 I welcome everyone to the 31st meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017, and can it please remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? The first item of our business is our second evidence session as part of the early scrutiny of the Scottish Government's proposed education reforms. Last week we had a very interesting evidence session with academics. This week I welcome Frank Lennon, a recently retired head teacher and a representative of the commission on school reform, Danny L. Mason, head of research at the education endowment foundation, and Dr Rebecca Whittlefield, chief executive officer of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I'll begin questions before inviting contributions from the other members. Last week we heard about the evidence based on the proposed education reforms. Do the panels have any views on how best to implement these reforms, particularly in regard to the changing governance and accountability structures, and if they have differing views from the reforms, if they would like to expand a wee bit on what their alternative would be, that would be helpful? The starting point for me in preparing for this session has been looking at the evidence of what works to improve outcomes for pupils in education. At the education endowment foundation, we aim to improve education by supporting schools to act on the evidence, and at the very highest level what the evidence tells us is that approaches that focus on the quality of pedagogy and interaction between pupils and teachers are the approaches that can have the biggest impact, and at the lowest cost. I find it valuable to consider how the different elements of these reforms can deliver better quality teaching and learning, and there are just two important points that I wanted to start with. The first is that autonomy needs to be accompanied by support and good evidence. It's no good having the freedom to make decisions if you're not also provided with high quality evidence to support your decision making. Just to illustrate the point, many individual school level interventions aren't effective at raising attainment, so only one in four of the projects that we assess when they're robustly evaluated demonstrate enough promise to warrant further funding, and that figure is in line with similar organisations to us. All leaders who are making decisions about teaching practice and curriculum implementation they need high quality evidence of what works and what doesn't, and I think the second point I wanted to make is that collaborations need to maintain a strong focus on pupil outcomes. So again we've evaluated a number of projects which involve collaborations between schools or the sharing of interventions and approaches, and as you would expect, collaboration in and of itself isn't enough to improve outcomes. Our experience is that collaborations work when they're structured around interventions and approaches that focus on improving the quality of teaching and learning. Thank you very much. Anyone else? I mean, just building on that, I mean, I think there's a key point about, we often talk a lot about evidence into policy but then evidence into practice and how actually things are implemented as equally as important, so the policy might be sound but if it's not implemented effectively on the ground it's still not going to achieve the outcomes that are being sought. I mean others like Danielle are better placed to talk about the specifics of educational reform, I'm not an education expert but there seem to be some fundamental basics which are about engaging with people, so taking folks with you and that's consistent with any sort of change programme and being willing to learn as those changes are implemented so that you continually improve what's being done, and building capacity as Danielle was saying as well is really important, and allowing sufficient time, and I think the spice paper in particular gave a clear example in Sweden where rapid decentralisation had had not the best outcomes because it had been done very quickly, so taking account of the readiness of a system to change and piloting where that makes sense, I think it's quite important in terms of making sure that the implementation on the ground is led by evidence as actually the policy itself. I think the focus on implementation is the critical bit about where we are in the reform of schools. I frankly think that structure is important, that if pedagogy and pupil relationships are central to improvement of learning and teaching, the culture in which those thrive is determined by the structures, I think that the Scottish Government is quite right to reform the structure and to push in the direction of more autonomy, so I'm very much in favour, both from my experience of being a headteacher, but also I think just someone who's a children that's gone through the system that more autonomy at school level is definitely worth pursuing. I think the difficulties are how it is done. I'm a bit puzzled as to why, in the Government proposal, there is no sectoral identification. It's all schools, irrespective of whether it would appear primary or secondary, irrespective of their state of readiness or their willingness, they've all got to do it, so there's an irony here. We want schools to have more decision-making power, we want a school-led system, another phrase that I'm strongly in favour of, and I think that the commission's school reform has been arguing this point for at least four years, possibly longer. The irony is that in order to give schools more autonomy, we're compelling them to take more autonomy, and that seems a bit perverse to me, and it's possibly unnecessary why we can't have incremental change as we deal with the point that Rebecca has made about getting the pacing right. I think that more autonomy is likely to be more successful if the schools judge themselves to be ready for it, if they have an assessment of their own capacity and readiness, and I'm in no doubt that there would be a significant number of schools that would judge themselves to be ready for it. Those are likely to be in the secondary sector, I would suggest, and there's some sort of survey evidence that kind of indicates that. Primary headteachers, I think, on the whole are much less willing to take on the risks, as they see it, of being cast adrift from the local authority if cast adrift is an accurate way of describing it. However, I also think that if there was a degree of school control over the timing of the autonomy and the extent to which they embraced the details of the headteachers' charter, that would encourage a buy-in and would reduce the chances of a kind of grudging compliance, and that's one of the problems that we've got in Scotland. I think that there's a notion of compliance on the one hand with whatever the employer, i.e. the local authority, says that a school must or must not do. I mean, recently, we had local authorities determining the number of subjects that had to be offered in fourth year, clearly not a wise policy. However, if there was some school involvement in that, I think that that would reduce the chances of there being a grudging compliance and, therefore, perpetuating what I think is a characteristic of the Scottish education system, which is this conformity compliance situation. Secondly, I think that it would encourage more diversity. There may well be schools, given their circumstances, that will come up with much more imaginative ways of engaging parents, of ensuring a degree of democratic accountability. I know that the local authority argument is well what happens if schools are completely autonomous. I'm personally not in favour of schools becoming employers, but there ought to be a way of ensuring a high degree of local accountability by, for example, requiring school boards or parent councils or whatever organisational setup that we choose to help monitor schools. We could require them to allow every elected member. Most schools are now in multi-member boards. You could have four elected members on a school board that would guarantee a degree of democratic accountability. I think that autonomy and structure, therefore, can lead to culture change, encourage innovation. I think that there is a lack of innovative thinking in Scottish education. I'm not blaming anything for this. This suggests the way that it has been recently. I think that the most urgent thing that we face at the moment, given that we have a headteacher charter that clearly spells out what decision-making schools should control, is all about how we do this. I think that the lock-step change where everyone at the same time defined, it seems to me, by a political timetable we have to show measurable improvement in the lifetime of this Parliament. Daniels and Rebekah have already suggested that it could take a lot longer than three or four months. I know that this Parliament is going to be extended by another year or whatever. It is still not going to be enough to demonstrate real improvement or real narrowing in the improvement gap, although there may well be some indications of it. It seems to me that we need to seriously consider how we do this and a serious look at allowing schools to make some kind of self-evaluation of their readiness and their capacity to take on the new responsibilities. Thank you, Mr Lennon. Part of the reason why we are here is that we want to have a close look at it and see if there is anything that needs to be done or any suggestions that can come from the committee. Just to go back on the point about the lock-step changes that you are talking about, is there a danger of schools not having a date that some might be comfortable with what they are doing and deciding that they want to stay as they are, even if it is to the benefit of certain people but not the pupils? I can see the argument there. If you go for lock-step change, then everyone is in the same boat, even if the boat is sailing round in circles for years. That itself is a bit of a danger. If you allow a degree of incremental change, then early adopters might gain an advantage or a disadvantage and therefore jeopardise some concept of equality and equity. However, we have been here for four decades, and I have been in education for four decades. We have hardly moved the attainment gap or any other gap you care to look at between the most advantage and the least advantage. It seems to me that this change of direction is long overdue. I am just very disappointed that it is not more widely supported. That is partly because the education debate, probably since the implementation of curriculum for excellence, has become politicised in a way that party politics has exercised in a way that it was not before. A tremendous consensus during the national debate on immediately following it on the purposes of Scottish education is a remarkable achievement. When you look back on it, we have a fairly clear definition of the philosophy of Scottish education. No-one argues about the four capacities in the longer. It is all about the implementation. Here we are now following a period of budgetary constraints during the implementation of curriculum for excellence. It certainly did not help matters. However, there is now a feeling—I deeply regret this, I have to say—that the position adopted in some of the education debate is determined about whether or not you support one party over another. I think that it is about time that we set that aside and said what the Government proposals for a headteacher charter, it seems to me, should have overwhelming support. The fact that they do not bothers me, and it is partly because we have not made clear the sectoral differences and we have not signalled up to the profession as a whole that their particular anxieties, given their circumstances, size, sector, simply are not mentioned in the document at all. That is, I think, a mistake, but it is a rectifiable mistake. We are at the beginning of the process, so thank you, Dr Waterfield. I will pick up on the lock-step conversation. I am a researcher by background, and so I take as my starting point the evidence base. It does seem to be—I am not an education expert, but it does seem to be, at least in certain spheres, that the evidence base is contested or at least not unambiguously clear in terms of the right approach. Unless we are really clear about what works, there is an advantage sometimes in piloting so that you can test out different approaches and then you can learn, so that when you then roll out more widely, it is based on informed knowledge and learning. That will not be the same size that fits all right across the country and in different schools. The role of piloting has a real advantage in enabling people to learn and then that learning to be shared more widely. In terms of teacher buy-in, one of the things that we found effective in our work and that our partners in other countries have found effective is coming back to this fact, which I mentioned before, which is that it is the interaction between teachers and pupils in the classroom that can have the biggest effect on pupil outcomes. You find yourself in a position where it is teachers who can make the biggest difference. Although some of the practices and some of the interventions that we have worked in could be viewed as top-down, but once you focus on that fact, the evidence shows that it is teachers who can make the difference. That tends to be a really good starting point for a collaborative approach and shared responsibility for progress. To help us to understand the context a bit better, Mr Lynyddu, could you expand on what you think were the factors at play that moved us from general agreement about the direction of Scottish education into more conformity and less appreciation, perhaps, of diversity and the issues? Why have we got into this lock step, which does not seem to be doing much good? I think that there is a paradox here. I think that the consensus and the high level of consensus that resulted prior to the implementation phase of CREC infrex and so before 2010, there was such uniformity and such a consensus about the direction that the Scottish curriculum should go in and the fact that it should not be legislatively backed. Here I would like to pay tribute to the MSPs who, when the Parliament was first opened, I thought we were going to get nothing but legislation on the school curriculum given the significance, but in fact that has not happened. We do not have a legislatively backed curriculum. So there is a great willingness, I think, across the profession to accept the general direction of it. That, I think, carried us through quite a difficult period in terms of funding. A reform on that scale should have had far more funding, frankly, than it did and it coincided with the financial cracks and so on. No one really blamed the Education Scotland or the Government for that. We just kind of got on with it. I think that what has happened then—I was a headteacher throughout this period, of course—and it did seem to me that whatever criticisms one might have had at school level, one was very reluctant, certainly as a headteacher, to voice them for fear of jeopardising the general flow. There was a sense that we did not want to contradict or in any way upset the general thinking on curriculum for excellence, so we simply put up with a lot of things. Frankly, the way that it was managed at the implementation phase, where every time there was any kind of concern that was detected in the system, we got another 10,000 pages worth of guidance, it was simply very poor management, I think. Again, I am not trying to blame anyone—that seems to me to be what has happened—but that did lead to, throughout the implementation period, a sense that we will just have to put up with it. How many subjects were we going to offer, given the number of hours per course that the SQA was stipulating? Although I do think that they were given a brief, which they worked to. I am a bit less inclined to criticise the SQA quite frankly at that stage. I think that thinking about how many hours the new national exams could have been better handled. We ended up with an arithmetical division of the total number of hours in a school year by the number of hours in a course, and we ended up with five or six. In other words, we had the same number of subjects in fourth year as we had in fifth year, because they specified the same length of time for national fives as they did for higher. That was clearly a mistake looking back on it. I do think that it is unfortunate that that consensus did not allow honest, reflective criticism to emerge. That was partly because, as is always the case—it was certainly the case in my last six years as a headteacher—where the imminence of an HMI inspection figure fairly largely in one's mind. The idea that you would do anything different from what appeared to be the consensus was quite tricky. In fact, in my school we did do things a bit differently. We made sure that we offered seven subjects, but that required quite a bit of self-confidence and a degree of risk, as it were, because parents are very conscious of that. We have to sage now where we could be doing with far more open criticism. I just pursue that point. It fits what you said in your paper about the conflict between autonomy and the structures that are top-down. That is what we are going to have to wrestle with as a committee, as a central issue about governance reform. To what extent do we move to an autonomy system for headteachers, but without all the structures that go around where it has been very top-down? I entirely agree with your comments about the way it was led. That raises another question. If we do not have those structures, that would mean very considerable autonomy and diversity within the system. Do you think that that would be predicated on the headteachers' charter being perhaps the first thing that the governance reforms attended to in order to give heads the confidence to be able to lead and to make changes and to perhaps be more critical, self-critical of their own school in a way that you suggest has not happened? That is a genuinely complex question. I am not in favour of giving heads, in that sense, telling them that they now have confidence. I do not think that it can be mandated in that kind of way, but I think that the direction of travel ought to be clearly signposted. I regard the headteachers' charter as a major step in that direction, but I understand the complexity of what happens at local authority level or regional level. It is not at all clear to me whether the removal of the local authority improvement plan, which is what all schools currently, first and foremost, align with. They have a sense of the national improvement framework and so on. If that goes, what authority do the regional leads in the regional improvement clarities have over individual headteachers? If the heads decide one thing and it does not quite fit well, to whom do the regional leads report? I mean, I know the report to the new chief inspector, but it does seem to me unclear what their relationship will be to individual headteachers who are working to a charter, so that needs cleared up, I think. Can I ask you one final point on this? What relationship do you think there ought to be between Education Scotland and the regional collaboratives? The regional collaboratives? Frankly, it is not the critical relationship. The track record of Education Scotland recently suggests that it ought to be a bit more focused on schools. The idea that Education Scotland focuses its attention on the Government because the Government is the customer, as it were, has been part of the problem that we have had. So, whatever role Education Scotland has, my concern would be, as a former head, is that it does not interfere with innovation at school level, genuine innovation, and I think that we could trust schools a lot more to genuinely innovate if we reduced some of the guidance or accountability that is required of them. It is interesting to me that, for example, the recent move in the direction of water autonomy for schools has been hedged about with so much guidance that we are not entirely sure whether it has worked or not. The pupil equity funding is full of accountability. Head teachers are constantly producing paperwork to account for what they have done with the money to the local authority. Some local authorities have set up additional boards to monitor it. What should have been a tremendous freedom for head teachers is, in fact, hedged about by all sorts of concerns about whether they will spend the money appropriately or not. I think that that is part of the difficulty with the role of Education Scotland. As a head, certainly throughout the period of implementation of curriculum for excellence, I did not find them particularly helpful at any level. I am sceptical about whether, structurally, Education Scotland can be reformed sufficiently to improve that relationship with schools. I think that it may well be stuck with a quasi-government role, where it is constantly looking to... I do not know. I am greatly welcome, the appointment of the new chief executive of Education Scotland. She may well change the culture and we will take it in a different direction, but the evidence so far does not leave me to be very optimistic about it. Thank you. We have got the opportunity to ask them about the future direction. Daniel, do you want to come in about the cultural change? I think that you have more or less answered the question. I just thought about Education Scotland and its role. Thank you, convener. I ask about the point that you have both been making on primaries versus secondaries. Would you elaborate on the arguments why they should be considered to be dealt with separately? My observation is that all bar two of the primary heads in my constituency teach, so quite when they find time to do anything else is quite beyond me, but I would rather you give some intellectual clarity to that. Precisely the issue. The level of flexibility for leadership and management at the primary schools is much more constrained. One staff absence can remove a head, well not remove a head, but if a head has to cover usually herself or an absent teacher, run a coach and horses through the idea that head teachers are there to lead learning and develop and support staff, where all you are doing is plugging gaps in the cover. I think that that is a fundamental difference, but the other difference is that the range of leadership posts—this is why management structures are so important in the head teacher's charter—will give individual heads the right to design their own leadership structure within the budget, although what the overall budget is and how it is determined remains to be seen. However, if there is a defined overall budget and a primary head, for example, of a relative of the small school, is allowed to design it, how are you going to require her or him to define a promoted structure if it is largely dependent on covering for absent colleagues in the course of the year? The amount of flexibility would have to be put into that budget to guarantee that. I think that in some small primaries it would be absolutely enormous—it would be doubling its budgets. What would be the best reform in this area? Would it be to take secondaries and let them develop in the ways in which you have all been so hard? That was my inclination. I do not know enough about the primary sector from personal experience. It is all I make total, but having worked with several primary heads over the course of being a head teacher of a secondary school, it seems to me that the secondary sector is certainly more amenable. It may well be more important to provide more autonomy at the secondary level. By and large, primary schools seem to me, certainly in Scotland, to do a pretty good job. I think that secondary schools do as well, but there is more scope for real improvement, as we all know, looking at some of the statistics from the lower school. However, the issues seem to me to be similar in the sense that if you give more control to the head teacher, you will give more control to learning and teaching and, therefore, pedagogy and, therefore, culture change. However, it will be very expensive in primary schools, where they do not have the same efficiencies of scale. Thank you. Are there other witnesses of a view about this important distinction between primary schools and secondary schools? I am not in terms of the specifics, but I think that the points about capacity and capability are well made and the resourcing that might be required around that. Again, I am not an expert in these particular reforms, but the work that we have done, trials in schools, projects in schools, capacity, I do not need to say that it is a massive issue. One of the main reasons that we find that things do not work and are not implemented well is because there is not the time and there is not the capacity for teachers to step outside the standard classroom activity and get involved in CPD and innovation and change. So, absolutely, I take the point on that and there needs to be capacity in the primary sector, but I suppose the thing to stand against that is that the job that we want to do and the narrowing of the gap between disadvantaged pupils and other pupils, that does need to start in primary. We cannot wait until all the evidence that we have on interventions that start at secondary school is that I do not want to say that it is too late, but you do not want to start, then you do not want to start at 10 or 11, you want to start as early as possible. I will like to ask later about definitions of autonomy in the role of headteachers on that, but I just want to particularly ask Daniel Mason. You said that the most important thing was interaction between teachers and pupils. You might argue that there is an issue about what the pupils bring into the classroom with them as well as what the teacher brings and the challenges in some place, but I wonder if you thought then about the extent to which the autonomy should rest with the individual teacher as opposed to the headteacher. Where I came from in education, I was at the bottom of a very top-down structure as a classroom teacher, and while we hear a lot of the language around autonomy, it seems to settle at the headteacher level. Is there any evidence around the degree of autonomy that individual classroom teachers should have? I do not know of any evidence specifically of the impact of allocating autonomy at different levels of the school teacher and the impact that that has been shown to have, but in terms of our experience of working with teachers and the different types of interventions that we look at and the impact that they have, there is this group where there is just no way that you are going to make change without having teachers on board. Obviously, teachers already have a lot of autonomy in the classroom. What they choose to do and the way that they choose to interact with their pupils is going to be hugely significant in whether or not teaching and learning is effective in their classroom. I think that autonomy already exists whether you like it or not, even if you wanted the most top-down system in the world. I suppose it is about combining that with another level of interactions, which are really about headteacher responsibility rather than individual teacher responsibility. We talk to heads and teachers, and what we try to do is demonstrate that so many of the interventions that make a difference are either the responsibility of teachers or the responsibility of heads. I suppose that it is trying to empower a profession to say that you have decision-making powers, whether you are a head or a teacher, which makes a genuine difference to the outcomes of pupils. It is not a different level. We talk about secondary education. There is an intermediate level, which is at subject level. You might argue that in terms of education in the classroom, that relationship is more significant than a headteacher in a large secondary school who may have overall responsibility, but it will not necessarily be the person who is in a position to direct around the quality of teaching in a subject. Is there an argument for autonomy at subject level? Absolutely, but I am not the best person to decide whether or not those things need to be legislative. I suppose that what you want is a culture of autonomy within the school, and the headteacher charter can be the driving force behind that. One of the things that you would hope an autonomous teacher with access to good evidence and good continuous professional development and the tools that they need to support them will bring the whole school into that at the necessary levels. You have a headteacher, subject leaders and many other senior leaders in the school who have decision-making powers, which are important for deciding which interventions are going to make a difference to pupil learning. Is there an argument around autonomy to a teacher's shorthand for taking decision-making into schools as opposed to a person who gets autonomy and then directs what happens within their schools? I suppose that there is a difference between autonomy and accountability. There are obvious arguments for having a clear line of accountability, but autonomy over your practice and empowerment of you as a professional seems to me to have to go throughout the school, not just be about a single individual. It comes down to matters of leadership as well. It is not just about how those responsibilities are exercised, and you would expect, I would imagine, the headteacher to be engaging with teachers, parents and learners. I think that distinction between autonomy and responsibility is important. They might have the accountability, rather, but that does not mean that it is not exercised through engagement with other people. I am very interested in picking up the idea of piloting schemes. Is there a merit in being a little bit bold—I am very bold—and piloting different methods in different areas and then looking and analysing the results? I mentioned this last week to the panel. I am thinking of schools, secondary schools and primary schools that work in very close partnership with one another. They are the ones that I am always most impressed with. They are the ones where secondary school pupils might be in subject areas, might be involved in primary teaching, might be in languages or getting involved, so that there is a flow between the two tiers of school. Is there a merit in looking at different methods of clusters, targeting areas where attainment has not been particularly good and trying new models and being bold with that and then reporting back? I think that there is a lot to be said for that, particularly if the evidence base is contested or incomplete or we are doing new things that might not have been tried before. Seldon, will we know all the answers before we do something? It is not a perfect world, so trying out different things in different areas, particularly if you can get some degree of comparability about some of the challenges or the structures that already exist. It does not always need to be set up. It could be natural experiments where you have already got things working differently in different areas and you can compare and contrast and you set some controls around the parameters for that, but I think that that does enable better and greater learning if you can look at what has worked somewhere and what has maybe been less successful somewhere else and then share that learning and think about how you adapt your approach going forward in areas that have similar characteristics, so I certainly think that there is a lot to be said for that approach. We should be a little bit more relaxed about the risk involved, maybe something is not working but learning from them? I think that is absolutely critical. It is critical of this whole debate actually building in that learning culture and that learning culture at all levels, so actually something not being as effective as you might have thought it wanted it to be and not achieving its outcomes as long as there is learning from that, as long as mechanisms have been set in place to evaluate it from the start and as long as it is not reckless, it is a calculated risk because I think otherwise you do not get innovation, but that does require a maturity at all levels around actually being prepared for things not to work and then to amend and change them without them being seen as a U-turn or things like that, so there is a culture there that is required in terms of actually how that learning is responded to, but there is a real risk of a fear of failure that then prohibits innovation, so I think piloting really has a role to play in that. I think it is extremely important to think about designing that well, so there are many ways which can be relatively inexpensive and relatively straightforward to learn from piloting, but there are countless examples of governments piloting, innovating and not learning because they have not laid the groundwork for understanding how you evaluate the impact of something, so it sounds like a great idea to learn from pilots, but make sure that what is built into that is real learning of impact and the cause and effect of this type of partnership and this type of outcome, so that is essential. That means that it is really important that you identify right from the start what are the outcomes that are trying to be achieved and what is the data that is required to be collected in order to be able to determine whether or not that has happened. What piloting is not, is doing things in a few places and then rolling it out more widely, unless you have actually learnt from what has happened within that. Thank you very much. However, you were going to go on to governance, if you would like to. Sort of, convener, but I was also probably going to link back to a couple of things that we have heard already. One of the things that I hear from teachers in my constituency is not dissimilar to the points that Tavish Scott made was round smaller rural primary schools. A number of them don't receive any pupil equity funding at the moment because of how the funding formula for that has been worked out. Particularly those teachers do worry about the flexibility and the idea that if governance reform goes ahead, as proposed, good schools that have flexibility will see an improvement and those who are already struggling or have limited flexibility could go backwards or that that attainment gap for their pupils could widen. Do you think that that is a realistic possibility? First of all, governance is not going to close the attainment gap. No one thing will close the attainment gap. However, if we are seriously concerned about developing the Scottish education system and the quality of education right across the four capacities, as it were, then we ought to be open to flexible forms of governance. That is basically all the Christian school reform has been arguing for. We are not saying that we should scrap the current system and introduce a new one, lock step, as it were. The argument that is a bit more sophisticated than that is to take account of the nature of schools as they are and their capacity, but also, crucially, how they see themselves. It may well be that some schools need to be encouraged to see themselves as much more effective than they possibly feel currently. They may have greater capacities than they are aware of. That is a certain possibility. Changes in governance such as putting schools or allowing schools to form their own clusters, there are plenty of secondaries with, as has just been mentioned, very good working relationships with clusters that could be built on and developed. However, there is nothing to stop an individual secondary school. The problem with a cluster around a secondary school is what clusters the secondary school is in. It needs a secondary school network as well, but none of that is outwith the bounds of possibility. I just feel that, at the moment, as it is set up, the head teacher charter looks to me as though it is a kind of lock step approach, everyone at a particular driven by a timetable that is not the schools and probably not even any of the current local authorities. The idea that we should be looking at individual circumstances and allowing schools far higher levels of participation in that decision making seems to me to be crucial. That is the kind of thing that might change the culture. Creating an embedded learning culture at management leadership level in schools is as important as a teacher level. Teachers are very predisposed to reflect on their own work in being self-critical and so on, but not if they think that they are going to be rated on it every two weeks or every term or whatever. Changing the culture to allow people to make mistakes without their professional reputation being impugned applies equally to schools. We should be signalling up at this point in Scottish education a change of culture for the profession and not just focus on the idea that it would be better for everyone to have more autonomy. Does anyone else have any further comments? The second question was about problems with the implementation around curriculum for excellence. Do you think that those issues are sufficiently resolved to allow enough trust to have been built up with teachers to take forward governance changes at this time? I think that the jury is still out on that one quite frankly. The experience of curriculum for excellence was so bruising for schools that some of the damage done there may well be irreparable. I do not know. I would hope not. I certainly think that the current proposal will signal up an intention nationally to do something about it. What we are arguing about is not that we want—no one is arguing for the status quo, at least I hope not—that the idea is what would be the best way forward. My view is certainly that it should be a consensual way forward, but that should not allow—that should not forbid—rigorous debate, which is part of what the committee has so effectively contributed to over the past few years, particularly the scrutiny of curriculum for excellence and the management of it. I am optimistic at the moment. I would think that if provided we do not fall into the trap of just mandating everything from the centre to be then policed by Education Scotland in a combination of regional improvement, collaboratives and local authorities, we may well have the opportunity here to create a more diverse system that would allow different types of clusters, different types of partnership and schools would feel released to be creative. I think that there is a huge pent-up potential in schools that has been held back by fair failure and compliance with local authorities. Some local authorities have given points systems to schools to make sure that they all have the same leadership and management structure. In retrospect, that is beginning to sound really bizarre given the range and diversity of schools. I think that the primary sector has suffered badly from that comparison with secondary schools in their far fewer pro-rata, the far fewer promoted leadership roles in primary schools than there are in secondary schools, and they have been reducing it in secondary schools. Had teachers had much more authority at school level, I think that that is a better guarantee of teacher autonomy than you will get from something that is mandated through the curriculum. We have tried that and it did not work with curriculum for excellence. My only worry, I suppose, is that curriculum for excellence is beginning to sound like an actual curriculum. There are to be opportunities for individual schools, perhaps in individual small primary schools, to deviate from it quite dramatically without being punished, as it were. There ought to be that flexibility in the system, it seems to me. I am going to just pick up the culture point, because there is a question in the meeting's papers about whether policy makers can create culture change. Frank spoke earlier about the culture of compliance. I personally do not feel that policy makers in and of themselves can create culture change, but what policy makers and Governments can do is create frameworks that support and incentivise that. If you think of things that I have done to enable things like gay marriage, for example, that support different attitudes to homosexuality or are more restrictive in terms of things like the smoking ban, I think that it is all part. Going back to the point about trust, it is about developing and delivering policy with rather than done to. It is a bit of a cliché, but I think that it is an important point. Exciting people behind a shared goal and a shared vision, rather than because of the culture of compliance that Frank referred to. At the end of the day, in terms of trust, it has to come down to some fairly fundamental points about transparency, openness and mutual respect. That is how you get trust in a system. There is some high-quality research evidence about the best way to implement change. Trust and shared responsibility are key factors there. My organisation is going to be producing some evidence for schools putting that type of thing into practice next year, but there is evidence to draw on. I take on board what Frank Lennon said that governance itself will not bridge the attainment gap. It is a whole basket of measures that are going to do that long term. What is the role of governance in improving outcomes for teachers and in the classroom itself with young people? Is there a role for governance to help to make things better and to drive improvement forward? I certainly think so. Part of the difficulty is that a teacher knows when there are problems with school leadership, when the only rationale that they are given for a policy at school level or teaching and learning policy is that the HMI wants it, or Education Scotland wants it, or some outside agency that is to whom they feel accountable once or the local authority has appointed so-and-so to go around schools and check. That is the worst type of governance. It seems to me that creating a situation where schools are genuinely leading the system. Some of the language in the Government publication is just wonderful—a teacher-led, school-led system. Decision-making at school must not be overridden—that word is used in the document centrally. There is a lot to build on there, and it seems to me that it is in exactly the right direction. The problem is—I think that it is—a structural problem. If you create more autonomy at school level, what you will get, by and large, is not a series of rogue headteachers out to further their own nest or develop their own careers. I think that what you are more liable to get is a much more closely focused school on their intake, on their parents, on the diversity and challenges that their children face, and you will have far more imagination in how to deploy resources if headteachers feel they are in control of it. Again, it is one of the other paradoxes. We are not going to get collaboration, in my view, unless we have very high levels of autonomy. Mandated collaboration is not collaboration. We have got to encourage—the reason for Northern Alliance work is precisely because it was not mandated from the centre, so we now have a chief inspector that understands that. Every right to be hopeful about the future direction, the worry would be that the regional collaboratives will become another policing measure that local authorities go to headteachers with and say that they must have that because it is in the regional plan—very much in the way they used to say that they have to have that because it is in the authority plan. That is the difficulty. Governance can be very intrusive at school level, and it has been traditionally. Much of it is required—I am not for a free for all, as it were—but I think that the level of policy-making at a national level has to be much clearer than it has been, and that would allow a much wider range of innovation at school level. This has been one of the key issues that has been raised by the RSE in our submissions to date, since not the governance is not important, but understanding better the evidence in terms of how changing the governance will lead to improved outcomes. I think that the Government has sought to provide more evidence in some of its more recent publications, including the recent consultation, but I think that what would be useful to see is a comprehensive review of the evidence base that actually really documents that—it is actually how governance reform can make a difference, because I think that that would give credibility and weight to the proposals and help-build support, because it would be easier to see exactly what governance changes lead to what improved outcomes and how and why they do that. OK, one of the—so, are we saying, particularly in Mr Lennon's case, that probably the regional bodies along with the national bodies, probably a flexibility between local, regional and national then would make it more—would make it work better than just actually a rigid approach to coming from the top, although we still have national outcomes and we'll still have each region will probably have their outcomes as well? I'm still not too clear about that person. I have to say to whom is the chief inspector reporting, who's line managing education Scotland? Still not clear to me. There is some kind of reporting, but is it at the information level or is there a line management link between the chief inspector and the Government? There is this residual problem of the inspector in Scotland inspecting their own policies, so we're never going to have policy failures in Scotland if that keeps going. I do think that separation or clarity of role—that's another structural issue, I think—needs urgently to be addressed, I would suggest. I do think that at school level, a far higher level of authority will be self-empowering for individual teachers. I think that this is probably more true in rural primary schools where they feel dragged by local authority policies into whatever conventions or formulas being used. At the other end of the scale, you might get much more interesting openness about pedagogy that we've frankly not had in Scotland for a long time. We've become a professional bandwagon jumper, whichever comes along, you better jump on it because that's currently what the HMI will be looking for. I think that we need to stop some of that and allow people to try things out, fail and not be pilliried. One of the points that you've brought up during—you've got four points here, which you've gone down. You've told us to break down your belief in the breakdown in political consensus and the culture of compliance, but the systemic leadership weaknesses and the lack of diversity and innovation, you've mentioned it but you've not really gone on in detail. What exactly do you mean by giving me a more detail? I think that the lack of diversity and innovation is evidenced by school structures. With 358 secondary schools—much what I have to say is about secondary here—the diversity and innovation that I'm thinking about that largely comes from my experience in reading of the last few years about where we are. It's remarkable to me, given the diversity of Scottish schools, that virtually every state-run secondary school in Scotland is led and managed in exactly the same way. They will have proportionately the same number of deputies, probably with similar remits. They will have accountability systems at school level that are pretty much the same. Going to staff development courses or sending staff to staff development courses, they basically come back with stuff that you're already doing, or people think they're already doing. Finding or hearing of something that's genuinely innovative is problematic. That's partly because local authorities, for reasons of equality, don't want one school looking very different from another. I understand all that because they're responsible for all of their schools. Say, for example, that you wanted to double the number of principal teachers of pastoral care in a school. A local authority could quite easily say, no, the norm for a school of your size is three, and that's all you're allowed. The head teacher charter does away with that. A school can say, no, in this school we want 12 PT1s instead of three principal teacher salary points, PT6s or whatever. It's still within the same budget. Until the head teacher charter, no head teachers could guarantee that they had that authority. That's what I mean by lack of diversity. If you get that diversity into the school's structure system, it will have a knock-on effect inevitably on the climate in the school, and I think that you'll get genuine innovation at pedagogical levels. There's plenty of teachers that are innovative in the classroom, of course, and many of them will now be picking up on the educational endowment toolkit that's been developed, but that's been around for what, eight years? It's almost as if—I'll be looking at it as I had teachers since about 2008—'89, but it's suddenly arrived. It's suddenly new in Scotland. I'm delighted that Daniel's here, but that kind of mechanism has just not been part of our culture because it's too innovative and it doesn't have an HMI imprimatur on it. In fact, we have to have a Scottish version of it, not just for reasons of alignment, but because it's got to be Scottish before anyone will really look at it. I have a quick question just to follow on from what Oliver said. In general, last week, Keir Bloomer told us that it wasn't so much how much money you spent, it was how you spent it and where you spent it, and one of the debates that we have is that the SIMD is quite a—some would say crude measurement in areas like mine and Paisley. It probably is pretty accurate, but in Oliver and Tavish's area, it probably doesn't find a way to find where rural poverty is. It's currently always seemed to have. Keir mentioned last week the possibility of free school meals. I read the Royal Society's paper on it as well, and he didn't really come up with anything to say, what is another way of doing it. Are there other ways of looking at trying to identify that data, get that data and get the money into the right—as Keir Bloomer quite rightly says, it's not so much the amounts, it's getting the right money in at the right time at the right place? The Government's commission on widening access recommended looking at a unique learner number. I do understand that some work has been done within Government to begin to explore the feasibility of that. It's not that SIMD shouldn't be used at all, but it needs to be used with individual-level based data. If there is work on going to look at a unique learner number, it would be certainly worth exploring that further. I absolutely agree on that. The area deprivation is not a great measure for identifying individual need. The majority of deprived children do not live in deprived areas. They used to work on the index of multiple deprivation back in the day. It is important that you find a more individually targeted way to ensure that children in particular areas that are not deprived do not miss out. It's not insignificant. In our paper, we are missing about a third of the deprived children if we just use SIMD, and we are including a quarter of children who are not deprived. I just wanted to make the point that I feel quite strongly about that, that there are impacts within communities of there being a lot of deprivation, within a community, not just for the individuals who are deprived, but the impact it has on our school and its capacity to deliver anything is affected by the fact that three quarters of the children are deprived, not that a quarter of them aren't. All of the services in that community are affected by the fact that there is a density of deprivation within communities. I wonder whether that recognises a balance. I get the individual argument, but I'm just taught in a school where there's a significant proportion of the children who are deprived. You know it's not just an impact on them, it's an impact on the other young people in the school as well. If you're working at the individual level, then you're recognising that density of deprivation within the school. If you do have three quarters or half of the young people in a school who are deprived, you recognise that density at the individual level. For example, the capacity to teach a child who's coping very well might want to do five hires. The chances are that their ability to get the quality of education to get them five hires is going to be affected by other choices because, according to the kids, it's not that there's not a lot of bright children there, but the impacts on their lives, it's not just them and their families, but everybody within that community. The idea that somebody's developed SIMD because they don't want to do the hard work of finding out where poor children are living is missing the point, but it is the impact on services more generally in areas where there's a density of poverty. I think I made the point that it's not that you don't use SIMD at all. I mean I don't think anyone's saying you don't use SIMD at all, but you supplement it with unique learner data and it will depend on what you're trying to achieve and how you're trying to achieve it and actually what you're trying to measure. But in terms of unique learner numbers, as Danielle says, it allows you to look at school level as well to see actually how it plays out in terms of individual deprivation. Just a brief supplementary to George Adam's very fair question about Education Scotland earlier. Mr Lennon, your paper is very clear about your concerns about Education Scotland as currently constituted and you've just given us the view that inspection and policy should be separated. Apart from that point, which is pretty fundamental, what should Education Scotland's actual role be in the future? It does seem to me that this is quite a difficult one structurally, I think, but if schools are to lead the system, then Education Scotland should serve the schools. So schools should, as it were, towards additional responsibility coming schools way and teachers way, if that is the case. I think at the moment that the problem has been in the management, the six years of management of curriculum for excellence. Education Scotland was seen as as it were, keeping the train on the tracks, but not really doing anything about the quality of the carriages or whatever the metaphor might be, I don't know. I think we really do need to turn that around a wee bit. Schools need to be much more focused on the curriculum and seek advice from it. It tends not to have happened in the past where a school that goes to another agency to seek advice is admitting failure until there are cultural reluctance there. I don't blame Education Scotland entirely for that kind of conundrum, but I think that there is an opportunity to try and do it now. It may well be that regional collaboratives will work, but it seems to me that if we are going to improve the quality of learning and teaching, then it has to be done through staff development and schools that know what staff need to be developed and where. The issue about subject development is a particular issue in secondary schools. Obviously, if there are relatively few subject specialists in a particular school, how do they get their professional development? We have to find a way, and it ought not to be outwith the wit of our professional community, to come up with a system that empowers the schools to seek advice on or as part of a cluster or as part of a network, to seek advice on X, Y and Z. The worry is that everything is initiated by Education Scotland and is then evaluated by Education Scotland. It is already mentioned that genuine empowerment, particularly at the primary level, is expensive and that a number of the issues with the implementation of correct confrexolence were either compounded by or, in some cases, created as a result of that happening at the same time as some quite significant budget cuts. My concern is that, regardless of the specifics of those structural reform proposals, where they are right or wrong, I am wondering if any set of such fundamental reform is destined not to succeed if it takes place at a time of continued significant budget cuts. If any change in that drastic is not resourced, what chance does it have of succeeding and will any potential failure be put down to, will the reasoning behind the conventional wisdom be that structural reform is a mistake or will people be able to correctly identify that it was a result of budget cuts and not any inherent issues with the proposals? I think that that is a key question to some extent. It is exemplified, perhaps, by the requirement in the head teacher's charter that heads a point every member of staff to their school. The issue that arises is that if a school role is declared as someone's declared surplus and a head in that particular authority chooses not to employ that person, there has to be someone who will have to be some kind of financial mechanism to allow that to continue. There is one of the issues about that. A part of the difficulty with the implementation of correct confrexolence was precisely that it did take place at a time of drastically shrinking local authority budgets. Although there was resource available where it needed to be available, schools were constantly being asked to cut staff. It is just about the only way that you can save money in a school now. It is really from your staffing budget. That dominates the 2 per cent of the budget that head teachers have control of, but I think that that is a bit of a worry. If the funding of schools probably needs to be much clearer, the formula that is used or whatever the mechanism is used to decide the budget has to be in the public domain and open to scrutiny, it seems to me, in order to make clear where the issues might arise. Obviously, there is talk going on at the moment about fair funding for schools, but it may well be that the success or otherwise of the governance review falls down on funding. It depends, obviously, on how the reforms are implemented. In the consultation documents, it is very clear that this is not intended to be an extra layer of bureaucracy and demands on schools. If it is possible to manage that, rather than being an extra layer of demands, it is freedom to focus on the things that are most effective and most cost effective. A time of tight budgets is the time when you need to do that kind of thing. Identify the things that you are doing in your school that do not work and generally are not effective, and focus money resources capacity on the things that have been shown to be most cost effective in improving outcomes. A theme at both today's session and last week's session was all about capacity and capability. Ensuring that you have sufficient capacity and capability, I think that there are a number of dimensions to that, one of which might be funding. I think that the point that Daniel Mackay makes is well made, but it is also the time question, because that will depend on how much capacity and capability people have got to bring to bear on something. Dr Woodifood, you mentioned quite correctly the contested evidence in this area. There is a recent paper by the Government's Council of Education Advisors that stated their belief, based on the evidence that culture and capacity were the most significant issues. That seemed to chime more with the response from the teaching workforce as well as parents pupils, etc., to the Government's initial consultation on that. Is there a danger that, regardless of whether reforms are correct or not, that trying to implement them in the face of what is really quite significant and strong opposition, particularly from your teaching workforce, what are the dangers of trying to implement that in the face of such opposition being unable to carry that workforce with you, because they do not believe that their primary concern has been addressed? The way to do it is incrementally. What you are describing is effectively a scenario where everyone does it, whether they want it or not. The argument that I offer is, do not do it that way. Find those areas. They may be significant, we just do not know, where there would be genuine enthusiasm and willingness to go and do it that way. Remove the timescale. The timescale seems to me to be part of the difficulty. The idea that by the end of this Parliament there has to be a set of statistics that show narrowing or closing is a pressure on schools that they could do without. If there could be a clear articulation of the evidence base around some of this, it is not the only way, but it is a way of getting greater credibility and support for those proposals for people who might be opposed to it, because they do not know what the evidence is saying in terms of how effective or otherwise changes might be. There is always resistance to change. Any major change programme has some resistance. It comes back again to points about trust and respect and transparency in the way that the process is done, not just what is done. Just a couple of questions, one of which perhaps follows up Ross Greer's question. In terms of workload, I think that Danielle's comments were that you think that there is a potential to lighten teachers' workload, because one of the big issues that we hear about as MSPs is teachers' workload in our local schools. Those reforms hopefully will provide an opportunity to lessen teacher workload, and I just want to know if that is your view as well. It very much depends on how they are implemented and how the different governance structures and relationships work, but certainly our experience is that that is a huge issue for teachers as well. There definitely are ways to improve performance at the same time as reducing workload. Just to give one example, there are lots of marking practices at the moment, which teachers find very resource intensive, which have no evidence behind them whatsoever. We produce a report basically looking into the evidence on that, so stopping doing things that there is no evidence for, or even in some cases that are shown to be harmful and putting more resource and time into things that are known to be effective sounds simple. It takes strategy from ahead and buying from teachers, but there are ways to make things better at the same time as reducing workload. I think that we are having this debate over the education reforms in Parliament and throughout the education community in Scotland, but one way in which teachers themselves in the classroom will judge the success of the reforms as they impact on their workload. Teachers complain about their workload, they complain about the pointlessness of a lot of their workload. That is part of the difficulty. Teachers do not resent working hard. I think that what really exacerbates a teacher's working life is that much of their time is spent doing—often it is pointless bureaucracy—masquerading in some kind of quality assurance, which they then have to repeatedly do. Again, far more control at school level where we say, well, we are not going to do that, or looking for the precise of the kind of advice that the Education and Well Endowment Foundation can provide when looking in detail at it and having the confidence to say, well, we will stop doing this would be a definite way of making or taking things forward. The worry that I would have about it is that we would talk about the workload as if it was a uniform thing. I think that there are schools and individual departments where I am quite sure that teachers work as hard as any others but do not feel that they are oppressed in the way that some others, because of the nature or the culture of the environment that they are in, I think that I would be for being a bit more specific about looking at teacher workload. Two quick points in relation to that. I think that one is about not seeing the governance reforms just as a sort of standalone intervention. There are also the other initiatives and interventions that are going on across the education system, and those will all come together at different ways and play out in different ways. The other point about stopping doing things, the only caveat that I would make to that, is that you often need to invest time in order to be able to save time, because you need to be able to have that time and capacity to step back to look at the evidence base to see what is working and then make some decisions about actually stopping doing things. My final question relates to my constituency of Murray. In that, we have some well-publicised challenges facing our schools in Murray at the moment, and one of which is the shortage of teachers, and particularly the shortage of supply teachers, which is putting huge pressure on the current workforce. I wonder to what extent some of those issues relate to the fact that it is a small education authority, and this turn links into the debate that we are having here about regional collaboration, as well as more autonomy to schools. How do those two themes that are surrounding the education reform debate impact on small education authorities? Do you think that Murray being a small education authority is a factor in some of the not necessarily distinctive challenges, but very much big challenges that are facing our schools at the moment in Murray? Well, it could be. I have not taught a particularly small authority to understand the issues. The flexibility that exists currently, for example, between primary and secondary schools, to share staff is very limited. I would hope that, in a paradoxical way, some reform of the GTC might loosen up some of those arrangements and make some of the demands for cover a bit more manageable. I am pretty sure that professional associations will be very alert to that kind of thing. However, for example, in a cluster where you have seven or eight primary schools and a secondary school or whatever, there might be more flexibility, even in a small authority, to operate some of the personnel issues holistically than constantly having to worry about the individual institution. I think that that kind of innovation might come with some of the structural changes, but also with the look at the education workforce council. Okay, thank you. Daniel? If I can paraphrase a little bit some of the things that have been discussed, what I have heard is that the increasing autonomy is a necessary condition, but not necessarily sufficient and collaboration is the other critical factor. Last week, I spent a bit of time asking around the OECD comment about strengthening the middle. Do you think that that is what is required in order to bring about that collaboration? Do you think that there is enough focus on that from the Government's review as it stands at the moment? If not, what would you like to see in terms of that strengthening the middle? I am not so sure about that. I think that the regional collaboratives could become weakening the middle because they could have another layer of accountability, so that is a danger of them. The intention to share expertise across a wider base is entirely laudable, and there is some evidence from the Northern challenge that that did work. The answer is that we need to do something about strengthening the middle, but I do not think that it should be at the expense of the school autonomy. If we do not have a high level of school input into that middle area, we will not have moved forward significantly. We look at how you put evidence into practice in my organisation. One of our experiences is that teachers listen to other teachers. At the moment, we are setting up a network of research schools for sharing of best practice, but just to be clear, evidence-based best practice. We definitely have recognised the need as an organisation for a layer above school where there can be shared learning and collaboration and sharing of evidence. I know there is a lot of discussion about definition of the middle, and I do not want to wade into that, but certainly there is value in having the space somewhere to have shared experiences and shared learning above the single school level. Is that about making sure that the regional improvement collaboratives are accountable downwards as much as they are accountable upwards? Does that also have a clear implication in terms of the consultation around funding mechanisms? That will, regardless of how you state things, ultimately behaviour follows the money. One of the things that they could be is an opportunity to provide that space for shared learning and high-quality focused collaboration. There are many things that they could do, and we have talked about some of the things that they could do that would be unhelpful, but to provide a space for high-quality collaboration with a focus on outcomes and improving the quality of teaching and learning, so that school-focused and teacher-focused would be a valuable contribution at that level. Can I finally ask that there has been an awful lot of discussion from all the panellists about the role of evidence and demonstrating that? Do you think that a component of this governance review needs to be how we demonstrate how we use evidence and build evidence? One supplementary point to that is, do we need to have another look at what international measures we are using and what role they play? In particular, I think about the ones that we use, PISA and the ones that we don't, such as Pearl and Timbs. I will let Rebecca speaking about this in a lot more detail, but my organisation focuses on a particular kind of evidence that allows us to assess whether something has had a particular impact, whether an intervention or a reform has caused the change that you see in schools. There could be a greater focus on this type of causal evidence, because without that type of causal, there are many different types of data and evidence that are valuable, but without also looking at that type of causal evidence, it is very difficult to predict impact. After the fact, to say whether or not something was responsible for the change that you see. We would advocate a greater emphasis on that. The other thing to say about that, of course, is that evidence in isolation is never sufficient. Bringing a professional judgment to bear is obviously essential. I think that the type of evidence that you need depends on the questions that you are seeking to address, but in a sort of major reform programme of this kind of nature, you need to be drawing on a wide range of evidence that would include both the sort of formal statistical evidence as well as things like judgments and experiences. One source of evidence can seldom tell us all that we need to know, and particularly when you are looking at evaluating the effectiveness or otherwise of particular interventions, the causal data that Danielle was talking about is really, really important. We might have statistics that show how things are changing, but knowing why those things are changing is much more challenging. It is not just the types of evidence I have, but it is also the quality of that data and the robustness and the rigor of the interpretation of it. That is quite a skilled task, particularly when you are bringing together evidence from different sources and different places, where I think that harnessing better the capacity and capability that exists in Scotland as well as an organisation south of the border to help with that is really important. Evidence has to be a key part of this. I think that as part of that, it is thinking right early on. What are we trying to achieve? What are the key indicators of its success? What data are we already collecting and where are the gaps in that data that we can make sure that as we go forward, we have the right data that will enable us to make those judgments and assessments about whether something is achieving the outcomes that it has been set out to achieve? Another thing that is worth saying is that our experience in England and in some of the other countries that we are working with is that schools are really enthusiastic about being part of this evidence building project. We have had more than a third of all schools in England now have been involved in one of our evaluation trials, so there is a real enthusiasm. People said that it just was not going to be possible to do that kind of trialling in schools, and it really has. There has been an enthusiasm for it, and it pulls schools and teachers and professionals themselves into the process of evidence building and learning and improvement. That is absolutely critical. It has to be more than the academic community producing the evidence and then it being presented to the schools. Schools have to be absolutely part of building into that evidence base and understanding and learning how they can use it to best effect. I am interested in exploring the tensions in the policy and some of the contradictions, because it looks as if we both want to direct authority down, but to create collaboratives that are accountable directly up to the minister. I think that there is a contradiction there. The competition between what I would say is entitlement for young people and for staff and autonomy. Frankly, I mentioned the question of a structure at school level as a check-in balance against what the head teacher might do. You talked earlier about rogue head teachers and having a friend. Anybody would do such a thing, but would you accept A that there has to be limits on what the head teacher does? Where are the checks and balances at a local level and how do you think that they would look? I agree with the challenge there that schools, if they have to have democratic accountability, there has to be a mechanism at school level where that is evident. Frankly, it does not exist at the moment. Elected members rarely—you could ask your local councillor for this, if that is the case—but elective members in my experience rarely have ever attended a parent council meeting. Even when we had school boards, I am now at the stage in my career where I can look back longingly to the days of Michael Forsythney's school boards. I now think that the school boards provide an ideal of a mechanism that could be reintroduced that would give, with high levels of accountability, those schools that choose to go forward with it, might well be on the condition that they have an accountability mechanism at a local level that would allow scrutiny from elected members or an officer of the council. I do not think that that is incompatible with a high level of autonomy. At the moment, local authorities are struggling to provide any kind of meaningful support other than personnel support. Even then, headteachers complain repeatedly about delays in appointments or that they cannot get staff to blame the local authority. The truth is that local authorities have slimmed down their staff to the point at which they are incapable of offering high-level quality support. We have a de facto system at the moment where local authorities cannot fully service the needs of the school. I feel that this is an opportunity to do something about it. I accept that there is this tension if the regional collaboratives end up having a powerful middle-tier role. In other words, if the regional leads are line-managed by the chief inspector, they are appointed by local authorities. I am still looking at the situation and whether the local authority leads will report to elected members from the consortium or what the mechanism there is. I am not even sure what the constitution of the panel was that made the appointment. That might give us a clue as to who has the real authority there. However, the accountability issues will certainly have to be clarified, it seems to me, before we take forward a headteachers charter. Otherwise, you will be in this awkward position of deciding whether the school's decision to take at the school level, even if it is backed by the local authority or not, might come into conflict with the regional plan and which one prevails. I am interested in that. I go back to the placing requests. We thought that school boards were the most dreadful thing that had ever been invented. I suppose that some of that was about reluctance to change, and I accept that. However, I wonder whether there is another tension, which is that the school being represented by the headteacher, as opposed to what the school community believes to be right. If I can give you an example, it is rational and logical and certain. I have worked in some communities where you say, in terms of the needs of this community, we should invest in learning support and behaviour support, as opposed to providing five hours. However, that comes right up against the desire to be a community school that can serve the needs of all the young people in that area. In those circumstances, how do you get that balance of autonomy right when it is about the headteacher being allowed to make a decision but what the school community might find? It can see the logic of it, but it ends up creating a different kind of school that might be from the school down the road. I can see the danger there. Frankly, I do not recognise the idea of headteachers currently, as their role is currently defined, exercising that degree of feudal power, as it were. They would just decide that we are not having support for learning, we are having five hires. Every school currently, in almost every authority, is required to have a school negotiating committee, which is representative of the staff—the staff elect the members to it. The school negotiating committee in every school, and this will be true at primary schools as well, will agree the workload for teachers or the development plan or whatever for that school year. Usually, that is the organisation that makes the school workload or the overall division of budget allocations to school priorities. It tends not to be the headteacher sitting in his or her office speaking to like-minded individuals. It seems to me that it would be important, if for no other reason other than that there might be people in the community with that kind of concern, that there is a clear definition of what the accountability measures are for individual headteachers. The parent councils currently do not provide a sufficiently robust scrutiny of what is being done at the moment, but you could argue the same from the local authority point of view. If there is one last tension that I would observe here, the profession through the professional organisation of trade unions wants to have a level playing field for their members so that there are national negotiations, national bargaining. Being a principal teacher in one school should be much the same as it is in someone else with the same terms and conditions. Is there a tension there? I alluded to it earlier with the whole question of somebody's surplus in one school. Where do they go if an individual school has authority over staffing, yet autonomy without having control over staffing does not feel very logical? How is that tension managed? Is it reasonable, in your view, of the trade unions and professional organisations to say that there should be an evident view of what a principal teacher should be doing or a deputy head across their schools? I do not think that that is possible. I think that the arrangement of gods is as good as we are going to get. We have a national pay scale, so for principal teachers, for example, there are six points on it, depending on your level of responsibility. There is a job-sizing toolkit that was agreed and developed with the professional associations, which is used in every authority. At the moment, you can be a principal teacher of history in one school and be on a different salary point from a principal teacher of history in another, depending on how your job-sizing turned out. The job-sizing is to do with the number of pupils, the number of sections in your subject, the line management that you have, the budget that you have and so on. There is already in existence mechanisms to ensure a degree of fairness, but part of the difficulty here is that the schools are so diverse in terms of their intake and the amount of money that they can attract from pupil equity funding or from other forms of deprivation allowance or whatever, that it is impossible to match individual principal teacher posts exactly across the system. The system, at the moment, is as good as we need for that kind of thing. It would permit a degree of judgment to be made at school level without professional associations feeling that they are members of staff who have been unfairly treated or not. We have covered regional support structures and collaboration quite a bit this morning, but bearing in mind what Daniel Mason said, earlier collaboration has to focus on pupil outcomes and we have spoken quite a bit about the challenges of collaboration. I would be interested to hear how regional improvement collaboratives can improve the quality of support that is provided to schools and teachers and, therefore, improve the interaction between teachers and pupils in the classroom, which is, of course, the most important thing. We have probably covered accountability as well, but that was the other bit that I was interested in. If you have anything further to add on that, I would be interested to hear that too. When it comes to collaboration, as I have said, the evidence suggests that what is important is that collaboration in and of itself is not enough. There has to be a clear focus and a structure and scaffolding around what it is that everyone is trying to achieve. We looked at interventions where teachers, broadly speaking, meet and talk about evidence that they go back and talk about that with their colleagues. That does not seem to have a huge impact on attainment in schools. Where teachers are coming together with a school that is developed and tested in intervention and there is a lot of structure around it, there is a manual, there is a clear link between the evidence on teaching and learning and how this intervention is going to improve outcomes in schools. We see higher effects and clearer effects with that kind of collaboration. In terms of our focus on teaching and learning, that is what I mean with regard to that. Just on accountability, on a slightly different topic, but as you asked about it, one of the things that came up when we were preparing for this was the importance of looking at range within schools as well as average attainment. Looking at the mean schools within a school or mean results can mask poor attainment for particular groups of pupils. Especially when you are introducing change and reforms, as is happening at the moment, making sure that all pupils are benefitting and that all teachers and all lessons within a school are delivering for pupils is really important. One way to look at that is to look at the range of outcomes that a school is achieving as well as the averages. I would say that the most important thing about this is that it is school-led, because if it is top-down and opposed, mandated from outside the school, it is unlikely to get by and necessary to make real change at classroom level effective. If we can encourage schools to identify where they need the development without feeling that they are somehow selling their staff down the river by saying that they are no good or ineffective or whatever, that would be really helpful. The regional collaboratives might be able to facilitate that, so if you are in a small authority or what size Murray is, but if there are five or six secondary schools, you might only have three or four teachers of modern studies and you may say in that environment that that is not a wide enough professional base to encourage real professional development, so a regional collaborator might be able to set up something that would help address that. At primary school, there might be similar offerings that could be made. I just don't know. I think that the difficulty would be the mechanism by which schools access the collaboration on offer. I think that we have to get to the stage where it is genuinely school-led and teacher-led and that it comes from a full and frank self-evaluation rather than a judgmental decision on where the weak subjects are or where the weak teachers are. Just to follow up on that, I heard what you said about bringing people along and it being school-led and incremental change. I agree with that in terms of getting people's buy-in, but how do we marry that with saying that structure is important, changes are important, the changes have to happen? How do we get that balance right? What would that look like? I think that we need the moral authority before we get to that stage. This is part of the difficulty, but the only authority that counts in schools now is moral authority. Children are not going to respect you just because you are the head teacher, so there has got to be a better justification than you have this position of authority, but the same is true of the profession as a whole. We have to get to this stage, and I understand that this is difficult, and it is more difficult if we are dealing in timescales that are defined by the Scottish Parliament if we are saying that it has to be done by this. It may take longer, but we do not know how the momentum might build. I think that part of the difficulty with this incremental system is that it has not been tried yet, that we think that the only way to do it is to mandate it and, arguably, that will produce as many challenges as any other way of doing it. I am simply arguing from a school-led school point of view that schools have to be individually involved in whether or not they are ready to take on the full level of head teacher charter responsibility. I suspect that initially there will be a reluctance, but there will be enthusiasts who will then build it, and it could well be that if not within the lifetime of this Parliament, but shortly thereafter there will have been a significant evidence base that was worth scrutinising. We have not been good at that in Scotland. We had no independent evaluation of cricket for excellence. It is astonishing, though it may seem that none. We have social science departments in our universities that could come up with metrics other than SIMD or whatever. Are we asking them? I do not know. We do not appear to be. I think that part of the difficulty we have is this lack of imagination. What might we do? At what level are we really engaging the profession and harnessing their enthusiasm and passion for learning and teaching? The regional partnership of the Northern Alliance is something that I want to bring up, and my previous question is about pilots. It is not a pilot because they just went ahead and did it, but it is an official pilot. What about the Northern Alliance could we learn from? That is one of the reasons why this has come to the fore as being something to be discussed in the Government's review, and the idea that a regional collaboration has worked in the north of Scotland. Therefore, let's learn from that and roll it out further. What has been good about that? Could we allay some of the fears that we have about another tier of administration? Does it appear that it has worked? The question is, according to what evidence, what are we evaluating when they say the Northern Alliance word? What appears to me to be attractive about it is that it was not mandated from anywhere outside the authorities. It does seem to be the authority led, rather than the school led, but presumably the authorities are working on pressure from schools, so it has the right feel about it. I know that that sounds a bit nebulous, but that is a hair worth splitting. I think that the biggest problem that we are going to have with the Governments in the direction of policy, which I strongly support, is that the biggest obstacle is grudging compliance, and that is going to set the culture back. There is no neutral gear in education, so if we are not moving that forward, that grudging compliance will become a drag on the entire system, and it will be very difficult to move. That is a big danger of the current reforms. I simply do not know enough about the details of the Northern Alliance to answer your question fully, but I would imagine that, if the pressure has come from the schools and the authorities have got together themselves and moved things forward, that is exactly the model that I think we should be looking at. It is probably a real pressing case for an evaluation of how the Northern Alliance has worked and what it could do in terms of sharing its experience with the rest of the country so that people can build on that and have regional collaborations that are right for their individual areas. The difficult, of course, is that the Government has defined these collaboratives. They have told the authorities which collaborative they are in, so they have not come organically from the authorities. In fact, Ergyll but, I think, is in the same regional collaborative as Aberdeen. I think that it is important as well when we say that the Northern Alliance has worked, and I am not close enough to know whether it has or not, but be clear what we mean by that. I have worked on what basis. Has it worked in improving educational outcomes, improving education performance, or has it worked in terms of getting buy-in and support for change? It fits into that category of natural experiment, but being clear about what are the indicators of success that can be measured and evaluated that we really know whether it has worked or not and what things might have contributed towards that success or otherwise. Of course, if we want to be flexible around this, it is not one-size-fits-all, so it might have worked in terms for the region that it works in, but it might not work in another part of Scotland. To know the context and a wider set of factors, rather than whether it has improved education performance, you should understand how far it might be transferable in full or part of other places. I was just wondering whether you thought that geography itself was the best or sole categorisation for collaboration, or whether there are more imaginative solutions? I am in favour of multiple collaborations. I think that that is part of the difficulty with that. There is not a collaborative structure that can be set up that everyone can put into an appropriate collaboration. It would be possible, for example, for a secondary school to be on a nationwide network of similar or dissimilar schools, depending on what they are looking for, and to be closely associated with a cluster and, perhaps, for some other purposes, other schools that are much more geographically convenient. Possibly, we have to get away from the idea that there is a single model of collaboration that we can roll out to all schools. That is not going to be like that. If we allow the system and encourage the system to generate its own innovations, why do we not do that? Why do we not allow schools to decide for themselves when they are ready to accept the national policy framework and give them a period of time and then review it independently on the basis of the evidence that we have accrued? Based on data from English schools, we have something called the Families of Schools database at the EF. What it does is collect schools together based on various attributes such as the proportion of disadvantaged children, where they are, their results. A school can go and look at how they are doing compared to similar schools. There are now experimental statistics out in Scotland that would allow a similar thing. That can sometimes show really revealing things. You often will find that a school with a very high level of disadvantaged pupils is doing really well for its disadvantaged pupils and pupils on average. You can compare that to another school in a seemingly similar context that is doing much worse. It is not about accountability, it is not about blame but it is about looking and saying, my school is similar to that school and they are achieving something and we can make a change to make that happen. Thank you very much for your evidence. That was very helpful. Just as a point of interest, we are going up to visit North East soon to speak to the Northern Alliance. It sounds like a Star Wars site or something like that, but so maybe we will see for ourselves just how effective and what impact it could have on other parts of the country. Once again, thank you very much and I now close the public session.