 Good morning and a very warm welcome to the 19th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2019. I remind everyone to present, to turn their mobile phones and other devices to silent for the duration of the meeting. I declare a public interest declaration of interest in that I am the vice chair of CERC and also a member of the British Computer Society. I welcome the panel this morning. My apologies. Agenda item 1 is a decision in taking business in private. That is a discussion of the evidence that we will hear today. Members can take that in private. Agenda item 2, can we take evidence on the inquiry in private and future meetings? Agenda item 2 is a statement in early years inquiry. I would like to welcome to committee this morning Susan Boyd, primary teacher, Elizabeth Kelly, principal teacher, Andrew Bruce, deputy director of the learning directorate of the Scottish Government, Ian Menzies, senior education officer of sciences learning education Scotland and Edwin Woodham, STEM learning manager of Glasgow Science Centre. I am very warm welcome to you all this morning. I would like to open by just asking you to give a brief outline of your experience in this area and if you feel it would be really good to have a good example of STEM innovation. Perhaps Elizabeth, would you be willing to start with that? Sure. My name is Elizabeth Kelly. I am a principal teacher for early years in Midlothian Council. My job role is primarily to support challenge and help improve all our ELCs, our early learning and childcare centres, in Midlothian Council, state run and also our funded providers. That is my job role. My interest in STEM is because I am interested in all early years and we have a very holistic approach to the curriculum in early years. Personally, I am studying for my masters at Edinburgh in learning for sustainability. STEM in early years, there is a massive opportunity to really engage the children when they are young in STEM because they are already totally interested in their world and how it works and why things work and all that kind of thing. It is helping our staff to be able to capture that, to understand it so that they can scaffold the learning and progress that in those early years. Thank you. Ms Boyd. Hello. I am Susan Boyd and I am currently a primary teacher at the Bedelban Academy in Aberfeldy. I have over 40 years experience of working with children and was formerly a principal teacher of early years in Highland. I have studied science at Sinander's University and I got into primary teaching specifically to promote science and greater and quality experiences within early years and primary. I am really pleased to be able to report. I have seen a lot of wonderful practice, particularly in the early years. When I was in Highland, I had the opportunity to support a small cluster of nurseries. There were 33 principal teachers. It was a new programme that Highland rolled out and had for five years until, sadly, budgetary cuts changed that perspective. In those five years, we did what I considered to be absolutely essential support of early years practitioners who are not qualified teachers and have very variable experiences in science, technology, engineering and maths. I had the real fortune to work with a range of practitioners to develop the Highland science programme, which is now available on-glo and is a really big tool in supporting from early years through to second level. My current work over the last four years with the Bedalban Academy has involved us in trying to develop a STEM hub within our community school. That has been particularly successful. We were finalists in the Education Scotland STEM awards last year and we are promoting the development of STEM through STEM ambassadors from the secondary, through STEM prefects in the primary and through developing practitioner knowledge from early years right through the primary into secondary by having STEM drop-ins. Thank you very much, Dr Wood. Good morning. My name is Dr Emma Woodham. I am the STEM learning manager at Glasgow Science Centre. My role involves managing our multifaceted learning team. We are really passionate at Glasgow Science Centre that learning is for all. We want to inspire and challenge everybody to discover the world around them and the relevance of science in their own lives. Previous to this, I was a research scientist and today I would like to highlight our experience at Glasgow Science Centre in providing training for teachers in our inspiring challenge philosophy, which encourages teachers to become facilitators and to develop the natural curiosity inside their pupils to build pupils as scientists rather than vessels of knowledge. We are really passionate about equity of access at Glasgow Science Centre. I can also highlight a number of initiatives that we have been using to ensure that we reach far and wide throughout Scotland, everywhere from Orkney down to Dumfries and Galloway, to ensure that we are reaching those most in need, including our local areas that are experiencing the highest levels of deprivation. Thank you, Mr Menzies. Good morning. My name is Ian Menzies. I am a senior education officer at Education Scotland. I lead on the sciences curriculum and on learning for sustainability. I am also responsible for the implementation of the STEM strategy at Education Scotland. I was on the Scottish Government working group that developed a STEM strategy and oversew the new STEM team at Education Scotland. One of the biggest pieces of work that we have done over recent years is raising aspirations in science education programme. This was a three-year pilot with the Wood Foundation, with the Scottish Government and with participating local authorities. We have been working with local authorities up to now, and we have extended that programme to a further four. We just received a final evaluation last week, which was extremely positive. It showed that the programme had helped to increase the confidence of teachers. 71 per cent of teachers said that they reported an increase in their confidence in relation to the pedagogy around STEM. 76 per cent also said that their confidence had increased in relation to the content of science and delivering the content of science. It was all of that positive evaluation last week. The programme is now to be offered to all local authorities around Scotland on a rolling basis. Another big piece of work that we have been involved in is the improving gender balance and the qualities programme that I also oversee. This was a pilot programme that started with Institute of Physics in Skills Development Scotland three years ago. We are really trying to tackle the ingrained gender imbalance within STEM subjects at school. Again, that has been really positively evaluated and we are just in the process of extending that to schools and clusters around Scotland with the support of a new team. Good morning. My name is Andy Bruce. I am a civil servant in the Learning Directorate at the Scottish Government. The division I lead was responsible for both developing the original strategy and now for overseeing its delivery. It is really great to hear about the practice that we are hearing from colleagues on the table about what is happening out in schools and learning centres just now. I suppose that the things that I will focus on from the Government point of view are the arrangements that we have put in place to support the strategy at a national level. Along with putting the various governance arrangements in place to oversee delivery, I suppose that a key thing that I will identify is the introduction of the new STEM bursaries to support career changes into teaching profession in those particular subjects where there are particular shortages. Last year, we had 107 of those bursaries and the scheme will open again for the forthcoming year shortly. Thank you very much. It is quite a big panel this morning, so if you do want to respond to any of the questions of the committee, please just indicate to myself or the clerks, and I will try and ensure that everybody gets an opportunity. On that note, I am going to move to your first question from Les Smith. Thank you, convener. Mr Menzies, I wonder if I could ask you about the overall strategy towards the STEM subjects from Education Scotland. You have pinpointed some areas of what you consider to be good work that is being undertaken. Could you just outline a little bit more about what you see as the key points within that strategy to try to address some of the concerns that obviously we have been presented with through our evidence? Sure. I think that one of the big features within the STEM strategy is teacher confidence. I have referred to that from some of our other panel already. Education Scotland is playing a leading role in terms of professional learning and building that teacher confidence in the system. One of the things that we have just published last week is that we have undertaken a practitioner survey and also a provider survey, looking at the provision of STEM professional learning around Scotland. What that shows is that 43 per cent of the respondents from early learning and childcare agree or strongly agree that they are confident in delivering STEM. That compares with 63 per cent of primary respondents. We know that we have a big piece of work to do to build on those confidence levels. I mentioned earlier on that the race programme has been a big part of our work over the past three years to do that. We are really excited to be in a position to extend that programme to authorities around Scotland in partnership with the Wood Foundation. We are really grateful to the Wood Foundation for the financial support that they have given to that programme over £1 million to date. Another big piece of work that we have been doing is that we launched a new grants programme last October. We issued £187,000 to 24 organisations around Scotland. The real focus of that grant programme was to extend provision to practitioners around Scotland to ensure equity of access and to develop new models, new approaches and to find ways that we can scale up existing provision that should prove successful. It was a big week for us last week in Education Scotland because we also launched a second round of that grants programme. We now have a budget of £1.3 million, which is really exciting. Our new STEM team is busy working with local authorities just now around Scotland. I am with school clusters to encourage them to bid for that money. That money is for the STEM strategy, but it is also for making maths count because we realise that mathematics and numeracy are a big core part of STEM, so we are really keen to have a focus on maths and numeracy in that. We know particularly that we have good work to do in terms of building confidence in technologies and engineering, and we have identified them as priority areas for the grants this year. In addition to that £1.3 million that we announced last week, we are also starting this week to distribute a further £500,000 worth of funding to those organisations that bid for the funding last year. The whole idea is that year on year we want a growth in the provision of professional learning within the STEM strategy. For instance, the 24 organisations that received funding last year, most of those organisations are going to continue to extend and develop that support into this year, and our £500,000 is to support that work. I am sure that all of that is immensely encouraging. Can I just draw your attention to some of the comments that have been made by STEM professionals here? We have had Elizabeth Kelly, Juliet Robertson and Dr Cursey Ross who have made the point that they feel that there is quite a lot of practitioners who have a poor understanding of certain concepts. They also feel that, in Dr Cursey Ross's case, they feel that actually sometimes when they have that poor understanding they are not aware of that. What conversations are you having with the General Teaching Council of Scotland and also with the university training schools? It seems to me that some of those are issues about teacher training. Obviously, there are opportunities within teacher training to promote that confidence. For us, it is that whole journey of a professional. From the moment that they qualify as a teacher, providing probationer support, and that is something that race officers have been doing, very practically within local authorities, and also those early career teachers building that confidence from the word go. We are recognising, too, that there have been people who have been teaching for a number of years and still need that type of support. Race officers have been embedded within local authorities, working through all those different processes and opportunities, providing that support. Sometimes that support is delivered through separate training sessions, but we know sometimes that there are challenges around teachers being released from the classroom, so race officers are actually being grown into classrooms, doing team teaching alongside those officers. On that theme, could you ask whether there are specific issues that are being raised by teacher training colleges and by the GTCS? Is it a problem about the knowledge that is being taught within those courses, or is it more about having the confidence and the actual skills of teaching? What do you feel is being flagged up as the main area of concern? The issue is really just about the background in science and the experience of science as people go into teacher training. There is a big job to be done. I think that Initial Teacher Education has got an opportunity to address that, but it has a very limited time for those students, if you like. I think that a big part of the challenge is to build on that. To give you an example from our grants programme, one of the grantees from last year, from the first line of funds, was in New College Lanarkshire. They realised that the early learning and childcare practitioners that they were training had a lack of confidence within STEM. Through the funding that they have received from us, what they have done is to develop a new STEM module, which is being provided to those early learning and childcare practitioners as part of their training programme to build their confidence. I think that the college actually realised that they have a big engineering provision within the college, an early years provision, and they are trying to join that up much more effectively across the college. Those early years practitioners, through the course of this year, will be taking that learning and STEM into the establishments that they are going to visit in terms of their placements. That is one of the things that we are doing to the grants programme to try to give that early career support in place to build that confidence and to actually really take that into the system. I have just got one final question. Kelly wants to come in on that. I apologise. Only to say that most of the practitioners that we work with in that early learning and childcare do not go through the initial teacher education programme. They are coming from many other avenues because they are not teachers. There are very few authorities left that have actual teachers within early learning and childcare, they are awesome, but there are a majority of authorities now where the staff, and even with teachers in them, the majority of the staff in those settings are early learning practitioners and they come through HNCs, HNDs, BHL to practice if they are at graduate level. Some of them have SVQ3s. Within all that structure there is a very wide range of courses that are presented. Most from the research I have done, but it has been anecdotal on asking people, they have very limited STEM input into those courses. My last question was to Susan Boyd, if I may. We had a comment a couple of years ago, but more recently from the Royal Society of Chemistry, that they would like to see a dedicated science professional in every primary school. Would you care to comment on that view? I think that that would be lovely, and I personally would totally welcome that. I think that what we really need is that I am really happy to hear about all the development work, particularly the development work for early years practitioners who can actually come into the job with actually no qualification as such and are doing SVQs on the hop. My experience in Highland—I know that I am deviating slightly from what you have asked me about, but it does relate, hopefully—is that those people are supported by principal teachers and those were people who had a depth and breadth of knowledge of the curriculum and approaches to learning and teaching right through early level into primary. That is actually the only way forward from my perspective. It worked, it was successful, and I think that in a primary context I am very fortunate to work in a community school because I have access to secondary science, technology and engineering maths specialists, and that is invaluable. I think that small primary schools should have access to a STEM practitioner that has the relevant qualifications and experience to support practice. That was the hugely valuable thing that I was involved in in Highland was that we could deliver STEM training centrally in Inverness or in Sky for Sky in Lechabour, but the most important fact was that we were then able to go into those early years centres and schools and back that up with resources, with team teaching and to support practitioners who were either teachers or, most usually, early years practitioners. I would like to come back. Ian mentioned some of the survey results about the confidence of practitioners. Roughly 43 per cent of early years practitioners have level confidence, roughly 63 per cent of primary teachers in STEM. Some of the written submissions that we received on that were quite interesting. They made the point that STEM in and of itself is quite a broad area. You would expect a substantial majority of primary teachers to have a level of confidence in their ability to teach maths and numeracy, but in something like engineering it is quite different. Does Education Scotland or perhaps the Government have any stats that break that down beyond STEM into individual subjects at primary teaching level? We do, and that has been one of the reasons why we have taken forward that piece of work around the annual STEM practitioner survey and the provider survey. We just published those results last week on our national improvement hub. To give you the figures in terms of early learning and childcare, what early learning and childcare practitioners have told us is that one of their top priorities continues to be mathematics and numeracy. 33.8 per cent of them said that that was one of their priority areas. You can compare that with 20 per cent. They said that science was their priority for this coming year and 20 per cent for technologies. For primary, it is slightly different. 34 per cent said that their priority was mathematics and numeracy. They were a bit more confident in science. 23, 24 per cent said that that was a priority area, but technologies were 28 per cent. Again, our experience in the results from the surveys, but also from inspection, shows us quite clearly that the technology side is an area that needs more support, especially engineering, but we still have a lot to do in terms of mathematics and numeracy. That is why, with the grants programme that we just launched, the second round that we launched last week, there continues to be an extremely strong focus on mathematics and numeracy. I am interested in the balance between initial teacher education and continuous development. I accept that we have just been talking about early years practitioners who take a different route into that, but to look at just primary teachers for a moment here. In a range of inquiries that this committee has done, we have come across a range of areas in which people feel very strongly that there should be more of this in initial teacher education. It would be a very good idea for there to be more of all that in initial teacher education, but that is just not possible. I am interested in your thoughts on what is essential, what is so core to STEM teaching at primary level that it has to be an ITE and what can wait until CPD is probably the wrong phrase, but what is essential and thus has to be an ITE because it cannot realistically all be there when you are not a subject specialist? The value of the data coming from the STEM service is really important here. By a long shot, one of the things that teachers have told us is that the top priority across all sectors is about the pedagogy of teaching STEM. That was quite a significant front-runner. Second to that was the skills progression. We know that for STEM careers and for STEM pathways, there is a really important focus on skills. Teachers are telling us quite clearly that they want a strong focus on that. I think that another big area is just the general knowledge of what is available in resources. You do have quite a limited time with an initial teacher education to provide that support and learning to teachers that are coming into the system. A really important part of that support is to connect them to the really fabulous support from the science centres, from festivals, from other STEM partners, with a really rich landscape in Scotland around that. Again, I am just making sure that the newly qualified teachers, our training teachers, are really connected to that, why their landscape and infrastructure are really key, so that they can continue to progress and develop once they qualify. Susan, in your perspective, do you have seen any change in the balance between what is covered in ITE and what has to be covered later into career and whether that balance is being struck right? My experience is that there is a lot of IT going on in the early years centres as well. The school that I am in at the moment is that, in our survey, we have identified things that we would like to be improved, but we are using IT really well. The problem is the access to professional skills and knowledge. If you are in a rural area, that can sometimes be a problem accessing training. I know myself and I love using IT, but it is very difficult for me to go on training courses and, if you are not using it, you are losing it. Just one final question for Elizabeth, around early years practitioners. I am wondering how much emphasis we should be putting on equipping early years practitioners with those skills, as opposed to ensuring that there are subject specialists, whether it is teachers or industry professionals, who are involved in the early years setting alongside those practitioners? I think that it is probably a mixture of both. The early years practitioners themselves are the people on the ground every day with the children. They are the ones who are skilled in observing what is happening with children, seeing what learning is taking place and building on that. We can have specialists that go in and people like me that go in and help and train a model and coach and teach. When you walk away, we need to have left them with those skills in some way. Whether they come through their initial training or we build on them in the setting, I think it would have to be a bit of both. From my own experience of teacher training, you can learn everything in the world, but then you are on the job unless you are continually refreshing and improving. Five years down the line, you have forgotten that bit. Priorities change, and that is what is difficult in teaching. In the minute, there is a huge focus on literacy and numeracy, so in people's heads, everything else shifts a wee bit away. Does that answer your question? I think so, yes. Hello. It is a both. It is a both. Thank you. Ms Lamont. Thank you very much. My question is probably mostly for education Scotland and the Scottish Government, specifically on how realistically that can be delivered on the ground in a theoretical model, but what is happening in our communities around resources? You might be aware that, in response to concerns raised by the level of resources for science in school, the learning societies group investigated the funding of science practical equipment, and their study found that more than half of respondents felt that they did not have sufficient equipment and consumables to deliver practical science work. Others know the lack of training on use of science equipment and consumables, and most 98 per cent of respondents reported having to draw on additional funding for practical activities with parental sources, which is the most common for extracurricular activity. Obviously, that would be even more serious, I suspect, in early years, rather than secondary school, with at least some infrastructure, but I wonder if you have any analysis of the availability of resources, support staff in early years, and have you done any research into the extent to which this has been funded through external resources, as it says, and parents, because that must create or amplify disadvantage, and I wonder if there has been work done on that? In terms of resources, I think that the point to make at early learning and childcare is that this is very much about STEM in the everyday. It is about observing STEM in nature, walking in your local park, your setting grounds, for instance, observing biodiversity, observing the changing of the seasons, enjoying your senses and understanding about your senses. In early years, in early learning and childcare provision, in lower primary, there is not a big need for very expensive resources to support STEM. I think that one of the things that a raised team has been doing, really successfully, is working with schools, visiting schools and early learning and childcare settings, as well, and looking at the resources that they already have. Quite often, in many settings, they have big kit boxes for science and STEM that maybe people have forgotten about, and so part of the training that raised officers are doing is taking those boxes out, looking at the consumables, for instance, that they might need, providing training on those boxes, getting those boxes back in shape, to make sure that the primary schools have got the support they need. A raised officer in Murray, for instance, made sure that every primary school in Murray had a basic kit for teaching, science and STEM up there. In one or the other, a piece of support that a raised team has been providing is that there are different organisations across Scotland, across the UK that provide funding for resources. Our resources have been providing training to different settings and practitioners to point them in the direction of the funding resources that are already available and allowing them to access them. Will you accept that even accessing those resources requires support? It requires resource within an early learning and primary school setting for somebody to do that job. I repeat the point that the funding that was established was an issue about science and practical equipment. There was an issue about the training and the use of anything like that, and that it was being resourced largely by parents. Do you think that that is an equality issue? Again, that is a support that a raised officer is providing locally. They are embedded within local authorities, they are targeting different communities, and they may be in more need of support. That is part of the work that they are doing locally. They are providing that training for those settings to access the funding that is available. They are saying that there is not the training. They are saying that there is an issue about training, there is an issue about equipment and there is an issue about training. The third one, which I did have concerns about, requires external resource, which is disproportionately parental resource, which means that disadvantage is going to be amplified. Is this something that Education Scotland or the Scottish Government is looking at? In terms of the resourcing for science, that is the responsibility of local authorities, for instance, in their schools and establishments. If you were doing an inspection, would you have a view on what resource should be? During the inspection process, if there was an issue around the resourcing, then that would be brought up in dialogue with those establishments. Do you accept that the survey is flagging up an issue? Is it the responsibility of Education Scotland to respond to the survey or is it somebody else's responsibility? Local authorities have the lead responsibility in terms of resourcing, the curriculum in resourcing their schools and settings. Does the Scottish Government have a responsibility in dialogue with local authorities? We still have a responsibility to respond to various research and report that is coming forward. I do not have additional insight that I can give you into how we have taken forward those particular things, other than to pick up the points that Ian has mentioned around the significant investment that we put into additional support for practitioners in training areas. However, I certainly agree that as we take the strategy forward, we want to keep it alive to anything that is potentially getting in the way of successful implementation of it. Do you think that a strategy without the resources underpinning it is not really a strategy at all? I think that there has been significant resource that has gone into supporting the strategy, so Ian has alluded to earlier on the additional support. Sorry to interrupt you, but does that mean that you do not accept the findings of the learning societies group on this issue? I am not saying that I do not accept the findings. I have not studied them in detail, so I must admit that I would certainly be prepared for myself and, indeed, the infrastructure that is around supporting the implementation of the strategy to look at that in more detail. However, I do not accept the point that there has not been additional resource that has gone into supporting the strategy. It has gone into areas around professional support and areas such as stem bursaries. The question is whether it is sufficient to support, but it would be very useful if we were able to come back having looked at the findings. Mr Gray? Surely the question was about support for technicians and equipment, the additional resources that you have talked about are about supporting teachers and training. So, are you saying that there has been resources going out that the learned societies concern to the Muslims raising was about lack of technicians and equipment in order to carry out empirical science? So, are you saying that additional resources have put in support of that because the examples that you have given are not supporting that, they are supporting something else? So, the point I make is that the supply of technicians is a local authority matter and how they choose to deploy their resource in education. The point that I was making about CLPL is that resource is available to a full range of practitioners. We have spoken about teaching professionals, we have spoken about earliest practitioners and it also includes technicians who are able to access that support through CERC and, indeed, through some of the other work that education has gone about line this morning as well. I think that another point to make here is that the Scottish Government is providing significant funding to CERC, which is over £100,000 of funding this year. So, CERC is part of their training and will also provide kit and resources as an embedded part of that professional learning. So, you know, they come to CERC, they get that training and the support, they can come to CERC physically, but CERC also run very good online cook-along sessions. Where professional learning is delivered virtually through GLO and other forms. And when they do the training, those kit boxes and those resources are sent to establishments ahead of that sort of virtual cook-along session. So, again, through the Scottish Government support for CERC, we're helping to provide that resource into the system. The training that I was talking about wasn't necessarily training in terms of confidence in science. Just last week, for instance, we provide training to a race officer team and to other local authorities about how to access funding and about all the different funding sources that are available so that they can provide that support to settings within their local authorities. So, our focus is very much on professional learning for practitioners, also for technicians, and the local authorities is very much about the... So, you're providing funding for somebody to learn how to access funding. And you're providing training. And you're providing CERC delivering training. Rather than it's been the core business of the education system. With that sort of responsibility of the local authorities. And you're in the mercy of whether somebody within the system... So, first, what we're looking at is how you can be systematic in your approaches, rather than being at the mercy of individuals within individually established who have happened to have an interest already. But how do you make it consistent if you're actually accepting that it's all about getting access to this or looking to that group or whatever? How do you make that consistent in a school that is under perhaps more pressure or an early learning centre that's under more pressure than other centres? I just wanted to say that my personal experience in three local authorities is that it's down to head teachers to decide on what part of the budget they're identifying for STEM resources. As we all know, budgets are under pressure, but I haven't found that to be the major factor in the inconsistency of delivery of STEM. It's more about the expertise that I personally have found the experience of a deficit in. Can I just ask a quick supplementary, because it has been raised in articles in the test about the importance of technicians, not least of which, because they usually carry the health and safety for any science experiments that are taking place. At what point would Education Scotland, would that only be identified as an issue at an inspection? At what point would Education Scotland make an intervention to say that the support wasn't enough to support the curriculum? In terms of technicians, they're mainly based within secondary settings. We're talking about early learning and primary today, but one of the things that we've done quite strongly within the STEM strategy, and I'm really pleased about that, is that we have a focus not just on early learning practitioners and primary practitioners, but also on school-based technical support staff. For instance, within our grants programme last year, we provided funding to CERC and the Scottish Technicians Advisory Council to provide opportunities for professional learning and development for technicians. That funding and that support will continue into this second phase this year. One of the opportunities that we've got here, and this is something that we can explore further as we go, is a really nice or highly effective cluster model where you have the early learning settings, the primary settings and the secondary settings all working very strongly, collegially and collaboratively. I suppose that one of the things for us to explore is how the technicians can provide support and resources for the whole cluster, for early learning and primary settings as well. In terms of the resourcing aspect, that's one of the things that we're seeing in some clusters already, where they're sharing resources, where a primary school doesn't have access to the resources. Quite often, the secondary school is prepared to provide that in support with their technicians. Those are all things that we're hoping to grow and develop through. That's a cluster approach that we've got a very strong focus on within the grants programme. Thank you. I was interested in how, Dr William Wopland, talking about the importance of overcoming some of the challenges that geography and other limiting factors place on young people's access to science. I'm just curious to hear from all of you what you feel those obstacles are and whether they correspond with everything that's been listed as a potential obstacle in the way of young people accessing STEM? It's an exciting time at Glasgow Science Centre just now, and due to a £4.1 million investment from the Welcome Trust, we're able to embark on what we're calling the connect project, which is a large-scale organisational change for us to be able to support and attract more diverse audience. As part of that, we've been really looking in depth as to what the barriers are for those who wish to access us. It's really about those who partially see us as being relevant to their lives, whether they are financially able to visit us, and it's about making what we do relevant to them. In terms of where we are at the Science Centre in Govan, we are surrounded by those who are experiencing the highest levels of deprivation. In those cases, entrance costs and transport barriers are a huge issue. There's a range of issues in terms of people not accessing us, and they're not all financial. Over the next three years, during the spending period of that funding, we'll be looking to address those, and it will be over the next 10 years to see this period of organisational change. In terms of ensuring that we are overcoming those barriers, we are able to use a great blend of different options. For example, our transport grants that we allocate over the last academic year. We've been allocating our transport grant to those in the highest 40 per cent SIMD areas, as well as those in areas 5 and 6 on the urban and rural scale. Also, all additional support schools are eligible for transport grants three per school. We also find it extremely important to invest in and make partnerships with local educational authorities to ensure that the pupils who are experiencing the highest levels of deprivation in those areas are able to access. On that front, we have long-term, fruitful partnerships with Glasgow City Council and Westin Bartonshire. We really see the benefits of those partnerships in that we see that 43 per cent of Glasgow schools visit at least once per year, and 28 per cent of Westin Bartonshire schools visit once per year as well. It's also worth pointing out that half of our non-visitors are higher than 40 per cent SIMD, so it highlights that they are not just financial buyers, people who are coming to visit us. In terms of remote and rural and difficult to access, we are able to offer an on-tour visit, and that can be a great option for those who are not able to visit. People are frankly astonished by the lengths that we are willing to go to at Glasgow Science Centre to visit schools. We have received funding from the Adina Trust. Over the next three years, we will be visiting every island-based remote primary school in Scotland. Over the past year, we have visited Orkney and Sky, and over the next two years, we will continue to do so when we are planning a Shetland tour. We have just seen our one millionth visitor as part of our on-tour team, which we are very proud of. We always keep in mind when we are designing exhibitions, programmes and experiences, how we can take those on the road and ensure that those experiences are getting to those who are not able to access us. As somebody from who went to school up in Inverness, I really feel passionately that we are getting up there and inspiring the children in those schools to come and take part and maybe work there one day, like I have. We are very proud of our on-tour funding, and we have really worked hard to leverage third-party funding to make that happen. We have received £2.25 million from GlaxoSmithKline and funding from the Scottish Government Energy and Climate Change Directorate and Apeto to build those exhibits. We go about reaching those who cannot visit us. You mentioned those who cannot visit you, but you are making some efforts to get people to the science centre itself. Obviously, there are a lot of experiences that you can have by outreach to schools, but there are some that you can only have by visiting. What efforts are being made to ensure that schools or sections of schools who are coming to visit, there is some co-ordination? You will appreciate that a school that is coming from US or Shetland to come to visit Glasgow or Edinburgh cannot do that every time there is something on in Glasgow and Edinburgh. There has to be some level of co-ordination so that they can do them all in three or four days. Otherwise, frankly, it is not an option. Is that level of co-ordination going on with other cultural and educational organisations to make sure that those kind of trips are possible? That is a really question that I can kick off and say from my understanding that that is not something that we are part of. It is a really interesting point and something that would be great to look at. We do not look further afield in terms of when we are engaging with schools in Orkney, for example. Only one has ever come to visit us on tour is really our priority for those areas. We have not really looked at when they come down to visit us and what else they are doing, but I am not sure if any of my colleagues are able to advise. I can certainly comment on that because I have experienced the body works twice in two different settings. It really is hands-on. It is like visiting the science centre. Those are invaluable initiatives for supplementing the STEM experiences that we are trying to develop in early years in primary. I want to go back to you and ask to clarify whether you have just asked us what the challenges are in delivering quality STEM in early years in primary. Was that part of your question? I was just going to come on to schools in early years, but the issue had been raised there about the science centres. I am happy to move on to schools in the early years, since it seems to prompt me in that direction. In terms of that, I was wondering on that subject, we have already talked about parental inequalities, if you like, or differences of opportunities that have existed for parents. The fact that that is or that still represents inequalities among children. Is there any work that is being done either in early years or in primary school to work directly with parents so that parents are included in the process? One of the actions in the strategy is to improve the level of resources available to parents through parent zone. You can say a bit about that. Equally, within the work to support the expansion of early learning and childcare, and I suppose to reiterate Elizabeth Boyle's point, that very active expanding that represents a great opportunity and support for practitioners around that. There is support that is going into practitioners there around things like gender-neutral play and so on and so forth, which you then hope through interactions with parents spreads back to the home environment as well. There is a whole online module, I think, developed by the University of West of Scotland, to support early learning practitioners particularly around their STEM practice, particularly around tackling gender stereotypes, and through the engagement that early learning practitioners will have with parents. You would hope that there would be a spread there, but I guess to answer your specific action, it would be the additional resources that are going on to parents' zone around this point, would be the main action there. Parents are crucial. I think that the STEM strategy was very influenced by the SPIRES research, which showed importance of building science in STEM capital within families and communities around Scotland. It is something that we take really seriously. Engaging parents has been part of the work that we have done through the RACE programme. One of the strengths of the STEM strategy is a big focus on community learning and development. We have a real strength in Education Scotland. We are working very closely with our community learning and development specialists. Over the past few months, for instance, we have been doing a series of events and sessions around Scotland, bringing together community learning and development specialists with early learning specialists and primary and secondary staff, looking at the connections and how we can take STEM into the wider community and families. Our RACE team, for instance, has been running a lot of different parental engagement events. We just did Angus STEM Festival just last week, I think, over 400 attended. We had the Leith family fund day, and over 700 attended over three days. We had a family stargazing event in Fife as well. Engaging with parents and finding new-based engagement with parents is really important. Even at a very simple level, within early learning and childcare establishments, one of the things that we have been doing with our RACE officers is sending STEM bags home, interactive STEM challenges that young people can take home and do with their families at home. We had a Scottish learning festival last year, and one of our keynote speakers was Professor Louise Archer, who was responsible for the SPIA research. We wanted to put it right up front there as part of our big STEM live event at the Scottish Learning Festival about the importance of engaging families. It is just a huge part of what we do. In terms of parent zone, we have already got IMA mathematician resource up there for parents to use and download those activities for use in their home. We have got IMA scientist. We have also just finalised a new resource, IMA engineer, and they are all available in Gaelic as well. In that case, the other thing that I was going to ask about was how you measure the performance that there is on all those fronts. There are performance indicators, more or less heard about them than there are about the performance indicators in the science centres, but should there be performance indicators or other performance indicators more widely to measure how we are making progress in the area of equity when it comes to access to STEM? To write the key indicators in the KPIs that we have produced related to some of the science centre activity, there is also an equity indicator in relation to performance in national qualifications around SCQF level 6, which mirrors the wider attainment indicator in the national improvement framework. Clearly, we published a set of key performance indicators in December 2017, and the annual report that was published earlier this year provided a report against those. We are going through a process of just reviewing those, not with a view to perhaps introducing a whole set of new ones but seeing whether there are better ways of producing milestones on the way to those. A number of those will have indicators about developments by 2022, for example at the end of the strategy, but what we are looking at with colleagues is whether we can produce some additional milestones with that. If, as part of that work, there are suggestions about other measurements that should come in there, we will be very happy to consider that. I am particularly interested in the challenges that are facing rural areas from a constituency point of view. Some of the challenges are pretty obvious. In particular, in one and two teachers' schools, just to ensure percentage terms, you are less likely to have someone who is interested in science proactively within the staff base than you would in a larger primary school. There are fewer STEM businesses in the vicinity, fewer academic institutions operating, science centres are further away, so those schools have smaller budgets. In some cases, there is no access to PEF money. I was interested, when you talked about science visits and other things, about supplementing. I have a concern that sometimes we focus too much on one-off visits and people think that they are covering off-stem because they manage a trip out once a year or when someone comes to visit the school. What do we need to do to reverse that imbalance? First of all, in rural areas, we are developing our own ways of delivering STEM. That is being supported by a lot of people who are passionate about science, technology and the other aspects. Those visits are great, but they are only part of what we are doing. Where I am at the moment in Aberfelldy, we have some great professional partnerships with Marine Scotland. Over the past few years, we have been working with Academy 9, Jacobs, who are developing the A9 dualling project. What we are doing there is fabulous. They are not working in the early years, but they are working in middle to upper primary, but Marine Scotland is available to everybody in the school. Those are real scientists and engineers that are coming in. They are great role models. The gender issue is very well supported, particularly by our Academy 9 scientists and engineers who have been coming in. We are working on three fronts. Emma's work is fabulous and has a part to play. The second front is the actual practitioners. When I was in Aberdeenshire, I was the teacher in the school that I was in, but I had access to the schools in the cluster. I was able to meet regularly and through our tapestry learning initiatives and projects, we were able to team-teach and visit other schools. There was quite a rich and diverse range of opportunities, but I see the biggest challenge as being having those STEM practitioners able to support in the early years. I come back to that. Additional needs that we have not mentioned, workload and additional needs, they are the biggest issues on my challenges to deliver STEM. I think that what you said is really crucial in the fact that STEM shouldn't be and can't be one teacher's passion. It has to be everybody's. It has to be every teacher that can deliver this to a really high quality all the time, not on one-off science visits, which, again, I think are great as provocations or part of it, but as you say, some people in our profession do go, right, I've been to dynamic earth, dick, I did that bit of the curriculum, and it cannot be that. In rural communities, the teacher's schools, we have issues, but you say that there's no technology around whatever. We just need to look in more interesting ways. In a rural school, you have the rural countryside, which is an amazing way to experience all sorts of STEM activities. We have farming communities. We have all sorts of different kind of industries, but it's just about looking a bit more creatively at how to get them involved, I would have said, in rural schools. Again, back to the cluster approach, pulling on people, neighbours, getting together, but I think what you said highlights to me exactly one of the problems. It can't just be one person's passion, and they're in charge of the whole learning in that school. It can't be, so we need to get to the bottom of that. From that, going back to Dr Allan's question, would you support having more concrete indicators to make sure that we are achieving that kind of model? Do you think that we need more data and review to make sure that's happening consistently across the country? I think we have to be careful by what we mean of concrete indicators and data. The minute we start putting in very structured next steps or data collection, it can backfire, as we've seen it happen in some instances with some of our other curriculum areas, as teachers' opinion, but I think that we definitely need more information, I suppose, at the minute, about what the reality is going on in schools, but you probably have more. Well, I think that it's a hugely complex issue, and I think that, as is mentioned in some of the papers in here, there are a number of initiatives. As I've said and keep saying, I am passionate about STEM, but I see that there are a lot of other areas of need, and I think that STEM will be supported if we address some of the challenges that we are facing in early years and primary years education as a whole. Yes, we would like to have these indicators so that we could gauge how we are doing, but I think that early years staff, there is a high turnover in early years staff, so we may train people and give them resources, but we need to retain them. We need to have those professionals that are able to deliver the broad general education that we are all hoping for, and that includes STEM. That means that people that are vital to the wellbeing of pupils and their development of their learning are not just teachers, but they are the support staff that we are desperate to retain. STEM is highly resourceful. We need resources for STEM to deliver science in any way in the primary or in the early years. We need to create the resources, we need to set them up and then we need to teach them. We do not have enough bodies on the ground to do that effectively. We may be doing it, but we are not doing it effectively, and a lot of it is being done on the good will of early years practitioners and teachers. Let us have a framework that is really going to deliver support for STEM and support for teachers. We are really aware of the needs of rural areas, and it is something that we have been working on for a number of years. For instance, when we set up the raising aspirations and science education programme, we were looking to identify, sorry, to engage with authorities around Scotland. We deliberately chose authorities that had challenges around rurality, including Highlands, Dumfries and Galloway and Murray. What we also did is recognise the big challenges in terms of geography, so we made sure that those authorities, particularly Highlands and Dumfries and Galloway and also Fife, had additional resources to employ two-raise officers in Highlands. Dumfries and Galloway had two or three-raise officers, so it is something that we are really conscious of. Part of the partnership that we are doing with the raised officers is that we realise that there is a real challenge sometimes, connecting schools in rural areas to local employers. We have been working in partnership with the STEM ambassador hubs in the west of Scotland. In just the last 12 months, we have increased the number of STEM ambassadors active within Dumfries and Galloway from 36 to 115. In Highlands, we talked earlier on about the science centre model and accessing a science centre. In Highlands, the Highlands Skills Academy is just a process of launching and opening newton rooms, five newton rooms across the Highlands. The one in Thursill has been opened and the one in Lochaber has been opened to give those rural areas that science centre experience. University of Highlands and Islands has a very active STEM hub that is doing a lot of outreach across the area, as does Aberdeen Science Centre. Through our grants programme, for instance, we provided funding to Highland Council. They have got big challenges in terms of rurality and remoteness, so they are now delivering professional learning to early learning and childcare and primary staff virtually. That support has been able to do through our grants programme. We are hearing really strongly from our practitioner surveys, which has given us really important data in this area. The practitioners absolutely want more support online. I go for practitioners in rural areas as well as others. Again, through the grants programme, we are really trying to enhance that offer of online professional learning support. To pick up on the point about drawing on what is available locally, in the grants programme this year, we have introduced a new funding stream called the Leadership and Collegiate Professional Learning Fund. What practitioners have told us really strongly is that that opportunity to work with practitioners within the schools, within your clusters, is really valuable and has a high impact on a professional learning. For instance, for early learning and childcare, 70 per cent said that working collegially within your cluster has a high or very high impact. Within early learning and childcare, 81 per cent said that working collegially within your cluster has a high or very high impact. That new funding stream is to give teachers the space and time locally, to draw on their collective expertise, the resources, to learn together, to collaborate, to co-develop new approaches. The reality aspect is really important. We will continue to track that through our surveys and the provider survey. One of the surveys that we provided just published last week was the STEM provider survey. We are now looking at all the providers across Scotland, the science centres, the festivals and universities. We are inviting them to share that information with us so that we can see the service offer that has been provided to different local authorities and plug those gaps where we can. I am really happy to hear of all those developments. They are starting to have an effect, which is great. However, I would like to highlight in the papers my union's concerns, which were brought by members. I want to be absolutely clear that you can have a passion for science, you can have all the training in the world, but you need the staff to deliver that. If you have a class of 25 children with a large percentage of additional needs and you do not have any support in that classroom, you may be creative and bring in STEM professional volunteers or parents, and that is the way that you are delivering it, but you need to have the staffing to consistently deliver STEM. I will follow up on the collegiate fund and ask how much money is made available and whether or not it is available for classroom cover. The collegiate fund, the enhancing professional learning fund, has two funding streams. One is for regional and national partners. The regional and national partners include organisations like science centres, festivals, universities, colleges, professional associations, third sector organisations and learning societies, for instance. The leadership and collegiate professional learning fund is more of the practitioner-led professional learning, so the totality of that. That is what I am interested in in the second stream and how much money is made. There is £1.3 million available this financial year for the whole of the enhancing professional learning grants programme, which is the two funding streams. There is not a breakdown just now. We are going to look at the demand from the system, the bids that come in and look at where we can make that money work the hardest. Will it be available for classroom cover to allow teachers out of the classroom? Part of that might be classroom cover. For instance, one of the things that we know within different clusters is that you can have practitioners like Susan with a background, a passion for science and STEM. They have a lot to share in building confidence of other practitioners within primary schools, for instance, within a cluster or working with their learning and childcare. Where, for instance, we can make use of, like Susan's, resource or capacity expertise, that money can be used to release them from the classroom to provide that face-to-face support in other settings. Quite a lot of the line of questioning come down to the same thing, really, approach from different sides, which is about how do we mainstream the delivery of STEM education in early years? A couple of questions ago, Susan Ewer asked about that, and she said that it is complicated. In some ways, it is not complicated, but it is really simple. If we went to any primary school or early years setting and asked them what they would do in terms of literacy, none of them would say that we went to the library last year. But if we go and say what do you do in terms of STEM education, they might say that we did a visit to the science centre. That is the problem, really, isn't it? The problem is that the system does not recognise this as being core in the same way as it recognises rightly things like literacy and numeracy, speech and language development and other things that are considered core. What is the thing that will change that mindset so that all schools, all early years settings understand that this is not an option, this is something that we really need them to be delivering? I think that what would begin to help is raising its profile within a lot of the policy and documentation that we have. A lot of the things like the new national standard, for example, that is coming out for expansion in early learning and childcare, the references to the curriculum, the references to the curriculum in the other documents that we have like Higgy Elk, how good is our early learning and childcare? There is a lot of literacy and numeracy and health and wellbeing. There are words like curiosity and imagination and creativity, but it is helping our practitioners to link those words to STEM. That is education in Scotland and the Government's fault. You are actually not asking the system to deliver on this in the same way as you do in literacy and numeracy, so they do not. Why would they? I suppose that your initial point, Mr Gray, was that it is not part of the core curriculum, I think that it is part of the core curriculum. Three out of the eight... Does it sound like it is? Elizabeth Kelly has just said... But in terms of the systems, the policy framework, three out of the eight curricular areas are STEM related, so it covers mathematics, sciences and technology, so it is part of the framework. What I certainly accept is that in the national improvement framework and the priorities that the Government has set, there is a focus on literacy and numeracy, on raising attainment, on health and wellbeing and on the wider sort of developing young workforce. That is what the position the Government has set out in the national improvement framework, but I think it would counter the suggestion that it is not part of the core framework. It is. What I certainly accept is the challenge that you pose around the extent to which there is that confidence time dedicated to actually delivering that. I think that the actions and the STEM strategy are designed to respond to that. To deal with the expansion of early learning and childcare and trying to get sure that the STEM is properly in there, I alluded on to the package of support that is going in to support the workforce around that. I think that it is there, but I certainly would not dispute what Elizabeth another said about the need to support it even further. You kind of are disputing more, she said, because she said that it is not prioritised in the documents that practitioners in the system believe that they are being held to account to. You are saying that it is there. You cannot both be right. Well, I am saying that it does feature in the support that we are putting in place and certainly in what we are trying to do around things like learning and outdoor learning as well, but there is an interesting question here about prioritising. There is a danger that if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Clearly, the Government has put— Sorry, so are you saying that STEM is not a priority? Well, STEM is clearly not one of the priorities that is set out in the national improvement framework. That is clear. It does not mean that it does not happen, and there is all sorts of stuff that is happening. The STEM strategy is just one of them, as is the fact that it features so heavily in the broad general education. Well, you say that, but then there is— Can I just check? I think that Ms Kelly still had some points to me on that, if you could just let her finish. No, it is about, I suppose, the priority. Even if these things are coming down to the Government, the teachers on the ground, in their head, it is about literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing. Often, the inspections that Education Scotland do have that focus or certainly have done in recent times, but also with STEM though, that is the problem. I feel that we are very siloed back into these subject disciplines when actually something like STEM enhances literacy or literally enhances it and numeracy. They shouldn't be different, especially in early years. It is a very interdisciplinary pedagogy that we use. Play is the main source of the learning, as it were, and in something like a DEN building exercise, for example. A child can experience literacy, numeracy, engineering, technology, science, the whole cabang, depending on what that child's interests are and how the practitioner is helping them. They will bring a different element out of that experience. For me, it is about bringing us back to how I feel the curriculum for excellence was meant to be, which was about working together in real meaningful context with an interdisciplinary focus. For some reason, and I am not blaming anyone, we seem to have gone very literacy and numeracy, but separate. Literacy and numeracy, of course, are so important. They are the foundations of everything, but we have lost sight of the rest of the week. I am really just backing up a lot of what Elizabeth has said, that STEM is being delivered hugely through interdisciplinary learning. Almost to the point that we are concerned a little bit, scientists, that maybe the progression in science, knowledge and skills is not perhaps being attended to as well as we should be, but that might be a bit more for middle and upper primary, where I am moving into at the moment. However, in the early years, and right up to middle primary, through interdisciplinary learning projects, outdoor learning, forest schools and all those marvelous initiatives that are being developed within early years in primary, we are delivering a lot of STEM. One of the things that you said earlier on, Susan Was, and you have used this example a couple of times, was you were in Highland, part of a team who went into early-year settings and worked alongside practitioners there to raise the quality of delivery of what you have just described. You also said that team was the first thing to go when cuts came. Is that right? Well, I have to say that that is correct, that that team has gone. In fact, it is much more along the model that I think that Elizabeth is working in, where she is supporting many more centres. Having worked in early years, early years practitioners are being asked—they are not teachers, but they are being asked to teach children at a level that is the same as a teacher, and then they have all the care standards on top of that, and they have a lot on their plate. It is how we support that. I really would say that we need to support that with more teachers like Elizabeth, who are out there on the ground working and reinforcing good practice across all disciplines, and STEM would benefit from that. So my question really is—I suppose that it is a version of the question that Andrew was dealing with—how much of a priority are we really giving this? You seem to be saying that perhaps not as high a priority is sometimes we purport in terms of the resource. I cannot answer that question fully because my authority is not in the raise programme, and we will be in there joining. Obviously, there is additional funding, which would allow groups such as the STEM working group— Is that not the point? If this was core business, it would not be who is in the raise programme, who is not in the raise programme. That would be support. I know that it is available everywhere, you have made that point, but it is not taken up everywhere because there are other priorities. One of the things that we have done over the past four months is to recruit a new STEM team, a new team of STEM education officers. We have seven or eight in post just now. They are now embedded within the new regional teams, Education Scotland to set up. Every region across Scotland has a dedicated STEM education officer. When we are up to full complement, we will also have a dedicated, improving gender balance and equality officer within each of those regional teams. I think that we will get some really exciting opportunities within the new regional infrastructure. Our new STEM education officers are improving gender balance officers. We will absolutely be working in harness with the mathematics and numeracy officers, with the literacy officers, with the attainment advisers within those regional teams, and I think that we have a real opportunity to join that up. It is something that we are really excited about. We feel really strongly, and it is a big part of our work through the raise programme. The STEM is a context that really brings the curriculum to life, and all the learning that takes place within the curriculum areas, within sciences, technologies and mathematics and numeracy, is really brought to life through a STEM context. It should not really be seen as something that is additional, but it is something that just provides a really engaging, motivating, exciting context for learners that enables them to connect their learning within the classroom, the outdoor settings, with the real life. Our new STEM teams are absolutely a part of that system change, about that equity of provision and about that mainstreaming. No, I just noticed that in the papers you have mentioned the regional improvement collaboratives. Is that a new initiative as well that is going to be rolled out involving those officers? Absolutely. The local authorities are coming together within those new regional improvement collaboratives. Education Scotland is, over the last few months, is refocusing our work to support those regional improvement collaboratives. Just even in the last months I am really excited by the conversations that our STEM officer team and our gender balance officer team are having with their counterparts within the regional collaboratives. With local authorities, there is a real energy about it. There is a really big focus on STEM. One of the things that we are doing already with the west partnership, one of the biggest collaboratives, is from the word go, they have identified STEM, and also learning for sustainability is a focus area for them. We are working in partnership with them and Keep Scotland Beautiful looking at the upstream battle campaign along the River Clyde. It is looking at marine plastic pollution, a really exciting context for learners, for schools and for young people. There is one of the big regional collaboratives already saying that they want this close partnership working on learning for sustainability instead, and we are really happy to support that work. Susan and Elizabeth have said that this will not happen everywhere unless, in every setting, there is enough resources and specifically enough staff to actually make that play through. What is your response to that? The good practice can be there and the support can be there, but if the teachers and technicians and support staff are not in the classrooms, they are saying that it will not happen. I guess that the initial starting point of that would be around those areas where there are shortages in teachers. I think that we acknowledge those. The targets for intake of those into the ITEs has been increased and indeed the numbers are going up, that is supported by the STEM bursary scheme. There are attempts to address that, but I do not pretend that it is anything other than that. That is secondary teachers, though. We are talking about primary in early years here. I do not have the figures to hand about the situation with primary school teachers across the picture. I am happy to provide that later on, but I suppose that the point that I am trying to make is that we are looking at very carefully in terms of the supply into the system. The point that Ian makes around the support that the Education Scotland is providing to the regions is a consistent picture. Education Scotland has adopted its new structure that is based on the regional structures. Those regional structures are coterminous with the regional improvement collaborative, so there has been a real change in the infrastructure to make sure that support that the Education Scotland provides and is alluded there to the specific STEM expertise are aligned with the new regional improvement collaborative to provide that consistently. Mr Scott, do you want a supplementary in this area or a new area? Yes, I have got some on this area as well. I am going to bring in Ms Mackay first, because gender was mentioned there. I know that there is an interest there. I would like to follow that up. I could go back please to the equity of access regarding gender. Andrew Bruce, you mentioned that I was interested in parental involvement, because we know that a lot of gender stereotyping starts in the home. The modules that you talked about, was that relating to early years or is that secondary education? The module that I mentioned was the support that was going into the workforce around early years. It is the University of West of Scotland resource. Ian, you will keep me right on this. It covers a number of things. One of it is around, well, some of it is promoting STEM in those early learning settings, but it includes tackling gender stereotypes as well. Alongside that, care inspectors have been working with zero tolerance to produce a series of resources around promoting gender-neutral play. In addition to that, which Ian will be able to speak at length about, there is the expansion of the pilot that was around improving gender balance switch to place in schools. However, the focus of that will go beyond schools into other settings as well. Can you explain a bit about how the parents are involved? What form does it take, the module and what is the uptake on it from parents? The module is for early learning practitioners, but part of the theory here is that practitioners will be having engagements with parents and the chance to spread that learning approach that way. Is that started? I'm not sure. It's literally just in development just now and it's due to be finalised at the end of this year. How will you monitor what the uptake is and how that's succeeding? Do you have a plan to monitor how that's going? There will all be work that's underway over the coming months. This new online module takes shape and this is to support the expansion of early years, so there will be a focus on STEM in that and gender balance. I'll be chairing that piece of work in partnership with our Scottish Government colleagues, so that gives us a real chance to make sure that it's fully connected to our ambitions within the STEM strategy, which I think is really important. In terms of monitoring the stats, the usage, the uptake and the engagement, that will all be embedded, I'm sure, within the resources that it develops. Elisabeth, you mentioned in your opening speech that there was a massive opportunity in early years for STEM and that's good in it and I agree with that. The 2018 report, Tapping All Our Talents, which was a report on women in STEM subjects etc, part of it says, where progress has been made, this is frequently due to the personal interest in the issue of one or several individuals within a school and their drive to create change. How much do you think that is a factor, because I think that that might be quite important, if my teachers might know about it and they might think, yes, I'm not that, so they don't actually focus on it? Is there any way of addressing that? I think that's hugely influential and that's what we've said in my paper. Across the early years landscape, it's very varied depending on what everybody's interested in. In one setting, yes, you might get an early years practitioner who is either a woman or a man, probably a woman, because that's the situation we're in, although the early years community are trying massively to change the gender as you were in our workforce and if that person is really interested in STEM, then they might create that really STEMing environment and that's what we were talking about. We can't have that, it needs to be everywhere all the time, so not just one person as it were. The gender imbalance in, I think our practitioners are working really hard actually to conquer some of their unconscious bias when it comes to gender and I think we're mainly succeeding, but I certainly don't think we're in a position yet where we can start influencing parents because a lot of practitioners probably aren't strong enough yet on that understanding themselves, they're in to help with that. But what is lovely about most early learning chakra settings is really children play anywhere all the time, so we will have girls in block corners, boys in the house corner and that is lovely and that has been developing over the years. We've got rid of a lot of princess outfits and know about kind of stuff and it's becoming a lot more. I think I went off there, sorry, did I answer your initial question in the beginning? Is this part of the new training for the new early years practitioners that were, you know, the drive, that's the recruitment drive that's on, is this part of... The gender imbalance? Yes. Again, it would totally depend on my experience on who's delivering that training. So for example in Midlothia and we have MAs, Modern Apprentice is coming into our local authority and we're delivering that training ourselves through the team that I work with and yes I have no doubt that they will be addressing that at that point but in other authorities they're going through like Edinburgh College maybe, they've got SVP3, some of them are doing that, they're beginning to do like NAP5s in high school and it's all very mixed as to what is inputted into those courses so I couldn't guarantee it's being addressed. And in your work are you finding that parents are receptive at the early years level to their daughters being involved in STEM stuff or is there any resistance to that? I would say it varies massively from community to community and parent to parent. Our practitioners on the whole do a very good job of helping parents understand that we encourage every child to do everything in our setting but likewise before when we had the princess outfits for example you might get a little boy dressing up in a princess outfit and there'd be a picture of that in his learning profile and there would have to be a conversation sometimes with parents about how that was absolutely acceptable and fine and that was nothing for them to be worried about but that is a kind of ongoing thing but it does need the parent dialogue sometimes. I think the kind of STEM cattle in the families is really interesting to look at but again it's quite a complex area though because some parents in some of our areas are more potentially the deprived areas just the words are kind of frightening you know they're a bit like whoa what's that all about I'm not whoa that's not for us so that's the importance of communicating it well and again for me back to the sum of the community projects like community gardening and you're gardening alongside somebody and then you're talking about actually this is this is science and we're learning about this and we're learning about that and and doing it in that more natural relaxed way rather than this is STEM and you're going to need to teach that to your child at home which is just my final question it's just how do you sort of or can you ensure that that's carried on through the the primary years when things become you know more intense and they're working to the curriculum etc how does the you know the the basis in early years transfer to primary well you've hit upon a huge can of worms generally in how early years is being transferred up into the primary within Scotland at the moment and personally I can't we do try and influence the transition into into p1 a lot of authorities are trying to make the early level work now as an early level so nursery into primary one and that flow and the communication with primary one teachers and all that kind of thing but it does still in my experience in season would probably no more look it can look like a very different animal in a primary school than it does in an early learning in Sharka centre bring in mr menses and I'll come to you miss point thanks yes when I think the point in terms improving gender balance and equalities this is complex you know we looked at our data over the last 35 years in terms of uptake of hires stem hires within secondary schools and over the last 35 years we have made very little impact both in terms of the participation of girls in subjects like physics and also computing technology based subjects but also as well about boys and biologies we've got an underrepresentation of boys and biology so there is a lot of work to do this is complex work it does involve a whole system change this is about a mind shift for the whole of society this is why we've got a new agenda balance team in place within education scotland that will be embedded within these new regional teams this is a new work for us this is work that's been underway for for three years so we've done a lot of learning over the last years within that pilot programme we've drawn heavily on research we've provided over two and a half thousand hours of professional learning to teachers in the system over five thousand hours of engagement with pupils over three thousand hours of engaging with stakeholders in the system do you know different organisations and so on so we're drawing on all of that experience over the last three years to take this work forward our big target which is challenging and ambitious is to reach every school cluster in scotland in the next four years and for us one of the key aspects of this has to be a very strong cluster-based approach this isn't something that a primary school can do on their own it's not something that an early learning establishment can do on their own it's something that we all have to do as a whole community and a whole society and actually one of the things we've been doing you know as part of the earliest expansion we've talked about this new module that's been developed and picking up some of the earlier points about you know the policy and how it reflects a STEM and gender balance with the new induction resource for the earliest expansion does talk about gender and about encouraging gender and neutral practice I think we're going to have a refresh of building the ambition document for early learning childcare so that gives us an opportunity to put STEM in there and issues like gender balance as well so you know there's a big piece of work under where we're really excited by it I think one of the things we're really excited by is just to share demand for for time and engagement from a new team and we're looking forward to seeing how that work in those discussions continue well there's kind of two issues I think we've touched on on here and the early years into primary and I would say that there's a lot of work being done to make it a more seamless transition and the value of play you know right through primary is a lot more acceptable in our learning and teaching environments within a primary school now the second thing is the gender equality and I would like to say that you know certainly within the setting that I mean at the moment we've got a perfect scenario where we're running from early years right up to the end of secondary and we're you know very much promoting young women and girls to move into roles of responsibility within STEM in fact our primary STEM prefixes you there are more girls than than boys can I just start with there how are you promoting it what you know how does that well because we are all aware of the importance of STEM even if some primary practitioners and and early years practitioners maybe aren't confident but they are aware of the importance of it so in our planning for play and learning we are making sure that we are giving opportunities to to to both male and female and that we are positively promoting those experiences with girls and I know my colleagues in the secondary are doing a marvellous job you know we've got great role models because in fact three out of the four principal teachers in our secondary are women and they are down in the nursery and they are in the primary so we're very much showing good role models and working in our workshops with parents to share the STEM learning that we're doing in a in a way that isn't is demystifying these subjects and not making them a worry for parents or for children okay thank you thank you I'd like to pick up on something that Elizabeth Kelly said in her answer to Rona Mackay and it was it needs to be everywhere all the time and I wonder if you would accept that there might be a challenge here for our primary teachers who are trained to be generalists I guess I'm thinking about one of my friends who has a politics degree and then went on to do a postgrad in primary teaching she might not naturally have an inclination to deliver STEM in the way that others might who have a specialism in it she will have an opportunity and an obligation to deliver it through the bge as we've heard from Andrew Bruce but her interest might lie elsewhere so is there a challenge there potentially in terms of disempowering the profession if it's you know being instructed and would you also perhaps have any suggestions as to what the answer might be there I mean we heard I think in a previous evidence session from the RSE about the level of qualifications for primary teachers going in and I think the RSE were advancing the idea that you should have a higher qualification in maths for example which is not I think at the moment currently required I think it's in five level so what's your going to answer to that challenge about primary teachers being generalists well it's a huge question isn't it because as a primary school teacher you are expected to be a brilliant at teaching music these days as well and PE and art and everything and you're right we all come from very different backgrounds my own first degree was in history yeah um so you know I love doing a social science thing on Vikings that's my thing but I also love STEM I think primary school teachers have to accept that when we come into the profession that is the profession that we're in if we want to be specialist subject teachers we go on to secondary school yeah so there has to be an awareness that you have to be passionate about learning and teaching and therefore we're passionate about all our subjects there will be a bit more expertise in one than the other because of your your previous life perhaps but it shouldn't that shouldn't control the curriculum you present in your classroom I strongly believe that I shouldn't just teach history all the time because that's what I was previously interested in and likewise when I say STEM should be all the time every day I mean it shouldn't be a week of science yeah we do a week of science there we go or we go to dynamic earth and we do it should be because if you look at a lot of the primary school although I'm not currently in primary school but in my experience if you look at a primary school timetable if you went into like a primary three classroom there's a lot of there's a big literacy block and there's a numeracy and then there might be a wee bit of topic and there's a big literacy not in all schools but this is the kind of so that's what I mean about interdisciplinary learning I feel we need to start looking at literacy through being outside through a gardening project through an engineering project we're designing you know a new mars lunar landing but we're also learning literacy whilst we're doing that so that we don't get into these blocks of I need to spend an hour teaching literacy before I can look at STEM yeah so yes I think it's appropriate at this time just to highlight a little bit about our approach to teacher training because I think in some ways it can really answer this individual that you're mentioning who maybe doesn't come from a STEM background and how we can empower them to see STEM as relevant and to make sure that they feel that they can facilitate STEM learning and I think our inspiring and challenge reports really does that and I come at this from an angle of somebody who went through our school system and went directly into a phd in an excellent research institute and was faced with having to have the confidence to be an active research scientist and that's not about knowledge it's about skills it's about having the confidence in yourself to investigate to use observational skills to categorise to analyse these are things that all of us will have done in the sort of few hours before we even came into this room today and I think our inspiring challenge approach tries to highlight to anybody whether that's a primary secondary or early years teacher or practitioner that they don't need to have the answers they don't need to have an in-depth knowledge on any of those topics I have a phd and there's lots about you from my phd subject that I'll never know so it's about really encouraging them to invest in the pupils and developing the pupils skills and that I totally agree with Elizabeth and that that can happen inside of any different type of lesson you can categorise in any lesson you can observe in any lesson you can try and use those skills and it's not about for me that we need to recognise the importance of building those skills in a lesson to be a scientist to use those and everybody whether they end up working in the STEM industry or not at all these are very important skills and I think our approach helps to build and give give teachers and practitioners confidence so we have trained 240 teachers an inspiring challenge primarily in western bartonshire region over the last three years and prior to funding teachers will rate their confidence in teaching STEM 2.6 out of 5 and after training they will rate they rate it 3.4 out of 5 and having been on the ground and done that training myself and spoken to the teachers and having to see them through beginning this journey to increase their confidence in STEM I think it's really them recognising that they don't have to know the answers and that they need to support their pupils to have free investigation time for free investigation and recognising that is I have seen it being hugely beneficial to the learning experience of their pupils thank you I'd like to go back to evidence we heard from Lorna Hayh who's a primary teacher in my constituency in Padookher East primary school and because she told the committee previously about evidence which suggests that if children are not exposed to STEM based subjects by age 10 so I think primary six then they just won't choose them later on in their school career so do you think then by and this is really for the practitioners by the time you get to secondary school any interventions around about challenging that gender divide are too late right okay that's a really difficult question to really answer I think that you know I would have to say that my experience of early years is that there's a lot of rich STEM things going on and I think it's mentioned in the papers without early years practitioners or anybody parents really knowing that it is STEM because you know everything is mass we know that and you know so I think a lot of that is happening the worry is that when we get into primary you know do you know do we have the know-how in the STEM subjects and you know we talked about interdisciplinary learning we've also got to look I mentioned when we were putting together the Highland Science programme our concern was that that science wasn't being taught in a cohesive and progressive way within primary schools now because it was all being taught through interdisciplinary learning and so this gives us a problem when we get to that to 10 plus bracket because we're wanting children to be interested in chemistry and physics and biology we want them to to be interested in those subjects and so they've got to be taught to them they've got to have the knowledge and they've got to be being taught those skills and I'm not sure that that's happening consistently can I ask you on that point then would you advise that they should be taught discreetly because I guess the challenge for science-based subjects is that when pupils enter s1 science is usually delivered until the end of s3 as a general subject and it might not be obvious to pupils that they are studying physics chemistry or biology so is that a challenge in primary you would say as well then yeah I think that it's one of those things that it's actually it is so complex because actually it's great for children not to be aware that they're doing chemistry when they're out doing the coca cola and mentos challenge little do they know they're actually exploring a science concept that people are still arguing about you know a high level scientist are still arguing about but yeah that I think that that we need to be clear that in you know in once we start getting into primary we we need to have interdisciplinary learning that's rich and diverse and important but we need to be teaching discreet science skills and lessons as well and we need the skills and the training to do that okay and just finally convener if I can ask a question to Ian Mendes and I should say just to make the committee aware I did used to work with Ian in a previous life education in Scotland and I'm really interested in in the role of education Scotland in supporting this you're a senior education officer so what does your role look like and I've not worked in education Scotland for five years now so can you maybe just explain can you maybe just explain how SEOs work with HMI to ensure consistent delivery in terms of equalities and we've heard I think from Professor Ian Wall previously that the last five inspection reports of primary skills in a year equalities was dealt with in one case in two sentences and in the others in one sentence I mean I appreciate you're not a member of HMI but how do SEOs work with HMI and can you maybe tell us a wee bit about if you have development officers around about you centrally I know I appreciate you've spoken today about the ricks but within education Scotland centrally are you still supported by a team what does that support look like? I think this is one of the you know the fabulous strengths of education Scotland you know when I came into post a number of years ago one of the first things that was presented to me was the curriculum impact report for sciences the 3 to 18 curriculum impact report and I was a piece of work that had been done by inspectors looking at the strengths of the system in terms of sciences and aspects for development and I became my work plan you know and it was really nice over the years to have that you know that day-to-day contact with our HMI colleagues you know occasionally they'll say you know there's really fabulous practice in that school it would be really wonderful for you to go in and and find out how we can share that more effectively so for instance we did that to Moff Academy a couple of years ago with a really strong cluster approach and we were able to go in following inspection and organise an open day and invite people from around Scotland to come and see the practice that was taking place there. Similarly our inspectors would give us intelligence to say you know here's an area of support that we need in terms of STEM and we can mobilise our resources within our curriculum teams to provide that support. I think in terms of the inspections you know some of the the feedback we're seeing is we're seeing positive progress being made in terms of STEM we're seeing examples of really highly effective practice but it's still variable where practice is strongest the settings are making really good use of partnerships you know with local employers and so on really developing the skills of the learners we are seeing you know examples of practice where practitioners are challenging traditional stereotypes so all of this intelligence from the inspection is really useful for our work. In terms of the resources we have for the last four months I've been managing the new team of STEM officers within Education Scotland. I also have oversight of the Improving Gender Balance and Equalities team. The race programme for instance is led by Gail Duffas who's a national education officer for the race programme. She's actually employed by the Wood Foundation but in base within Education Scotland. So on a day-to-day basis you know I have oversight of all of that work trying to help to shape to coordinate it. We're moving into a new space within Education Scotland because the staff and all of us including myself are now you know embedded within these new regional teams but that gives us such wonderful new opportunities and so the new staff will be embedded within the regions they'll be working with literacy officers as I said numerous officers, attainment advisers but I'll still have an oversight and a role we'll have regular opportunities to come together to look at the STEM strategy, to look at feedback from petitioners, to look at the data from a STEM survey and really try and you know develop that vision and those actions to really deliver on the impact we want to see. Thank you. Thank you Mr Scott. I want to ask our teachers whether rising class sizes in primary schools is helping or hindering the teaching of STEM subjects. Right. Okay. Well I'm in the fortunate position that I'm in a rural school so although I've taught in Vernes in a city school where I had the maximum amount of children that was quite a well supported and resourced school so and at that time which was a few years back that wasn't an issue where I am at the moment you know our class sizes are good so I can't really comment on that being an issue. All I can comment on is that this is the first year in 15 years that I have had no classroom support and if you have 80% of your children with additional support needs that is a very tough ask. It's tough to deliver the core curriculum but it's tough to develop STEM. Well in early linear childcare we have certain ratios that we have to adhere to so even if you have 80 children in a building which we don't try to do you have a ratio you know a kind of 1 to 10 1 to 8 ratio so I suppose in that way it doesn't it doesn't affect. In my personal experience the more qualified great staff you have to number of children the better the learning experience. But the broad the government's own figures obviously show that class sizes in primary schools and most parts of Scotland are rising significantly so those pressures are clear but the general pressures that they affect all aspects of teaching. And I think class size I mean where I don't really know maybe where the figure came from in the first place but I would have to say that my own personal experience of having 33 children in a class not being an issue if you're well supported but I'm teaching 20 children at the moment and we don't have the resources within the school to offer support to some of the learners in my class they're supported by me and by parents and volunteers and in many creative ways that our school are developing but we would obviously be much happier to have core support staff supporting those learners needs. Thank you for that. I wonder if Ian Menzies could tell me one school inspection report that demonstrates that that's an issue in Scottish education. In terms of the staffing I'm not from the inspection side I've got some you know information in terms of what we're seeing in terms of STEM and also I can talk about the gender balance and equality aspect. So teaching STEM has never been flagged up in an inspection report that you're aware of because of the exact pressure that Susan Boyd and thousands of teachers across Scotland report. I can tell you the you know we are seeing positive progress be made as I said. That's not what I asked. That's not what I asked because you answer the question. As I said I'm not an inspector but you know if you want that information I can send that. But you're in charge of STEM, you just explained to Jenny Galruth, you're in charge of STEM for Education Scotland but you're not aware of any of this being flagged up as an issue. We can send that information out later today but I'm saying we're seeing progress. Do you know in terms of STEM? It's not what I asked, it's not what I asked. Andrew, do you have any any context in this one? Well in terms of the additional support for a learning point that Susan Boyd wrote I think the Cabinet Secretary has committed to a review of additional support for learning. That came up in a book on that and I'm also aware around the increases of teacher numbers that have been taking over the previous years. I mean I think in particular there's more primary school teachers than there have been any time since some time ago, since I think 1980. So there are rises there. That's not the point Susan Boyd was making. She was making a point about support in schools for teachers in private practices. I appreciate that and I've made the comment around the support element of that, that it's something that the minister has committed to looking at. Susan, can I just go back to the point that you were making earlier on about your union submission in relation to initiatives because it very helpfully sets out, well I can count five, but I was also thinking about languages in primary schools as well so I can think of six initiatives that you as a primary school and Elizabeth as a primary teacher are being asked to as a word implement if that's the right expression. Do you get a sense or are you given guidance as to what's the most important initiative? How do these initiatives work? I mean I don't envy you at all. This route's impossible to me because they're all really valuable. I get that but what's more important or are you given guidance as to what is more important? Well I think that in my staff survey one of the feedback comments and although it was anonymous you know obviously I know staff handwriting so I know who wrote this. One was the question of balance and even though I'm passionate about STEM I would have to agree that there has to be balance because that's what we all want for our children and I think what the NESUWT and other unions and members are highlighting is that of course we know that literacy and numeracy are hugely important and health and wellbeing and to be frank with you you know with the needs in my personal class at the moment you know I probably spent five months almost exclusively teaching literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing and you know but that was what that specific class needed and that was because of the support that I had within the school but now I've got more opportunities in the final weeks and months of the term to enrich the curriculum with a variety of other subjects so these initiatives we are aware of them all and we are all trying to balance them. Okay thank you it's very fair. Yeah I mean initiatives exactly we're all trying to achieve balance but in individual authorities there are different priorities I mean we have the national improvement framework that comes down and then each authority I'm sure you know this makes their own quality improvement plan and then each head teacher you know each cluster sometimes and then each head teacher and so the actual staff on the ground do then input into their own kind of quality improvement certainly in early learning and childcare and that will come from a combination of all these factors of what the government is saying what practitioners are saying and then we in early learning childcare what the children need what that cohort need what that community needs at that time and there how we as professionals I believe try and balance all the things coming at us. Okay thank you can I ask you one other question about your own submission because you made a very good point about taking children outside outside the school and into into the wider world and when I come from a farming background and when I was still farming long before I was in politics we used to have primary school classes all the time at landing time and they would come and they would pick up lots of silage and you know they'd learn about why we put fertiliser on a field because the grass grew and all that kind of stuff we don't get that now and you make a very important point in your submission about teachers and I suppose you're hinting local authorities here um trend towards this being solely about risk rather than learning about our world and the world would you want to just add to that because I so agree with that point. Yeah sure um I'm going to add to that I think that and the learning sustainability is kind of the background that I come with from this angle um I feel some again some of the policies like Care Inspectorate for example put my world outdoors out recently for a little and shackled not recently a couple of years ago now and it's all about getting the kids outdoors and for a long time that has been the priority because for some reason we went very into our schools into the playground and into the classroom so there's been a big push to get everybody out again which is fantastic but with that push there became a big slant in my opinion on risky play and the Care Inspectorate again because of their own perception people perceived that they didn't like risk so that's probably why they had to push this big we love risk be risky it's great and everything but because of that I feel that a lot of staff in early learning and some of the primary think that going to a forest is the most important thing and experience in risky play and I think we need a shift back to actually it's about learning about our world through our world and that their real contextual experiences so it's all well and good going to a forest and I think forests are wonderful but if you live in Mayfield for example in Dalkeith that isn't your reality on a daily basis or your community so for me going out into a local green space or even not a green space if you don't have a green space around you there's nothing worse than we made to feel like that's then you know that's detrimental to your health or your wellbeing you know so we need to go out and help these people love the communities that they're in and experience the world around them I think and are there some practical things that you'd like to see done as a teacher which would help that to happen well I think as you mentioned the care commission is it them and some other agencies that need to do a bit more and I mean they also recently brought out a document called out to play which is a kind of step further on from that and that does give more practical guidance about getting children out and within that I was pleased to see there was references to sustainability to learning about the little things you know when you're outside and embracing that so I think it hopefully is slowly coming coming in but teachers are in my experience still afraid to take children out they're afraid to leave the classroom they're even afraid to go into the playground because to be honest to some of the points Susan's made if you don't have that support with you and you have a class of 30 children and you have children that for whatever reason might present distress behaviours you know as a teacher you're not probably going to go to a farm unless you have a lot of support because you can't guarantee everybody's safety is the reality thank you very much for that history do you want back in yeah so just to make a point just to you know in terms of education Scotland's you know learning for sustainability for instance in stem you know shouldn't be viewed as initiatives learning for sustainability is an entitlement within the curriculum we know the young people as we've just heard from Elizabeth they're really passionate about getting outdoors exploring getting to know the world we've seen that for instance recently you know we young people's passion about climate change and reducing plastic within their schools stem as well as not an initiative it's a context for learning which gives learners a chance to apply their learning and meaningful and engaging contexts you know I'm really privileged I get a chance to visit schools around Scotland and what I really see with stem it's not a sense of this being a burden but just the energy and enthusiasm that comes from that and I think that comes through in a lot of the submissions and you know the you know the hearing or the information we've had today so stem is a really engaging exciting meaningful context for young people so what is education Scotland doing to break down these barriers that teachers face in terms of risk and one of the things we're doing in partnership with the Scottish Government is a getting out there resource which is online developed in partnership with the Scottish Association providers of outdoor education so it gives them support in terms of getting out there managing risk risk assessments and so on so that's a really practical way that we're doing that so giving them some guidance is what you've done guidance support how to manage risk assessments how to you know visit places like farms and forests but I'll get Susan Boyd the support she needs so just extra assistance in her class to get those kids out of school well that was one of the one of the things we did with the new race officer team came in post and we're actually going to be doing this with our stem team as well as we actually provide them with training and outdoor learning and taking stem outdoors so we can provide that support locally to clusters to schools to practitioners and within the regions I wanted to kind of pick up on on some points that have come up during the discussion there risk absolutely you know risk assessments are part of the growing workload that does hold us back in delivering all the areas of the curriculum and stem is included in that because a lot of our stem experiences are outdoors and for that we do have to go online and fill in risk assessments and and spend time involved in that and so you know that very nicely you know one of my big challenges here is workload and although there has been working groups on reducing teacher workload what I would say is that my experiences that those recommendations are wonderful but local authorities aren't necessarily implementing those and you know that is a huge pressure on delivering any valuable learning and teaching but especially stem okay thank you very much can I thank all the panel this morning for attendance at committee our deliberations will continue next week and I now suspend and move into private session