at this stage. I cannot remember this when I was looking back last night. It was one session, I think, with Skills Development Scotland, but it was also referred to by colleges and universities, about how accurate we are in determining the data as to where a young person goes after leaving school. Did we make some progress on that? I am going to have to do fair perhaps advice, convener, on the other members about that, because I was not present for the eight-minute session. Could we maybe find that out, because it was quite important? It was quite important. I don't know if anyone else is able to. We made the suggestion that we needed to have better quality information about when somebody leaves schools to try and track that progress. I certainly remember that it was referred to by Petra Vend when the universities were talking about tracking young people as they went through institutions. Could you pose a message of clarification from the Government on that? That would be helpful. I am sure that we can write to the Government regarding that issue. Are there any other comments? We might be reluctant to go through the whole thing, which I did go through. I have got quite a lot of points here, but I don't know whether it is really useful to raise them here. I was concerned as a general observation that quite a number of the recommendations what seemed to happen was that they just repeated what they said to the committee so that teacher survey of young people was a good example. They said, well, we are just doing what we are doing. I think that we are awaiting a report on an update on retention and promotion of teachers. There was a report done for the Scottish Teachers Negotiating Committee, and that was supposed to be done in February 2019. We could maybe ask what has happened to that. I think that there was issues around the quality of careers education. There was an issue about prioritising statutory levers, which, again, they have just batted back. They are not really respond—they are not engaged with the argument, which I think I found frustrating. The whole question of, is there an equivalent to UCAS? They do not really respond to that. There was a thing about workplace standards. We argued that people should be doing a module, which tells them what they should expect when they go. The response is, while the standard tells you that, but the point is that the young person should know. I suppose that without pressure, I am wasting too much time from other folk. I do not think that they answer the question and post their destination for care leavers and disabled. They do not answer the question about, we made a point around developing young workforce that should not be left to schools to do it, and they do not, again, respond to that. They simply repeat what they said before, and that was a concern for us that schools could end up in a position where they could not continue the good work that they were doing. On the SQA, I pursued the question of commercial work. I simply said, well, we have to be self-financing. The question that I would ask is why more than any other public agency would we expect them to have to find a way of funding their core work, especially since the argument was made to us that the commercial work was a distraction and was diluting their ability to focus on what they needed to do. In the last two points, there was a question on panels, where we argued that it was important that, if possible, that panels could be consistent for a young person, and they said that 99 per cent of those who ask for the same panel accepted that request, but that is not really the point. It is not the one to simply ask for it as a routine. Sorry, Jan. Can I just stop you there? We have got the agenda item about the general responses from the Government, so that agenda item was specifically in the development of the young workforce. I think that that has gone into the... Okay. ...which we will deal with. So specifically in the development of the young workforce issues and the report and the responses, are there any further comments from the committee? Several of the points that John's raised. Are we content to write to the Government drawing their attention to the official report and asking them to come back with further clarification on those issues? Yeah, definitely. Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you. So the next agenda item was the more general and detailed response from the Government on its response to our work and recommendations that we've made in earlier reports in general. So I think that most of your points up until that point about the panels was... Yeah, that was still on the point that I had about the panels was in the consistency. Is that the children's panel issue? Were there any other points on the more detailed Government responses? Yeah, if you want to go on. We made a point about thematic inspection around personal and social education and how important that was and the response that they gave us, well it can be inconsistent but we found good practice, which can again just simply missed the point, which was we were wanting to make sure that the general, the accessory young people across Scotland should be, if not done in the same way, at least there should be some basic things that were the same. So the giving guidance now on specifically the role of the tie recommendations, including the recommendations, should we ask them to report back on that? I think that we've reduced what I think the other point was just around the role of inspection system in identifying how consistent the approach was across Scotland. I mean I accept the local flexibility in different priorities but I don't think the response simply saying, oh well, you know, this would practice would be enough. As anyone otherwise minded about those points, should we write to for further detail for those ones? The only other point that I thought we might want to highlight is our recent work on ASN again, which we have written to the Government about but just to highlight again to the importance of that work and getting some further information from the most recent evidence sessions that we've had. I thought the response in digital support needs was a bit disappointing, it was a bit thin, so it would be good if we could turn that up. I think that we should highlight that. I think that we'd be content with those that way forward. Thank you very much. That concludes the public part of today's proceedings and we will now move into privatisation.