 Good morning and welcome everybody to the second meeting of the Education and Culture Committee in 2015. Can I remind all those present that electronic devices should be switched off? Can I begin by welcoming Siobhan McMahon to the committee as a new member? And also can I welcome Ian Gray, who is here as a member, but not a member of the committee. So welcome Ian to the committee. Obviously in our absence at our last meeting, Siobhan was elected as Deputy I also want to congratulate her on the record for that post, but can I invite you on to declare any relevant registrable interests? Thank you, convener. I don't have anything to declare. Okay. Thank you very much. Our second item is to consider whether to take item 5 in private. This is to discuss a letter from Claire Baker MSP about a possible suggestion on the work programme about the V&A museum in Dundee. Do members wish to take that item in private? Yes. Okay. Agreed. Our next item is to consider petition 1470 from the Scottish Youth Parliament. As members will see from the paper, the petitioner is now content for the petition to be closed. I think that this is unique in my experience of asking for a petition to be closed. However, it is up to committees to decide whether they wish to close a petition or not. It is therefore time for the committee to consider further action, if any, if it wishes to take. Liam Kerr. I need to close the petition, but to put on record our congratulations on the outcome of the efforts that the petitioners have put in. Members agreed to that? Yes. On behalf of the committee, I would like to reiterate what Liam Kerr said on the work that has been undertaken by the Scottish Youth Parliament and thank them for all their efforts in this area. However, the petition is now closed. I move on to item 4 on the agenda. Our next item is to discuss the implications of a recent report on the resourcing of science in Scottish schools, which was published by the Learned Societies Group on Scottish Science Education. The committee has previously agreed to undertake work on science, technology, engineering and maths, or STEM, as the better known, and today's meeting is the first step in that process. I welcome to the committee Professor Sally Brown, Stuart Farmer, Dr Bill Beverage, Dr Liz Lakin and Kate Farrell. I thank you all very much for coming along and giving your time up to the committee this morning. We have got about an hour to spend on this, hopefully. Without further ado, I am just going to go straight to questions from members, if you do not mind. I am quite happy for everybody to answer a question if they feel that they have something to contribute, but if somebody has already covered it, you do not need to repeat it. I thank you very much for your support this morning. Can I ask members to indicate if they want to ask a question, and I know that Chick Brody wants to begin. Good morning. In the general context, some of the figures that we have seen are quite heartening. On another committee, the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, we had a problem in challenging young people to get involved in the engineering, to say, I wonder what you can tell me what you are doing to attract more students into studying STEM products. Professor Brown. Well, we are very much supportive of the recent reforms in education, when I say recent, they have been going on for some years now. Therefore, anything that we do is to try and improve the situation with regard to the curriculum for excellence, the role that that has to play. For example, in primary education, which is, in a sense, we are moving STEM subjects back into primary education, where, although maths has been there consistently, the record in primary education for science has been less encouraging. We are certainly doing that. I would like to ask Bill Beverage to say something about that from the Royal Society of Chemistry, because they have a particular focus on starting everything at the primary level. We are concerned that we have some, as you know from the material that we've produced for you, as well as the material on resources. We've also been looking for and carrying out some independent search for evidence about how things are going in schools. There are certain things that are of concern, perhaps to us, but also, of course, to teachers and to schools themselves. For example, about the curriculum structure, particularly the move from a 2-2-2 structure to a 3-3 structure, and the impact that that might have on people being able to continue—when I say people, I mean pupils—being able to continue with what they need in order to gain entry to further education or higher education courses. I think that, as a group, that's really the kind of general focus that we have. I'll turn to Bill Beverage first, but maybe the others here could say something that is much more specific, which relates to their particular learning society in science. One of the elements in the discussion that we had in the other committee was that we talked about those that are involved in the industry or in the sector. Invariably, nobody ever seemed to talk to the parents in depth about how attractive the stem sector might be. I just wonder if, in your answer, Dr Beverage, you can give some indication as to how much of the survey was applied to the consideration of parents, as to whether or not they wanted their children to be involved in science or not. Those are excellent points that you raise. Very much a matter—the concern of all of our learning societies—is very much promoting to the entire community—not just school pupils, but parents and grand-parents and the whole of society that the important role that those stem subjects play. You asked in your question what we are doing to promote those subjects. Each of our organisations will have different programmes. We have a programme called Chemistry at Work. Chemistry at Work brings in people who use chemistry in their everyday employment into schools, secondary schools and, importantly, primary schools, to showcase what it is that chemists do. The important thing is that those chemists will not just work in the petrochemical industry, but with people from the fire service coming along or people from the food industry or the textiles industry. We see that as being very important. As Sally mentioned, one of the most important things for us at the moment is primary. At the very early stages of a child's career, evidence is overwhelming that the attitudes that you are forming at those early stages are attitudes that will, in many cases, be set for life. Forgive me, but those attitudes can be disabused by parents who take a perhaps a different view of that particular sector. Is that not the case? You are absolutely right. In other programmes that our societies operate in, so again, speaking for their off-site of chemistry, one of the things that we are looking at funding this year in Scotland is an initiative to take the message out to communities and rural communities in particular, and more remote rural communities, showcasing the important role that chemistry plays in other STEM subjects. In that pilot, we are looking at not just speaking to traditional audiences that we speak to, such as school pupils, but the families and the parents and the grandparents, because you are right. The attitudes in the home are crucial. A quick question on the report and the survey sample before I kick off. We had a member's debate in Parliament last week and there was a question around the survey sample and whether the figures in the report could really be used to analyse a picture across Scotland or Llo. I think that a survey of 12 per cent of secondary schools is clearly insignificant. Do you think that there is a body of work here that the Government could be doing to emulate the work of the report to give a more accurate position of what is going on right across Scotland? I wonder if I could start and then I will hand over to Stuart. One of the concerns that has led us to undertake this gathering of evidence has been that there has not been enough gathering of independent evidence in relation to the reforms. That is our first concern. A 12 per cent or a 10 per cent sample of schools is, I think, insignificant. I said that it is not insignificant. Oh, not insignificant. Sorry, I did not hear the not. It is really relatively significant, although that does not apply to the primary schools. We have not done a 12 per cent. I am not sure that the panel had listened in to the debate or read the report of the debate. I think that the primary schools that were being questioned—not the second reason, but the 2 per cent sample size in the primary schools—were much lower. What I would have to say was that the findings were pretty much in line with what the individual societies had found in their own experience, but it is true that we do not have a large primary school packet of evidence available. However, may I turn to Stuart and let him comment on this? Yes, the learning societies would like to see more work done in this area. Essentially, the reason that the learning societies decided to follow this up was as part of the SEAG report recommendations in 2012. Recommendations 411 to 413 was precisely to do, as you suggested, a proper independent study to identify the resources that are required to adequately deliver the curriculum. Unfortunately, some of the recommendations in the Government's response were rejected. However, the learning societies felt that there was a sufficient issue here that they were able to devote a small amount of funding in order to do some independent evidence gathering. We would have liked to have done a sufficiently large study to be able to present findings with a statistical basis of 95 per cent confidence with a 5 per cent error. However, on doing the analysis that would have required us to have sampled over around about 200 or more secondary schools in Scotland and a slightly greater number of primary schools and the resources available to effectively work charitable member-funded organisations was not sufficient to do that. However, we did attempt to provide as representative a survey sample as possible. We wanted to ensure that as many local authorities were represented as possible and that large, small, rural, urban, island schools were all represented. The sample that we have got, particularly in secondary, does have good representation from all those groups. We ended up getting a statistical sample where the error on 95 per cent confidence is about 14 per cent. As you will have seen from the figures, the outcome, if I can use the secondary figures as a base, indicates that the funding for an average school within the sample of £5,590 per annum is about 19 per cent of what we have estimated to be a reasonable sum to maintain—not to start from scratch but to maintain the resourcing level in secondary schools. With a 14 per cent error, if you give the benefit of the doubt and increase the amount by 14 per cent, that still only increases the sums available to about 24 per cent of that which we estimate. The sample, as I said, is small. However, the findings from the sample bear remarkable comparison with the previous study that was done in 2001 to 2003. While that was only done for physics departments in Scotland rather than in Scottish secondary schools, rather than in all schools, that was based on a sample of 120 schools across Scotland and another was more than 30 per cent of all schools based on return. The two studies together give an element of breadth and depth, which give representative figures and also over an extended time period. Therefore, we would strongly recommend that consideration be given to do further research and gain independent evidence of the real situation in Scotland. I think that the learning societies have done as much as we were able to do on the timescale and with the resources available to us. Thank you very much for that. You touched on the question of resources and your answer then. You have given an estimated annual budget of just under £30,000 for average Scottish secondary school. Have you done any work as to what that would mean on a Scotland-wide basis in terms of an increase in funding and any analysis of how that could possibly be met from local authority budgets or whether that would need to be supplemented by additional funding from central government? We haven't done any analysis or any work on where that funding ought to come from. We've done that analysis in terms of what we estimate to be a reasonable sum in order to deliver the curriculum based on evidence that historically started off by work that the Royal Society in London and ASC started about 20 or more years ago and has been updated in various steps since then. We've come up with a reasonable estimate for a care and maintenance budget to reasonably deliver the curriculum. Reports and the press over the weekend have set that at a Scottish level of an additional £8 million. Annually, do you think that's an accurate reflection of what you're suggesting in your report? I think that that is reasonable. The last question that I wanted to ask was on comparisons in your report between spending in other parts of the UK and Scotland. Mark, can I answer your question? I've got some members who want supplementaries on that area before you move on or bring them back to you, thanks. Gordon MacDonald, first. Thank you very much. When Mark talked about the sample size, I've got a couple of questions about primary coming up later on and I just thought it would maybe be appropriate at the moment just to put it in context, your findings. Particularly about primary, how was the sample, what was the size of the sample that was originally identified, what was the response rate from primary schools and was it self-selecting, the schools decide whether to opt in or not or did you invite them and how was the sample put together? The sample, we try to identify name contacts within schools, within London Society contacts and the initial sample was by invitation but at the same time we put out a general invitation to the education sector in general and invited people to respond. The consultancy firm that did the research then analysed the sample that we got, where we got full and adequate responses. We got partial responses from some inevitably with such surveys. No matter how well we try and design a survey, we don't always get a full completion rate that we would have liked. If my understanding is correct, there were 39 primary schools that took part in the survey. How many primary schools did you invite to take part in that survey? We invited—I cannot give you an exact number off the top of my head but slightly more than that, plus we made a general invitation more widely through networks so that there was an open invitation to contribute as well as for those that we identified with name contacts, which was somewhere in excess of 50 but I cannot remember the exact number off the top of my head. Given that you had a general call to all 32 local authorities, is the response rate disappointing? We were slightly disappointed with the response. We were hoping to get a full 50 fully completed. I would like to come back to resources that were touched on. Clearly, that is a key element of the papers that are being submitted that are insufficient resources being allocated to those areas. I look at tables that show entrants to hires in selected subjects, the passes to hires, the entrants to advanced hires and the passes in advanced hires, and most of those figures are at record levels. Between 2009 and 2014, which is the periods that I am looking at, we are seeing huge increases both in the number of entrants and in the number of passes. What additional resources would add to that? What sort of improvements would we see beyond what we are already seeing? The learning societies are concerned about, and that comes from communication with a wide variety of stakeholders. All the learning societies, such as the Institute of Physics, Draw Society and Chemistry, have a large industry and higher education representation. There is a consistent message of concern about the practical investigative problem-solving skills that our young people are developing. There is concern within the learning societies that too much of the practical science that is being reported to be done in secondary schools and in primary schools, particularly in secondary schools in this case, is where the teacher is demonstrating the experiments and so on to the class because there is a shortage of equipment that there is one of something rather than having say 10 of a piece of equipment and allowing pupils to do experiments themselves with their hands-on basis. There are concerns that, although the basic knowledge of the science subjects is being taught well and that the figures that you quote show that lots of pupils are seeing positive benefits from studying the science, nevertheless their ability to develop the hands-on practical skills and the deeper analytical skills that can be based on experimental work are not being as developed as fully as we would wish. Are you saying that it is industry that is coming and saying that? There is information from industry, from higher education generally, from the places that our young people in schools go on to when they leave schools. But surely industry has ways of feeding that back, not just through yourselves, but there are many engagements between education and industry that would receive that sort of feedback and take it into account. Surely that is part of what we are seeing here in terms of the outcomes. I am struggling a wee bit on this one. We should repeat our concern that there has not been a significant amount of independent, systematic evidence gathering on this. That certainly applies in relation to the connections that we have between industry and school education and higher education and so on. Of course, there are plenty of people who give opinions so that one can collect together one's own set of anecdotes in relation to this. What comes continually from people who write about it, and this is not systematic evidence, this is what we read about, is that you are probably all too young to remember the changes that were made in the 1960s when we went into the alternative science syllabuses. There was quite an extraordinary change in the amount of practical work that young people did, which previously had just been something demonstrated by the teacher. Sadly, over the years, that practical work has diminished. I can give you anecdotal statements that people have made. Very often teachers will say, well, of course, it is all the health and safety regulations, which I do not believe, although there may be some that is to do with health and safety, but there are a lot of reasons why we don't have as much practical work among young people now. That is not good for our future. We do have every week on television and elsewhere concerns expressed about the loss of practical skills. Those are in many different environments, but we have a lot, as I say, of anecdotal evidence, but we do not have systematic evidence. That is what we would actually want to have. Is it not a little bit odd to be making assertions based on anecdotal evidence on what has been read about? Is that hard evidence to back up what you say? We are trying to provide some evidence that approaches hard evidence, but our primary concern has been, and I said this from the start of this meeting, that, as a country, we are not looking for systematic independent evidence in the way that we should be. The answer to you is that we are very short of hard evidence, and we have perhaps the closest thing to it, but it is not enough. I wonder if I could ask Liz from the teacher education. I am representing the Society of Biology, but I also work at the University of Dundee in initial teacher education. What has come through from the experience, particularly of the Society of Biology, is that we have evidence from across the UK that students are coming into employment, as well as into higher education. Those are science students without the skills—or fully developed skills—that Stuart was alluding to a moment ago. That has prompted the Society to develop an accreditation scheme, which is looking at university degrees so that students coming out of degrees have been developing those skills. For us, to be doing that has meant that there really is concern up and down the country that something needs to be done in education, in school education, to promote and develop those skills. They go back to the practical work, they go back to students being able to assess the nature of science, the way science actually works, to look at the evidence that they are getting, and to be proactive in what they are trying to do so that they can look at the quality of the evidence that they have. They can say, yes, I know where I can go with this and I know what I can do with this, and they have not got those skills at the moment. They do not seem to be coming out with them. Therefore, they need to be addressed a lot later on than perhaps they should be at secondary schools. There is the evidence available, but it is available across the country, not specifically from what we are talking about here. I will come back to you on a second, Dr Weaveridge. I have three supplementaries before and at the end. Rudley interrupted Mark earlier and I want to come back to him, so I do not want to get stuck at this one question. If he could have three quick supplementaries from Liam, Mary and then Ian, then we will come back to Mark. Thanks very much. Good morning. I struck by the conversation again this morning about sample size in relation to the primary sector. The programme for government, 2014-15, suggests that the minister will continue to support improvement in the learning and teaching of STEM in schools with particular focus on primary schools. Do you not find it astonishing that, given that priority, the focus should be on the small sample size in the survey that you have conducted rather than on some of the issues that have been thrown up and a determination to get to the bottom of that one way or the other? I also invite you to follow up Colin Beattie's questions earlier. The statistics in terms of pass rates suggest that, for a bit of a mixed bag that passes in hires for biology and physics, they have gone down while others have gone up. In advance higher, the pass rates on chemistry have gone down, albeit that others have gone up. That is a bit of a mixed bag. The real issue that you have conducted by the survey is that the problems that we are seeing in primary school now will manifest themselves in the secondary sector in relation to hires, advanced hires and so on in a number of years' time. In essence, there will be a lag effect to the issues that your surveys have thrown up. Yes, and we are working, of course, very much in the context of the reforms of the last few years, which, as you know, have only just got to the point where we are moving into the hires and the advanced hires, and we will have to see what impact it has. However, there are big questions about whether the reforms that we have had, which have had support across all political parties and support from us, are being implemented in ways that are going to prepare young people better, not just for hires and advanced hires, but for the future of STEM in Scotland. Thank you, Mary. Like Colin Beattie, we were given a set of figures today. I was surprised that there are an increasing number of students entering for hires and advanced hires. My expectation would be that it was going in the other direction. If we take the information now, the direction in which it is going at the moment? The trend that I have— There was a trend. Between 2009 and 2014. In some information systems, there is a slight decline, but generally speaking, it is increasing. If I take that and look at the paper from you, and if I may read it out, convener, SQA presentation for 2014 qualifications indicate reduced numbers, biology down 8.9, chemistry down 8.8, physics down 5.6, computing related 22.4 and maths down 9.4. I am struggling to see all your figures are down, and that is SQA presentations, and yet all the figures that we have got here, and as an economist, I have looked at them very carefully. All the figures that I have got here are going in the opposite direction. I am trying to establish why I have two separate sets of figures here. Those are going in the wrong direction, and the figures that I have are the trend that is up. That is a very pertinent point. The figures for hires and advanced hires that we are looking at are from 2014, and those were the non-curriculum for excellence traditional old versions of those courses. Those numbers over several years had shown a heartwarming rise in the number of people doing the sciences, but the figures that are giving us concern are the figures coming from the new curriculum for excellence courses, which, of course, have only reached in schools S4. I am looking at those figures and trying to compare like with like across Scottish qualification framework levels 3, 4 and 5, which equate to the old standard grade. We are concerned that we are seeing decreases in all of the sciences. As you say, the figures are almost 9 per cent for biology and chemistry, and they are a little less the drop for physics. You are picking that up now, so that explains why you are getting the early signals of a decline to our entrance from the past. In fact, you are both correct. My second question, convener, if I may. It seems to me now that we understand this and obviously will look more in-depth at the alarming figures that you give, but what concerns me, Professor Brown, you say that you are very supportive of CFE, and we all are. We also all hear the stories from Wood commission and we have heard it from Dr Leakin today about the hands-on skills. It is your concern mainly that you are having reduced numbers going forward from the curriculum for excellence new curriculum, or is your main concern that the qualifications that they are getting are not enough hands-on, not enough practical, and that you are, dare I say, a watered-down version of what used to be a science qualification and that school pupils no longer have the employment and higher education skills, no longer have the practical work has diminished and the ability to develop hands-on skills have diminished. Are you saying that we are no longer preparing them for the employability and higher education, as well as the declining numbers? Actually, I think our main concern is that what we need to try and ensure is that a reformed system which we are working with now actually produces the best that it can for the future. Are we all like that? Yes, of course, but the decisions that were made to have no pilot work in these reforms have meant, together with the fact that we have no independent evaluations, we have no baseline data, it means that we really don't know what is going well and what is not going well and what we should do about it. You are concerned at the quality of the practical experience and the ability of school pupils to pitch into employment and higher education, am I right? Indeed, we are, but our concern is that we really understand what is going on at the moment. The sorts of things that you are suggesting that we should be concerned about in the questions... I am not suggesting that I am only asking questions on the basis of your evidence. The sorts of things implied by your questions, then, are that we should be concerned about the long term and indeed we should. We also should be concerned about such things as whether the SQA assessments and qualifications are actually doing what we need to do in order to ensure that the curriculum for excellence is achieving the things that it is set out to do. That is our concern as a group of royal societies. You have to think about what you are going to put your efforts into. It certainly seems to me that the kinds of things that we have brought to your attention, both about resources and about such things as the confidence that primary teachers have in their ability to do what is needed. We need to do some work on that and that is what we have focused on. What we have not got to yet is a set of recommendations that we would bark at you during this meeting to say what ought to be done. If you take, for example, and you have shown that you are concerned about it, the responsibility for who does something about funding better resources and how it should go, we have to say that central government has responsibility and it tells us that all of that is devolved to regional authorities. Regional authorities tell us that almost all of the money for education, 80 per cent or 90 per cent, is devolved to schools and then we go and ask the schools and the schools say well actually 90 per cent of what we spend is spent on teachers and we have absolutely no control over that. We have to pay what the national scales are and some say and even on procurement we have to obey the decisions that have already been made so now we don't have any freedom to speak of to take on that responsibility. Now we're not here to tell you how that should be done we're simply here to say that that's something that has to be given attention whether it's by central government or by local government and all we can do is to offer the evidence that we have and say it will be a very good thing if more extensive, more overall evidence was actually commissioned. So I think you have to see the position that we are coming from. Thank you very much. It was on the point of the equality of data and evidence that's available that I wanted to follow up although in some ways the discussions moved on a little bit and that's been a theme of the questioning and I think that's not surprising because the data available is a bit of a theme of the submission that the LSG have made. You talked, I think it was Stuart about CEAG and the recommendations they had made about tracking progress and STEM subjects and how those recommendations had not been accepted and the submission talks about for example the establishment and vacancy statistics ending so there's no information on teacher vacancies, a lack of information on the level of science qualification of primary teachers whether they have hires for example in a science or maths subject and then also the withdrawal of Scotland from Tims and Pearls, the international comparisons. My question really is this, you've talked a lot about the data that's available. Is it fair to say that when it comes to both inputs and outputs, actually the data available is reducing, that this is not getting better, it's actually getting worse and we know less about what's happening in science teaching in our schools and that's why you've tried to plug that gap with your survey. Yes, I think I would agree with that. I mean if you make a, I've already made a comparison with the changes that with the reforms we went through in the 60s, let me shift up to the 80s to the reforms to standard grade where there was very much more concern about pilot studies and about continuing professional development which happened before and as the reforms were being introduced, not as a kind of afterthought after difficulties were identified by teachers. We have a problem with not having the right data. I mean maybe I should turn to Kate who's from computing science. Computing science, we are all agreed, is absolutely centrally important in ways that it used not to be and we have concerns about both the number of teachers of computing science, the distinction between ICT which is quite often readily taken on but computational thinking which we think is absolutely essential for the future of our society but we also have difficulty in getting data that we need. May I ask Kate to contribute to this? We've carried out two surveys this year and two years ago. This year we've discovered that we've lost 109 computing teachers over the last two years so we're now down to about 650 computing teachers in Scotland for secondary. That equates to a 14% drop. In the five years before that we lost 100 teachers so we've had a drop of 100 teachers over five years and then we've had another 109 teachers over the last two years. That's now meaning that 12% of our secondary schools in Scotland don't have a computing teacher at all. When we ask schools why they don't have a computing teacher or how they're teaching the curriculum if they don't have a computing teacher many of those respondents were confused between the difference between ICT and computing so they were saying that we're teaching ICT across the curriculum. ICT should be taught across the curriculum but that's how to use the technology within teaching. That's how to use iPads or phones or laptops or whatever. We're concerned that we're not teaching how to programme those devices, we're not teaching how they work, we're not teaching computational thinking, the core skills of understanding processes and methods and modelling. In terms of the numbers staying relatively static we've been hit fairly hard on the changes from standard grades to national 5. In standard grades pupils were generally taking 7 or 8s of standard grades. Now with national 5s they're generally taking five national 5s, maybe six. That reduces their subject choices down so their column choices are generally Maths English, a modern language science and then there's a column of everything else and computing science although it's a rigorous academic subjects it's generally bundled in with practical subjects such as on my score we were competing with cake decorating and car mechanics which are valid subjects but they're not rigorous academic subjects and they're not scientific subjects. We're finding that there's a lack of computing teachers in the system, we're not getting enough computing teachers being trained up which is one of our problems. So 10 out of 32 local authorities were saying they were having problems recruiting computing teachers. We only have teacher training happening in Glasgow as a city now so Glasgow and Strathclyde are offering PGDEs in computing and they're only we're not reaching our targets so this year 21 teachers there's 21 student teachers training as computing teachers plus two it's sterling each year and that's not reaching our targets not even reaching the the sort of extended cap that the universities were allowed to to reach so we're not getting enough teachers into the system which is then causing problems with recruitment. In terms of those numbers so each year we're staying steady for our computing so far but we're not we need to train a massive number of more teachers because we need more at the Scotland IS our industry body for Scotland in act for IT is saying we need to train up more computing teachers we need to train up more people in computing and get through university so that we get more people into the IT industry if we can get tens of thousands more into our industry then our economy can boom but at the moment we don't have enough people coming through to meet the demands of the industry and they're carrying out an annual survey over this month last year's annual survey was saying that 70 percent of respondents to that industry survey were planning on recruiting but couldn't get we're struggling to get staff or again to go out with out with scotland to get new members of staff okay thank you very much is a very brief supplementary if i may ask again about the other committee i'm on we've been investigating creative industries and video industry yeah and you know here we have a sexy industry and yet you can't recruit those that are needed to support that yeah and i come back to my original question about you know where does the responsibility lie how much responsibility do you have or you personally with the but the the societies and etc in attracting people we're quite clearly there's a huge industry very attractive hugely important to the and yet you're raising your hand saying well what are we doing well what's government doing about it what are you doing about it well computing at schools scotland are working with skills development scotland who are planning a publicity campaign so that's a core part of their skills investment plan for it so we're working with them on that in terms of increasing demand and increasing skills we've had government funding a couple of years ago that's a part of a project called professional learning and networking for computing plan c where we're providing cpd and networking and support for computing teachers so there's only 650 computing teachers and we're working with over 50 of them already on upscaling and learning new pedagogies for teaching computing we've not had any professional development generally as a nation since the 80s when a lot of teachers were converted over into teaching computing as a nation we're very rare internationally so we're one of the few countries in the world where we ask our computing teachers to have a degree in computing and we've had that for a long time now we're one of the few nations that provides teacher training and train teachers in computing and we're one of the few countries in the world who have a curriculum for computing in primary level and i really hope we don't squander that and what we build on that because we have a lot of countries looking at us in envy at the moment okay thank you to what Kate has made i think that all the learning societies here are doing quite a lot and various initiatives bill spoke about some earlier on to try and recruit young people into STEM subjects but also to recruit teachers into subjects example at the moment the institute of physics for example are in the process of putting together a campaign for physics and suitable undergraduates to enter the teaching profession to try and address the issues of teacher shortage although i'm here today representing the association for science education and the institute of physics i also sit on the STEM education committee that are following on from the the SEAG committee that i mentioned the report earlier the supply of an adequate number of teachers is something that's concerned the STEM we had a meeting last year with john gunston from the the teacher workforce planning of the scottish government and the figures for 2012-2013 showed that the actual target intake for computer science teaching pay gde was 42 but the actual intake that was achieved was only 17 obviously a shortfall of 25 that gives a replenishment rate of about 2.8 per cent so in other words the rate that pgds students were being trained it would take 36 years to replenish the existing workforce which as Kate said i think is insufficient there are schools that don't have a computer science teacher at all and the four subjects with the lowest replenishment rates are computer science, physics, chemistry and business studies and the institute of physics is as i said very concerned that we do not go down the route in scotland that we see for example in england where there are many secondary schools in england without a physics teacher and so far we've been more or less able to avoid that we're not in the situation yet that computer science sees itself but i think that there is definitely a job of work to be done not only by the likes of the learning societies to try and ensure that teaching is seen to be a valuable career that we attract people into it but we are facing a situation where as has been reported various sources that job opportunities are very good in physical sciences, engineering, computing as you've said yourself they're things like the creative gaming industry and so on it's very sexy so these industries are attracting potential very good teachers away from teaching and as a result we're concerned and we would like to gain better evidence on the longer term impact that that's likely to have on the future workforce because if we do lose our talented young people to other industries we lose the capacity to train the future workforce that this country will rely on to ensure that we've got a good science and technology based knowledge economy to ensure that the country is successful in the future. You mentioned replenishment rates in your answer there i know from my own patch there i represent that some physics teachers who wish to retire have actually had to keep on because there was no one to take their place and if they had retired physics wouldn't have been offered in those schools do you have facts and figures on how often that's happening given that you said you don't want to go down the route? Unfortunately we've only got largely anecdotal evidence again that's one of the things that we would like to see independent evidence for i'm sitting here today not teaching my national five higher and two advanced higher physics classes that i some would say ought to be teaching today it is a retired physics teacher who have managed to secure who is covering my classes today that's one anecdote but it's very typical and i'm a little concerned as a retired physics teacher that he might get me in on this yes i know that Ian Gray has said that he's played a small part in the history of physics teaching but i can assure colleagues that my GTC registration has lapsed well thank goodness for small Mercedes Ian Gray can i um unfortunately i think mark's question has been covered by his colleague Ian Gray actually just so he can talk about afterwards but um can i come to you Liam i know you had some questions yeah just moving on to the on to the secondary sector there i mean i think professor bryne you've made very clear the support of the learning societies for the role at the curriculum for excellence i think you were also right to allude to the across party consensus on this but and this committee is familiar with some of the concerns that have been raised about the implementation but i have to say i was struck by the stride and say of some of the concerns that were expressed in the written evidence i think in part of the survey it refers to the implementation being condemned as incoherent amateurish and rushed causing stress amongst teachers and pupils and goes on in terms of the assessment requirements to say that this was poorly explained inadequately implemented nationally and undermining the confidence of both staff and pupils now i just want to perhaps tease out from you whether or not you think that the teaching profession in the STEM subjects has been disproportionately impacted by the rollout of curriculum for excellence and whether that's the impact on presumably moral etc has been more pronounced in these areas than it has been across the board or whether what you're seeing use a reflection of in certain schools and problems have emerged in others less so well i'm probably going to give an unsatisfactory answer because of course i don't know because we haven't looked at teachers in other areas we do have i mean for example the raw society of Edinburgh we've had concerns about things which have been expressed in small groups in history and geography and so on although they're they're not always the same kinds of things so i think there are probably some distinctive things about STEM i want to remind you as i think we we made clear that the data was collected this year sorry last year in 2014 at a time when they were going through the national four national five for the first time sqa was going through national four national five for the first time and so it would be surprising if there weren't things that made people nervous and set them up on edge however i think probably something which has been going on for several years and which i think we're picking up is that it really is important when you're hearing from a number of different sources concerns and sometimes these come from parents we actually do work with with parents organisations as well things coming from parents things coming from teachers that are really not properly dealt with and i think that has been going on and i suppose one of the hopes that we would have is that some attention will be paid to this so that government government agencies and others involved will say well look we are getting some systematic evidence to say that there's a concern about this area what can be done about it it's the feeling i mean i was actually rather flattered but also rather embarrassed when i gave a talk over at dynamic earth and afterwards a teacher stood up and said thank you for taking notice of us and i was embarrassed because i shouldn't be pleased about this i mean it really seems to me that we have to take the concerns of parents and teachers and to do that we need to find the evidence and we have done some rather small on a world scale pieces of inquiry i think that for the reasons that scotland has had a really magnificent name for education what it should be doing is to be really looking at evidence about how things are actually going in classrooms what's going wrong and what's going right and building on that particularly it has the opportunity to do that now with the increased emphasis on continuing professional development but it has to be done systematically i think very very candid i mean i think we're getting back to the issue around the data that's available that i think Ian Gray was touching on earlier but it's suggested in the Royal Society of Chemistry's briefing here that if one looks at the the piece of studies for example that scotland does lag behind a number of international competitors including Singapore, Germany, Poland, Vietnam and Chinese regions of Shanghai and Hong Kong so i mean there is there's some evidence there that i suppose would would justify and on which government and others with a stake in this could found decisions to provide additional support where it needed now you've just talked about the need for i suppose a better communication between teachers and those with responsibility over over school management and these sorts of issues others have suggested that in areas where there are particular problems whether in terms of computing science or physics that those are deemed sufficiently important that they get kind of key worker status and there's an additional supplement to try and retain people within the sector or recruit against it's a competition from the creative gaming sector or wherever it is i mean if you got any senses to the sorts of things that might address some of those problems that have been flagged up in in this report and might help address the some of the the concerns coming out of the pieces of findings well i think first of all i think you have to be careful about interpreting international attainment data there have been lots of reasons over the years why scotland has come out better than perhaps it should or worse than perhaps it should so i think one has to look at that very carefully and not wildly wildly use that data personally i think the way in which we have to look forward is to say i think we'd probably all agree that we're moving into a new world in all sorts of ways that we have a radical set of reforms that we've introduced and that which we're very pleased that people around the world accept that these are radical reforms and that we may be leading the way but we have to look at what the implications of these reforms are and we have to see it as a radical new approach to what happens in school i mean if i might give it the example in the curriculum for excellence of the notion of focusing not just on effective learning but also on responsible citizenship also young people having confidence developing confidence and being able to effectively contribute to society and then having no idea whether we're actually including that in the assessment i mean the sqa will say oh yes well you know we include these sorts of things but we don't actually know we haven't had a study which says you know these things are included we have to accept that this will take a few years i mean it really isn't that we're comparing this year with last year we have to say yes but next year coming through we may have quite a different approach given that we've had the experience when we look at what happens next year next year may may have very different things but you can't just let it go on you know without examining what impact it's had and without saying and what does that tell us about what we've got got to do for the future given that we have some very good aims and goals so would would it be fair to say that a successful outcome from your perspective from the work that's been done would be a commitment from um Scottish Government to developing the the the sort of the longitudinal studies of whatever it is a mapping exercise that gives us a clear understanding of what is happening going forward well that would be that would be a very important matter i mean there would of course be arguments and stated positions about what is the priority i mean it's a it's looking at priorities but what i would say is that if i would put one criticism in it's been that we have to been too busy to assert the successes that we've had in these reforms and when you look for the evidence for that we don't know where it is okay i want to ask some questions about the would report on the commission for developing Scotland's young workforce in the report it was said in a quote tangible steps to improving the popularity of STEM education are only achieving limited success and then it goes on the Scottish government's response has been that employers in schools need to develop strong two-way partnerships partnerships that deliver improvements to teaching and learning and bring real-life context into the classroom particularly in relation to science technology engineering and mathematics i was wondering therefore if you believe that this would bring an improvement into the funding for teaching and any tangible results that you see coming forward from in what the government's response has been to the commission well i'm not sure that i can answer the last of those but um i mean it seems to me that what we're what we're at one with wood is that we are looking for ways um i mean for example in relation to partnerships it's a very loosely used word very often um we will i mean we have ourselves been involved in partnerships where it's turned out that they have not been partnerships at all but it's simply been an opportunity for other people to say our partners the royal societies or whatever it is support us in something that we actually haven't been given any information about so while in principle i think conceptually that partnerships are of course always necessary you have to be clear about what that means i mean we did in fact have a meeting with education scotland not so long ago where they listed their partnerships which went on and on and on and we said had they evaluated which of these they should be pursuing and we found that actually they hadn't and they said to us quite rightly well we're not a research or evaluation organisation and indeed that's quite right but the trouble is how do you decide what is going to constitute a partnership and how do you not only get people to take responsibility on both sides partnerships are not takeovers and how do you maintain accountability for that so i would say that in that i mean others may want to put their their bit in here but if we're going to talk about partnerships we have to be clear what the responsibility is and how accountability is going to be implied it worked out is there any the rest of you would like to say for in terms of computing i think there's certainly a need for more varied opportunities for young people what we're not what we don't want to do is necessarily just focus on training a generation of software engineers and i think that there needs to be far more varied opportunities whether it's going through fe college or going direct on to training schemes or working with employers and so that's certainly one thing we'd like and we've done a little bit we started doing a little bit of research into what non-it industry employers would require of their employees and a lot of what they're coming out from our initial research a lot of what they're coming up with is actually core computational thinking skills of being able to see a bigger picture of being able to break a problem down being able to model a solution for the problems that they're seeing so what we'd like to be doing is working with Education Scotland and in fact we are in discussions with them as to updating our curriculum terms of computing for broad general education so three to fifteen and updating that to include more computational thinking and going beyond just looking at computer games as a context which is currently what we have in the curriculum at the moment. Okay, Dr Beverage. Yes, I can say that from our perspective we certainly think there's great value to be had from industry becoming involved and a huge contribution that industry has to make in promoting STEM subjects and working with schools and this programme I mentioned earlier chemistry at work is one that we fund which we found to be very very effective in allowing people from industry to come in and share the excitement of their subject and their experience with school peoples directly and that is something very worthwhile. Yes, I think much is done already in this area. I think it's very clear from the Wood report recommendation 12 I think states very clearly that STEM should be at the centre of the education of future young people. I very much agree with Sally's comments that this has to be done in a structured way in partnership with other organisations. I think much of what is done at the moment is done on a relatively ad hoc basis and as a result there is perhaps less value obtained from many of these partnership arrangements than could be the case if this was done in a more structured framework where there was again follow-up with independent analysis of that and feedback and evaluation. I think that industry organisations like the learning societies have definitely got a part to play in this but it's got to be done in a structured framework that maximises the benefit for all partners in the organisations. I really wanted to say was that already in existence there is the STEM ambassador scheme which you may well be aware of which is where representatives from higher education, from research but also from industry will come into schools and will work alongside children in schools and that is a tremendous way to raise the profile and raise awareness of working in science and that's something to be applauded. You were mentioning about funding and I think we've got to be a wee bit careful there because reiterating what Kate was saying about the difference between training for work and what education is about we've got to remember that there are different agendas. Yes part of what we're doing from an education point of view is preparing for work but it's also the wider agenda as well of preparing for life in society and the funding side of it could hold us possibly to ransom if we're not careful. Just on that then, obviously given the report that you've given us and the challenges that you foresee in the education system as it is, do you think the recommendation in the report you could implement just now given the challenges you already face? I wouldn't like directly to comment on that but I'm not sure. It depends on what you mean by just now. It's Monday afternoon, no, no, no. But over a few years, you can make a lot of difference over a few years. You have the resources to do what I'm getting at the minute given that you've given us a challenge in paper. You're setting out all the things that you think you require more support from. You've now been given another challenge by the wood report, the Scottish Government is endorsing it. Do you know what others are signed up to it? Can you implement it with the resources that you have? You're the Government. No, I'm not. So if I want to go back to the Government and say, I should say, what? Well, we're not trying here to say that one specific thing is much more important than others or less important. What we're trying here is to in a sense help you by trying to lay out some of the landscape. Of course, one can never do everything that you want to immediately. One has to have priorities and you have to go public with the priorities and listen to the debate about it, of course. I don't think that I personally, and it's not something that we've tried to come to an agreement in our group. If I could just say that the main reason that our group came into existence was that the individual learned societies in the different sciences, and we include engineering, of course, although we haven't got anybody from engineering today, they'd found that their societies were not perhaps having the impact on public policy that they would like to have. And they thought that if we could get together, and we've done that with this learned societies group, there were some general things that we might want to collaborate on, and perhaps to have a slightly louder voice because we were all here. But I wouldn't want to, I mean, I would put a lot of support on the primary sector. I think that the support that the primary sector has had in the past, that the priorities that have been put on it, haven't been enough. I mean, one of the things that we have tried to do—I'm not sure whether we said this in the paper—is that we have tried to persuade the general teaching council that people going into primary education should have much better qualifications in science than they currently have. Whether we will succeed on that, of course, I don't know. That's one of the things that I would think was important, and putting that together with the kind of campaign that the Royal Society of Chemistry has at the moment is a very important thing. I think that Kate has told us of the instancy of the need and the needs to promote changes in computing studies, but I'm not in a position to give you a list of—this is what I would be putting forward as the first thing for this country to take. I would simply say that these must be on the agenda somewhere. Thank you. Gordon MacDonald. You've just turned the conversation to primary sector, and that's exactly what I want to ask you about. I was a bit concerned when I read the report about a couple of issues that you've highlighted within the report. The first one was under funding for science, and it was paragraph 7. You stated that, among those Scottish primary schools surveyed, a number indicated that per capita science spend in 2013-14 was nil. Can you tell us how many that number was? For clarity, are you able to name the schools, or if you don't want to name the schools, are you able to identify whether that was widespread, depending on the number involved, or was it relating to one local authority area, or what was the situation? The number was very small. No, we're not in a position to identify the schools. You mean very small, db in one or two? Yes, one or two, yes. Obviously, the majority of schools were having some spending on science. As you can see, the average figure, and indeed the maximum figure, is still very small. The numbers that identified that they weren't spending anything was a very small number. When you say that they weren't spending anything, was that because they couldn't identify how much of their budget they were spending on science, or was it that they weren't teaching science at all? Our survey didn't have a question that could identify whether it was because they weren't teaching science or because they hadn't identified any spending for it in that financial year. Either reason could be possible. So they could actually be teaching science, but if they're going to Dynamic Earth or the Glasgow Science Museum, they're registering those trips rather than science? Perhaps, again, we don't have evidence for that. Again, it's the sort of thing that we would like to see more independent evidence and information gathered, but our survey wasn't able to identify that level of detail. Right. The second concern for me was... I have to say this. It jumped out at me as well. Do you think that it's likely that any primary school in Scotland isn't teaching any science at all? Sorry. I think that we've got to be very careful with this one, because we haven't got any independent evidence either way. However, anecdotally, I see students in primary schools as part of my job. It seems to be some sort of lottery as to whether or not the amount of science that's being done, depending upon the expertise within the school, so I think that's something that we do need to have some more information about. I would accept that. I think that the question... I'm sure that this is the reason Gordon's asked it, but also the reason that jumped out at me was that it says that a number, which turns out it's one or two, but a number, the spend was nil, which seemed to me more likely to be an anomaly in the survey than an actual fact. There are primary schools in Scotland where no science at all has been taught. It may just be that it's identified as a budget spend. I think that there are degrees of what different people would identify as science. For instance, one of the concerns, and again, part of the reason I think why the Ross Society of Chemistry is supporting the campaign for science specialists is to ensure that the quality of science experience in our primary schools is a good one. Again, we don't have detailed evidence within this group, but anecdotally, you could identify that in some schools, for instance, a teacher might be doing a science topic about the solar system in the universe, and the activity would be out of paper mache around balloons creating models of the different planets in the solar system. That could be a very basic activity, which is essentially just a craft art activity, where you paint balloons different colours to represent the different planets, without there being any of the deeper activities going on where work is done on the scale of the universe, where the mathematics behind the relative sizes and distances are explored, or that there is what I would recognise as scientific activity going on with that activity. However, that could still be interpreted and identified within a teacher's work plan as a science-based activity. It is very difficult without doing some good-quality research and identifying in a bit more detail what the specifics of the activities are to identify the quality of the science activity going on in many of our schools. As I was going on to say about, my second concern was paragraph 12 of your report, which looks at classroom facilities, health and safety and outdoor space. It says that 45 per cent of primary schools report having no access to safety equipment. There are obviously health and safety regulations that take place. Are we saying that schools are teaching science and ignoring health and safety and therefore putting pupils in danger, or are we saying that there is no practical science lessons taking place? What is it? That is quite a substantial number, albeit that it is a small sample size of 2 per cent. Personally, of all the outcomes from the survey work that we did, I think that largely most of the outcomes that were reported were broadly in line with my own personal expectations. That was the one that I did not expect. Personally, I am quite alarmed by the fact that so many primary teachers seem to be quite forthcoming to admit the fact that they did not have adequate health and safety or access to that. That is certainly an issue that I think ought to be followed up with more investigative work. Again, the survey did not go into sufficient details to indicate that, as a result of not having any access, they were not doing anything or they were just doing things without access to the appropriate health and safety advice. That is quite a serious accusation. There is the potential there for pupils to be put at risk. If what you are saying is of that 39 schools that you surveyed, roughly 17 or 18 of them, roughly 45 per cent, have genuine concerns, I think that there is a duty on you to inform us in writing of those schools because we would then have to address local authorities. We cannot have a situation where you are highlighting to us that there are serious concerns that schools do not have access to safety equipment and we sit here as a committee and do nothing about it. We are reporting what has been reported asked by teachers and yes, it is something that— We assure them of anonymity. Surely when health— You are claiming that there is— No, we are not claiming, the teachers are claiming— Right, okay, but your report is claiming that there is a 45 per cent of primary schools, albeit a very small sample size, have no access to safety equipment. That is a very— I think I still have to challenge you on who is claiming what because we have no validity established about this. All we are saying is that 45 per cent of the responses from primary schools said that, but we have assured them that they will remain anonymous. I think as well, I have got to remember that the teachers are only answering the question that was put to them and the question that was put to them is, do you have— I mean, I would have to check with the exact wording of the question, but basically they were being asked, do you have specific science safety equipment? You can do lots of wonderful hands-on science in a primary school without requiring some safety equipment, so in no way would a teacher who had answered this necessarily be admitting that in any way they had put any pupil at risk whatsoever. Given what you said earlier on that there are so few teachers in primary school that have a science background, how would they be in a position to know whether they had the correct science equipment in place for health and safety reasons if they have got no background in science? Well, I regret that our research was not so sophisticated that we have an answer to that. I think if we dig deeper into what it's actually stating in this bullet point, the examples that are given are tongs, heat mats, goggles and sand trays. Of those, sand trays are the ones that I would expect to see in a primary school. I wouldn't necessarily expect to see tongs, heat mats and goggles, merely because the practicals that they would be doing wouldn't necessarily imply that they would use them anyway. I think that what's coming out here is perhaps a misunderstanding on the type of practicals that these teachers would be using and don't necessarily assume that they're actually doing them. That's giving us a slightly different story, I think. Okay, thanks so much. Just to confirm then, of course, we're not saying that the primary schools are necessarily inhibited from carrying out the lessons that we want them to do because of a lack of safety equipment. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily expect them to have tongs, heat mats and goggles. No, now that we're dying. Yeah, so therefore that they can still carry out, like you're saying, they can still carry out a range of wonderful experiments. In fact, I would advocate that they would do rather than try to go down this route. Is it tongs? No, indeed it's what it is. But we don't know now. Now, is it possible, then, that this was perhaps a misunderstanding by the respondents? It could cost me, but we don't. I'm not saying that it is, I'm just wondering. Yeah. Right, okay. Sorry, I know Liam McArthur wanted to supplementary. Thank you, Bruce and Gordon. Perhaps just touching and listening to the exchanges there, both about the safety equipment, but also about the explanation of how you could have a project involving the solar system that could be at the one end simply an arts and crafts exercise at the other end, one with some level of scientific input. It seems to underscore the importance of having at least somebody within the school who can give you the scientific or give other colleagues the confidence that there is a scientific input in there. And that would see me do the conclusion I would draw from both those paragraphs. I think that's reinforcing what Professor Brown said earlier on about raising the entry level to teacher education for primary potential teachers. Is it realistic to do this across the board? I mean, I've had conversation with some colleagues about this in the past. I mean, obviously, the constituency I represent in Orkney has a number of very, very small primary schools. And in the sense, probably, what you're looking at there is somebody who perhaps has a role that spans primary schools. Yes. This is one area where there's complete agreement across the board, because the evidence is very, very strong, both from Education Scotland 3 to 18 report from our PI Tate survey, that a prime issue is the access to somebody in a school or access to someone in a neighbouring school. That's a very important point who has the confidence to be able to address science teaching and advise others on science teaching in primaries. You're quite right. Scotland has almost 11,000 schools that have a school role of less than 50. So in our campaign, what we're advocating is that there should be science subject leaders, people who are confident in science. And for that, we're looking at someone who might have a science degree background, but actually all we're recommending when they're on the site of chemistry is a science hire or equivalent training that they've picked up during initial teacher training education or experience from an extensive career to be able to advise others in their own school or in more rural areas where we have small schools, would be on hand to be able to advise people in neighbouring schools on science issues. But again, we presumably need to know where we are at the current time, and as I understand it, the statistics around what that profile is across the current teacher population is not necessarily that revised. No, we've tried hard to try and assess how many teachers might already have a science hire or how many teachers are entering the profession with these qualifications, but these are statistics we haven't been able to obtain. And these are something very, very much we would welcome, any kind of initiative to try and pin down harder figures on. I just want to check something, I may have misheard it, but Dr Burbych, did you see that there are 11,000 schools in Scotland with a roll of less than 50? Close to 11,000. Is that right? Oh, 1100 maybe? Oh, it could be 1100. I would check your maths, Dr Burbych. And numeracy is important as well, I think. Yeah, we'll double check that. It didn't sound right, sorry, Professor Brun. Well, I just wanted to make the point that, you know, when you're talking about something like this and how we might be able to get the science expertise that we need into schools, it's just to remind you of the foreign languages developments in the 90s, when we had a number of different kinds of models that you could use, some of which involved developing the modern language skills of primary teachers or of some primary teachers or bringing secondary teachers in. It seems to me that that's the sort of thing that we might be looking for, just exploring what different models could provide in relation to science in primary schools. I agree, but I'm wondering whether what your view is then, because the Government, I mean, I'm looking at a report that was in The Herald about this issue that we're discussing today on your report. The Government's quoted there, and it's something that came up in the debate last week that Ian Gray had on the subject. I'll quote you from the Government's spokesman that says, we provide direct funding of £900,000 per annum to the Scottish Schools Education Research Centre. No, the purpose of that is to actually try and support teachers and increase their confidence levels in the various areas, I think, in science areas that you've been talking about. And also, they go on to talk about the Education Scotland's developing a national STEM project, and that will be, I think, it's been piloted, and then the intention is to roll that out. Isn't that what you're just calling for? Is it actually beginning to happen? Let me say that in relation to CERC, which was the first point that you made, CERC is a very effective organisation, and it's been around for some time. And one of the really good functions that it fulfills is it has an independent evaluation, which shows how good its work is. It does suffer in the sense that it can't expand enough. I mean, that's just a resources question. But I would say that that is a model that has shown itself to be very good indeed, and it would be great if it could be extended across the whole country more effectively. As I understand it, that £900,000 CERC project that we're talking about operates in about half of the authorities. Yes. About 16 authorities. I think it's 15 of the 30 authorities. However, I would qualify that slightly by the fact that within each local authority that may just be one cluster of primary schools, so it may be a very small fraction of the primary schools in a particular authority. So there are issues of scale involved in the project. The second point that you made about Education Scotland, well, actually I don't know anything about that particular development, at least not in enough detail to really comment on it. I don't know whether anybody else knows enough about it. It's currently operating in four local authorities, and the intention is once it's, I'm using the word pilot, they don't say pilot, but I assume that's what's going on, will then to then roll out further across the country. Well, if it does the job. I was asking you, but obviously you maybe don't have enough detail at this stage. I'm aware that it's taken place and that which four local authorities that's involved with, but again, I don't think we've got any evidence of that. Okay, thank you very much. I've just got some brief questions. Given that mathematical skills have been highlighted in the last exchange, we're not going to let you forget that one. We've not actually said much about maths today. I'm not sure who's speaking up for maths. I think Kate did very well in terms of computing. But would you say that the teaching of mathematics is a priority in schools, and I did highlight that there's been increased presentations for higher and advanced higher? In the grand scheme of things, is that a priority? Yes. Would you be concerned, as I am, then, that although there's been a fall in the number of teachers for various disciplines in science, the highest fall that I have in front of me today, which may not be totally complete, but the most significant fall in teachers is mathematics. Between 2009 and 2014, we have 314 fewer maths teachers, so that hasn't been covered today. Should that be a priority? Why is it happening and does it give you cause for concern? Well, this is an off-the-cuff answer to you, because we actually don't have mathematics in our group of learning societies, but we are. Maybe that's something that needs to be corrected. Well, maybe it is. We have to take that back. But am I personally concerned? Yes, I am. I don't know if maths is worse than computing in terms of the loss, proportionately. I was just going to pick up on what was being said about the importance and significance of maths. Yes, there is concern right there across the board. Remember STEM, science, technology, engineering, maths, is part of the whole STEM agenda, but it's the application of maths. It's the interdisciplinary side of it all, where it all does interweave. I think that's what we need to remember. Although we don't have a representative within the learning societies groups from a maths organisation, it is applied throughout all the subject areas that we look at. It's not just a case of teaching the subjects, it's looking at how it is used within the various disciplines as well. Thank you for putting that on the record. My second point is, to what extent do schools—we've been talking about partnerships this morning— schools of links with universities, colleges, industry? We've talked about Gordon MacDonald talking about the shortage of equipment, etc. Are there partnerships to utilise the science and teaching equipment? For example, do businesses and universities donate science equipment to schools? Is that a partnership worth developing further in order to look at better utilisation of the equipment that is out there? If you look, University of Scotland has published some things on that. There is a really quite extensive, although not systematic, pattern of partnerships. If I could take an example, Harriet Watt University had, for many years, had very close partnerships with schools in engineering and physical science and mathematics and so on. There are certainly cases where I'm not sure whether equipment is given, but equipment is often lent and young people in schools go into universities sometimes to use their facilities. Of course, you're likely to benefit much more if you're a school in the central region than you are if you're out in some rural place, but UHI has also done this with its college structure around the more rural parts of the country. One of the big questions is how you can extend this to all of the schools, either by getting young people travelling in to other institutions or what happens probably more often, people from the higher education institutions travelling out. That follows on to the point that I made earlier about a lot of the partnership initiatives that are ad hoc in nature. I think that, as a nation, we ought to look at being more clever in terms of how we develop partnerships and particularly for the benefit of all. We should be looking to have some provision that, in outlying rural areas, our young people have the same opportunities as those who live down the road from a higher education institute. It's looking at it in a systematic system-wide way. I'm pleased to hear that, given that I have an MSP for the Highlands and Islands. My final question, which has not been covered today, is about spending. You have also mentioned the autonomy of local authorities. In your brief page 2, you say that, in primary schools, the per capita spend is around £162 in Scotland and £289 in England. For secondary schools in 2013-14, you've got £7.33 for Scotland and the figure for England is two years earlier, but it's still greater. It's still £3 more. Is the spending per pupil the main issue or the outcomes in England so much better? What is the result of this higher spending per capita? Is that the main issue that we're looking at today? It doesn't always have to be, sadly. I can see it all. She's worked very hard this morning. Every someone else could give her a break. I think, again, that there are issues that we don't have much direct evidence of that, as we've already mentioned. You have quoted these figures. These are your figures. Oh, yes. We've got the evidence for the figures. Part of the reason why the Learning Society's group wanted to conduct this research into resourcing was because the equivalent group that was based down in London, SCORE, the science community representing education, had conducted this other survey in England. The Learning Society's headquarters down in the London area saw fit to support the Learning Society's group to conduct a similar survey for Scotland, because we were interested in finding the comparison. Again, we've conducted that study. We're presenting the outcomes. Obviously, the engagement of Scotland in international studies is one of the main ways in which comparisons between different countries are made. As has already been mentioned, there was a withdrawal from TIMS, which was the main study looking at upper primary, lower secondary comparisons between Scotland and England. We basically do not have any independent evidence on which to make a comparison. So, although you've got the figure, you haven't got the result of that figure in terms of passes or employability. Historically, one of the differences between England and Scotland was that, since the introduction of the national curriculum in England in the late 1980s, science along with mathematics in English were one of the three core subjects. That has given greater status and prominence to science within the curriculum in England than it has enjoyed in Scotland. I think that there are some unintended consequences that have occurred over the past couple of decades or so that, in England, science has enjoyed greater status within their curriculum than it has in Scotland. OK. Thank you very much. I'll be pleased to have one final question. It's been very good reviews. We haven't gone on longer than I anticipated, but I'm sure that that's a good thing. You mentioned earlier on, Professor Brown, about obviously one of the underlying themes here is about building a better evidence base, reviewing what's going on. Are you aware that the OECD is reviewing curriculum for excellence this year? Yes. Indeed, we are. If you're aware, are you involved in that in any way? Are you reassured by that review in any way? Well, it is a review. It isn't an evaluation. It's the first thing. Yes, we are described by the Government as a partner in that. Although that hasn't worked out terribly well so far, but they are coming twice. They're coming in February, and I'm now talking actually, I've realised, not from the Learned Societies group. I'm talking from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but we are expecting that the Learned Societies group will have an input to this, but the real collection of evidence will come in June, and then I just forget when the publication of the report is, but my guess is the end of this current year. The way in which this is organised is that there is a very ambitious background paper which is being put together by the Scottish Government, and we have had the chance to comment on an early draft of that, which we have done. We don't know what impact we'll have on that, but we will find out by the time we meet the OECD next month. If you ask us in a couple of months' time, we might have more to say, but we really have to wait to the end of the year before we know. Thank you very much. I thank all of you for coming along this morning. It's been almost an hour and three quarters, so that was a decent crack at it. Thank you very much for indulging us this morning and bringing not only your written evidence but also yourself along to give us oral evidence here today. We very much appreciate your time and effort today, so thank you very much. We previously agreed to take our next item in private, so I therefore close the meeting to the public.