 I welcome everyone to this, the 22nd meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2018. I remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices to silent for the duration of the meeting. We should note that Alasdair Allan has given apologies that he will have to leave the meeting at one point to move some amendments in the local government committee. That will happen at the time that he is aware of, so we note that for the record. We have had a change of membership to the committee since the last meeting, and therefore the first item of business is an opportunity for the new members of the committee to declare any interest relevant to the remit of this committee. I warmly welcome Clare Adamson, Alasdair Allan, Jenny Gilruth and Rona Mackay to the committee and can invite Clare first of all to declare any interest. I would just like to declare that I am a board member of CERC. I draw people's attention to my declaration of interests. I do not think that there is anything relevant or anything that derives many remuneration, but I draw people's attention to my register of interests. I draw people's attention to my register of interests as a member of the General Teaching Council for Scotland. I also take the opportunity to record my thanks to all of those who are leaving the committee—James Dornan, George Adam, Richard Lochhead and Gillian Martin—for all the work that they did in contributing to the work of the parliamentary committee. In particular, I want to record my thanks to James Dornan, who, while we were dealing with substantial and challenging issues, managed to do so in a way that pulled and held the committee together, which was very important. He showed a very interesting willingness to take the committee out beyond the committee rooms itself, engaging actively with people who have an interest in education across Scotland. I wish him well in chairing the local government committee. We can move to the next item of business, which is the choice of convener. On 1 June 2016, the Parliament agreed to motion 278, which resolved that members of the Scottish National Party are eligible to be chosen as convener of the committee. I understand that Clare Adamson is the party's nominee for this post. I ask someone to nominate Clare Adamson as our convener. In that case, I congratulate Clare on her appointment. I look forward to working with her. I will now hand over to you to do the hard bit of the job today. Thank you very much. I am pleased to be back on education committee having served in the previous education and culture committee in the last session of the Parliament. I would like to echo the comments of the deputy convener regarding the members who have gone on to new roles in the Parliament and wish them well. The next item on the agenda is agenda item 3. It is a decision whether to take agenda item 5 in private and whether to take consideration of the work programme at the next meeting in private. I have an agreement from the committee. Agenda item 4 is the 2018 exam diet curriculum and attainment trends. We are taking an evidence session on this this morning. I am very pleased to welcome Dr Alan Britton, senior lecturer in education at the University of Glasgow, Professor Jim Scott, School of Education and Social Work at the University of Dundee, Dr Marina Shapira, lecturer in quantitative methods at the University of Stirling, Dr Janet Brown, chief executive and Alistair Wiley, head of technology, engineering and construction qualifications from the Scottish Qualifications Authority. We have her apologies this morning for Professor Louise Hayward, who is unable to be with us this morning. I welcome the panel this morning. We did have some themes in our paper today, but we are going to, just like members, have questions once you have all had an opportunity to make some opening remarks, and I would like to invite Professor Scott to lead off. Thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is something of a challenge to condense all that has happened in CFE into about three minutes, but I will do my best. I am not going to attempt to read you my attainment evidence or my curriculum evidence. You have seen that. What I would say to you is that I have drawn evidence by sieving every single school and local authorities' documentary pile, the website, the paper, the lot. I have examined agency papers, Government papers and I have interviewed 100 of the governance actors in Scotland from this level to middle level head teacher and deputy head teacher. It is by triangulation of a great deal of evidence of the conclusions in my paper of a rise. Curriculum of excellence is a very difficult thing for Scotland to achieve. It is a highly commendable thing for Scotland to achieve, and I spent many years of my professional life trying to do just that. It is worth noting that major initiatives tend to take 10 to 15 years to work through, and they tend to have been initiatives that covered two years of a secondary curriculum or aspects of a primary curriculum. We are attempting to improve the entire curriculum. One should expect, therefore, that there would be A issues and B that it would take a significant period of time. I think that what my evidence suggests is that there certainly are issues and that we are not yet at the end of the process by any means. If I look at the curriculum, I have looked at two parts of the curriculum. I have looked at the broad general education S1 to S3 and I have looked at the senior phase S4 to S6. You have in your possession a cut-up version of this, which is a curriculum map of the entire Scottish S1 to S3 curriculum. It demonstrates, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the things that Douglas Osworth, when he was a Majesty's senior chief inspector of schools back in the late 90s, told us not to do have been implemented in flesh in Scottish schools. We have significant fragmentation of the curriculum. Taster courses have reappeared in many schools, despite the fact that HMI always warned us not to do this. Languages appear or don't appear. I was hoping that I could smile at Dr Allan, because he and I have had many conversations about 1 plus 2. The reality of the situation is that 1 plus 2 is by no means implemented in the BGE, although it should be. Approximately two-thirds of Scottish schools more or less implement the 1 plus 2 process. In the S4, 5 and 6 curriculum, the real problem lies in S4, but there is a subterranean problem there because much of the problem lies in the articulation of S3 and S4. If you have tried to work your way through that curriculum map that I supplied you with, you can see that articulation, the idea that courses are coherent and progressive, which are things that CFE would wish them to be, does not seem to be the case. If I only look at the schools that are progressing towards six courses in S4, that happens with anything from eight courses to 24 courses in S1. No one would suggest that eight courses or 24 courses are an appropriate way to educate Scottish children. None of us would take that view, I suspect. That happens in S2 as well, but then in S3 there appears to be significant confusion within the profession. That is backed up with interviews that I have carried out recently and before. What happens in S3 is that any pattern in S1 and S2, and they are often quite consistent in S1 and S2, any pattern in S1 and S2, leading to any one of those six courses, seven courses or eight course models in S4, what one then finds as the progression route through S3 from that to that can be almost apparently random. Going in one block of schools that do 16 courses and 16 courses in S1 and S2, you can have 12 to 15 different processes evident in Scotland for schools trying to track through to the next set of courses in S4. That is not something that we should support. We did away with the curriculum guidelines at the end of the 1990s, and the place that was circular 3, 2001 and then curriculum for the X ones. All of that allowed head teachers in communication with their school bodies to actually choose the curriculum. What appears to be the case is that either school communities have made some very random choices or head teachers have made some very random choices. There is, of course, another layer there because some Scottish local authorities have chosen to mandate those schools to carry out a certain course structure. One sees that evident in the map that I supplied you with to show what happens in the S4 curriculum. Many of the local authorities in the north have opted for six courses and most of the rest have opted for something else. The outcome is, I think, both the spice paper and I produced the numbers that demonstrate what is happening in S4 in Scotland just now. The latest, and I can tell you it is the latest, because I have just finished a survey of all the 159 Scottish secondary schools again. The latest position is that 54 per cent of Scottish secondary schools are offering their children, I will carefully say, only six courses. Approximately a third, slightly less than that, are offering seven courses. About an eleventh are offering eight courses. And there are still three or four hardy souls who are offering five courses. The problem there is in the detail for the child, because in the end it does not matter of tuppence what the curriculum structure is unless it meets the needs of the child. The evidence demonstrates that the problem for many middle- and upper-ability-veined children is that their choice is being squeezed, particularly in the five and six-course schools. If you are in a six-course S4 school, what happens is that most children choose maths and English, understandably, and they then either choose two social subjects and a science depending on what their particular aspiration is. That leaves the entire remainder of the Scottish curriculum fighting for one column in those schools. Needless to say, much of what would have been a beneficial experience for those children in times past has gone. That obviously has an impact then on attainment. Some of my critics have chosen to point out that I have focused on S4. The only reason I have focused on S4 is that there was data for S4 sooner than there was for S5 and S6. It takes time for those things to work through. However, we will leave that to one side. If I look at S4, the situation in S4 is that, had things gone on as they were in 2013, and 2013 was not the strongest of the pre-CFE years, 2011 was stronger than 2010 was stronger, but if things had gone on as they were in 2013, a middling year, we would have had an extra 622,000 qualifications in Scotland over the five years since. I actually struggled to say that in a public forum. It is almost unbelievable. We have chosen to do something different, but that curriculum narrowing has both impacted significantly on the quantity of attainment—I will come back to quality in a minute—and has impacted significantly on the quantity of attainment, but it has also impacted on the progression pathways that are then available to children. I think that most of you are probably aware that I am an ex-head teacher of several schools. If I look at those several schools that had quite different catchments, in all cases it tended to be the case that children who started off aiming for a particular thing frequently did not end up doing that because things went wrong in exams and they had to have backups from some of their other subjects to pick up and move forward. We used to be able to assure children that those progression pathways were there. It is harder now. It is almost impossible in a five-course school, anecdotally one school in Scotland that chose to do five courses and opted to do English, Gaelic native speakers and mathematics as mandatory subjects for two years at the beginning of CFE. That left only two other subjects for everything else, which is a refined form of madness, I think that I have to say. Clearly, if one moves on into S5 and S6, the current mantra is that we should look at leavers' attainment. I have no problem with that. Those of us who worked in schools and local authorities always looked at leavers' attainment. There is nothing new there at all. The evidence suggests that things have continued to improve in terms of leavers' attainment, and that is true. However, if you look at the profile of what has happened with leavers' attainment, leavers' attainment grew quite strongly from the beginning of the recording of the data in 2009-2010 up to the point where we hit curriculum for excellence. Since then, leavers' attainment has either grown much more slowly or it has plateaued, or in one case it looks like it may just be beginning to go down. If it is going down, that would be in line with what seems to be happening in the senior school. Level 7, advanced higher, progresses more or less smoothly. There have been a couple of little ripples, but those could be experimental errors. There is no way of suggesting that there was anything wrong there. That is probably not surprising, because the most able children tend to survive changes of system most effectively. They have all the additional benefits. The thing that concerns me most about both my curricular findings and attainment findings is that what seems to be happening is that those who are worst affected by curriculum for excellence are the lower end of the average group of children and the lower group of children. I do not know a head teacher in Scotland or an educational researcher in Scotland who would not subscribe to the concept of equity. That is something that education professionals will spend their lives attempting to achieve. The evidence here suggests that equity is not being achieved and, in fact, things appear to be getting somewhat worse. That is not a happy thing to say to a group of politicians, because that is not what you want either. If I look at school-based evidence, I have amongst the many things that I did not give you because I was aware that there was a limit. I have a profile of schools that still declare their attainment. One of the problems for a parent or a child who is involved in the process is that we all understand that, since 2001, it should be the case that parents and children are consulted about the nature of the curriculum and the experience. The problem is that, where schools declare their attainment—that is not many of them—the pattern demonstrates that schools in less—I will use the word posh, since I am out of adjectives at the present moment, schools in less affluent areas, since my brain has returned, generally are the ones whose attainment has gone down. There are quite market profiles among schools across Scotland in terms of what has happened. Some schools have allowed their level 3, level 4 and level 5 attainment to rise and supported that in effective ways. Others have just gone along like that and there has been no change. Others have either gone down a bit or, in a small number of cases, have gone down quite significantly. I know that one of my colleagues later will talk about her findings in that context. We have a problem that we do not seem to be achieving excellence at least if attainment in S4 has dropped by 33.8 per cent since 2013. I find that number difficult to say in public again. If equity appears to be being diminished rather than increased, it appears that we have a problem. There are three layers of problems that I suggest to conclude. One lies with the national process. You might describe curriculum for excellence as—excuse me, I do not know why I have a dry mouth sitting in a political meeting—you might describe curriculum for excellence as a process of four committees and two administrations. The trouble is that the process has not been a smooth one. I am a mathematician, so I might be tempted to describe the process as orthogonal, but it might actually be worse than right-angled. We had a national debate, a ministerial response to that national debate, a curriculum review group, a ministerial response to that curriculum review group, and then we went on to a curriculum board and then on to another curriculum board, and the process of going from one to another is not smooth. I have been involved at the front edge of all the national developments since higher still, possibly the one before it to some extent. In all those developments that have gone through, this is the one that has had the most random governance pathway nationally. If you then look at the situation where those bodies who are actually responsible for implementing the process of Scottish local authorities, I can say with some feeling as an ex-headteacher, an ex-local authority officer on and off, that it has become harder and harder for Scottish local authorities to carry out those actions, because their residue of highly experienced educationalists has diminished across the past 10 to 15 years. Then you have the school situation. I do not know if you speak to headteachers a great deal, but one of the things I would say to you is that we would all commonly accept that not all headteachers are curricular experts. Headteachers all have quite different skill sets, and therefore, if there is no curricular guidance to guide headteachers, you must assume that they will do the best that they can in the circumstances. Yes, they will meet the needs of their constituency as best they understand it, but I used to be the chairman of the building our curriculum self-help group, which is the only body in Scotland that has produced consistent exemplification of how curriculum for excellence can be implemented in secondary schools. My successor is a guy called Jerry Lyons in Glasgow, whom I suspect that you may have heard of, and the two of us have spent some considerable time trying to do exactly that to support schools. One of the things that we learned from holding national conferences year after year through the development process of curriculum for excellence is that headteachers claimed that they were uncertain, that they were not as well informed as they should be, that their colleagues were confused by going to different national meetings with different national agencies because some said one thing and some said another. I did a small resurvey before I came here today with some of my key witnesses just to check if they were still saying that sort of thing. The response is that it is better, but there have been some recent changes that have re-sewn some confusion. From three fronts, from the curriculum, where there is fragmentation, narrowing and, in one or two cases, excess broadening, from the viewpoint of attainment, where we have seen a significant drop in fourth year and the beginnings of a drop in fifth year, and from the point of view of the ability of the various bodies in a school community to come together and actually improve things, there are challenges in all of these areas. They are not insurmountable, but I think that my bottom line to you would be in line with that of OECD 2015, which suggested that there really should be a reconceptualisation of CFE and to underpin that reconceptualisation, because I remember my evidence to that committee, the idea that the CFE process and documentation and support materials should be worked through more effectively than it is it can. I thank the committee for inviting me. I will try to indicate what I feel that I can offer by way of my insights into the issues under consideration today. My analysis mainly stems from a long-standing search project that has been tracking the origins and evolution of CFE more or less from the outset and indeed looking back to its precursors in the national debate that Jim mentioned, but also your predecessor committee's report on education, culture and sport committee inquiry in 2002, which in many ways is at least as interesting as the national debate when we look back at it because it explored the purposes of education. I think that that is the point that we have reached again in the process where the issues that Jim has articulated today take us back to that starting point that we have perhaps lost sight of what it is that we are trying to do through this process. In terms of the analysis that I would be able to present to you today, it is based on interviews with senior policy actors who were involved in CFE from the outset, a lot of document analysis. What I was really looking at was what are the underlying drivers of that process? What are the power dynamics between the different stakeholders in the process? What is the balance of power, if you like, between the different organisations? Crucially, in the context of today, I have kept an eye on the governance and the sequencing of the implementation process. What follows from what in that sequence turned out to be critical in reaching the point that we have at the moment? I continue to monitor the on-going evolution and I still engage regularly with practitioners and beginning teachers on how the system is adapting to CFE, this idea of policy translation from the original vision in 2004 to what we have today. Drawing from the research, I have set out a number of short bullet points in my submission. I think that that is an XA in the papers today. I will not repeat all of them here just now, but I hope that some of the following observations might help to frame the discussion this morning. The issues under consideration emerge as unintended but inevitable consequences of the way that curriculum for excellence was conceived and implemented. I do not think that anyone has consciously set out to create the rather chaotic pattern of provision that Jim has outlined across all the different schools and local authorities. It is accidental in its nature but still inevitable. For example, in relation to the assessment and qualifications, there was a conscious policy decision made around 2004 that sought to delay the thorny issues around certification that you had. In the one hand, a particular vision of education presented in the review group report, which was not a good fit for the assessment and qualifications regime that existed at the time. With that conscious delay, it meant that there was no real opportunity, or it meant that the problems were simply delayed and there was no opportunity then to do piloting to actually work through some of the inevitable problems that would emerge. We have left with the legacy of that today. What we tend to find now, and I think that the picture that Jim describes is really important here, is that schools and school leaders are having to retrofit solutions to the nature of the policy, the architecture that we are left with. The decisions that they are making are not necessarily educational decisions. I think that that is really critical. Again, it is not through any fault of the individual schools, but they have to make pragmatic decisions around timetabling and the resources that are available to them. Those are not educational decisions. The variation in practice across the country that Jim described is indicative of underlying tensions and unresolved tensions in governance. We are still caught between the tension between very centralised forms of accountability in the one hand and, yet, at the same time, a presumption and rhetoric of devolved responsibility and subsidiarity in relation to other elements of education. There is not really a coherent rationale for identifying which elements of governance sit centrally and which are devolved either to local authorities or to individual schools. Finally, I think that Jim hinted at this, that the version of curriculum for excellence that we have ended up with operationally is not the one that was originally intended. Some of the key principles and objectives that were set out at the outset and that were, if you like, part of that genealogy from the national debate and the ECS report, were things relating to curriculum coherence from 3 to 18. Those were stated aims very explicitly, more choice to meet the needs of individual pupils and ensuring that assessment and certification support learning. Those were high levels of objectives at the very outset of the process, but now is the time to revisit some of those objectives and to work collectively, again, without blame, to identify ways to move forward from that. Thank you very much, Dr Britton. Can I now invite Dr Shapira? To talk about findings from the paper that we recently have finished, and this paper is about the decline in the number of subject choices in S4. Also, we have done also other research around the narrowing of the curriculum, but I thought that probably would be most relevant research to talk about here. And we used the data provided to us by Scottish Government, the data from the Scottish Qualification Authority about subject entries at schools during the period 2011-2017. And then we had this data on the level of schools, meaning for every secondary school in Scotland, and then we analysed the variation in the number of subjects offered to children in S4 and also the number of subject choices made by children across different local authorities and across areas with different levels of deprivation. And our findings were quite striking because we found a clear relationship in the rate of reduction of the number of subject choices made by S4 pupils and the level of school area deprivation. And this finding is very worrying. So, in general, we have this trend of narrowing the curriculum. And on average, there is a reduction in number of subject choices across the entire secondary sector in Scotland. However, the reduction is larger in schools in higher area of deprivation and the reduction is larger in schools where there are more children on free school meals, which means more children from deprived socioeconomic background. In schools where less subjects overall are offered for national level 4 and level 4 qualifications in schools where there are less qualified subject teachers. And this finding shows that these particular developments in the curriculum of excellence, they put at disadvantage a particular group of young people and this is the most worrying group. This is the group for whom the opportunities of social mobility provided through education system are very important. So, why it happened? And I think here we need to look at previous research that links between the curriculum and subject choice attainment and progressions from school into work and higher education. And if we look at this literature, then you can very often hear that curriculum for excellence had a number of unexpected consequences and the reduction of the curriculum is being considered as one of these unexpected consequences because at the beginning the stated aim of the curriculum was to broaden the educational opportunities of young people. But looking at the existing literature, we will find that this reduction wasn't unexpected, that wasn't an unexpected consequence. And this is because there is a clearly established link not just between student aptitude and the family background, family characteristics and the subject choice that they made at school. There is also established link between school characteristics and the opportunities that school offered children in terms of subject choices they make. And when curriculum to excellence delegated more autonomy to local authorities and also to schools in shaping the curriculum provision and in deciding how many subjects and configuration of subjects that they offer to young people, this link between the characteristics of students in school and between the overall composition of the school intake in terms of socioeconomic background of it and also in terms of ability composition, the link between that and the opportunities offered to children through the curriculum and the curriculum choices they make became stronger. And this is why today we can see this increased relationship between social deprivation on one hand and the curriculum choices on the other hand. And if we look our findings show if we look at the trends we could see really in 2011 the curriculum choices were far less differentiated by the school characteristics and by the local area level of deprivation than they are now in 2017. And for this reason we just think that what should be done, the curriculum policies should be bring back to the more general understanding about the curriculum development and about the link between curriculum type and opportunities, reduction of social inequality, opportunities for social mobility. So this is one thing that we think would be very important but another thing it's very important to carry out more research on the level of schools and to understand exactly the processes of curriculum making at schools at different levels starting from the head teacher but also their curriculum leaders and their teachers and all they participate in some way in making these decisions and understanding to what extent they are prepared to participate in this process or feel themselves a part of this process and whether they realize that by this process they shape opportunities of young people of transition for example from S4 into the upper stage of secondary education and then more importantly their transition from secondary education into labour market or in higher education that would be very important and that only could be done if we carry out more research on the level of schools and just one remark about the attainment. I think that it is very important to look at the changing levels of attainment in conjunction with changing enrollment in different subjects because a subject enrollment is a selective process and then if you look at the attainment of those who were enrolled in the subject we can see rise in the attainment however if we don't account for this selection bias and just make a conclusion that attainment is rising looking just at those who are obtained as a proportion of those who were enrolled in a particular qualification we may miss again this important point that enrollment is going down and for some young people this is a missing opportunity and this is not a random selection those young people who are missing the opportunity of being enrolled in particular subjects these are young people more likely from more disadvantaged background and this is where the attention should be. Thank you very much Dr Shapira. Is Dr Browning going to meet up with him? Yes, just some very brief comments. Fundamentally to sort of just explain our role in the panel today as you know we are required to develop validates quality, share and award all of the qualifications that we're talking about today and we certificate those every August and the nature of what subjects are taken as we've heard is very much at the level of the schools decision in terms of those but it's our responsibility to make sure that qualifications are available for people to to enter for. I think on the point that Dr Shapira has just made we only have data on the number of people who have attained our qualifications based on the entries we do not have it on the school role I think that's an important point to make. We did see a change in the volume of entries this year with small reductions continuing in SCQF levels 5 and 6, a very slight increase at SCQF levels 2, 3, 4 and 7 and we saw a small increase in the attainment about the wider area of qualifications that we make available in terms of wider achievement and also in terms of vocational qualifications from SCQF levels 2 to 6. Attainment across national courses and awards this year was broadly in line with what we've seen in previous years as we saw a slight increase in advanced hire and a decrease in attainment at national 5. We also published data in August for a longer period of time at a high level and that was published for 2011 to 2018 this year and as we've heard from other panel members the new qualifications were introduced in 2014 so the data prior to 2014 also included standard grade qualifications and I'd just like to put some caveats around the comparisons that are possible between pre-2014 and post-2014 and there are some that are able to be used. So before the introduction of the new nationals candidates would be generally entered for two levels of standard grade credit in general foundation in general but the grades that they will be awarded would be dependent on how they've done in those qualifications so it's very difficult to actually look at entries at SCQF levels in the standard grade era. You can however compare attainment in SCQF levels prior when standard grade existed with the current qualifications that are in place so for instance a learner who performed poorly in both general and credit assessments could have been awarded a foundation qualification so it makes the entries a little bit of a mess but in terms of attainment you definitely can compare that. You can compare entries if you add three, four and five together in both systems sorry that sounds a little complicated but I think it's important it's an important point. So I think it is also important to say you can we can look at attainment volumes and I think that's the number of learners that are gaining qualifications at SCQF levels across the piece that I think is a very meaningful measure and we have seen a decline in that over the over the years all the way back prior to the introduction curriculum for excellence and it does vary by subject as some other panel members have pointed out so we we have undertaken some work to look at the attainment levels in English math sciences languages for instance and that's included in our paper but we're very happy to take any questions on the data that we've provided. Okay thank you very much Dr Brown. I'm going to invite our vice convener to open the question if members could indicate if they want to come in to me. Thank you all very much for that I think that that's really important I would think first step in trying to understand what's happening I don't think in this session we're going to really get to the the heart of what needs to be done but I think that that has actually been very challenging in terms of the idea that unintended consequence of a decision is that young people have got fewer chances in poorer areas than they had five years ago I find deeply troubling. I wonder if I can focus on this issue of S4M, I do hear what Janet Brown says about standard grade but that seems to me to be an argument to have retained it not as something that confuses the statistics. I wonder if folk have a clear understanding of why and who decided that we should not have certification at fourth year that allow young people from poorer backgrounds a better opportunity. I wonder if you have specific suggestions of what we should be doing about that because nobody was ever able to explain to this committee why that decision was taken and therefore presumably it's a decision that could be unpicked and this was the last question specifically to Dr Shapira. You seem to be suggesting it's not just that youngsters who are less able are having less opportunity but that bright children in poorer communities are now disadvantaged more than they were before and I think it would be worthwhile maybe expanding on that point if I can maybe ask first for Jim Scott and then yourself specifically what we can be doing round this for what should we be looking at rather than some you know it may be an unintended consequence but it's a very severe one. I think your perception of what's happening and what we've all tried to say is largely correct. There is a problem for the most able and neither of Janet Naray touched on the conversion rate from an enrolment to her success and clearly something has happened at level five because that's gone down quite sharply. Part of that I think is that both parental aspiration and school aspiration has got a little bit ahead of what children are actually where their inherent level is. We saw a significant spike in level five presentations in 2014, the first year. I think that that may have been based on optimism rather than realism. That has settled down since then but we've both found this idea that where a child is enabled in a school in a less able catchment they do not appear to do quite as well but both are sets of data to some extent support that. You asked where this happened that the actual decision to move away from standard grade and finally settle on new national qualifications was made by the first education minister as it was then of the current administration. My understanding is that she did that on professional advice. That was my own obsession because when I was teaching standard grade was introduced and the joy of having a certificate of class rather than a non-certificate class because it brought respect to the course and brought resource to the course. The decision at national four, not so much that people were inspired to national five, but national four is not externally assessed and it's a pass or fail. Do you think that that had an impact and would continue to have an impact in terms of whatever you thought about standard grade? There was a great achievement for a lot of kids. You got them to general or you got them out of found or you got them to stay in school long enough to get a qualification. That sense of that disappearing means that there's a whole group there who are not even going to be encouraged to achieve the potential. One does want to encourage achievement. One of the things that's in my set of stats and Janet's set of stats is the fact that if you look at the lever of data from 0910 the number of children leaving with no qualification is slowly creeping up. It's still very small but the fact that it's creeping up in the 21st century in Scotland is not something any of us would subscribe to. Part of that is because some schools have been boldly experimental. There's always a danger for the head teacher in that head teachers should, with their school communities, be able to experiment and should try to offer a different range of experiences for their children. However, my acid test as a head teacher was always, what will happen to that young man or woman 10 years down the line when they're applying for their third job? Have we equipped them well not just to go out of the door into a positive destination but to stay in a positive destination? Have we got them the appropriate broad and deep set of experiences that will support them? There has been some experimentation. It happened before CFE and since CFE with things like that has done in bringing Duke of Edinburgh into the curriculum. I know that in Perth High School we did all that pre-CFE and I know that my successor still does all that post-CFE so there doesn't seem to be a difference with the alternative experiences in many places. What seems to be the case is that the cutting down of a number of subjects, I have not carefully added up the numbers for level 3 so I'll let SQA contradict me if I'm in any way wrong, but since we've moved away from standard grade it appears that children on a narrower curriculum at a lower level are more prone to failure and thus some of them clearly are dropping right through the system and gaining nothing. What I really need to do or someone else needs to do in terms of research is to track the children at the bottom end who are gaining five qualifications of that level, four qualifications, three qualifications, two and one and that is in the lever data but it would have to be differentiated for the least stable. That would allow us to see whether or not there is a significant change at the bottom. Obviously the global measures such as the number of children enrolling at level 3, the number of children attaining at level 3 indicate there has been a drop off there. I looked very carefully to see whether there was clear evidence that all of these children who disappeared from the level 3 stats had moved into level 4 and thus there was a significant gain due to CFE. Sadly the stats show that there may be some upward movement both from level 3 to level 4 and from level 4 to level 5 but there are significant numbers of other children who have just disappeared from attainment and that's not necessarily because of the curriculum enrolling. The 33.8 per cent drop is 17 per cent structural drop due to curriculum enrolling and the rest of it is partially due to a drop in the role and then it's partially due to how a school has structured its curriculum and the aspirations of the head teachers, teachers and parents in that school. Therefore there are several questions to be investigated there about what is exactly happening in certain schools in Scotland but there is no doubt that the safety belt removal has added to the problem for these children. Our study is on the level of schools not on the level of pupils. So what we see at the moment is that there is a link between schools, area level of deprivation, number of children in school on free meals and the average number of subject choices at school. The mechanism of it at the moment we haven't done a study into it so we can just have some speculations about that but also there is an existing literature that probably can offer some insights in the relationship and explain why school characteristics are important for subject choice and what I guess are from the literature. The mechanism of this relationship is not entirely clear again. More research is needed to be done but the way it works is school for example school in more deprived areas they might have more difficulties in attracting subject teachers especially in such subjects as sciences for example and this is one way how this mechanism could work. Our study shows a clear relationship between the number of qualified full-time teachers at school and the number average number of subject choices. Another possibility how this mechanism works is of course that having at school a larger number of children from more disadvantaged background may create some behavioural atmosphere at school that affects also other students and affect their attainment and as a result affect the way they make subject choices. What we think and suspect going on here is also if we have more children from disadvantaged family background draw ease of schools in guidance in career guidance in subject choice guidance is becoming more important for these children because overall we know how important is the family and family networks and family advice on subject choice. Families could help youngsters to make informed choices because they can advise them about the consequences of their choices. If children are coming from more disadvantaged background more responsibility goes to school for these guidance but if schools uniformly offer less subjects this automatically is cutting out opportunities for children from disadvantaged background of selecting more subjects or selecting facilitating subjects that would help them to make successful progression after school. This is why we think that more research is really needed on the school level about curriculum decisions by teachers but also by pupils and their families to understand the interaction between these and to understand how this is changing with the new curriculum for excellence. In a more deprived area a child who is very well supported by their family and is very able is not going to be able to compete to get into university because perhaps they have already been denied the opportunity to do the number of subjects. The school uniformly offers five or six subjects. There is no way a child would be... It is looking at the cohort of young people who are able to compete to get to university or college. Logically also with a cap it doesn't mean that people are competing on the grounds of qualification that's how the rationing is happening. Part of our ongoing study because what we are trying to see is just the impact of the curriculum on excellence on subject choices and then an attainment and transition into higher education. There is a research in Scotland that has been done on the impact of subject choices on the transition into higher education under the old curriculum. What we are trying to do now to look at the impact of new curriculum of excellence and reduce the number of subject choice on the transition into higher education. I'm going to move on if people could maybe move past members to direct questions directly to panel members, but if you want to pick up any points on an opportunity later on I'd be happy to do that, but we've got a lot of people wanting in and I know that everybody's tight for time this morning, so if I can ask Ms Fee. I'll roll my questions into one to try and get them through them as quickly as possible. I can come from quite a simplistic view that our school should meet the needs of our children and certainly Professor Scott from what you said in your contribution at the outset about the significant fragmentation of the curriculum and the almost chaotic explosion it would seem that in some cases it's not so I suppose my questions are around three areas and it is around the needs of our young people and the flexibility that our young people now have in schools. Not all children stay in the same school from the Gwyn at S1 until the leave to go on to college or university, so I'd be interested in the impact the number of curriculum areas have on a young person's ability to move and reselect to choose or follow a particular path, but I'd be also keen on your views on the impact that this has on our teaching staff and are the curriculums that are available in certain schools, are they because that's what the school can offer or because that's what the school thinks that their young people need? And my final question is around the skills gap. What impact does the curriculum choices are available? What impact does that have on the skills gap? Because we hear quite a lot about particular areas where there are shortages of young people available to go in to a particular employment, so does the fragmentation of the curriculum impact on that? The obvious answer to our last one first of all is yes, it must. I'm not sure I would describe what's happening in S1 to S3 as chaos. I think that it's a more measured attempt by individual schools to try and meet the needs of their constituencies, but the question is whether they've got it right. Obviously, the ones at the extreme ends of the spectrum probably have not got it right. What worries me a little is that my current troll round them all again, a yeave after the one that's reported in this evidence suggests that some of them are going further towards the ends of the spectrum. That is an issue. You asked about staffing empirically because it wasn't a major question in my recent mini-subway of my witnesses, but I asked them about staffing and I run another research team in the University of Dundee, which is looking into SAC and PEF. We have asked a whole set of head teachers quite specifically about staffing. There is no doubt that some schools have experienced difficulties in recruiting teachers in some areas, and some of those areas are quite key to the curricular experiences of a number of young people. It's not simply stem subjects. We're all making a great fuss about stem at the moment, but the curriculum was much more than stem. There are significant deficits in the number of subjects, and shortages of home economists, shortages of computing teachers, for example. Although shortages of computing teachers have been resolved by the fact that computing has developed by the best part of 50 per cent in terms of uptake in S4, the question is whether that is a chicken or egg situation. It is difficult to say that my suspicion is that it is much more caused by the curriculum than by the lack of teachers in the case of computing. Does fragmentation affect all life chances and future pathways of young people? Yes, it does. It is more affected by the narrowing in S4. What tends to happen is that if you are brought down to six or if God help us five—let us assume that there are no fives for the future wellbeing of Scottish children—if you are brought down to six, you inevitably have to have a bet with yourself about column six and what it is that is going to be beneficial to you. That means, by any chance, that the real problem is not for able kids who pass all their subjects and move on because they have made the right choice and they can progress. Able children almost always survive in the system, although I completely agree with Marina's point about if you live in a deprived area, it is harder for you. However, able children who succeed go through. Average in able children and particularly less able children who pick up a clutch of six subjects and fail several of them are then playing catch-up in a way that they probably were not playing in the situation before CFE. That bears on the original question as well. Those children are in a situation in which they had to narrow their curriculum anyway, some of the key parts of their curriculum have not worked out. They are into repeats and they are into catch-up. What should happen is that, if you go down from eight subjects to six subjects, you obviously have 25 per cent of the time available to you that you did not have before, which would be redeployed in the pursuit of the six subjects that you are still studying. That should mean, A, that the pass rate is higher, the conversion rate from enrolment to pass is higher and it is not. That should mean that the overall number of passes in these subjects should be of a higher quality. There is some evidence that the passes of a higher quality varies from subject to subject, but there is some clear evidence there that that is improving. There is some clear evidence that the number of children getting at least one at the level is going up a bit, albeit more slowly as I said earlier. There are slightly contradictory flows there, but the bottom line is that, if you do not get it right on the first hurdle, I remember the national debate in education. A highly commendable process in which one of the things that people said was, get rid of the two-term dashes. We had two two-term dashes. Well folks, we now have three two-term dashes and children are indeed dashing. There is a big question that was mentioned earlier about level three and level four and the worth of those, the worth to schools, the worth to individual children, the worth to families and the worth to employers. I suspect that these qualifications would be seen a little more positively by all of these constituencies if there was something that did not simply rely on teacher judgment. I remember that the Deputy First Minister's recent comments on teacher judgment in CFE levels and I agree with him entirely that there are issues there about the quality of teacher judgment across the piece. I do not think that it is any different at level three and level four. Teachers do the very best they can. They try very hard, but they are not perfect people. Having an external agency that applies a rigid standard to that assists things significantly. I'm going to move on and ask Ms Smith. Thank you, convener, and congratulations may I say on your new role. Could I ask Dr Brown in the submissions that we have from Professor Scott and from Dr Britton? They both made the comment that in the developmental period of curriculum for actions, the three to five 15 period was pretty good. There was a lot of organisation that was quite effective, but beyond that it was largely left to yourselves to do the senior phase. As you rightly pointed out earlier in your opening remarks, that's not technically your job. Your job is to make sure that the qualifications suit whatever the educational strategy is. Do you think that that problem for the senior phase in terms of not thinking about the strategy in a coherent manner, do you think that that's part of the problem that we're discussing? I think that part of the problem is the fact that was highlighted earlier by Jim. It was a three to eighteen curriculum and I think that we need to think about it being the three to eighteen curriculum and I think that the extension of broad general education by one year had an implication on what senior phase was intended to be and the qualifications have to be the way they are in terms of the amount of learning that's necessary and therefore is a required assumption that candidates are at a particular level at the end of broad general education. I think that there is clarity needed on the whole three to eighteen pathway in order to be successful once you get to the courses that are co-designed by us and by teachers and by universities in terms of what we believe needs to be in those courses in that curriculum in the senior phase for the candidates to go to the right destinations and to be successful in those destinations but for me it's very much around thinking about that pathway through and I think that we might have been a little disjointed between broad general education and what's required at the end of that in order to be successful in senior phase. Can I just ask, do you feel that that lack of connection is more to do with what is on offer in the extra vocational courses, which in large cases have been pretty successful? Do you feel that it's to do with what is on offer or do you think that there are qualitative issues here about the standards in schools in terms of what's being delivered in order to allow pupils to have that additional choice? That's a very complicated question I think for me the what is on offer if Jim pointed out the idea that if you're going from eight subjects to six subjects you should have more time but eight subjects used to be taken over two years now we're trying to take six subjects over one year and that has an implication so that's a complexity that I think has an implication on lots of different issues within the school sector. I think that what's on offer has an implication also in terms of how many candidates are being asked do you want to do a higher over two years versus the two term dashes and I think that that was one of the original implications was that would therefore free up some of the curriculum time in S4. My final point if that's all right, we've had this discussion before at committee about the national four and I think you're in the middle of a review of the national four just now could you just tell us what timescale is for that review to be finished? The review is being undertaken by the curriculum assessment board and they are due to meet I think in a couple of weeks we have a Scottish education council meeting tomorrow so that's part of that group's responsibility to decide what the nature of national four will need to be in the future and that recommendation will be made to the Scottish Government. Just three associated points if I can remember them all. I was part of the process that SQA carried through with respect to the 16 to 18 curriculum as Janet knows I was part of the curriculum area review group in language. I have to say it was a very thorough process but tried to involve all agencies and all parties in the process so although I am the author of the comments that Liz is talking about there is no doubt that to some extent it was left to SQA and should not have been that the key question is where was LTS and what did it do? Nevertheless the process was carried through by an attempt to bring together all the relevant constituencies so the issue does not lie with SQA I don't think. There is a problem in schools associated with that if you read school handbooks if you have no life and nothing else to do it's edifying to read the handbooks of 359 secondary schools where those exist he said carefully because some schools a minority of schools but a significant minority of schools appear to have confused the curricular levels with the assessment levels and in print one or two of them have drawn the conclusion that because their children have reached a given curriculum level they don't need to be presented for attainment at level 3 and that bears upon a couple of earlier comments as well. So there is a situation where some schools in their presentation policy in their handbook say quite clearly that they will not present for level 3. So one finds excellent practice in that some schools consider everything from SQF level 1 to SQF level 6 and that's entirely appropriate for fourth-year children because some are at the end of that spectrum and other schools tend to look at levels 4 and 5 only. It would be acubit to say that the majority of the schools in the latter pattern come from what might best be described as leafy suburb areas but those schools still have groups of children who are operating at level 3 or below and to simply say we don't do that does not appear to serve the needs of all children. So there are things running at several levels that the third thing I was going to add if you'll forgive me is that local authorities have a key role here and there have been some very interesting practices by local authorities at no names, no pack droves is not the occasion for that but some local authorities have given very queer guidance to schools about what they should do to try and deal with the S4 problem. I will quote one positive example, Glasgow City Council. Maureen MacKinnon's handbook for head teachers on curriculum for X1s is exemplary. It makes very clear that they should seriously count in what happens in S3 but the experiences and the work carried out in S3 can count towards the 160 hours and that takes away some of the sting of doing it in one year instead of two. I note with interest however that that local authority then allows its head teachers to choose so some of them have gone for six, some have gone for seven and we're all over the place to some extent again but nevertheless that's a local authority fulfilling its duty and giving a clear lead in saying S3 should count here. If all local authorities did that, trust me they don't, then we might find ourselves in a stronger position. Does anyone else want to come in on that subject? Thank you. I'm now going to move. I'd like to follow up on this misline of questioning there. Dr Shapira, a note in your evidence you say that fewer subjects are being taken in school year S4 for level national five qualifications and I was interested when you said that 2011 choices are far less differentiated than in 2017. I'd like to ask a practical question and Professor Scott hit on it there as a former teacher myself. I'm interested in timetabling and how this works in practice and we've not spoken about that elephant in the room today. Professor Scott alluded to the 160 hours for each NQ course. I'm really interested to find out a little bit more about how you think that would work in practice because from my perspective as a teacher one of the issues in terms of there being less courses taken is that you have less time in which to teach so how does that work in practice? I don't think I can answer how it works in practice probably Professor Scott would know better than me. Okay, schools adopt various practices. Some of them change their timetable not in June or August but at Easter and that buys them an extra 8-10 weeks. It's not necessarily in some schools the most productive 8 or 10 weeks it would have to be said because other curriculum of experiences are carried out at that point in time but my experience of children is if you start them early and they will actually A turn up and B engage in the process of learning because they perceive it's beneficial for the next stage of their education so that certainly works to some extent but the other thing is to deal sensibly with how you phase from S12 through S3 to S4. When Eddie Brodwell and I ran around Scotland on behalf of LTS for a couple of years what we tried to sell schools was that they would operate a wedge system in S123 so that you would start with Douglas Oswa's 14-13 qualifications and you would head towards what you were implementing in S4 which was 6, 7 or 8. That went down very well at national meetings but if you actually look at my evidence and what schools are doing you'll perceive that the tiny minority of schools have actually taken that on and they have gone in various directions. There is no obvious pattern to what's happening in Scottish education in S3. It almost appears it's not random but it looks random when you first look at it and that is a significant concern. How do you do that in a wider sense? I suppose my question would be why don't you do seven courses because HMI's evidence apart from reading council websites and school handbooks I also read inspection reports in schools. I cannot see evidence in HMI's findings over the past five years but schools doing seven courses are failing their children in a way that schools doing six courses are not. If you are familiar with building the curriculum 3 sadly it's engraved in my heart just above Calais. If you are familiar with it then realistically speaking there is nothing in building the curriculum 3 particularly pages 20 to 25 which refer to the curriculum which in any way suggests that a school should do six courses. It says you should do what's appropriate for the needs of your children which is quite right. So my question would be in any school where there are children with aspirations why would you not be offering them seven courses? In any school where there are children whose needs are profound would you not be looking at a curricular system that allows a two-state if you go back to the Perth High School curriculum I left behind me well it's might no better than me if it's still there but realistically speaking if you go back to that curriculum we had a three-phase curriculum an integrated S4 to S6 that allowed children to work in layers of ability and to pursue pathways that took six courses seven courses of eight courses and that allowed them all the options that their ability permitted them to do. Now one could accurately say that in a school the size of Perth High School that's an easier thing to do and that's absolutely true but Perth High School is by no means the largest school in Scotland so therefore I've seen differentiated curricula which is the answer to the question. I've seen differentiated curricula in a whole pile of medium-sized schools in Scotland well done by head teachers and their colleagues who've worked out that you can do this but you need to use the third year it's the only sensible way to do it. I suppose that I think from my experience there was a reluctance in the profession when CFE came in in terms of my own experience the broad general education the advice I think at the time a lot of head teachers understood it to mean until the end of S3 and the fear in the profession at the time as I was teaching at the time I know was that you could not assess prior to the end of S3. The advice that was given by LTS Education Scotland as it is now at the time was that teachers were able to gather evidence for the outcome and assessment standards at the end of S3 but not to formally assess as it were so I think there is perhaps a lot of confusion there for it. Perth Grammer can I just ask Professor Scott were you advocating course choice earlier in the year than at S3 for example perhaps in February or is that the model that you followed at that time? I followed the model of starting as early to fourth year as I possibly could I was never an Easter starter because I actually thought there were pragmatic reasons to allow the children to get through the exam process before changing so I lost the two weeks before the exams that some schools have picked up. My colleague in Balfrown at the time was very keen because she had a very very strong school in terms of ability to get as much time into that as possible she started at Easter I know some other colleagues who started two weeks after me and some of course actually started in August so there is a disparity of practice but it's actually quite clear in building the curriculum 3. I actually wrote this quote down in case someone asked me and I'm grateful that you did. It actually says in BTC 3 quite clearly that learning in S3 can and should contribute to the 160 hours of directed study associated with the national qualification and that children should experience these experiences that contribute to qualifications in S4 in that stage so it's actually written into the book. At the time that people were not able to assess prior to S4 there was a reluctance certainly in the profession and the advice actually given that the time from education Scotland was that no assessment was allowed to happen in S3 you were allowed to gather the evidence but you had to carry out the assessment in S4 so perhaps that evidence is some of the reluctance therefore to move to different models. I have a personal pathway through LTS which resulted in my in the end deciding that I was going to sever my connection with him and it's not germane to his meeting so I won't comment personally but realistically speaking I would accept that perhaps the advice given was certainly contradictory perhaps not from the agency itself but from the individual officers who went out to serve as meetings. I certainly have evidence from I ran for two and a half years as a local inspector for local authorities I inspected 45 schools at that time. At the time of the senior inspector in HMI and I were reasonably close and we cross-referenced the grades that we gave to make sure I wasn't making full of myself so I'm fairly confident of what I say to you would be sustained by HMI. What seemed to be the case was that schools did not understand what they were actually being asked to do and that some of that confusion came from national meetings which they had attended. I can never dig inside nor can anyone else what the mind of the individual headteacher or teacher actually takes from a meeting that's a difficult process but there seems to be some evidence that different people offer different advice at different meetings. To what extent that caused the problems I cannot speculate. Thank you. What we're hearing I think is illustrative of the very confused policy landscape where we hear advice, guidance, direction interchangeably in policy making and it's very hard for schools I think to react to understanding what is statutory, what is required of them, what remains advisory and I think that that's the kind of landscape that has existed for a long time it's never been resolved but that seems to have fed the initial confusion, the uncertainty in schools to know what it was that they were being asked to do or told to do so that remains a tension of governance that hasn't been resolved. Yeah very quickly. Thank you. It's just with regard to changing enrolment levels and Dr Shapira hit upon this as well. I wonder if the panel has any views with regard to how many people you think should be selecting a course for it to run because I know from personal experience I had three girls who wanted to take advanced higher modern studies in a previous life. I wasn't able to run that course because there wasn't enough footfall for it as it were. The girls were then sent to a hub school which was providing advanced higher modern studies in the town at the time and other pupils were able to do likewise from other schools. I just wonder therefore is there a view with regard to how many people should enable a course to run because surely in some instances some courses can't run because there is an uptick? As far as I know some schools where they don't have enough students signed to a particular qualification on a particular level they offer these students to sit the same course somewhere else in another school or for example in Edinburgh College. So they are ways of solving this problem if this is the just question of how many students are signed to a particular course and whether this is enough to run the course at school. At least a number of good schools with more advantages school intake they are clearly doing that in Edinburgh I know. They are either sending their students to other schools that run those models or to colleges. Again I think it's an example of the ad hoc nature of the landscape. There are pockets of excellent practice, really good models for just those scenarios, the advanced higher hub at Glasgow Caledonian University for example which started with modern studies and has expanded to other subjects but there's no consistency, there's no national approach to this that would resolve some of these issues. There are choices to be made by any school obviously. I agree with my two colleagues in that there is good practice. The good practice is often in urban areas because it's very easy to move people around urban areas. There was an exemplary scheme in West Lothian which may still be running I've just lost touch with it which moved children throughout the area and had an entire transport infrastructure built under it to facilitate that but obviously if you're somewhere like Perth where the high schools sit in pairs looking at each other across streets it's a very easy thing to achieve. I don't think we ever failed to deliver a senior school subject for the child in whatever it was. In 14 years I was head teacher in Perth high school due to the lack of a teacher or due to the inability at the timetable. It might have been necessary to work with the academy or even with the grammar school on the other side of the town but it was achievable. There's a wider issue about the extent to which there is a demand for certain subjects because before you can service that demand you need to have employed a teacher. So head teachers make historical analyses of what's likely to be wanted within their school and their staff accordingly. Of course you build up a pattern and then it's quite difficult to change from that pattern because what does one do with a surplus modern language teacher? Since many schools now have surplus modern language teachers it's very difficult to persuade a local authority to take them out of your complement and park them somewhere else. It's a disgusting way to describe a teacher's professional life but that's what happens. So it is hard. Okay, Mr Scott. Thank you for that and all that will get worse I guess Professor Scott because if it's narrowing and as your figures show French, German, Gallic and Computing geography are declining in terms of subjects then local authority is going to recruit and have less of those teachers so the thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't it? I'm afraid that that largely seems to be correct. It's particularly evident in modern languages as you've said. It's particularly evident in the creative and aesthetic subjects where some of those are again falling very steeply. It's evident in some aspects of technology and yet other aspects are growing so there is a certain counterbalance there. ICT obviously given that we live in the 21st century and we have invested tens of millions of pounds in ICT the fact that it seems to be falling away is at best surprising. The other thing I was going to ask you is on your number of overall attainment falling from over the five year period by 33.8 per cent which has to be pretty deeply disturbing to all of us. Your comments helpfully provided the committee to say that 16 to 17 per cent may be attributed to this narrowing of the curricula. So what do we do about it? The logic of that is you change that. There is no obvious reason for another curriculum. So we've got it wrong then. You might know better than me with due respect why S1 to S3 was introduced in the first ministerial response to the curriculum review groups paper because at that point in time I think your party was part of the administration so I cannot find out through research why S1 to S3 appeared. I've asked some of the key players, a civil servant who chaired the committee, several members of the committee of the first one, why they did not mention S1 to S3 in the report and yet it suddenly came out. The answer appears to be that someone decided somewhere and no one can tell me and either they're not prepared to admit to their guilt if guilt is a particularly Scottish thing or alternatively they don't remember which I find to be unlikely. So there is an issue about how we suddenly found ourselves bumped into S1 to S3 bearing in mind that only five years before that report was published Douglas Oswell had warned a whole of Scotland very carefully that S1 to S2 was being wasted, that secondary schools did not use it wisely, we needed to focus much more, condense much more, have a clear pathway forward and then we added the next two years to that causing a major problem of linkage with the S456 process and no one seems to be accountable. Peter Peacock signed a piece of paper so maybe he knows something about it but I actually sent an intermediary to try and find out from him what the story was and the answer that came back allegedly I can't quote it did not in any way illuminate my darkness. So I'm a bit stuck about how we got in this mess, we should not be in this mess. And we're 14 years on so what are we going to do now? I think my evidence to OECD suggested that it was time for a midlife upgrade. OECD echoed that almost to the world. There has not been a midlife upgrade since 2015 and I think it's passed time for there to be one to be honest. And who leads a midlife upgrade? Scottish education has not been well served in terms of using the benefits of research, I have to say. Only the MUN report actually accessed research to any significant extent. The rest of Scottish educational strategic initiatives are a bit research light, if you want an honest response. I think Alan would probably agree with that. So we have a problem that it needs to be based on something that actually holds water. Who would be involved in that? My caution would be that you make that a broadly based process. I've sat in those rooms where national policy is decided, I've served in several national committees. People in those rooms do the very best they can. I'm 33 and the third percent responsible for circle 3, 2001. We meant well, Ken Muir, Gordon MacKenzie and I, but we didn't get it right. The idea that you stick three or four experts in a room is not necessarily the process. I actually thought that the national debate on education was a step in the right direction because we went to the wider public and we got quite a lot of the wider public and said what you actually value in Scottish education. We then brought that back and before two reports had gone by it was completely changed. I have a, if you read the appendix to my paper to the OECD report in 2015, I actually chart that process. It's quite amazing how we got to where we got. So I would look for, there has to be a political input obviously, you are the people who make the decisions on behalf of the people of Scotland. There is no choice there. There have to be civil servants in the room, there have to be national agency people in the room. There should be teachers and head teachers and parents and children. The trouble is some of these bodies are severely challenged by being involved in making such significant decisions. So what tends to happen is that you build a hierarchical structure with a national steering committee of the very great and very good and bits fall down to other people to actually implement and it's the process of going up and down through those structures that loses the golden thread. Unless we can find a better way to do that. I'll give you one good example. Higher Still is regarded by pretty much any academic or professional source who has commented upon it as being a successful initiative. It did something completely different. It trusted the initiative to Mary Perry and Tony Peely as two well thought of professionals with a chief inspector sitting alongside them to make sure we didn't do anything that wasn't acceptable to that constituency or to politicians. The three of them ran it. There was an interesting degree of fiction round about that as vested interests tried to operate with that but they delivered something which was well resourced, was extremely well trained, was delivered on time and which functioned quite effectively. If I look at the 51 strategic initiatives in Scottish education since 1947, only a third of them have been significantly successful and most of those have been, I hate to say it because I have not been paid to say this, qualifications initiatives whereas the covicular initiatives have generally had significant or partial trouble so we haven't got the mix for covicular initiatives right. Does any of the panel wish to make a further comment? Thank you convener. I wanted to return if possible just to a couple of comments that have been made previously. I have a particular interest given my constituency in the situation in smaller rural secondary schools where the number of subjects on offer has dropped and the number of teachers offering those subjects even before qualification level has dropped. You get mixed messages from those schools in my own region. There is quite a big variation between what is on offer in Dumfries town, for example, and what is on offer in smaller schools. Some teachers say that it is better to focus on a smaller group of subjects and teach them better. Obviously parents are quite alarmed, particularly around some specialisms like medicine or veterinary study where pupils are unable to take the full complement. I know that you have mentioned Dr Scott around capacity. I am also worried at local authority level that in smaller rural authorities there is not the same backup or support coming from the centre. I know that Dr Shapira mentioned capacity. You have mentioned school characteristics and I wondered whether any of your evidence supported or highlighted some of the issues in smaller rural schools. On overall, we did not really find in the multivariate analysis that the region in terms of rurality and the size of locality have a significant impact on the number of subjects, but because we are looking at general trends, of course, but what we did see, we indeed saw that there is a although on average there are almost no changes in the number of subjects that school offer in as for there are variations between local authorities and between different areas of deprivation. So probably what you are saying is being picked up by this variation between different local authorities in the supply side in the number of subjects that school can offer given the number of proper subject teachers they can recruit in these schools. Obviously there are two forms of poverty that we attack and try to resolve in Scotland. The one that gets by far the larger extent of publicity is urban poverty because of the way in which things work in Scotland. Unfortunately, rural poverty and the other issues that attach to rural schools, the difficulties of finding staffing, which lies at the bottom of the narrowed curriculum in particular in rural schools, I think that the staffing model of a local authority may or may not work well with respect to small rural secondary schools. I have just finished reading most of the rural local authorities in Scotland for my latest trol because I do them separately from the urban ones because the issues are different. You are absolutely right to say that the curriculum in many rural authorities, particularly rural schools, can be quite narrowed. If I look at Highland with the plethora of secondary schools in Highland, there is obviously an issue in maintaining the breadth of curriculum that you might find in Inverness in some of the smaller schools that serve really quite small communities, albeit with a bigger hinterland. It is very difficult to achieve a solution to that. Once upon a time, Scottish local authorities offered inducements to teachers to go to remote or places, houses, extra money, golden handshakes, all of that. We live in the 21st century and I do not think that there will be many houses or golden handshakes at all. That means that a teacher is then faced with the choice between going to somewhere that is five miles down the road and they can get a job and commute easily or move themselves wholesale. The net result of that tends to be that teachers choose convenience and one can understand why, particularly women, because many teachers are women with young families and all the issues that go with that. I have to agree with you that the curriculum does appear to be narrower in rural schools. I would like to say that it was not true, but that does appear to be the case. Some of the subjects that we prided ourselves on on a hilltop in Perth are not evident in many of the rural schools. The core is clearly evident and the evidence of attainment suggests that it is often very well taught by the teachers who are there. It is not that the teachers who are there are at any issue, it is just that the bread cannot be supplied alas. The second question that I wanted to ask around was the unresolved tensions that you were talking about before. There is, obviously, a considerable mixed opinion in the academic community but also in the teaching community about whether or not the core principles of the curriculum have even been the correct ones. Do you think that that contributes to some of those issues? There is nothing wrong with the core principles of the curriculum at all. To a large extent, they devolve from prior principles that were in evidence and in action in the curriculum before we got to the stage that we are now. I personally have found no evidence that any headteacher or teacher I have spoken to disagrees with the core principles. I think that the issue is in how those principles are then enacted because a number of things were suggested in the national documentation. BTC 3 is a very good document. It is a very thin document, but it is very effective. It does not exemplify what it preaches, but what it preaches is absolutely correct. If you look at how it suggests that you unpack that set of principles into a working curriculum, it covers not just subjects but the skills issue and the wider set of experiences a young person should pursue. Part of the problem that is speaking to people from schools and local authorities is that some of them have quite different understandings of the balance between those sets of experiences and the set of subjects that will embody the curriculum of subject part of that process. What you are coming back to is the idea that there is not common consensus in Scotland about what CFE consists of. If you wanted to see it at large, my successor is the chairman of Bosch, Gerry Lyons and I. If you put that in a room, we will shake hands warmly, we will talk about the families and all the rest, but 30 seconds after that we will disagree profoundly about the curriculum and we will continue to do that through an entire morning. That is an issue. It is not about the principles that we disagree, both of us would subscribe to the four capacities and the curriculum principles completely. We would disagree about the mechanisms and that is because the documentation that was developed through the process of implementation does not deal with that. If I give you the building archivicum self-help group as a metaphor for the whole thing, we were set up at the behest of learning and teaching Scotland. Our first report was produced as a learning and teaching Scotland report. We were then sent into the out of darkness because we said something that someone in LTA has disagreed with. We became a multi-authority agency because we managed to persuade a majority of Scotland's directors of education to support us and to fund us, and we staggered on as a quasi-independent body due to the good agencies of that set of local authorities. That says much for them. We then became quasi-official again briefly, and our fourth report had a rubber stamp from a national agency that said, this is a good idea, read this. Our subsequent reports and activities have again been in formal multi-authority processes. As far as I am aware, the building archivicum self-help group has given the most exemplification. Why is there not national exemplification? There should have been. Mary Perry and Tony Keeley, whom I mentioned earlier in terms of higher still, were criticised for providing shed loads of material, and they did provide too much, but I know why they provided too much, because they wanted to make sure that the sorts of things that we are talking about were never discussed. There is a happy balance between these two things. We have not struck that balance. Just to pick up on that unresolved tension, I think that one of the more profound things that has been going on in Scottish education is that you do have two quite distinct messages being sent out to the profession, to parents, to young people, about the nature of education, and up until what is now the end of S3, the emphasis is on forms of knowledge that are interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and yet we still come back at the end of S3 to the discrete subject and the discipline. If we look back on the process and as a thought experiment, if you were to remove a very much, an extreme thought experiment, but remove certification and qualifications from the landscape, what would the curriculum have actually looked like? If the same principles had been applied, the idea of focus on experiences and outcomes, you could conceivably create that vision for Scottish education from 3 to 18, where it is developmental, it is progressive, there are elements of personalisation and choice, but the challenge was always going to be that in reality you cannot go through with that thought experiment, you have to have certification and qualifications, and so there is that rather abrupt shift in the fundamental philosophy underpinning Scottish education. That is the nature of the unresolved tension, I think. I add one further unrelated question. I have just come back, Professor Scott, to the point that you made before about the number of pupils disappearing, and I know that you are still working through that, but do you have a rough estimate of how many young people have dropped out of the system? I have had some help from SQA in pursuing that, and I am grateful to them for that. There needs to be more work here, because we need to get to a level where we can interrogate the pupil data. Stirling University has done excellent work in starting to interrogate the pupil data. More of us need to do that. I have deliberately chosen to come from the school side because I am working towards a process where I show the extent to which schools and local authorities are engaging with their communities. The answers that you have seen in that little bit are not as much as they should be. I think that we are going to find that the percentage of children who were in level 3 has dropped from about 12 per cent to about 3 per cent of the original total. Some of them have gone upstairs to level 4, so the probable drop is something like a half to two thirds of them have disappeared into other places where they are not easily tracked. The question is what we are doing. I have deliberately tracked very carefully those schools whose headteachers stand on platforms and say that they have now produced a more effective curriculum that better meets the needs of their children. I cannot find significant differences in their curriculum before and after, in any case so far. I remain to be pleasantly surprised that something new and exciting is coming. I also tracked other things that this committee knows something about. I tracked a number of schools that were doing 666 because my understanding was that you were told by the ADES representative at a previous meeting that there was no problem about qualifications because schools were increasingly doing six courses in S4, S6 and S5, S6 and S6. The number of schools that I can find who are doing that is a number easily said that it is nine. There are a number of other schools who hint that they might be doing that because some children will do five and some will do four and some will do six. The implication but not the statement is that the least able will do six because the other ones are doing five hires or three or four advanced hires. It is possible to track some of that, but the ones who have hardest to track are the ones who are least able to survive in the environment to find themselves in. I think that it is a matter of urgency. I am a little bit ashamed—I have done my best to pull a lot of things together—but I am a little bit ashamed that I have turned up without an answer to that question because I think that equity is the most important thing that we do. Sure, we have to pursue excellence but equity is the thing that makes a difference. Professor Scott, you said in your opening statement that it would take 10 to 15 years for a new initiative such as curriculum for excellence to sort of bed in. Is there too much comparison with the old system in your research? Are your results—how much of your results are based on the sort of implementation of the system among schools and local authorities? I think that it is a very unwise system that does not learn from the past. I am not suggesting that it should not be a learning process. I am just saying that is there a danger of you comparing it to the old system too much? Oh, you mean am I some sort of a profit of the previous system? No, I say again that I spent three years running around Scotland trying to sell CFE to people and I spent four years as a chairman of the building curriculum self-help group, which has produced the only exemplification of it. No, my entire professional focus has been to make things better and move them on, so no. I am, however, a historian and therefore I dwell upon the fact that a great deal has happened before and that we should have learned some of the lessons that have been learned before. The biggest problem that we have in Scottish education with strategic initiatives is that, A, we do not get everybody lined up behind them and, B, that to some extent, at least, we are not clear about what we are trying to do. If I were to add a codicil to that, it would be when things go wrong, we usually have no exit plan. One of the things that people who aspire to leadership have taught these days is that you need to plan for failure as well as success. I teach a whole lot of aspiring headteachers these days and some of them are outstanding and will greatly improve the profession, but one of the things that we have to get them to look at is that most of them do not believe that the 51 initiative 17 went well, 17 went badly and 17 stuttered along. You have to unpack that for them for about two lectures. After that they go, I write. Headteachers tend to work in the now and, to some extent, with due respect, politicians tend to work in the now. The reality of that is that you are looking to see what you need to do to move things forward right now. It takes a more reflective process to stand back and say, okay, where are we? What do we actually know here? What are we trying to achieve and what do we know about how that might be affected? The historical evidence is a key part of that. Equally, the research evidence is a key part of that and apart from the one initiative—we haven't really used research to any great extent—bizarrely, OECD, who I wouldn't necessarily consider to be a research body, they're a transnational with a neoliberal stamp to them, but OECD are reasonably well respected. They give us a very queer view of what we need to do next with CFE. The Scottish Government invited them in to give us that queer view. We haven't done much about that queer view, so therefore there are things that we can do quite easily that are sitting there on the shelf for us. Mr Scott talked about the idea that maybe we need to be a bit more inventive about how we build the group and the consensus that takes things forward, and I think that that's absolutely right. There are some historical lessons that have worked. There is a clear and obvious thing, but somehow SQA and its predecessor have mostly made their initiatives, mostly work, mostly quite well. You'll note the caveats, and Janet no doubt will as well. There is something in what they do in terms of preparation and organisation and actually focusing on how it goes forward that we might all learn from, because what we tend to do is we set up a national committee, which is sometimes set up on top of the previous national committee. I was a member of the curriculum flexibility national steering group back in 2002. I made the keynote presentation at Hamden Park and was taken into a side room at that meeting and told by an SQA colleague who I shall not name, that something called curriculum for excellence was about to overtake everything that we were doing and that everything that we were doing was a complete waste of time. It was a heartwarming moment for me. Realistically speaking, one has to say that we haven't always done the right thing. We can do it better. Can I just ask you one other thing? It's about the headteacher guidance. You said that you quoted the Glasgow model as being successful. Do you think that it should be mandatory for headteachers to have curriculum guidance? I think that it should be mandatory for headteachers to tell their parents what their curriculum is and to have asked them what that curriculum might be in the first place. My figures are quite clear that that is not the case at the moment. I would personally have stuck with a national curriculum framework. It was not the intent of the group that produced the curriculum framework in 2001 to do away with the national curriculum framework. Someone else did that for us. We ended up as the responsible officers having not recommended what actually happened. That is another example of that it doesn't always quite work out. Certainly, in the secondary sector, it would be immensely helpful to headteachers and their colleagues to have some indication of what should be done. We are coming down to a situation where the five course people will disappear and the eight course people are fading fast, so they will probably disappear because other than in the leafy sub-arbs eight is a fair stretch in the new system. You are going to end up with six and seven. You are going to end up 55, 45, 60, 40 or something like that. Why do we have two systems? I ask again the question what possible benefit is there from six courses instead of seven if the seven is implemented in the way that BTC3 says. Personally, I once suggested to Dr Allan in his previous incarnation that he should bring back curricular guidelines since he is not in a room to defend himself. It didn't happen. It is the obvious thing. Maybe one passing headteacher was never going to make that happen, but realistically speaking, we could make an immense difference not all headteachers are curricular experts. Some are, some are not. If you consider that one very unfortunate secondary school ended up four feet high in the national press for its unusual curricular structure, people were pilloried, parents were alarmed, children were alarmed, none of that would have happened had we had some guidelines. One specific question following up the issues around guidance issue to teachers. Professor Scott mentioned that at the start of the transition into curriculum for excellence, there was a particular issue of headteachers receiving confused or conflicting guidance, depending on which national officials they were speaking to. There had been a bit of an improvement in recent years but then you mentioned that much more recent events have again sowed some confusion there. Could you expand on what those recent events are? I need to be careful not to tell tales out of court here. I was giving you a very broad summary of the feeling that is coming from the headteachers that I am interviewing at the moment. The problem is the removal of unit assessments. A significant number of the headteachers, roughly 65 per cent of those that I have interviewed in the sample is about 30. A significant number of headteachers are saying that their colleagues are coming back from meetings now somewhat uncertain about what they should actually be doing and how the changes affect them and their students. I am not in the school anymore so it is a dangerous ground for me to stand on here. I am not going to stand there for any length of time. There is apparently an issue with respect to the latest change. However, if I can take a wider point and thus escape out from under your question with some hopefully skin left on me, there is a problem about the extent to which we are piling initiatives on initiatives. One of the problems that Scottish education has experienced—this is the second period in Scottish education since the war where we have had this tremendous pressure of initiative—happened back in the 80s when there was a great surge of initiative. Then it went quiet for a little while and then from the build-up to 2000 onwards it has just gone up. It is entirely understandable and perhaps more so in the context of a Scottish Parliament rather than a UK one, that people who are in a position to pull the levers of power want to pull them because you all want to make things better. We understand that. The problem is that unless you get it right, you can actually make it worse. I am not suggesting for a moment that any of you would wish to make it worse, but sometimes it does not work. It is actually here that I can show you evidence of failed initiatives, abandoned initiatives, truncated initiatives. It did not work out the way that it was supposed to be initiatives. The impact they have had on the lives of children—primarily children—teachers and parents. We just need to do it a bit better. I will not continue to press on that question because I appreciate how open you have been with the information that you have. Another area that I would like to turn to is the transition from S1 to S3 into S4. We have touched on the somewhat—I suppose you could describe it as a misalignment or coming at it from slightly different philosophical basis, given who was responsible for the development of each of those phases. It was quite interesting that SQA did a report—I think that it was published this time last year—on the experience of learners. The feedback from learners being that they felt that that was quite a significant and unsettling shift. We have discussed the tangible impacts around subject choice and achievement. I am interested in the less tangible impact of the effect that it has on the learners' expectation of their own education journey, of their own aspirations. I do not know if SQA went into any detail on that or if there is evidence available from elsewhere, but does anyone have any evidence of what the impact is on the learners' own expectations and their experience of education? I did a survey of schools, headteachers, senior management teams, teachers themselves, but also, very importantly, pupils as to how they felt the transition and their experiences of the new qualifications were. We have done two of those reports, so they have been published over the last couple of years. What the young people were basically telling us is that the pace of learning that they experienced during broad general education was quite slow, not across the board—again, there is variety all the way across the system—as soon as they hit the qualifications, the pace of learning increased dramatically and they found it very challenging. There are multiple reasons why that happens. I think that we have touched on some of them in terms of the amount of time that is available for particular subjects, for instance. However, we felt that we needed to go back and ask them how they had experienced it the year after, because the first year was very much as for pupils, so we talked again to S5 and S4 pupils. Again, the feedback from the kids was very much that it was getting a little bit better, because the pace of learning in BGE—we have introduced that very quickly, is the challenge. There has been not a lot of piloting, as was mentioned earlier, and I think that teachers were getting their heads around it, so there was a bit of improvement in the second stage. However, the kids definitely said that the pace of learning that they found when they hit S4 went up dramatically. If anyone else is aware, if there is any academic work out there on the impact on pupils' sense of self-expectation on their aspirations as a result of the shift in that transition. Mark Presley was working with Highland Regional Council at one point in time, doing a linear study of children there. I do not know whether they still are, but I do not know, because I thought that that had great promise to watch what happened to children going through the process. I will drop Mark an email and see if there is any sort of—maybe we will get to him before me—and we can find out whether there is anything that is still going there. I am not aware of anything else. I think that that would be very useful. I am sure that the committee has been in touch with Mark already, I believe. I think that there will be two brief responses. It may also be that some of the best data about the impact on young people is held by the youth Parliament and the commissioner. There are other people who are trying to keep up with what is going on, with the possible impact on young people's health and wellbeing around the nature of the examinations pressures. The broader point that occurs to me is that there is very limited research. For such a major initiative, it is massively under-researched. One of the things that we have recently been doing in SQA is using young Scot to talk to young people about what they feel about assessment and what should the future of assessment look like. That is a very interesting approach. We will be publishing a report on young Scot on their views on assessment. Young people want the qualifications because that is seen as the passport to the next stage, but they want the assessment to be much more fluid and much more continuous as opposed to the examination piece. It is really important to keep talking to young people because there is a real challenge that we talk a lot about how schools approach it and how teachers approach it. Young people are the people that we are working for and doing it for. Do you have an indexive publication deadline for that? It will be October. Fantastic. Thank you. I have a very quick supplementary from Ms Goldruth. Thank you, convener. This is a brief supplementary to Ross Greer's point, which I thought was really interesting with regard to young people whom we have not almost spoken about until this point in the meeting today. It is year of young people. Professor Scott, I note in your research that you talk about column choice. I know in certain high schools that people design the curriculum as it were because they opt to take choices and then the timetable is arranged around about their needs, which seems much more responsive. I was really interested, Janet Brown, with regard to the SQA's findings about the mental health of pupils in the system, particularly with regard to assignments and the gathering of data at that pressure point at the end of term. As you are approaching the exam diet around about March, April, you have assignments due for every subject area, potentially for higher and that five level and the impact that it has on children in terms of their mental health. Has the SQA considered, for example, staggering when those deadlines might be to not put pressure on the children just before they go forward to sit final examinations? I know that it is a huge pressure point in schools for teachers, but really for pupils who are sitting subjects in a range of different areas. That is the date that we pick it up. It can be done at any point in the year. That is part of the flexibility of an assignment. It can be done at the appropriate point for that particular learner. We do recognise that a lot of people tend to do it right towards the end because they have gathered all the knowledge up at that point, but it is a flexible environment. We need to pick it up at a certain point in order for us to be able to mark it. That is part of the reason why we are engaging with Young Scot, because it is to start looking at how we can assess those skills and abilities in potentially different ways. It is not going to happen next year, but we need to think about ways of doing it slightly differently. I would say that teachers usually work to a deadline, so if you are given a deadline when it is going to be picked up by the SQA, that is when it is completed for us. I wonder if the SQA therefore could think about considering having a different date in the year, which is perhaps earlier, so that there is not that crush at the end before the final examination. For examination diet 2019, we obviously have challenges every year, depending on where the Easter holidays fall. There is a deadline date. That is towards the end of March for next year. A lot of subjects fall into that category, but where there are practical subjects or subjects where the coursework has a very high proportion of the final overall grade, those dates are pushed back. We have other collection dates that go quite far into April, for example. It would not necessarily be the case that that single date is the date that everyone has to work to. I am going to bring in Mr McDonald. Before I go on to my questions on the narrowing of choice, I want to ask a couple of technical questions about the data just to try to understand it. My understanding is that school roles have been dropping in S4. They will pick up eventually, because we can see the pressure on the primary schools. Yes, but certainly in S4 we have seen from 2011 55,000 S4 pupils down to 49,000 in the last numbers that are available, a 10 per cent reduction. Have you reflected that in your comparison of exam results from year on year? Secondly, in terms of colleges, we have talked about the fact that some pupils are attending colleges for courses. Have the number of passes at colleges been reflected in the data as well? The answer to both your questions is yes to save a lot of time, but I will amplify a little bit. The drop in S4 is probably one of the second tier effects. Obviously, the drop in curricular structure causes the 17 per cent drop. There is no doubt about that, that is evident from the structure. After that you are left with a remaining 16.8 per cent, and there is no doubt that roughly half of that comes, particularly as it goes forward, from the declining role. It is not quite as evident in the early years of CFE, it has become a great fact. You saw that this year in 2018 because it dropped quite sharply. That is partially due to the declining role and partially due, I suspect, to something to do with unit assessments and the changes that SQA have made. However, there are a number of factors in there that caused the problem. There is a very clear evidence that you may not spot quite as easily with respect to overaspiration by someone in the early years of CFE to have children in level 5. Particularly in 2013-14, there was a huge lump of children who have ended up in level 5 who simply did not pass at all. That has tapered off a bit as we have gone on, and to some extent that has balanced the growth of the decline in the population. I tend to factor those two against each other and hover a number of about 8 per cent against the two of those together. You then are left after the 17 per cent, which was 12 per cent initially a curricular decline through the 17. You then have a remaining at the moment 9-10 per cent left over that is due to other factors. I think I have managed to convince most of the reasons for those, as I have gone through this morning. Aspiration is one particular twist to the curriculum structure, not just shrinking the number, but there are some strange little twists in when people in a few schools actually present other certificate core subjects such as RME or PE, and that means that you get a slight upward boost to some numbers because they are adding that to their six or seven or eight. It is not a simple process, unfortunately. I wish I could say it was. If you are asking the question, did I take account of all those factors, then thank God I can say to you, yes I did. Thank you very much for that. The one question that I want to ask in relation to narrowing of a choice. We had a quote back in November of 2016 from Dr Bill Maxwell, who was the previous chief executive of Education Scotland. He said, One key difference, which has emerged nationally, is that young people are taking exams in fewer subjects at the end of S4. He was on to say, as they move into S5 and S6, there is also the opportunity to study different or additional subjects from those studied in S4. The quote finishes by saying, Some higher attaining young people bypass exams in S4 and instead follow a two-year course to higher in S5. The example that is given of young people taking courses in S5 and S6 that would have been taken in S4 is that, in 2017, there were 62,000 entries at national 5 in S5 and S6, which was 21 per cent of the NAP5 total. I know that you said at the beginning that you were comparing fourth-year results because the data was easily available and easily comparable, but will the picture change as you then move on to fourth and fifth and then fourth, fifth and sixth as the data becomes available? That is absolutely correct. You are quite right to say that. I do not have any problems with that at all. However, the reality is that it is not often that you get a chance to offer a trailer for a forthcoming academic paper, but here we go. If you wait a few weeks, I will demonstrate what the curriculum of every Scottish secondary school is and how that is concatenated to S4, S5 and S6, because I have done that. The overwhelming situation in most Scottish secondary schools is that they still offer either 654 or some of them have been liberally enough to go with 655. You have heard me say that 666 almost does not exist, apart from the least stable children. Much of the uptake that you are talking about comes from that least stable or lower middle group who are picking up an extra subject in S5 or S6, and that is allowing them to pick up one or two extra qualifications. That is the driver for the continued growth in more people getting one at that level as we go on. I say again that that growth has actually slowed since CFE, so there are contrary tides working there. What you are saying is absolutely correct in that more people in S5 and S6 are turning to lower-level qualifications. SQA's data shows that, my data shows that, and that will be a beneficial factor. The problem is that what that tends to do is disguise the issues that are actually happening in the stages because they are all lumped together in one set of results. One of the very useful things for us would be to disaggregate those. I have been trying very hard to pick out the five at three, five at four or five at five figures, the traditional ones, to which, interestingly, more schools are returning in the presentation of attainment. In the years ending 2014-2015, it was almost impossible to see a school's progress against five at three, five at four or five at five. It gave up, but we are increasingly returning to that. I am carrying with me, if you wanted to see it, the results of 50 secondary schools from 359. That shows you the extent to which they are improving in fourth year, because we can pick that out as fourth-year figures. However, we need to be able to do that to see what the effect of fourth year is and what the effect of the subsequent years are. You are absolutely correct. I am going to take a quick supplementary and then I will have final questions. I suppose that one of the things that I am struck by from your evidence, which I think we want to look at further, is that there is quite strong lessons here about how new initiatives are developed, the importance of evidence, the importance of monitoring or getting evidence at the point where you are developing a plan and in the implementation and how it has been implemented and this thing about unintended consequences, which I think we would hope to go back to. I am sure that you are all aware of the controversy around standardised assessments. I wonder if you have a view on the initiative. How well do you think that the evidence has been sought for and how do you think that it sits with the philosophy of curriculum for excellence? Can we have very brief answers on that, because we are pushing the boundaries of the work? I understand that there is a sense of the public about certain things. I think that it has to be seen in the context of the broader initiative in education. So if you could, Dr Shibiria, would you like to answer first? Well, I think just at the moment when we only can look at the emerging, we are only starting to seriously look, collect the data and look at the emerging trends and thinking about these trends and what is important at the moment to try to develop more sort of, first of all, more informed understanding of what's going on at all levels and try to understand the interconnections between curriculum impacts, developments on the school level and consequences for enrollment at different levels and progressions from one level to another. But also think about the impact on the attainment and progression and what I also think it is very important to understand the consequences on the various outcomes of pupils, including the consequences on the outcomes, on their well-being and on the broader competencies that they develop on their skills. And that partially could be achieved looking at the data on early destinations of school leavers, for example, but also we can benefit from analyzing existing longitudinal data that can show us the pathways of young people who go through the secondary education system, not just now during the period of the implementation of the curriculum for excellence, but also those who went through the secondary system before them. So if we look at the data over the last 10 years and compare outcomes of those who were going through the system before 2013 and after 2013, in terms of their out-broad outcomes, attainment and transitions and destinations, then combining this data with understanding on the level of policies and schools and local authorities was actually going on, would help us to develop recommendations and to fulfill that meet-life policy, how it was expressed and introduce much needed changes in the way the curriculum for excellence being offered and implemented in the secondary schools at different stages. So I think it's also the answer to the question who should be on this committee who will review this meet-life policy changes and I think for sure also educational researchers, also specialists in curriculum, also those who see the relationship between type of curriculum and consequences for social inequality. Thank you. Does anyone else want to speak to Dr Burton here? Well, it's clearly, it has become a highly politicised issue. So I want to separate my take on it from any of that and apply the same forms of analysis as I've done to the origins of curriculum for excellence, which is to consider whether as a policy initiative does it pass certain criteria around the extent of consultation, the extent of reference to existing research from home or abroad, the extent of consensus building, and I'm not necessarily seeing those characteristics in relation to this policy. Dr Scott, Professor Scott, you might want to entirely support what Alan just said. Obviously one needs to be, we're not political, we're heroes researchers, we know what you're doing this afternoon. We can only look at an initiative and judge it by the evidence that demonstrates it will be beneficial. At the present moment, I do not think I have personally seen, although I'm not claiming my reading is exhaustive, sufficient evidence to say it would be beneficial. If I were chaving our committee, I would only bring an initiative to that committee if I felt I could demonstrate that it was well thought out, that it would generate clear benefits and that there was a mechanism for carrying that out effectively. I'm not sure we're there at the present moment, and it's typical of Scottish education. Very quickly, Mr Mandel, but on the issue of today's, which is about the exam results and attainment. Well, thank you, convener. It related to a point that had come up elsewhere around piloting, and I just wondered whether Professor Scott would agree that some of those issues have come up out, because, again, there hasn't been enough road testing of initiatives before they've been introduced and rolled out across the country. There's a terribly awkward balance in the development of an initiative, because one wants to, Philip Bank's ex-HMCI used to rant, and the word is used advisedly, but it took 15 to 20 years to fully bed in any Scottish major initiative, and he was right. There is that terrible tension between starting something and wanting to have it apply to young people to improve their situation and making sure that you've got it right. All the things that I've talked about that haven't quite worked or haven't worked at all are on the basis that someone's rushed something and there hasn't been sufficient work done to make sure it's going to go forward, and that's unfortunate, because we do keep doing that. Piloting in the case of CFE would have been extraordinary. I can't possibly talk about the current situation, I'm not going to, but, in the case of CFE, it would have been very helpful if we'd actually tried to work through some of those. Eddie Broadley and I produced curricular model after curricular model to try and help schools. We brought dozens of head teachers and deputies and principal teachers together to try and get them to work through what that would mean for their school. We did what we could as a totally independent agency. That would have been better organised on a central basis. There were a number of gatherings when people were brought together, but they were not brought together to look at evidence from that sort of piloting. You can't actually launch the curriculum for three years and once go ahead of the others if it also involves a major change of the qualification system. You have to work with what you can do, but we could have done that. Actually, while there were two groups that were trying to do that, one of them only lasted about six months, sadly, and decided that it couldn't do it. We carried it through as best we could, but all of us who were involved in our process are aware that more could have been done and that we could have done a better job. Piloting is an important thing. Okay, if I could move to questions of my own now, that's okay. Finally, and almost back to where we started, Dr Britten said about the principles of curriculum for excellence in the very start of the process. In the previous committee in 2012, it took evidence on the curriculum at that stage. Terry Lanigan, who was the director of education at Western Bartonshire but representing the Association of Directors, gave evidence at that time. He said that the new system is not about going for eight to nine qualifications in one year. It's a continuum of learning. He also went on to say that it was about that pupil-specific need of an individual's journey through the process. He talked about the two-term dash to higher, which considered a problem at that time. He said that the other myth is grown up that the idea that those schools that choose to present some or all of their pupils for eight qualifications in S4 are somehow doing better than those that adopt another model. It's really to the crux of this that it's about the models that have been adopted in this. I'm also looking at EU cast figures for Scottish enrolments this year, where it's shut up by 4 per cent. Of course, that doesn't include some of the articulated routes that some people might have to degree level qualifications through the colleges. Also, in June this year, the National Office for Statistics published the attainment and lever destinations for young people and showed that 92.9 per cent of the 2016 school leavers were in a positive destination. While I absolutely accept the correlation that has been made between the subject choices in some of the areas, and I accept that the curriculum has narrowed at S4, I'm still struggling to see what evidence it is that this is affecting the outcomes for young people on leaving school. It was said that the universities might not somehow be disadvantaged if they didn't take the subjects in one year. That's another thing that I think has been the universities are saying they're looking at the whole curriculum final stage for deciding on what students to take in for degrees. I'm just asking what evidence that is that this is having a significant impact on youngsters. I think some of those in my presentation and in my paperwork, but I'll say them again. There is clear evidence that the problems of S4 have now transferred themselves to S5 and that the higher situation, the higher attainment has changed its profile. We had asked, but SQA can say it better than me, we had a steady growth in higher attainment from around 2006-2007 to the current moment. That steady growth was predicated on two things, a brief period of growth in the pupil body and a profession bedding in higher still. There was no major initiative during that period at all, thank goodness. It was predicated on a profession coming to terms with what higher still meant and actually implementing that effectively in the schools and allowing teachers to become expert in producing that and affecting the learning of their children. We had that growth and suddenly when we come to the first year of the new higher in CFE system, the growth profile changes completely and it looks with the latest figures that there may actually even be a downward turn in higher, never mind slowing the progress. We see that quite clearly. Obviously, advanced higher is not affected because the most able children in any system tend to reach the top anyway. Higher, the fourth year qualifications, clearly there are issues. We've seen that the one at five, one at six leavers figures, the profile of growth which was significant up to 2013, has suddenly changed and is on a much lower level of climb or perhaps even has levelled off in one of the indicators. So we see there evidence as well that things appear to be changing at the top end. You do not get a sudden and irrevocable change when you change qualification systems. What tends to happen is a pattern that establishes that the reason I've deliberately delayed a whole lot of this is HMI would say to you that anything less than three years does not constitute a trend and they would prefer five years. So we wait with our data until we can actually demonstrate that something is happening. There are now signs that something is happening. It's sure as heck is happening in fourth year. It's happening to a lesser extent in fifth year and in leavers data, but there are signs that changes are occurring. The best time to do something about an unwelcome change is early on in the process. I don't think one generally waits ten years to see if it's as bad as one thinks it is. So the time now is to do something and see if we can actually ascertain what's going on. Dr Britten, would you like to come in on that one? No, I agree with Jim about the timescale for these things, but if we wait for longitudinal effects to really bed in, that will be too late. I agree with my colleagues, but I just want to add in addition the question is why, how do we have evidence that this narrowed choice has a negative effect? Overall, we will have to wait and see, look at the trends in probably a couple of more years, but more generally if we think about if children at age, as early as age 14, they already have to do some choices that would affect their future because subject choice at S4 affects subject choices S5 and S6 consequently affects opportunities of transition to the university. So less subjects choice on S4 means that if they are not successful in these five or six subjects, then instead of doing higher, they will have to take other subjects on lower level and they have less opportunity to take qualifications on higher level, but this is also about we shouldn't narrow the opportunities of young people. We shouldn't restrict it just pragmatically to the subjects that they need to study in order, for example, to make a progression to the university. Why young people should decide not to selecting, for example, history or geography or the third science subject because they just don't allow to? Why we expect that at age 14 and 15 they know what they are going to do when they are 17 or 18? Why we are not giving them opportunities to remain open about this until probably age 18, but in order to do that, we need to keep their choices quite broad. We need to allow them to choose more, not less subjects and try different things. In this sense, I am sure that narrowing the curriculum has a negative effect on everyone. Dr Brown, you want to talk? Yes, I think that this whole conversation exemplifies the fact that it is really important to not just look at the SQA qualifications because they are year on year. It is about the senior phase and it is about understanding what students achieve at the end of the senior phase whether it is the five subjects, whether it is the eight subjects and what impact does that have on their success in the future. However, we do not have that data at this point in time and I think that is a set of data that is really critical. I would argue that it is also critical to do it for three different groups of students. The ones that find learning challenging, the ones that are your average student and the ones that are high achievers because it will have a different impact on each group. I think that it is really important that we understand what that is. Some of our problem is caused by the management information system that is now used in schools in Scotland. It was a bold venture to try and incorporate equity into the reporting processes of insight. I was the first principal teacher of computing in Scotland. I have worked with management information systems for a very long time. Whereas the previous system was quite effective and efficient and relatively easily used, insight has been, according to almost every headteacher, deputy or director of a person that I have interviewed, something of a trial. It now incorporates level 3, which is progress at least, but insight will very easily spit out key data. However, when Mr MacDonald asked a question about the proportions of fourth year, fifth year and sixth year, that is an absolutely key question. If we actually had the five at three, five at four, five at five data for fourth year, as well as the fifth year data and the sixth year data, we would have an instantly better picture of what is going on. If we also had a local authority level breakdown and or a school level breakdown of what is happening because schools are generally not publishing the results, we would have a much better picture of what is going on. It is not difficult for a Government to cause that to happen because that is what happened before. I understand in the process of transition because things were so different that there was a period where it had to be got up to speed and moved forward. We all understand that, but we are now in a situation where that could be generated quite easily. If I go and tap a friendly headteacher on the shoulder, I asked a national room full of headteachers three weeks ago past Saturday. How many of you know your five at three, five at four, five at five data? Every hand went up. How many of you published that? Two hands. I asked the others why they didn't. The standard answer was there really was no clear answer given at all. You have the opportunity as the administration to change that, not at the stroke because some work would have to be done with people to get that sorted. However, in breach of the school handbook regulations 2013 and the enabling act of 2012 before it that said that parental information should be in the following format, there is nothing that requires to be done other than to say, excuse me, schools and authorities, do you remember we put this out, you are not doing it? It is not a big job. I thank all the panel who have attended this morning for their contributions. It is a huge area, given that there is a lot of food for thought this morning. I am sure that it is an area that the committee will return to in the future. Thank you very much. I am going to suspend for five minutes or so just for comfort break for the committee to come back.