 I welcome everyone to the 15th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017, and 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 business is our second evidence session of the committee's inquiry into teacher workforce planning for Scotland schools. The committee heard from a number of trainee teachers and qualified teachers last week. This week we will consider the perspective of a teacher education university and education authority from an area where there are teacher shortages, a teaching union and a specific STEM subject shortage. Can I welcome Lons Finlay, Corporate Director Education and Social Care and Murray Council, Dr Liz Lacken, senior lecturer in education, learner societies group on Scottish STEM education, Jane Peckham, national official of the NASWT, Dr Leslie Reid, director of undergraduate studies, Murray House and Dr Rowena Arshad, head of Murray House School of Education University of Edinburgh. Before we begin, I thank you for taking the time to respond to the committee's request for views and for agreeing to give evidence. I also highlight that the committee will hear further evidence next week from unions and education authority and university representative bodies, so there's no expectation that you're answering behalf of all universities or all education authorities. That said, the detail of your organisation's perspective is very valuable context for our work. As standard, I'll kick off with a general question on teacher training targets. What role do your organisations have in influencing the initial teacher education targets and what are the issues that prevent some of those targets being met? All teacher education institutions are part of the Scottish Teacher Workforce Planning Group, so we have conversations with the Government at least two or three times a year about targets. We generally have a discussion around December. I think that it's not about the participation of those targets. It's actually the timing for us of when we get those targets agreed, which can be later than is desirable. Ideally, it would be good to get the targets in December, because we're already interviewing between January, February, March, so we really need that earlier. I also think that another route that is being developed and is one that I think is in process of growing is the teacher education partnerships working with our local authorities far more closely to identify local gaps and local pressure points. Those would be the two areas. I'm sorry, but on that point about timing of targets, what's the reason why you think the timing of the targets are pushed back to December? It would be useful to know it earlier. For example, if you get 20 excellent physics, well, let's not take physics because that's a hard to recruit area, so I would suspect that if you're getting 20, you get them all, but let's assume it's something that has a controlled number, and actually you would like to be able to get more. Because we don't get our targets until about February or March each year, we don't know whether we can offer extra places or not. I think that's the issue, because if we overshoot, we have a penalty, and if we undershoot, we have a penalty. Presentation is about the thing? Yes. Having it earlier would actually assist us. As far as the learning society is concerned, we would push for a very strong and comprehensive evidence base as far as the targets are concerned. When the workforce plan is together, it needs to have a complete, reliable and accurate evidence base to draw on. The figures that we're looking at are the vacancies, the shortages in subjects, not just STEM but across the board, so that the target figures mean something. They can also be projected forward to the shortfalls as per Donaldson. From a local authority perspective, it's incumbent upon us to work very closely with our local teacher training institutes. If we are going to meet the demand for teachers that we have locally, we have to start identifying people locally who can become teachers in our area and to build from the grass-roots up. I can give you an example locally from Murray. We have a partnership with UHI, where they have trained primary teachers for a number of years. Through on-going partnership working, they have now expanded into secondary in critical subject areas such as home economics, physics and technological education, where we have been struggling to recruit. Again, we have worked in partnership to identify people locally who are willing to train as a teacher, and we are guaranteeing them, provided they passed their year training, a post in Murray for their newly qualified year. That has to be the future. It's about developing local approaches to teacher training. There's a number of questions. I'd like to haste round about that, but I'm going to leave it for my colleagues. I think that Tavish would like to come in very quickly. Sorry that I didn't mean to interrupt at all, convener, but it's your assessment there that this national workforce planning regime, for want of a better word, needs to be more localised. Your example is presumably the Northern Alliance or Murray specifically. Your take on that and then the Murray House take on that would be fascinating. I think that, very much just now, we're doing it locally from a Murray perspective, but I know that my colleagues in Orkney are doing it with Orkney College and so on, and that's the case across the Northern Alliance. I think that there's a huge scope to develop a regional approach to teacher planning for our future workforce. That could be done using the seven regional consortia that we have. I think that it's a multi-pronged approach. I think that one of the ways would be to work more locally to get local people interested in teaching and to convert that into people coming into the profession, but that is only one route. That might be the case with people who are not wanting to change because they've got family circumstances or whatever that suits them therefore to come in locally. That's not true for people who have moved for their undergraduate degree and have gone somewhere else. They might be quite prepared to move into different geographic areas. I think that it's really important to balance so that they have a multi-pronged approach because you do want more people to be socially mobile and to move, not least for the cultural diversity of the area. That is really important. I think that we've got to look at several fixes to that Lawrence's idea, but also looking beyond that. I think that we've got to think creatively what is it that's stopping people from moving. If it's the issue of expensive housing, then do we need to be thinking about some kvarmyshed equity packages that assist people to move? If it's to do with perhaps not having local networks, is there other ways that we can help people to settle and to stay? That's the issue here because I think the workforce targets have been really difficult and challenged to get to because we have no idea how people are going to change their lives. At the moment, I suspect that young people coming in particularly younger people who are not facing 40 years in teaching are not going to stay in one place to teach. They are fairly mobile. That's the beauty and the success of our system. So they're going to go to South Korea and work for a year or wherever and then they're coming back, which is why I think returners to teaching is another very important route to consider. Thank you for that. I mean, I can't think of any region in Scotland that wouldn't benefit from Glaswegians going up to work in it, but, Speckham. Well, we don't have direct influence over the targets and so on, but one of the points that we made was that there doesn't seem to be enough being done to promote teaching as a viable career in terms of when you're contacting young students in schools. There are a lot of other professions and trades that are advertised, even at career fairs and all the rest of it, but very rarely do you see anyone standing promoting teaching as a career. We've had quite a few discussions with local authorities and with councillors at various events. Although the preference waiver scheme was introduced to encourage movement and it could be adapted in some way perhaps to be a bit more flexible, the problem is that people are not able to put down routes in one year and then why would they effectively take a salary hit the following year to stay in a more expensive place, for instance, then go back home. So I do think that there's quite a lot that could be looked at in terms of incentives for induction and probationers to encourage them to spread their wings more widely. Thank you. Before I bring in Ross Thomson, Gillian, do you have a short supplementary question? The supplementary question is really coming off the back of what Dr Asher has just said. It's really a question for Lawrence Finlay. I believe that Murray Council did a scheme where they had affordable homes for teachers. Is that still on going in that work? That was a one-year programme where we developed a partnership with a local building contractor who were building new flats in various locations in Murray and they offered six months rent-free accommodation. It was successful. We did succeed in attracting a number of people to come to work in Murray, but more importantly than that it also highlighted the issues that we faced because we had a lot of publicity around about it, so it got people more interested in potentially moving to rural Scotland. It was a one-year short term fix and it did work and we are continuing to look at other programmes similar to that which we might be able to extend in the future. Ross Thomson, thank you very much convener. It has been a very interesting discussion already because the region that I represent in the north-east, as you will wear just like Murray, has significant shortages in teachers. In our papers there was a submission from the GTCS who suggested that there should be more work with local authorities who have that greater insight into local need. For my understanding, how could that work? What would a more formalised structure look like? I mean, I know there might be relationships already, but what would best practice look like? What do you think would be a model that would really work to help ensure that kind of communication and that local need is met? I think it's very difficult because every local authority will have their own individual issues. Some of it will be to do with accessibility in terms of transport infrastructure. Some of it will be to do with the cost of housing. And very often when people move, they move as a package, so someone moves and they have a spouse who is looking for work as well, and that creates a whole other tension, another issue, and that's an increasing problem. I do think that across our local authority areas we have different levels of expertise, which we could perhaps pull together more effectively into a consortia approach to work with the universities, to work with the general teaching council to actually really get smarter at mapping out exactly what our needs are in terms of our future workforce, because they will be divergent across the regional areas. In terms of the preference waiver scheme, it does work. Rural authorities do benefit from it. I would argue that it could be more preferential to particularly rural authorities, so people who tick the box to go anywhere. There are some of those people who still end up in central belt authorities, but there aren't the same staffing shortages, so I think that we could make the preferential scheme a bit more preferential. Can I come in here, Ross, if you don't mind just on that very point? I saw you make those comments in the press today. Whose responsibility would that be then? If you're ticking a box and you'll go anywhere, then somebody should be saying, well, that's what the shortage is. You're going there. I think that that would have to be done on a partnership basis between the local authorities, the training institutions and the general teaching council. That would have to be done as a partnership approach to change how that's done. I don't know if Rina wants to come in with more information on that. Not on that point, but a little bit more on Ross's point. One of the things that is very practical—I'll see if it works—returners to teaching is actually very big, because a lot of our workforce go away, the industry teachers and then they go somewhere else in the world or wherever, or they go to another profession and then they find, actually, that they want to come back to being education. We run a returner to teaching programme and we're about to put it all online as of September this year. I'm interested in approaching every single local authority in Scotland to say, will you consider investing X number of places? We're not charging a lot. We're probably in the region of £400 per person for the course fee, £400 or £500, because if you do, then you help us to select to your gaps and they then become people who are associated with your authority. We then can start networking them into your schools and networking them into the local area. That's an investment from their local authority. I don't think it's a lot, but I'll be interested to approach ADES about that and see whether they'll take it up as a very practical option. I asked the question to the training teachers about what was made preventing them from moving to other parts of Scotland, where there are vacancies, where there are jobs. One of the trainees said that sometimes his local authority took the decision to pay for his PGDE, but when the other trainees said that it's about the place and maybe the authorities don't do enough to sell the place. Do you think that sometimes we need to do more to sell the region to attract people to come up? Absolutely. I would agree with that. We've done a number of things. We've had a YouTube video to highlight how beautiful Murray is and what a fantastic area of the country it is and all that the outdoor pursuits you can enjoy and how accessible it is to the bright lights of Inverness and Aberdeen as well. I agree that the PR and the marketing around it is a huge issue. I think all local authorities, particularly across the north and northeast, work hard to try to capitalise on all the advantages of the area. Given some of the incentives that are in place, if you look at some of the submissions from, for example, Aberdeen City Council and Aberdeenshire Council yourself, there are a number of things that are in place and every authority is different. Should there be a more national approach to some of those incentives? Given, for example, at the north-east, where you have the downturn in oil and gas and some of the vacancies have been exacerbated, as you said, when a partner moves because they've been made redundant, you lose even more people, should there be a national approach to incentives for new teachers? I think that a national approach with regional flexibility would help hugely, because we could end up in the situation where we're actually competing against each other, which isn't helping anybody and it's certainly not helping the children that are in the classrooms. I could come out and go to my elected members and say, right, we're going to start offering a £7,000 relocation, then Aberdeenshire next week could trump that and offer £9,000. Then you're just getting into silly games, really. I think that a national position on incentives would be useful, but then some regional flexibility on how that's implemented. Last question, convener. In the Aberdeenshire Council submission, it mentioned GTCS registration, because it said that, including candidates from elsewhere, even in the UK, it can be quite a protracted process and that it thought that there's an opportunity to look at how that process could be made more flexible. I was looking to see if you shared that view and what measures you thought could be taken to actually make that more flexible. I think that that's a work in progress. I think that a lot of good work has taken place in terms of introducing provisional registration, and that's helped us certainly from a money perspective where we've got a large proportion of military families and military spouses, many of whom are teachers who have trained elsewhere. Provisional registration has allowed us to recruit between 10 and 15 additional teachers in Murray. For a small area, that's quite significant, and that has really helped us. We still get individual anecdotal evidence of some people saying that the GTCS process takes quite some time, but compared to what it was like a year or 18 months ago, there's been a huge improvement. From that perspective, I would say that it's good work on-going. One suggestion from last week was that perhaps we should proactively recruit from communities where there are shortages. I think that the proposition was almost headhunting people into the profession. Is that a suggestion that you think that there might have legs? If I can come in again on this one, I wrote to all parents in Murray in January of this year, and we have 12,000 schoolchildren in Murray, so it was quite a lot of letters that went out. From that, I had 165 responses to the letter. I was asking, are any of you teachers, have you previously trained in a previous life to be a teacher, do you have any relatives elsewhere who would like to relocate and become a teacher in Murray, can we help in any way? Of those letters sent out with 165 responses, we've managed to get again between 10 and 20 people either seeking GTCS registration, provisional registration, or doing the delight scheme, the distance learning initial teacher education scheme, which we are going to support them through as a local authority. I think that being proactive and going out there writing to people is a good approach that can work. One of the things that came across last week, speaking to trainees, there were two distinct groups. There were people who had worked on another job, not teachers, people who trained and wanted to come back, but people who had done another job and wanted to come into teaching, and young people who wanted to do teaching. I don't know whether Jane Peckham wants to respond to this, but is there a sense in which the system still really thinks of somebody coming out of university who is available to go anywhere and is going to do this job forever? It feels like some of the barriers, if you were going to choose to do it once you're settled in a community and you've got a family, the idea that you have to go anywhere or it's very restricted seems to be problematic. Is there anything being done around different ways of looking at the times at which people will come into teaching? I think that quite a lot needs to be looked at in terms of the way that we've moved forward in making training to be more accessible to people from different backgrounds, maybe even single-parent families and so on, but the induction scheme is a one-size-fits-all scheme and it does not suit people with families who have mortgages and so on who might want to move. It doesn't. You cannot do induction on a part-time basis, for instance, and I think that we need to start looking at how we can maintain the standards that are required but offer much more access across the board, because I think that part of our discussions with members have been the difficulty in being able to make choices after they've qualified and they are held back, so I think that a bit more needs to be done. Thanks, conveners. One quite specific follow-up is looking at the shortfall in secondary teaching by subject. The top two subjects are maths and technological studies, where there are, obviously, quite acute gender issues. Given your background in STEM, how much are the gender issues? Text studies are only one in four. Teachers are currently in text studies are women. How much is that acute issue putting them at the top of the list of subjects where there's a shortfall? Is the gender problem really behind that? I don't think that it's the gender problem behind it. It's the profile and the status of teaching itself. If you consider that there's a shortage as far as STEM graduates are concerned across the country, nationally and internationally, so getting them into employment is initially in its own right. Getting them then to consider teaching as a career is an even greater problem, and when you consider that courses in universities, education, unfortunately, is still considered the poor cousin. We need to raise that profile. We need to recognise it as a profession, and that way, raising its status so that people will be considering that, yes, this is the pathway we want to go. We have got competition in terms of STEM graduates wanting to go into industry, where you've got much better salaries, which is what James was leading to earlier. That is an issue in its own right, but raising the profile, raising the status of education to attract those people is very important. Gender is part of it, but it's not the main issue, I don't think. I've got some questions around the content design of teacher training courses. First of all, I'd like to ask those present here that represent the colleges what autonomy you have in terms of the design of your courses. Is the design of your courses regulated, or is it consistent across colleges? I think that I should answer that one. Our initial teacher education programmes are accredited by the GTCS. They are approved by all the university committees in terms of academic level and appropriateness of content. However, the GTCS considers all proposals for new programmes and the balance of subject areas within that. I would like to give the opportunity to respond to some of the evidence that we had last week, particularly from graduates of Moorley House that you are representing, Dr Ashad. I think that one graduate said that she did not feel that there was enough emphasis on numeracy, and that was backed up by a couple of her colleagues on the panel. I would like to give you the opportunity to respond to that. I'll start and then you can maybe continue. I mean, I absolutely did see that response. The thing is that I think that you've got to go back to the fact that, when they come in, they have to have attained, as you know, a secure at level five. It is a level that is far higher than what is required to teach primary school young people. There is, I think, an issue of numeracy confidence, not necessarily numeracy competence, so I think that that's the first thing. The second is, of course, there will be people who have subject knowledge, perhaps their confidence level is lower. That very same student of ours talked about a maths audit that we do provide, where students have to self-evaluate where their strengths are and where their gaps are. She said that she did not find the audit helpful, while that might well have been the case for her. We have evidence to show that many of our students who take it do find it very helpful, because they get to identify their strengths, but they get to identify where they need more work. Last year, for example, we provided quite a lot of supplementary classes for those who have identified that they actually have some weaknesses. When they come to those supplementary classes, they are taught again how to teach the subject, because I think that that is important. In so doing, because you can teach a particular algorithm in many ways, you can say that four times four is sixteen, but equally four plus four plus four plus four is also sixteen. It is actually helping different pedagogical ways, so those classes offer those kinds of examples. In so doing, what the students tell us who have attended is that their own confidence, their own confidence, their own subject knowledge also increases. I think that that is an example of one that I would use, but Leslie might be able to expand a bit more. I think that just to give a little bit of detail on what actually happens in a mathematics pedagogy classroom might help. I come from a primary teaching background myself, so I feel qualified to talk about that. Clearly, we are not teaching students who have national five mathematics. We are not teaching them things like calculus in initial teacher education for primary school teachers. The level of subject knowledge that students need, who are working in primary seven classrooms, is the level that the school children are learning, if you like. That is a very different thing from the pedagogical subject knowledge that primary school teachers need. The activities that we offer are naturally workshops and lectures, but the kind of teaching that students experience in interactive workshops allows us, for example, to help them to use children's misunderstandings as a natural part of teaching. If you are using children's errors and children's misunderstandings, that requires a very different conceptual understanding of addition and subtraction. The things that students are learning in initial teacher education are not higher-level mathematical concepts but rather a really in-depth understanding of lower-level mathematical concepts. In our teaching, in initial teacher education, we would use those interactive workshops to explore student misunderstandings, thereby modelling how they would deal with children's misunderstandings. It is quite a complicated pedagogy that is adopted. It is not just about how good are you at calculus and how good a mathematics teacher will be in a primary school. Does that clarify a little? I just wanted to emphasise that the initial teacher education programme is a partnership. It is a partnership between the school, the student and the university or the provider. From that regard, we have the standards that the GTCS standards of provisional registration. Those standards are there for a purpose. They enable the student to be able to document where they are in terms of their progression through the programme. They are able to identify their goals for their various placements and, within that, their own subject knowledge and development. They are given opportunities throughout the process through, like you were explaining, when they are in the university talk sessions as well as when they are in school to identify the opportunities there. It is an on-going active process and it is not a passive process, so all partners are going to be involved. I think that that is a very important thing to remember. It is not just being passively downloaded onto the students when they are in class and they cannot expect to do that with their own pupils. They need to be actively identifying where their needs are and developing those from the opportunities that they have. We help with that in school and at the university. One of the issues that came up last week was the balance between being in university and being out on placement on site learning. We are modelling something that is new that is coming up, our masters in transformative learning teaching, which is in your documentation. All research tells us that spending time extensively in schools across your training or across your education programme is really important. When we are starting this out now, we are looking at our site-based learning model, where it is two days in schools or potentially three, but two, three at the moment, three back in the university. Every week, it will be by and large like that. I think that that is a slightly different model to what we are currently having under block placements or individual threaded days in the school. New Zealand has certainly done that. Their students are showing certainly an ability to bridge that theory in practice. I know, because I reviewed initial teacher education in Auckland University in March, so I have spoken to some of those students myself. I think that that is it because it is that constancy of ebb and flow. Here, you are talking about the theoretical, the conceptual, practising some of the issues that you are taking forward in the classroom. You are then going into schools within the week and seeing whether it is done differently and coming back and saying, well, actually, that is the theory, but the practice is saying this. I think that it is that ebb and flow that is required on a regular basis. We will see, but certainly international research tells us that that kind of site-based learning does work. It is not in either all. It is a partnership, as you said, and it is both sides of the same coin. The thing is that it comes back to my original question as well, because one of the people who gave evidence last week—not from many colleges, as I remember—said that there was a period of time when she was only in college and had not actually been able to apply that knowledge into a school and have that practical experience. That comes back to the consistency across the colleges. You do not want to be potluck which colleges you go to. You get a different type of approach that might work better to another soul. How is good practice shared amongst the colleges and what works and what does not? That seemed strange to me that you would spend a year in college and not actually access a school. I cannot remember which college that was, but that was certainly some of the evidence that came forward. We are definitely in a period of transition with regard to the design of teacher education programmes. All universities now are moving away from the block placement model, where students spend a period of time in school with little interaction with university-based learning. All universities are moving to more integrated models. There is variety in those integrated models. Indeed, that is encouraged by Government, who wants to see a diversity of models of teacher education so that there is choice provided. However, the original type that you were describing, the block placement model, is genuinely in a period of transition at the moment, as we seek better integration between university and placement learning. Thank you, convener. I preface my remarks to acknowledge my membership of the GTCS. However, from the witnesses that we heard last week, there were some very positive things that they reported about teacher training, and we should not forget that. Nonetheless, I think that some of the reports that they gave and some of the evidence that we have in our papers, as well as those that provided evidence to us last week, there were some really shocking comments about the standard of teacher training, particularly when it comes to literacy and numeracy. I find it very disturbing, and as I am sure many parents would have crossed Scotland, that we are finding it very difficult to know exactly how much focus is put on literacy and numeracy within some of the courses—not all of them, but within some of the courses. I know that I am not the only member who has tried to ascertain from the different teacher training institutions just how much of that focus is there, which is one of the reasons that the convener has had to ask specifically for us to be told. Do you find that that is disturbing, that we do not know how much time is being devoted to literacy and numeracy? The bottom line for any parent and any pupil is that if we cannot train our teachers properly in this area, what hope is there for our youngsters? I could ask you to comment on that. I am going to start and then I am going to pass to you. I want to start by saying that I absolutely did listen to the evidence so I do know what you are talking about and the concern. However, we have other sources of feedback as well, which I think is important. One of it is actually through our partnership with local authorities and head teachers in schools, and the evaluation of Donaldson, which is research-based, which tells us that, by and large, it is effective. We have to, as you say, balance the comments that were heard by acknowledging that there are also many other sources of evidence that tell us that teacher education is operating well and effective. I will just interrupt on that point. If you are a parent, you see declining standards in literacy and numeracy coming through on OECD material from PISA, SSLN, and some of the issues in other measurements. Therefore, when you say that things are improving and getting better, that does not seem to fit with the evidence that is out there for the public. Can you explain exactly why you are of the opinion that there are some really good things happening? I think that it is actually the way that literacy and numeracy is taught, which is where I was going to pass on to Leslie. The actual hourage is not the only hour. That is maybe where it is explicitly mentioned. This is literacy, this is about numeracy, but it is actually how that is developed within the whole programme. That is something that perhaps other colleagues in the team also want to talk about or can say. I do think that the issue about the PISA side of it—they are worrying, yes—but we have got to go back beyond teacher education, because there is something else happening. The whole area needs to be looked at from early years all the way through to teacher education. I do not think that it is just about the education of teachers, but I perhaps let Leslie explain a wee bit more about how literacy and numeracy is developed. It is threaded through with specific hours, but in other ways across the programme. We are providing the figures, the number of hours that students experience face-to-face teaching in the university. That is not a problem for us to do. The information is generally available publicly through the key information sets, but we are providing it in detail for you. There is something that needs to be borne in mind when you think about face-to-face teaching that students experience. If students are undergoing an intensive PGDE programme, for example, they are timetable very heavily in the 18 weeks that they are in faculty with us. There are very few hours in the day where they are not receiving some sort of input from the university. However, any university course is premised on the idea that in order to earn 20 credits for a university course, that involves 200 hours of student effort. For a student on the PGDE primary programme, they may receive 45 hours of face-to-face teaching of that 200 hours. That 200 hours, therefore, is an expectation that students take increasing responsibility for their own learning. Some of that time, some of that remaining 150 hours might be spent on activities that are devised by staff in the university for students to engage with. However, it is a very important part of anybody's professional development to learn how to analyse your own learning and reflect on it and to act upon that. It is an absolutely integral part of professional, continuous professional development for teachers. It is an approach that they will follow throughout their career. Our students are pretty busy when they are in the university, but there is also a high expectation that they will take part in their own professional learning in that way. Dr Reid, can I just pick you up on that? That is exactly what Graham Donaldson did say in 2011. He also said, in one of his recommendations, that he believed that there had to be much more rigor about, when you accept students' interchange of training, about their competence in literacy and numeracy. That followed on, I think, from a study that was done at Edinburgh University a couple of years just before that, whereby there was a very worrying degree of the lack of in-depth knowledge among some teacher trainees about basic grammar and, in some cases, on numeracy. Those two things taken together is the main concern. What we are really driving at here is that, given that Graham Donaldson's recommendations and the Scottish Government produced an update on the implementation of that in 2016, I come back to the original question. If those improvements are being made, why is it that we have trainees coming to this committee to tell us that, in some cases, they feel that that education is failing in some degree, and secondly, why is it that we are not seeing some improvement in basic literacy and numeracy? That is the central concern. When Dr Arshad has provided some answer there in saying that it needs to be looked at in a much wider context, I can describe the sort of pedagogy that we adopt in initial teacher education. I have described how that works in mathematics and it would work in a similar way in the teaching of literacy. We have protected face-to-face contact between teacher educators and initial teacher education students so that we can unpack student teachers' misunderstandings of those issues. When you say misunderstandings, why are there misunderstandings? Is it not the job of the teacher training colleges in partnership with other stakeholders to ensure that those teachers—I was struck last week by how interested they were in becoming teachers and the very considerable belief that it was a vocation and a very worthwhile vocation—why is it that they are coming out without those necessary skills? That is the key problem. I am not convinced that they are coming out with those necessary skills, but let us take the example of something like grammar teaching that you are talking about. A student cannot come into an initial teacher education without a higher English, so they have the understanding of grammar that they require to pass higher English. That understanding should be sufficient in terms of knowing what sentence structure is, knowing what nouns, verbs and adjectives are. They come in with that level of understanding into initial teacher education, but that is a very different thing from being able to teach children about creating sentence structures. Initial teacher education is focused not on doing more about what an noun, verb and adjective is but on unpacking those understandings so that student teachers can help children with those misunderstandings and teach them to create sentences in ways that are motivating and interesting. That is a point that is also worth being made. A child will never write well unless they are motivated to write well. One of the most important things that we do in literacy teaching is to help student teachers to learn how to teach things in motivating and engaging ways. That is also a very important part of our pedagogy. Before I bring Tavish in, one of the witnesses last week when we were talking about the issues that Liz quite rightly raises said that, for both literacy and numeracy, I think that you get immersed in it for one week out of the 18. Everything they do now is that A is that right and B is that adequate or one week out of 18? That is not a model of initial teacher education that I would recognise and I am sure that our representative from Dandy can echo that. What I would like to point out that was said through the evidence meeting last week was that one of the students had said that he felt that, as far as literacy was concerned, he was immersed in it throughout his entire programme, which all the students would have been. They have to submit written assignments. With those written assignments, they are picked up. I know from my own experience in the institution that I am in, but I am sure that it is the same with yourselves. If there are flaws in their grammar, in their punctuation, in their sentence construction, etc., etc., they are then given advice to take that forward and offered support within the institution. As far as numeracy is concerned, that is a slightly different issue. I recognise that the Llanet societies group recognises that there are problems with fundamental numeracy. I find it with my own students that those who have said that their own subject knowledge, as far as numeracy is concerned, is their limiting factor. That is where they know that they need to take that forward and seek help and seek advice. In the majority of cases, they do, but it is a learning curve. You cannot expect to come out of a programme that may be a year-long programme and then go straight into an environment like a primary school and be expected to teach the basic fundamentals of how to learn maths. It is an on-game process. It needs support as it goes through, and that needs to be recognised, not just in the training programme itself. I will ask this question in the positive sense. Are we getting it right at teacher training level on literacy and numeracy, or are there still things that you think we need to do more of? It is clear that we need to do more, and we need to do more collectively. Can you give us a couple of examples of what those should be? I would say that, particularly from a numeracy point of view, we need to look back at the very basics. We need to ensure that all the students are able to identify where their weaknesses are, where their misconceptions are, but they might not know that until they try to teach it to somebody else. I am not saying to learn in the classroom necessarily, but in our workshops, we encourage them to do some micro-teaching, to teach to each other, and that way that peer support, et cetera, et cetera—that is a way of actually taking it forward. Perhaps we do need to do more of that. The convener's point and the Smith's point. Obviously, there is a lot of political focus around literacy and numeracy for good or ill, and that is why the Smith rightly made the point about those studies, both Scottish-wide and international as well. How does that come into your sphere of operation? I absolutely take the point that there are wide ratios about a younger age and so on and so forth and many other socioeconomic factors, but your teaching is not the next generation of teachers. We need you to do it. How do we make sure that you are on it in terms of literacy and numeracy, given the political focus that is there at the moment? One of the ways, for example, that we are doing it is that one of our colleagues is actually partly in the School of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh. It is a drawing in our colleagues who maybe are their disciplines expertise areas together with ours, so that there are different ways of looking at mathematics and literacy—sorry, numeracy—that we are partnering with them. I think that the university has got the potential to engage with its partner schools in that respect. What is happening across all of our teaching universities? I would not know what is happening in ours. Who does keep an eye on that? I appreciate that you represent Mary House and Dundee, but are you conscious in your discussions with colleagues from across the sector that this is a priority and this has been carefully looked at in exactly the way that you have just described? We do talk. We do recognise what the problems are. When something has got a high profile because of its physical status, of course we stand up rather than sit back. We stand up and say, look, what are we doing? We are proactive. It is a classic example of action. Questions for next week in some ways, but maybe I could ask two others. The first one is a general question that came out of one of the witnesses last week who said that on curriculum for excellence, if we ask 100 teachers to define it, we will get 100 different answers, which sure doesn't help any of us. I wonder if you would like to reflect on the challenges of curriculum for excellence, which has now been in place for 10 years in terms of how you teach the next generation of teachers. I would return to the comment that I made on motivation that the strength of curriculum for excellence, I believe, and the flexibility that it gives teachers will lead to better motivated pupils. That should be our primary concern, because people who are not motivated will not learn, and the choice and flexibility that curriculum for excellence offers in the primary school. I cannot talk in such an informed way about the secondary curriculum, but in the primary school I think that it is working, and I think that children are enjoying learning, and I think that that is really important. I would like to return to the point that you were making about are we getting it right and to assure in some ways that what we do in initial teacher education is as research-informed as we can make it. We are introducing students to the latest research in literacy and numeracy teaching. We are engaging with them about the different ways that are put into practice in our schools so that whatever context they arrive in in school, if they are faced with a reading scheme that does not seem to them to be very motivating and exciting, that they can use that research-informed approach to use that scheme in the best way to motivate children to learn. That research-informed view and process of what we do is absolutely fundamental to initial teacher education. The other question that I raised with witnesses last week was about internet security and the changing world that we live in, and they all observed that that was not part of how they learned to be a teacher through their courses. We have asked the Government, and the Government rightly has said that there is some work to be done with, if I may say so, all of you. Do you accept that our kids now all sit on mobile phones all the time? There are some enormous positives to that, and there are some big challenges to it as a father of teenage children. What are you going to do about it? What will we teach in future to help our teachers deal with the reality of internet safety? Absolutely. Data literacy of that kind in online securities is very important, and it is an area that we can all do better on. I will say that from the outset. My concern, of course, is not a concern. It is that my hearts and minds are helping colleagues to also think here about, because they have a pressure on literacy, they have a pressure on numeracy, they have well-being, they have all sorts of things to be sustainability, you name it, it is all there. It has all got to be crammed into that very short time. That is why I have said from the outset, since I became head of school, it is really important that we put it in. I do not think that we put it in as much as we would like to, so it is an area for improvement. I absolutely accept that. The other thing that I think is important, and it is slightly moving away from your question, but it is about the term training. I have noticed that consistently colleagues have been using the term teacher training. We use the term in the sector teacher education. The reason that we say that is because it is not a training in the sense that you will robotically train people to do A, B and C in a particular way. That is really important because curriculum for excellence is one framework. Those teachers are going to have lots of different curriculum frameworks over the lifetime of their study. They have to be agentic, they have to be adaptive teachers. If they cannot do that, then we have a problem that we are storing up for the years to come. Is curriculum for excellence effective or not? Is it effective or it can be if the teachers themselves are able to be agentic and adaptive? If they cannot, then they are going to go through a tramline robotic approach to it, unable to see beyond siloed, not interdisciplinary. We need people like that. Our only resource in the small country like ours is our people. We have got to actually get people who are able to compete in the 21st century, so I think that that is really important. I agree with that. I would like to say that we had a classic example last week of the student who responded to your question. She said that she had conducted a lesson about internet security and she had done it off her own volition. One of the big problems with the way that curriculum for excellence is put out there is that it is perceived to be prescriptive. Rather than trying to emphasise the interdisciplinary aspects of the curriculum for excellence, all the good qualities of it, by squashing it, by saying that we have got to try and get so much on literacy and numeracy and everything else into the time that is available, what we are trying to do is to enable those students, exactly as you were saying, to actually be professionals in their own right. They are the ones who know what the real problems are on the ground and that student was a case in point. I saw one of my own students in school last week and she said exactly the same, because I was asking her about evidence against the professional values aspect of the standards. She was saying that she conducted a session on internet security because she had overheard some of the children in her class talking about aspects that she thought, oh wow, we need to squash this one. That was her professionalism coming through. That comes as part and parcel of the whole course, the whole programme and students being proactive. I am sitting here quite because I am finding this really interesting because we do quite a lot of work with newly qualified going into induction. I have not yet heard any of the students complaining about the level of literacy and numeracy training, but they do absolutely emphasise their feeling of lack of confidence in going into the workplace because they have not been taught enough behaviour management about things like internet safety, but also how to teach a child with additional support needs. One of the other issues that comes out of that would help to build confidence. I completely accept that the more we have school experience tied in with learning, I think that it would be a huge advantage. I vividly remember coming out as a primary teacher myself and I would not tell you how long ago, but I literally felt like my first day in my classroom was my first day of learning how to be a teacher, so we need to look at that. All the resources that we have given teachers the confidence in addressing all the grammatical things, all the literacy things, how to teach internet safety and all the rest, there is nothing there now. You mentioned reading schemes and a lot of our members no longer have reading schemes because there is no investment in the resources that teachers and students need, nor has there been any investment quite the opposite in terms of support that teachers should have to allow them to get on with the job of teaching and learning. That is at the crux of the issue. Really, it does not matter how much training a teacher gets at university level if the support systems and resources are not in place for them when they finally get to do the job. It is extremely damaging and it also does not allow the curriculum to flourish in the way that it has been intended to do. One final comment on the internet safety thing and linking that to the teaching of literacy. One of the challenges that we face in the teaching of literacy is, of course, that we are not simply teaching students to help children to decode in terms of reading, the mechanics of reading, but also to help children to approach the media texts that they come across all of the time, because of the balance of things that children are reading very much. Nowadays, many of them are digital texts, so that is an issue. Using those digital texts as part of our teaching is important, but behind all of that, one of the most important things that we teach in literacy is to teach critical literacy skills to the students so that they are then able to teach those to the children. To approach a text in a critical way is a fundamental part of internet safety, in other words. Having said that, when I was collating the figures that were asked for on internet safety, most of the programme directors that I approached said, as Dr Ashad has said, we are not doing enough on that, but it has to be framed within that wider picture of a critical literacy approach to all texts, including digital texts. I am interested in—I hear absolutely that a young person has to be motivated in order to write and plead in evidence that I was an English teacher for 20 years. That balance between saying, those are the rules, but we do not want to inhibit you in writing and so on. I get that, but I wonder whether post my time teaching was more of an understanding that kids actually did need to hook into rules and it helped them and it gave them confidence. I am a generation that passed in primary school, so I was quite relieved that we stopped doing that. However, as a higher English, the level of literacy that is required now is the academic work that is being done in looking at whether the levels of confidence in literacy around a current higher are the same as it would have been five years ago. Ten years ago, we have had some—I have had anecdote levels in talking to people who work in universities who say that the level of competence among young people coming into universities is lower than it was. Just to say that I teach you coming in with a higher English does not necessarily mean that they have the confidence and competence in literacy that they might have had ten years ago. I am interested in the academic work that is running. I think that there is a lot of political interest, but it would be helped if there was academic work looking at this. It is a very relevant point. One answer, of course, is that learning in literacy—the one that I have just given is a very different thing from what it was ten years ago and that students are coming in with much greater proficiency in digital text that is not always recognised, for example, in the higher English qualification, but that they need to become good primary school teachers or good secondary school teachers. In terms of what is involved in being proficient in literacy, of course, in writing children have to have a good command of vocabulary, they have to know how to organise their thoughts in writing, as well as all the technical skills of spelling and grammar and punctuation. They need to know all of these things, as well as all the challenges of the new digital world. It perhaps just allows me to make a general point about teacher education in that we are preparing teachers for an unknown world. The world has changed enormously in the past ten years that you are referring to. It is therefore really important that we cover all the things that we are talking about in detail, the numeracy and literacy skills that are required. Fundamentally, our teachers are going to need enormous resilience to cope with the children in the schools of the future and to help them to survive and cope in that. It all has to be framed in that bigger picture. Before you ask this also, you can respond to it. One of the things that came out last week was this sense. I said it 35 years ago when I was training that there was too much theory or not enough hands-on practice. You say that that is training, but do you not accept that some of it is training? You do not have to be a robot but good classroom management, rather than having to learn to reinvent the wheel every time a student goes in or a new teacher goes in. Is that work being done? Also, to the point about reading schemes, in curriculum for excellence, would you still have something—maybe not in those terms—that we would have had a school-wide policy around marking or what you encourage around literacy and numeracy? Are those things still encouraged in curriculum for excellence so that, while, yes, you create and innovate and energise and motivate, there are still basic things that young people can refer to and that teachers can refer to in terms of developing their confidence, which I think is pretty central? There are several—we have lots of questions there in what you have just said. I want to go back to your first one about the research, because, basically, you are saying what evidence is there that higher English is sufficient to enable our student teachers, because we are in education, to be the marker, to know that there will be literacy level. I personally do not know of any research that—so you are talking about is it better now or is it worse now? I actually do not know what research there is that says that higher English is the marker, is the signifier that you are therefore more capable, therefore, to teach literacy. That is actually a question in its own right there. I am saying, I do not know, it does not mean that it does not exist, but that is a quite important question, because it is being used as the signal to say that that is what we need in order to have this level of competency for being teacher education. That is quite a fundamental question that I think I would certainly be wanting to dig a bit more after this committee. The second thing that you were saying about is where is the balance between training and education. I guess it is not about that robotic training, so I noticed one of the things that people said was that there is not sufficient to support children with autism. That was another one that came up, I think, last week. Within the timeframe, what is really important is to get the teachers and the student teachers to be thinking about, for a start, having a disposition that does not see the child as a deficit, that is a value-based thing, because that still exists, that problem child with English is an additional language or that problem child with whatever. That is a mind-frame thing, so we actually have to set a framework of values and approaches. After that, I think that we have got to give them some fundamentals of how to engage with this classroom management and actually also getting it thinking in terms of, instead of behaviour management, to be thinking about, perhaps, it is about relationship management, getting them to think differently about situations. Now, we can give them those building blocks. I think that that is the important bit. How we populate those and how they do it, only they can do it, because if I teach somebody how to actually react to a child with autism, but actually it is not the autism that is the issue, is that perhaps it is English as additional language that might be the issue alongside the autism? If I do it in one track way without them seeing it in a more intersectional way, then I have got a problem, potentially, because it could be mixed diagnosis coming in, a misrecognition. So I think that that is something that we really need to do and keep doing much more of. It is a bit like that AA advert. I do not know how to solve that, but I know somebody who does, so they need to know what the support structures are, what the frameworks are, who to go to and who they call, at what point they actually say, well, actually I need some support and assistance on this, that predicates on the fact that there is that support network and assistance. So I think that it is really difficult, because when I was thinking about the autism one, I can immediately see other communities coming and saying, what about us, what about us, what about us, we cannot possibly consider all the conglomerations, but we have to give a framework whereby at least you have got your top 10 ideas of how you might pull some of those tool kits out of the tool box, but it is not going to be a complete one. Very briefly, please. Just to respond on the behaviour management side of things as well. Yes, outages are devoted in the university to the helping students with behaviour management issues. They are taught a positive behaviour management approach that research tells us works best with children and avoids damaging children, that is an important one there. Students are taught about that general philosophy. It is relationship-based, it must be in the modern world, it must be relationship-based rather than disciplinarian. They are also taught about the initiatives that are used in local authorities and schools in wide-ranging ways, so that they can compare and contrast those. They are given practical strategies to help them with behaviour management. When they go into schools on placement, they are assessed on their behaviour management skills and supported by the classroom teachers with the individual classroom context that they are working in. I believe that it is approached in many different ways with students, but it is something that we take very seriously because we have to. If students cannot control the behaviour and help children with their behaviour in class then they are unable to teach. I think that curriculum for excellence is very ambitious, it is broad and it is about joined up learning. That is obviously a challenge for initial teacher education. I am just wondering if the panel could reflect on how IT has changed as a response to curriculum for excellence over recent years. There have been many developments in degree design since the introduction of curriculum for excellence. Some of them have involved, in the primary school, a move away from teaching in discrete subject areas. There has been a greater emphasis, for example, on interdisciplinary learning that is seen as highly motivating for children. That has been a challenge, but it has resulted in a lot of very creative teaching. Every year, at the end of our PGDE primary programme, students come back and give presentations on interdisciplinary learning experiences that they have enabled in school. They are jointly assessed by head teachers and members of university staff and are genuinely examples of very high quality teaching. Another development in relation to curriculum for excellence and how that has impacted on what we do in the university is the different ways in which we look at assessment. Along with curriculum for excellence, the development of the assessment is for learning programme in Scotland that prioritises the benefits of formative assessment. Using assessment to genuinely enhance pupil learning has been a shift in universities since curriculum for excellence was introduced. I would say that one of the most positive moves in ITE has been the fact that it is more of a partnership now between institutions and local authorities and schools. If I think back to graduating as a young teacher myself, I was very much left to get on with it. With the best bill in the world, there is only so much that can be done in a PGDE year. Within a local authority working closely with our partners, in our case with UHI and with Aberdeen specifically, we can then model the on-going teacher education that is required throughout year 1 of a teacher's career, then years 2 to 5 and so on and so forth. One of the first things to be covered when teachers come to us for their induction year is internet security and how they approach that in the classroom, how they approach ASN, how they approach positive behaviour management. That is a one-off on an on-going basis throughout their induction year. Looking opportunities to develop a career long approach to professional learning throughout a teacher's career, that has been a big shift in the past 10 years of CFE. I think that it is a very welcome one. From our point of view, we look at the interdisciplinary learning side of things, as was mentioned before, but also the transition phases. There is a big emphasis on that. When I trained as a teacher, I was in secondary. We were very much in our own silo and I was biology, so we were in my own silo, if you like, within the sciences and the STEM subjects. Now we break that down so that we have our STEM students together. We also have our primary and our secondary students. There are times when there are crossovers there as well, and that is all as a result of curriculum for excellence and the emphasis that is brought through. One of the comments that came out last week—it was not a new one to me—is that there is an over-emphasis on theory and maybe less of an emphasis on technique. Technique is very much being that bridge between the theory and the practical placements that students are doing. Is there a danger that, in preparing teachers with this sort of thinking about how to think about education, we have lost some of that technique? Is that a concern? The biggest question that I would always want a student teacher to be able to answer when I am watching them teach in the classroom is, why are you doing that in that way? If you do not know the answer to the why question, then you will not know what to do appropriately when something goes wrong. The theoretical aspects of education provide that answer. At the end of that year, we are asking teachers, albeit on a probationary, to stand in front of a class on their own. While they might be able to ask the why question, there is the how question. Is there a concern that they are not there yet? It is interesting to listen to Liz Lleican's point about maybe needing to have teachers practice on teaching one another and some of those practical experimentation. That, to my use, sounded like a need to focus on technique. I do not disagree, but the why cannot be to the exclusion of how, surely. I am with you there. We need to do both. Given the breadth, it strikes me that we have to cover a lot more with the initial teacher education. Would that be correct? How much of a problem is it in terms of the provision of CPD or lack thereof? No one is expecting a fully formed teacher to be spat at at the end of ITE. Most of the acquisition, once they are in the job, is what is there adequate to do that? Again, another several-layered question there. The thing about—sorry. You talked about—what I jotted down here was outdoor and literacy. Why did I do that? I wanted to give you an example of pure learning is also important as an approach. If children have to be motivated for learning, outdoors is one of the great ways to get them motivated because they like being out and it is actually good for them to be out. Within that, you can have some literacy sessions and lessons. The way that we are doing it with our students is that we video a lecture so that they can watch it so that they do not spend time with their tutor to be lectured at or lectured with. They then look at the lecture and it is a flip classroom approach. They then come back in and they talk to each other about what they have heard. They maybe then go out and do their two days on placement, say, and they come back and they say, well, in my school, we do not use the reading schemes, we do it like this. In my school, we do it like this. Actually, they are sharing also the how of how it is being done and they are evaluating that against the readings and the video lecture that they have had. It is a different form of learning. It is about using peers and it is also bringing in the outdoors here. You are effectively double-dividending on it and I think that that is important if the time is short. The second thing that you then said was about the CPD. There was something else that you said in between but I was not fast enough to catch it. The CPD aspect, I think that that is very important and that is something where the local authority partners, for example, in the UOE teacher education partnership, we realised that we had six authority partners and they were each offering their CPD and they were each offering things and we realised that actually as a partnership we should not be doubling up on this and every authority offering X. We agreed that. Let us just agree that if X is being offered in one authority, the other five can come to it too and therefore we have more of a menu. That is not saying about the time that people would give and how that is going to be paid for. All of this at the moment was paid for by the Scottish Government as trialling to see that there is a different way that we can approach the CPD and to get people engaged in that next stage of the professional learning part of it but there was a bit in the middle that is annoying me as to what you asked about. Can I just come back to this business about thinking about how? I think that we have got to remember that there are several different ways of arriving at an answer and one of the pushes that we have in the initiative teacher education and education per se is to think about the process that you are involved in in your learning. Think about how you have actually arrived at the answer and maths is a case in point. One of the things that we encourage our students to think about is to ask the children about the different routes that they have taken to actually come up with an answer in maths and there are many different ways and without thinking about that and without able to identify that we won't be able to take on board that people learn in different ways. I think that the best way of really gaining that understanding is to be an expert. If you are proficient in a technique or multiple techniques that's the best way that you can really step back and examine how. We ask driving instructors to be able to teach driving by demonstrating their driving skills first and then reflecting back on that. I think to look at those why questions from a purely conceptual basis without that expertise surely that's quite limited. Except that we're living it every day and unless you take your lived experiences it's not really going to mean anything. We can then bring the expertise in and actually make it a mean something and have sense if you like and then use it for later further experiences. We're trying to encourage our students to be reflective practitioners all the way through. They're not experts until they've actually spent some time doing the job if you like and this is why the career-long learning is so important. The emphasis is on learning all the time. We carry on learning and you can't really learn until you can stand back and say okay how did I do that, what went wrong, what was good about that, did it work, were the children engaged, did they understand, have I got evidence of that understanding. That's one of the biggest problems that the teacher might find is to actually get the evidence and real evidence that the children are progressing. Okay thank you. You've got to ask a short question. You've talked about the how and the why which are absolutely essential. What about the question over what they are learning because there are some who will criticise the curriculum for excellence because they don't feel that the knowledge content is sufficiently rigorous. Could you respond to that? I would certainly think depth is important as well as breadth and one of the ways that the universities and I think Donaldson did say that actually we needed to reach out a lot more to various other groupings in the university to populate that depth knowledge as well. So the what and the depth I think are the two things that is important not decrying that. I also think that who we partner with in the learning could be improved as well broadened whether that's learning from industry, people in industry or whether that's learning from people in the third sector. I think actually teacher education has done very well, it could do better in broadening I think the input that comes into it from different sources. So for example within I suspect all teacher education establishments now there are people who come from a very education background but there are also people who come from other subject area backgrounds and other work backgrounds as well because one of the things that worries me or has been and it doesn't happen now is what we see as APL what are the prior learnings that are seen as good credentials to become a teacher and I think we could look a bit more creatively on that. I've had one student who well as head of school I get complaints or people come in when they say well I've not been selected to enter your course I get that kind of letter and one of them was actually somebody said well I haven't spent time in a primary school before I applied to be a primary teacher but I've spent a lot of time working in youth work in Pylton. Why is my experience not actually seen as the same and it's not the same but there are transferable learnings from it and these are the kinds of things we've got to hone in on a bit more. I'd like to explore additional support needs in initial education a little bit more and Dr Asher you made a very good point a moment ago about the need to take an intersectional approach to when you've got one in four kids with additional support needs that's obviously a massive spectrum and we don't expect every teacher to be an expert in every kind of additional need but from the evidence that we've received so far there is a huge inconsistency between institutions between courses and how well equipped new teachers actually are. Is there a need for more consistency between institutions and courses on this and is there a role for the GTCS to beef up their guidance on it? Well of course coming from inequalities area I would say yes wouldn't I but that's because I'm biased so I will declare that from the outset. I think it is very important for I think student teachers to be thinking a lot more about the diversities in their classroom and this is where additional support needs comes in but for me the fundamental was what I said a while back which is actually even getting past that hurdle is seeing somebody who is different or who doesn't fit in as a deficit. I still think and that's a personal view so I'm not speaking on behalf of any of my colleagues but at my personal views there's still a mindset to move forward on that. So can the GTCS offer more guidance? I think they offer a lot. I think they're trying to re-look at their professional standards at the moment professional values. I think they've done a lot actually to contribute to this area. What more can be done of course more can be done but whether it's the GTC alone or whether actually it's for me it's about mainstreaming aspects of additional support needs about equalities issues into the teaching of literacy, into the numeracy, into data literacy, into wellbeing and not just seeing it as a wellbeing issue. Thank you convener. I think this is a huge challenge for us moving forward. Within my own local authority area we've seen a 124% increase in the number of young people registered with additional support needs since the legislation was updated in 2009. We expect a lot of teacher education and we've discussed that already in terms of initial teacher education and what it looks like but the content is. We are experiencing young people coming to our schools with increasingly complex and challenging conditions and teachers need to be able to support that and I think that's an area from a local authority perspective that there are huge risks and I think there needs to be a wider conversation around how that is remedied and how we can work in partnership to ensure that training is in place to give teachers the confidence to work with these young people. Additional support needs in all its many contexts is quite a complex area and the issue for students is that you could never teach them about everything that would be required because each individual situation is different and if you end up in a class of 25 with 11 pupils with identified needs then nothing is going to prepare anyone for being able to teach that but it was something that Dr Ashaid said there that triggered me to indicate because you were talking about the diverse nature of qualities and all the rest and one of our motions at our conference on Saturday just passed was about asking us to start looking into the diversity of entrants into the profession because they don't mirror the diversity of our nation and I think that we need I'm not I can't sit and say I know exactly what each institution does to encourage but there's an extreme lack of BME teachers across Scotland teachers with disabilities for instance and children need role models as well as that you know making everything equal for everybody so I would be quite interested in following up on on what universities are doing to encourage a diverse background of trainee teachers which again I think would assist with a lot of the preconceived notions of what additional support is as well as the other areas. Okay thank you Ross. Thanks and just to go back to part of what I initially said do you think it's accurate what we've heard so far from trainee teachers that there is that level of inconsistency between their courses and their institutions? Jane? Well I do because that's what they report to us you know we have students who come sorry they're newly qualified who come from all over Scotland and it's a chance for them to network together as well and discuss what their experience was and there was an extreme variation in how much of each thing. Obviously you have to build in the students' perception of what they were getting but I don't believe personally that there is a consistency across the board and I recognise that work's being done to change that but I think we do need to look at what's being offered across the country. Yeah just one final question. In terms of newly qualified teachers who are coming in and feeling underprepared to teach and support kids with additional support needs how much of that is a lack of preparation in their training and how much of it is that teachers are now entering schools where there are not the professional specialist staff that there used to be, there's not the support needs assistant that used to be there. So how much of it is their training and how much of it is a reduction in the staff that would have otherwise been supporting them? The education they get in initial teacher education there's always room for improvement so I think it would be entirely complacent of me to be sitting here to say we could not do more of course we would and we can. So I think yes that bit of it can be improved. I think yes I think that the erosion that Jane was talking about and others talked about because of pressures of, I mean I look at English as an additional language I mean we do have that, that population is growing in Scotland and actually all the support areas have been amalgamated so these people who could have assisted, who would have handheld some of the teachers who would have said look this is the how, this is the ways you can do it, they're not there anymore. So actually this person coming out is becoming more and more and need to be multi competent and multi expert in a whole range of issues and I think that's very scary and I'm not surprised therefore some of the evidence you heard were from final year students coming in and already people are nervous coming into a new profession and they understand those complexities so all very understandable but in terms of I can't be complacent we as the provider could do more. I'd also say that we can't apportion blame to any one area it's a society issue to be honest and we all collectively need to be working towards it, there's more we could all do from that regard. Just bring to everybody's attention that of course our own student populations come with additional support needs now as they always have but increasingly so so the numbers of students we support with additional support needs is also increasing. Can I just clarify when you say that, are you talking about teachers? Yes, but which kind of goes against what Jane Peckham was saying when Jane was saying that there didn't seem to be teachers with additional support needs etc but you're saying that there are a number of them going through the system? Absolutely, some but there aren't enough. Sounds ridiculous it's not a target and yes the numbers are very small and they're not visible when you're looking across the whole population of school. I'm not saying there aren't any buts. I'm just talking about students for example with mental health difficulties, they form a significant number in our population now, students who may have dyslexic difficulties, these are all issues that we have to cope with initial teacher education that do reflect the standard of population and are not necessarily visible. I just wanted some clarity around it, thanks very much. I'd like to ask you about placements, we've heard a little bit this morning. In evidence last week and in the written evidence it reflected that students' experiences were really quite different and I was struck last week with one of the panel members saying that experience even within a school between departments had been quite stark, starkly different for her and her student colleagues. I'd like to hear first of all what sort of across your partnerships you can do to just ensure that the quality of the placements are high for all students. There are two bits, one is that I do think that and what we've tried to do because I can only speak from our example is we put on, we developed a course 24 hours which is teachers give up, so teachers who are mentoring our students give up their time free voluntarily to come to it often on Saturdays or the evenings but they can get accreditation for a professional recognition etc and they can trade it in for a master's credit at the end but the point here was that we put on that particular course for our teachers supporting our students because we realised that actually for the student they need to actually be confident that the language that's been spoken in university and the language that's been spoken in the school that they're being placed in that though that is it's not that it's got to be the same but it's got to chime I can't do is send people in two three different directions that there has to be an understanding of that partnership working in tandem so that is an example of trying to bridge that experience to enable actually coherence and consistency for the student experience that I just jump in and ask do you take feedback from your own students oh yes I suppose what I'd ask what are the sort of things that they've fed back to you that they've made you change how placements are done or have made you take action on on what's happening when they're within the school establishments I tend to pick up things when they go wrong in schools so in a sense I get a very skewed perspective of it it is every school context is different many of the teachers who support students in primary schools are not given any additional time to do that so essentially they're doing it from a perspective of goodwill in some secondary schools our students are supported by student regents who have a more overarching role across the secondary school in supporting students sometimes that's the case in a primary school sometimes it's not and I think one of the things that would improve the situation would be if if there was more time allocated to students to to mentor teachers officially to to support our students so we would be actually I mean I actually put this down here then I think I we would be suggesting that there's a need for a service level agreement actually which recognises the work required of the school mentor because it is by and largely at a given time but it is ahead and miss but I don't think it should be authority by authority I think it should be a national one which allows which is drafted and agreed by the universities and local authorities so that partners can sign up to it and it shouldn't just be ad hoc I would say there are huge challenges in in this area we have almost a quarter of our primary schools in muddy council with a no head teacher or an acting head teacher present and these head teachers are very often teaching a full weeks class worth of teaching as well on top of having to lead and manage the school and I think they very often see having a student teacher and it's a great thing to have but isn't additional burden just now and I would completely echo what was said last week in that the practice is very very inconsistent and that's nobody's fault we do put additional time into schools to allow them to mentor but if they can't then get the backfill to cover it's it's it's a meaningless gesture in many ways so we've tried central mentoring in the past where we've got one person mentoring across local authority but I actually thought dilutes I think that dilutes the experience a young teacher gets or a newly qualified teacher or a student teacher indeed gets so I think this is a huge challenge for us moving forward I would add that the vast majority of our beginning teachers have very positive and very successful experiences on placement due at large to the commitment of the profession quite frankly there's scope for improvement but it's not to be forgotten and sometimes I forget it as I say because I pick up all the difficulties and those placement experiences are jointly assessed by schools and teacher educators together and students generally go smoothly through that experience and we're well prepared I mean I would add that I do recognise that we had some very positive feedback as well but I guess whenever anything's relying on the goodwill of an individual rather than a sort of system it feels it sort of rings alarm bells a bit yes and apologies Lawrence because you're the only local authority person here and I know it doesn't all fall to you but what can local authorities do to ensure that there is the time within schools because I guess that's where it the buck stops in many ways. It is but I think until we have really radically resolved the issues we have in terms of recruitment of teachers and supply teachers I think it's going to remain a challenge you know five years ago we had 400 supply teachers on our books so it was quite easy to use those teachers to put them into a school to release the head teacher or a senior member of staff to mentor a student or to mention mentor a newly qualified teacher the number of supply teachers has halved we're now at about the 200 mark and most of those are being used to cover you know long-term medium short-term illnesses and absences and so on so I think it's a real challenge for the system we provide some central support but equally over the past few years we've reduced the size of our central team as well in order to to make efficiency savings and budget savings and so on so I don't think there's an easy answer to it but I think on-going partnership working is essential working again I said earlier with more local providers so in our case UHI based on our doorstep in Elgin and looking at what they can do what we can do at the centre and then what the schools can do in a kind of tripartite arrangement that really has to be the way ahead. Jane. At the risk of being the stroppy one in the corner I think it's about time we stopped relying on the goodwill of people to bring through essential training and support for student teachers and for NQTs it's absolutely ridiculous I'm not suggesting that people get remunerated with huge sums of money or anything else but there has to be time dedicated to this and this sort of ad hoc approach and I appreciate that local authorities have tried to put in centralised support but it is down to the fact that there is no cover there is no supply but for something as essential as supporting students and every teacher was one at one point to to get through their training and to get through their NQT and relying on the goodwill is just absolutely unacceptable it really is. The other thing is that very very strongly in favour of an opt out for schools rather than an opt in in terms of providing the placements but equally recognising the specific issues of local authorities where you can't possibly you know so something has to be looked at that on a national basis to ensure that the amount of placements are available because there were massive issues in the last few years and I do wonder this isn't official capacity but whether perhaps some of the variation in standards resulted from the absolute relief that there was a replacement in the first place that students could undertake and I don't mean that in a critical way but you know it's particularly for post graduates who have to do a really in-depth one-year training the fact that there isn't this availability is just scandalous. I'm struck listening to what you're seeing this morning how there are many similarities to teacher and teacher training to my own profession of nursing and nurse training where there's an academic part but there's also a very skills based as well hands-on practical getting your hands dirty if you like a way of learning your craft but I'm also struck by how we heard from the panel last week where people were saying that sometimes the experience of having those placements in schools was not as good as it could be and it sounded like a lot of the difficulties were through the administration of those placements people were being told at short notice schools were changing or that they weren't going to where they had expected to go and it was an expectation that people would travel quite some distance so can you tell me how the university's and local authorities liaison in terms of trying to make that transition from university into the classroom smoother for those teachers in training? We certainly had extreme difficulties with placement this year so the student placement database is now under the auspices of the general teaching council for Scotland. The deans of education right across all of the universities came together this year to try to take action on the problems that had arisen and have reached agreement that there will be an opt out from placement rather than an opt in in the future and we're very hopeful that that will improve the situation and prevent the last minute arrangements that were required this year. What that would mean in practice because I suppose when I hear opt out I'm concerned that there are perhaps schools like in your own council Mr Finlay that may well say we don't have time to do this so we will opt out therefore you won't get teachers on placement and so teachers won't be attracted to work in your local authority. I think the reasons for opt out will be pretty limited next year and it will be something some crisis within a school that means it's unable to fully support students. I mean I can just come in here totally in favour of the opt out arrangements but it would be really in extremis so it would be a school that perhaps only has two teachers or two teacher school and they were both going to be off and we were struggling to get supply in to keep the school afloat and to keep the school open and actually what kind of experience would that be for the student teacher? Actually it might be not a bad experience because it does show them the reality of teaching in Scotland in the 21st century perhaps but I don't think that that would be entirely fair on a student teacher but it would be that kind of situation on a one teacher department in a subject say like RME where there's one teacher and they're going to be off ill for six months what kind of experience will the student get so that's when a school would opt out and it does create some hassle but it would be in absolute extremis. In terms of liaison between local authorities and the universities of the colleges how does that happen? Does that happen? How regularly are you in contact? Certainly I can only speak for my own authority but I have a dedicated officer who leads on career along professional learning and she's in regular contact with our two main providers UHI and the University of Aberdeen and that's an on-going discussion, on-going dialogue probably on a weekly basis round about both the initial teacher education but also the support that we're giving to NQTs and so on so that's a very close relationship and also working closely with our schools as well and looking at the expertise that we have locally so can we provide input on behaviour management can we provide input on ASN and so on so really is a very important partnership. Following the Donaldson report all universities established partnership agreements with local authorities so we have six such agreements with local authorities that surround Edinburgh and Dr Arshad from the beginning actually has led that group all the way through so that provides regular meetings where we can discuss with local authorities and preempt problems not only around placement but around wider things as well. We've also in the School of Education of course we have a placement unit where staff are dedicated to interfacing with this GTCS practicum system that manages the allocation of placement and I know at Murray House as well we took the initiative of appointing a member of staff to support me actually in the management of these placement issues this year as well so we're trying to devote staff resource to it to make it as smooth running as possible but the fact remains this year was the most challenging year I've ever seen in the allocation of placements in 15 years in teacher education. And do you have a rationale for why this was the most challenging? It seemed to be a numbers game that schools were simply not coming forward and able to offer placements. The schools are local authorities. I think one additional thing in that mix maybe we have more diverse provision in teacher education we've been encouraged to develop different models of teacher education with different placement patterns so it's this kind of transition from the block placement system to different patterns of site-based learning in schools and that change is quite difficult for the profession and although we have employed development officers to go out into schools and to if you like educate schools about these differences it is a process of change that is difficult. Daniel, you've got a short supplementary now. And we are trying to get to the end of the session now so could we both keep the question short and the responses short please thank you very much. Justin, that last round of question right at the beginning you touched on feedback and there was just a very specific comment about feedback from class reps and how that was acted upon at Murray House and as a former student union education officer it would be remiss of me in order to ask you about that specific point. What are the structures and what would your comments be to those specific remarks that were made last week? You will know that you asked we did kind of thing feedback but what occurred to me from last week's evidence and it's actually one that I subsequently wrote to Leslie about last week was actually sometimes what happens is that students will say something in year four but they don't see the benefits of it because they're away so actually we need to actually do more about saying your students from previous years said this we can't do this we can't do that but we did this what are you saying so that I think communicates is a commons issue as well. Thank you very much. Dr Reid just one supplementary to the answer you get to clear hockey just now about this has been the biggest challenge on placements for 15 years and the show show that you've experienced and you mentioned the change from blocks to something different could you describe that something different because is the problem or has been part of the problem that schools were used to the blocks and therefore student trainees would be in for a period of time I guess what you're arguing you're telling the committee now is that's not the case the system is changing so it's more challenging schools to accommodate students in a desire to bring together theory and practice and that kind of divide is not one I really recognise but you know in a desire to integrate university based learning and school based learning some of our degrees have ways of experiencing placement that means a student is going in every week to a school as opposed to just going there for a five week block so that's a very different model the new msc tilt that we're offering the transformative learning and teaching degree will have students in school for two or three days a week as well as block placements so our current ma primary degree has students in school for all of their third year so that's a year long placement so diversity of provision is being encouraged by government universities have responded to that and we've tried to work with the profession so that they understand what we're doing and why we're doing it but it is challenging for them to understand which programme is the student coming from and what are the requirements thank you thank you very much con thank you one of the important issues that we've been talking about are actually the retention of existing staff and quite a number of reasons were given by people giving evidence it's quite complex what do you think are the main reasons the main barriers to retaining staff yeah I think this is a really complex area talking to people who've left the profession locally and looking at exit interviews and so on there are myriad reasons why people are choosing to to leave the profession one that certainly has been raised has been round about salaries and the competitiveness of salaries compared to to other professions one has been round about just a sheer demands and the one person referred to me as the never ending churn and change of the last 13 years that had left them feeling a little bit powerless as a teacher in fact I spoke to one principal teacher recently who's retiring at the end of this year who has many years service over three decades of service and she said that she actually felt quite disempowered just she felt the changes had she said we'd succeeded over the past 15 years and over complicating teaching and learning and over complicating what we do and she just felt really down about it and that's why she was she was bringing her retirement forward early and equally I think if I look at from a headteachers perspective the headteachers that I work with in Murray are working ridiculous hours with very very poor staffing levels due to the ability to recruit and some people are just saying that they've had enough and they're actively choosing to leave the profession or to step down to a less demanding non-promoted role as they would see it so I think there's a wide variety of reasons that this is a this is a big issue for our system I think to grapple with over the months and years ahead. Can I just pick up on one point that you made there? What professions do teachers normally compare themselves with in terms of salary? Pass, I mean I don't, I mean it's just that it's just that you made the statement. Yeah, yeah absolutely. People haven't mentioned any specific professions to me but they haven't mentioned that you know graduate salaries compared to other graduate salaries so I haven't done any research into what other starting salaries are but it's certainly been something that's been mentioned. That's just to add to that that actually refers back to the STEM issue that somebody who has a science degree is far more likely to go into some industry in terms of STEM than teaching because of the salaries you know that's one example of where they see but in terms of what they compare themselves to it's it will be the traditional degrees that they always wear as professions and law and so on so that's where they see the salary differential. There also seems to be a lack of career opportunities for a long-term progression in terms of the change in structure in the school taking away the principal teacher role that seems to have had some possible impact but once again we need clear evidence on all of this you know we've got pockets of evidence coming through but we could do with some comprehensive evidence on retention and on recruitment and everything really. There did seem to be something of a consensus in I think last week's panel as to where the salary issue was that seemed to be in the early years there seemed to be a consensus that later on it was much better but in the initial period it was quite tough. I think there's an issue between deputy head and head teacher level as well in terms of salaries so we often when we look at why we're struggling to recruit head teachers we often hear anecdotal evidence from deputy head teachers in a large primary school for example who are paid more than the head teacher in a small rural primary school so they say why would we take the five thousand pounds per year pay cut for all the extra responsibility and hassle that goes with being a head teacher so I don't think it's just at that start of a career I think it's up at deputy head and to head teacher level as well. Is this question of expectation I mean I come coming from the private sector if I get paid a hundred thousand pounds a year I expect to work 12-14 hours a day normally what's the average working day for a head teacher? I would say certainly from straw polls I've done locally that the average weekly working week would be somewhere between 60 and 80 hours including significant weekend work and work during the school holiday periods. There was also I think a concern expressed about lack of recognition lack of the profession being valued the same way as it used to be. Do you agree with that? Yes, we mentioned social media earlier and one thing that's become very much a 21st century phenomenon is the notion of a teacher attack on social media where for whatever reason a parent or indeed a group of parents take a dislike to a decision that a teacher or particularly a head teacher has made and run campaigns covertly I have to say on social media but these can be very damaging to a head teacher or anybody and I think exacerbated in a small rural area where everybody knows everybody as well and there are huge risks around that I think. No teacher goes into the job for the money that's self-evident and there are huge issues around how the profession is valued but where we have concern we do a survey every year of our members across Scotland and we compare them year on year and we look at the top five things they like about the job and the top five issues but actually it's the survey from last year unfortunately because the one that we did for 2007 is still being collated and I'll happily submit it when it is but three quarters of teachers in Scotland this year are seriously considering leaving their job and 62 percent would leave the profession altogether and I mean that's a horrific statistic because why are we training all our new and young people to come in and the main reasons were not surprisingly workload being the top one it's actually been not been workload for a while it was always pupil behaviour or whatever so it's workload curriculum changes which are just an absolute nightmare at the moment pay 51 percent have a concern about pay now if you did that survey five years ago teachers did not have the same levels of concern around pay but they're now reaching almost a 20 percent deficit so that's where they're starting to pay attention and the fact that they now have to work till well who knows what it will be at the moment it's 67 68 and it's basically the lack of ability to progress beyond the main grade scale because there's no promotion the restructuring into faculties removing principal teachers removing shape I mean even things like shared headships where are people supposed to go what it only takes them six or seven years to get to the top of the main scale and they're going to have another 40 years to work on that so there's no opportunity for them to develop in the way that they would wish and that's notwithstanding the lack of respect for their own judgment but in terms of their own development where is it they're supposed to go so that's the main reasons at the moment why the profession is so dissatisfied so in terms of researchers looking elsewhere to say where our teachers in fact highly prized and of course it'd be no surprise to you Finland would be a classic example they're talked up so I think the key lesson for us we've got to talk up this profession we've got to think why it is that the Finnish teachers stay on they don't have the kind of bureaucratic the autonomy levels are a lot higher they don't have constant testing going on all sorts of things we've got to learn and they are fairly high in the PISA ratings. Workloads are a consistent theme has there been any improvement in recent times? Absolutely not in fact I had a recent meeting with education Scotland because as you know through tackling bureaucracy they're supposed to now be inspecting the measures that have been put in place to manage workload again we've challenged the cabinet secretary to go back and have another look at it because all of the recommendations are still being ignored largely by schools the workload is increasing rather than decreasing and the changes to national qualifications which we've been heavily involved in discussing and we thought we actually had achieved something although we were hesitant to begin with till we saw what the proposals were all going to be but the removal of unit assessments for national 5 is a huge bonus however the lateness of it happening and the fact that the national 4 are now still having that there's still a fallback the whole thing's chaos and teachers are finding that a lengthening exam is actually going to increase workload rather than decreasing it so obviously we're all still working extremely hard through the ANQ group to look at what else can be done and to minimise but you know there are areas where we've got members who are actually taking action short of because it's the only way that they can restrict their workload and I mean it's not an exaggeration that there are primary members doing 75 hour weeks and it's through pressure from their management who are also being pressured from the employer to meet the the statistics and all the different things and I mean that they're basically crumbling now so unless something is seriously done to address it I think we're in for for chaos so teacher workloads obviously can I just ask the statistics that you're quoting there is this from the NASUWT big question 2016 okay and who was that conducted over who is that this is your own our own membership across the whole of scotland okay and what is your membership across we have over seven thousand now okay and what proportion of the teaching profession is that oh that's about 15 percent about 15 percent okay and included in that there were yw y ddim yn gyfrifondu beeru 你waithbarthwr? Rydyn lly unseenid hidden ar-led y sneif llychHEY o ond ond ers yn cy duckwysio ar gyferheithherwydd. Rydyn lly 9 Iím dwello amateurwaith Ynw sydd o'r argyffredeon gyllid yn cyfrifon y appetite wllc. Gaer o'r gyfrifonwyr rhesweddol i Lynydd Cymru a'r cyfrifôr wrth â'r cyfrifôr i fynd yr yw gyfrifôr hyn? Rhyw ni'n fi foldw i ddingffiadau i'r gwrth byd ac yn prysgwrs liw Holda Yng소 The benchmarks came in in August, so everything else, in terms of assessment for literacy and numeracy, was supposed to go in terms of assessing a level. We've been dealing with individuals in a couple of authorities' individual management where they've basically said, no, I spent a lot of work doing this, this is what we're doing. This is a direction from the Scottish Government and Education Scotland that the benchmarks iau trafwysio i fewni drwodaeth, a'w i gwsminu'r providers, sydd hoffy clearlyllwyr eich osbysigol. Mae'n cwybr nhw fawr iau gweld y dyfiedig yn ziw beithio, ond eswNetol yngyrch� systemic Is there a early drop out rate from people just newly to the profession and then perhaps people later on cashing in the retirement early? Or what balances are between the two? I'll come in first here if that's okay. I think there's a bit of a mixture here. It goes back to something we said earlier about the fact that the notion of a job for life is disappearing fast. So whereas 10, 20 years ago, somebody would graduate and there'd be a teacher till they were retired, and move up through the profession in that manner has gone. So we often have newly qualified teachers who are quite open about the fact that they will do their NQT year, they will teach for this for a couple of years, then they want to go and do a second gap here or go travelling, or shift profession. But they very often are quite clear as well that they want to return to teaching at a later point after doing other things and I think that's becoming more common in the workplace. So we're also seeing an increase in people now choosing to take a career break halfway through their careers, maybe in their mid-40s or even into their 50s just to take a year or two years out to do something different and then to come back. So I don't think there's anything we can pinpoint in terms of pressure points that when people are leaving the profession, I think there's a fair mixture. So we get that the world has changed and the idea that you go to school, university, school has changed. However, are there specific pressures that are now coming on teachers who are making them think, which is what the suggestion from Jane is, and frankly, evidence reflected in a lot of the evidence that's come to come to me. Can I just get an answer to this question about workload? Because I think there's a thing about the amount of work you have to do as a professional, but to what extent is that ability to focus on your workload, whether you're a headteacher or a classroom teacher, challenged by the fact that you're also having to cover for somebody who's not in because you can't get in supply, or you haven't got a classroom assistant, or you haven't got a support teacher, or you haven't got somebody that basically does the admin round preparing your worksheets or whatever, maybe we don't do worksheets anymore, I don't know. With that kind of, when I think of the physical support that I would get to deliver a lesson, it allowed me to focus on my teaching, and to what extent, because I think we can talk about workload and the difficulties of actually the other things that have been cut in schools, to what extent is that impacting on people's ability to stay and actually be focusing on their job? In terms of what we've done with research for our members, it's having a huge impact. One of the main drivers of increasing workload is the stripping away of all the additional resources. Obviously, teaching is not a job that you can put down and walk away from at four o'clock every day and go back to at nine, and teachers recognise that. When the 35-hour week was originally introduced back at the beginning of this century, it reduced the average teachers working week to around the 48-hour mark from the high fifties. What we're now seeing is it's rising and rising and rising. It's accumulation of things. It's a lot to do with things needing done that other people would have done before, but there's also an expectation of an inspection in a school three weeks into term that does not require the walls covered with the children's work. The children have only been at school for three weeks of a new academic year, and no HMI inspector would expect that, but the school is asking for that to be produced by the teachers and so on. It's this unnecessary bureaucracy, and it's difficult to challenge it in all aspects, but that's what's having the most impact, this compulsion to meet the needs. Can I ask about the retention of students? I think that I can just see somebody when given the responsibility to be a mentor, and they're under the caution. In fact, we got it from our group last week that people didn't complain because they could see that people were doing their best to mentor them. What provision is there within those who are providing initial teacher education to have a policy where people feel that they can report back on what their experience of a placement was, without feeling that they were somehow letting down folk who were doing their best for them? Way back in the day, my first teaching placement, I just got put in with a classic of somebody who hadn't turned up. The last thing that I did was to complain to the college at the end of it because they were very good to me during that period. How do you manage to get the space where people can be honest about a placement without being somehow condemning schools who are doing their best under difficult circumstances? It's very challenging. We have to work very sensitively with our partner schools on this. We have to explain to students that a placement, in a sense, has to be good enough for them to achieve the learning that they need to achieve on that placement and to take professional responsibility for liaising with other staff in school if they are in difficulties, so we would expect a student to, if they are having difficulty with their relationship with their mentor teacher, first of all, maybe to go to the deput head in school or the head if necessary, if that's not working. Students have varying levels of support while they are on placement, so all of our students have a personal tutor who looks after not only their academic development but their pastoral care. In addition to that, they have a placement tutor who visits them on placement and supports them. In addition to that, they have the programme director who looks after their whole experience in initial teacher education. There are lots of different routes for support and different students find it easier to access one or other form of support. It tends to be relationship-based, so if they have a good relationship with their personal tutor, they may go there first. Ultimately, it would all come to me as director of undergraduate studies if there was a problem that wasn't resolved, but there is close dialogue between the programme director, for example, and the school if a student is in difficulty. How do you stop a student, a young person, who would not be a young person? Does somebody training, learning, getting a teacher education, being inhibited from being honest about what their experience was because the school report might work against them? What are the checks and balances? There is quite an imbalance in power around that process. There is, there definitely is, and an assurance with the student that they will be supported in their learning and that they have a right to the learning that they need to do when they are in school. It is a very sensitive thing. I think that we could get better join at that because I do think that safe spaces to actually just come and share. It's not a complaint, it's sharing. And it's actually sometimes also a space to share, hey, I wouldn't be doing this this way. I think students are incredibly loyal, incredibly professional, like you were when you were a student teacher. They are the same now. What we have to do is actually help them to have the spaces to simply talk about those things. Actually, it's important because if we don't want them to actually start walking after the first couple of years, we need to actually allow those spaces. Experience tells me that one route isn't the answer, that because it's relationship-based, they often have to have a variety of people to call upon. Is that back to you, Lynne? I'll pick up on something that Jim Peckham just said about school inspections and about unnecessary bureaucracy. We've had the inspector in here, as you'll know, a few times, and they are really wanting to get the message to individual schools that what you're describing about having the place redecorated for the inspection is actually not what they're looking for at all, yet it's still happening in individual schools. I'm wondering what steered a local authority can be given to their schools to stop this unnecessarily workload. I think that there's still a mindset within schools that they have to be going by the way that inspectors used to. The word smells of fresh paint is the phrase that we hear time and time again. We give all our schools quite a clear steer on what the expectations will be of inspection and that they are not expecting tractor loads of box files with pieces of paper in them and posters all over the wall and so on. That information is put out loud and clear to head teachers. Of course, what individual head teachers do with that? It's at their discretion. Why is it still happening? Because some people are still choosing to do it. I put extra stress on their colleagues by having that mindset. How can we stop that? I think that some of the try-outs that Education Scotland are carrying out, such as the short notice inspection, is having an impact. Previously, when you had three weeks notice, two weeks notice for an inspection, for some schools, that's a lot of time to panic and to get the school smelling fresh paint and looking good. If you get the phone call on Thursday saying that the inspectors are coming on Monday, that really focuses the mind on what really matters in terms of your own self-evaluation and selling the story of your school. I think that moving towards short notice inspections will help greatly. Thank you. I'm now just going to bring the session to a close. I'd like to thank you all very much for your full contributions and your patience in dealing with all our questions. I will close the public session.