 First of all, can I apologise for starting late? We got caught up on another meeting up the stairs. Can I also welcome everyone to the fourth meeting of the Education and Skills Committee of 2018? And I'm pleased to be chairing a meeting of this committee in Peterhead this evening and pleased to welcome all members, witnesses and observers to the meeting. And can I just say how grateful I am that so many people have made the effort to get out in a cold night to come to this? It's quite a great turnout. As background, the committee is responsible for scrutinising the Scottish Government in relation to its education policy and in recent months the committee has been taking evidence in the education reforms that the Government is consulting on at the moment. The result of the committee's work will be recommendations to the Government on the reforms, including how they should be changed and improved. Today we are hearing from education authorities that sit on the Northern Alliance, a regional improvement collaborative that covers a huge area from Argyll to Shetland. The Government wants other areas of Scotland to follow the North's lead and have more collaboratives of education authorities across Scotland. We know that teacher recruitment is a big issue in this region and is one of the reasons why we were keen to come to the North East today. After a session we will have a more informal discussion on all the reforms starting at around 6pm. We have received apologies for this meeting from a number of members who have either taken part in other parts of the day. Ruth Maguire and Gillian Martin were with us earlier in the day for local visits on the impact of Brexit and school reforms. Apologies are also received from Liz Smith, Tavish Scott, George Adam, Oliver Mundell and Mary Fee. Also, Helen Shites from Aberdeen City Council was due to speak to us. Unfortunately, Helen is unwell. The first item in the agenda is to agree to take two items in private our next meeting next Wednesday back in Edinburgh. Are members content that we take our consideration of a response to the Scottish Government's consultation on education reforms in private at the next meeting? Are members also content to take consideration of our work programme in private at our next meeting? We now move on to the next item of business, which is on education reform. I welcome the witnesses to the meeting. Lons Finlay, Corporate Director Education and Social Care, Murray Council and Interim Lead at the Northern Alliance. Maria Walker, Director of Education and Children Services, Aberdeen City Council. I understand that Lons intends to make a short opening statement before we move to questions. Thank you very much and good afternoon. The Northern Alliance is a collaboration between eight local authorities across the north, north-east and also now west of Scotland, Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire, Argyll and Bute, the Western Isles, Highland, Murray, Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands councils. Our shared vision is to improve the educational and life chances of our children and young people. In order to remove the barriers to learning and to improve children's outcomes, the collaborative seeks to build on the strengths of shared service development, create professional networks and deliver continuous professional development. The Northern Alliance exists to make a difference to the lives of children and young people by ensuring that professionals who work with them collaborate for improvements and impact. We aim to work together to reduce inconsistencies in the system and to strengthen the support that we provide to all schools and practitioners across the alliance, making best use of our collective resources. Whilst regional improvement collaboratives were required to be established by the end of October 2017, it should be noted that the Northern Alliance has been working together on joint projects for a number of years now. Having come together initially in 2015 to start addressing some of the collective issues and the wicked issues we have faced, such as teacher recruitment and retention, and the alliance has evolved from then. As the convener alluded to in his opening remarks, the reach of the alliance is vast, covering 58.4 per cent of the land mass of Scotland, yet it represents a small percentage of the Scottish population. However, we all share many similar challenges as eight local authorities. In response to the governance review of education, the alliance has sought to further develop our culture of collaboration. This has resulted in the sharing of expertise in a range of areas. Curriculum development, school of states management, early years and integrated children services and community learning and development, amongst many others. Partnership working has enabled the Northern Alliance to deliver programmes such as Emerging Literacy and Leadership Development, which are already benefiting schools and teachers and most importantly young people across the regional area. The raising attainment in literacy, language and communication workstream is currently providing direct support to practitioners in 47 per cent of primary schools across the alliance. A key strength of our alliance is found in its commitment to distributed leadership at all levels. This approach allows flexible and organic partnerships to emerge which cross professional and geographic boundaries. We advocate a bottom-up approach which is reflected in the origins of a number of our workstreams, such as the Equalities Group and more generally in the practitioner-reformed approach that shapes all our activities. To summarise, we are a committed learning collaborative and as such we aim to continue to develop and learn as programmes are embedded and developed. We are committed to working in partnership nationally, regionally and locally and welcome wider collaborations and learning which develop impact and drive improvements across the country. Thank you very much for that. We have identified a number of themes for these discussions and I will work through each in turn. However, I will kick off with a question under the first theme about the Northern Alliance. If you could tell us a bit more about how the Northern Alliance came about and also you talked about Emerging Literacy. If you could tell us other ways in which it is adding value across such a wide geographical and diverse area. I take that start with the response to that question. We very much believe in organic growth as an alliance and we are very much a coalition of the willing and we are keen to focus not just on education but also to focus on wider children's services. Where we wish to work together, as I said in my opening remarks, we came together because of the teacher recruitment and retention issues that we face. We quickly began realising that we could add significant value by coming together where our resources could be pooled to the greatest effect. We are quite keen in terms of looking outwards in terms of system innovation and system improvement and we are quite keen to encourage our colleagues in schools, our headteachers, leaders of learning to work in a borderless cross-border way to focus on some of the major issues that were challenging us all and one of those was literacy. We felt that we could take a programme, which was very much focusing on early years and early level literacy, and we could take that and upscale it across the region. Using some additional resources that we were given from the Scottish Government, we were then able to upscale that project. Individually as eight local authorities, we would not all have been able to have taken part in just because of scale and cost and so on, so it is allowing us a level of development and innovation that individually we would not all have been able to achieve. We are all very clear in terms of our individual identities as local authorities and our individual areas of responsibilities, but we come together using our self-evaluation to really focus on the areas where as a collective we can make the biggest impact and the greatest difference to children's lives. Maria, would you like to respond to that? Yes, I think one of the areas, we have tried to focus what is the data telling us right across the Northern Alliance. A couple of areas, Lawrence has talked about early literacy, there is an issue about poverty in a larger area, how do you define poverty and how do you how do headteachers support young people who are in poverty in maybe perhaps affluent areas, and also in numeracy we wanted to look at early numeracy, not the very early numeracy that we were doing it for literacy, but more what is happening at primary 3, primary 4 and also what is happening in the secondary schools for maths development as well. What we have tried to do as far as possible is focus on the areas where we know collectively we have an issue and that together we can work together, so just to add that to the work in terms of literacy. Thank you very much. Can I just add, but the fact is such a wide geographical and diverse area, is there any particular issues that come along with that when you are trying to pass on this work? I think it is a challenge for us, but we are very good at using technology as far as possible, so while we cover, as I said, almost 60 per cent of the country's land mass, we encourage our teams and our colleagues as far as possible to use videoconferencing, to use audio conferencing and so on. There are times when people need to get together obviously for development purposes, but we do keep that to a minimum and encourage a virtual approach, and within our regional improvement plan draft, which will be submitted tomorrow, we are quite keen at extending that in terms of workforce development, workforce planning and the whole notion of a virtual classroom and how that could be rolled out and extended across the collaborative. But you do have to be very disciplined, I would say. One of the things that we realised early on is that we have to be quite disciplined about having a structure, so I think we started very well within terms of a culture of collaboration, maybe that was a happy chance or whatever, but within months we realised we needed to work about when we actually met, so the directors have a fortnightly meeting, it's a teleconference on a Tuesday morning at half past eight, everybody goes to that, and that's where we, if you like, clear a lot of the business. We then meet once every six weeks somewhere, either in Varys, Aberdeen or whatever, and that's when we look at much more of the bigger issues and the, if you like, looking forward as well. Gradually, because I think we were concerned that this wasn't a director's club, this was us in terms of the leadership trying to make sure that we involved everyone else, so what we've tried to do as well is to make sure that our heads of service and our managers and the headteachers get a chance to meet in a particular way as well, but you do absolutely need a structure, you need to have, you know, minute meetings, you have to have quite clear areas of responsibility, both for the business side of the things and for the more developmental pro-active side. It's sure like Morseby Ross, he's turned to hold a meeting soon. Richard. Thank you, convener, and good evening. One of the consequences of having been in Peterhead since 10.30 am this morning meeting lots of teachers as I have about 5,000 questions, so I'm trying to drill that down to about two or three. In terms of the discussions we've been having with teachers and as a committee over the last few weeks looking at the proposed education reforms which include regional collaboration, one of the issues is how deep that should go with that regional collaboration because clearly we have education authorities, schools themselves obviously, and we have the parliament role as well. So how deep do you think the collaboration should go for regional collaboration? I think it should go very deep actually in terms of taking that holistic view of a child's life that I spoke about earlier, and we were quite keen from early stages of our development not to be seen as a collaborative which focused on just policy and just development in an educational sense in terms of the national improvement framework for so on. So while we absolutely must focus on literacy and numeracy and health and well-being and employability developing the young workforce and so on, as outlined in the NIF, for many children and young people in our schools the support needed is much different. So it would be wrong to take a narrow education focus which is why we're committed to going to a further level of depth really in terms of youth work and you'll see in the draft regional improvement plan which is in with your papers that we've included CLD, community learning development runs through our plan. So it's back to that thing about it takes a village to raise a child, it's not just about the school, it's about looking at all the services that we manage as local authorities, education, children and family social work, CLD youth work and so on. So I think we need to go quite deep and not just have a narrow focus on education. I think though you have to be clear about the different roles within education and we see ourselves very much as local authorities who come together to collaborate and to collaborate in the areas of the work where we are just better together. But that doesn't take away the responsibility we have as local authorities to ensure improvement and to make sure that we work together to ensure that education is a really vital part for our young people particularly for those who are most in need of it. So the issue for me is about what is the added value of the Northern Alliance and what bits are, if you like, mine because I'm the director of education of Aberdeenshire and what things are the collaboratives and the area that I use most frequently is that if a school is being inspected or if it needs a bit of support or it's been inspected and it needs a bit of support, who gives that kind of support and I think that's one of the key areas that we need to be thinking about that the local authority is there to support all of its schools and to work with its schools as well but drawing on the collaboration of other local authorities we can make that learning for the teachers and for the classroom practice deeper but the big issue for me is about being clear about the different roles within education what's the local authority, what's the regional collaborative, what are the roles of education Scotland, where does policy begin and into implementation end and I think these are the things we still have to work on together. In terms of some of the feedback we've had, clearly we've had some really good examples of shared best practice which teachers in schools appear to have benefited from in the Northeast of Scotland in particular which is good news but the Northern Alliance has been going for three or four years and as you explained the instigation for it was very much to tackle the number of teaching vacancies so as MSP for Murray and Lawrence's director of education in Murray clearly I want to mention or ask the question as to what progress has been made, what contribution has been achieved by the Northern Alliance to fill some of the vacancies and come up with new ideas and initiatives because it's an ongoing issue it'd be good to have. Happy to kick off the response to that question I think since we had our initial summits in 2015 there has been significant progress across the Northern Alliance. We've worked closely with our partners in ITE particularly Aberdeen University but also the University of the Highlands and Islands and now Dundee in looking at innovative routes into teaching such as the Delight scheme such as increased an increase in approaches to initial teacher education being run by UHI for more remote and rural areas supporting existing employees to retrain as teachers and so on various incentives that we've all had that we've all shared with each other and at times you know gone into competition with each other because we're all trying to get teachers but most importantly collectively I think we've raised the profile of the issues around about teacher recruitment and retention because until 2015 nobody was really talking about us about it but particularly the Northeast authorities the former Grampian authorities but that national conference the sorry the regional conference we had in 2015 really gave us a focus and since then and you know we said that things were going to get worse and things have got worse and it's now not just a northern issue or a northeast issue we hear of schools across the country including in the city is not being able to recruit and retain teachers so I think we have given it a platform which was much needed and now we're starting to see a fair degree of national action in place to address it one more question speaking to the profession and given the fact that the Scottish Government are promoting more regional collaboration you said that you think it's important it's not a director's club as an education director's club and many teachers are asking um does this mean there'll be more bureaucracy when local government is facing cuts in some areas and staff are being cut back centrally that support schools uh how can we then support the bureaucracy of having regional collaboration at the same time how does that work and linked to that is it's quite clear there's a lack of awareness amongst teaching staff of who the northern alliance are what they do what they've achieved and also how the agendas are set if it is bottom up how teachers and staff and schools are influencing your agenda yeah I'm sure that's true teachers probably don't know very much about the northern alliance but I think if you ask the teachers about the early literacy project or if you ask some of the the secondary head teachers about what we've been trying to do or the head teachers about some of the work we're trying to do in poverty then they would know that and so I'm less concerned of the fact that they don't know about the northern alliance and more concerned of the fact that the if you like the product of the northern alliance impacts and learning and teaching across the northeast it doesn't you know that that's part of the the the work that we're trying to do is if you like to make sure that we um that we do we don't see we don't see us particularly adding to bureaucracy at all but what we're trying to do is to make sure that the the very best practice that's right across the region is impacted but quite often what will happen is that that will be done by a local authority member of staff and be done you know in the local authority schools so some of the work that I know is being done just now on the on the numeracy work is being done by each of the local authorities working together what they're trying to do though is to collaborate on materials development on curricular development on teacher training and that's what will impact in the schools and in the classrooms it may not necessarily you know it doesn't really matter that it's the northern alliance what matters is that the teachers are getting the chance to have really high quality cpd on on a particular area of concerns for all of us so I think I'm rather less concerned about that but more concerned about the fact can we make the impact in the classrooms yeah very briefly we're starting to see real examples of bottom bottom-up development as well and I mentioned the example of equalities and we identified collectively some issues that we were all grappling with that we needed to address but equally some staff came forward and said you know what are we doing to support lgbti young people across the northern alliance we're not doing enough can we set a group up and just start doing some work so we were able to give that permission to to to front line staff to get together to to take forward a focused piece of work so I think we're starting to see an increase in that that's just one example okay thanks convener I'm keen to explore the issues around accountability so accountability for yourselves at a local authority level is broadly understood decisions taken by departments for education children services or scrutinised and overseen by bodies of elected councillors and other relevant representatives how does that accountability work on that regional level when you're covering eight local authority areas so we have agreed a governance structure which you should have access to hopefully in your your papers so we have a regional improvement forum which meets as Maria said on a six-weekly basis and then on a quarterly basis we have a regional improvement advisory forum and that brings in colleagues from universities to some academic oversight education scotland the care inspectorate to apply some scrutiny to our plans and the work that we're leading forward and then we also have a convention of conveners so this is our plans are to meet twice a year with our convention of conveners and these are our key political leads for education and children services from the eight local authorities so we do have that quite a clear governance structure built in which is still very much in its early stages but it is there and we are currently are moving towards developing ways of working so we've got clear lines of reporting and reporting on our improvements and our measures and so on but the accountability still stays with each of the local authorities and we've been very clear about that and that's what the conveners wanted as well so for example um I think there's different kinds of accountability so you get because we're the collaboration of the willing um there's got to be mutual accountability that's built in a professional accountability so if you say you're going to do something you do it and and so we've all got particular areas that we will lead on within the work streams as well so there's that kind of general accountability and if you like a very light touch governance for that for ourselves as directors but for the conveners as well we agreed with the conveners that while the conveners would meet if there was a big decision to be taken it would go back to the local authority and that's how we've kept it and the the example I always give if there's a if there's a school that doesn't do very well in an inspection that in Aberdeenshire that's Aberdeenshire's issue it's not it's not Helens in in in in Shetlands that's for us to to support and to deal with it's not that's not part of the collaboration we can pull on the help from the collaboration but the accountability still rests with the local authority and I think it's really important that both the the officer accountability and indeed the political accountability has worked out keen to to follow up on that point the idea of it the northern islands its nature is as a coalition of the welling so just to quote from your plan it's given it is an alliance of welling partners rather than a formal decision-making structure it will not be part of the formal governance structures of each of the eight local authorities the proposals in the that the government's heading towards are not for coalitions of the the welling it's for legislative regional improvement collaboratives what impact would that have on yourselves would it be sustainable to maintain your current format for governance and accountability when you are no longer a coalition of the welling I think we would still be a coalition of the welling and I think we we have got such a clear structure that that would easily chime with with what is being proposed in the the reforms being suggested I think there is a danger then that you've got a couple of tears and it's back to my my theme I think about one of the things we really have to be clear about going forward is what are the different roles within the in Scottish education and can we be a bit clearer about who does what so if there was to be legislation about the regional collaboratives you'd have to be very clear about what that was otherwise you could have duplication and you also have to go back as who is responsible who is who is hit for particular areas of the work and I think both for our parents and our wider community and for yourselves as elected member and my own local elected members it's really important that we understand who is accountable for what because I think that's that's been difficult it's been easy for us because we have you like have grown organically but we've always remained local authorities who come together and so what we are doing is the added value I think as the northern alliance and I think as Mr Lockhead was saying I think there is an issue about us being really really clear about the added value that we're giving but I think we need to be really careful because you could have duplication and with your regional approach final question convener with your regional approach how does that work in practice if you're in a situation where you're trying to take a regional approach but you do not have unanimity of your eight local authorities have you proceeded with five six seven or is it a unanimity or there are eight local authorities which make up the northern alliance but we don't all need to be involved in all our improvement projects at the same time equally if in Murray I decided I wanted to go and work with Falkirk or Sterling for a specific project that's allowed and nobody would give me a right for doing that so it is just about encouraging partnership encouraging that sense of looking outwards to where the best practices and what best meets your local needs the result of yes thanks very much I suppose the first thing I would ask you talked about the coalition of the willing we've just come from a a focus group with head teachers with primary and secondary the majority of them had no dealings with you weren't very clear about what you did and where they were clear about what you were did they were not exactly enthusiastic they said that we would produce 16 work programs there seemed to me to be a sense it was in conflict with other bits of policy which is about driving responsibility down into schools how do you think that can be squared so I think what we have tried to do is to look at a number of issues at the same time we've looked at the fact that as local authorities were getting smaller we're we're losing resources we're reducing in size in terms of our capacity for improvement to support schools there are also a number of national improvement initiatives that we're all struggling to resource and to drive forward and we've also got the teacher recruitment issues and the retention issues and so on so what we have tried to do is collectively identify the areas that we're all struggling with and where we feel that we can start to pool our collective resource limited so that that may be in some areas to really start adding value and I think we're still very early on in that I mean although we've been together a few years a lot of the focus early on was on teacher recruitment and retention is really just in the past year or so we've started to look specifically at the improvement programmes but we are very conscious that we need to ensure that we're involving people at school level and I think the literacy project gives a prime example of that where the next steps in that project will be to look for our local leaders of literacy because it's unmanagable that one person can lead that across you know all the schools that we have in the northern alliance so we need to have people locally that can drive that forward so we can get that bottom-up approach and distribute that learning and leadership across the piece I think that's something we have to get better at. The message in the rest of the approach is that the leaders of on literacy would be the leaders of learning within the schools which would be a head teacher so you don't need to get somebody else to do it you already got somebody there do you think there's a difference between a coalition of the willing and what we're now going to have which is a coalition of the legally obliged that is I get that perhaps the northern I'll have to say I mean it's everywhere I've ever been in my holiday ever in my life is in the one coalition it's so massive that the I get that perhaps it's out of necessity has come together does it work if it's imposed as a model I think that's an issue I think it is an issue um um I think one of the I'm just pondering what you'd said about about the teachers as well I think the um it's really important when you're trying to do this kind of work that um you focus on the things that will make the difference in terms of collaboration so there's no point in coming together for things that um that you mean you're already doing quite well or that you know is working quite well in within within local authorities um and I understand completely um you know what what you're saying about the teachers and the head teachers what I would point to the fact that quite a lot of the officers within the councils who are responsible for if you like implementing and ensuring um the development of policy things like some of the additional support needs work or community learning and development um those officers have wanted to come together and have come together really willingly they wanted to do it themselves um we might have at the beginning focused on teacher recruitment in some of the curricular ones but they wanted to come together because they were learning um a lot from each other and if you like um trying to find efficiencies in in the way that they were um either supporting practice or developing um developing action plans etc so I think one of the areas that um we need to think about is how how do how does a local authority function in terms of supporting its schools and a lot of that is to do with the middle tier officers and I think in there the Northern Alliances would accept well and there's another just a couple of points very brief ones because it feels to me there's a complete inconsistency we seem saying voluntarily coming together doing what works on what works then having a structure which you're obliged to engage with at the same time as you have an approach which says we're going to devolve things down to the schools do you accept that there's a contradiction we can move on if you just simply acknowledge because we're doing something slightly different if we're testing a proposal which is not quite what your proposal is yeah can I ask then in terms of accountability about the role of Education Scotland presumably Education Scotland doesn't drive the Northern Alliance do you think it should drive should it should it be from Education Scotland who are the leading regional improvement co-operatives I think Education Scotland are a key partner and we already have a regional lead officer from Education Scotland who's provided significant support as we've put the plan together and we've had other support in some of the key developments that we've been leading on and I think what we would welcome as a Northern Alliance is the decentralisation of resources that could come from Education Scotland I think a complaint that I certainly hear regularly from my own schools in Murray is that Education Scotland has had a very central belt focus and it would be useful to have the development function decentralised and spread more equitably across the country and so we see them as an active partner and I think we should also be clear that it's not just Education Scotland we see as partners there are other nationally funded agencies like SILT for language learning and so on who equally could provide a more efficient and effective service in a regional manner. I'll ask if you think there's any final one. You talked about inconsistency do we not celebrate diversity is there not a danger tackling inconsistency becomes imposing uniformity at the same time again go back to the point in this contradiction that we're devolving power down and empowering head teachers to make decisions they want. I think it's inconsistency in terms of the support that we are all able to offer individually to our schools we're all local authorities of varying sizes with different financial situations and so on and as a such sometimes as a result sometimes the improvement offer that's provided can be variable across the piece which will result in some schools performing really well and others performing less well so it's about the consistency of support I think that is required through collaboration rather than consistency in terms of uniformity. I'd like to ask the question that just leads on from that one then how might the day-to-day job of a head teacher changes as a result of these reforms and how do you see that relationship between the regional collaboratives and head teachers taking control of their own well greater control of their own schools. Yeah I think the role of a head teacher is huge it's evolving and it's demanding and I think and I say that as a former secondary head teacher myself and it can only be achieved through distributed leadership and we are very keen as a northern alliance to identify who our champions are if you like across across our head teachers and we've got 569 primary schools 92 secondary and 92 secondary and 18 special schools across the northern alliance so it's a huge amount of schools we've got a huge pool of talent there and but equally we have a lot of teaching head teachers who are struggling to release themselves from the classroom at present to lead their schools to innovate so we are keen to identify where our champions can be in terms of leading learning and get them buddied up with each other that notion of twinning head teachers the head teachers and Murray all work very well together but sometimes they need to get out and meet people from Aberdeenshire or from Highland and to share practice and to openly challenge each other in their practice I think that's really important yeah how's it going to impact on their day-to-day job I mean how is what you're saying to me they are going to make life easier for the head teacher on a day-to-day job or more difficult for the head teacher on his day-to-day job to answer that you have to also ask what's the role of the local authority because because that's that's the big issue here as well is that just now and I'm sure this is one of the reasons why some of the the areas you've been reflected back the local authority is the person that is the local authority is who head teachers identify with the local authority is the one who gives most of the support so it's where is the local authority with the regional collaboratives it's not regional collaboratives and head teachers in there is a local authority as well and that local authority also has a role to play as well and that and the local authority will be would be part of that except that of course but as the draft is written then clearly head teachers are going to have a much more controlling role in the schools they're going to have much more focus on what they're able to do there's going to be the regional collaboratives local authorities are still going to have a role but it's not going to be the same role as it is just now and what I'm asking is as we've seen from there how does that impact on the day-to-day running of a school by a head teacher you know don't forget the local authorities I don't mean that but but remember that the the role of local authorities is going to change and is it going to change in terms of head teachers with these other changes for the the better or the worse they're going to make their job easier or harder I want to go back and say I think that's one of the things we need to clarify is what what are the what's the regional collaboratives doing are they added value to local authorities are they are they the bits that local authorities are better doing with other local authorities and the local authority functions within in terms of supporting schools quality assuring schools is that still to remain or is is that something that's going to the regional collaboratives and I think that's some of the work that needs to be done to try and clarify what the roles are a short answer is that what you should be expected head teachers should be expecting ever to think from the regional collaboratives is more support in terms of curriculum development and teacher teacher education because that's that is one of the areas where the regional collaboratives can actually give added value but there are other areas of the work to do with being part of a local authority that again need to be clarified. John John what you saw sorry was the balance between the school improvement plan and the regional improvement plan because again some of the anxieties that were coming from our group was once you've got a regional improvement plan with 16 work streams and whatever that must impact on the school improvement plan it must direct it and actually you then lose the energy that presumably is driven the idea of putting more down to to school level do you think there is a limit on school level decision making well I think well I think the school improvement the school improvement plan should be for the school and that's as we know the improvement plan should be based on the self-evaluation that the head teacher has done themselves what I think if you jump to and then the local authority and we don't want to talk about it but the regional improvement planning that we've been trying to do is to look right across the whole of the the northern alliance area and alliance area and say where have we got big issues that would be better to do to collaborate based on good hard evidence now I accepted it still quite early doors but the some of the big hard evidence are we definitely needed to do something about early literacy particularly early literacy teaching in the classroom and we definitely needed to do something about numeracy particularly in the middle stage of primary three and four and we definitely needed to do something about the broad general education and maths so there were things that we could see by looking at attainment well no no no but then we wouldn't ask every secondary but when you look at the totality of our data that we have within the northern alliance there's a definite issue there but it's not and of course it's not in all schools a different issue at local authority level it may be a different issue at school level the question is where is it resolved and the resources directed and I think what was being asked of us where is the primacy if resources are drawn on the basis of a plan does the local plan draw the resources or is it reliant on it being decided that it matters it may matter in one school and it doesn't affect any other school or are you saying the resource have to be directed where there's a bulk concern across that massive area so we target yeah we will target the resources the collective resources where they are most needed so if we focus on numeracy so school plan is not prime no it's not a primacy because if a school identifies a particular issue we have a duty collaboratively to provide the support that is required to that so the school will have an ask of the regional improvement collaborative if you like but they're not guaranteed an answer they can ask but they're not guaranteed an answer whereas I mean it is the fact that this policy that we're testing both recommends regional collaboration and says schools have self-determination if you like am I right you think and these are in conflict with each other I don't think they are in conflict with each other I just think we need to be clear about the difference between what we can achieve regionally and what can we achieve locally so if you take you know I strongly believe that a policy direction like developing the young workforce is best done locally because you know as a diverse region the employment needs of each area are very very different so we can share practice regionally but actually the development has to be done locally an area like maths attainment in secondary we are all looking to improve maths attainment in secondary across the piece across all eight local authorities so we we think we can better pool our resources there to support the schools because most of our schools are looking for support in that area thank you to take us a step back to where your plan comes from a number of the headteachers that we met today when your plan appeared it seemed to be that it essentially came out of the blue for them and the expectation was that the most effective way to build a regional plan was you start with your local plan potentially a costar plan local authority plan that your regional plan is the result of plans at school level plans at council level and it is drawn up to that rather than something imposed regionally so could you explain what process produced your plan did it come from these individual school level plans all the the major issues that I mentioned earlier that we were all struggling with individually as eight local authorities and where we felt we could we could collectively make a difference we then looked at our individual national improvement framework plans which were due in by the end of august which are obviously local authority level plans and we pulled out the key themes from those and that's what we've used to produce the regional improvement plan bearing in mind that we haven't had a long time to pull the regional improvement plan together our next stage after we submit the the draft tomorrow is to do that testing to get views from parents from young people from teachers from headteachers and so on so that we can ensure that the final plan that we submit in the autumn has fully taken cognisance of everyone's views saying that for your plan to be drawn from the individual school plans depends on the local authority plan to have done the same and has that happened in all eight so if you look you should be able to see some kind of thread between a school and the local authority plan and the regional plan the concern was that for the headteachers we were speaking to that thread was not at all obvious i think that's probably right but given the fact that you know the timescale in which we've been asked to improve the plan and you've got to start somewhere but i think what we're trying to guard against for headteachers and for teachers this is not about an additionality and another part of a plan that they have to take this should be the taking from all of the local authorities and what we know ourselves what we need to be doing clearly we were discussing earlier how the northern alliance is a collaboration of about half of scotland's landmass and i assume it's the the the agenda is dominated by rural issues clearly in terms of the authorities we're speaking about and we were discussing the pupil equity fund because the number one priority from the first minister in the Scottish Government is closing the attainment gap in terms of education policy and the pupil equity fund clearly is playing a role in that and that appears to be a popular funds and with lots of positive feedback but schools are using it differently in different areas which perhaps is just expected but i'd have thought one of the key roles for the northern alliance would be to look at that kind of issue of what is the best way to close the attainment gap in rural areas and what's the lessons to be learned from that fund so i was just wondering if that work was underway or if it's something you're planning to do that work is certainly underway and there's an event on the 7th of march which is bringing together which mr schwindie is coming to to speak at which is bringing together head teachers from across the northern alliance to look at best practice in terms of use of the pupil equity fund one of the concerns we have as a northern alliance is that we're very much aware and well we're of the belief that being rural in a being poor in a rural area can be very very challenging in terms of accessibility transport and so on and we're aware that there are moves afoot nationally to look at how funds such as the pupil equity fund are distributed because SIMD data does not always do it for us because it looks at you know a massive population that we don't always have in a rural area and i'm aware that there's a group nationally looking at that and we are represented on that group and i'm hopefully it will it will report positively in the future and relating to that is the the wider debate about the impact of poverty on attainment and clearly not all issues can be sorted out by teachers and classrooms or staff in our schools it's a wider society issue and there's many social issues if children are not fit to learn when they come to school for various reasons then clearly all these questions can't be answered by education are these issues being looked at as well as part of that rural agenda yes absolutely again in our draft plan you'll see cld community learning and development running through the plan youth work running through the plan and also wider children services and that goes back to my opening remarks that we're not looking at education in isolation here as a school entity we're looking at all the different aspects which can support a young person's journey through school and therefore improve their attainment including parenting and so on move on we are coming to the end of the session it seems to have flown in still a number of questions we'd like to have asked but before we finish up just last question can I ask both of you your view on head teacher charter more over than just how it touches on day to day but you know what your your general view of the teacher charter is the view is that there seems to be a disparity between primary and secondary here and particularly in authorities like ours in the north and northeast particularly where we have a lot of teaching head teachers and there seems to be a feeling in some of the literature that we impose curricular policies on schools and we don't we provide guidance to schools and many of our head teachers welcome that guidance and want that guidance because they are teaching head teachers who don't necessarily have the time available to innovate to develop and so on whereas on a secondary setting you very often have head teachers with larger teams round about them who can develop the curriculum and so on across the northern alliance our head teachers already recruit their own staff they already have flexibility in terms of how they make up their teams round about them in terms of the promoted post structures and so on so that there's not a huge amount in the charter that we don't already empower our head teachers with so that would be my view on it Maria. I would agree that as well I think it would be it's helpful to clarify again I'm back in my hobby horse about clarifying the roles and responsibilities in each of the areas within within education in Scotland as well but we do we do want head teachers to feel that they are part of a local authority and that's what we try to do but that within that area they have as much empowering responsibilities they need to be able to do it so if the charter allows us to to be clear about that then that's that's a good way forward but the devil's in the detail I would say that absolutely true and that's why we're taking these evidence sessions to try and get as much feedback as we possibly can one of the things that came out of the of the focus groups we were speaking to today was though that in terms of the flexibility that head teachers has it seems it seems to vary from local authority to local authority and how does that work within something like a regional collaborative where what you're trying to do is if you've got best practice somewhere surely you want that rolled out elsewhere and to the comments earlier about we're not looking for uniformity across the piece we're wanting to celebrate diversity in all the differences that our schools have but we want to provide a vehicle to allow our to allow our head teachers to look outwards that we haven't been very good at doing traditionally we've been very good at doing things 32 times over as as individual local authorities so this is just a way of encouraging people to look beyond their local authority boundaries to to another patch to another part of the country where they might get support or where we can create a professional learning network of practitioners in a particular subject area maybe the local authority is telling them that they can't look beyond because they don't have the flexibility then that really doesn't give them the opportunity to do that that not be right that would be right but I think that certainly the message that we're giving out corporately is that we want to we want our teachers to be able to to look outwards and to innovate with our colleagues that might not be the same across scotland but certainly in the northern alliance that's that's our aspiration okay in that case can I thank you both for the evidence that you've given today and I hope you'll be able to stay for the informal meeting discussions on the reforms and that is the end of the formal meeting thanks very much for everybody's attention i'm really keen to make the most of the time we have for the informal discussion so can we take five minutes to have a comfort break grab a coffee and a biscuit and then i'll kick off the session after that thank you